BOOK BURNING
The anti intellectualism of the Nazis was demonstrated on May 10, 1933, when the principal German student body organized students for a book‐burning festival. In university towns, students consigned to the flames books that were considered a threat to the Germanic spirit, many of them written by prominent Jewish authors. Louis P. Lochner (l887—1975), head of the Associated Press Bureau in Berlin, gave an eyewitness account of the scene in the German capital in Tbe Goebbels Diaries 1942‐43 (1948). Photo
The whole civilized world was shocked when on the evening of May 10, 1933, the books of authors displeasing to the Nazis, including even those of our own Helen Keller, were solemnly burned on the immense Franz Joseph Platz between the University of Berlin and the State Opera on Unter den Linden. I was a witness to the scene.
All afternoon Nazi raiding parties had gone into public and private libraries, throwing onto the streets such books as Dr. {joseph] Goebbels [Nazi Progaganda Minister] in his supreme wisdom had decided were unfit for Nazi Germany. From the streets Nazi columns of beerhall fighters had picked up these discarded volumes and taken them to the square above referred to.
Here the heap grew higher and higher, and every few minutes another howling mob arrived, adding more books to the impressive pyre. Then, as night fell, students from the university, mobilized by the little doctor, performed veritable Indian dances and incantations as the flames began to soar skyward. When the orgy was at its height, a cavalcade of cars drove into sight. It was the Propaganda Minister himself, accompanied by his bodyguard and a number of fellow torch bearers of the new Nazi Kultur
“Fellow students, German men and women” he said as he stepped before a microphone for all Germany to hear him. “The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit ..,_"You are doing the right thing in committing the evil spirit of the past to the flames at this late hour of the night. It is a strong, great, and symbolic act—an act that is to bear witness before all the world to the fact that the spiritual foundation of the November Republic has disappeared. From the ashes there will rise the phoenix of a new spirit .... “The past is lying in flames. The future will rise from the flames within our own hearts .... Brightened by these flames our vow shall be: The Reich and the Nation and our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler: "Heil! Heil! Heil!"
The few foreign correspondents who had taken the trouble to view this “symbolic act" were stunned. What had happened to the “Land of Thinkers and Poets?” they wondered.
The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the authorities of Nazi Germany to ceremonially burn all books in Germany which did not correspond with Nazi ideology.
The Rejection of Modern Science:
The Nazi Dismissal Policy of 1933
Colleen Harris
Jacksonville University
Florida Conference of Historians
February 2004
In 1933, the Nazi regime in Germany passed the Civil Service Law, which dismissed non-Aryans and the “politically unreliable” from state employment.[1] Exemptions existed, such as those for World War I veterans, but many of these civil servants were forced to accept transfers to other positions.[2] Two currents had flowed together to create the Civil Service Law, the first law of the Dismissal Policy. Long before the rise of the Nazis, many Germans had rejected elements of the modern world of which science is a crucial component. On top of this, Nazi Germans associated Jews with modern science because of the high number of Jews working in science. These dismissals included scientists from teaching and other governmental positions. Of those dismissed from their positions, some left their homeland and some remained in Germany. In either case, the dismissal of professors from their appointments adversely affected German science.[3]…
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German laboratories and industrial institutions had been the best, most innovative, in the world. In fact, between 1901 and 1932, one third of all Nobel Prize winners hailed from Germany. Only 18 percent were British and a meager 6 percent were American.[8] Germany retained its dramatic lead over the rest of the scientific world until the early 1930s, when the United States took its place.[9] Certainly, the Nazi regime’s Dismissal Policy, especially toward theoretical scientists, spurred the decline in the quality of German science and enriched the scientific establishments of its enemies. By 1939, for example, the level of chemistry in the United States, a country frequently adopted by the German refugees, had risen dramatically.[10] After a European tour in that same year, a University of California professor asserted that, while the pace of research under the Nazi regime had not diminished, theoretical science was not being encouraged because it conflicted with the government’s ideology.[11] By 1942, even some Germans were themselves admitting that the United States had pulled ahead in physics.[12]…
Many of the scientists who left objected to Nazi-enforced methods of science. The Nazis’ “new science” was not objective; it was certainly not the “common property of mankind;”[14] and the party used it to serve its own purposes.[15] In June 1936, Dr. Bernhard Rust, German Minister of Science, Education, and People’s Education and loyal Nazi, declared that Nazism and official ideology were more important than was empirical, objective science. Turning the notion of empirical truth on its head, he argued that “Science which is not in accord with it [German ideology] is not objective.” For Rust, the changes made in German science were only to “enrich itself.”[16] The Nazis maintained that they were basing science on observing nature and its reactions. Non-Aryan, theoretical science, on the other hand, did not expect one clear, definitive answer and considered each partially proven assumption to be a milestone.[17] In Germany, as the New York Times reported, not even “a laboratory worker [could] decide for himself what the philosophy of science [should] be,” implying that science was a merely a tool of the dictatorship to be manipulated by the Führer and his party.[18] Prominent scientists willingly gave themselves and their study to the regime.[19]
Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, who included Adolph Hitler as a great scientist, wrote as early as 1924 that “incarnations of this spirit [that of the great scientists] are only of Aryan-Germanic blood.”…
Nazi science naturally contained a racial element to it: theoretical science was “Jewish” and non-theoretical was “Aryan.”[22] The Nazis dismissed the validity of Jewish science, especially physics, a field where Jews were particularly prominent. Philipp Lenard later wrote, “With the massive introduction of Jews into influential positions . . . the basis of all scientific knowledge, the observation of nature itself, was forgotten and was no longer considered valid.”[23] Dr. Otto Wacker of the Ministry of Education clearly stated the party’s view at a renaming ceremony of the Physikallsches Institut [Physics Institute] in 1936: “The problems of science do not present themselves the same way to all men. The Negro and the Jew will view the same world differently from the Germans.” He also claimed that true science resulted from the “superior qualities of ‘Nordic’ research. [24] The Institute was itself renamed the Philipp Lenard Institute.[25]…
The Nazi failure to develop an atomic weapon symbolized the disfunctionality of Nazi science wherein a priori ideology trumped scientific accomplishment. The Third Reich promoted a subjective view of science that rejected theoretical ideas. Because of the disproportionate number of Jews in science, the Nazis associated modern science with the Jewish people. The Nazis dismissed hundreds of Jewish and Aryan scientists who practiced theoretical science. Many also left their institutions and Germany on their own volition. The Nazi Civil Service Law of 1933 had set in motion events that led to the downfall of German science and contributed significantly to Germany’s eventual destruction in 1945.
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Florida Conference of Historians:
By J. S. Medawar, David Pyke 2001
Description
Would Hitler have won the war had he not "given" the Allies Germany’s most talented scientists? This is the gripping story of some of the greatest scientists of our times who, forced to flee Nazism, sought refuge in the U.K. and the U.S.
"If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!"
With these words, Hitler closed the door on Germany’s fifty-year record of world supremacy in science. The exodus of German and Austrian scientists, mostly Jewish, that followed caused critical damage to Germany’s scientific output and brought invaluable gains to the West. The Third Reich’s losses included many of the leading physicists who later became the driving force behind the atomic bomb project. Of more than 1,500 refugees, fifteen went on to win Nobel Prizes. Among them were the co-discoverer of penicillin, the physician who revolutionized the treatment of paraplegics, and Max Perutz, who discovered the atomic structure of the hemoglobin molecule...
Read complete description:
http://www.arcadepub.com/book/?GCOI=55970100356320 —Adolf Hitler
Hitler's gift: the true story of the scientists expelled by the Nazi regime
By J. S. Medawar, David Pyke 2001
Related links:
Gay Marriage & Benedict XVI’s Obsession "…HITLER YOUTH brainwashed young Germans into support of their prejudices and policies against homosexuality."
"Hidden holocaust?: gay and lesbian persecution in Germany, 1933-45" By Günter Grau, 1995
Gay Marriage & Benedict XVI’s Obsession "…HITLER YOUTH brainwashed young Germans into support of their prejudices and policies against homosexuality."
"Hidden holocaust?: gay and lesbian persecution in Germany, 1933-45" By Günter Grau, 1995
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