I have been thinking about the current conflict and how those in the Academy respond to it. It brought me to look back at the Nazi regime and German universities. Are there any similarities?
The Nazi regime received enthusiastic support from German universities during the transition of 1933, from students and faculty alike. Some professors sought to secure concessions on the part of the Nazi regime “to save what they can” while continuing in their own work, believing that a dictatorship won’t go away any sooner because one worries about it. In other words, it means staying out of any involvement. Many rationalized the actions by outlining five standard arguments:
1. Universities had become “the rotten inside,” with too much specialization, too little care for teaching, too much privilege, too much corruption in appointments, and too little connection to the real world;
2. Universities had become hotbeds of radicalism;
3. Universities had become hotbeds of Judaism;
4. University faculties had degenerated into a nest of quarrelsome cliques or schools, with much infighting, too much influence over the university itself, and too much power over the lives and future careers of students;
5. For those who criticize the loss of scientific objectivity in bowing to the Nazi Weltanschauung, these professors argued that objectivity had only been a myth of liberalism that had never actually existed in the real world (Ericksen, page 142).
German universities were transformed into political universities with Nazi ideology as the centerpiece. Across the universities, they developed two powerful Nazi organizations: the National Socialist German Students’ Association and the Nazi Student Association and also the National Socialist German Professors’ Association. As a result, German universities underwent widespread politicization.
History was revised to the “world-historical significance of evil Jewry and the proper place of a ‘healthy Germany’ in the world history” (148). Academics were selected based on their political qualifications (Nazi Professors’ Association). Political appointments, unsupported by academic credentials, became rather common with Nazis in charge.
In 1937, Hitler instituted arrest without trial, concentration camps for political enemies, the Aryan paragraph to remove Jews from public employment, the Nuremberg racial laws to deny Jews the normal rights of citizenship, and a series of early steps with regard to Germany’s borders. These actions were perceived as appropriate steps and the signs of a positive new Germany.
Curriculum also underwent change. Literature professors were quick to pay attention to the superiority of the German language and the greatness of the German literary tradition. Philosophy professors started to remove Jewish philosophers, claiming their unimportance. Economics professors dismissed Marx. Einstein was condemned, and his relativity theory was pronounced a “Jewish” theory. Historians placed their focus on military history, glorifying past German heroes. Racial science was added, and it represented the most dramatic change. Walter Frank and Eugen Fischer together published nonsense on the so-called evidence of negative Jewish characteristics to be found in Egyptian funerary portraits dating from the 4th century. Fischer joined two other professors, Edwin Bauer and Fredrich Lenz, to produce a textbook on “racial hygiene” linked to eugenics and sterilization (of the ‘undesirables”).
University of Munich trained the most famous racial scientist – Joseph Mengele, who performed his experiments on twins. (Mengele first studied at the University of Munich and then got his doctorate at Frankfurt). Mengele sent blood samples and body parts from Auschwitz to Berlin and to Heidelberg and other universities so that scholars in these institutions could expand their racial expertise.
“One of the most distinctive features of the Holocaust – its modern, technologically sophisticated nature – is rooted directly in German universities” (158). Everyone pitched their expertise: engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, to ensure that it is possible “to kill so many people so effectively in such a short span of time” (159).
“It is impossible to imagine certain specific horrors of the Holocaust absent the training and expertise of German universities” (159). In addition to developing in their students a set of skills helpful in implementing mass murder, these universities taught their students a set of values that were coached in terms of the highest idealism. As a result, students perceived their actions as a duty to follow Hitler and set things straight; they saw their actions as noble.
Gottingen University was particularly notorious (forced sterilizations and euthanasia).
The myth of clean hands and pure hearts in the academic world, the myth of clear-thinking critics of Nazi ideology simply cannot be maintained. The reality of complicity and collaboration is closer to the mark (166).
Source: Robert P. Ericksen, “The Intellectual Arm” in Complicity in the Holocaust. Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Hopefully, there is very little similarity, and yet some things do seem to resonate. Tease them out.
Adding today” 7/2/2024:
Apparently, the first thing that the Nazis did was to make sure that their higher learning institutions broke the separation between science/scholarship and politics. From that, the next step was the indoctrination of their students, who carried forward the political agenda of the Nazi party. Isn’t the idea of what we call “tool” professors who serve (internationally or unintentionally) the aims of Hamas and Hamas-likes clearly reminiscent of the same means of propaganda? I stopped posting their blogs, not because they stopped writing them but because I no longer can stomach them.
I am sharing (below) a lecture by Niall Ferguson given to Hoover Institution (this institution is often deemed “right” by most of the liberal academics, yet Ferguson refers to Max Weber, so go figure).