The Third Reich at War (99 page)

Educational standards at university did not just fall during the war as a consequence of the decline of educational standards in the schools. Students were obliged to spend increasing amounts of their time on work duties, helping with the harvest or working during the vacations in factories. The Ministry of Education did recognize in 1941 that the three-semester year, in combination with labour service during the vacations, was imposing an impossible strain on students, and restored the traditional two-semester year.
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But there were widespread complaints from professors that students were either too tired to work or too lazy and apathetic. The Nazi Party’s open contempt for learning, hammered into them in their formative years, lowered their respect for their teachers. After the war, there would be a huge demand for lawyers and doctors, they thought, so why bother to work anyway? As the Security Service of the SS reported on 5 October 1942:

It is unanimously reported from every university town in the Reich
that the performance level of the students is continually falling
. Their written work, their participation in classes and seminars, as well as their examination results, have reached a real low point . . . Many students
don’t even possess the simplest, most elementary knowledge
. Orthographic, grammatical and stylistic mistakes are encountered ever more frequently in written work.
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Knowledge of foreign languages, the report added, was so poor that students were unable to follow lectures that used Latin words to denote different parts of the human body. Professors were asked by students to avoid using foreign words, and began to lower standards, making examinations easier to pass, and reducing the demands on their own time by marking student work less rigorously.
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The student body, already disparaged by many active Nazis as politically apathetic before the war, did not find any new commitment to National Socialism when the war began. If it committed itself to the conflict, it was as much on behalf of Germany as it was in the cause of National Socialism. The National Socialist German Students’ League went into decline, though it did score one success by persuading the remaining traditional fraternity members in its ranks to abandon the practice of duelling on the grounds that it was no longer necessary to demonstrate one’s manly courage by standing unflinchingly still as an opponent gouged a scar in one’s cheek with a sabre: one could now prove one’s valour by fighting in a real battle.
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The war, however, increasingly came home to the universities themselves, especially to those located in the larger towns and cities. By July 1944, twenty-five out of sixty-one higher education institutions in the Greater German Reich had been damaged in bombing raids. The disruption to teaching was considerable, as it took time to find new classrooms and lecture theatres, and these too were then often damaged by bombing. Frequent false alarms caused further disruption. By the end of the war, in 1945, bombing had effectively put an end to higher learning almost everywhere in Germany: only Erlangen, G̈ttingen, Halle, Heidelberg, Marburg and T̈bingen were undamaged. Many other universities had been totally destroyed. Long before this, study had been made more difficult by the understandable decision of many university libraries to move their precious collections out to coalmines or similar sites for safe-keeping. Bookshops fell victim to the bombing raids as well, so that journals and textbooks became increasingly difficult to find.
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When Goebbels was appointed Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort in 1944, university education effectively came to an end. 16,000 students were drafted to the front, and 31,000 were conscripted for service in war industries. Goebbels had wanted to close all the universities down, but he had been prevented from doing this by Himmler on the grounds that some, at least, of their activities were of direct benefit to the war effort. Thus the only students allowed to continue their studies were either those about to take their final examinations or those enrolled in courses on subjects like physics, maths, ballistics and electronics. There were still 38,000 German students in university at the end of 1944, though this was many fewer than the number of students who had been there a year before. But they could no longer study to any effect, even had they wanted to. Disillusion with the regime was widespread. The use of the ‘Hitler greeting’ was said to have virtually ceased many months before this. Yet open opposition to Nazism was still rare. Dull apathy was far more common.
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In these circumstances, continuing with research and publication was extremely difficult for university teachers. The longer teaching year in 1939 and 1940 indeed made it virtually impossible for many. Only if research could be shown to be of direct benefit to the war effort, or to projects associated with it, would it be given any kind of priority. Publication in the arts and humanities was reduced to little more than propaganda. For most professors, conservative nationalists as they were, the war presented a spiritual call to arms to fight for Germany, however much they may have disliked Nazism and its ideas. A case in point was the Freiburg historian Gerhard Ritter, whose writings, public and private, of the war years were torn between his moral revulsion for Nazism and his patriotic commitment to the German cause. Like many others in his situation, he was enthused by the victories of 1939 and 1940, but increasingly disillusioned by the military setbacks and disasters of the following years. His behaviour was strongly coloured by the death of his own son on the Eastern Front. In his public lectures and publications he did his best to bolster morale both at home and in the forces; he went on tours of France and other occupied countries and lectured to the armed forces as well as continuing to teach in his own university. Increasingly, however, he larded his lectures and articles with appeals for moderation and implicit criticisms of what he saw as Nazi extremism. Introducing a reissue of his biography of Martin Luther in 1943, for instance, he insisted on the importance of retaining a pure conscience and a strong legal order. Ritter was bitterly opposed to the attempts of the German Christians to Nazify German Protestantism, and began to write private memoranda about the need to re-establish a moral order after the war was over. In November 1944 he was finally arrested by the Gestapo, but he was not badly treated in prison; he survived the war and became a prominent member of the West German historical establishment in the 1950s. His complex and often contradictory position during the Third Reich typified that of many other academics in the humanities, and he was not the only one whose views evolved gradually from a positive though always conditional support of the regime towards a deepening opposition based on the Christian, conservative and patriotic values that he thought it was violating.
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Other historians and social scientists, however, and especially younger ones, were only too keen to participate in the war in the interests not so much of Germany as of Nazi ideology. Specialists in the history of East-Central Europe like the young Theodor Schieder and his colleague Werner Conze declared large parts of the region to be historically German and urged the clearing-out of the Jewish population in order to make room for German settlers. In a memorandum presented to Himmler, Schieder advocated the deportation of the Jews overseas, and the removal of part of the Polish population further east. Other, more senior historians including Hermann Aubin and Albert Brackmann offered their services in the identification of historically ‘German’ parts of the region, as a prelude to the expulsion of the rest of the population. Statisticians calculated the proportion of Jews in the region, demographers worked out the details of possible future population growth following Germanization, economists engaged in cost-benefit analyses of deportation and murder, geographers mapped out the territories to be resettled and redeveloped. All of this ultimately fed into the General Plan for the East, with its almost limitless ambition for racial reordering and extermination.
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These various enthusiastic contributions reflected the eagerness of a variety of scholars and institutions to exert an influence on, or at least play a part in, the reconstruction of Eastern Europe under Nazi rule. Beyond this, they rushed to take part in the grand schemes developed by the Nazi leadership for the reshaping of the whole economic, social and racial structure of Europe. ‘Scholarship cannot simply wait until it is called upon,’ wrote Aubin to Brackmann on 18 September 1939. ‘It must make itself heard.’
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Some of these scholars and scientists were still based in universities during the war, but even more than had been the case in the peacetime years, research activity, particularly in the natural and physical sciences, was concentrated in non-university institutes funded by major national bodies, notably the German Research Community and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. These survived, with their very substantial budgets, in the first part of the war not least because nobody in power paid very much attention to them. German military victories generated a widespread sense of complacency. The victories in the west in 1940 and the rapid advances across the Soviet Union the following year demonstrated not only the superiority of German arms but also the world-beating stature of German science and technology. Only when things began to go badly did Nazi leaders turn to scientists for help. Albert Speer in particular was keen on co-ordinating scientific research and focusing it on war-relevant projects. In the summer of 1943 a Reich Research Council was established to co-ordinate and focus scientific efforts across the wide variety of research institutes and funding bodies that were competing with one another in the effort to deliver new weapons and new technologies. But this still left a number of rival institutions, as the air force and the army insisted on running their own research centres and the decentralization and dissipation of military-related research defied all attempts of the Reich Research Council to develop a coherent research strategy that would avoid the same areas being covered by parallel groups of researchers.
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Scientific research during the war ranged across the whole spectrum of Nazi plans and ambitions. Scientists at a specially created institute in Athens carried out research into improving crop yields and food supplies for future use by German settlers in the east, while an SS botanical unit collected plant specimens behind the Eastern Front to see if any of them were of nutritional value.
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Such work involved a two-way bargain: scientists were not just being co-opted by the regime, but also willingly used the research opportunities it provided to build their own research careers and further their own scientific work. So intensive was the collaboration indeed that some even spoke ironically of ‘war in the service of science’.
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In 1942, the creation of a Reich Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy set the seal on the efforts of Matthias G̈ring (a cousin of the Reich Marshal, whose name was of considerable help to him in his campaign) to gain recognition for a profession long associated by the Nazis with Jewish doctors such as Sigmund Freud. The Institute investigated war-relevant matters such as the reasons for neuroses and breakdowns among the troops; but it is also, as we have seen, researched homosexuality, which the army and the SS regarded as a genuine threat to the German soldier’s fighting prowess.
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Racial-biological research was carried out not only by Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institutes but also by Himmler’s Ancestral Heritage organization, the research arm of the SS.
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Himmler’s men ranged far and wide both before and during the war in search of proof for his often wild racial and anthropological theories. The organization mounted expeditions to Scandinavia, Greece, Libya and Iraq looking for prehistoric remains, and two scholars worked their way through a variety of sites in the Middle East, sending back reports to German intelligence as they went. Most remarkably of all, Ancestral Heritage staffers Ernst Scḧfer and Bruno Beger led an SS expedition to remote Tibet, where they photographed some 2,000 of the inhabitants, measured 376 individuals and took plastic casts of seventeen Tibetan faces. Heinrich Harrer, already well known for his conquest of the Eiger mountain, achieved greater fame on another expedition sent by Himmler to the Himalayas. Arrested by the British on the outbreak of war, he escaped and spent seven years in Tibet, later writing a best-selling account of his experiences.

Encountering problems in identifying who was Jewish and who was not in the ethnically and culturally mixed regions of the Crimea and the Caucasus when they were overrun by German forces, Himmler dispatched Scḧfer and Beger to the area to try to sort things out so that the Jews could be separated out and killed. Before long, Beger was engrossed in a large-scale study of supposedly Jewish racial characteristics. Unable to continue his work because of the advance of the Red Army in 1943, he relocated to Auschwitz, where he selected and measured Jewish prisoners and took casts of their faces, in full knowledge of their impending fate. Then he moved on to the concentration camp at Natzweiler. Here he was assisted by the ghoulish anatomist August Hirt, whose features had been severely disfigured by a wound to his upper and lower jaw during the First World War. At Natzweiler the two men started a collection of Jewish skulls, first taking x-rays of selected inmates, then, after having them gassed, macerating their flesh in a chemical solution before adding the skeletal remains to the Ancestral Heritage archive at Mittersill castle. These macabre activities were only brought to an end by the arrival of the advancing Allied armies.
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