Science, Technology, and National Socialism (review)

Just after the end of World War I a biology teacher, Otto Rabes, asserted that biology education in schools should provide a basis for understanding politics. He and his fellow biologists wished to increase their significance in education. In her contribution to this volume, Sheila Weiss uses the view of this biologist to demonstrate continuity between Weimar and the Third Reich. Biology teachers eventually allied themselves with Nazi party officials: one group gained status, the other gained a racial basis for education. In addition, funding for biological research increased in the Third Reich until 1944, as Ute Deichmann and Benno Müller-Hill demonstrate, although after 1940 research had to appear relevant to the war in order to gain support.

With one exception, contributors to this volume provide similar essays. They are concerned with investigating continuities and discontinuities from Weimar to the postwar period. Four articles deal with aspects of military technology, while nine treat disciplines like biology, mathematics, physics, and psychology. The editors’ introduction places the contributions within a larger framework and summarizes the findings. They note, for instance, that science and technology under the Nazis can be divided into two categories: fields useful ideologically or practically (biology, chemistry, and engineering), and fields that had to demonstrate their utility (mathematics, physics, and psychology). Only in the latter category did “Aryan” science movements challenge existing professional hierarchies. The editors also place science and technology within the framework of a Nazi government consisting of competing factions.

The exception to the general pattern of the essays is provided by two previously published essays on the history of mathematics by Herbert Mehrtens. Mehrtens develops a sociological framework for analyzing the development of mathematics. In doing so, he makes a valuable contribution to the issues of continuity and discontinuity, but raises significant issues that bear on the editors’ ideas about technocracy. The editors put forward two rather different conceptions of technocracy. One view suggests that technocrats are more rational than others and know the one best way to do things. Mehrtens undermines that epistemological view by describing “pure science” as a sociological category. A group can develop esoteric knowledge (pure science) significant to its members alone, only if the social group has enough legitimacy to retain support from the rest of society. That situation broke down in mathematics under the Nazis: mathematicians sought support for their discipline through what Mehrtens terms “caste politics” by promoting mathematics as a necessary applied discipline.

The editors’ other view, that technocrats are simply those people who, in any given situation, will seek ways to make things work, can also be found in the contributions of Mehrtens and others to this volume. They portray scientists and engineers adjusting themselves as individuals and as castes to Weimar, Nazi Germany, the Federal Republic, and, in the case of rocket scientists, the United States. Technocrats did more than find ways to survive under the Nazis: they made things work, while, except for proponents of Aryan science, they avoided larger political issues outside of caste politics. By analyzing this process, the authors make a solid contribution to our understanding of how German scientists and engineers made their way from World War I to the Cold War.