The following text is based on the lead-off of Elisa Mellin (from Germany), to the discussion titled “Science in the shadow of the swastika”, held during the 33rd camp of Antinazi Zone / YRE (Youth Against Racism in Europe), the antifascist and antiracist campaign built around Xekinima (Greek section of ISp). The other two introductions from this discussion will be published in the coming days.
Introduction
Especially in Germany, there is the widespread belief that the National Socialists were, on the whole, hostile to science and devoted themselves solely to pseudoscience.
One might be inclined to believe this when reading Nazi writings which state that intellectualism was regarded as ‘Jewish’ and therefore contemptible.
However, this belief is not entirely accurate.
Whilst there was indeed fierce disagreement between those in power, new plans were constantly being drawn up – for example for a national academy of sciences or for the more efficient integration of science into armaments policy. The totalitarian state was justified on scientific grounds, Nazi ideology was implemented through the law, and the Nazis’ ideas of rule were historically substantiated.
For a long time, German historians focused on the notion of the ‘abuse of science’ under National Socialism. There was the idea that a politically “neutral“, “pure“ science was, so to speak, snatched from the hands of scientists and turned into a tool of a violent and psychopathic ideology. It is only since 1990 that the history of science in the Third Reich has been seriously researched and examined and it is now clear that there was a close and deadly interlocking relationship between the state and science.
While the scientists themselves did not do the ‘dirty work’, their memoranda and lectures helped the perpetrators on the ground to see themselves as the executors of a ‘unified German popular will’.
1. The Nazis take over science
“The poverty of National Socialist philosophy did not, of course, prevent university professors from steering full steam ahead into Hitler’s wake – once his victory was beyond doubt.“ (Leon Trotsky, Portrait of National Socialism)
Immediately after the Nazis seized power, well over 1,000 ‘undesirable’ researchers – that is, those with differing political views or of Jewish origin – were expelled from universities and research institutes; they were sent to concentration camps or forced into exile.
This was a bitter loss for academia; among them were (alongside many others) Albert Einstein, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Hannah Arendt.
From April 1935 onwards, the new Higher Education Act imposed severe restrictions on academic self-governance. The rector was now regarded, so to speak, as the ‘leader of the university’; he was directly subordinate to the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Public Enlightenment, founded in May 1934. Educational institutions were subject to political influence and were affiliated with the NSDAP (the Nazi party). Academic freedom was thereby subordinated to the party’s political and ideological directives. The humanities departments either lost their significance or were turned into a means of producing ideology for the Nazis.
Subjects closely linked to politics, such as law and history, gained increasing importance after 1933. The totalitarian state was justified on academic grounds, Nazi ideology was implemented through the law, and Nazi ideas of rule were historically substantiated. Academic disciplines that were promoted and favoured under National Socialism included ‘cultural soil research‘, eugenics, genetics and racial research. These were closely linked to the Nazi regime’s policies on ethnicisation, autarky and rearmament.
The majority of academics did not protest against this; instead, they aligned themselves with the Nazi regime for careerist reasons and placed their work at the service of the Nazis.
By 1945, the NSDAP counted more than two-thirds of all university lecturers as party members
2. Science as a means of producing Nazi ideology
The Nazis made up German claims to dominance in Europe and these were to be legitimised through historical, linguistic and cultural studies. The German Research Foundation (DFG), as one of the most significant funders of science, financed such research and projects from the outset.
Studies claimed a general superiority of the Germans over the Slavic population. The definition and question of ‘race’ was a central issue in Nazi policy, even though the answer to this fundamental (that is, fundamentally important to the Nazi but scientifically meaningless) question remained unresolved as late as 1944. Attempts were made to identify ‘racial types’ on the basis of supposedly scientific characteristics. A categorisation into ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ races formed part of the Nazi value system.
Consequently, consideration was given to promoting ’healthy‘ genetic traits for the genetic improvement of ‘one’s own race’, for example through so-called ‘positive’ eugenics (increasing the birth rate among those with ‘sound heredity’) and ‘negative’ eugenics (birth control for those with hereditary diseases). ‘Racial hygiene’ and ‘human genetics’ were regarded as legitimate fields of research. In this context, science investigated the extent to which criminality, alcoholism or mental and physical disabilities were genetically determined and heritable.
Such projects, for example those involving genetic pathology studies, were in fact still co-funded as late as 1930, interestingly enough by the Rockefeller Foundation in the USA.
In 1933, the ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Disease in Offspring’ led to the mass forced sterilisation of so-called ‘hereditarily diseased’ individuals; this later culminated in ‘Aktion T4’, during which 70,000 people with disabilities and mental illnesses were systematically murdered using poison gas.
In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws took effect, including the law ‘for the protection of German blood and German honour’. It prohibited marriage and extramarital sexual relations between Jewish and non-Jewish people.
The scientific community contributed in various ways to the implementation of such laws and crimes.
3. Human experimentation ‘in the service of science’
“National Socialism is nothing other than applied biology.“ (Rudolf Hess, leading member of the Nazi Party in Germany)
The assumption that there were ‘inferior human lives’ that ‘needed to be eradicated’ encouraged many scientists to violate ethical rules and resort to human experimentation.
Many of them described this as ‘a blessing for research’, because experiments on humans were regarded as the simplest and most precise way to answer specific research questions.
For example, there were ‘cold exposure experiments’ on prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp, experiments involving the chemical weapon mustard gas on prisoners at the Natzweiler concentration camp, and, perhaps most famously, the extensive and degrading twin studies and human experiments carried out by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.
The victims of Nazi science included Jewish people, people with disabilities, prisoners of war, people with mental illness, and Sinti and Roma. Toxic substances and medicines were tested on them; their organs were removed; they were exposed to the cold until they were deliberately frozen to death; mass forced sterilisations took place; and many other atrocities were committed. The results of this inhumane research continued to be utilised long after the war; NASA drew on findings from concentration camp experiments right up until the late 1980s.
However, the scientific value of these studies is limited and, in fact, plays virtually no role today. Nonetheless, specimens from the Nazi era – that is, tissue samples, organ specimens, brain sections, etc. – continued to be used for decades after 1945 and were only legally disposed of and buried in the 2000s.
The Nazi regime’s relationship with drugs would merit a chapter of its own. On the one hand, drug addicts were persecuted, on the other hand, German soldiers were given Pervitin on a massive scale to prevent them from tiring during the ‘Blitzkrieg’ and Adolf Hitler himself was dependant on a plethora of hard drugs (as described by German author Norman Ohler in his book Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany).
4. Engineers in the service of the war machine
From around 1936, Nazi science was closely intertwined with the war machine; Rudolf Mentzel, then Secretary-General of the German Research Foundation and a chemist, remarked that science inevitably also involved “self-assertion in war“ and that “in modern warfare, it is not only the genius of leadership that is decisive, but also the quality of the weapons, and this is determined first and foremost by the genius of the scientists.“
Enormous resources were channelled into research as a result of the war. Innovations in electrical engineering led to modern means of communication. The ‘Volksempfänger’ (the “people’s receiver”, low-cost radio receiver produced at the request of Joseph Goebbels) was created and used to disseminate propaganda, radio communications were rapidly used in warfare, the world’s first computers were deployed during the war, military aviation technology was promoted against the backdrop of rearmament and the systematic build-up of the Luftwaffe (the Nazi air force), helicopters and rocket propulsion were developed, the first jet aircraft was born, and much more – all with the aim of making war and destruction faster and more effective.
5. Science in the Service of the Holocaust
Between 1940 and 1943, scientists developed a total of five variants for the violent transformation of Eastern Europe, the so-called ‘General Plan East’. The vision was of a highly productive agricultural region with decentralised industrial and settlement structures; a wide range of scientific disciplines were involved in the development of these ideas.
Scientists therefore did not merely take note of this, but actively formulated their own war aims.
The ‘Germanisation’ of the territories conquered by Germany entailed the expulsion of 1.7 million people from the German-occupied territories. In these occupied territories, 13–20 million forced labourers were exploited, 2 million of whom died as a result. 3 million Jewish people throughout Poland were initially crammed into ghettos and later murdered in extermination camps.
A particularly cynical example of the involvement of engineers and chemists in the Auschwitz camp complex: at Auschwitz-Monowitz, IG Farben (the chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate) built a huge chemical plant using forced labourers. To ensure a steady supply of labour, a completely private concentration camp – Auschwitz III – was established, financed and operated by an industrial company. Those who could not cope with the hard labour were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The chemists at IG Farben even supplied the Zyklon B (cyanide-based pesticide used in gas chambers) for this purpose.
6. Historical reappraisal
It took a long time for the scientific community’s involvement in the crimes of the Nazis to be properly addressed. Thousands of medical professionals were deeply entangled in the euthanasia programme – yet only 23 were prosecuted in Nuremberg.
As late as 1999, it was claimed that very few professors and researchers had understood their activities during the Nazi era to be political; they pretended that hardly anyone had been actively committed to the development of a specific ‘Nazi science’, and only in a few cases had there been any affinity with the NSDAP.
The perpetrators were not isolated monsters, but active scientists acting in the name of ‘progress’. The old academic elites allowed themselves to be seamlessly integrated into the Nazis’ policy of extermination. This is precisely why, after the end of the Nazi era, former NSDAP members, Nazi lecturers and racial ideologists were, across the board, permitted to return to their chairs. Many scientists were not prosecuted by the Allied powers at all, but were instead recruited for their own armaments and space research during the Cold War (‘Operation Paperclip’).
To conclude, the history of science in the shadow of the Swastika shows that science can never be truly neutral or independent. Instead it is a part and product, even a mirror of the system and the society it is operating in.
This means, if we want to fight for free and humane sciences, at the same time, we need to fight for a free and humane – a socialist – society, so atrocities like this can never happen again.
