Science and the Swastika by Adrian Weale, Channel 4 Books, £14.99, ISBN
0752219316
THE Nazis didn’t invent eugenics. The first professor of eugenics was
appointed in 1909 at University College London. Years earlier, the Fabian
socialist Beatrice Webb had proposed sterilising “difficult” members of the
working class, and laws permitting compulsory sterilisation of the mentally
handicapped were introduced at the beginning of the 20th century in several
countries, including the US and Sweden.
But it was in Germany during the 1930s that the “applied biology” of eugenics
became an entrenched political doctrine, finally leading to the systematic
slaugher of the Holocaust. In Science and the Swastika, Major Adrian
Weale does a good job of explaining the historical context of the evil, which,
he makes plain, did not emerge from an intellectual vacuum. His
book-of-the-TV-series also takes a broad look at Third Reich science at a time
when non-smoking vegetarian Adolf Hitler had released the ethical brake on human
experimentation.
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Many of the details of the experiments came to light only in the 1970s, and
reading them requires a strong stomach. Concentration camp inmates were used to
determine the tolerance limits of high altitude—”required” for fighter
pilots to handle the latest warplanes —and of hypothermia, “required” to
determine the best way to rewarm shot-down pilots rescued from the sea.
Prisoners died as they “modelled” battlefield injuries to test antibacterial
drugs and were infected with malaria to test anti-malarial therapies. Brains
from those murdered were purloined for neuroscience research unrelated to the
war effort.
What of the science, or pseudoscience, itself? How far were the rules of
scientific methodology infringed? Weale tackles this important question, but his
analysis is weak, especially his analogies with today’s environmentalist
movement. Green activists, he claims, use pseudoscientific arguments to demand
political change, just as Nazis used the pseudoscience of eugenics to justify
their policies. Bad taste, Major Weale: this trivialises to the point of
immorality the events of the Third Reich.