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The purge of German science in 1933
- graycat 2y agoCommon estimates are that WWII killed 50 million to 100 million people. So, wanted to get some understanding of how it happened, how to avoid such, and looked at many descriptions of that history. I'm just a US citizen, not a professional historian, and here have only rough explanations, maybe not 100% wrong. A really short description: Hitler became a dictator and then went nuts. For a little more: (1) Foundation. The German culture didn't have much in resistance, walls, defenses, etc. against a dictatorship. Hopefully our US Constitution and three branches of government will have the US do better. (2) Provocation. Germany suffered in WWI, the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, some massive monetary inflation, and, then, the Great Depression. (3) Unification. Early on, say, starting near 1933, Hitler was an effective speaker and able to exploit the culture and the provication politically to unify Germany. (4) Success. Soon Hitler was a dictator and had something of a 4 year plan to get the economy going again. In simple terms, the plan worked. Hitler and Germany could'a stopped there and likely been okay. (5) Empire. Long in Europe, the idea of an empire was common, and Hitler wanted one and started grabbing land. There was the reaction of the conference and treaty at Munich, 9/30/1938. Hitler could'a stopped there, but, nope, he was only beginning. He had an excuse he could use -- his master race wanted living space. (6) Poland. He attacked Poland and quickly occupied about half of it. An excuse was that he wanted the piece of Poland that separated Germany and East Prussia. France and England responded with war on Germany, but it didn't do much. Hitler could'a stopped there. By then Hitler had done lots of ugly things and got away with them, e.g., the Holocaust. (7) Military. Hitler's military did well in fast attacks against opponents not yet taking war seriously. For longer, larger battles, his military was not good: His airplanes didn't have enough range to do well bombing England. England's defense -- radar, Spitfires -- was good; Hitler's losses were high; and he gave up. He could'a stopped there. Instead, he attacked Russia; his front and supply lines were both too long; and Russia was too much for his "fast attack military". (8) Two Fronts. While Hitler was losing in Russia, the US and England did the D-Day attack at Normandy and quickly ran to Germany. He was in a "two front" war with both fronts long lasting and too much for his "fast attack military". (9) Nuts. He had lots of chances to stop in place, declare victory, sign some papers, and live in peace. Instead, as his attack on Russia was failing he went nuts and went even more nuts after D-Day. Lesson: Too commonly, if make a human a dictator, they will be short on constraints and do nutty things, e.g., want to take over the world. So, have a constitution and a democracy that keeps out dictators.
- Tainnor 2y ago> Hitler and Germany could'a stopped there and likely been okay. If Hitler had been Franco or Mussolini, then maybe. But racism and especially anti-semitism were integral parts of Nazi ideology. It wasn't principally about wealth or strategic objectives as we might recognise them. They really believed that the races of the earth were in a big struggle for resources and that if the "Aryan race" didn't exterminate or subjugate the others, it would risk extinction. Your analysis seems to rest on the idea that Hitler was some brilliant politician that went nuts because he had too much power, but he was "nuts" way before he ever came into power.
- graycat 2y ago> but he was "nuts" way before he ever came into power. I agree, sure, but strictly, literally that doesn't conflict with what I wrote -- i.e., I didn't claim he was not nuts before 1933 or before he became a dictator! I considered being clear and explicit on this point but omitted such to make the main points shorter and simpler. And I part way addressed this issue by noting that with constraints a nut might not look like one but look nuts if the constraints are off. > was some brilliant politician Well, it seems accepted that on his way to being a dictator he was an effective speaker. Maybe he had some industrial backers who were brilliant. On the Nazi ideology, Aryan, master race stuff, you know more than I do and might be right, but I omitted mention of those out of not being sure they were more than just a party line, a way to get political support, etc. "Master Race"? Let's see: Math, science, music. Hmm .... Germany, yes, but also Poland, France, Russia, Austria, Hungary, England, the US, .... Ah, poor Hitler and his "master race": About then, the 1936 Olympics in Germany, Dad was at Ohio State and knew Jesse Owens -- 4 Gold Medals!!!! Hitler's athletes just needed better running shoes -- that was the problem????
- Tainnor 2y agoHitler was certainly brilliant in certain ways, e.g. as a public speaker he must have been very persuasive. I don't think that changes anything about how utterly insane his (and his fellow Nazis') ideology was, though. There are "effective" dictators who manage to have a stable, if brutal reign, and then there's Nazi-ism which at its very core is such a destructive ideology that it can't really even sustain itself in the long run.
- jjgreen 2y agoLong and interesting article from 2024, the title is "The Great Purge (1933)" (which kind-of clashes with the HN conventions ...)
- dang 2y agoThanks—I've edited the title a bit to solve that problem.
- atleastoptimal 2y agoI wonder just how advanced Germany would be nowadays without the World Wars.
- Terr_ 2y agoIf you mean like jetpacks and robots, it would probably look the same as our current timeline, given that "nowadays" is 70 years later plus the global diffusion of technological progress. Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago> Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars. Agreed. How many years does each war set us back? And are there hurdles in our future that we will be unable to clear if we too often let war impede our progress.
- ScoobleDoodle 2y agoThere's an alternative as unfortunate as it may be of: how many years does each war move us forward. Or how many years behind would we be without the war having occurred.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoHmm, yeah maybe it sort of breaks the before/after model. We're over here because the war happened, and would be over there if it hadn't. Sorta depends if progress means being ready to repel a hostile alien invasion, or if it means being capable of large scale cooperation on geoengineering projects in the face of biosphere collapse, or you know... whatever other can-you-survive-this test comes our way.
- aftbit 2y agoOr did the wars actually lead to progress? A challenging question. Strife breeds strength, but stability breeds prosperity.
- j7ake 2y agoThis goes to show how prestige and reputation built up over centuries can be destroyed in a matter of decades. Also the prestige and reputation of institutions rest solely on the superstars that are in that institution. A single prominent scientist can carry the prestige of an entire institute. This means when they leave, the reputation goes with it.
- jltsiren 2y agoIt's about the institutional culture, not the superstars. The reputation that matters comes from a culture, where the people who are good at what they do can focus on what they choose to do. But if the government / administrators / donors / other politruks get too much say over how the institution is run, that reputation can easily be lost. Superstars leaving is then just a symptom of a wider issue.
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- xyzelement 2y agoIt occurs to me that anti-semitism is a disease that ultimately destroys its host. If Germany "simply" wanted to win WW2, it should have cultivated its Jewish scientists (and by the way, 100K Jewish soldiers served their country in WW1) instead of eradicating them as per this article. Not to mention, diverting scarce wartime resources towards the program of concentration camps and ethnic extermination is not just pure evil - but strategically stupid. It seems very clear that Hitler and his friends hated the Jews more than they wished for some positive outcome for Germany. This pattern repeats throughout history including in the modern day. Ultimately, once you start optimizing for your hatred vs your love (of your own people, for example) you're going to make decisions that doom you.
- jandrese 2y agoThe counterpoint is that Hitler wouldn't have been able to seize power so easily were it not for the clear "other" to demonize. That's just human nature. Fascists always need some identifiable enemy to rally against and there was no shortage of antisemitism already in the country to work with. This is why they also picked up on hating Gypsys and homosexuals. Fear mongering is one of the most efficient ways to gain power, but is a double edged sword since you can only ramp up the rhetoric if you want to keep your coalition together, the very force that brings you to power distracts you from your actual objectives.
- timeon 2y agoYes he wouldn't have been able to seize power. But what is power for? If he had not sized the power he would be able to see his grandchildren grow.
- arp242 2y agoHitler didn't exactly seize power "easily"; it took an attack on the German parliament (possibly orchestrated by the Nazis themselves), a paramilitary force intimidating opposition parties (and at times directly preventing them from voting in parliament), and an assassination campaign. In the end it's a "what if?" type question, but I think a decent case can be made that anti-Semitism was not key to the Nazi success, although it was part of it. The NSDAP was far from the first or only anti-Semitic party, even at the time. But it was the only major fascist party in Germany at the time. In other countries fascist parties managed without such strong explicit anti-Semitism, Italy and Spain being the most notable. In my reading of events of the 20s and 30s, it was much more of an ideological battle and disappointment with the ruling class than anything else. This is also why the communist party did well at the time, and one reason the Nazis spent so much effort fighting them even though there are more similarities than both liked to admit. Or in brief: most people voted mostly for the fascism, not anti-Semitism. The basic concept of "strong leader to get shit done" has been and remains popular in various forms for a long time, especially in times of hardship.
- perihelions 2y agoOne aspect of this that fascinated me is Nazi Germany's "physics denialism" (?) — the reactionary response to the modern physics revolutions of the early 20th century. (I.e. the twin revolutions of quantum physics and of relativity). It was a much weirder response than simply an attack on physicists who happened to be Jewish humans. Fields of physics were conspiratorially labelled as having a "Jewish" character, and dismissed as psuedoscience, as pathological science: "Jüdische Physik". There was a fanaticism that's hard to grapple with philosophically, a thing that's far outside rationality, a magical thinking. How much more "magical" can you get than disregarding natural physical laws, and substituting your own? That's the definition of magic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik ("Deutsche Physik" or "Aryan Physics")
- foobarian 2y agoThe depictions of "wrong physics" in the 3 Body Problem show kinda remind me of that. Any kind of thinking that had even a whiff of going against the party line would cause problems for the author. What a weird time. I wonder if it's similar to how we look down on e.g. string theory, except I don't know if that's an apples to apples comparison given that we haven't seen any string theory apples yet :-)
- xyzelement 2y agoFWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.
- wongarsu 2y agoAlso a "climate alarmist". There is a band of climate science you can freely publish without reputational damage, but don't go over or under it. But that's probably nothing compared to the narrow band of tolerable science when it comes to questions of race or ethnicity. Anything that could be construed as people of some descent being "inferior" in any aspect is pretty risky to publish.
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- caseysoftware 2y agoOf the scientists who stayed.. what did they do during/after the war?
- zitterbewegung 2y agoHeisenberg was the leader of the Nazi atomic weapon program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg?wprov=sfti1#
- carlosjobim 2y agoPut people into space and put people on the moon.
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- KingOfCoders 2y agoAnd 1945. Double whammy. Germany never made a comeback. The anti-science culture revolution of the 1970s cemented this. It's cool to be bad in science in schools since then, every celebrity boasts about how bad they were in mathematics etc.
- nforgerit 2y agoGerman here. It's actually true that you see a lot of "public intellectuals" that publicly tell how bad they were at math. I only realized that when Merkel as chancellor back in Covid times, after numerous meetings with other politicians and non-scientists, found herself explaining exponential growth on a press conference with her fingers. Not sure about the 1970s hypothesis, though.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoGerman here. Grew up in the 70s with anti-intellectual TV-shows (like Rappelkiste).
- 48864w6ui 2y agoDespite that Germany did manage to elect a p-chemist as BK.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoInteresting idea.. but ABleton comes out of germany!
- KingOfCoders 2y agoI think Germany has been quite good in practical research (see world leading companies, especially smaller ones in niche markets you never heard of), not so in science (think Nobel Prize winners).
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoHow about Zeiss?
- leephillips 2y agoThe discussion of Weyl is incoherent: according to the author he was both forced out and decided to leave. The reality is that he decided to leave Germany out of fear for his family, after delaying an alarming interval of time. One of the very first people to be removed from a faculty position by the Nazis in the purge of Jews is also one of the most important mathematicians and scientists of the 20th century, but goes unmentioned by this author. I discuss her removal and its aftermath, and the phenomenon of her invisibility to both amateur and professional historians, in my forthcoming book: https://lee-phillips.org/noether/ https://lee-phillips.org/noether/
- Isamu 2y agoThanks! Looking forward to this!
- RecycledEle 2y agoHere is a purported list of authors banned in Germany in 1933: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_banned_in_Nazi_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_banned_in_Nazi... A Alfred Adler Hermann Adler Max Adler Raoul Auernheimer B Bertolt Brecht Otto Bauer Vicki Baum Johannes R. Becher Richard Beer-Hofmann Hilaire Belloc Walter Benjamin Robert Hugh Benson Walter A. Berendsohn Ernst Bloch Felix Braun Bertolt Brecht Willi Bredel Hermann Broch Ferdinand Bruckner Edmund Burke C G. K. Chesterton D Dorothy Day Ludwig Dexheimer[3] Alfred Döblin John Dos Passos E Einstein's official 1921 portrait after receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics Albert Ehrenstein Albert Einstein Carl Einstein Friedrich Engels Erasmus F Sigmund Freud Lion Feuchtwanger F. Scott Fitzgerald Marieluise Fleißer Leonhard Frank Anna Freud Sigmund Freud Egon Friedell G Edward Gibbon André Gide Ernst Glaeser William Godwin Emma Goldman Claire Goll Oskar Maria Graf George Grosz H Ernest Hemingway Ernst Haeckel Radclyffe Hall Jaroslav Hašek Walter Hasenclever Raoul Hausmann Heinrich Heine Ernest Hemingway Theodor Herzl Hermann Hesse Magnus Hirschfeld J. Edgar Hoover Jakob van Hoddis Ödön von Horvath Karl Hubbuch David Hume Aldous Huxley I Vera Inber J Hans Henny Jahnn Thomas Jefferson Georg Jellinek K Franz Kafka in 1910 Franz Kafka Georg Kaiser Mascha Kaleko Hermann Kantorowicz Erich Kästner Karl Kautsky Hans Kelsen Alfred Kerr Irmgard Keun John Maynard Keynes Klabund Heinrich Kley Annette Kolb Paul Kornfeld Siegfried Kracauer Karl Kraus Peter Kropotkin Adam Kuckhoff L Portrait of Jack London, taken between 1906 and 1916 Else Lasker-Schüler Vladimir Lenin C. S. Lewis Karl Liebknecht Jack London Ernst Lothar Emil Ludwig Rosa Luxemburg M Thomas Mann in the early period of his writing career Joseph de Maistre André Malraux Heinrich Mann Klaus Mann Thomas Mann[4] Mao Zedong Hans Marchwitza Ludwig Marcuse Karl Marx Vladimir Mayakovsky Walter Mehring Thomas Merton E.C. Albrecht Meyenberg Gustav Meyrink Ludwig von Mises Thomas More Erich Mühsam Robert Musil Taryn Moses N Alfred Neumann Robert Neumann John Henry Newman O Carl von Ossietzky in Esterwegen concentration camp (1934). Flannery O'Connor George Orwell Carl von Ossietzky Ouida P Marcel Proust Thomas Paine Hertha Pauli Adelheid Popp Marcel Proust R Erich Maria Remarque in Davos, 1929. Fritz Reck-Malleczewen Gustav Regler Wilhelm Reich Erich Maria Remarque Karl Renner Joachim Ringelnatz Joseph Roth Jean-Jacques Rousseau S Rudolf Steiner around 1891/92, etching by Otto Fröhlich Nelly Sachs Felix Salten Rahel Sanzara Arthur Schnitzler Alvin Schwartz Anna Seghers Walter Serner Fulton Sheen Ignazio Silone Adam Smith Joseph Stalin Rudolf Steiner Carl Sternheim T J.R.R. Tolkien Ernst Toller Friedrich Torberg B. Traven Leon Trotsky Kurt Tucholsky Mark Twain V Voltaire W H. G. Wells circa 1918 Jakob Wassermann Armin T. Wegner Simone Weil H. G. Wells Franz Werfel Oscar Wilde Eugen Gottlob Winkler Friedrich Wolf Z Carl Zuckmayer Arnold Zweig Stefan Zweig