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EPISODE LINKS:
Robert's Website: https://history.stanford.edu/people/robert-n-proctor
The Nazi War on Cancer (book): https://amzn.to/3hjYzdZ
Agnotology (book): https://amzn.to/3viS8A1

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
4:08 - Ideology and science
15:43 - Wernher von Braun
22:49 - The scientific process
32:52 - Censorship
42:05 - Anthony Fauci
47:16 - Courage in science
54:35 - Tobacco industry
1:18:21 - Nazi medicine
1:28:30 - The Nazi War on Cancer
1:33:43 - Science funding
1:44:37 - Ignorance
1:52:17 - Ideology in academia
1:58:37 - Human origins
2:08:30 - Hobbies
2:15:48 - Diversity in the universe
2:19:23 - Stones
2:28:18 - Conspiracy theories
2:32:28 - Nazi impact on Soviet science
2:37:43 - Nazi tobacco industry's denial campaign
2:41:58 - Hope for the future
2:44:32 - Meaning of life

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What is the heroic action for a scientist in Nazi Germany?

Science in many respects actually is the full collaborator in the most horrific forms of Nazi genocide, Nazi exclusion.

Cigarettes have killed more than any other object, than all the world of iron, all the world of gunpowder.

Nuclear bombs have only killed a few hundred thousand people, Cigarettes have killed hundreds of millions.

The following is a conversation with Robert Proctor, historian at Stanford University, specializing in 20th century science, technology, and medicine, especially the history of the most controversial aspects of those fields.

Please allow me to say a few words about science and the nature of truth.

The word science is often used as an ideal for a methodology that can help us escape the limitation of any 1 human mind in the pursuit of truth.

The underlying idea here is that individual humans are too easily corrupted by bias, emotion, personal experience, and the usual human craving for meaning, money, power, and fame.

And the hope is that the tools of science can help us overcome these limitations in striving for deeper and deeper understanding of objective reality, from physics to chemistry, biology, genetics, and even psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience.

But history shows that these tools of science are not devoid of human flaws, of influence from human institutions, of manipulation from people in power.

As we talk about in this conversation with Robert Proctor, in the 1930s and 40s there was the Nazi science and there was communist science, and each had fundamentally different ideas about, for example, genetics and biology of disease.

This history also shows that scientists can be corrupted, slowly or quickly, by fear, fame, money, or just the ideological narratives of a charismatic leader that convinces each scientist and the scientific community that their work matters for the greater cause of humanity, even if that cause involves the genetic purification of a people, the extermination of a cancer, and the unrestricted experimentation on the bodies of living beings who do not have a voice, whose suffering will never be heard.

In some periods of human history, science was deeply influenced by the ideology of governments and individuals.

The hard truth is that we can't know for sure about which of the 2 periods we're living through today.

So let us not too quickly dismiss the voices of experts and non-experts alike that ask the simple question of, wait, are we doing the right thing here?

Are we adding suffering to the world or are we alleviating it?

Most such voices are nothing more than martyrs seeking fame, not truth, and they will be proven wrong.

But some may help prevent future atrocities and suffering at a global scale.

Let us then move forward with humility so that history will remember this period as 1 of human flourishing and where science lived up to its highest ideal.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Robert Proctor.

What is the story of science and scientists during the rise, rule, and fall of the Third Reich?

Well, we tend to think of science as always on the side of liberty, as always on the side of enlightenment, as always on the side of enlarging human possibility.

And here we have this phenomenon in the 1930s of really the world's leading scientific power, the Third Reich, which collectively had won a big chunk of all the Nobel Prizes.

Suddenly they go fascist, they go Nazi with Hitler.

And instead of being primarily a source of resistance, science in many respects actually is a full collaborator in the most horrific forms of Nazi genocide, Nazi exclusion.

And that's kind of a relatively untold story in the sense that when we think of science in the Third Reich, we think of Joseph Mingeli injecting dye into the eyes of twins, or we think of horrific human experiments, and those are real.

But it's also the story of a huge scientific apparatus, a bureaucracy, you could almost say, participating in every phase of the campaigns of Nazi destruction.

And what I looked at in particular, and actually in my first book, was how physicians in particular, but also biomedical science, was collaborating with the regime and that it's wrong to think of the Nazi regime as anti-science.

In particular, it was radically against what they call Jewish science, communist science.

Certain types of science they did not like.

There's a whole nature-nurture dispute in that period and they're firmly on the side of nature, which interestingly gives rise to a very different type of science in the Soviet Union, by the way.

The Soviet Union is more on the nurture side?

The Soviet Union is on the side of the nurture side in the dimension of genetics, and this is sort of an untold story.

I was actually gonna write a book about it until I was barred from access to the Soviet Union.

There have been different times in my life where I was a Russianist.

A Russianist, okay, we're gonna have to talk about that.

I got excluded from fulfilling that dream, but 1 of the things I was gonna look at when I got a Fulbright in the 1980s was to go over and look at the anti-Nazi genetics and anthropology of the Soviets and how a lot of their Lysenkous Lamarckism was actually anti-Nazi, anti-genetics on the nurture side of nature.

It's an uncomfortable story because it sounds like someone, we might want to make heroes out of the twisting of science in the Soviet Union.

But nonetheless, there are these interesting complexities and what's amazing about Nazi science is how there was this collaboration.

And you're talking about a culture where they're inventing things like electron microscopy, they're doing all kinds of studies in anthropology.

So what was the connection between the ideology and the science, if you can just linger on it longer?

Well, we tend to think of science and ideology as completely separate when I think the reality is they're not.

If you look at why the Mayans in the 7th and 8th century AD had the world's most accurate calendar, accurate to within 17 seconds per year.

That was all part of a ritual practice to celebrate the rise of Kukulkan, the rise of Venus with what's called the heliacal rising, namely the rising of Venus before the rising of the sun in which, at which moment Venus is destroyed by the light of the sun.

Well, they developed this elaborate calendrical astronomy which required detailed observation, detailed chronicling of the movement of the heavens, in particular the planets, for the purpose of celebrating this cycle of renewal that they thought was sacred and holy and magical.

So where's the ideology, where's the science?

There's the sort of instrumentation, the calendrics, the measurement, all in the service of this magical moment.

And I think that's true of a lot of science.

I had a friend years ago who was Mennonite and wanted to study solar cells and to improve silicon chips to make more efficient solar energy.

Yet when Ronald Reagan took office, the budgets for solar and alternative energy were essentially zeroed out, and Reagan takes off the solar panels off of the roof of the White House.

So my friend ends up working on hardening silicon chips against nuclear war.

So he becomes part of the nuclear war protection defense apparatus, even though he wanted to work on alternative energy.

Doing very similar work with silicon chips, but in a different framework.

And so the practices of science often gets pushed into and is woven into ideological practices.

Sort of in the same way that you get beautiful medieval cathedrals built in service of Catholicism.

Well, what's in the mind of an individual scientist?

So this process of ideology polluting science, or is it science empowering ideology?

So, almost like if you can zoom in and zoom out effortlessly into the individual mind of a scientist and then back to the whole scientific community.

Like do scientists think about nuclear war, about the atrocities committed by the Nazis as they're helping on the minute details of the scientific process?

I think sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, right?

You think of the chemists working to develop the cyanide that will be used to kill Jews in a concentration camp.

You can imagine a whole range of thoughts.

Maybe they don't know what they're doing.

Maybe they know a little bit, but not a lot.

Maybe they have ways of lying to themselves.

Maybe they are the 1 person who agreed to do it and

So, it's hard if not impossible to know what's in the soul of anyone.

But when you have enormous power directing the motion and the currents or the ocean, it's not hard to find people willing to fill that in, especially if they're narrow technocrats, if they're just doing their job, if they're just building the widget.

And I think a lot of scientific training is in widget building, and that leads to the possibility that they can become easily instrumentalized in a particular action, which is maybe horrific or glorious.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Science is, as we say, what scientists do.

And that can include a lot of things, it can exclude a lot of things.

The word science itself is interesting because it's cognate, it actually comes originally from the Proto-Indo-European, skein meaning to cut or divide.

And so it's cognate with scissors, schism, skin.

Skin is that which divides you from the world.

Shit or scat is that which has been divided from you into the world.

And so there's this cognate between science and shit or science and cutting

the whole idea being that you're dividing into parts, classifying.

And to know is to know where something belongs, to divide it into its parts and put it in its proper place.

And that taxonomic impulse can be very static.

It's actually 1 of the things that Darwin had to overcome in recognizing evolution, that the taxonomies are in motion.

But it also can lead to a kind of myopia that my job is done when I've classified something.

And that again can be, it can be ideological or it cannot be, but scientists are humans and they're fitting in with a world, with a world practice.

And that's limiting, it's kind of inevitable.

It's unavoidable, It's hard to be, if not impossible, out of the world that we're walking in.

Yeah, and it's fascinating because I think Ideologies also have an impulse towards forming taxonomies.

So just being at MIT, I've gotten to learn about this character named Jeffrey Epstein.

I didn't know who this was until all the news broke out and so on.

And I started to wonder how did all these people at MIT that I admire would hang out with this person?

I don't mean any of the bigger things, but even just basic conversations.

And I think this has to do, you said scientists are widget builders and taxonomizers.

I think there's power in somebody like the Nazi regime or like a Jeffrey Epstein just being excited about your widgets and making you feel like the widget serves a greater purpose in the world.

And so it's not like you're, you know, sometimes people say scientists wanna make money and, or they have a big kind of ideological drive behind it.

I think there's just nice when the widget, so you like building anyway, somehow somebody convinces you, some charismatic person, that this widget actually has a grander purpose.

And you don't almost think about the negative or whether it's positive, just the fact that it's grand is already super exciting.

I think that's the story of Werner von Braun, you know, and the fascination with rockets and this will, you know, enlarge something in the world.

And here he is, he's an SS officer, he's working around slave labor.

But his rocket then gets compressed into the Western world or the American world and basically launches us to the moon and we forget about how the sausage was made originally.

Well, can you talk about him a little bit more because he's such a fascinating character.

So he was a Nazi, but he was also an American, and it had such a grand impact on both.

And there's this uncomfortable fact that he's 1 of the central figures that gave birth to the American space exploration efforts.

Yeah, he's an interesting figure, fascinated in a kind of a tunnel vision way with spaceflight.

He makes these beautiful rockets already, beginning in the 20s, early 30s.

Ends up for a while at Penamunda using slave labor to build V2 engines and so forth like that.

I remember going to Penamunda where people have actually tracked the flights of aborted V2 rockets and found some of these beautiful, beautiful old engines, just the most like works of art, these engines used to rain terror on the British.

It's interesting because in that same spot, I was hunting for amber, Baltic amber, because I'm a stone collector.

And among the amber collectors there, there's a famous story of the penamunda burn, it's called, because they find yellow phosphorus, they think is amber, they put it in their pocket and then it dries out and then explodes and creates this big burn on their legs.

But the whole Nazi regime is full of things like that.

It's full of these scholars who get twisted into a mindset.

And it's also important to realize that people didn't often see what was coming.

And we look back and we say, how could you X, Y, or Z?

But before the Holocaust, there's not the Holocaust.

There are versions of it, but things get on a new meaning, gain a new meaning in light of subsequent events.

And there's an entire propaganda machine that makes it easier for you to hold the narrative in your head.

Even if you kind of intuitively know there's something really wrong here, because of the propaganda you can kind of convince yourself to be able to sleep at night.

That's right, and we have to remember that Goebbels' office was not the office of propaganda, it was the office of enlightenment, of popular enlightenment in propaganda.

It was the new era of enlightenment from his perspective.

It was supposed to be the new age, a new era of enlightenment.

It's a little bit like the kind of myth of Hitler's failed artist.

You know, there are a lot of artists who are worse.

And I had a very interesting conversation once with my college roommate who became a librarian at Harvard.

And at Harvard he met an old, old librarian, a German woman who had met Hitler as a kid when she was like 8 years old.

Her dad was like a Gauleiter for the Nuremberg area.

And she said that for 15 minutes, Hitler goes out onto the balcony with her and has this conversation alone with this eight-year-old girl.

And then he said he loved kids, and she said he was the most charming sort of person.

And that's part of the history too, that we tend to forget when we make a scarecrow image of this rabid, raging fanatic.

That's really, really, really important to think about when we make a scarecrow, because that gives you actionable, like It forces you to introspect about people in your own life or leaders in your life today, ones you admire.

They're charismatic, they're friendly, they love kids, they talk about enlightenment.

You have to kind of think, all right, am I being duped on certain things?

You have to kind of have a, I mean that's the problem with Jeremy Epstein that people don't seem to talk about.

I never met the guy, but just given the people he talked to whom I know, it feels like he must have been charismatic.

Like people think about like, oh, it's because of the women, it's because of the money.

The people I know, I don't think they're going to be influenced.

Ultimately, it has to be how you are in the room and make, it's exactly like you said, the enlightenment.

Of course, as a charismatic person, you have to know what to pick in terms of what excites you, but that is also the fascinating thing to me about Hitler is all of these meetings, even like with Chamberlain, inside rooms, whether he was screaming or whatever he was saying, it seems like he was very convincing.

There must have been passion in his eyes, there must have been charisma that one-on-one in a quiet conversation he was convincing.

Yes, there's a famous story about Goebbels who would do a party trick where for 15 minutes he would rouse the crowd to communism.

Then for 15 minutes he would rouse the world to capitalism and individualism.

Then for 15 minutes he would rouse the world to Nazism.

And apparently he was quite convincing in each of those performances.

Well all those ideologies are pretty powerful.

And I think it's not even the reason that matters as much as the power of the dream of the vision of the enlightenment.

I mean, the vision of communism is fascinatingly powerful.

Like workers unite, the common people stand together, they'll overthrow the powerful, the greedy, and yet share the outcomes of

Well it's kind of like the story of 2 thirds of the things that Marx calls for in the Communist Manifesto are already just part of the liberal state.

And so the parts we remember or forget about in ideology are very revealing.

If we can just linger on this a little bit longer, what have you learned from this period of the 1930s about the scientific process?

So 1 of the labels you can put on your work, I knew as a scholar as a philosopher of science.

And you also talk about Nazi Germany as a singular moment in time, or like a rebirth of the integration between ideology and science.

So like in terms of valueless science I think is the term.

I mean it seems like Nazi Germany is a important moment in history, I mean it probably goes up and down.

What difficult truths have you learned about the scientific process, and what hopeful things have you learned about the scientific process?

Well, I guess the saddening thing is how easily people can become part of a machine.

If there's power, people can be found to follow it.

You know, 1 of the things I work on is big tobacco and we'll probably come to that, but it's amazing to me how easily people are willing to work for big tobacco.

It's amazing to me how many scientists and physicians were willing to work for the Nazi regime for multiple reasons.

Partly because a lot of them really thought they were doing the Lord's work.

They thought they were cleaning the world of filth.

I mean, if you really thought Jews are a parasitic race, why wouldn't you get rid of them?

So there's an ontology, there's a theory of the world that they're building on.

And interestingly, 1 that was also present in the United States, And 1 of the things I did find out in my earliest research was that the Nazis had looked lovingly and enviously over at the United States in terms of racial segregation, racial separation, and saw themselves in a kind of competition to become the world's racial leader as the most purified racial form.

And that this required this kind of cleansing process.

And the cleansing meant getting rid of the physically handicapped, it meant getting rid of racial inferiors as they imagined them.

It meant getting rid of cancer-causing chemicals in the air and in our food and our water.

There's a famous illustration that Richard Dahl talks about the great cancer theorist of studying in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and he's shown a lecture where cancer cells are shown as Jews and x-rays are shown as stormtroopers, and these stormtroopers are killing the cancer cells who are also Jews.

And so there's this metaphorical work of cleaning, extermination, sanitation.

Purification, there's definitely a kind of purity quest, and you see that at multiple levels.

And so you see how easy it is for people to fall into that, given a particular theory.

And again, coming back to that earlier point about the scarecrow, which I think is very important, If we imagine that nothing like this went on here in the United States, that would be a big mistake.

The Nazis are looking to save the Redwoods League, to the Aryan supremacists, to the Ku Klux Klan, to the separation of blacks and whites.

Blacks were not allowed to join the American Medical Association until after World War II.

You have massive sterilization in the United States way before the Nazis.

1 of the first things the Nazis do from a racial hygiene point of view is start sterilizing what they called the mentally ill and the physically handicapped.

All that had been going on since around World War I in the United States and even earlier in certain states in the form of castration of prisoners in order to prevent their demon seed from being propagated further into the race.

So there's a kind of a racial international that's going on and that part of the story also needs to be told.

And scientists were able to carry those ideas in their mind from your work?

I mean that's 1 of the things going on with all the renaming of buildings now is scientists who were eugenicists are now getting their names pulled off of buildings.

My personal view is that it has to be done on a case-by-case basis, but in general, I think it's usually better to add on rather than subtract.

In other words, to add history rather than erase history or pretend as if history had never existed.

Let me give you a specific example of that.

1 of the most powerful and diabolical university presidents in the Nazi period was a guy named Karl Ostel, A-S-T-E-L.

And he was a rabid Nazi, high up in the leadership.

And in his portrait at the University of Vienna, there he is in full SS uniform, that painting was taken down.

Now, what I would have done is left the painting and put a, you know, add a plaque.

But to pretend as if that never happened or to erase history in that way, I think is a big mistake.

So I haven't gotten through it yet, but I've been trying to get to the Mein Kampf.

And throughout its history, it's been taken down and up.

It actually was taken down from Amazon for a while recently.

What can you say about keeping that stuff up?

So the reason it was taken down from Amazon, I mean, there's a large number of people that will read that.

So they're not using it for educational purposes.

You can't put a plaque on the Mein Kampf.

Like you can't, I mean, Amazon can't do a warning saying like,

this per gate, you get an expurgated version of mine copy.

I mean, it's not well written, so you can maybe convince yourself that it's okay because it's not well written.

So it's not like this inspiring book of ideology that could easily convince.

But can you steelman the argument that Mein Kampf should be banned?

And can you still man the argument that it should be not banned?

Well, I wouldn't say it should be banned.

I think, if anything, that might make it forbidden fruit.

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Robert Proctor: Nazi Science and Ideology | Lex Fridman Podcast #268