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Swastika Science
| Article
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16268 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1989 |
3,988 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
RACIAL HYGIENE: MEDICINE UNDER THE NAZIS
Robert N. Proctor
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988
414 pp., $34.95
"Science" and "scientific" are among our century's most prominent buzzwords. Since the Enlightenment, science has been identified as an ally of reason and tolerance and as an opponent of primitive religion, intellectual sloth, and reactionary political movement. Such individuals as Galileo, Darwin, and John Thomas Scopes have been elevated to the status of transcendent moral heroes, while William Jennings Bryan, Lysenko, and other opponents of unfettered scientific inquiry have become symbols of ignorance and superstition. Science, it was further argued, had had a mutually reinforcing relationship with democracy. Both sought to destroy the power of individuals and institutions that for centuries had kept the masses of mankind ignorant and oppressed.
Nowhere was this supposed contrast between science and reason, on the one hand, and intolerance and primitivism, on the other, more obvious than in the history of science under Nazi Germany. The flight of Jewish scientists from Nazi-controlled Europe, the cleansing of German universities of scientists who dissented from Nazi scientific orthodoxy, the attacks on academic freedom and the ideal of unfettered research, and the headlong flight into irrationality and violence revealed Nazism's opposition to the spirit of scientific inquiry.
The inherent antipathy of Nazism to science is the thesis of Alan Beyerchen's important volume Scientists Under Hitler (1977). According to Beyerchen, those German scientists who remained in Germany and cooperated with the Nazis did so only because of the pressures exerted by the state. They were passive and apolitical, forced to work for a regime that represented primitive political and intellectual impulses they abhorred.
Beyerchen's interpretation is the conventional view of the relationship between science and the Nazis, an interpretation reflected in the title of Joseph Needman's 1941 book, The Nazi Attack on International Science. Two years earlier, in his Social Function of Science, the English Marxist scientist J.D. Bernal had asserted:
The destruction of science in Germany, if it can be
maintained for many more years, may be one
...
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