[HN Gopher] The great purge of German science in 1933
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The great purge of German science in 1933
Author : privatdozent
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-04-15 10:43 UTC (12 hours ago)
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| jjgreen wrote:
| Long and interesting article from 2024, the title is "The Great
| Purge (1933)" (which kind-of clashes with the HN conventions ...)
| dang wrote:
| Thanks--I've edited the title a bit to solve that problem.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| I wonder just how advanced Germany would be nowadays without the
| World Wars.
| Terr_ wrote:
| If 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__ wrote:
| > 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.
| aftbit wrote:
| Or did the wars actually lead to progress? A challenging
| question. Strife breeds strength, but stability breeds
| prosperity.
| mxkopy wrote:
| Industrial or technological progress, sure, but at the
| expense of cultural and societal progress.
|
| Tech trees are straightforward to visualize but I challenge
| you to think of a law tree or social norm tree as well.
| aftbit wrote:
| Perhaps, although perhaps cultural progress as well. For
| example, perhaps the hippie movement of the 60s was
| enhanced by the threat of draft in the Vietnam war.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I wish could answer that.
|
| On one hand, the fact that a lot of smart people are trying
| to kill you is a great motivation for rapid technological
| advance and reduction of red tape.
|
| On the other hand, many of the young men in uniform who
| were torn apart by shells and mines could have been new
| Einsteins.
| crote wrote:
| I'm not convinced it's that simple.
|
| Take a look at the very first Nazi book burning, for example,
| which targeted Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut fur
| Sexualwissenschaft. It was the leading institution of its
| kind, and the complete destruction of its archive and
| community not only set back the LGBT community in Germany
| (and to a large extent the rest of the Western world) some 30
| years - it didn't really recover until at least 1970!
|
| If it can cause that much damage there, imagine what it
| would've done to the wider scientific community.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I think the trick is to either get governments to fund basic
| research for a reason other than national defense, or get
| them to fund it for that reason but then never use the
| weapons.
| grujicd wrote:
| You can also wonder what would happen if Gavrilo Princip
| missed Franc Ferdinand in 1914? Single bullet could
| completely change world history. Would Austro-Hungary declare
| war to Serbia over some other cause? Or would some other
| incident start war between other two countries, leading to
| the same worldwide havoc? Some say that history is inevitable
| since it's result of massive forces which are similar to laws
| of nature. I'm not that sure. Tensions can be defused,
| diplomacy might work, some other incident could lead to
| different kind of conflict at different location. What is
| pretty much sure is that there would still be wars since they
| seem to be inevitable.
|
| But if that one shot missed, perhaps we wouldn't have WW1,
| and without WW1 there wouldn't be WW2 as circumstances would
| be completely different. Was there a single development as
| small as firing a single bullet that affected world's history
| this much?
| newsclues wrote:
| The wars were a driving reason for a lot of technology and
| innovation, and at the least accelerated some important
| technological advances.
| ekianjo wrote:
| the amount of destruction and financial ruin that comes with
| war makes it a very negative outcome
| wongarsu wrote:
| The lingua franca in many sciences might still be German
| instead of English.
|
| But for the most part the technology level of Germany is
| coupled to that of the rest of the world. It's hard to tell how
| that would have evolved. Maybe keeping the existing research
| clusters in Western Europe intact would have lead to faster
| advances in chemistry and particle physics.
|
| On the other hand we probably wouldn't have a space station
| today if it weren't for the Nazis bankrolling a rocketry
| program, the two world wars leading to the creation and rise of
| the Soviet Union as well as the ascension of the United States
| to superpower status, and those two bankrolling competing space
| programs in the aftermath of WWII as a way to show the
| superiority of their respective ideological systems.
|
| No WWII would have also meant no Manhattan Project. Even a more
| limited WWII where only the Pacific Theater happened wouldn't
| have lead to Manhattan Project since the fear of a German
| nuclear weapon was a major driver. Without nuclear weapons,
| ballistic missiles make little sense. Which both means that
| rocketry is even less likely to get off the ground, and that
| bombers would play a much bigger role (US firebombing on Japan
| had similar devastation as early nukes, at the expense of
| needing a lot more bombs for each attack). This would probably
| mean more advanced aviation than in our timeline.
|
| Without WWII decolonization might not have happened. Not a
| major impact on Germany as they only had few colonies even
| before the wars, but the impact on their neighbors would be
| profound.
|
| Without the world wars leading to the US rising to power and
| the cold war and nuclear threat the arpanet wouldn't have
| happened. Would Germany have created something similar, and
| would it be as decentralized without the defense department
| backing and threat of nukes taking out key network
| interchanges? Maybe French Minitel would still have happened
| and the internet would have been French?
| Ringz wrote:
| During my studies of computer science, a professor told me
| that Germans might have programmed in Latin if the war had
| not intervened. Simply programming in German would not have
| been ,,scientific" enough. Think about it. Latin is highly
| defined and static. But German could be great for imperative
| programming /s
| j7ake wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| It'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.
| xyzelement wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Yes 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 wrote:
| Hitler 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Ah the fine line between fascist:
|
| "if you died you were weak and deserved to die"
|
| vs nazi:
|
| "you are weak, you deserve to die"
| kromem wrote:
| Well, "most people" didn't actually vote for the fascism.
| The ticket was split enough that it ended up being minority
| rule.
| arp242 wrote:
| "Most people" of the people who voted for the NSDAP,
| obviously.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Anti-semitism(or any other type of systematic hate) is not a
| disease but a symptom of a declining, rotten society. It's also
| wishful thinking that any society that engages in genocide will
| self-destruct. Plenty of historical examples exist where it
| continued to survive and collapsed for other reasons.
| arp242 wrote:
| From a Nazi perspective, what you're saying makes little sense.
| It would be similar to "we should enlist Ted Kaczynski and
| Timothy McVeigh in the army, because they've shown to be
| excellent at bombing stuff". That would be silly because these
| people and the organisations they associate with are considered
| a corrupting influence. In the Nazi view, Jews consisted a
| corrupting influence.
|
| "Hitler and his friends hated the Jews more than they wished
| for some positive outcome for Germany" really misunderstands
| the world-view of the Nazis, and what Hitler did and didn't
| believe.
|
| Anti-Semitism came rolling out of 19th century racial science;
| many people self-described themselves as such. As in: "against
| the Semitic race" (as opposed to the Aryan race), in the same
| way someone might describe as "anti-" any number of things
| today.
|
| A number of organisations in the late 19th century carried the
| label (e.g. Antisemitische Volkspartei in Germany, or
| Antisemitic League in France), and a number of elected
| candidates from other parties were explicitly and proudly self-
| described anti-Semitic.
|
| From outside the Nazi world-view, it of course makes a lot more
| sense. A lot of the Nazi rhetoric isn't even internally
| consistent and it was all a load of bollocks. But I don't think
| you can so easily separate Nazi-ism and the second world war.
| greedo wrote:
| Anti-Semitism as a 19th century development doesn't seem
| historically accurate. While anti-Semites in the 19th century
| glommed on to racial theories as backing for their hate, the
| origins of anti-Semitism are millennia old.
| arp242 wrote:
| It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much
| rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th
| century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-
| Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to
| Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that.
|
| Especially in the context of the Nazi ideology, this really
| matters. Recall that the Nazis killed more Slavs than Jews,
| who were also considered racially inferior, and the plan
| was to kill many more. Nazis treated the Danish, Dutch,
| French, English, etc. much better (no mass executions of
| prisoners of war, and the occupation of those countries was
| markedly different from the occupation of Slavic
| countries).
| bsder wrote:
| Um, please explain The Merchant of Venice. c. 1600 in an
| England which basically had no Jews.
|
| Or the Edict of Explusion c. 1290.
|
| Or the Jews being under the direct whim and jurisdiction
| of the king. c. 1066
|
| I can go further and further back ...
|
| Anti-semitism is _old_.
| arp242 wrote:
| Again, anti-Judaism is not the same thing. This is just
| "normal" religious persecution that has been around since
| forever and that many (if not all) religious groups have
| experienced at some point or another. You really
| shouldn't confuse these, especially in the context of
| discussing Nazi world-views.
|
| None of this is especially controversial among mainstream
| Jewish historians, as far as I know.
| tptacek wrote:
| There's a lot of weird things in this comment, but the
| weirdest is the claim that antisemitism is a 19th century
| innovation; Google "expulsion of the Jews from" and see
| where it autocompletes for you. Similarly: pogroms in the
| Pale of Settlement were not motivated by (and predate)
| 19th century race science.
| arp242 wrote:
| I didn't claim that "antisemitism is a 19th century
| innovation", I claimed that Anti-Semitism in the sense of
| "against the Semitic race", as I described in my previous
| comment, is a 19th century invention. A distinction I
| made to describe the Nazi world view.
|
| This is not "weird thing", it's a mainstream view that I
| got from mainstream Jewish authors on the history of
| Jews. But hey, maybe those are also weird *shrug*
|
| And your extremely condescending attitude is not
| appreciated.
| paganel wrote:
| Anti-semitism wasn't a major factor in European history
| until the (second-ish part) of the 19th century, for the
| simple reason that the European Jewish population wasn't
| that big of a presence for hundreds of years. Once the
| Enlightenment and French Revolution happened and once the
| Jewish population started to get some rights (which gets us
| into the 19th century) then things changed.
|
| Yes, I do know about the very unfortunate anti-semitic acts
| carried out in German cities as part of the First Crusade,
| but that kind of proves my point, starting with the
| 1200s-1300s the Jewish population throughout (what would
| later be called Western) Europe stopped being a thing.
| WolfCop wrote:
| Yes, "very unfortunate".
| adastra22 wrote:
| It's true in a very strict sense: before the 19th century
| it was called Jew hatred. "Antisemitism" was an attempt to
| dress it up in a veneer of science.l, and that does date to
| the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
| antod wrote:
| You're mixing up the unintended consequences with the intended
| consequences. Persecuting jews (and others) was an intended
| consequence and started a lot earlier than WW2. Hitler wanted
| war, but just to the east - not a world war with the west. He
| was convinced the French, British and Americans wouldn't care
| enough to resist him. WW2 was an unintended consequence.
| sebastian_z wrote:
| Indeed, that is what Sebastian Haffner argues in The Meaning of
| Hitler: In December 1941 he abandoned the goal of world
| conquest in favour of the Final solution-exterminating the Jews
| [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Hitler
| neffy wrote:
| It's an interesting question, and on the face of it, yes, the
| Nazi's probably would have won with the Jewish people on board.
| Similar arguments can be made about their invasion of Russia,
| given the support they would have received against Stalin
| without their accompanying genocide.
|
| The big but in this, is whether they would have gotten there to
| begin with. Picking on the Jews was a huge cash/property grab,
| which was used to buy their support with general German
| population. Are the Nazis still the Nazis without the genocide?
| Do they even end up wanting to start a war?
| perihelions wrote:
| One 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: "Judische 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 ( _" Deutsche
| Physik"_ or _" Aryan Physics"_)
| foobarian wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| FWIW 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 wrote:
| Also 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.
| dmbche wrote:
| You got some of those edgy papers near? I keep hearing
| things like this, but at every turn the science being
| published is hot trash.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Funny I was thinking of how so many otherwise intelligent
| and educated people believe climate change is just a
| liberal hoax.
| devjab wrote:
| There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer
| though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the
| herd immunity created through general vaccination isn't
| just a theory anymore.
|
| I'd be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever
| became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate
| change, there are clear economic forces which will pour
| "tobacco is healthy" amounts of money into pushing whatever
| makes them money. But then you have something like
| antivaxing which quite literally benefits nobody, because
| even the people who don't want to put themselves at risk by
| getting vaccinated still sort of do so by collectively
| bringing back terrible diseases through their destruction
| of the herd immunity... but who could possibly gain
| anything from spreading this nonsense? "Yay, polio and the
| measles are back!!!". Then you have the more harmless stuff
| like flat-earthers which also don't really have any obvious
| driving force. But at least it's harmless and sort of
| funny.
|
| Anyway, I don't think you really have a point with what
| you're saying here. You can't put anti-vaccinate "science"
| up for a discussion with real science because it's utter
| nonsense. Similarly you can't be a climate change denier,
| you're free to argue about what causes the heat up, but you
| can't deny that it's been happening at a rapid pace since
| the Industrial Revolution, at least not with any pretence
| of doing science.
| Vecr wrote:
| I don't know, what's rationality's current reputation?
| enasterosophes wrote:
| The Nazis weren't unique in dismissing categories of research
| on ideological grounds. The USSR label of "bourgeois
| pseudoscience" [1] was applied to various fields like
| evolutionary biology.
|
| We aren't immune to it now. In the software world, remember
| that Ballmer called Linux a cancer, and in general there is a
| meme amongst capitalist software developers that the GPL is a
| cancerous or infectious license. In academia, there is always a
| question of where the funding is coming from, or how some
| research output can be monetized, and so there is an inherent
| bias against research which doesn't offer hope of capitalist
| and military-industrial dividends.
|
| [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bourgeois_pseudoscience
| kromem wrote:
| You mean things like thinking that the vaccine harms of
| something nearly the entire world has received which was being
| said would kill people in two years time is more dangerous than
| the thing that actually killed millions of people during the
| last few years?
|
| It would be pretty weird if there were major political parties
| denying the science like that, or even picking who they would
| vote for as a leader based on the person agreeing with their
| magical thinking flying in the face of empirical evidence on
| that subject.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| Of the scientists who stayed.. what did they do during/after the
| war?
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Heisenberg was the leader of the Nazi atomic weapon program.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg?wprov=sfti1#
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Put people into space and put people on the moon.
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