Adolf Hitler is long dead. Nevertheless, his name is still uttered every day as a rhetorical smear. By drawing some parallel to Hitler and the Holocaust, however dubious, many charge others with guilt by association. This unfortunate cultural twitch has even been canonized as Godwin’s Law or reductio ad Hitlerum. At the top of the list, Hitler’s supposed Christianity is often raised by the critics of religion. But was Hitler a Christian? When you get down to the bottom of it, what’s the truth? Was Hitler in any meaningful sense a “Christian”?

The title of our program is Great Minds with Michael Medved, and it really does take a great mind to survey the sweep of Western intellectual history and pick out in all of that a disturbing trend. That’s what historian of modern European history Richard Weikart does in his latest book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life.

One question that tragically never goes away is that of evil and its roots. Adolf Hitler was not a lunatic, nor did he emerge onto the stage of history from nowhere. He had a background, an intellectual milieu, that historian Richard Weikart explores in his book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany.