ScienceWeek

BIOLOGISTS AND PHYSICISTS AND NAZI SCIENCE

Fifty-five years after the end of the Nazi regime in Germany (1933-1945), studies of the active collaboration of a number of German scientists with the Nazis continue to be a focus of attention. Perhaps part of the reason for the attention is puzzlement: These scientists actively collaborated with a tyrannical regime whose essence was totally opposed to the very spirit of science. Hitler, in fact, is said to have dismissed German physics with a wave of his hand and a statement that Germany could do without physics for a thousand years. What was in the minds of these scientists when they chose to actively support the Nazis? Was it an arrogant belief that their expertise in a science gave them superior insights into the enigmas of political, social, and economic realities? Such questions will continue to be pondered by historians, sociologists, and psychologists. Meanwhile, the contemporary German science community is struggling to deal with its past.

The following points are made in a report by the Max Planck Society (formerly known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society) (Nature 19 Oct 00 407:823):

1) Ernst Ruedin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, and Ernst Fischer and Otmar von Verschuer, both of whom headed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin during the Nazi era, advised the Nazis at the highest levels. All three men had direct contact with the Nazi leadership and served on important government advisory panels. Ruedin sat on an expert committee to the ministry of the interior on population and race policies. There is evidence that Ruedin, whose work to give racial laws a scientific basis was funded directly from Hitler's office, chaired the committee's working group on "racial hygiene and racial policies". This panel set the criteria for the castration of criminals and the forced sterilization of so-called "inferior women", particularly those with "psychological" problems.

2) According to the new report, Ruedin lobbied successfully for ever broader criteria, and on Ruedin's initiative, the sterilization came to include the "morally ill" -- the Nazi term for the mentally handicapped. This category covered 95 percent of the 400,000 sterilizations carried out between 1933 and 1945. At Ruedin's suggestion, the sterilized included 600 children of black French soldiers and German women in the state of Rhineland, which the French occupied after the First World War.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of all of this is that these policies, which now seem the product of deranged minds, were not proposed and implemented by a few mentally deranged political leaders, but were indeed proposed and implemented by at least part of the German scientific establishment. Why did this happen? And how can the present scientific community prevent such a thing happening again?

The new German investigation has so far focused on the history of four Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, three of which were in the biological sciences and the fourth the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Metal Research in Stuttgart. The head of the research group that produced the report, Carola Sachse, according to the Nature news report, says "it is not known whether Nazi sympathies were the exception or the rule among scientists."

Then, at the very end of the Nature news article, there appears a remarkable photograph and caption. The photograph shows a meeting at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Metal Research in 1935, and in the foreground is the physicist Max Planck (1858-1947), at that time president of the Kaiser Wilhelm society and the most illustrious scientist in Germany, Planck seated flanked by two senior Nazi officials, the Nazis replete with uniforms and swastika armbands. Max Planck? The caption to the photograph reads: "Close ties: Max Planck (centre) at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Metal Research in 1935".

The implication of the caption, in the context of the news report in which it appears, and in which there is absolutely no mention of Max Planck the individual, is clearly that Max Planck was an active collaborator with the Nazis, which is an astounding accusation. (The Nature photograph is credited to "Archiv zur Geschichte der MPG", i.e., the archives of the Max Planck Society.) Was the meeting some official function which Planck, as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, was obliged to attend? Perhaps so, but there is no explanation of the photograph beyond the caption. At the time of the photograph, Max Planck was 77 years old. Two years later, in 1937, Planck resigned as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in protest at the Nazi treatment of Jewish scientists. In 1944, Planck's son Erwin was executed by the Nazi's for participating in the July plot to kill Hitler. Max Planck a Nazi collaborator? Where is the evidence for that? At the end of the Second World War, partly in honor of his resistance to the Nazis, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society was renamed the Max Planck Society and Max Planck was made its first post-war president.