“As long as the Nazis are seen as the epitome of evil, there will be a demand for explanations” (Image: Topham Picturepoint)

From Churchill’s nuclear predictions to Darwin’s influence on the Nazis, four books explore the deeper levels of a history that continues to fascinate us

THE idea that we can learn from the past and avoid repeating it makes sense only if someone else is around to remember what happened. Historians have been aided in this task by memory traces that increase in quantity and quality the closer we get to the present. A watershed was reached in the second world war, the first major international conflict to be readily available to the mass media.

But why are we still fascinated by an event that ended nearly 70 years ago? Part of the answer is because so many people who are still living were involved in or affected by the war. Another part lies in a need to settle old scores, especially with the Nazis. As long as they are seen as the epitome of evil, there will be a demand for explanations that enable us to cordon off that “evil”. And then there is the worry that we too may be living in times when the heady mix of science, power and exigency could result in actions as extreme as the ones taken by the Nazis and their opponents.

“As long as the Nazis are seen as the epitome of evil, there will be a demand for explanations”

It is rare to see anyone stressing the positive legacies of the second world war for science and technology. These are fairly obvious: the research agendas of nuclear energy, rocketry, genetics, cancer and ecology were all expedited by the war. Arguably the threat of sustained military engagement has the best track record in hastening the advancement of science and technology. Academia and market forces can appear desultory by comparison, as the efforts of the former are divided into ever more specialised problems, and those of the latter are expended in chasing fickle consumers. There is nothing like the fear of annihilation to focus the best minds on taking us to the next level of technical achievement. Certainly this was Winston Churchill’s opinion.

As biographer Graham Farmelo shows in Churchill’s Bomb, Churchill managed to redeem his faltering performance as a minister in the first world war by elevating the “atomic bomb” from a neologism created by H. G. Wells to an existential risk in one deft essay, Published in 1924, the essay stands as a brilliant testimony to the power of science fiction to fuel the political imagination.

Three other recently published books attack the Nazis from various angles. Was Hitler a Darwinian? is a “greatest hits” package from Robert J. Richards, a US historian of evolutionary theory, that aims to settle scores against historians on both the political left and right who, he thinks, overplay Darwin’s influence on the Nazi imagination.

Population control

Richards sees this problem as urgent. But he never quite explains why, and ends up devoting much space to the obvious non-Darwinian roots of Hitler’s racism and anti-semitism, which was to do with a kind of biblical naturalism that would have black people descend from cursed sons of Noah, and Jews cursed for having killed Christ.

He becomes more interesting when he discusses the tortured arguments of the professional biologists at the time. These are very much worth revisiting today.

Unfortunately, there is an elephant in the room: “racial hygiene”, the most influential German medical ideology in the 50 years preceding the second world war. Unlike the biblically based racists, the biologists raised issues of population control, euthanasia and eugenics. They targeted “counter-selectionist” social policies that perpetuated the lives of “unfit” people who would have perished (or never have been born) had natural selection been given a free hand. Policies such as mass vaccination were held responsible for rates of population growth and resource consumption that allegedly stoked imperial expansion – and the violent reactions to it.

Racial hygienists generally positioned themselves on the political left, identifying with ecological and pacifist causes. Their intellectual leader, , was both a Nobel peace prize nominee and a Nazi. On all this Richards is conspicuously – and regrettably – silent.

It is relatively easy to show the Darwinian roots of Nazism, compared to the much harder task of demonstrating the mental pathology of Nazi politicians and scientists. In The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, journalist Jack El-Hai gives a fresh twist to the failure of US military psychiatrists to arrive at a morally satisfying diagnosis of the Nazi leaders for “crimes against humanity”.

He approaches the matter from the perspective of US Military Intelligence Corps officer Douglas Kelley, who was chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg Prison during the war trials. Kelley could not see much difference between the personality of Hitler’s heir apparent, Hermann Göring, and that of a highly motivated top corporate executive. El-Hai suggests that Kelley shared some of these qualities, and Kelley even ended his life Göring-style, by taking a cyanide capsule.

A subtler moral appraisal lies in science writer Philip Ball’s Serving the Reich, which focuses on the physics community. It generally confirms a thesis introduced by historian Ute Deichmann in her book, Biologists under Hitler. She argued that scientists (especially non-Jewish ones) found Nazism a permissive, even proactive regime for scientific research, but they suffered when the international community began to refuse to engage with them because it could not tolerate the Nazi society.

The Deichmann thesis scuppers the idea that deformities in Nazi science were attributable to an “unfree society”. They were simply the result of isolation, which continued after the war through a taboo on references to Nazi research.

Ball supports this view by highlighting the Rockefeller Foundation’s shifting position on the Nazi regime’s viability for cutting-edge research. The US-based foundation was interested in improving the human condition biologically, and wanted to involve physicists and chemists. Germany was a natural place to find talent. When the foundation severed ties, its decision was less influenced by the removal of Jewish scientists from major posts than by the destabilising effect that this and other political interventions had on the general research climate.

The German scientists did not help their case by keeping arms’ length from Nazi decision-making. This merely made them appear clueless and unreliable. Had the German scientific community been a more consolidated and visible presence in Nazi policy, the Rockefeller might have continued its support.

Against this backdrop, Ball provides an interesting twist on Werner Heisenberg’s failure to realise a Nazi atomic bomb. The dominant narrative, constructed by wartime Dutch-US physicist Samuel Goudsmit, was that the “unfree society” of the Nazi physicists closed them to the necessary information. What really happened was that the rest of the scientific world gradually closed its doors to the Nazis because it could not tolerate their society.

We have yet to disprove the hypothesis that an open-door policy to an authoritarian regime would lead to superior science. In our time, China may be the test case: its capacity for cutting-edge science has been increased by the West’s self-interested open-door policy on scientific knowledge.

This article appeared in print under the headline “The war with a past that never ends”

There is something fundamentally incoherent about Britain’s science education policy. Last December The Times Higher Education Supplement reported that 20 per cent of all science graduates from Britain’s “old” universities were jobless, up from 10 per cent five years ago. Yet the science minister and the other champions of the recent national science week, alias SET95, claim that not enough students are pursuing scientific degrees.

A similarly incoherent vision can be found throughout the developed world. Just ten years ago, when the Cold War was starting to wind down, the UN estimated that 20 per cent of the world’s scientists were engaged in research related to defence. In the US and Britain it was more like 30 per cent. But now, in the post-Cold War era, policy makers lack the guts to question why nations still require so many people to pursue a degree in science. Rather, they seem satisfied with the politically safe stance of looking for new markets in which the surplus of scientists might ply their trade.

From this standpoint, the UN Population Conference, held in Cairo last September, was a godsend. “Overpopulation” is clearly a problem that is unlikely to disappear overnight, and so there should be plenty of work for scientists. But what kind of work? And will it really contribute to a solution?

The consensus of learned opinion tends to diagnose the problem of “overpopulation” in a way that reinforces the division of labour between the arts and the sciences. On the one hand, there is the long-term problem of poverty in most of Africa and much of Asia and Latin America, which stems from a history of exploitation by the developed world, abetted by local Third World elites. This is portrayed as a problem of geopolitics, not science. On the other hand, there is the more immediate problem of Third World populations growing at ecologically unsustainable rates. This is portrayed primarily as a technical problem of devising and acquainting people with the techniques of birth control, while at the same time finding more scientific ways of producing food.

The politically correct thing to say about all this is that we need to move on both fronts at once. The arts-trained people should be tackling the long-term geopolitical issues, while the scientists deal with the more pressing life-and-death matters through their technology transfers.

Few political planners seem to entertain the possibility that the short-term and long-term strategies may work at cross-purposes, given the klnd of education that scientists receive. In particular, scientists are trained to think that any problems can be solved if only they can find the appropriate “magic bullet” – some invention that, when widely distributed, will make the problem disappear without leaving more problems in its wake.

The magic bullet mentality is fallacious. Every new bullet eventually becomes a bargaining chip strengthening the hand of one or another party in local Third World power struggles. And each time, the scientific community is horrified that something as well-intended as contraceptives can be converted into a tool of domination. While scientists cannot be expected to become politicians or even political economists, they should have enough understanding of the ways of the world not always to be so surprised when short-term fixes turn into long-term messes.

But the fallacious magic bullet mentality is all too pervasive. Scientific projects designed with the long term in mind are often framed as aiming for a “magic target”, an underlying causal mechanism – some gene or bacillus – that, once found, can be treated, cured or eliminated at a stroke. Here, too, the limited horizons of the scientific mind can play into unscrupulous hands. A striking case in point is the “war on cancer” that the US has been waging since 1971. Among the biggest financial supporters of this campaign have been the manufacturers of such carcinogenic products as some chemical additives and tobacco. Has a sense of humanity overtaken their sense of profit? Not exactly. Rather, these industries have discovered that predicating social policy on knowledge of ultimate causes is one of the surest ways of preventing such policy from ever being made.

Why do scientists fall so easily into the trap of thinking in terms of magic bullets shooting at magic targets? The problem here is that students are consistently taught to think about science as quite different – and perhaps even independent – from the rest of society. Among the worst offenders are the potted histories of science that are supposed to inspire students to pursue scientific careers. In elementary school, they tell of the ability of one genius – an Edison or an Einstein – to change the world simply by developing a Good Thing. By the time students reach university, a slightly more complex story is told, whereby the “giants” stand upon one another’s shoulders in a fixed sequence: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, and so on. In neither case are students told about the individual and institutional “middlemen” who were involved in translating the original idea into a variety of applications that reached far beyond what the original scientist had in mind. A classic example is the wireless, which required the shipping interests of a Marconi, although James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz often receive credit for its “theoretical basis”.

Bringing this sense of history into play requires that students learn about the larger social dimensions of the scientific enterprise – that science is, indeed, an “enterprise” in the full sense of the word. Admittedly, this would paint a messier and more ambivalent picture. Showing how relativity theory led to the atomic bomb is both intellectually and morally more demanding than telling cosy tales about Einstein scribbling down formulae while watching trams from a Swiss café.

Nevertheless, more serious stories can be told in just as colourful a fashion as the average tale of political intrigue. James Watson’s famous book The Double Helix is such an example. And if our society is committed to training more scientists in the coming years, they should be taught to participate more effectively in the larger geopolitical networks of which their work will necessarily be a part. In addition, this broadened educational horizon will enable scientists to adapt more easily to the vicissitudes of the job market, which are likely to continue into the next century. At present, science education is ill-equipped to address the full range of problems that “overpopulation” and “cancer” represent.