Nazi Science Was Not Anti-Science. It Was Science with a Purity Quest

We like to picture science on the side of liberty and enlightenment. Robert Proctor, a Stanford historian of twentieth-century science, technology, and medicine, opens with the decade that wrecks that picture. In the 1930s Germany was the world's leading scientific power, a country that had collected a large share of Nobel Prizes. Then it went fascist. Science, he says, was not primarily a source of resistance. In many respects it was a full collaborator in Nazi genocide and exclusion.

The popular image is Josef Mengele injecting dye into the eyes of twins, or other horrific human experiments. Those things happened. Proctor's first book looked at something larger: a huge scientific apparatus, almost a bureaucracy, participating in every phase of the campaigns of destruction. Physicians and biomedical science collaborated with the regime. It is wrong, he argues, to think of the Nazis as anti-science. They were anti a particular type of science: what they called Jewish science, communist science, the kinds they did not like.

The period's nature-nurture dispute put the Third Reich firmly on the nature side, which helped produce a very different science in the Soviet Union. The Soviets stood on nurture, and Proctor once meant to write about their anti-Nazi genetics and anthropology. He won a Fulbright in the 1980s and was barred from the Soviet Union. His hunch was that a lot of Lysenko's Lamarckism grew as an anti-Nazi, anti-genetics posture. That is an uncomfortable story, he says, because it tempts us to make heroes out of another twisting of science.

We tend to treat science and ideology as separate rooms. Proctor says they are not. In the seventh and eighth centuries the Maya had the world's most accurate calendar, accurate to within seventeen seconds per year. They built it to celebrate the rise of Kukulkan and the heliacal rising of Venus: the moment Venus appears before the sun and is then destroyed by daylight. Instruments, calendrics, and years of planetary observation all served a cycle they thought sacred, holy, and magical. Where, he asks, is the ideology and where is the science?

A closer example is a Mennonite friend who wanted to improve silicon chips for solar energy. When Ronald Reagan took office, budgets for solar and alternative energy were essentially zeroed out, and the solar panels came off the White House roof. The friend ended up hardening silicon chips against nuclear war. The technical work was almost the same. The framework was not. Proctor's analogy is the medieval cathedral: stonework, vault mechanics, and stained glass in the service of Catholicism. You do not deny the engineering because the building is religious, and you should not pretend a science disappears because it serves a politics.

Lex Fridman presses on the individual mind. What is the chemist thinking while developing the cyanide that will be used in a camp? Proctor's answer is restrained. Maybe they know, maybe they know a little, maybe they do not want to know, maybe they have ways of lying to themselves, maybe they are the one person in ninety-nine who agreed. It is nearly impossible to know what is in anyone's soul. But when enormous power directs the currents, it is not hard to find people willing to fill that in, especially if they are narrow technocrats just building the widget.

A lot of scientific training, Proctor says, is widget-building, and that is what makes scientists easy to instrumentalize, for horror or for glory. The word science itself comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to cut or divide. It is cognate with scissors, schism, and skin: skin is what divides you from the world. To know, in that old sense, is to classify, to put a thing in its proper place. That taxonomic impulse can be static. Darwin had to overcome it by seeing that the categories themselves are in motion.

Classification also produces a professional myopia. The job is done when the bird is an x, a y, or a z. Ideologies have their own taxonomies: who is one of us, who is a parasite, who is a cancer that must be cleaned away. When the scientific impulse to classify and the political impulse to purify lock onto the same frequency, the fit is very smooth. Scientists are humans walking in a world practice, Proctor says, and it is hard, if not impossible, to be out of that world.

Fridman offers a contemporary echo from MIT. After the news broke, he wondered why people he admired would even have light conversations with Jeffrey Epstein. Scientists like building widgets and sorting the world. Someone like a Nazi regime, or like Epstein, only has to get excited about the widget and make you feel it serves a grander purpose. You already loved making the thing. A charismatic person tells you it points somewhere larger. You barely think about the negative. Grand is already exciting. That, Proctor agrees, is also the story of Wernher von Braun.

Wernher von Braun is the mechanism in a single life. Fascinated in a tunnel-vision way with space flight, he was already making beautiful rockets in the 1920s and early 1930s. He ended up at Peenemünde using slave labor to build V-2 engines. He was an SS officer. After the war those rockets were compressed into the American world and helped launch the United States to the moon. We remember the landing, Proctor says, and forget how the sausage was made.

Proctor went to Peenemünde for two reasons. Collectors have tracked aborted V-2 flights and recovered engines that look like works of art, engines once used to rain terror on Britain. He was also hunting Baltic amber, because he is a stone collector. Among local collectors there is a story of the Peenemünde burn: people pick up yellow phosphorus, mistake it for amber, put it in a pocket, and when it dries it explodes and burns the thigh. The Nazi regime, he says, is full of that pattern. Scholars get twisted toward a stone that glows up close and is something else at a distance.

People often did not see what was coming. Before the Holocaust there is not the Holocaust as we now understand it. Events gain a new meaning in the light of what follows. An entire propaganda machine makes it easier to hold the narrative in your head even if you intuitively know something is wrong. You can still find a way to sleep. Fridman and Proctor both return to that later as the cost of the scarecrow: if the danger only looks like a rabid fanatic, you will miss it in a charming room.

Goebbels's office was not simply the office of propaganda. It was the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Enlightenment was on the door. From his perspective this was supposed to be a new era of enlightenment. Proctor's college roommate, later a Harvard librarian, met an elderly German woman who had met Hitler as a child. Her father was a Gauleiter in the Nuremberg area. She was about eight. Hitler took her onto a balcony for fifteen minutes. She remembered him as charming, funny, fond of children, the most charming person she had known.

That is the history we forget when we make a scarecrow of a rabid, raging fanatic. The cost is practical. If you imagine dangerous people as obviously ugly, you lose the ability to inspect the charismatic, kid-loving, enlightenment-talking leaders in your own life. Fridman brings it back to Epstein. He never met the man, but given the people he knows who did, money and women do not explain it. The answer is probably how you feel in the room. Hitler, in quiet conversations including with Chamberlain, seems to have been convincing. There was passion in the eyes.

Goebbels had a party trick. For fifteen minutes he would rouse a crowd to communism: workers of the world, unite. For fifteen minutes, capitalism and individualism. For fifteen minutes, Nazism. He was apparently quite convincing in each performance. The ideologies are powerful, Proctor says, but the deeper force is the dream. Two-thirds of what Marx calls for in the Communist Manifesto is already part of the liberal state. Which parts of an ideology we remember, and which we forget, are very revealing.

The saddening lesson about the scientific process, Proctor says, is how easily people become part of a machine if there is power to follow. A lot of Nazi scientists and physicians really thought they were doing the Lord's work: cleaning the world of filth. If you truly believe Jews are a parasitic race, why would you not get rid of them? There is an ontology underneath. It was also present in the United States. In his earliest research Proctor found that the Nazis had looked lovingly and enviously at American racial segregation, and saw themselves in a competition to become the world's most purified racial form.

Cleansing was one discourse. It meant getting rid of the physically handicapped, of imagined racial inferiors, and of cancer-causing chemicals in air, food, and water. These were all of a piece. Richard Doll, the great cancer epidemiologist, recalled a 1930s lecture in Germany in which cancer cells were shown as Jews and X-rays as stormtroopers killing those cells. Cleaning, extermination, sanitation, and purification shared a vocabulary. There was a purity quest at multiple levels.

If we imagine that nothing like this went on in the United States, Proctor says, that would be a big mistake. The Nazis looked to the Save the Redwoods League, to Aryan supremacists, to the Ku Klux Klan, to the separation of Black and white. Black physicians were not allowed to join the American Medical Association until after World War II. Mass sterilization in the United States began around World War I, and even earlier in some states as castration of prisoners to stop a "demon seed" from propagating. There was a racial international. That part of the story also needs to be told.

Buildings named for eugenicist scientists are being renamed. Proctor's general view is case by case, but usually it is better to add history than to subtract it. Carl Astel, a rabid Nazi high in the leadership, was a university president in the Nazi period. His portrait at the University of Vienna showed him in full SS uniform. The painting was taken down. Proctor would have left it and added a plaque. Pretending it never happened, he says, is a big mistake.

Fridman asks about *Mein Kampf*, which had been taken down from Amazon for a time. You cannot put a plaque on a book that stands alone in a store. Proctor would not ban it. Banning might make it forbidden fruit. After the war, thousands of Hitler statues came down from office buildings and post offices, and even the most rabid opponents of cancel culture would not call that a mistake. Placement and purpose matter. A book you can buy and a bronze in the public square are not the same kind of object. *Mein Kampf* is so poorly written and so dated that he expects more good from people being shocked at how dumb it is than evil from someone reading it.

Robert Millikan, who measured the charge of the electron, had his name taken off a Caltech building. It was not a central aspect of the work that put his name on the building. Take the name off, Proctor says, and the memory is lost and the lesson is lost. Keep the name, add a plaque that this man was a racist or a eugenicist, and you get a teaching moment instead of a forgetting moment. A person can be a great physicist and hold an ugly politics. Writing that down is more useful than a clean wall.

Fridman turns to a live fight: whether Spotify should carry Joe Rogan, and whether Robert Malone should be able to argue against the Covid vaccine. Who decides what counts as scientific misinformation? Proctor says it used to be a million-dollar question and is now a multi-billion-dollar one, not yet a trillion. Large internet platforms have become publishers, and publishers cannot say whatever they want. He is a fan of dedicated offices that try to rein in misinformation, the way *Time* or the *New York Times* have ethics codes. Mistakes will be made. It cannot be a let-everything-fly situation.

Fridman's objection is that the pressure on those platforms is currently ideological. The political lean of the people pushing censorship makes the label "misinformation" itself a political act, not a value-free test of truth. The size of Malone's audience is also a signal. It says a large part of society has lost trust in science, institutions, and leaders. Censoring misinformation, Fridman argues, will not fix that deficit. It throws gasoline on the fire. Proctor grants the point. A lot of distrust is good. He is not a conspiracy theorist, but there have been a lot of conspiracies, and powerful bad things done behind the scenes need to be exposed.

The other new fact is flattening: all news and data feel equal. Peer review and evidence lose to outburst. A hundred years ago a flat-earther had a church or a parlor. Now anyone can have a blog or a Twitter feed. Fridman calls it a kind of radical democracy that forces experts to stop being lazy. A PhD is no longer enough. You have to actually convince people, make lectures and documentaries, and battle the ideas. Some people labeled crazy are asking the right questions. In Nazi Germany, protest against medical atrocity would also have been labeled crazy. Those voices, they agree, are important enough to leave room for.

That communication problem has a history. The last original scientific contribution written entirely as a poem, Proctor says, is Buffon's *Loves of the Plants*. After that, the eighteenth century began a deliberate uglification of science: if you write clearly and beautifully, you must be hiding something under flowers. The modern paper format is policed in an inhumane rhetorical way. Combine that with the research lab, ever-narrower widget-builders, Auschwitz's requirement that physicians supervise killings, Tuskegee, and the atom bomb, and public distrust is not mysterious. You do not repair it by saying people should have trusted science. Fridman then asks what heroic action looked like for a scientist in Nazi Germany. Proctor's answer is almost impossible once Hitler is in and the Reichstag has burned. The heroic act is to stand up and tell the truth earlier, while the machine is still being built.

Proctor likes to ask students what makes fish move. Most Americans say muscles, fins, neurons. In salt water, fish are moved by currents. The American ideology of personal choice treats the smoker the way it treats the fish: as a self-made agent. In tobacco research there is a whole field called cessation that always means cessation of consumption, never of production. All blame sits on the individual smoker. A few years ago Proctor wrote that the cigarette is the deadliest object in the history of human civilization: about six million deaths a year, a hundred million in the twentieth century, and a billion possible in this one unless the course reverses.

Cigarettes have killed more than all the world of iron and gunpowder. Nuclear bombs have killed a few hundred thousand people; cigarettes have killed hundreds of millions. Every year they kill about as many as Covid, and over five years there is no contest. We live in a bizarro world with a nightly Covid report and almost no mention of cigarettes, as if they were chewing gum on a sidewalk. Humans are predators with a fovea: tunnel vision on what is in front. A multi-billion-dollar industry still spends billions advertising, and still manages to make itself invisible. There is not really a tobacco industry in the public story. There are just people who smoke, a personal choice like dinner.

How do executives live with themselves? Whoever becomes CEO has already survived a ladder that filters out people who would refuse. One logic is: if I did not do it, someone else would, the same excuse as pouring Zyklon B down the chimney. Another is contempt. R.J. Reynolds ran Project SCUM, for Subculture Urban Markets, targeting homeless people and gay men in San Francisco. A Winston executive's line, Proctor quotes, was that we do not smoke this stuff; we reserve that for the poor, the Black, and the stupid. Internally the industry lies to its own employees, hired Darrell Huff of *How to Lie with Statistics* to write a smoking sequel, and wrapped itself in the arts: Duke University, women's tennis, Billie Jean King on the Philip Morris board signing Virginia Slims coupons.

Inside the industry in the 1950s, the assumption was that if cigarettes were ever shown to cause cancer they would be banned. Spinach causing a tenth the harm would be banned overnight. Flash forward, and the United States still smokes on the order of 200 billion cigarettes a year; the world, about six trillion, enough to chain Earth to the sun and back with leftover trips to Mars. U.S. consumption peaked in 1981 at 640 billion and has fallen to about 240 billion, a 1940 level, while the global number has increased. Indoor bans, some of which started in computer rooms because smoke snagged magnetic tape, denormalized the habit. Most people who smoke wish they did not. That, Proctor says, is how you know cigarettes are not like alcohol, and why the problem is solvable: about eight billion fewer smoked in the United States every year.

Proctor went to Germany on a Fulbright in 1980-81 after being blocked from Russia, partly because his partner Londa Schiebinger was going. He rented a room from a landlady born in 1900, a World War I nurse who remembered the mentally ill dying in both wars. He started reading Nazi-era medical journals that librarians did not want him to touch. He found a veterinary journal joking about a cow with a natural swastika on its forehead, stories about tobacco and abortion, lists of who had been promoted, demoted, or Nazified. Physicians joined the Nazi Party, and the SS, in a higher proportion than any other profession. The regime was a sanitary utopia: control the body through sterilization and abortion, control the mind through psychiatry, kill a lot of the mentally ill. Gynecologists and psychiatrists were the most Nazified specialties.

Oddities pulled him sideways. Why were the Nazis anti-tobacco? Why were they first to recognize asbestos as causing mesothelioma, to try to ban food dyes, to encourage women to do breast self-exams, to ban X-raying of pregnant women in the early 1930s? His mother told him that in 1950s Texas women were not even supposed to touch their breasts. He has an eye for what does not fit. He even found a 1919 German newspaper that used the language of a holocaust of six million Jews, went to the original, and saw it was real: one of those coincidences that later feed conspiracy theories, and also a string you pull to see the culture underneath.

The Holocaust Museum asked him to be its first senior scholar in residence. He proposed looking at how the Nazis ran the world's most aggressive anti-cancer campaign, which is in a way the opposite of the Holocaust and also a clue to why Nazism was so seductive. Right before invading Poland, Hitler was talking late into the night about how to cure cancer. They declared soybeans the official bean of the Third Reich, pushed whole-grain bread against white bread as a French revolutionary capitalist product, and mixed vegetarianism and alcohol limits into the same purity project. The famous line, Proctor recalls, is that if Nazism ever comes to Britain it will be wearing a bowler hat. The fantasy image of robots following orders misses a period of massive biomedical innovation walking beside the killing.

Historians celebrate contingency: things did not have to turn out this way. Once ideology blends with wartime operations, Proctor says, it becomes catastrophic. Fridman, whose graduate work was DARPA and Defense Department funded, describes a faculty member who refused that money, and how that small stand woke him up. Proctor's classroom question is almost never taught: what would you not do for money? He has colleagues who carry water for Big Tobacco in court, a mercenary army of historians who leave it off their CVs. Stanford's new sustainability school, he warns, will be pretty much in bed with big oil. Philip Morris funded a denial campaign on secondhand smoke, then the Center for Indoor Air Research, then the Philip Morris External Research Program, pouring millions into Stanford to study genetics and diet, anything but cigarettes. Faculty voted against kicking Philip Morris off campus. Bad press made the company withdraw anyway. You can lose a battle and win a war.

Proctor edited a book on agnotology: the making and unmaking of ignorance. Human ignorance is infinite. There are probably trillions of planets and we know a tiny piece of one. Almost everything that has been known has been forgotten, including the names of ordinary people and perhaps of Neanderthals. History is a resurrection and archaeological project from biased traces. Diego de Landa burned Mayan codices as heresies; dozens are gone, four remain. The missing piece, Proctor says, is that ignorance is not just the human condition. It is culturally produced. There are factories of ignorance.

The tobacco industry measured it. Watching one of their 1970s propaganda videos produced a 17 percent increase in people unwilling to say cigarettes cause cancer. He calls that agnometrics. A memo leaked in 1981 said doubt is our product: they make two things, cigarettes and doubt, and they can keep selling the first only as long as they sell the second. That became a template for climate denial and for the work of some 1,500 trade associations in Washington. After World War II, trust in science was enormous, so what could be more effective than Big Tobacco funding hundreds of millions in research while hiding that the point was to distract from the fact that cigarettes cause cancer and a million other diseases? Nixon's 1971 War on Cancer excluded cigarettes, which cause about a third of cancer deaths, because the industry successfully framed "cigarettes cause cancer" as a political opinion, not a scientific fact.

In 1991 Proctor published *Value-Free Science?*, on purity, power, and modern knowledge. Asked about ideology seeping into universities now, through Marxism, anti-racism, gender studies, he says these fights are old. The loudest claims that science is a neutral, value-free enterprise came in periods like the 1950s, when universities had few Black students and few women. Value neutrality arose as a defensive shield against inclusion and against questions about the priorities of science. Cancel culture is real, he thinks, and also a distraction from bigger power: whether big oil will steer Stanford's sustainability school is a larger issue than which words you cannot say on campus. An admissions committee is a rejection committee. Undergraduates are consumers who do not own the menu. The politics of who controls the means of academic production stays invisible to them.

On human origins Proctor likes what he calls the Gandhi question: Western civilization would be a good idea; humans have not evolved yet. After the war, no one wanted to say a newly found fossil was less than fully human, so ramapithecines were credited with folkways and language, and Neanderthals could not be anything less than us. Human origins is an identity quest: when did we become us? Upright posture goes back at least five million years, agriculture twelve thousand, a blink. We become fully human, he suggests, when we bury the dead, make jewelry, and invent fantasy and deception. Acheulean hand axes, beautiful teardrop tools unchanged for vast stretches of time, have no agreed purpose: maps, weapons, choppers, sexual displays. Becoming ignorant of that purpose is itself a form of knowledge, because teaching well means remembering what it is like not to know.

His stone collecting is not a side hobby so much as another way of thinking. Scholars overrate books; humans evolved without them. He walks hours in the forest, cuts stone as a lapidary, and is writing about images people project into agates: Hindu temples in India, three crosses in America, the word Allah in Yemen. The amateur, from the root for lover, invented many gemological techniques. Hobbies explode from curiosity cabinets and, in the Depression, as the job you cannot lose. Science has a love-hate relationship with rarity: ball lightning, Libyan desert glass in Tutankhamun's breastplate, 'Oumuamua. Rocks, Proctor says, can do almost anything; a cigar-shaped interstellar object does not have to be a spaceship. Professional rewards still warp the field. There is huge credit for naming a new hominid or finding the oldest art, almost none for another specimen of someone else's species, which helps explain the over-proliferation of hominid names.

He never got to write the Soviet book. Harvard made him take French and German instead of Russian and Chinese; a late-1980s Fulbright visa into the USSR never came through. In Nazi tobacco journals he still found a Japanese military report, translated into German, about Chinese soldiers sneaking up to Japanese forts to retrieve glowing cigarette butts and being killed for it, while the writer lamented a brotherhood of smoke. Those journals, unembarrassed and largely unread, were more valuable than interviews with aging men who wanted the subject walled off. Asked what gives him hope after all this, he talks about forests, Wikipedia, space, and a walk among giant redwoods west of Stanford. They were almost all cut. They are growing back from stumps as fairy rings, five trees competing to be the successor. The roots are old growth. Loggers could not kill what was underground. If the world is infinite, there are infinitely many ways for it to be fixed.