Science and political ideology: The example of Nazi Germany
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7203/metode.10.13657Keywords:
academic anti-Semitism, ecology and holism in Nazi Germany, science and valuesAbstract
Although in their basic framework Nazi anti-Semitic and racist ideology and policies were not grounded in science, scientists not only supported them in various ways, but also took advantage of them, for example by using the new possibilities of unethical experimentation in humans that these ideologies provided. Scientists’ complicity with Nazi ideology and politics does, however, not mean that all sciences in Nazi Germany were ideologically tainted. I argue, rather, that despite the fact that some areas of science continued at high levels, science in Nazi Germany was most negatively affected not by the imposition of Nazi ideology on the conduct of science but by the enactment of legal measures that ensured the expulsion of Jewish scientists. The anti-Semitism of young faculty and students was particularly virulent. Moreover, I show that scientists supported Nazi ideologies and policies not only through so-called reductionist science such as eugenics and race-hygiene, but also by promoting organicist and holistic ideologies of the racial state.
Downloads
References
Bergmann, B., Epple, M., & Ungar, R. (Eds.). (2012). Transcending tradition. Jewish mathematicians in German speaking academic culture. Heidelberg: Springer.
Beyerchen, Alan D. (1997). Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the physics community in the Third Reich. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bramwell, A. (1985). Blood and soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’. Bourne End, Buckinghamshire: Kensal.
Charpa, U., & Deichmann, U. (2007). Jews and sciences in German contexts. Case studies from the 19th and 20th centuries. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck.
Deichmann, U. (1996). Biologists under Hitler. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.
Deichmann, U. (1999). The expulsion of Jewish chemists and biochemists from academia in Nazi Germany. Perspectives on Science, 7(1), 1–86. doi: 10.1162/posc.1999.7.1.1
Deichmann, U. (2000). An unholy alliance. The Nazis showed that “politically responsible” science risks losing its soul. Millenium-essay. Nature, 405, 739.
Deichmann, U. (2001). Flüchten, Mitmachen, Vergessen. Chemiker und Biochemiker im Nationalsozialismus. Weinheim: Wiley/VCH.
Deichmann, U. (2004). Politische Ökologie, biologische, chemische und medizinische Umweltforschung in der NS-Zeit. Acta Historica Leopoldina, 39, 117–134.
Evans, R. I. (1975). Konrad Lorenz: The man and his ideas. New York/London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Friederichs, K. (1934). Vom Wesen der Ökologie. Sudhoffs Archiv zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, 27, 277–285.
Friederichs, K. (1937) Ökologie als Wissenschaft von der Natur. Leipzig: J.A. Barth.
Hutton, C. (2005). Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, racial anthropology and genetics in the dialectic of Volk. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Joravsky, D. (1970). The Lysenko affair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kennedy, E. P. (2001). Hitler’s gift and the era of biosynthesis. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 276, 42619–42631. doi: 10.1074/jbc.R100051200
Mayer-Tasch, P. C. (1985). Aus dem Wörterbuch der politischen Ökologie. Munich: Dt. Taschenbuch-Verlag.
Müller-Hill, B. (1988). Murderous science: Elimination by scientific selection of Jews, Gypsies, and others, Germany 1933–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sussman, R. W. (2014). The myth of race: The troubling persistence of an unscientific idea. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.
Trepl, L. (1987). Geschichte der Ökologie: vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegewart: zehn Vorlesungen (Vol. 4070). Frankfurt: Athenäum.
Weber, H. (1935). Lage und Aufgabe der Biologie in der deutschen Gegenwart. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenschaft, 1, 95–106.
Weber, H. (1942). Organismus und Umwelt. Der Biologe, 11, S. 57.
Wetzell, R. (2017). Eugenics, racial science, and Nazi biopolitics. In D. Pendas, M. Roseman, & R. Wetzell (Eds.), Beyond the racial state: Rethinking Nazi Germany (pp. 147–175). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/9781316691700.006
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
-
Abstract3663
-
PDF1154
Issue
Section
License
All the documents in the OJS platform are open access and property of their respective authors.
Authors publishing in the journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors keep the rights and guarantee Metode Science Studies Journal the right to be the first publication of the document, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of authorship and publication in the journal.
- Authors are allowed and encouraged to spread their work through electronic means using personal or institutional websites (institutional open archives, personal websites or professional and academic networks profiles) once the text has been published.