Ten

If, indeed, totalitarianism nourished science and technology more efficiently than liberalism did, then the future of liberalism looked dark. But was this the case? How did science fare in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and communist China?

Germany prior to the rise of the Nazis went through fitful excursions into liberalism while enjoying considerable scientific success. Following the European revolutions of 1848—when an economic depression touched off rebellions in the German Confederation, France, and Italy—the vested interests sought to preserve their traditions of nationalism, militarism, and monarchism by enacting just enough reform to stave off further unrest. The man who best managed this balancing act was Otto von Bismarck, appointed prime minister by King William in 1862. Bismarck was personally conservative but regarded all passionate political convictions as impediments to effective statecraft, preferring to absorb—and almost to embody—many points of view: “It was not that Bismarck lied [but] that he was always sincere” wrote Henry Kissinger, one of his many admirers. Crown Princess Victoria of Germany judged Bismarck to be “mediaeval altogether and the true theories of liberty and of government are Hebrew to him, though he adopts and admits a democratic idea or measure now and then when he thinks it will serve his purpose.” Neurotic and insecure—he was an insomniac, a hysteric, and a morphine addict who, said a contemporary, “eats too much, drinks too much and works too much”—Bismarck projected an image of unbending self-confidence. “I want to make music in my own way,” he said, “or not at all.”

It was, however, inherently unstable. Europe in general was unstable—as was demonstrated when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serb nationalist on June 28, 1914, resulted, to everyone’s surprise, in the Great War. Instabilities continued to bedevil the Germany of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), when innovations like expressionist art contended with the conservatism of monarchists, militarists, university professors, and government bureaucrats. Much of our ongoing fascination with Weimar libertinism—nudity and drugs in the nightclubs, Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel—derives from the fact that these romps were played out by young adults who, like drunken teenagers skinny-dipping in the swimming pool just before the parents come home, had too little political power to accept the responsibilities that went along with their newly acquired freedoms.

Hitler wanted to harness the power of science, of course. Like any dictator he wanted all the power he could get his hands on, demanding the “total mobilization” of science toward one or another hellish goal. But he understood little of what science is or how it works, relying for news of promising scientific developments on conversations with his barber. Comprehending nothing but power, Hitler assumed that science would quicken to the sharpened spurs of ruthless rule. “The triumphant progress of technical science in Germany and the marvelous development of German industries and commerce,” he asserted, “led us to forget that a powerful State had been the necessary prerequisite of that success.” He imagined that science was useful principally “as an instrument for the advancement of national pride.” Schools should teach “will-power” instead. “Instruction in the sciences,” Hitler decreed, “must be considered last in importance.”

To the notion that science could be flattened under the boots of power and still deliver the goods—a fallacy described by Jacob Bronowski as “trying to buy the corpse of science”—the Nazis added leaden layers of superstition and pseudoscience. Looming large among these was a racial doctrine that proclaimed the superiority of an Aryan Nordic race, destined to rule a world cleansed of genetic impurities. Although decked out in costumes of mythological antiquity, these ideas were actually crackpot novelties: “Aryan,” a Sanskrit word for Persian nobility, had only recently been imported into European discourse, and “Nordic” was coined in 1898. Neither term described a race, much less a “pure” race, whatever such a thing might be. Nor would genetic purity confer an advantage on any population: The strength of a species resides in its genetic diversity, which improves its likelihood of surviving environmental changes. As Joseph Needham said of Nazi racial doctrines, “A more shameless flying in the face of established scientific fact has never been known in human history.”

When people think of “Nazi science” today they usually have in mind either eugenics or the pointless and sadistic “experiments” carried out by Nazi doctors in the death camps. But such obscenities can be described as science only in the rather distant sense that, say, Theodore Kaczynski’s “Unabomber Manifesto” can be called philosophy. The death-camp doctors discovered little beyond the fact that it is possible to kill a great many defenseless prisoners through the use of poison gases like the pesticide Zyklon B. Nazi eugenics research consisted of studies by physicians such as Eugen Fischer, who measured the “racial purity” of various individuals by looking for “Negro blood” Julius Hallervorden, who studied the “feeble” brains of euthanasia victims; Robert Ritter, whose data were employed by the SS to dispatch Gypsies to Auschwitz; Ernst Rüdin, who helped draft a Nazi sterilization law aimed at preventing “genetically diseased” offspring; Otmar Von Verschuer, who campaigned for forced sterilization of the “mentally and morally subnormal” Ernst Wentzler, who coordinated a pediatric euthanasia program that killed thousands of children; Carl Clauberg, who sterilized women at Auschwitz; and Josef Mengele, who murdered Jews and Gypsies to study their organs. It scarcely need be added that their results were of no scientific value.

The Nazis presided over a nuclear-physics brain drain of startling proportions. The computer pioneer John von Neumann departed for the United States in 1930—the same year that saw the emigration of Hans Bethe, who would help discover the nuclear processes that make the sun shine, and of Leo Szilard, who while soaking in his bath in a London hotel suddenly realized how a nuclear weapon could be made. (To keep the idea secret, Szilard patented it and assigned the patent to the British Admiralty; he then drafted a letter, which he had his friend Einstein sign, warning President Roosevelt that “it appears almost certain” that an atomic bomb could be built “in the immediate future.”) The quantum-physics virtuosos Max Born and Erwin Schrödinger fled, as did James Franck, who would help build the atomic bomb and then petition to have it demonstrated to the Japanese rather than being dropped on a city.

Hitler was untroubled by the scientific exodus. When a physicist tried to alert him to the corrosive effects that Nazi anti-Semitism was having on scientific research, Hitler reportedly replied, “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!” To direct the Reich Ministry for Science, Education and Popular Culture—which was chartered to “unify and control all of German science by the Reich both within and outside the universities [and manage] the control and methodical shaping of all of scientific life especially at the university”—Hitler named Bernhard Rust, a former provincial schoolmaster who had been dismissed for molesting a schoolgirl but had escaped prosecution on grounds of his documented mental illness. For Rust, the whole purpose of education was to create Nazis. When Rust asked David Hilbert whether the once great mathematics center at Göttingen had suffered from the expulsion of its Jewish faculty members, Hilbert replied, “Suffered? It hasn’t suffered, Minister. It doesn’t exist anymore!”

A few first-rate scientists did remain in Germany throughout the war. One of them was Max Planck, the founder of quantum physics—a patriot whose eldest son died fighting in World War I and whose second son was executed by the Gestapo for attempting to assassinate Hitler with a bomb on July 20, 1944. Planck noted that intellectual midgets were being promoted to the academic posts vacated by professors who had fled the Nazi regime or perished at its hands: “If today thirty professors get up and protest against the government, by tomorrow there will be also one hundred and fifty individuals declaring their solidarity with Hitler, simply because they’re after the jobs.” He took comfort in the objectivity of science. “The outside world is something independent from man, something absolute,” he wrote, “and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.” Another who stayed behind was Werner Heisenberg, discoverer of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics. Something of a Romantic, Heisenberg was given to long alpine walks and to the formulation of oracular queries like, “Why is the one reflected in the many, what is the reflector and what the reflected, why did not the one remain alone?” He thought of the war as a passing storm, upon the subsiding of which intellectuals like himself would restore German culture to its proper prominence. “I must be satisfied to oversee in the small field of science the values that must become important for the future,” Heisenberg wrote in 1935. “That is in this general chaos the only clear thing that is left for me to do. The world out there is really ugly, but the work is beautiful.”

Meitner refused a 1943 offer to work in the Manhattan Project, declaring, “I will have nothing to do with a bomb.”

Ultimately, though, the decay of German science under the Nazis resulted not just from the brain drain and the harebrained ministrations of Hitler and his henchmen, but from fundamental differences in the way science operates under totalitarianism as opposed to liberalism. Science demands free, open discussion and publication, not only in order to circulate fresh information and ideas but to expose them to lively criticism. A totalitarian regime can afford little of either. Having seized a measure of power to which it has no legitimate claim, in order to solve real or imaginary problems that it cannot in fact solve, such a regime is highly vulnerable to criticism and so must stifle it. One way it accomplishes this, aside from jailing and murdering dissenters, is to create a cult of secrecy and power in which access to secrets is perceived as a source of power. Such vices are infectious, and the history of Nazi Germany is rife with examples of corporations and government agencies needlessly duplicating their R&D efforts by playing their cards too close to their chests.

Overcoming these obstacles called for an openness to new ideas that was scarce in wartime Germany. The Nazis’ institutionalized paranoia produced a stovepipe array of mutually suspicious public agencies and private corporations, with university scientists—such as they were—largely excluded from radar work altogether. The effort was further retarded by the low quality of Nazi appointees—men like Ernst Udet, who knew next to nothing about science but was appointed technology chief of the Luftwaffe on the basis of his fame as a World War I flying ace, and who objected that if radar systems were deployed, “Flying won’t be fun anymore.”

Churchill took a personal interest in science, numbered top scientists among his friends, and understood the importance of free communications in developing new devices and tactics. There was “no time to proceed by ordinary channels in devising expedients,” he said, boasting that his military service ministers “stood on no ceremony…had the fullest information…and constant access to me,” and that “anyone in this circle could always speak his mind.” In his view the conflict was not

“Unless British science had proved superior to German,” Churchill later wrote, “we might well have been defeated, and, being defeated, destroyed.”

This is not to say that the Allies were immune to the difficulties posed by bureaucratic opacity and conservatism—indeed British and American scientists often complained of just that—or that German scientists were never able to cut through red tape and get anything done. But on the whole, wartime scientific and technological development fared far better in the liberal democracies.

Not even Marx and Engels could foresee the extent to which communism would indeed come to haunt Europe and the world. Chiefly an enthusiasm of intellectuals and political opportunists, communism failed to capture the affection of the working masses whose interests it claimed to promote, yet came to rule a third of the world’s peoples. Marx and Engels talked about liberation, yet communism presided over the most craven sacrifices of liberty for the promise of material gain to have darkened human history. They described communism as a science, yet few more noxious assaults on science had ever been concocted.

Communist theory was inherently reactionary—a reaction against the brutalities of the early industrial era—and pseudoscientific, in that it pretended to be scientific while ignoring the need to test theories experimentally. Marx was stricken, as any right-minded individual would be, by the appalling lot of the working poor and by child labor in particular. Capital is rife with descriptions of children being

Engels, similarly affronted, recalled walking through the slums of Manchester with “a bourgeois” to whom he complained of

Communists regarded Engels’ middle-class companion as the villain of the piece, yet capitalism and liberal democracy went on to alleviate the privations of far more working people than communism ever did. Liberalism proved to be empirical enough to address the plight of the working poor, while communism—an absolutist philosophy, equal parts religion and pseudoscience—was too inflexible to respond to much of anything.