Scientific institutions have a long history of anticipatory obedience

Time for a little history lesson. Within months of the election of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Jewish staff of the German Chemical Society, including some high-profile members, were asked to resign in an act of what historian Ute Deichmann has called anticipatory obedience. All ‘non-Aryan’ members were expelled over the next few years.¹ ‘It is one of the most notable phenomena in academia in 1933 that the severest measures of National Socialist policies against science were carried out under a high degree of silence and with the frequent consensus of scientists,’ Deichmann has written.²

‘Chemists fought no battles for Jews,’ historian Helmut Maier has said.¹ ‘They fought no battles for immigrants. They only fought … a battle for their professional interests.’

German chemistry was by no means unique in this regard, but it was one of the most compliant disciplines towards Nazi demands. The German Physical Society dragged its feet but offered no significant resistance to ‘Aryanisation’. In 1946 the society’s vice chairman Wolfgang Finkelnburg tried to construct an exculpation, saying that the society ‘did everything in its power … to represent … a clean and decent scientific physics’. Such a refusal to confront the past lasted until recently: the German Chemical Society received letters of complaint from members even in the mid-2000s when it announced a plan to investigate its past during the Third Reich.

As for the German chemical industry, the Nazi legacy is summed up in one trade name: Zyklon B. That should not, however, overshadow the use of slave labour from the concentration camps by BASF, Bayer, Agfa and Hoechst to make synthetic rubber.

A lack of resistance

History does not repeat, and Donald Trump’s United States is not Hitler’s Germany. But the point is surely to learn from it anyway. In Germany in the 1930s, scientific institutions and societies failed at every level to offer any significant resistance to Nazism. You would be hard-pushed to find any scientists who resigned from a post because of the antisemitic purges who was not personally affected by them. This is how Leo Szilard, who left Berlin in 1933 for England, saw it:

The Germans always took a utilitarian point of view. They asked ‘Well, suppose I would oppose this, what good would I do? I wouldn’t do very much good, I would just lose my influence. Then why should I oppose it?’ You see, the moral point of view was completely absent, or very weak.³

And so Szilard concluded that Hitler’s plan would be achieved not because the Nazis were so strong but because ‘there would be no resistance whatsoever.’ 

Parallels with purges

Anyone who has studied science under the Nazis, as I did for my book Serving the Reich, cannot fail to be dismayed and alarmed at the parallels in the response so far of scientific institutions and academies to the purges and abuses of power following Trump’s executive orders attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia. Here’s a small selection of events (which have been documented much more exhaustively by Derek Lowe, familiar to Chemistry World readers, in a blog for Science ).

• The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has shut down its Inclusive Excellence 3 programme, saying to recipients that ‘no further payments will be made’.
• NASA has removed the word ‘inclusion’ from the core values it represents and has instructed employees to remove all personal pronouns from work communications.
• The US National Science Foundation is scouring grants for keywords (equality, minority, trauma) that could lead to funding being stopped.
• The National Institutes of Health have said that applications from graduate students from underrepresented backgrounds under their diversity scheme have been removed from the applicant pool.
• The American Society of Microbiology Society censored an article on women in the development of antimicrobials to remove words such as ‘marginalised’, ‘equity’, and ‘diversity’, without telling the author.

Some of this seems to be anticipatory obedience – behaviour that historian Timothy Snyder has identified as a characteristic (and perilous) response to totalitarian regimes. There have been no official statements either on these assaults on inclusion nor on the more general anti-science crusade from the American Chemical or Physical Societies (my enquiries to both have gone unanswered to date), nor from the US National Academy of Sciences.

Prudence cannot mean timidity

No one can expect individual scientists to make a stand, at professional and even personal danger (even though some are doing so). Still, a very few university presidents have spoken out: Christina Paxson of Brown University in Rhode Island has said ‘we are prepared to exercise our legal right to advocate against laws, regulations or other actions that compromise Brown’s mission.’ Holden Thorp, editor in chief of the Science journals, has wisely said that resistance does not have to be overt: ‘It also means understanding the situation, caring for the people under their charge who are affected, helping them grieve for what is being lost and leading a conversation about how higher education is going to adapt to the new realities without sacrificing our values.’

But prudence cannot mean timidity, nor can it risk looking like it. As I wrote in my book: ‘Science can and should as a community organise itself to maximise its ability to act collectively, ethically and – when necessary – politically.’ The scientific community needs to speak up – not just for the sake of science, but of human decency, dignity and morality.