- Email: [email protected]
Continental drift under the Third Reich
Review
Endeavour
Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
171
Continental drift under the Third Reich Eric Buffetaut CNRS, 16 cour du Lie´gat, 75013 Paris, France
Contrary to what happened in many other countries in the 1930s and 1940s, Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift was not generally rejected in Nazi Germany, although several leading German geologists of the time did not accept it. It was actually presented as the modern view of Earth history in books and magazine articles aimed at the general public. Although outlandish geological theories such as Ho¨rbiger’s Welteislehre were favoured by some Nazi dignitaries, they were not widely accepted in scientific circles. On the other hand, continental drift received official support under the Third Reich, at a time when it was ignored or ridiculed by most earth scientists outside Germany. When Alfred Wegener died, aged 50, on the Greenland ice cap in November 1930, continental drift lost its most influential proponent. The idea that continents moved on the surface of the Earth had been hotly debated in the 1920s, after Wegener’s original publications in 1912 and 1915. Despite the support of a few eminent scientists, such as Emile Argand in Switzerland, Arthur Holmes in Britain, Alex Du Toit in South Africa and Ma Ting Ying in China, the hypothesis of continental drift was met with widespread scepticism in the 1930s and 1940s, to be revived on the basis of new evidence in the late 1950s and 1960s, under the guise of plate tectonics. The story of the rejection of continental drift by most geologists and geophysicists in western Europe and North America has been told repeatedly and analysed in great detail [1]. However, relatively little is known about what happened in Wegener’s own country, Germany, in the years immediately following his death. In the standard German biography of Alfred Wegener, Schwarzbach [2] did mention that a few German scientists supported continental drift, but that most opposed it, and summed up the German response to Wegener’s ideas with the old saying, ‘No man is a prophet in his own country’. Among the few supporters of Wegener’s ideas, Schwarzbach listed Solomon-Calvi, who had to emigrate to Turkey in 1934, after Hitler’s accession to power. He mainly stressed that two of the leading German structural geologists of the time, Hans Cloos and Hans Stille, for different reasons rejected continental drift. This gives the impression that continental drift was generally ignored or rejected in Germany in the decades that followed Wegener’s death. However, a closer look at the reception of continental drift in Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s reveals a different picture. Corresponding author: Eric Buffetaut ([email protected]).
Less than three years after Wegener’s death, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of the Reich, and within a few months, all aspects of German society and culture came under the influence of national-socialist ideology. A study of various documents published under the Third Reich (1933 – 1945) shows that the response to Wegener’ ideas was more complex than simple ignorance or rejection on the part of eminent geologists, and that the Nazis were not unsympathetic to continental drift, at a time when it was almost universally rejected. Welteislehre – a theory of ‘universal ice’ Descriptions of Nazi ‘science’ sometimes stress the importance of the Welteislehre, the theory of ‘universal ice’, which was put forward in the first decades of the 20th century by the Austrian engineer Hanns Ho¨rbiger (1860– 1931). The Welteislehre involved repeated catastrophic collisions of icy moons with the Earth, and, at least in its later versions, had strong mystical and racist overtones, involving the Nordic race, whose superior physical and mental features had been tried during those cataclysms. There is no doubt that some members of the Nazi hierarchy, especially among the Schutzstaffel (SS), were supporters of the Welteislehre. Novels inspired by Ho¨rbiger’s ideas – including a bizarre biography of a trilobite – were distributed under the auspices of Reichsfu¨hrer SS Heinrich Himmler (Fig. 1). The Welteislehre was one of the pseudo-sciences that flourished in Germany in the aftermath of the defeat of 1918, as noted by Muir Wood [3], who goes so far as to suggest a link between Ho¨rbiger’s icy cosmology and
Fig. 1. Stielauge der Urkrebs (‘Stem-eye the primeval crab’), by Batti Dohm, the biography of a trilobite inspired by the Welteislehre, and distributed under the auspices of Reichsfu¨hrer SS Heinrich Himmler (1942).
http://ende.trends.com 0160-9327/$ - see front matter q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2003.08.005
172
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Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
Wegener’s attempts to explain ice ages through continental drift. However, there is no mention of Ho¨rbiger’s theories in Wegener’s writings, and nothing to suggest that he ever was influenced by the Welteislehre. It should not be supposed that the outlandish speculations of Ho¨rbiger and his followers ever became the official geological credo of the national-socialists – who after all needed serious geology for economic purposes, especially in wartime. Books and papers published by academic geologists under the Third Reich show no influence from the Welteislehre, which was never accepted as a bona fide scientific theory, although it did have vocal and sometimes influential followers outside scientific circles under the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Alfred Wegener was neither ignored nor forgotten in Nazi Germany. The account of his last and fatal expedition to Greenland in 1930, edited by his widow Else, originally published in 1932, was reprinted in 1940 [4] (which, in a totalitarian state, reveals implicit support, or at least acceptance). Else Wegener repeatedly mentioned that her husband was ‘a good German but not a nationalist’, and had been hurt by the brutality and bloodshed of World War I [5,6], during which he was sent to the western front as a reserve officer and was wounded twice, after which he served in the meteorological service of the German army. However, Wegener’s image as a brave German explorer and scientist, who had lost his life in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, was likely to appeal to the nationalsocialists (all the more so because he was no longer around to criticize the regime). Continental drift, as a theory put forward by a German scientist, but widely rejected in the outside world, could also be represented as an instance of the superiority and inventiveness of German science, compared with foreign science which, in the case of geology, was sometimes denounced as the ‘slave of economic interests’ [7]. Although Wegener’s ideas were not adopted by all German geologists in the 1930s and 1940s [2,6], some were rather outspoken in their acceptance of continental drift. In a book aimed at the general public published in 1941 [7], for instance, Kurd von Bu¨low (1899 – 1971), who was then professor of geology at the University of Rostock, presented Wegener’s ideas as the ‘most modern views’, and contrasted his paleogeographical reconstructions with the older, outdated ones. Others, who were clearly Nazi sympathisers at that time, do not seem to have shared von Bu¨low’s views. Karl Beurlen, in a 1939 book on Earth history [8] in which he railed against the ‘Jewish-Oriental world view’, did not even mention Wegener, and only briefly suggested that the southern continents might have been closer to each other at the time of the Permian glaciation. A supportive Signal All this certainly suggests that there was no consensus about continental drift among German geologists under the Third Reich, and no strong pressure from the government to either accept or reject it. Evidence for official support for Wegener’s ideas comes from a different source – an article published in 1941 in Signal (Fig. 2). Signal was a bimonthly propaganda magazine, published by http://ende.trends.com
Fig. 2. The cover of Signal from August 1941, showing German soldiers passing through a burning Russian town.
Deutscher Verlag in Berlin for distribution in the countries occupied by Germany (including the Channel Islands, hence an English edition), and among its allies, such as Italy, Spain, Hungary, Finland and Croatia, as well as in neutral countries such as Switzerland. It had editions in more than 20 languages, including French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Czech, English, and even Arabic and Iranian. In a format reminiscent of the American Life magazine, Signal was lavishly illustrated with photographs (some of them in colour) and drawings, and was mainly designed to praise the successes of the German army and its allies, and to foster the idea of a united, German-led Europe fighting for its freedom against the Soviets and their Anglo-American allies. Besides war reports and papers praising collaboration with Germany, Signal also included articles on cultural and scientific topics. Its first issue for August 1941 was largely devoted to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which had been launched on 22 June, and featured photographs of the early successes of the Wehrmacht. However, German victories in the East left enough space for a two-page article on continental drift by K. von Philippoff, under a title with Galilean overtones, ‘And yet they do move’ (Fig. 3) [9]. Like, to some extent, Wegener himself, von Philippoff ’s article in defence of continental drift was right for the wrong reasons, in that it was based mainly on geodetic measurements, which purportedly revealed that the distance between North America and Europe increased by 32 cm per year.
Review
Endeavour
Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
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Fig. 3. The French version of K. von Philippoff’s article on continental drift, published in Signal.
The article described in some detail how astronomical data obtained at different places on Earth could be coupled with extremely accurate time measurements (provided by a high-precision chronometer kept in a sealed room at Potsdam) to produce precise longitude determinations. These, in turn, supposedly revealed an increasing distance between the American and European continents. Wegener considered geodetic data as being of prime importance for demonstrating continental drift, and discussed them at length in the last edition of Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane [10], but, as remarked by Schwarzbach [2], he was overoptimistic in this regard, for at this time longitude measurements were not accurate enough to really demonstrate continental movements. As a result, both Wegener and von Philippoff overestimated the rate of displacement of the continents – according to von Philippoff, when Columbus reached the shores of America, the Atlantic Ocean was 140 m narrower than in 1941. Although he devoted a large part of his paper to those misleading geodetic results, which he considered the ultimate and indisputable proof of Wegener’s hypothesis, von Philippoff also reminded his readers of other evidence (such as the fit of coastlines on both sides of the Atlantic) in favour of continental drift, a theory which provided a likely and satisfactory solution to many geological and biological problems that could not be explained otherwise. According to von Philippoff, ‘no mistake was possible’, and ‘Professor Wegener’s bold hypothesis’ was now fully demonstrated. http://ende.trends.com
Nazi approval The importance of this paper lies in the fact that it was published in a propaganda magazine, which reflected the views of the German government. Obviously, contrary to other scientific theories, continental drift was politically rather innocuous, and the scientific and personal record of Alfred Wegener was acceptable to the Nazis. Beyond that, some geodetic measurements appeared to prove him right, and the ‘demonstration’ of continental drift could be considered as one more triumph of German science (although von Philippoff ’s paper was rather subdued in this regard). That continental drift was chosen to appear in Signal certainly denotes approval and support by at least a part of the Nazi administration (which is notorious for having been divided on many issues, because of parallel hierarchies, some of which may have supported continental drift while others were in favour of the Welteislehre). Understandably, studies of German science during the Nazi period have often concentrated on its criminal aspects (in the medical and biological sciences), or on its more outlandish developments, the Welteislehre being a good example. More ‘progressive’ aspects have often been overlooked, or considered simply as part of mainstream science in the mid-20th century (which certainly largely applies to German earth sciences at that time). However, recent research has shown that the Third Reich was ahead of most other countries in some unexpected fields, such as cancer prevention and attempts to limit smoking [11].
174
Review
Endeavour
Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
Support of continental drift never amounted to a full-scale campaign, for the simple reason that it was a mainly academic issue without any real political or social significance, and German geologists were left free to decide whether to accept it or not on the basis of their own conceptions of Earth dynamics – and they were obviously divided on this issue. Moreover, it is now known that the purported geodetic evidence in favour of continental drift which was made so much of in von Philippoff ’s paper was flawed. Nevertheless, at a time when in other countries they were generally dismissed as ‘the dream of a great poet’ (to quote the French geologist Pierre Termier), or simply a ‘fairy tale’ (to quote the American geologist Bailey Willis), in the early 1940s it was far-sighted to promote Wegener’s ideas and to consider them as the solution to many of the major problems of Earth history. Conclusion Historians who have studied the reception of continental drift in the geological community have often emphasized its widespread rejection, notably by American scientists, but little attention has been paid to those who accepted it, especially in Wegener’s own country in the very peculiar intellectual atmosphere of the Third Reich. Books and
articles in defence of Wegener’s hypothesis published at that time suggest that continental drift enjoyed some official support. More research is obviously needed to establish to what extent continental drift was actually promoted by the Nazi authorities, and what influence this official support may have had on the opinion of German geologists during that period. References 1 Oreskes, N. (1999) The Rejection of Continental Drift, Oxford University Press 2 Schwarzbach, M. (1980) Alfred Wegener und die Drift der Kontinente, Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft 3 Muir Wood, R. (1985) The Dark Side of the Earth, George Allen and Unwin 4 Wegener, E. ed. (1940) Alfred Wegeners letzte Gro¨nlandfahrt, Brockhaus 5 Ko¨rber, H.G. (1982) Alfred Wegener, B.G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft 6 Wutzke, U. (1988) Der Forscher aus der Friedrichsgracht. Leben und Leistung Alfred Wegeners, Brockhaus 7 Bu¨low, K. von (1941) Geologie fu¨r Jedermann, Kosmos 8 Beurlen, K. (1939) Erd- und Lebensgeschichte. Eine Einfu¨hrung in die historische Geologie, Quelle und Meyer 9 Wegener, A. (1929) Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (Vierte umgearbeitete Auflage), Fried. Vieweg und Sohn 10 Philippoff, K. von (1941) Et pourtant ils se meuvent! Signal 15, 44 – 45 11 Proctor, R.N. (1999) Why did the Nazis have the world’s most aggressive anti-cancer campaign? Endeavour 23, 76 – 79
News & Features on BioMedNet Start your day with BioMedNet’s own daily science news, features, research update articles and special reports. Every two weeks, enjoy BioMedNet Magazine, which contains free articles from Trends, Current Opinion, Cell and Current Biology. Plus, subscribe to Conference Reporter to get daily reports direct from major life science meetings. http://news.bmn.com Here is what you will find in News & Features: Today’s News Daily news and features for life scientists. Sign up to receive weekly email alerts at http://news.bmn.com/alerts Special Report Special in-depth report on events of current importance in the world of the life sciences. Research Update Brief commentary on the latest hot papers from across the Life Sciences, written by laboratory researchers chosen by the editors of the Trends and Current Opinions journals, and a panel of key experts in their fields. Sign up to receive Research Update email alerts on your chosen subject at http://update.bmn.com/alerts BioMedNet Magazine BioMedNet Magazine offers free articles from Trends, Current Opinion, Cell and BioMedNet News, with a focus on issues of general scientific interest. From the latest book reviews to the most current Special Report, BioMedNet Magazine features Opinions, Forum pieces, Conference Reporter, Historical Perspectives, Science and Society pieces and much more in an easily accessible format. It also provides exciting reviews, news and features, and primary research. BioMedNet Magazine is published every 2 weeks. Sign up to receive weekly email alerts at http://news.bmn.com/alerts Conference Reporter BioMedNet’s expert science journalists cover dozens of sessions at major conferences, providing a quick but comprehensive report of what you might have missed. Far more informative than an ordinary conference overview, Conference Reporter’s easy-to-read summaries are updated daily throughout the meeting. Sign up to receive email alerts at http://news.bmn.com/alerts
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Endeavour
Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
171
Continental drift under the Third Reich Eric Buffetaut CNRS, 16 cour du Lie´gat, 75013 Paris, France
Contrary to what happened in many other countries in the 1930s and 1940s, Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift was not generally rejected in Nazi Germany, although several leading German geologists of the time did not accept it. It was actually presented as the modern view of Earth history in books and magazine articles aimed at the general public. Although outlandish geological theories such as Ho¨rbiger’s Welteislehre were favoured by some Nazi dignitaries, they were not widely accepted in scientific circles. On the other hand, continental drift received official support under the Third Reich, at a time when it was ignored or ridiculed by most earth scientists outside Germany. When Alfred Wegener died, aged 50, on the Greenland ice cap in November 1930, continental drift lost its most influential proponent. The idea that continents moved on the surface of the Earth had been hotly debated in the 1920s, after Wegener’s original publications in 1912 and 1915. Despite the support of a few eminent scientists, such as Emile Argand in Switzerland, Arthur Holmes in Britain, Alex Du Toit in South Africa and Ma Ting Ying in China, the hypothesis of continental drift was met with widespread scepticism in the 1930s and 1940s, to be revived on the basis of new evidence in the late 1950s and 1960s, under the guise of plate tectonics. The story of the rejection of continental drift by most geologists and geophysicists in western Europe and North America has been told repeatedly and analysed in great detail [1]. However, relatively little is known about what happened in Wegener’s own country, Germany, in the years immediately following his death. In the standard German biography of Alfred Wegener, Schwarzbach [2] did mention that a few German scientists supported continental drift, but that most opposed it, and summed up the German response to Wegener’s ideas with the old saying, ‘No man is a prophet in his own country’. Among the few supporters of Wegener’s ideas, Schwarzbach listed Solomon-Calvi, who had to emigrate to Turkey in 1934, after Hitler’s accession to power. He mainly stressed that two of the leading German structural geologists of the time, Hans Cloos and Hans Stille, for different reasons rejected continental drift. This gives the impression that continental drift was generally ignored or rejected in Germany in the decades that followed Wegener’s death. However, a closer look at the reception of continental drift in Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s reveals a different picture. Corresponding author: Eric Buffetaut ([email protected]).
Less than three years after Wegener’s death, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of the Reich, and within a few months, all aspects of German society and culture came under the influence of national-socialist ideology. A study of various documents published under the Third Reich (1933 – 1945) shows that the response to Wegener’ ideas was more complex than simple ignorance or rejection on the part of eminent geologists, and that the Nazis were not unsympathetic to continental drift, at a time when it was almost universally rejected. Welteislehre – a theory of ‘universal ice’ Descriptions of Nazi ‘science’ sometimes stress the importance of the Welteislehre, the theory of ‘universal ice’, which was put forward in the first decades of the 20th century by the Austrian engineer Hanns Ho¨rbiger (1860– 1931). The Welteislehre involved repeated catastrophic collisions of icy moons with the Earth, and, at least in its later versions, had strong mystical and racist overtones, involving the Nordic race, whose superior physical and mental features had been tried during those cataclysms. There is no doubt that some members of the Nazi hierarchy, especially among the Schutzstaffel (SS), were supporters of the Welteislehre. Novels inspired by Ho¨rbiger’s ideas – including a bizarre biography of a trilobite – were distributed under the auspices of Reichsfu¨hrer SS Heinrich Himmler (Fig. 1). The Welteislehre was one of the pseudo-sciences that flourished in Germany in the aftermath of the defeat of 1918, as noted by Muir Wood [3], who goes so far as to suggest a link between Ho¨rbiger’s icy cosmology and
Fig. 1. Stielauge der Urkrebs (‘Stem-eye the primeval crab’), by Batti Dohm, the biography of a trilobite inspired by the Welteislehre, and distributed under the auspices of Reichsfu¨hrer SS Heinrich Himmler (1942).
http://ende.trends.com 0160-9327/$ - see front matter q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2003.08.005
172
Review
Endeavour
Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
Wegener’s attempts to explain ice ages through continental drift. However, there is no mention of Ho¨rbiger’s theories in Wegener’s writings, and nothing to suggest that he ever was influenced by the Welteislehre. It should not be supposed that the outlandish speculations of Ho¨rbiger and his followers ever became the official geological credo of the national-socialists – who after all needed serious geology for economic purposes, especially in wartime. Books and papers published by academic geologists under the Third Reich show no influence from the Welteislehre, which was never accepted as a bona fide scientific theory, although it did have vocal and sometimes influential followers outside scientific circles under the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Alfred Wegener was neither ignored nor forgotten in Nazi Germany. The account of his last and fatal expedition to Greenland in 1930, edited by his widow Else, originally published in 1932, was reprinted in 1940 [4] (which, in a totalitarian state, reveals implicit support, or at least acceptance). Else Wegener repeatedly mentioned that her husband was ‘a good German but not a nationalist’, and had been hurt by the brutality and bloodshed of World War I [5,6], during which he was sent to the western front as a reserve officer and was wounded twice, after which he served in the meteorological service of the German army. However, Wegener’s image as a brave German explorer and scientist, who had lost his life in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, was likely to appeal to the nationalsocialists (all the more so because he was no longer around to criticize the regime). Continental drift, as a theory put forward by a German scientist, but widely rejected in the outside world, could also be represented as an instance of the superiority and inventiveness of German science, compared with foreign science which, in the case of geology, was sometimes denounced as the ‘slave of economic interests’ [7]. Although Wegener’s ideas were not adopted by all German geologists in the 1930s and 1940s [2,6], some were rather outspoken in their acceptance of continental drift. In a book aimed at the general public published in 1941 [7], for instance, Kurd von Bu¨low (1899 – 1971), who was then professor of geology at the University of Rostock, presented Wegener’s ideas as the ‘most modern views’, and contrasted his paleogeographical reconstructions with the older, outdated ones. Others, who were clearly Nazi sympathisers at that time, do not seem to have shared von Bu¨low’s views. Karl Beurlen, in a 1939 book on Earth history [8] in which he railed against the ‘Jewish-Oriental world view’, did not even mention Wegener, and only briefly suggested that the southern continents might have been closer to each other at the time of the Permian glaciation. A supportive Signal All this certainly suggests that there was no consensus about continental drift among German geologists under the Third Reich, and no strong pressure from the government to either accept or reject it. Evidence for official support for Wegener’s ideas comes from a different source – an article published in 1941 in Signal (Fig. 2). Signal was a bimonthly propaganda magazine, published by http://ende.trends.com
Fig. 2. The cover of Signal from August 1941, showing German soldiers passing through a burning Russian town.
Deutscher Verlag in Berlin for distribution in the countries occupied by Germany (including the Channel Islands, hence an English edition), and among its allies, such as Italy, Spain, Hungary, Finland and Croatia, as well as in neutral countries such as Switzerland. It had editions in more than 20 languages, including French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Czech, English, and even Arabic and Iranian. In a format reminiscent of the American Life magazine, Signal was lavishly illustrated with photographs (some of them in colour) and drawings, and was mainly designed to praise the successes of the German army and its allies, and to foster the idea of a united, German-led Europe fighting for its freedom against the Soviets and their Anglo-American allies. Besides war reports and papers praising collaboration with Germany, Signal also included articles on cultural and scientific topics. Its first issue for August 1941 was largely devoted to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which had been launched on 22 June, and featured photographs of the early successes of the Wehrmacht. However, German victories in the East left enough space for a two-page article on continental drift by K. von Philippoff, under a title with Galilean overtones, ‘And yet they do move’ (Fig. 3) [9]. Like, to some extent, Wegener himself, von Philippoff ’s article in defence of continental drift was right for the wrong reasons, in that it was based mainly on geodetic measurements, which purportedly revealed that the distance between North America and Europe increased by 32 cm per year.
Review
Endeavour
Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
173
Fig. 3. The French version of K. von Philippoff’s article on continental drift, published in Signal.
The article described in some detail how astronomical data obtained at different places on Earth could be coupled with extremely accurate time measurements (provided by a high-precision chronometer kept in a sealed room at Potsdam) to produce precise longitude determinations. These, in turn, supposedly revealed an increasing distance between the American and European continents. Wegener considered geodetic data as being of prime importance for demonstrating continental drift, and discussed them at length in the last edition of Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane [10], but, as remarked by Schwarzbach [2], he was overoptimistic in this regard, for at this time longitude measurements were not accurate enough to really demonstrate continental movements. As a result, both Wegener and von Philippoff overestimated the rate of displacement of the continents – according to von Philippoff, when Columbus reached the shores of America, the Atlantic Ocean was 140 m narrower than in 1941. Although he devoted a large part of his paper to those misleading geodetic results, which he considered the ultimate and indisputable proof of Wegener’s hypothesis, von Philippoff also reminded his readers of other evidence (such as the fit of coastlines on both sides of the Atlantic) in favour of continental drift, a theory which provided a likely and satisfactory solution to many geological and biological problems that could not be explained otherwise. According to von Philippoff, ‘no mistake was possible’, and ‘Professor Wegener’s bold hypothesis’ was now fully demonstrated. http://ende.trends.com
Nazi approval The importance of this paper lies in the fact that it was published in a propaganda magazine, which reflected the views of the German government. Obviously, contrary to other scientific theories, continental drift was politically rather innocuous, and the scientific and personal record of Alfred Wegener was acceptable to the Nazis. Beyond that, some geodetic measurements appeared to prove him right, and the ‘demonstration’ of continental drift could be considered as one more triumph of German science (although von Philippoff ’s paper was rather subdued in this regard). That continental drift was chosen to appear in Signal certainly denotes approval and support by at least a part of the Nazi administration (which is notorious for having been divided on many issues, because of parallel hierarchies, some of which may have supported continental drift while others were in favour of the Welteislehre). Understandably, studies of German science during the Nazi period have often concentrated on its criminal aspects (in the medical and biological sciences), or on its more outlandish developments, the Welteislehre being a good example. More ‘progressive’ aspects have often been overlooked, or considered simply as part of mainstream science in the mid-20th century (which certainly largely applies to German earth sciences at that time). However, recent research has shown that the Third Reich was ahead of most other countries in some unexpected fields, such as cancer prevention and attempts to limit smoking [11].
174
Review
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Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
Support of continental drift never amounted to a full-scale campaign, for the simple reason that it was a mainly academic issue without any real political or social significance, and German geologists were left free to decide whether to accept it or not on the basis of their own conceptions of Earth dynamics – and they were obviously divided on this issue. Moreover, it is now known that the purported geodetic evidence in favour of continental drift which was made so much of in von Philippoff ’s paper was flawed. Nevertheless, at a time when in other countries they were generally dismissed as ‘the dream of a great poet’ (to quote the French geologist Pierre Termier), or simply a ‘fairy tale’ (to quote the American geologist Bailey Willis), in the early 1940s it was far-sighted to promote Wegener’s ideas and to consider them as the solution to many of the major problems of Earth history. Conclusion Historians who have studied the reception of continental drift in the geological community have often emphasized its widespread rejection, notably by American scientists, but little attention has been paid to those who accepted it, especially in Wegener’s own country in the very peculiar intellectual atmosphere of the Third Reich. Books and
articles in defence of Wegener’s hypothesis published at that time suggest that continental drift enjoyed some official support. More research is obviously needed to establish to what extent continental drift was actually promoted by the Nazi authorities, and what influence this official support may have had on the opinion of German geologists during that period. References 1 Oreskes, N. (1999) The Rejection of Continental Drift, Oxford University Press 2 Schwarzbach, M. (1980) Alfred Wegener und die Drift der Kontinente, Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft 3 Muir Wood, R. (1985) The Dark Side of the Earth, George Allen and Unwin 4 Wegener, E. ed. (1940) Alfred Wegeners letzte Gro¨nlandfahrt, Brockhaus 5 Ko¨rber, H.G. (1982) Alfred Wegener, B.G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft 6 Wutzke, U. (1988) Der Forscher aus der Friedrichsgracht. Leben und Leistung Alfred Wegeners, Brockhaus 7 Bu¨low, K. von (1941) Geologie fu¨r Jedermann, Kosmos 8 Beurlen, K. (1939) Erd- und Lebensgeschichte. Eine Einfu¨hrung in die historische Geologie, Quelle und Meyer 9 Wegener, A. (1929) Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (Vierte umgearbeitete Auflage), Fried. Vieweg und Sohn 10 Philippoff, K. von (1941) Et pourtant ils se meuvent! Signal 15, 44 – 45 11 Proctor, R.N. (1999) Why did the Nazis have the world’s most aggressive anti-cancer campaign? Endeavour 23, 76 – 79
News & Features on BioMedNet Start your day with BioMedNet’s own daily science news, features, research update articles and special reports. Every two weeks, enjoy BioMedNet Magazine, which contains free articles from Trends, Current Opinion, Cell and Current Biology. Plus, subscribe to Conference Reporter to get daily reports direct from major life science meetings. http://news.bmn.com Here is what you will find in News & Features: Today’s News Daily news and features for life scientists. Sign up to receive weekly email alerts at http://news.bmn.com/alerts Special Report Special in-depth report on events of current importance in the world of the life sciences. Research Update Brief commentary on the latest hot papers from across the Life Sciences, written by laboratory researchers chosen by the editors of the Trends and Current Opinions journals, and a panel of key experts in their fields. Sign up to receive Research Update email alerts on your chosen subject at http://update.bmn.com/alerts BioMedNet Magazine BioMedNet Magazine offers free articles from Trends, Current Opinion, Cell and BioMedNet News, with a focus on issues of general scientific interest. From the latest book reviews to the most current Special Report, BioMedNet Magazine features Opinions, Forum pieces, Conference Reporter, Historical Perspectives, Science and Society pieces and much more in an easily accessible format. It also provides exciting reviews, news and features, and primary research. BioMedNet Magazine is published every 2 weeks. Sign up to receive weekly email alerts at http://news.bmn.com/alerts Conference Reporter BioMedNet’s expert science journalists cover dozens of sessions at major conferences, providing a quick but comprehensive report of what you might have missed. Far more informative than an ordinary conference overview, Conference Reporter’s easy-to-read summaries are updated daily throughout the meeting. Sign up to receive email alerts at http://news.bmn.com/alerts
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