The German Genius

(which Himmler thought formed the southern edge of the lost continent, Atlantis), the Andes (where Himmler thought the civilization had been founded by Aryans), and even Tibet. They studied Bronze Age rock carvings and Paleolithic caves, excavated ancient graves, collected different types of tents, coins, skulls, and needles, took endless photographs, recorded folk stories and dialects, and in Tibet worried they were being spied on. 23 They all fell ill on Christmas Day 24 before entering the “white- and wine-coloured walls” of Lhasa. 25 They made plaster casts of things they couldn’t take away and studied ancient rites with a view to introducing them to Germany to replace traditional Christianity. They published a monthly magazine, Germanien , but, that apart, it is difficult to know what to make of these activities since few projects were properly completed or incorporated into Himmler’s overall view because, during the war, under the guise of “repatriating” goods that were of help in understanding the history and continuity of “Germanness,” the SS forces (and sometimes the Gestapo) carried out innumerable art and cultural robberies that were shameless in their extent. This process started in Lithuania and Estonia, then spread to Poland and even France. As part of the “cover” for this, Himmler declared himself to be Reichskommissar für Festigung deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissioner for Solidifying the German Folk-Nation).
    T HE N AZI C ONCEPTION OF S CIENCE
     
    In a survey conducted in 2007 by Stern magazine, one in four Germans believed that Nazi rule “had its good points.” One of those was “a high regard for the mother,” and another was the Autobahn (highway) system. Hitler is often credited with starting Germany’s impressive Autobahnen , but in fact the first such roads were conceived during the Weimar era. Similarly, Hitler was not quite the scientific enthusiast he is sometimes made out to be. Walter Dornberger, one of the physicists leading the army’s ballistic missile program at Kummersdorf West in Berlin (well ahead of everybody else’s), said later that the Führer never really grasped the significance of missile technology when it was explained to him. At his trial after the war, Albert Speer confirmed that Hitler had some pretty strange views in regard to technology. He was against the machine gun because “it made soldiers cowardly and made close combat impossible.” 26 In 1944, when the Luftwaffe high command wanted to use the Me-262 jet as a fighter, Hitler insisted it should only be used as a bomber (he wanted to be able to bomb New York eventually), arguing that aerial combat in jets had a dangerous effect on the brain. He was unable to grasp the revolutionary nature of nuclear physics and distrusted German attempts to build an atomic bomb because it was based, he said, “on Jewish pseudo-science.” (Before he had taken power, he promised he would reduce the amount of science pupils had to learn at school.) One of his enthusiasms was for Hanns Hörbiger’s theory of “glacial cosmogeny,” which claimed that the universe was formed from ice. Hitler believed that “progress” in science had led man to believe, mistakenly, that he could master nature. Instead, he said, he believed in an “intuitive acquaintance with the laws of nature.” 27
    As with the artists, so the dismissal of scientists began almost immediately after Hitler became chancellor, in the spring of 1933. For the most part, one would think that science—especially the “hard” sciences of physics, chemistry, mathematics, and geology—would be unaffected by political regimes. It is, after all, generally agreed that research into the fundamental building blocks of nature is as free from political overtones as intellectual work can be. But in Nazi Germany nothing could be taken for granted. Some Jewish academics were exempt for a while, if they had been employed before World War I, or had fought in the war, or had fathers or sons who had done so. But such exemption had to be applied for and Hans Krebs, who was to win the Nobel Prize in 1952 for his discovery of the citric acid cycle, wrote a memoir in which he described how, all of a sudden, in the laboratories of the Freiburg hospital where he was then working, people who had shown only the mildest interest in Hitler, “were suddenly to be seen in the uniforms of Nazi organisations.” 28 The situation was quickly