Biologists Under Hitler (review)

The terms “organism and environment” mean nothing other in the language of biology than the phrase “blood and soil” in the language of politics.

Hermann Weber, zoologist, 1942

The Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg that followed Germany’s defeat by the Allies in World War II focused attention on nineteen medical men and one woman, whose “projects” had been widely publicized as the key medical atrocities in the Third Reich even before the indictments were published. The unprecedented violence and bestiality of these “experiments” allowed both sides in the trial to demonize the accused as highly aberrant psychopaths and sadistic Nazi party henchmen—not to be conflated with the mass of German physicians, who, both sides agreed, were as ethical and as dedicated to their patients during wartime as were American and British physicians. After all, the medical profession in the Allied countries (except for Soviet Russia) had a long and illustrious history of intimate association with German peers before the war. The trial served to repair the rupture occasioned by the war by providing closure, rehabilitation, and continuity for normative German medicine. Thus relegitimized, Germany and its physicians closed ranks with their Western counterparts as thirty long years of conflict with the common enemy to the East began to unfold.

Michael Kater’s pioneering work Doctors under Hitler (1989) signaled the beginning of an intensive effort to reexamine and document the participation of medical scientists and ordinary practitioners in the eliminationist policies dictated by the racist doctrines of National Socialism. Kater demonstrated that more than 55,000 German physicians joined the Nazi party after its takeover of government, from 7% of all licensed physicians before 1933, to 44.8% by 1945. Physicians were overrepresented by a ratio of 3 to 1 in the Nazi party, and by a factor of 7 in the elite SS.

Now Ute Deichmann, a biology teacher and historian, presents analogous data on biologists, expanded from her dissertation. Based on an analysis of 404 biologists who worked in German universities and Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWI’s) in the 1933–45 period, she shows that 57.6% joined the Nazi party, a rate of enrollment exceeding even that of physicians. In contrast, only 20% of physicists and 15% of mathematicians became Nazis. These “disturbing facts,” as the geneticist Benno Müller-Hill puts it in a useful foreword to the volume (p. xiii), are consistent with previous research suggesting an affinity for Nazi ideology and practice among workers in medicine and other life sciences.

Deichmann struggles with several important issues, foremost being “the question of how National Socialist politics and ideology influenced the development of biological research” in Germany (p. 1). In addition to assembling impressive statistical data, Deichmann fleshes out her account with remarkable original portraits of individual scientists representative of those who worked in Nazi Germany and of the 13% who were expelled (Jews accounted for four-fifths of the dismissals). Figures such as the eminent geneticist Hans Nachtsheim, among the former, and the botanist Gerta von Ubisch, among the latter, illustrate the continued influence of Nazi attitudes at every level of German society, coupled with a pervasive denial of complicity in Nazi crimes long after the war.

Deichmann’s book contains chapters on the expulsion and emigration of biologists during the Nazi years, and on the relation between Nazi party membership, research funding, and scientific careers; extensively documented chapters on research in the universities and the KWI’s; and somewhat skimpy accounts of biological weapons projects and Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage) research conducted under the direct aegis of the SS. The main shortcomings of this extremely well-documented and timely history are a somewhat unbalanced presentation (e.g., forty pages are devoted to the dismissals of Jews and socialists, and just twenty-eight pages to the ostensible Leitmotif of the volume, the aftereffects of National Socialism on German bioscience), the absence of biochemists from the account (only botanists, zoologists, and those among them who became geneticists are included), and the necessarily speculative conclusions about the...