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Biologists under Hitler
Book reviews Biologists Under Hitler. By Ute Deichmann, translated by Thomas Dunlap. Pp335. Harvard University Press, 1996. ISBN 0 674 07404 1. Ute Deichmann, Research Fellow in the Institute for Genetics at the University of Cologne, has done for the history of the biological sciences what previous historians have done for physics and medicine: she traces the response of a group of professional scientists in Germany to the rise to power of the Nazis after 1933. Like two recent authors, Robert Proctor (on medicine) and Benno Muller-Hill (on scientists in general), Deichmann shows how many well-known biologists slipped easily, even eagerly, into aligning their research interests with the explicit goals of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Specifically excluding studies of racial hygiene (on the grounds that this topic has been covered in other works), Deichmann shows how physiologists, cell biologists, plant and animal breeders, biochemists and a host of other biologists were eager to make their work relevant to Nazi political and social goals. For example, geneticists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research in Muncheberg were given considerable funds to develop new plants that could be used when the German resettlement program was carried out in the east (i.e. when Germans were to be given Lebensraum by the forcible increased removal of the inhabitants of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary). Others, like pioneer animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz actively embraced Nazi racial policies and geared their work specifically to support Reich ideology. Still others, like racial hygienist Otmar von Verschuer, the mentor of Josef Mengele, actively carried out experiments on inmates in concentration camps for research on the physiological response of individuals to various stressful conditions such as extreme cold, or used anatomical material from those murdered in the camps to study the genetic basis of specific pathologies in monozygotic twins. Even supposedly ‘pure’ and neutral biologists such as Hans Nachtsheim, a geneticist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Munich, proved to have a strongly tainted past: Nachtsheim knowingly participated in research on epileptic children obtained from a euthenasia center in Gorden, Brandenburg from 1942. Deichmann makes it clear that the Nazis developed a strong program for funding scientific research; they did not shun science or offtcially advocate the kind of pseudoscience with which they are often associated in popular accounts. The funding for science was particularly strong for the various
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institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, although less so for individual scientists working in universities. While the detailed descriptions of much of this work make somewhat tedious reading, their inclusion makes dramatically clear the extent to which biological business was carried out ‘as usual’ even during the height of the Nazi era. What is simultaneously provocative and chilling, are Deichmann’s accounts of how ordinary German (non-Jewish, of course) scientists continued their research work, or redirected it, after 1933 to maintain and/or augment their professional positions and funding. Such work, Deichmann insists, did much to help the overall political, social and economic aims, as well as the prestige, of the Nazi regime. If there is any single, most important take-home message from Deichmann’s book, it seems to me that it this: the path to moral ignorance and bankruptcy for scientists is a very slippery slope, especially when greased by the dangling carrot of research funds and increased power at a time when both money and new jobs are scarce. Scientists can be more easily ‘bought’ than most of us would like to believe. By demonstrating this fact so clearly, however, Deichmann provides at least the hope that we can (though, sadly, we may not) learn from the mistakes of our predecessors. Somewhat more problematical is the author’s attempt to assess the quality of the biological research carried out under the Nazis. The general impression one gets from Deichmann’s presentation is that the quality of science in Germany declined after 1933, but not as much as postwar German scientists tried to claim when they portrayed themselves as victims of Nazism along with workers, Jews, communists, gypsies and homosexuals. The decline that did occur may have been partly due to the emigration of a number of the best German scientists (especially Jewish) and partly to the Nazi’s attempt to control all scientific work through a central Research Council (the DFR). More intriguingly, the author suggests that the same moral lapses that allowed German biologists to overlook the dismissal of their Jewish colleagues, or to participate in research in behalf of the Nazi state, may have also given rise to, or supported, a lapse of concern for scientific rigor and for the critical opinion of the international scientific community. While biology in Germany after the Nazi take-over may not have been as outstanding as it was before 1933 (and especially before 1914) it did not all lapse into bogus racial theory or pseudo-science. Much of it was distressingly ‘normal’. Despite these compelling points, there are some peculiar aspects of Deichmann’s study. For one thing, there is a strange section thrown into the conclusion comparing
biology under the Nazis to that under the Bolsheviks in the USSR - particularly focusing on the Lysenko case. The alleged purpose of this comparison is to show that whereas the communists tried to control the content of biological theory - at least in genetics - the Nazis maintained a much more hands-off approach to the actual nature of an individual’s research. Although careful to avoid taking a moral relativist position with regard to the Nazis, Deichmann does play into exactly the sort of anti-communist mentality that characterized much of Nazi ideology. Her survey of the Lysenko case and the conditions under which the communist party gave official sanction to what many felt at the time was a bogus biological theory (inheritance of acquired characteristics) is too brief and too superficial to provide any understanding of the very different economic and social context in which biological theory developed in Germany and the Soviet Union. There is also a peculiar ‘Epilogue’ which consists of a letter written by physicist Lise Meitner from England to her former colleague Otto Hahn, in Berlin (though apparently never delivered to him) just after the war, explaining why international scientific opinion was so outraged by the behavior of many German scientists during the Nazi period. The letter itself is quite interesting, but it is presented with no comment or justification for its inclusion. The book has a useful appendix with thumbnail biographical sketches of several hundred biologists (mostly, but not exclusively German) mentioned in the book. Despite some shortcomings, Deichmann’s book is an important reminder to us today that unless scientists remain both politically and morally aware of their work and the context in which it is used, co-option can always be just around the comer. Garland E. Allen
Birth to Death: Science and Bioethics. Edited by D.C. Thomasma and T: Kushner. Pp. 382. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hardback f4O.OO/US$54.95; paperback f 14.95/$19.95. ISBN 0 521 46297 5/ 55556 6. With the approach of the millennium there has been a flurry of interest in the ethics of science and especially the consequences of medical progress. In this book, many authors have looked at their areas of special interest and at how the applications of science have changed the world - especially the relationship of humans to other species and the environment.
Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-9327/96/$15.00.
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institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, although less so for individual scientists working in universities. While the detailed descriptions of much of this work make somewhat tedious reading, their inclusion makes dramatically clear the extent to which biological business was carried out ‘as usual’ even during the height of the Nazi era. What is simultaneously provocative and chilling, are Deichmann’s accounts of how ordinary German (non-Jewish, of course) scientists continued their research work, or redirected it, after 1933 to maintain and/or augment their professional positions and funding. Such work, Deichmann insists, did much to help the overall political, social and economic aims, as well as the prestige, of the Nazi regime. If there is any single, most important take-home message from Deichmann’s book, it seems to me that it this: the path to moral ignorance and bankruptcy for scientists is a very slippery slope, especially when greased by the dangling carrot of research funds and increased power at a time when both money and new jobs are scarce. Scientists can be more easily ‘bought’ than most of us would like to believe. By demonstrating this fact so clearly, however, Deichmann provides at least the hope that we can (though, sadly, we may not) learn from the mistakes of our predecessors. Somewhat more problematical is the author’s attempt to assess the quality of the biological research carried out under the Nazis. The general impression one gets from Deichmann’s presentation is that the quality of science in Germany declined after 1933, but not as much as postwar German scientists tried to claim when they portrayed themselves as victims of Nazism along with workers, Jews, communists, gypsies and homosexuals. The decline that did occur may have been partly due to the emigration of a number of the best German scientists (especially Jewish) and partly to the Nazi’s attempt to control all scientific work through a central Research Council (the DFR). More intriguingly, the author suggests that the same moral lapses that allowed German biologists to overlook the dismissal of their Jewish colleagues, or to participate in research in behalf of the Nazi state, may have also given rise to, or supported, a lapse of concern for scientific rigor and for the critical opinion of the international scientific community. While biology in Germany after the Nazi take-over may not have been as outstanding as it was before 1933 (and especially before 1914) it did not all lapse into bogus racial theory or pseudo-science. Much of it was distressingly ‘normal’. Despite these compelling points, there are some peculiar aspects of Deichmann’s study. For one thing, there is a strange section thrown into the conclusion comparing
biology under the Nazis to that under the Bolsheviks in the USSR - particularly focusing on the Lysenko case. The alleged purpose of this comparison is to show that whereas the communists tried to control the content of biological theory - at least in genetics - the Nazis maintained a much more hands-off approach to the actual nature of an individual’s research. Although careful to avoid taking a moral relativist position with regard to the Nazis, Deichmann does play into exactly the sort of anti-communist mentality that characterized much of Nazi ideology. Her survey of the Lysenko case and the conditions under which the communist party gave official sanction to what many felt at the time was a bogus biological theory (inheritance of acquired characteristics) is too brief and too superficial to provide any understanding of the very different economic and social context in which biological theory developed in Germany and the Soviet Union. There is also a peculiar ‘Epilogue’ which consists of a letter written by physicist Lise Meitner from England to her former colleague Otto Hahn, in Berlin (though apparently never delivered to him) just after the war, explaining why international scientific opinion was so outraged by the behavior of many German scientists during the Nazi period. The letter itself is quite interesting, but it is presented with no comment or justification for its inclusion. The book has a useful appendix with thumbnail biographical sketches of several hundred biologists (mostly, but not exclusively German) mentioned in the book. Despite some shortcomings, Deichmann’s book is an important reminder to us today that unless scientists remain both politically and morally aware of their work and the context in which it is used, co-option can always be just around the comer. Garland E. Allen
Birth to Death: Science and Bioethics. Edited by D.C. Thomasma and T: Kushner. Pp. 382. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hardback f4O.OO/US$54.95; paperback f 14.95/$19.95. ISBN 0 521 46297 5/ 55556 6. With the approach of the millennium there has been a flurry of interest in the ethics of science and especially the consequences of medical progress. In this book, many authors have looked at their areas of special interest and at how the applications of science have changed the world - especially the relationship of humans to other species and the environment.
Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-9327/96/$15.00.