Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (26 page)

The claim that these professionals were
forced
to participate in these crimes is, in the case of doctors and academics, false. Dr. Hans Hefelman, a high-level euthanasia programme bureaucrat, testified, “No doctor was ever ordered to participate in the euthanasia programme; they came of their own volition.”
⁴²
Himmler, in a written statement to a high-level judge, noted that operations undertaken in psychiatric hospitals were ordered and administered solely by medical doctors.
⁴³
Proctor wrote that “Doctors were never ordered to murder psychiatric patients and handicapped children,” rather they

were
empowered
to do so, and fulfilled their task without protest, often on their own initiative. Hitler’s original memo of October 1939 was not an order (
Befehl
), but an empowerment (
Vollmacht
), granting physicians permission to act.
⁴⁴

As German zoologist and geneticist Dr. Ludwig Plate wrote, “progress in evolution goes forward over millions of dead bodies” of “inferior” humans, and the “key elements of the worldview had been constructed and repeatedly reaffirmed by linguists, racial anthropologists, evolutionary scientists and geneticists.”
⁴⁵

SUPPORT FROM PHYSICISTS

It was not just biologists and medical doctors who supported Hitler in large numbers, but also physicists. Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard and Professor Johannes Stark opposed not only Jews but even what they called “Jewish physics,” the research conclusions of Jewish scientists, such as the work produced by Albert Einstein.
⁴⁶
Lenard, Stark and others argued the work of Aryan physicists was superior to that of “Jewish science.” Part of their opposition to Jews was “Einstein’s avowed pacifism, internationalism, and support of Zionism.”
⁴⁷

Lenard’s loyalty to Nazism was revealed in an “ecstatic statement in favor of Hitler and the Nazi party” that he had published early in the history of the Nazi movement.
⁴⁸
Although strident anti-Semitism by physicists such as by Lenard was not the norm, “a milder version was widespread.” Bernstein concluded that

Von Laue was almost the only German physicist who publicly continued to lecture on relativity, attributing the theory to Einstein, and he courageously opposed Nazi physicists at every step in their efforts to gain control of German physics.
⁴⁹

It was not only Jews that the Aryan scientists opposed, but also those few who spoke out on behalf of Jews, such as Max Planck who opposed the appointment of anti-Semite mathematician Theodor Vahlen to the German Academy. Even “Planck’s retirement did not free him from the attacks of the Aryan physicists” that resulted from his stand against anti-Semitic scientists.
⁵⁰
Planck was merciously ridiculed by Aryan scientists as “no physicist,” and his work was condemned as nothing but “mathematical reworking stumbling after experimental results.”
⁵¹

Hitler achieved strong support not only from many scientists, but also the entire academic community including philosophers and historians. Elie Wiesel wrote that one of the major shocks of his adult life came the day he

discovered that many of the officers of the
Einsatzgruppen
—the death commandos in Eastern Europe—had received degrees from Germany’s best universities. Some held doctorates in literature, others in philosophy, theology, or history. They had spent many years studying, learning the lessons of past generations, yet nothing kept them from killing Jewish children at Babi Yar, in Minsk, Ponar. Their education provided them with no shield, no shelter from the temptation and seduction of cruelty that people may carry within.
⁵²

WAR CRIMES OF NAZI PROFESSORS AND ACADEMICS

The “final solution” to the “Jewish problem” was decided at the infamous Wannsee Conference held in the exclusive Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942. Of the fifteen high-level Nazis in attendance, eight held a doctorate degree and several were lawyers.
⁵³
The “final solution” they unanimously agreed on was to exterminate all Jews (a definition they had a difficult time deciding on) in Europe, mostly by use of gas chambers or to work them to death.

So many university professors and academics took part in the Holocaust that a separate war crimes trial called the “Doctors’ Trial” was held for them in 1946. Of the twenty-three on trial, out of an estimated 400 doctors that “committed medical infractions in concentration camps and ‘euthanasia’ stations,” only a mere twenty physicians were in the end charged with having initiated, directed, and organized crimes against prisoners.
⁵⁴
These were the worst of the 400 and those against whom clear evidence existed, which could be used at the trial. The trial lasted from December 9, 1946 to July 3, 1947, and sixteen doctors were found guilty and sentenced to death or long prison terms.
⁵⁵
A witness at the trial wrote:

There was not one scintilla of remorse shown by any of these defendants. I was stunned at the evil, expressionless, hard faces of these doctors and assistants during the trial. They often expressed resentment when testifying, spewing defensive justifications and denying responsibility.
⁵⁶

STUDENT SUPPORT OF NAZISM PRIOR TO 1946

As expected, given their professors’ support, college and university

students were one of the most vocal forces of National Socialists policy at the universities. On April 13, the German Students Association announced its campaign “Against the Un-German Spirit,” which would climax in public book burnings on May 10 [1933].
⁵⁷

The students rationalized their anti-Semitism by concluding that a

Jew could only think Jewish, and when he wrote German he was lying; students should view Jews as aliens, and Jewish works should appear in Hebrew, or at least be designated as translations if they were printed in German; students and professors should be selected “according to their guarantee of thinking in the German spirit.”
⁵⁸

The Nazi government reworded the students’ activism by the Prussian minister of education restoring

student self-government, which had been taken away under the Weimar ministry, and restricted membership in student organizations to Aryans only. Quotas for non-Aryans in the German schools soon followed. Also on the thirteenth, the first dismissals [of Jews] under the Civil Service Law were announced at half a dozen universities.
⁵⁹

OPPOSITION TO NAZISM BY PHYSICIANS

As noted, Hitler had enormous support from physicians, both those in academia and those working in hospitals. When Hitler and Himmler made it known to the leaders of the medical profession that their goal was to murder Jews and others, “few in the German medical profession believed it…[was a good idea] to refuse” to be involved in murdering those determined to be “useless eaters.”
⁶⁰
One of the few physicians who openly opposed the Nazis even before they came to power was a Jewish doctor named Julius Moses. Moses was concerned about articles written by the leader of the National Socialist Welfare Organization calling for the killing of disabled persons.

Dr. Moses wrote in 1932 that the Nazi eugenic programmes had to enlist physicians to do the dirty work, writing that “it is the physician who must carry out this extermination…he is to be the executioner.”
⁶¹
Dr. Erich Hilgengeldt was even more open than the Nazi Welfare Organization in supporting the Nazis’ eugenic goals, proclaiming, “the unfit must be ruthlessly exterminated.” The “unfit” later included Dr. Moses himself, who died in a concentration camp in the 1940s.
⁶²

AFTER GERMANY LOST THE WAR

After the war ended, “despite Jewish professor Lise Meitner’s powerful criticisms, Hitler’s scientists showed little remorse” for their role in Nazism’s many crimes against humanity, not the least of which was the Holocaust.
⁶³
After the war, “with rare exceptions criminal doctors calmly returned home to resume normal practices and ordinary life” in post Nazi Germany.
⁶⁴
Science in West Germany simply accommodated itself to the changed situation and moved forward.

Professor Konrad Lorenz, an active Nazi, went back to his scientific work after the war and, as noted above, was later awarded a Nobel Prize in 1973 “for discoveries in individual and social behavior patterns.” Lorenz, an Austrian zoologist and ornithologist, is regarded as the founder of the field called
ethology
, the scientific study of animal behaviour, and a sub-field of zoology. He was a committed evolutionist to the extent that he refused even to discuss the merits of the theory because he considered the question closed.

Lorenz also vociferously rejected Christianity and concluded that evolution provided a superior goal—the higher evolution of humanity—to Christianity. Lorenz fervently believed that evolutionary theory reinforced Nazi racial doctrines, including racial inequality and racial solidarity.
⁶⁵
He also argued in harmony with Nazism that the race is foremost and the individual clearly secondary.

One professional group that did not become active supporters of Hitler, at least after the persecution against them began, were Jewish professors. Professor Kater concluded that, because of expelling Jews, “Germany may have lost as many as 40 percent of its medical faculty to racist fanaticism; the harm to science and education [in Germany] was unfathomable.”
⁶⁶

The level of support by doctors in Nazi Germany was so strong that “there were so many doctors and scientists involved in the Nazi crimes that to weed them all out would have left post-war Germany with hardly any at all, an intolerable situation in a nation reeling from starvation and decimation.”
⁶⁷
Medawar and Pyke, in documenting the many scientists expelled from Germany, mostly Jewish—which ended Germany’s fifty-year record of world supremacy in science—as Hitler’s gift to America.
⁶⁸

Recognizing their central role in the Holocaust, “Professors Astel, de Crinis, Hirt, Kranz and Dr. Gross committed suicide, and so, later, did Professors Clauberg, Heyde and Schneider, when charges [of genocide] were brought against them.”
⁶⁹

THE SCIENTISTS CONVERT ITALY TO EUGENICS

Italy’s Benito Mussolini agreed with Hitler on many issues, but one belief with which he disagreed passionately was Hitler’s anti-Semitism and racism.
⁷⁰
Mussolini even appointed some Jews to high-level posts in Italy. Some of the reasons for this include the beliefs of Hitler and the Nazi elite about the racial “superiority of the Germanic race compared to the Mediterranean peoples” as well as the Czechs, among other peoples.
⁷¹
The problem was solved by leading scientists who declared that, “Italians belonged to the Nordic race and are completely Aryan, while the Jews are not of the same race as the Italians.”
⁷²

This ruling by the elite scientists led to race laws, the first one published on July 14, 1938, that began the persecution of Jews in Italy—albeit in Italy it was “superficial and amateurish compared to the brutality Hitler was known for.”
⁷³
The result was that the large numbers of Jews that Italy had invited to migrate from Germany “in droves” were forced to return to Germany, many dying in concentration camps.

SUMMARY

The well-documented fact is “scientists played a significant role in the formulation of Nazi racial ideology.”
⁷⁴
German academics provided the scholarship, the putative scientific support, and the “techniques that led to and justified…unparalled slaughter” of Jews, Catholic Poles and other groups that the Nazis deemed biologically inferior, a conclusion well documented by numerous scholars, such as Weinreich.
⁷⁵
Both “Nazi medicine and science…were integral” to the Holocaust and “the monstrous crimes committed in occupied Europe out of hatred for…so-called inferior races and groups.”
⁷⁶
The fact is that