The German Genius

and he survived only because there was in Germany in 1941 an outbreak of nosema, a bee disease, killing several hundred thousand bee colonies. This seriously damaged fruit growing and at that stage Germany had to grow its own food. The Reich government concluded that Frisch was the best man to rescue the situation.
    According to recent research, about 13 percent of biologists were dismissed between 1933 and the outbreak of war, four-fifths of them for “racial” reasons. About three-quarters of those who lost their jobs emigrated, the expelled biologists on average proving considerably more successful than their colleagues who remained in Germany. The subject suffered most in two areas: the molecular genetics of bacteria, and phages (viruses that prey on bacteria).
    By one of those quirks of statistics we now know that doctors were more enthusiastic Nazis than members of any other profession—44.8 percent of German doctors joined the NSDAP. 33 It helped that, in the Weimar Republic, the doctor/patient ratio had been confined to 1 in 600. As Jewish doctors were expelled (some 2,600 by 1939), their non-Jewish colleagues were more in demand than ever.
    In fact, the focus of modern historical research has shifted from a concentration on the small minority of medical men who specialized in “racial science” to the broader picture of whether Germany’s doctors as a whole modernized too quickly in a “hard” scientific sense, at the expense of proper professionalization, involving greater ethical and socializing training. Thanks to widespread social insurance, Weimar Germany had a surfeit of doctors, 13 percent of them Jewish. In 1933, 36 percent of medical students were Jewish and so, when the racial laws came in, non-Jewish doctors and medical students had every reason to be grateful to the Nazis. As things now stand, the question as to whether German doctors were less “socialized” than in other countries has not been settled, but undoubtedly doctors were overrepresented in the NSDAP. 34
    Psychoanalysis came under attack because it was seen as a “Jewish science.” The Berlin Psychoanalytic Society was purged of its Jewish members, and the leadership passed to M. H. Göring, cousin of Reichsmarschall Hermann. He let it be known that one of the basic texts of psychoanalysis in the Third Reich would be Mein Kampf. The German Society for Psychotherapy was renamed the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy under its new president, Carl Jung, though Adlerians were equally strongly represented. 35 Jung was later to argue that he did all in his power to help Jewish colleagues, but Freud had long suspected him of anti-Semitism (see Chapter 30) and, certainly, in his theoretical work, Jung targeted Freud, arguing that the founder’s “soulless materialism” was a reflection, in part, of his Jewishness. Julius Streicher joined in. 36 The Nazification of psychology was completed with the takeover of six of fifteen full professors of psychology at German universities, in which chairs were occupied by Jews, and a purge of the German Society for Psychology and the Berlin Psychological Institute, where the offices of the director were ransacked for evidence of “treason” (nothing was found but the director, Wolfgang Köhler, one of the founders of the Gestalt school, subsequently resigned, his life having been made intolerable). It was a rude shock too when, in October 1933, psychoanalysis was banned from the Congress of Psychology in Leipzig. Psychoanalysts, in increasing numbers, looked to the United States.
    American psychologists were not especially favorable to Freudian theory—William James and pragmatism were more influential. But the American Psychological Association did set up a Committee on Displaced Foreign Psychologists and by 1940 was in touch with 2,169 leading professionals (not all psychoanalysts), 134 of whom had already arrived in America: Karen Horney, Bruno Bettelheim, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and David Rapaport among them.
    Freud was eighty-two and far from well when, in March 1938, Austria was declared part of the Reich. Several sets of friends feared for him, in particular Ernest Jones in London but even President Franklin Roosevelt asked to be kept informed. William Bullitt, U.S. Ambassador to Paris, was instructed to keep an eye on “the Freud situation,” and he ensured that staff at the consul general’s office in Vienna showed “a friendly interest” in Freud. Ernest