A Question: Name the European Chancellor, a non-smoking teetotaller vegetarian, animal-lover, at the height of his powers in the 1930s and 1940s, who promoted far-seeing and progressive public health policies and encouraged healthy lifestyle, and who transformed the physical infrastructure of his country.
Answer: Adolf Hitler.
The idea that Nazi philosophy was imposed on the people by a band of crazed thugs with the morality of gangsters is a crude oversimplification. And in particular, the idea that science under the Nazis was bullied and beaten into submission is a gross oversimplification.
The latter point is comprehensively made by Robert M Proctor in his fascinating book Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Harvard University Press, 1988). He returns to this general topic in his latest book The Nazi War on Cancer, published this month by Princeton University Press.
The Nazi era was surely the low-water mark of Western cultural morality this century. Proctor's argument is that the development of Nazism was much less of an imposition of the will of a fanatical minority on a majority and much more an organic growth of ideas, trends and movements already present in mainstream Germany than is commonly supposed.
He documents this argument comprehensively in his book Racial Hygiene, regarding the part played by medical /biological science in the development and implementation of Nazi racial policy.
In the early decades of this century concepts of eugenics and racial hygiene (i.e. protecting and improving the human genetic stock by selective breeding and by preventing the breeding of people with `undesirable' traits) were endorsed by mainstream biological sciences and also enjoyed widespread general support. These ideas were particularly popular in the Nordic countries, in Germany and in the USA.
Several of the leading scientific workers in this field were German, e.g. Fritz Lenz. The national socialist movement enthusiastically endorsed the pre-existing ideas of eugenics and racial hygiene and found many German biomedical scientists ready and willing to promote and implement their ideas with state backing.
Most historical studies have concentrated on the destruction of science by the Nazis, the expulsion of Jews from the universities, and the destruction of liberal values. However, not all sciences suffered under the Nazis. Physics and mathematics declined but sciences such as psychology, anthropology, human genetics and racial hygiene prospered. Medical science did well under the Nazis.
In 1937 nearly 1,000 medical books were published in Germany. Between 1933 and 1938 more articles were published in German medical journals than in any other country in the world. Large numbers of intellectuals, often leaders in their field, were eager and willing to serve the Nazi regime.
One of the disturbing truths about national socialism in Germany is that many found much of what it promulgated to align with their own convictions, and this was true in science as in many other areas. And there were many elements of national socialist policy that were sensible and attractive. For example, the Nazis were preoccupied with the physical health and well-being of the average Aryan body, which equated in their minds with the health of the nation.
German medical science was very advanced in its ideas on preventive medicine and in its very early recognition of the potential of agents in the environment to cause cancer. Large scale screening programmes of cervical smear testing for women were introduced under the Nazis. Men were advised to have their colons checked regularly. Medicine was concerned about the ill-effects of alcohol and about foetal alcohol syndrome.
Medicine under the Nazis recognised that cigarette smoking was bad for the health. High fibre diets were recommended and organic farming was commended.
When the Nazis assumed power they enforced their will with brutal determination. Their policies were an eerie mixture of the good, the bad, the ugly and the insane. The bad, the ugly and the insane quickly dominated, moving from forcible sterilisation to euthanasia, through horrible human experimentation and on to the final solution itself.
Nazi doctors sterilised some 350,000 Germans, murdered 200,000 disabled people, and killed at least 1,000 people in horrific medical experiments in concentration camps. Nazi doctors collaborated in the extermination of six million European Jews and millions of other people, including gypsies and homosexuals.
Far from going to sleep under the Nazis, many aspects of German science flourished. For example, television, jet-propelled aeroplanes, guided missiles, electronic computers, and the electron microscope were either invented or were highly developed by German scientists in Nazi Germany.
It is disturbing that so many scientists happily found a home under Nazism. Although there were honourable exceptions, by and large science did not protest loudly against Nazism. Of course to do so would have meant certain death. What does it tell us about the nature of science that so much of it should flourish under such peculiar circumstances?
William J. Reville is a Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry and Director of Microscopy at UCC.