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Comment by tlogan | Hacker News Reader

One lesser-known and deeply unsettling fact from academic history is that a significant number of professors at major German universities supported the Nazi regime during its rise to power. Far from being passive bystanders, many actively embraced Nazi ideology, joined the party, or participated in the purge of Jewish and politically dissident faculty.

A detailed exploration of this phenomenon can be found in the books “Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany” by Robert P. Ericksen and “Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und der Nationalsozialismus” by Richard J. Evans. An accessible summary is also available via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-role-o...

This isn’t just a historical footnote—it’s a sobering reminder of how institutions of knowledge can be wrong.

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Also, institutuons of knowledge are not right or wrong. It's the people and their ideas who are. And they are not ideologically monolithic.

And like the head of École Polytechnique (France's top university) once said in an address to the students: “there are 10% of complete idiots in the population, and I see no reason to assume the ratio is any different in here”.

If you have a political power that rewards stupidity, then those people will become empowered everywhere they are, including in the universities.

Compare this with the fate of universities in occupied countries[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion

Among them were jewish nationalists like Fritz Haber. He was allegedly a very proud german. Didnt help him though.

He saw the writing on the wall enough to quit his job in Germany and move his children to the UK.

Also a big fan (and basically the father) of gas warfare

Also saved the world from starvation. And provided Germany with synthetic fuels which prolonged the war. Bit of a mixed bag.

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Alchemy-Air-Jewish-Scientific-Dis...

And with all the trumpist shit going on in US universities right now, I wonder how many professors suddenly feel a need to advertise pro-Donald propaganda in order to keep their funding.

That's not going to happen with the current people, all of whom see credibility as their only tool.

Some may think differently once a few are killed in a Salvadorean prison. Unless SCOTUS or Congress puts the kibosh on some of this nonsense, that's where we're heading.

Isn't it just obvious? When the Nazi ideology was widespread, of course it permeated into every domain of the society.

I haven't read the books, but the presentation by this holocaust museum was not informative. For instance, it fails to mention a relevant fact: some people earned their academic position to their activity in the party.

And, most of all, the existence is irrelevant without some prevalence. I would be very surprised if the established scholars that "actively embraced Nazi ideology" were a majority. From the Vietnam wars to nowadays, there have been US academics that embraced war or actively supported genocides, but I think most academics and students are less heinous or indifferent than the average population. That's why some German scholars were oppressed by their government, even when they were not Jews, and chose to emigrate.

> When the Nazi ideology was widespread, of course it permeated into every domain of the society.

One of the architects of that ideology was Carl Schmitt, who formulated the concept of the Totalstaat or "total state" as a state that did exactly what you say: permeated into every domain of society. He considered a state "total" when it was co-extensive with the entirety of its people's endeavors, co-opting or liquidating any alternative authority such as media, academia, or church. This was a novel concept at the time, especially after the swing to liberal (small and restrained) republics in the late eighteenth century. As a novel concept, the total permeation of the Nazi state into academia and the rest of the spheres of non-governmental authority would have been far from obvious at the time to observers of prior governments, but it was also the intent.

The Nazis were not the only ones to adopt an illiberal, totalitarian stance: the twentieth century saw a huge growth in government authority and its permeation through other parts of human life, like academia, in regimes that rejected other aspects of the Nazi ideology. The Soviet Union comes to mind as an example: the government coopted authorities like academia and liquidated others like churches in order to pervade as far as possible every aspect of society.

The fact that it seems obvious in retrospect that Nazi ideology would permeate academia and every domain of society shows how successful the concept of a Totalstaat was, even in an age that looks back with horror upon the Nazis. The way to counter the spread of government is to put strong limits on government, keeping it out of academia, the media, religion, and so forth completely, with no government funding for any of them. If academia requires government funding, the government of the day will always control academia.

>keeping it out of academia [...] with no government funding for [academia]. If academia requires government funding, the government of the day will always control academia.

In this case, you'd have to transfer most research in the biological and physical sciences to NASA-style government departments, at the expense of communication between theorists and experimentalists, otherwise it would not occur. The present system is for "politically sensitive" positions like historians to be covered by endowments, and for economically service-providing research to be performed on government grants.

P.S. in some ways being controlled by people who are wealthy enough to hire professors is more politically charged than being controlled by a democratic government with checks and balances. Be careful who you wish for in matters of replacing the taxpayer's authority with that of private donors...

> In this case, you'd have to transfer most research in the biological and physical sciences to NASA-style government departments

I understand most of the points you've made, but I'm not sure I understand this part. NASA's budget is directly controlled by Congress, so how would moving all research into departments like that be more insulated it from government funding than university researchers getting grants? If anything, it feels like it would make it _more_ susceptible to politics than grants.

That's exactly right, it is the one other alternative and less independent. I think the government realizes that cutting government funding to universities at this extreme level would mean the end of US advantage in the biological and physical sciences, but the parent commenter might not have.

Your knowledge is 30 years behind current historical research. I'm not saying you are totally wrong, but totalitarism as a mean of explaining nazism was abandonned in the early 90s by academia (to be exact: in the 80s in Germany, early 90s in the US and in the mid 90s in France).

It is still taught in school because some states want it taught that way, but WW2 historians do not use it as an explanatory tool anymore (except a part who specialize in Italian fascism, but nowaday even those are the minority in their field).

This tool was created during McCarthism to equivocate the Soviet Union and Germany, and also help explaining that denazification was complete by 1953 (it was clearly not, between the explicitly neonazi DRP, NPD, and the FAP, you also had the REP who was neonazi in its program and his ex-SS leadership, but not explicitely so).

Benito Mussolini: "Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."

The total staat or initially total war idea was not a nazi idea, they were even against it initially.

This came from the WWI loss, and the perceived lack support in the media and civil society. The German generals were furious about their weak soldiers and officers in the field, with a high percentage of deflectors and vocal liberals. On the other side the French and British were known for their immediate death sentences to such deflectors.

So the army (Ludendorff) pushed for the total war effort after the loss, with extreme new civil laws outside wartime. Everybody ignored those new "Zersetzungs" laws initially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war

The Nazis opposed that before 1943, because it was very unpopular. The army were the initial enemies of the constitution and civil liberties, not the Nazis.

A bit bizarre to push this on Schmitt, when it was a common thread throughout fascism.

>As a novel concept, the total permeation of the Nazi state into academia and the rest of the spheres of non-governmental authority would have been far from obvious at the time to observers of prior governments, but it was also the intent.

It wasn't a novel concept. What are you on about? Mussolini seized power in 1922, while Germany was still a functional democracy.

Schmitts Most influential writings were all after 1922, pretending he conceived of the idea while Mussolini was already implementing it is patently absurd. The history of totalitarian thought did not start with Schmitt.

>The way to counter the spread of government is to put strong limits on government, keeping it out of academia, the media, religion, and so forth completely, with no government funding for any of them.

Just FYI. Germany post WW2 has publicly funded universities, churches and media.

If Academia is not funded by the public, who does?

That is why you see the authoritarians always accelerate the privatization and commercialization of the public good. That is why neoliberal beliefs are a precursor; it has become The Right Thing to do.

Those people, whether they are tech-dystopians, christian-nationalists, paleo-conservatives, or Braunhemden -- they instill belief in the public that they should treat the illness with "medicine" that will make the disease even worse. The percentage that really are willing to burn the whole thing down are successful in getting the public to think and act against their own interest. Whether they do that via think-tanks, corporate media-ownership, corporate education or stuffed up policy-makers.

A society does not go down because of Hitler. It is because of collective behavior, which is mostly informed by beliefs.

That is also the reason why the outlook is grim for the USA, because there are way to many Dems that can't make the reflection on what is going wrong, their thinking has been captured by decades of false theories, by narratives that stilled into rigid beliefs. Autocracies don't belief in free markets, they don't belief in meritocracy, they don't belief in freedom, they don't belief in independent media, they don't belief in independent academia, they don't belief in free speech.

And yet, these are the soft sticks the 1% used to get the 99% to hand the keys over to them.

And now, the power of those 1% will not be threatened, because the rigid beliefs the people hold onto will self-handicap them. Mix it with sadopopulism and you have a winning strategy.

That last sentence sounds very ChatGPT-like

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