The Third Reich in Power
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Traditional approaches to academic subjects survived in German universities not least because their complexity and sophistication defied easy assimilation into the crude categories of Nazi ideology.294 In history, for example, established professors obdurately resisted attempts by the Nazis to introduce a new, racial, ‘blood-and-soil’ approach to the past in the first years of the regime. In the universities, as in the schools, ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg demanded that history should become a form of political propaganda and indoctrination, abandoning traditional ideas of objectivity based on scholarly research. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, German academic historians had been accustomed to try and view the past in its own terms and consider the state as the driving force in history. Now they were being told that Charlemagne, for example, was a German, in an era when many historians believed that it was anachronistic to think that Germans existed at all, and asked to affirm that race was the foundation of historical change and development. Some went along willingly with the idea of Charlemagne’s Germanness. In the case of the Eastern European specialist Albert Brackmann, this even included the attempt to minimize the extent to which Charlemagne had been motivated by Christian belief. But traditionalists such as Hermann Oncken insisted that history was in the first place a search for the truth, irrespective of its ideological implications. Another historian, Johannes Haller, who had publicly supported the Nazis in the elections of July 1932, declared in November 1934 that historians who adopted a ‘mythical view of the past’ were committing ‘hara-kiri’: ‘For’, he proclaimed, ‘where myth had the word, history has nothing more to say.’ Thus many university historians resisted the regime’s attempt to revolutionize their subject through new foundations like the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany, led by the Nazi Walter Frank. The new institute was not a success. It largely failed to produce any research, except from its section for the Jewish question, led by Karl Alexander von Müller, whose association with Hitler went back to his time in Munich at the end of the First World War.295
Müller took over the editorship of the profession’s flagship periodical, the Historical Journal (Historische Zeitschrift), from the liberal Friedrich Meinecke in 1935. But apart from a few brief articles and reports on the ‘Jewish question’, the history of Germans abroad, and one or two other political topics, the journal continued as before to publish specialized articles on academic themes based on detailed archival research.296 The leadership principle was introduced into historical organizations and research institutes, but this made little difference in reality; the profession was already extremely hierarchical, with enormous power resting in the hands of the senior professors. The national organization of historians first incorporated a couple of prominent Nazis onto its executive committee in 1933, then was itself taken under the control of the Education Ministry in 1936. This led to a more politically motivated selection of German delegates to international historical conferences, and to the domination of the organization’s annual congresses by Nazi historians from Walter Frank’s Reich Institute. The main consequence of this, however, was that university-based historians did not bother to go any more, and the apathy of the majority was now such that the 1937 national congress proved to be the last.297 As the Security Service of the SS noted the following year, historians were mostly content ‘to carry on compiling old scholarly encyclopedias and to deliver new scholarly contributions to the illumination of individual epochs’. There was not much sign of any advance of National Socialist concepts and methods to record.298 It seemed, therefore, that the historical profession was relatively unaffected by the Nazi regime and successfully preserved its custodianship of the legacy of the great German historians of the past against the onslaught of the new anti-intellectualism.
Yet when historians, particularly of the older generation, protested that history was an unpolitical subject, they meant, as so many conservatives had done under the Weimar Republic, that it should not be tied to party politics, not that it was devoid of any political content. From their point of view, patriotism was unpolitical, a belief in the historical rightness and inevitability of the Bismarckian unification of Germany in 1871 was unpolitical, the assertion that Germany had not been responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914 was unpolitical. A scholarly, objective approach to the past dovetailed miraculously with the nationalist prejudices and preconceptions of the educated German bourgeoisie in the present. For almost all, for example, it was axiomatic that the eastward Germanic migration in the Middle Ages had brought civilization to the Slavs. The German right to conquer Slavic nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia in the present grew in this way of seeing things out of the objective facts of Germany’s historic mission to civilize this part of Europe. Nobody gave a thought to the possibility that they were reading history backwards rather than forwards.299 Thus although no full professor of history had been a member of the Nazi Party before 1933, hardly any resigned his chair on grounds of political belief or conscience when the Nazis took over the universities, because hardly any saw the need to.300
The traditional Rankean concept of objectivity was not shared by all historians, particularly in the younger generation. One of them, Hans Rothfels, openly rejected what he called the ‘tendentious misconception of objectivity without a standpoint’ in favour of a conscious ‘unification of scholarship and life’ in the present.301 Even younger scholars who rejected the notion of objectivity in such terms, however, still insisted on the need for scholarly standards of research to be maintained and the open conversion of history into propaganda to be resisted. Hard-line ideologues like Rosenberg and Himmler thus met with considerable opposition when they attempted to foist racial interpretations of history, ‘blood-and-soil’, paganist anti-Christian views and the like onto the historians. Hitler himself preferred to praise German military prowess and great national heroes in the past. This point of view was far more congenial to the professors. Despite the interest of some younger historians in a populist-oriented history of the common people, under Nazi or quasi-Nazi ideological auspices, diplomatic and military history were still dominant in Germany, as in many other European countries, at this time, and writing biographies of great men was widely thought of as central to the historian’s business.302
A not untypical example of the academic historian in this respect was the Freiburg professor Gerhard Ritter, who became during the 1930s one of the most prominent representatives of the profession. Born in 1888 into an educated middle-class family, Ritter had been marked for life by his experience as an army officer in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. His patriotism gained a strong dose of sober realism in these circumstances, and though he never ceased to argue for the revision of the Treaty of Versailles and against the thesis of German war guilt in 1914, he also warned repeatedly against irresponsible warmongering and empty patriotic rhetoric. Unusually, perhaps, Ritter never had any truck with antisemitism and he mistrusted the populism of the Nazis, preferring an elitist conception of politics that excluded the irresponsible and uneducated masses from full political participation. After Hitler came to power, Ritter’s attitude towards the regime fluctuated ambivalently between conditional support and limited opposition. Combative and courageous, he did not hesitate to support Jewish pupils and colleagues dismissed or persecuted by the regime. On the other hand, he vigorously supported a whole variety of Hitler’s policies at home and abroad, while at the same time hoping continuously for the reform of the regime in a less radical direction. As he wrote in his biography of Frederick the Great in 1936, the Germans had rightly learned ‘to make sacrifices of political freedom’ for the ‘advantage of belonging to a leading nation-state’. In private, he was critical of many aspects of the Nazi regime, but in public, his books and articles served its educational purposes in broad terms by emphasizing the historians’ usual themes of German nationhood and the lives of great Germans of the past, even if some of the standpoints they took were not wholly shared by the Nazi le
adership.303
In a similar fashion, other disciplines too found little difficulty in fitting in with the regime’s broader requirements while preserving at least some of their scholarly or scientific autonomy. At Heidelberg University, for example, the Social and Economic Sciences Faculty focused its research on population, agricultural economics and the vaguely named ‘spatial research’ which in fact was focused on accumulating knowledge relevant to the proposed future expansion of the Reich in the pursuit of ‘livingspace’. The sociologists put their faith in detailed empirical work and cold-shouldered the rabid Nazi ideologues who tried to use their own fanaticism to gain promotion. A similar development could be observed in other universities too.304 In university-level teaching and research on German language and literature, professors and lecturers in the Nazi period focused on literary and linguistic history as a field in which the German spirit and expressions of German racial identity could be traced back through the ages. They contrasted this tradition with the threat posed by foreign influences such as Romance literature and American popular culture. This seemed a Nazi view, but it had been held by the great majority of scholars in this area since even before the First World War.305
Theology faculties, divided institutionally between Protestant and Catholic institutions, were in a more difficult position. Protestant theology faculties became the sites of bitter quarrels between supporters of the German Christians and the Confessing Church. At Bonn University, for instance, where Karl Barth, the chief theologian of the Confessing Church, was the guiding spirit, a new dean, the German Christian Emil Pfennigsdorf, was elected in April 1933. Within three years he had fired or transferred ten out of the faculty’s fourteen members and replaced them with his own supporters, with the result that before long the faculty was virtually without any students. The hostility of the Nazi Party to the Catholic Church found its expression in the refusal of the state authorities to sanction the filling of posts in Bonn’s Catholic theology faculty made vacant by retirements. Eight out of the faculty’s twelve chairs were unfilled in 1939; only the forcible transfer of two professors from the faculty in Munich, which the Nazis had closed down altogether, allowed teaching to continue. Similar upheavals occurred in other universities too.306
The contrast with what rapidly became the most important of all university faculties under Nazism, medicine, could not have been more stark. Teachers of medicine made up roughly a third of all university faculty members by 1935, and the absolutely dominant position of medicine in universities was reflected in the fact that, from 1933 to 1945, 59 per cent of university rectors were drawn from the medical profession. The close interest of the regime in the teaching of medicine was signalled right away in 1933, as Hitler appointed Fritz Lenz to the first full Chair in racial hygiene at any German university, in Berlin; this was quickly followed by chairs in the subject in other universities or, where this did not happen, in the institution of regular lecture courses in the subject. Unfortunately, not only was the subject itself poorly developed in intellectual terms, but those who rushed to teach it were often more noted for their ideological fanaticism than for their scientific competence. The abler students mocked such teachers behind their backs, but even they were often unable to pass the simplest tests in the subject, identifying as Aryan, for example, Nordic-looking individuals who were in fact Jews. The absurdity of such tests did not deter Nazi professors from investing a good deal of time and energy into racial studies. At the University of Giessen, for instance, an Institute for Hereditary Health and Race Preservation, partly sponsored by the Nazi Party in 1933, became a full university department in 1938 under its founder, the ‘old fighter’ Heinrich Wilhelm Kranz, who as a medical student had taken part in the cold-blooded shooting of fifteen workers by a Free Corps Unit in Thuringia in the wake of the Kapp putsch in 1920. Kranz was actually an ophthalmologist, with no scientific expertise in physical anthropology at all, but this did not prevent him using his connections in the Party to further his own empire-building in the field of racial research.307
If the quality of its teachers was often poor and the content of what they taught dubious in scientific terms, racial hygiene was at least accepted in principle by most medical faculties in the 1930s. But this was not all that the Nazis tried to foist onto the universities in this field. The head of the Nazi Physicians’ League from before 1933, and from 1936 leader of the Reich Physicians’ Chamber, was Gerhard Wagner, a close associate of Rudolf Hess and an enthusiast for alternative medicine. 308 Wagner backed the Nazi radicals who championed a holistic approach based on herbs and other natural remedies, known as the New German Healing. He did not conceal his disdain for the mechanistic, scientific approach of conventional university medicine, and rejected its dependency on synthetic pharmacology. Wagner set up a teaching hospital in Dresden in June 1934 with the aim of disseminating the naturopathic ideas of the New German Healing. He followed this up with a variety of special training courses. Racial hygiene was an integral part of the teaching of the new academy for state public health officials that Wagner established in Munich in 1933. Soon ‘people’s health’ was a feature of teaching in university medical schools too. Wagner backed this up with persistent and often successful interventions with the Education Ministry in appointments to university medical chairs, many of which had become vacant as a consequence of the dismissal of their Jewish occupants in 1933-4. At Bonn University, for example, twelve out of seventeen chairs in medicine became vacant in the years from 1933 on; ten of the fourteen new professors appointed up to 1945 were active Nazis, who then formed the dominant group within the faculty. Often the new incumbents were not up to their predecessors either as researchers or as practitioners. Even so, by 1938 there was such a shortage of qualified candidates for medical chairs that the Ministry of Education started to ask retiring incumbents to stay in office. In Berlin, for example, the 67-year-old Walter Stoeckel, an eminent gynaecologist, was given another two years in post because no replacement could be found. The fact was that for competent physicians and surgeons there were already greater rewards, and more freedom as researchers, to be had in industry or the armed forces. And the burden of student numbers in areas such as racial hygiene was now so great that non-specialists from other fields were being drafted in to do the teaching.309
Everywhere in the educational system, therefore, the Third Reich had an impact that was ultimately disastrous. ‘Scholarship is no longer essential, ’ noted Victor Klemperer in his diary in October 1933 as he recorded the cancelling of lectures on two afternoons a week in his university to make time for military sports.310 In a regime that was built on contempt for the intellect, this should hardly have been a cause for surprise. The Nazis saw the educational system in the first place as a means for inculcating the young with their own view of the world, still more as a means of training and preparing them for war. Anything that stood in their way, including traditional educational values such as freedom of inquiry, critical intelligence or the ideal of pure research, was to be sidelined or swept aside. As preparations for war became more extensive, so the demands of the armed forces for doctors became more urgent; and in 1939 the course of university study for medical students was shortened. The quality of teaching had already been diluted by a reduction of the time taken up in mainstream medical training to make room for new subjects such as racial hygiene, not to mention the students’ multifarious obligations to the Party, from attendance at labour camps to participation in the activities of the stormtroopers. Already in 1935 the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch was complaining about the poor quality of the new intake of medical students, many of whom had, he claimed, been picked because they or their parents were Party members. There was even some evidence that examination standards were being lowered to enable them to get through. When a dissertation on racial hygiene could serve as the final qualification for medical practice, it was not surprising that traditionalists like Sauerbruch were concerned for the future of the medical profession in Germany.311