Abstract
GERMANY'S latest regulation affecting scientific inquiry may be the logical consequence of principles accepted in that country, but is none the less curious. Herr Julius Streicher's deputy, according to a correspondent in the Times of June 13, has issued an order prohibiting scientific lectures on racial questions, since they have a “diluting and distorting effect on the Nazi Weltanschauung”. Professional men of science, it is added, are not equipped with the necessary knowledge and honest conviction and their lectures are, therefore, a danger to the true Nazi creed. If this statement has any basis at all in fact, it can only mean that German men of science are either too honest or have too keen a sense of the incongruous to accept and reproduce the official Nazi travesty of racial history with which Hcrr Hitler has hypnotised himself and the German masses. The entire suppression of lectures in one branch of study, however, enforces the lesson that the relation between science and State action is one of extreme delicacy, and that any attempt to drive politics and science in double harness in the interest of a theory of racial or social regeneration, as has been done in Germany, and was attempted in framing the immigration laws of the United States, risks the suppression of honest, but unpopular, inquiry. It is surely inconsistent that the advocates of racial purity in their own part of the world, in their further programme for dealing with Jews, should suggest that the thirty millions of this people should be quartered among the inhabitants of Madagascar.
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Science and the Nazis. Nature 133, 941 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133941a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133941a0