February 17, 2008 | David F. Coppedge

Nazi-Era Scientists Were Willing Colluders

A seven-year study of the conduct of the German research funding agency, the DFG, was completed last month.  Historians focused specifically on the Nazi years, 1933-1945.  The report was mentioned by both Nature1 and Science.2
    The upshot is that many German scientists went along with Hitler’s regime without resistance.  Ulrich Herbert, a historian at the University of Freiburg, said, “The transition to National Socialism for most areas of research was not a very dramatic step.  In 1933, Nazis came into leadership positions, but there was no specific Nazi agenda.  Instead, contrary positions and voices were simply eliminated.”  German scientists were not particularly more racist, nationalistic or eugenicist than their American or Scandinavian counterparts, but contrary opinions lost support during the Reich.  “We found that the research community [in Germany] was seized by the same radical patriotism as the rest of society after the First World War,” he said.  Central control was not the only factor.  The same attitudes prevailed at the decentralized universities as at the centrally-controlled Max Planck Society.  Herbert told Nature, “Universities ended up colluding with the regime because the conservative professors who were able to continue working there agreed, like the general population, with most Nazi policies.  There was no organized opposition to the views and no public debate of different positions.”
    The historians did not uncover any shocking new atrocities beyond those already described at the Nuremburg Trials and since, but one thing stood out: the ease with which ordinary professors and scientists signed on to the regime:

But we learnt how exquisitely closely ‘normal’ professors – not just the mad Nazi typesaligned their goals with the policies of the Nazi regime.  Grant applications showed, for example, how many professors took part in developing plans for expansion to the east after Germany won the war (as they assumed).  Plans that would have killed or enslaved more than 30 million people.

Herbert also said that the nationalistic attitudes of the German scientists continued into the 1960s till a new generation emerged.  “It’s good to know the dark side of one’s history,” he said.


1.  “Lessons from the dark side,” Nature 755 (2008) | doi:10.1038/451755a.
2.  Newsmakers, Science, Volume 319, Number 5865, Issue of 15 February 2008.

Does anyone think for a moment that today’s professors and academics in Big Science would not fall in line with another genocidal totalitarian regime, if the inducements were strong enough?  The herd mentality makes it more comfortable to go along to get along.  We already see the shameless ease with which they support experimentation on human embryos, the selfishness with which they demand public money for everything they want to do, and their willingness to lie openly about the evidence for Darwinism.  Many individual scientists are the most honest and noble people you would ever meet, but the record of Big Science is not encouraging.  How many of even the honest ones would risk everything to stand against incipient evil policies?
    Hitler’s regime has become such a byword for evil, we tend to overuse it and get numb to it.  Don’t let that happen.  Watch the documentaries, read the histories, remind yourself regularly just how destructive it was.  Then read up on communism and the other Social Darwinist regimes of the 20th century: ideas that generated unspeakable evil on the world, resulting in 148 million deaths and untold misery for survivors, many of whom would have welcomed death.  This story demonstrates that “normal” intelligent professors, and citizens, went right along with policies that not only killed millions, but would have killed tens of millions more had they not been defeated.
    To prevent a recurrence, it is not sufficient to know the dark side of your nation’s history.  You must know the dark side of your own heart (Romans 3).  Jeremiah said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).  We may not know it exhaustively, but we can know it sufficiently to demand our governments set up safeguards to prevent the success of evil ideas.  Beware especially of ideologies that build their morals on a Darwinian foundation.  The solution to the problem of evil begins one heart at a time (Romans 5).

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Categories: Politics and Ethics

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