The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  In general, however, Nazi ideology itself was too meagre, too crude, too self-contradictory and in the end too irrational to have any real impact on teaching and research at the sophisticated level at which they were pursued in higher education. Attempts to corral university teaching staff into a National Socialist German Lecturers’ Association in December 1934 - very late, compared to similar organizations in other professions - failed not least because of the ineptitude of its leader, Walter ‘Bubi’ Schultze, who had earned Hitler’s gratitude by fixing the shoulder the Leader had dislocated during the failed putsch of 1923. Schultze made enemies everywhere by ill-concealed intrigues. He rubbed the Education Ministry up the wrong way. His organization was also regarded by the professors as constituting an unwarranted interference with their power over the profession at large. Its parent body, the Higher Education Commission of the Nazi Party, founded in July 1934, fared no better, since it was led by men who had no standing in the academic community. There could be no question of requiring German professors to go on indoctrination courses in labour camps like their schoolteacher colleagues. Secure within their own bailiwick, they took a dim view of the anti-intellectualism of the Nazis. The initial enthusiasm of nationalist academics like the philosopher Martin Heidegger for the Nazi cultural revolution soon faded as it became clear that the new regime had no interest in the renewal of German science and scholarship as an end in itself. By 1939 even a convinced and determined Nazi academic like Ernst Krieck was asking: ‘Has the professor changed? No! The spirit of 1933 has departed from him once more, or at least from his scholarship, even if he is otherwise at least partially well-disposed.’280

  Such a sweeping generalization needs to be qualified, of course; in some universities, Nazism made greater inroads among the professoriate than in others. Jena, Kiel or Königsberg, for example, counted as relatively strong centres of Nazi teaching and research, while universities in Catholic regions remained less strongly affected; Bonn University, indeed, became something of a dumping-ground for unwanted professors compulsorily relocated from other centres of higher education, while the student body here remained dominated by Catholic and conservative groupings until their dissolution by the Nazis in the mid-1930s. In Bonn, only a minority of posts - about 5 per cent in this case - was ever occupied by fanatical Nazis, another 10 per cent by committed supporters of the Party, and the rest by either superficial sympathizers, by the indifferent, or by academics who were opposed to the regime; the fact that nearly a quarter of Bonn’s 380 professors were hostile to Nazism was unusual, but the dominance of scholarly and scientific criteria in the majority of faculty appointments even after 1933 was not, nor was it in most other German universities either.281 Surveying the field in 1938, the Security Service of the SS drew understandably gloomy conclusions. ‘In almost all universities’, it complained, ‘there are complaints about the passive attitude of the lecturers, who reject any political or ideological work that breaks the narrow bounds of their specialisms.’282

  IV

  The difficulties experienced by the Nazis in turning traditional academic subjects into expressions of their political ideology were nowhere clearer than in physics. Here there was a thoroughgoing attempt to Nazify the discipline, led by the physicist Philipp Lenard, an elder statesman of German science who had retired from his Chair in Heidelberg in 1931. Born in 1862, the son of a wine merchant, Lenard had studied with Heinrich Hertz, the discoverer of radio waves, and been awarded the Nobel Prize himself for path-breaking experiments on cathode rays in 1905. Despite his Nobel Prize, Lenard was full of bitterness and resentment at being pipped to the post by his pupil Wilhelm Röntgen in the discovery of x-rays, and accused the British physicist J. J. Thomson, who established the nature of cathode rays, of stealing and then suppressing his own later work in the field. A charismatic and popular lecturer who achieved widespread fame in Germany through his work, Lenard emphasized careful and precise experimentation and had no time for theory. His hatred of Thomson intensified into a general dislike of the British, while the German nationalism he had imbibed in his birthplace, in Bratislava, in the multinational Habsburg monarchy, spilled over into chauvinism in 1914, and into antisemitism at the end of the First World War. All of this caused him to act with undisguised fury when the general theory of relativity was empirically validated in May, 1919, bringing Albert Einstein worldwide fame.283

  A pacifist, a Jew, a theoretician and a supporter of the Weimar Republic, Einstein represented everything Lenard hated most. Moreover, the scientists who had validated his theory were British. In the ensuing debate over relativity, Lenard took the lead in rejecting Einstein’s theory as a ‘Jewish fraud’ and in mobilizing the physics community against it. He was driven into the arms of the Nazis when his refusal to join in official mourning for the murdered Foreign Minister Rathenau - whose assassination he himself had openly advocated not long before - sparked trade union demonstrations against him in 1922, in which he had to be taken into police custody for his own protection. Banned from returning to work by his own university, Lenard was reinstated as a result of pressure from right-wing students, into whose orbit he now gravitated.

  In 1924 he openly praised Hitler’s beer-hall putsch of the previous year, and although he did not formally join the Nazi Party until 1937, he was now to all intents and purposes a follower of the movement and participated actively in the work of groups such as Rosenberg’s Fighting League for German Culture. He greeted the coming of the Third Reich with unbridled enthusiasm, celebrated the removal of Jewish professors from the universities, and published a four-volume textbook on German Physics in 1936-7 which he clearly hoped would provide the foundation for a new, racially based ‘Aryan physics’ that would eliminate the Jewish doctrine of relativity from German science altogether.284

  Lenard’s relatively advanced age by this time, however, prevented him from taking the lead in the struggle for an Aryan physics. This role fell to his friend and close associate Johannes Stark, another gifted but extremely quarrelsome experimentalist whose discoveries included the splitting of spectral lines in an electric field, a phenomenon that became known as the Stark effect. Like Lenard, he was a German nationalist and he was driven into opposition to Einstein not least by the latter’s pacifism and internationalism in 1914-18. His growing hostility to modern physics, and particularly to the predominance achieved in Einstein’s wake by theoretical physics, hampered the advancement of his career in the 1920s; his failure to find a job led him to blame the Weimar Republic for his misfortunes and to form close connections with leading Nazi ideologues like Hans Schemm and Alfred Rosenberg. As a result, the Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, appointed Stark as President of the Imperial Institute of Physics and Technology on 1 May 1933, and a year later he was given the post of President of the Emergency Association of German Science (later the German Research Community), in charge of disbursing large sums of government research money. From these positions of power, Stark launched a concerted campaign to position the supporters of Aryan physics in academic posts, and to reshape the funding and management of research in the field in such a way as to cut off support from the proponents of modern theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics.285

  But Stark was too effective at making enemies for his own good. Before long he had aroused the hostility of leading civil servants within the Education Ministry, of the SS (whose own racial and genealogical research he had brusquely dismissed as unscientific) and of the Party Regional Leader of Bavaria, Adolf Wagner. Moreover, the ‘German physicists’ themselves were divided, with Lenard championing pure research while Stark embraced the application of physics to technology. Above all, however, when the political polemics and antisemitic diatribes were taken out, there was not much of use left in Aryan physics, whose ideas were muddled, confused and contradictory. Quantum mechanics and relativity were just too useful to be ignored, and other physicists got round Lenard’s criticisms by arguing that such theories embodied key Nordic conce
pts, and constituted a rejection of Jewish materialism. The majority of physicists therefore repudiated Lenard and Stark’s ideas, and the Aryan physicists’ progress was slow. By 1939 they had only managed to fill six out of the eighty-one physics chairs in Germany, and these mainly with their own students. Nevertheless, their influence did not disappear. A characteristic triumph was the campaign they mounted against Werner Heisenberg, who had won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering of quantum mechanics in 1932. Born in 1901, Heisenberg had studied with such luminaries of modern physics as Niels Bohr and Max Born, and had been appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at Leipzig in 1927. A conservative nationalist, though not politically active, Heisenberg like many of his colleagues felt strongly that the damage done to German science by the dismissal of Jewish researchers could only be repaired if men like himself stayed in Germany.286

  But the Aryan physicists had other ideas. They mobilized a vigorous campaign against his appointment to a prestigious Chair of Theoretical Physics at Munich in 1937. Stark’s open attack on Heisenberg in the Nazi press as a follower of the detested Einstein was pure polemic: in fact, Einstein rejected quantum mechanics altogether. The attack, however, clearly threatened mainstream physics as a whole. It called forth a public response drafted by Heisenberg and signed by seventy-five leading physicists, an almost unprecedented public intervention under the circumstances of the Third Reich. The physicists reaffirmed the principle that no progress in experimentation was possible without the theoretical elucidation of the laws of nature. The actions of the Aryan physicists, they declared, were damaging the subject and putting students off. There were already too few physicists of the younger generation in Germany. After this, open attacks ceased, but behind the scenes, the Aryan physicists enlisted the support of Reinhard Heydrich’s SS Security Service and of the Munich branch of the National Socialist German University Teachers’ League to block Heisenberg’s appointment. To counter this, Heisenberg capitalized on his family’s acquaintance with the family of Heinrich Himmler, whose father had been a schoolteacher in Munich at the same time as his own. He sent his mother to intercede with Himmler’s mother, with the gratifying result that the head of the SS cleared his name in July 1938. Yet in the end the outcome was still a victory for Stark and his supporters. With effect from 1 December 1939, the Munich chair was filled not by Heisenberg but by Wilhelm Müller, who was not even a physicist, but an aerodynamics expert whose main recommendation was the fact that he had published a small book entitled Jews and Science in 1936, attacking relativity as a Jewish con-trick. After this, the teaching of theoretical physics at Munich University ceased altogether, a result wholly congenial to the Aryan physicists, whose greatest triumph this represented so far.287

  Apart from physics, no other traditional scientific subject was quite so convulsed by an attempt by some of its most eminent practitioners to turn it into a specifically Nazi form of knowledge, with the possible exception of biology. There was a rather feeble attempt to create a ‘German mathematics’, stressing geometry rather than algebra because it was supposedly more closely related to the ideal human form as expressed in the Aryan racial type, but it was ignored by most mathematicians as abstruse and irrelevant, and came to nothing.288 In a similar way, the attempt to create a ‘German chemistry’, which, like its parallels in other disciplines, was launched by scientists themselves rather than emanating from the regime or the Nazi authorities, was too vague and diffuse to have any real impact. Less antisemitic than Aryan physics, it preferred to direct its attacks against ‘Western’ rationalism and to base its theories on a recovery of the organic concepts of nature favoured by the German Romantics; but the results were even less impressive, not least because the Aryan chemists could boast nobody among their ranks of the stature of Lenard or Stark.289 What united all these attempts to Nazify science was a characteristically National Socialist suspicion of abstraction and formalism, comparable to that demonstrated so graphically in official diatribes against ‘degenerate art’. But ‘degenerate science’ was both less easy to identify and less obviously connected to liberal and leftist trends in cultural politics.290 In the end, it survived, but not unscathed. The Third Reich saw a marked decline in the standard of scientific teaching and research in German universities between 1933 and 1939. This was not just because of the enforced emigration of so many distinguished Jewish scientists, but also because German science gradually became cut off from the international conferences, visiting professorships, research exchanges and other contacts with the worldwide scientific community that have always played such a vital role in stimulating new developments. Numbers of scientists from leading countries in the international research community visiting German universities fell sharply after 1933. Already in 1936, Heisenberg was complaining to his Danish colleague Niels Bohr of his growing isolation. Foreign academics and institutions began to reduce their contacts with German colleagues in protest against the dismissal of Jewish scientists, foreign travel was increasingly restricted or turned to political purposes, and university library subscriptions to leading international journals were cancelled if - like the British periodical Nature, for example - they contained any hint of criticism of the Third Reich.291

  Yet despite these developments, scientific research did not atrophy or collapse altogether in Nazi Germany. While standards in the universities might have fallen, the universities had never enjoyed a monopoly over research in Germany. Ever since the nineteenth century, large, modern companies in areas like the electrical, engineering and chemical industries had depended heavily on their own research and development sections, staffed by highly trained and well-paid scientists, for the technological innovations on which they relied to keep at the forefront of world markets. Even more importantly, perhaps, the state itself had instituted massive investment in scientific research institutes not only inside but, more importantly, outside the universities through a variety of bodies, notably the German Research Community and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Not surprisingly, the Third Reich directed its funding heavily towards investment in military or war-relevant technology, from new weaponry to synthetic fuels. Medicine and biology benefited from the Nazis’ encouragement in areas such as the improvement of crop yields, chemical fertilizers and synthetic fibres. As the drive to rearm and prepare for war became more urgent, so those parts of the scientific community that contributed to it were able to direct increasing amounts of funding towards themselves. It was symptomatic of this development that Heisenberg and his colleagues were able not only to secure the acceptance of their argument that theoretical physics was necessary for the development of sophisticated military technology, but also to secure the removal of Johannes Stark from the Presidency of the German Research Community in 1936 because his obdurate hostility to theoretical physics was hampering the funding of war-relevant research.292

  The government sharply increased the funding of the German Research Community and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, making its grants conditional on the ability of the recipients to demonstrate the relevance of their work to the preparation of Germany for war. Other governments in other states and at other times, of course, have directed their research support towards what they have considered useful to the state, a tendency that has seldom been of much comfort to the arts and humanities. But the scale, intensity and single-mindedness of the Third Reich in this respect far outdid most parallels elsewhere. The scientific research community in Germany was immensely strong; measured by the country’s overall population, it was probably the strongest in the world in 1933. Especially in government-funded research institutes and company research and development departments, it continued to pioneer many scientific and technological innovations under the Third Reich. These included the discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in 1938, the creation of important drugs such as methadone and Demerol, and the nerve gas sarin, technological developments like the jet propulsion engine, electron microscopes and the electronic computer, and major inventions such
as cold-steel extrusion, aerial infrared photography, power circuit breakers, tape recorders, x-ray tubes, colour film processing, diesel motors and intercontinental ballistic missiles. It has even been claimed that the first television broadcast strong enough to reach out beyond the planet Earth was of a speech by Hitler, delivered at the opening of the 1936 Olympic Games. Thus while the Third Reich tended to prioritize military training in the schools and the universities, to the detriment of other kinds of learning, it fully backed the most modern, most advanced scientific and technological research elsewhere if it could be shown to have even the remotest possibility of relevance to the war the regime was preparing to launch on Europe in the medium-term future.293