Robert Proctor: Nazi Science and Ideology

Lex Fridman Podcast #268 – Robert Proctor: Nazi Science and Ideology Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. 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 one 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. All of this for the greater good. In some periods of human history, science was deeply influenced by the ideology of governments and individuals. In some, less so. The hard truth is that we can't know for sure about which of the two 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 helping or hurting? 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 one of human flourishing and where science lived up to its highest ideal. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. First is Theragon, the device I use for post workout muscle recovery. Second is BetterHelp, an online therapy service. Third is Indeed, a hiring website. Fourth is Grammarly, a service I use to check spelling, grammar, and readability, and fifth is A Sleep, a self cooling mattress cover I sleep on. So the joys is health, wealth, or linguistic eloquence. Choose wisely, my friends. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. 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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 Mingley 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 in actually 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. It's anti a particular type of science, in particular it was radically against what they called 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 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 going to 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 going to have to talk about that, but I got excluded from fulfilling that dream. But one of the things I was going to look at when I got a full bright 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 licentious Lamarckism was actually anti Nazi anti genetics on the nurture side of nature, and that's really an untold story. It's an uncomfortable story. Because it sounds like someone we might want to make heroes out of some 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 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 a lot of that's an untold story. 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 there 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 Cuculkan, the rise of the Venus with what's called the heliacoal rising, namely the rising of Venus before the. Rising of the sun in which 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 measure 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. There was no money for that 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 practice of science often gets pushed into and is is woven into ideological practices, in sort of in the same way that you get beautiful. Um medieval cathedrals built in service of of Catholicism. Well, what's in the mind of an individual scientist? So this 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, 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 at in a concentration camp. What are they thinking? You can imagine a whole range of thoughts. Maybe they don't know what they're doing. Maybe they do. Maybe they know a little bit but not a lot. Maybe they don't want to know. Maybe they have ways of lying to themselves. Maybe they are the one person who agreed to do it and 99 refused. So you know 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. You know 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 widget building, and that leads to the possibility that they can become easily instrumentalized in a particular. 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 that 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. Uh, uh, scane 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. With the whole idea being that you were dividing into parts, classifying it's the taxonomic impulse. 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 one of the things that Darwin had to overcome in recognizing evolution that that taxonomies are in motion. But it also can lead to a kind of myopia that my job is done when I've classified something is is is this bird an X or Y or a Z. And that again can be it can be ideological or it cannot be but scientists are humans humans and they're fitting in. With a world, with a world practice, and that's that's that's limiting. It's kind of inevitable. It's unavoidable. It's hard to be if if not impossible. Out of the world that we're that we're walking in. Yeah, and it's fascinating because I think ideologies also have an impulse towards forming taxonomies, and there is um. So just so 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 it started to wonder how did all these people at MIT that I admire would hang out with this person just lightly just have conversations. 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 is power in somebody like the Nazi regime or like 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 um. You know sometimes people say scientists want to make money and or they have a big kind of ideological drive behind it. I think there's just nice when the widgets you like building anyway. Somehow somebody convinces you some charismatic person that this widget is actually has a grander purpose and you don't almost feel think about the negative or whether it's positive. Just the fact that it's grand is already super exciting. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. 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. And then but his rocket then gets compressed into the the Western world or the the American world and basically launches us to the moon and we forget about the sauce how the sausage was made. Originally, well can you talk about him a little bit more because he's such a fascinating character because he so he was a Nazi but he was also American and it had such a grand impact on on both and like there's this uncomfortable fact that he's you know. One 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 space flight. He makes these beautiful rockets already beginning in the 20s early 30s. Ends up for a while at Penimunda using slave labor to build V2 engines and and so forth like that. I remember going to Penimunda. 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 these these engines used to rain terror. On 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 the Penimunda 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. Burn on their legs, but the whole Nazi regime is is full of things like that. Is 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 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 Gorbels' office was not the office of propaganda. It was the office of enlightenment of of popular enlightenment and propaganda. So enlightenment. Enlightenment was part of his. It's the new era of enlightenment from his perspective. It was supposed to be the new age, the new era of enlightenment. It's a little bit like the the kind of myth of Hitler as failed artist. You know his art is not that bad. You know there are a lot of artists who are who are worse and. Had a very interesting conversation once with my 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 eight years old. Her dad was like a gauferider 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 you know eight year old girl. And she said he was charming and funny and then he said he loved kids and she she said he was the most you know 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. You know there's there's more to it than that. That's really really really important to think about when we make a scarecrow because. That gives you actionable, like it 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 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 Jeffrey Epstein that people don't seem to talk about I don't 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. I don't 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 it's it's exactly like you said the enlightenment. I think that excites the scientists. Of course as a charismatic person you have to know what to pick. In terms of what excites you but that 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 Gorbels who would do a party trick. Where for 15 minutes for 15 minutes he would rouse the crowd to communism. Workers of the world unite and then for 15 minutes he would rouse the world to capitalism and individualism and 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. I mean they and I think it's not even the 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. Yeah, like workers unite the the common people stand together. The overthrow the powerful the greedy. Yeah and yeah share the the outcomes of our hard work. Yeah well it's kind of like the the story of two thirds of the things that Marx calls for in the Communist Manifesto are already just part of the. The liberal state and so the parts we remember or forget about an ideology are 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 one 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 a rebirth of the integration between. Ideology and science, so the like um in terms of valueless science I think is the term. Value-free science that you use I mean it seems like Nazi Germany is a important moment in history I mean it probably goes up and down. What 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 one of the things I work on is is big tobacco and we'll probably come to that but. Ah 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 you know doing the Lord's work they thought they were cleaning the world of. Filth, you know I mean if you really thought you know Jews are a parasitic race you know why wouldn't you you know get rid of them. So there's an ontology there's there's a theory of the world. That they're building on, and interestingly one that was um also present in the United States and one 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 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 imagine them. It meant. Getting rid of cancer causing chemicals in the air and in our food and our water these were all of a piece. There's a famous illustration that Richard Doll talks about the great great cancer theorist of of studying in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and. He shown a lecture where cancer cells are shown as Jews and X rays are shown as stormtroopers and these stormtroopers are killing the the cancer cells who are also Jews and so. There's this metaphorical work of of cleaning extermination sanitation purification of a sort 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 sort of 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 the Nazis are looking to the Save the Redwoods League to their you know to the the Aryan supremacist to the Ku Klux Klan to the to the separation of blacks and whites. Blacks were not allowed to join the American Medical Association until after World War II. So you have racial segregation. You have massive sterilization in the United States way before the Nazis. One 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. Well that had been going on since around World War One in the United States and even earlier in certain states in the form of castration of 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 care those ideas in their mind from from your work. Of course, of course I mean that's one of the things going on with all the renaming of buildings now. Is scientists who were eugenists 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 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 let me give you a specific example of that. One of the most powerful and diabolical university presidents in the Nazi period was a guy named Carl 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 is a big big mistake. Kind of linger on that point so I haven't gotten through it yet but I've been. Trying to get to mind comp and you know throughout its history has 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 there's a large number of people that will read that and the hate in their heart will grow. So they're not using it for educational purposes. You can't put a plaque on the mind comp. You're ruining mind comp then. Like you can't I mean this is you know Amazon can't do a warning saying like. Or an exspurgate you can do exspur gated version of mind comp. Yeah take out the word Jew you know exactly that would solve anything. So it still just stands on its own. Yeah I mean it's uh not well written so you could maybe convince yourself that it's okay because it's not well written. So it's not it's not like this inspiring book of ideology that could easily convince. But can you steal man the argument that mind comp should be banned and can you steal 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. Now this might be different when we come to statues on the public square after World War II. The statues of Hitler there must have been thousands of them were taken down now I think even the most rabid. Um opponents of cancel culture. Would not say there was something wrong with taking down the statues of Hitler that were in every office building every post office. So I think a lot depends on the placement and the purpose of icons of statues of Texas. I don't see the harm in being able to buy mind comp. It's so out of this world in now by now just the language and. If anything there probably is more good done by people being shocked at how dumb it is than the evil that might be done. By someone reading it I I can't imagine people being really gripped by that now partly just because it's kind of outdated and crazy crazy talk so. In that case I would not be in favor of that. When it comes to monuments or other types of things, it's a judgment call in each case. I think it has to be probably voted on. But it also I think in many of these cases there's an add on view would would fix a lot of the problems. We'll jump around a little bit. We'll come back to medicine and war on cancer. But let me just add one thing on that recently the. The name of Macmillan who works on the charge of the electron in early part of the 20th century his name was taken off of a. Of a building at Caltech. Well to take his name off what do you really do it wasn't a central aspect of his actual work it's not why he was put on the the name of that building at Caltech. And also the memory is lost and the lesson is lost when you could have kept the Macmillan name on the building and added a plaque. You know this guy was a racist or this guy was a eugenicist or some something to make a teaching moment instead of just a forgetting moment. Yeah. Well let me take a small tangent ask you about censorship and this particular period we're living through. So my friend Joe Rogan has a podcast he hosts a few folks. On there and they they're folks of differing opinions and as we speak there's kind of a battle going on. Over whether Joe Rogan should be on Spotify and allowed to spread scientific misinformation. In particular, there's a guy named Robert Malone that's talking about that that's making a case against of. At least against the COVID vaccine and so on. So outside of the specifics of this person. In this battle of scientific ideas that are sometimes tied up with ideology. In our modern world, what do you think is the role? Like who gets the censor decide what is misinformation or information. Should we let ideas fly in the scientific realm? So scientific ideas or should we try to get it under control? Like what which way obviously all approaches will go wrong in some ways which is more likely to go wrong. One where you try to get a hold of like all right this is a viral thing. And it doesn't fit with scientific consensus, so should probably like try to like quiet it down a little bit or do you let it all just fly and let the ideas battle. Do you think about this kind of stuff in the context of of history? Well, that used to be a million dollar question, of course. Now it's a multi billion dollar question. Not trillion, yeah. We're talking about powerful internet platforms becoming essentially publishers, and publishers can't say whatever they want. There are limits. There's you know they can't yell fire in a crowded theater, but there are there's a kind of social responsibility that is there. And I know some of these I don't know a lot about this topic, but I know there are large some of the large platforms do have dedicated offices to. Trying to rain in misinformation, as you would expect any publisher to do, you can't just let anything fly and Time Magazine or or the New York Times either. They have there are all kinds of codes of ethics and legal obligations. So. I I'm a fan of the efforts, or I think some of the large internet platforms should be congratulated at least for trying to make an effort to rain in misinformation. It's going to be. Difficult and there, mistakes are going to be made, but it can't be a let everything fly kind of situation. But when I watch, unfortunately, the pressure these platforms feel to identify and to censor misinformation. That pressure is ideological in nature currently, so if you just objectively look, there's a certain political lean to people that are pressing on the censorship on the misinformation, which makes me very uncomfortable because now there's an ideology to labeling something as misinformation, as opposed to. Kind of having a you know value less evaluation of what is true and not, and you also have to acknowledge. That it says something that there's a very large number of people that, for example, follow Robert Malone or follow people. I mean, what does that say about society? Yeah, and that there's a deeper lesson in there that's not just about blocking misinformation. It's distrust in science and institutions, distrust in leaders. Like it feels like you have to fix that. And then censorship of misinformation is not going to be fixing that. It's only going to like throw gasoline on the fire. You got to put out the fire. Well, that's that's certainly possible. Yeah, I mean the I think people are distrustful of certain institutions and not others, right? And I think a lot of distrust is is good. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do know there have been a lot of conspiracies. And that you know people work behind scenes to do powerful bad things, and that's what needs to be exposed. The other thing I worry about, which is relevant to your question again, it's a billion or trillion dollar question is. We're kind I think in a world of kind of flattening where all news or all information or all data is kind of equal in some way, and so you get the Twitterverse. Going and doesn't matter if it's peer reviewed or it doesn't matter if it's been supported by evidence, it's just you know a kind of outburst. It's it's interesting to contrast it with say a hundred years ago. I mean, what would a crazy person or a a flat earther or anything? What venue would they have? I mean, maybe they could go to a church or someplace. I mean. So now we have this these empowering engines, then that's what's new historically is that basically anyone can have a blog or a Twitter feed and that is new and so that is. You can think of it also as a kind of clutter, so it's a kind of a radical democracy in a way. The kind of the one of the weaknesses of democracy is if everyone has an equal voice and if everyone has equal power. So there's of course a flip side to that where everyone has equal power. It forces the people who are quote unquote experts to be better communication. I think people are like scientists are just like upset that they have to do like better work at communicating now. They used to be lazy and you can just like say have a PhD there for everyone listen to me. Now they have to actually convince people. Like you have to convince people that the Earth is round. You can't just say the Earth is round that's it. You have to like show you have to make. Like I mean, not the Earth is round part, but things like that. You have to actually be a great communicator, great do great lectures, do documentaries and so on, to battle those ideas. And then also to defend the sort of the people labeled as crazy. You know in Nazi Germany, if you were protesting against some of the uses of science of medicine. To commit atrocities, you would also be labeled crazy. Yeah, well, those voices are important. Yeah, there's so many good points there. The on the scientists becoming good communicators. The history of scientists becoming bad communicators has a history, and the last original contribution to science. Written entirely in the form of a poem is Buffon's Loves of the Plants. And following that in the 18th century, you get the uglification of science, the deliberate uglification of science with the idea being that if you are clear and if you speak beautifully, if you write beautifully, you're hiding something. You're covering over the truth with flowers and decorations and and and scents and and pleasant odors, and so. You get this scientific paper format, you know introduction, discussion, methods, conclude you know results, conclusions, and it's it's kind of policed in this. Inhumane, nonhumanistic kind of rhetorical way, and that's a big problem, and so you get. That combined with just the rise of the research lab and the ever narrower widget builders, the cogs in the machine. It's not surprising that people might not trust certain aspects of that. That combined with the dirty laundry history of a lot of science. That you did have you know the requirement at at Auschwitz that people be you know that physicians supervise the killings. You know the the horrors of you know Tuskegee and and all kinds of other things or even something like the atom bomb, which is arguably more neutral