it had a tradition of glossing over its ignominious past in favour of celebrating its greater scientific achievements. By the 1990s, however, there was too much pressure from the public to ignore that past any longer. And anyway, older members of staff who had been alive during the war – who might be affected by such revelations – had almost all died. The time had come. So Markl resolved to lift the lid, appointing an independent committee to investigate what German scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society might have done during the war. It would be an investigation into the very darkest corners of race science. Younger researchers at the Max Planck Society justifiably worried whether the body of scientific work they had inherited might bear bloody stains.
They were right to worry. The past turned out to be dripping with blood. A few years after Markl launched the investigation, historians began publishing their findings, and they were devastating. Some had assumed that the Nazis were ignorant of or hostile towards science. Historical evidence proved this wasn’t true. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society’s scientists had willingly cooperated with the Nazi state, marrying academic interests and political expediency, helping to secure financial support and social standing for themselves. ‘Such research not only literally built on the spoils of war, it also led scientists deep into the abysses of Nazi crimes,’ wrote a reviewer. At least one prominent scientist helped draft and disseminate the legislation relating to racial ideology.
Those who weren’t opportunistic were often complicit, displaying moral indifference when they could see inhumane or criminal acts happening right in front of them. When moves began in 1933 to expel Jewish scientists from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Einstein abandoned Germany that same year, leaving for a conference and wisely never returning), staff made little effort to stand in the way. At least two of its scientists and two other staff members ended up dying in concentration camps.
And then there were those who wholeheartedly supported the Nazis from the beginning. The work of Otmar von Verschuer, head of department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, makes for chilling reading. Until the war, von Verschuer was a widely respected academic, his research on twins as a means of understanding genetic inheritance funded for a few years by the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. He was once invited to speak at the Royal Society in London. But he was also, it transpired, an anti-Semite who openly praised Hitler and believed in a biological solution to what he saw as the Jewish threat to racial purity. According to American anthropologist Robert Wald Sussman, von Verschuer became one of the Nazis’ race experts when it came to addressing the ‘Jewish question’, actively legitimising the regime’s racial policies. One of his former students, the doctor Josef Mengele, went on to become infamous for his cruel experiments on twins and pregnant women at Auschwitz concentration camp. British writer Marek Kohn has documented in his 1995 book The Race Gallery that among the samples sent to von Verschuer from Auschwitz were ‘pairs of eyes from twins … dissected after their murder … children’s internal organs, corpses and the skeletons of murdered Jews’.
In 2001, the Max Planck Society at last accepted responsibility for historic crimes committed by its scientists. In its apology, the society admitted, ‘Today it is safe to say that von Verschuer knew of the crimes being committed in Auschwitz and that he, together with some of his employees and colleagues, used them for his purposes.’ Markl added in his speech, ‘The Kaiser Wilhelm Society tolerated or even supported research among its ranks that cannot be justified on any ethical or moral grounds … I would like to apologise for the suffering of the victims of these crimes – the dead as well as the survivors – done in the name of science.’
This came too late for justice, of course. Those involved had died already. What was remarkable was that it had taken so long to root out the facts, to even find the will to do it. Scientists complicit with the regime had been skilled at covering their tracks, evidently. But maybe it was also easier for their colleagues to pretend that fellow scientists couldn’t possibly have been active participants in murder and torture. Perhaps, they imagined, they were just bystanders, caught up in the mess while trying to get their work done.
The truth – that it is perfectly possible for prominent scientists to be racist, to murder, to abuse both people and knowledge – doesn’t sit easily with the way we like to think about scientific research. We imagine that it’s above politics, that it’s a noble, rational and objective endeavour, untainted by feelings or prejudice. But if science is always so innocent, how is it that members of such a large and prestigious scientific organisation could have sold themselves to a murderous political regime as recently as the middle of the twentieth century?
The answer is simple: science is always shaped by the time and the place in which it is carried out. It ultimately sits at the mercy of the personal political beliefs of those carrying it out. In the case of some Nazi scientists, particular experiments may have been perfectly accurate and rigorous. They may even have produced good science, if goodness is measured in data and not human life. Other times, researchers didn’t care about the truth or other people’s lives, choosing instead to give the illusion of intellectual weight to a morally bankrupt ideology because it suited them.
Now, decades later, the horrors of the Second World War still have a warping effect on how we think about race science. Many of us choose to remember Nazi scientists like Otmar von Verschuer as some kind of uniquely evil exception, nothing like those who found themselves on the winning side of the war. The Holocaust and the twisted scientific rationale behind it are thought to belong to that time and place alone, purely the work of ‘the bad guys’. But there was one question that went unanswered after the investigations into the bloodstained history of the Max Planck Society: Were scientists in the rest of the world so blameless?
To file away what happened during the war as aberrant, as something that could only have been done by the worst people under the worst circumstances, ignores the bigger truth. This was never a simple story of good versus evil. The well of scientific ideas from which Hitler and others in his regime drew their plans for ‘racial hygiene’, leading ultimately to genocide, didn’t originate in Germany alone. They had been steadily supplied for more than a century by race scientists from all over the world, supported by well-respected intellectuals, aristocrats, political leaders and women and men of wealth.
Among the most influential of them all, as far as the Nazi regime was concerned, was a pair of statisticians working at 50 Gower Street, Bloomsbury – not in Germany, but in the famous old literary quarter of London.
*
‘You have biologists who say there is no such thing as race, we need to get over it, forget it,’ Subhadra Das tells me in an angry whisper. ‘But then, if there is no such thing, why did you just say “race”? Where did that idea come from?’
Das is a curator of the University College London Medical and Science Collections, moonlighting occasionally as a stand-up comedian. Her dark wit betrays a fury fed by the things she’s learned from her research. We’re in the heart of Bloomsbury, recognisable by its peaceful garden squares and smart Georgian townhouses. Once a meeting point for artists and writers, including Virginia Woolf, it is still home to a large slice of London’s universities and colleges. Outside, busy Gower Street is jam-packed with students heading for lectures, but where Das and I are it’s library quiet. We’re seated at a small table inside the Petrie Museum, named for Sir Flinders Petrie, an Egyptologist who, before he died in 1942, used to collect heads from around the world to shore up his ideas of racial superiority and inferiority.
‘Scientists are socialised human beings who live within society, and their ideas are social constructions,’ she continues. She wants me to hear this, setting the scene before she begins unfolding the packets of objects in front of us, which she has pulled from the archive. Among the first is a black-and-white photograph of a well-dressed older man, his bushy eyebrows resting in a canopy over his eyes, long white sideburns trailing down to his collar. Underneath is his autograph: it is the biologist Francis Galton, born in 1822, a younger cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton, she tells me, is the father of eugenics. He coined the term in 1883 from the Greek prefix ‘eu’ for ‘well’ or ‘good’, to describe the idea of using social control to improve the health and intelligence of future generations.
Galton considered himself an expert on