Totalitarian Science

Dimensions:
A Journal of Holocaust Studies

Volume 10, Number 2

The Final Solution and the regime that made it possible are hardly comprehensible without an understanding of the integral role that scientists played in their perverse successes. Biologists created an aggressive program of human genetics and eugenics, a program that was used to justify the murder of “undesirables”; engineers designed sophisticated rockets that rained destruction on Britain; physicists attempted to build nuclear weapons; and chemists and physicians participated in the efficient working machinery of genocide. Yet until recently, it was generally believed that most scientists in Nazi Germany had somehow remained aloof from National Socialism’s malevolent influence, and had maintained both their personal and professional integrity. The seven writers in the present issue demolish this view, a view whose persuasive force managed to rehabilitate many Nazi scientists after the war.

Mark Walker makes the case that many nonideological German scientists who sought state-sponsored academic positions and research funds in the Third Reich were more than willing to cooperate with the regime. Indeed, by demonstrating the “indispensable” value of their research to the Nazis’ political and war aims, these scientists prospered in Nazi Germany. German science, however, suffered as a result of Nazi policies: Alan Beyerchen argues that the forced emigration of some 15 percent of Germany’s academic scientists — the émigrés were largely Jewish — weakened the scientific community that remained. The academic purges disrupted teacher-pupil relationships, isolated those scientists who remained in Germany from the international commerce of ideas, and robbed these scientists, over time, of their professional and moral authority.

The career of Werner Heisenberg, internationally recognized as a great theoretical physicist by the time Hitler seized power, provides a vehicle for exploring many of the recent controversies over Nazi science. Heisenberg, awarded the Nobel prize in 1933 for his work in the field of quantum mechanics, was never an admirer of National Socialism. Yet, as David Cassidy shows in his article, Heisenberg established a crucial alliance with Nazi authorities during the war years, an alliance that allowed him to pursue his personal physics research while he supervised attempts to build atomic bombs for the regime. Cassidy’s piece raises crucial questions about the moral responsibility of Heisenberg — and all “apolitical” scientists.

Diane B. Paul argues that science is never truly “pure” and value-free, and neither are scientists. Her article focuses on Hans Nachtsheim, a distinguished geneticist who remained in Hitler’s Germany but who never felt responsible for the Nazis’ — or his own — perversion of genetics research. Like other scientists in his field in the '30s and '40s, Nachtsheim believed that lessons learned from eugenics (the study of heredity) could eliminate many diseases. However, Nachtsheim’s zeal for eugenics led him to conduct vile experiments on helpless youngsters, and to condone even worse experiments conducted by colleagues. Nachtsheim didn’t consider himself a Nazi; remarkably enough, many scientists and nonscientists in the postwar era also felt that he had never truly embraced Nazism. Paul uses Nachtsheim’s life as the basis for an examination of the relationship between amorality and immorality.

Robert N. Proctor demonstrates in his article that German physicians and public health experts in the Third Reich promoted certain policies that, on the face of it, seem perfectly defensible: cleaning up water supplies, implementing a strong anti-smoking campaign. However, few of these doctors and experts ever acknowledged the reason why Reich officials endorsed these initiatives: the Nazis’ quest to ensure “racial purity.” Proctor’s piece is a fresh assessment of the ambiguities inherent in the Nazi regime’s public health projects.

In our final two essays, Robert Kanigel and Joseph W. Slade analyze the nature and magnitude of the Nazis’ sinister technological state. Such a state and its technocrats, Kanigel suggests, are essential factors in explaining the devastation wrought by the Holocaust. Kanigel’s assertion is an important element of his discussion of how the American Frederick Taylor’s popular innovations in social engineering (time-and-motion studies, scientific management, etc.) might have influenced the technocrats who supervised the Final Solution. The novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 masterpiece, is the centerpiece of Slade’s article. The book, among other things, explores the ways that various scientific disciplines both undergirded, and were exploited by, the Nazi technological and bureaucratic empire. Slade’s piece lucidly surveys these connections, and also examines how, in Gravity’s Rainbow, the agenda and artifacts of the Third Reich -- and the regime’s technocrats -- embody scientific principles.

Stanislaw Baranczak reviews James Park Sloan’s Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, a study of the much-heralded, and controversial, author of The Painted Bird and other books.