After the war ended, “despite Jewish professor Lise Meitner’s powerful criticisms, Hitler’s scientists showed little remorse” for their role in Nazism’s many crimes against humanity, not the least of which was the Holocaust.63 After the war, “with rare exceptions criminal doctors calmly returned home to resume normal Practices and ordinary life” in post Nazi Germany.64 Science in West Germany simply accommodated itself to the changed situation and moved forward.
Professor Konrad Lorenz, an active Nazi, went back to his scientific work after the war and, as noted above, was later awarded a Nobel Prize in 1973 “for discoveries in individual and social behavior patterns.” Lorenz, an Austrian zoologist and ornithologist, is regarded as the founder of the field called ethology, the scientific study of animal behaviour, and a sub-field of zoology. He was a committed evolutionist to the extent that he refused even to discuss the merits of the theory because he considered the question closed.
Lorenz also vociferously rejected Christianity and concluded that evolution provided a superior goal—the higher evolution of humanity—to Christianity. Lorenz fervently believed that evolutionary theory reinforced Nazi racial doctrines, including racial inequality and racial solidarity.65 He also argued in harmony with
Nazism that the race is foremost and the individual clearly secondary.
One professional group that did not become active supporters of Hitler, at least after the persecution against them began, were Jewish professors. Professor Kater concluded that, because of expelling Jews, “Germany may have lost as many as 40 percent of its medical faculty to racist fanaticism; the harm to science and education [in Germany] was unfathomable.”66
The level of support by doctors in Nazi Germany was so strong that “there were so many doctors and scientists involved in the Nazi crimes that to weed them all out would have left post-war Germany with hardly any at all, an intolerable situation in a nation reeling from starvation and decimation.”67 Medawar and Pyke, in documenting the many scientists expelled from Germany, mostly Jewish—which ended Germany’s fifty-year record of world supremacy in science—as Hitler’s gift to America.68
Recognizing their central role in the Holocaust, “Professors Astel, de Crinis, Hirt, Kranz and Dr. Gross committed suicide, and so, later, did Professors Clauberg, Heyde and Schneider, when charges [of genocide] were brought against them.”69
World History
