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The purge of German science in 1933

• jjgreen 2y ago
  Long and interesting article from 2024, the title is "The Great Purge (1933)" (which kind-of clashes with the HN conventions ...)
  • dang 2y ago
    Thanks—I've edited the title a bit to solve that problem.
• atleastoptimal 2y ago
  I wonder just how advanced Germany would be nowadays without the World Wars.
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    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.
    • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      > Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars. Agreed. How many years does each war set us back? And are there hurdles in our future that we will be unable to clear if we too often let war impede our progress.
      • ScoobleDoodle 2y ago
        There's an alternative as unfortunate as it may be of: how many years does each war move us forward. Or how many years behind would we be without the war having occurred.
        • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
          Hmm, yeah maybe it sort of breaks the before/after model. We're over here because the war happened, and would be over there if it hadn't. Sorta depends if progress means being ready to repel a hostile alien invasion, or if it means being capable of large scale cooperation on geoengineering projects in the face of biosphere collapse, or you know... whatever other can-you-survive-this test comes our way.
    • aftbit 2y ago
      Or did the wars actually lead to progress? A challenging question. Strife breeds strength, but stability breeds prosperity.
      • mxkopy 2y ago
        Industrial or technological progress, sure, but at the expense of cultural and societal progress. Tech trees are straightforward to visualize but I challenge you to think of a law tree or social norm tree as well.
        • aftbit 2y ago
          Perhaps, although perhaps cultural progress as well. For example, perhaps the hippie movement of the 60s was enhanced by the threat of draft in the Vietnam war.
        • dotnet00 2y ago
          Isn't a lot of the initial progress of women being treated as equals in the workplace in the US related to their work in factories during WW2? IIRC the end of colonialism and thus the end of the associated oppression, is also associated with the world wars, as they left the colonial powers too exhausted to retain their overseas empires.
      • inglor_cz 2y ago
        I wish could answer that. On one hand, the fact that a lot of smart people are trying to kill you is a great motivation for rapid technological advance and reduction of red tape. On the other hand, many of the young men in uniform who were torn apart by shells and mines could have been new Einsteins.
        • kaashif 2y ago
          > many of the young men in uniform who were torn apart by shells and mines could have been new Einsteins. The problem of geniuses dead in wars pales in comparison to the number languishing in poverty or ignorance. These may number in the billions right now. How many potential Einsteins are miserably toiling away in dead end jobs? How many Ramanujans are eking out lives in villages in India? So on and so forth. And another issue: if 100 million die in war or 1 billion aren't born due to fertility collapse, which is worse for progress?
    • jackcosgrove 2y ago
      I think the trick is to either get governments to fund basic research for a reason other than national defense, or get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons.
      • shiroiushi 2y ago
        >get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons. That's basically what happened during the Cold War. Aerospace technology and others were advanced incredibly (e.g., the Apollo moon missions). These days, we don't get this so much, so we have to rely on advertising companies to give us innovation...
    • crote 2y ago
      I'm not convinced it's that simple. Take a look at the very first Nazi book burning, for example, which targeted Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. It was the leading institution of its kind, and the complete destruction of its archive and community not only set back the LGBT community in Germany (and to a large extent the rest of the Western world) some 30 years - it didn't really recover until at least 1970! If it can cause that much damage there, imagine what it would've done to the wider scientific community.
    • grujicd 2y ago
      You can also wonder what would happen if Gavrilo Princip missed Franc Ferdinand in 1914? Single bullet could completely change world history. Would Austro-Hungary declare war to Serbia over some other cause? Or would some other incident start war between other two countries, leading to the same worldwide havoc? Some say that history is inevitable since it's result of massive forces which are similar to laws of nature. I'm not that sure. Tensions can be defused, diplomacy might work, some other incident could lead to different kind of conflict at different location. What is pretty much sure is that there would still be wars since they seem to be inevitable. But if that one shot missed, perhaps we wouldn't have WW1, and without WW1 there wouldn't be WW2 as circumstances would be completely different. Was there a single development as small as firing a single bullet that affected world's history this much?
      • dotnet00 2y ago
        IIRC all of humanity outside of Africa has gone through a tight population bottleneck at some point, such that a massive portion of human history can probably trace its root to a group of early humans managing to survive a certain encounter, none of which would've existed if they hadn't survived.
        • hollerith 2y ago
          The severe bottleneck 800,000 years ago includes the ancestors of all modern Africans.
          • dotnet00 2y ago
            Yeah was just coming back to edit after reading up on it. A bottleneck from 100k to 1000 human ancestors ~800,000 years ago for ~100,000 years. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 "Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event."
    • binary132 2y ago
      The world wars advanced science and engineering enormously. Aeronautic, nuclear, medical, radio, computer, mass production, logistical, and space technologies were all powerfully driven by wartime demands. Innovation might have been pushed by capital and human needs, but I would think it would probably look very different than it does today.
  • newsclues 2y ago
    The wars were a driving reason for a lot of technology and innovation, and at the least accelerated some important technological advances.
    • ekianjo 2y ago
      the amount of destruction and financial ruin that comes with war makes it a very negative outcome
      • newsclues 2y ago
        If you sell arms to both sides and no fighting occurs on your territory… No one has said there should be aggressive intervention in Ukraine or Middle East to minimize the environmental damage and financial impact of war.
  • wongarsu 2y ago
    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?
    • Ringz 2y ago
      During my studies of computer science, a professor told me that Germans might have programmed in Latin if the war had not intervened. Simply programming in German would not have been „scientific“ enough. Think about it. Latin is highly defined and static. But German could be great for imperative programming /s
    • csomar 2y ago
      You are assuming that without wars, all these achievements wouldn't have happened. Sure, that's one possibility. The other possibility is that people do them regardless. We have the iPhone today. A quite advanced device. We didn't need a war for that; but only the people willingness to connect with other people. In fact, most things we have from war are meaningless for everyday life. Man to the space has a certain grandeur to it but it didn't fill soviet shelves with food.
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  • xhkkffbf 2y ago
    Some suggest that war focuses the economy and drives it forward. How quickly would atomic power evolve without WWII?
• j7ake 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
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• xyzelement 2y ago
  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.
  • jandrese 2y ago
    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.
    • timeon 2y ago
      Yes he wouldn't have been able to seize power. But what is power for? If he had not sized the power he would be able to see his grandchildren grow.
    • arp242 2y ago
      Hitler didn't exactly seize power "easily"; it took an attack on the German parliament (possibly orchestrated by the Nazis themselves), a paramilitary force intimidating opposition parties (and at times directly preventing them from voting in parliament), and an assassination campaign. In the end it's a "what if?" type question, but I think a decent case can be made that anti-Semitism was not key to the Nazi success, although it was part of it. The NSDAP was far from the first or only anti-Semitic party, even at the time. But it was the only major fascist party in Germany at the time. In other countries fascist parties managed without such strong explicit anti-Semitism, Italy and Spain being the most notable. In my reading of events of the 20s and 30s, it was much more of an ideological battle and disappointment with the ruling class than anything else. This is also why the communist party did well at the time, and one reason the Nazis spent so much effort fighting them even though there are more similarities than both liked to admit. Or in brief: most people voted mostly for the fascism, not anti-Semitism. The basic concept of "strong leader to get shit done" has been and remains popular in various forms for a long time, especially in times of hardship.
• perihelions 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik ("Deutsche Physik" or "Aryan Physics")
  • foobarian 2y ago
    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 :-)
    • xyzelement 2y ago
      FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.
      • actionfromafar 2y ago
        Funny I was thinking of how so many otherwise intelligent and educated people believe climate change is just a liberal hoax.
        • 2y ago
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• caseysoftware 2y ago
  Of the scientists who stayed.. what did they do during/after the war?
  • zitterbewegung 2y ago
    Heisenberg was the leader of the Nazi atomic weapon program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg?wprov=sfti1#
  • carlosjobim 2y ago
    Put people into space and put people on the moon.
• graycat 2y ago
  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.
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• KingOfCoders 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
    • KingOfCoders 2y ago
      German here. Grew up in the 70s with anti-intellectual TV-shows (like Rappelkiste).
    • 48864w6ui 2y ago
      Despite that Germany did manage to elect a p-chemist as BK.
  • brcmthrowaway 2y ago
    Interesting idea.. but ABleton comes out of germany!
    • KingOfCoders 2y ago
      I think Germany has been quite good in practical research (see world leading companies, especially smaller ones in niche markets you never heard of), not so in science (think Nobel Prize winners).
      • brcmthrowaway 2y ago
        How about Zeiss?
• leephillips 2y ago
  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/ https://lee-phillips.org/noether/
  • Isamu 2y ago
    Thanks! Looking forward to this!
• RecycledEle 2y ago
  Here is a purported list of authors banned in Germany in 1933: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_banned_in_Nazi_Germany 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