The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich (review)

Sheila Faith Weiss's book The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich elucidates the "symbiotic" relationship between the Third Reich and German geneticists-eugenicists. Weiss describes the relationship as a "Faustian bargain" in which the Nazi regime poured funds into the coffers of those research institutions and scientists that showed themselves willing to expend their scientific credibility to legitimize the Nazi state and its ideology. Weiss explores this relationship from a variety of perspectives: from the vantage point of the international eugenics movement, at the institutional level within Germany, and even from the quotidian level of the Gymnasium class. In the end, The Nazi Symbiosis attains its main goals, but sometimes does so in an uneven manner. While there are some fascinating and well-developed sections in the book, at times Weiss departs from her main topic to delve into tangential issues—not always successfully. Overall, this book will appeal to graduate students and professional historians who study Nazi Germany or the history of science.

Weiss's discussions of the leading Nazi geneticists' careers is the chief strength of this book. The author shows that, even during the First World War, German geneticists began to discover the benefits of politically justifying their requests for research funding. They found that money flowed from government coffers most readily whenever they claimed that their research was meant to protect the German "germ plasm" or establish a scientific basis for the Weimar welfare state. These lessons in the politics of science were learned well enough by Germany's most prominent eugenics-oriented geneticists, Eugen Fischer and Ernst Rüdin, to allow them to survive the transition from the Weimar Republic to the National Socialist regime. Soon, however, both scientists had to reckon with the fact that the Nazis were entirely different from the preceding Imperial or Republican governments: the German scientists found themselves having to make ever greater accommodations to the Hitler regime just to retain their institutional power and research funding.

Weiss shows us that prominent scientists such as Fischer and Rüdin seemed initially to believe that they were as important to the Nazis as the Nazis were to them. While Fischer and Rüdin needed government funds to carry out their research, the Nazis wanted these scientists' imprimatur to legitimize National Socialist eugenics and racial ideology, as well as to project an image of intellectual respectability to the rest of the world—or so Fischer and Rüdin believed. Fischer and his star pupil, Otmar von Verschuer, even publicly claimed that the Jews were "different" from, as opposed to patently "inferior" to, the Aryan peoples. This, Fischer and von Verschuer hoped, would preserve their "scientific credibility" (p. 88).

However, the continuous radicalization of the Nazi regime exerted inescapable pressure on these scientists. Weiss suggests that the Fischer-von Verschuer-Ernst Rüdin troika Nazified and radicalized their own rhetoric, research agendas, and service to the Nazi state to avoid cognitive dissonance, to impress the regime with their loyalty, and to justify ever-larger research budget requests. Their prewar antisemitism pales in comparison to the ferocity of the remarks they were making by the middle of the Second World War. As Weiss explains, such tactics would pay off—at least in the short run. For example, as a reward for Fischer's increasingly Nazi-influenced research agendas, the budget of his institute more than doubled in the first four years of the Nazi era.

The Second World War brought a radicalization of almost all aspects of German society, including scientific research. Weiss demonstrates that Fischer and von Verschuer's main competitor for the Reich's genetic research funds, the genetic psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin, also felt compelled to make ever greater gestures of fealty to the regime (under what degree of compunction is never quite clarified in The Nazi Symbiosis). In exchange for funding, Rüdin fully endorsed the T...