The Intellectual Cowards
The Nazi Attack on International Science. By Joseph Needham. (Watts. 6d.)
THAT the Nazi system is the enemy of the intellect is now too evident to need demonstration. It remains only to form an
accurate estimate of the extent and character of the injury that it has inflicted on the intellectual world. A considerable literature has been directed to this end, but no work covers the whole ground. The most natural region to begin the survey is that of science. Much light might be thrown by a carefully edited series by experts, each recording the deterioration in his own department. Several short general surveys have, however, been produced, and the best of them lie before us. The three hardly overlap and each has its own special qualities.
Sir Richard Gregory's Science in Chains is drawn on the widest lines of the three. He treats not only of the deterioration of science in Germany, but also of the injuries that it has sustained in the attack on it outside the Old Reich. Sir Richard, long the editor of Nature, the leading scientific journal, is peculiarly well placed for undertaking this task. Dr. Julian Huxley's Argument of Blood is the most factual. He follows, in considerable detail, the changes'in the universities. After 1937 falsification and con- cealment of German educational statistics introduce special complications. From then on Dr. Huxley has to rely on the knowledge, necessarily imperfect, of the numbers of scholars dismissed from their posts in Germany who have been able to reach a haven in freer lands. He provides valuable illustrations of his theme from Heidelberg, Gottingen and Berlin universities, and from interesting phenomena in the course of Nazification of science and of scientific literature. Professor Needham has the very exceptional qualification of having been an eye-witness of the process of Nazification. He is, moreover, one of the few Englishmen with a good internal knowledge of the Polish univer- sities. Professor Needham provides a particularly valuable sign- post in his analysis of German scientific literature, during the years preceding and following the Nazi seizure of power, in the departments with which he is most familiar.
The three contributions combine to give a good picture of the change induced by Nazism in the German intellectual world • but none of them treats, save by implication, of the most significant element in the German intellectual scene. Every country has its gangsters who, given opportunity, might rise to power. To seek the moral or economic principles of Hitler would be about as profitable as seeking those of Bill Sikes. What is specially noteworthy is not what has happened in Germany, but what has not happened. Reaction against injustice, cruelty and corruption has been practically negligible from the first. Neither the universities, nor the churches, nor the intellectual classes have, at any time, shown any appreciable resistance. The professors were mute from the beginning, and- almost to a man, at the dismissal, imprisonment or exile of colleagues with whom they had worked daily and whom they themselves had selected. They scrambled eagerly for their vacant places. The churches were equally silent as to cruelty and as to insults to human dignity, though they did make feeble protests when their own rights were attacked. The intellectual classes were captured as easily as the churches and universities and, for one Thomas Mann who went into voluntary exile, a hundred Gerhart Hauptmanns have taken the wage of shame. It is this deep corrosion of the German soul, rather than the violence of a few blackguards, that most urgently needs
analysis. A knowledge of its essential nature is of the utmost importance for the future of Europe. Some of the symptoms are
well set forth in these three able pamphlets ; we await an adequate diagnosis. It is the conspicuous absence of moral courage in every department of German life that demands
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