The German Genius

institute, and the congress, were both designed to gain international recognition for the study of human inheritance in Germany because, like other scientists, its biologists had been boycotted by scholars from other countries after World War I. The first director of the institute was Eugen Fischer, the leading German anthropologist, and he grouped around him a number of scientists who became infamous. 25 Nearly all of them supported the racial-political goals of the Nazis and were involved in their practical implementation—for example, by drawing up expert opinions on “racial membership” in connection with the Nuremberg laws. 26 There were also extensive links between the institute’s doctors and Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. The institute was dissolved by the Allies after the war.
    One aspect of the role played by science in the Third Reich that has not received due attention is the polycratic nature of Hitler’s dictatorship, especially in the war years. Rather than being a tightly controlled regime, as the Nazis themselves advertised, so many people were clamoring for Hitler’s attention and approval, and authority was divided so much, that rivalries for the Führer’s favor created bottlenecks and gaps in lines of command that played havoc with the German war effort. The Vengeance rockets illustrate this point. Hitler was convinced they would wreak havoc in London, whereas in fact their chief effect was to draw resources away from aircraft production. This could have been predicted—it was predicted—but no one dared say it. As Norbert Elias has observed, this meant there were far more pressures on Hitler than may have appeared from the outside.
    This is underlined, in a way, by Trevor Dupuy’s figures about the fighting ability of German soldiers in World War II. Dupuy conducted the same exercise for the second war as he did for the first (see Chapter 29), comparing the combat effectiveness of the fighting men on both sides. His conclusion, which he wrote most reluctantly, because of his contempt for the Hitler regime, was that “the Germans consistently outfought the far more numerous Allied armies that eventually defeated them.” 27 Across seventy-eight engagements for which figures were available, the average number of opponents a soldier killed was as follows:
     
     
    Attack:
    Successful
    A LLIES : 1.47
    G ERMANS : 3.02
    G ERMAN PREPONDERANCE : 2.05
     
    Failure
    A LLIES : 1.20
    G ERMANS : 2.28
    G ERMAN PREPONDERANCE : 1.90
     
    Defense:
    Successful
    A LLIES : 1.60
    G ERMANS : 2.24
    G ERMAN PREPONDERANCE : 1.40
     
    Failure
    A LLIES : 1.37
    G ERMANS : 2.29
    G ERMAN PREPONDERANCE : 1.67
     
    Average:
    A LLIES : 1.45
    G ERMANS : 2.31
    G ERMAN PREPONDERANCE : 1.59
     
     
    With the German preponderance so marked, and extending consistently across many battles, one may ask why they lost. The answer lies in part in Hitler’s polycratic style of government, but also in the fact that, ultimately, the Allied numerical and matériel strength was just too much. Therein, perhaps, lies a profound truth. If you want to win, you need friends. Making friends was the one thing the Nazis were not good at.

Exile, and the Road into the Open
     
    B etween January 1933 and December 1941, 104,098 German and Austrian refugees arrived in America, of whom 7,622 were academics and another 1,500 were artists, journalists specializing in cultural matters, or other intellectuals. The trickle that began in 1933 swelled after Kristallnacht in 1938, but never reached a flood. By then it had become difficult for many to leave, and anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant feeling generally in America, meant that many were turned away.
    Other artists and academics fled to Amsterdam, London, or Paris. In the French capital Max Ernst, Otto Freundlich, and Gert Wollheim formed the Collective of German Artists, and then later the Free League of Artists, which held a counter-exhibition to the Nazi Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) show in Munich. In Amsterdam Max Beckmann, Eugen Spiro, Heinrich Campendonck, and the Bauhaus architect Hajo Rose formed a close-knit group, for which Paul Citroen’s private art school served as a focus. In London such artists as John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, Ludwig Meidner, and Oskar Kokoschka were the most well known in an intellectual community of exiles that was about 200 strong, organized into the Free German League of Culture by the Artists’ Refugee Committee, the New English Arts Club, and the