Contact: John Aman, Coral Ridge Ministries, 954-334-5330, 954-540-8560 cell, [email protected]  

FORT LAUDERDALE, Aug. 22 /Christian Newswire/ -- Coral Ridge Ministries issued a call today for “more history and less hysteria” in response to harsh, unfounded Anti-Defamation League accusations leveled against a new Coral Ridge Ministries produced television special linking Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler.

The special, Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, which airs August 26 and 27 nationwide features historians and scholars who connect the dots between Hitler and the ideas penned by Darwin in his On the Origin of Species and later works.

When ADL National Director Abe Foxman, who has not viewed our television program, calls it “twisted” and asserts that “Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people,” he ignores the historical fact that Adolf Hitler was an evolutionist.

“Among German historians, there’s really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist,” according to historian Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler and a featured guest on the Coral Ridge Ministries television special. “He clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas,” said Weikart.

British evolutionist Sir Arthur Keith wrote in the 1940s: “The German Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist. He has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.”

Even leading evolutionist Niles Eldredge freely admits the link between Darwin and Hitler. Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has written that “social Darwinism,” which he regards as an illegitimate offspring of Darwin’s theory, “has given us the eugenics movement and some of its darker outgrowths, such as the genocidal practices of the Nazis in World War II—where eugenics was invoked as a scientific rationale to go along with whatever other ‘reasons’ Hitler and his fellow Nazis had for the Holocaust.”

But evolution was not incidental to Hitler’s thought. It was a “central aspect of his worldview,” according to Weikart, a leading scholar on the Darwin-Hitler nexus.

“It drove pretty much everything that he did. It was not just a peripheral part of his ideology.”

The argument for evolution’s impact on Hitler is strengthened by the fact that Darwinian thought heavily influenced Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hitler was hardly alone in his racist ideas fueled by Darwin and his intellectual progeny, who include Ernst Haeckel and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics which was a critical component of the Nazi killing machine. Hitler, according to Weikart, “was drawing on what many other scholars, biologists, and geneticists in Germany were preaching and teaching in the early twentieth century.”

Dr. D. James Kennedy, President of Coral Ridge Ministries and host of Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, stated, “We have had nearly 150 years of the theory of Darwinian evolution. And what has it brought us—whether Darwin intended it or not? Millions of deaths, the destruction of those deemed ‘inferior,’ the devaluing of human life, and increasing hopelessness. Darwin’s legacy has been deadly indeed.”

Coral Ridge Ministries has also published a companion book to the television special, Evolution’s Fatal Fruit: How Darwin’s Tree of Life Brought Death to Millions, which examines the social consequences of Darwin’s theory. Written by Tom DeRosa, Executive Director of the Creation Studies Institute (an outreach of Coral Ridge Ministries), the book explains how Hitler tried to use genocide to speed up evolution and reveals how the American eugenics movement is likewise indebted to Darwin.

To request review copies, or interviews with Dr. Kennedy, Darwin’s Deadly Legacy producers Jerry Newcombe and John Rabe, or Evolution’s Fatal Fruit author Tom DeRosa, please contact John Aman at [email protected] or 954-334-5330.

Coral Ridge Ministries is a Christian broadcasting organization with radio and television programming that reaches into 200 nations.