The purge of German science in 1933

[KingOfCoders]

And 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]

German 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.

[brcmthrowaway]

Interesting idea.. but ABleton comes out of germany!

[perihelions]

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: "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 ("Deutsche Physik" or "Aryan Physics")

[Tainnor]

It was the same thing in mathematics. For example, when Edmund Landau defined pi as "twice the value of the unique zero of cos in the interval [0, 2]" (a very common definition) instead of geometrically, this was attacked as being "un-German" (even though you can obviously go from the geometric to the analytic definition and vice versa).

https://institucional.us.es/blogimus/en/2017/03/pi-and-the-n...

[foobarian]

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 :-)

[mmaniac]

Quantum physics and relativity were a radical departure from classical mechanics and remain very counter-intuitive for laypeople so it's not hard to see how contemporary persons with ulterior motives and little interest in scientific inquiry would fixate on those.

[enasterosophes]

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

[Vecr]

I don't know, what's rationality's current reputation?

[mgoetzke]

Similar to some tendencies today with Right Wing from German AfD or American MAGA to dismiss complete fields of science. Whether it is climate change or vaccinations. They do not have a discussion, they dismiss it outright.

[kromem]

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.

[atoav]

The Nazis have had a strong mystic and esotheric undercurrent which also had to do with the Thule Society. When Hitler came to power German of all walks of life thought they could wield him to reach their own goals. Being correct in the sense of logic isn't what the Nazis were about. Or as my grandfather said paraphrased from Austrian German (who was in the Hitler Youth, like all kids his age — he was 12 when the war ended): "I didn't like the Nazis because in their ranks only simpletons and brutes would get into positions of leadership." So I am not surprised all kind of things have been called "jewish", as this was an easy way to quickly get rid of people you either disliked, envied or who simply did better work than you.

In a sense Trumpism echos that sentiment, where merit or truth doesn't count, but yelling the right thing loud enough does.

[wolverine876]

> 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.

People now deny climate change, often because it's 'liberal' - think of the incredible consequences of climate change, far greater than the disregarded physics, and yet it's ignored. It's the same with vaccines - people are causing their kids to become sick and sometimes die. It applies to many more things these days - anything 'liberal' is automatically rejected, regardless of cost.

[leephillips]

The 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/

[Isamu]

Thanks! Looking forward to this!

[caseysoftware]

Of the scientists who stayed.. what did they do during/after the war?

[carlosjobim]

Put people into space and put people on the moon.

[zitterbewegung]

Heisenberg was the leader of the Nazi atomic weapon program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg?wprov=sfti1#

[xyzelement]

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.

[arp242]

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.

[antod]

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.

[neffy]

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?

[myth_drannon]

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.

[Anotheroneagain]

That is, ironically, racist, as it sort of implies that jews are somehow the only ones capable of doing science.

[mrguyorama]

This actually comes up a lot in the "alternative history" community, who like to imagine ways "the nazis could have won", and in the end, they always come down to "If the nazis had just been less nazi, they could have survived".

Nazism was society built upon hatred and lies, including lying to yourself. When you are no longer connected to reality in such a way, you miss very clear details, things like "Hey maybe we can't win against everyone at the same time"

[sebastian_z]

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

[jandrese]

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.

[huytersd]

You have to tap into some strong basic instinct to get unquestioning massive support from the majority of the populace. In most cases, like in the case of Nazi germany, it is/was tapping into tribalism. Doing that builds up the in group’s self worth, imbues them with a feeling of superiority and generally makes them feel like they are living better, happier lives. Having someone to look down on is probably the easiest way to feel successful and happy. This isn’t rational thinking.

[RecycledEle]

Here is a purported list of authors banned in Germany in 1933:

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

[graycat]

Common 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]

> 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.

[pdonis]

> By then Hitler had done lots of ugly things and got away with them, e.g., the Holocaust.

No, actually the Holocaust, meaning the actual mass killing of Jews, didn't start until 1941, about the time Hitler attacked Russia.

Not to say Hitler hadn't already gotten away with plenty of ugly things by the time he attacked Poland. But the Holocaust wasn't one of them at that time.

[kmeisthax]

A couple of things you're missing:

- Hitler had rich German backers who specifically wanted to destroy the Weimar Republic[0], because democracy was starting to turn on the German capitalist class.

- Hitler was never popular enough to gain control through democratic means. The Weimar Republic was split in thirds between liberals, Nazis, and communists; the liberals thought letting Hitler be "vice-chancellor" (under a liberal chancellor) would be the least bad option. Hitler exploited this and demanded the chancellorship at the last minute. Once he was in position he was able to cause chaos and rip up the Weimar government.

- Very similar events played out in America.

America had its own very popular fascist parties. Furthermore, we had a very long history of people wanting to subvert or exit democracy in the name of white supremacy[1], and even a successful Presidential assassination to stop the fledgling Republican Party from stopping the South from reinventing slavery. Our constitutional guardrails are actually really thin and always have been.

1930s America also had very similar economic problems to Germany. We didn't have crippling war debt or hyperinflation, but the Great Depression was a globalized problem, so everyone had people demanding a strongman, which means fascists have a stall in the marketplace of ideas.

FDR was able to avert catastrophe, largely by subverting several of America's constitutional defenses against dictatorship. To be clear, capitalists had already coopted and corrupted classical liberalism, and they were able to successfully get the Supreme Court to shut down every moderately Progressive[2] policy because the one thing the Constitution was good at stopping was those policies. FDR threatened to pack the courts, and then suddenly the Supreme Court shut up.

But before that, the American capitalists tried doing exactly the same thing Hitler's backers tried - hiring a strongman to go and take over the US government[3]. Except they hired Smedley Butler, who was already getting tired of being Wall Street's hitman, so he immediately blabbed about it to the government. I'm under no illusion that America had plenty of competent men who would sell their country out in order to sit on a comfy chair and let the capitalists loot America. We're just lucky the capitalists picked the wrong guy.

Ultimately the thing that got America out of the Great Depression was WWII - and not because wars are inherently good, but because it gave FDR a blank check to rebuild the economy with government money. And yes, FDR had to engineer this too, by embargoing Japan and daring them to attack us. And yes, even with a not-shitheaded liberal running the show there were still dramatic overreaches of government power[4] that our constitutional guardrails did jack shit against[5].

Not to mention the whole "running for four terms" thing. Yeah, that's right, Presidential term limits were a norm - not a rule - until FDR decided he was just going to keep going until his body stopped him.

America did not come out of WWII with its democracy intact because it has superior structures. Nor because its people are inherently more trustworthy or we had more experience with democracy. (I mean, we did, but barely.) It was largely dumb luck:

- Luck that America's fascist movements didn't shoot first.

- Luck that the Progressive movement backed a liberal, not an authoritarian. FDR absolutely had all the power and could have destroyed American democracy instead of rebuilding it.

- Luck that the capitalist reaction stumbled at the starting line. The Business Plot could have taken him like the South took Lincoln.

The only thing mostly determined at the outset was that we were going to win the war, because we owned the oil. That's why America is still obsessed with oil to this day.

also

>Hitler's military did well in fast attacks against opponents not yet taking war seriously.

This is an echo of how authoritarians take power: do something so batshit insane so quickly that nobody has time to notice you palming everyone's phones. Think like January 6th: had Trump actually been coordinated rather than just angrily lashing out, he could have actually stopped the election before it was certified, gotten his 6-3 Supreme Court to look the other way, and then seized power.

[0] There are historical echoes to the French aristocracy's attempts to choke fledgling democracy out, though in that case the fledgling democracy went paranoid and made its own dictators first.

[1] To be clear, "White" was far narrower then than it is today. It excluded the Irish, Mormons, Italians, and so on. But for the purpose of this discussion we can use the modern colorist definition rather than the far more racist definition they used back then.

[2] As in the political movement, not the extremely genki insurance salesperson character

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States

[j7ake]

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]

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.

[atleastoptimal]

I wonder just how advanced Germany would be nowadays without the World Wars.

[Terr_]

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.

[wongarsu]

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?

[newsclues]

The wars were a driving reason for a lot of technology and innovation, and at the least accelerated some important technological advances.

[xhkkffbf]

Some suggest that war focuses the economy and drives it forward. How quickly would atomic power evolve without WWII?

[jjgreen]

Long and interesting article from 2024, the title is "The Great Purge (1933)" (which kind-of clashes with the HN conventions ...)

[dang]

Thanks—I've edited the title a bit to solve that problem.