Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ were those who had failed to reach the ideal of white European physical and mental perfection.

      The scientific distance created by believing that racial hierarchies existed in nature, this uneven balance of power, allowed human zoos to treat their performers as less than equals, making life for them fatally precarious. According to Boëtsch, many died from pneumonia or tuberculosis. Concerns were expressed in the press. There were always protests, as there had been about Saartjie Baartman, but they made little difference.

      In another example around the same time as the Paris Exposition, a Congolese ‘pygmy’ named Ota Benga, who had been brought to the United States to be displayed at the St Louis World’s Fair, was put in the Monkey House at Bronx Zoo in New York, without shoes. Visitors loved him. ‘Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him,’ the New York Times reported. He was eventually rescued by African American ministers, who found him a place in an orphanage. Ten years later, in despair because he couldn’t return home to the Congo, he borrowed a revolver and shot himself through the heart.

      As I stand among the weeds and crumbling former homes of Paris’s human zoo, it’s difficult to avoid concluding that the reason anyone pursued the scientific idea of race was not so much to understand the differences in our bodies, but to try to justify why we lead such different lives. Why else? Why would something as superficial as skin colour or body shape matter otherwise? What the scientists really wanted to know was why some people are enslaved and others free, why some prosper while others are poor, and why some civilisations have thrived while others haven’t. Imagining themselves to be looking objectively at human variation, they sought answers in our bodies to questions that existed far outside them. Race science had sat, always, at the intersection of science and politics, of science and economics. Race wasn’t just a tool for classifying physical difference, it was a way of measuring human progress, of placing judgement on the capacities and rights of others.

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       Scientific Priestcraft

       Deciding that races could be improved, scientists looked for ways to improve their own

      THE PAST IS BUILT of the things we choose to remember.

      The Max Planck Society, with its headquarters in Munich, Germany, has an illustrious history. It has been the intellectual home of eighteen Nobel Prize winners, including the theoretical physicist Max Planck, after whom it’s named. With an annual budget of 1.8 billion euros, its institutes employ more than 14,000 scientists, producing over 15,000 published scientific papers a year. By any standards, it’s one of the most prestigious centres of science in the world. But in 1997 biologist Hubert Markl, then president of the Max Planck Society, made a decision that would threaten the reputation of his entire establishment. He wanted to scratch beneath its glorious history to reveal a secret that had been hidden for fifty years.

      Before 1948, the Max Planck Society existed in a different incarnation, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Established in the German Empire in 1911, it was as important then as it is now, cementing Germany’s place in modern scientific history. Even Albert Einstein did some of his research at one of its institutes. But it was later, as the Nazis took power and began to act on their own scientific priorities, that things took a disturbing turn. We know that figures from within science and academia must have played a role in developing Adolf Hitler’s ideology of racial hygiene, which argued that those of pure, ‘Aryan’ racial stock should be encouraged to breed, while others were gradually eliminated – an ideology that culminated in the Holocaust. It couldn’t have been done without scientists, both to provide the theoretical framework for such an audacious experiment, and to carry out the job itself. On the practical side, there would have been those setting up concentration camps and gas chambers, as well as determining who should die. And then there were all the gruesome human experiments known to have been carried out on people who were eventually killed, plundering them for biological data.

      There were rumours that staff from within the Kaiser Wilhelm Society had been involved, that they were maybe even party to murder and torture. In hindsight, they must have been. Under the regime, notes writer James Hawes, half the nation’s doctors were Nazi party members. For a decade, German universities had taught racial theory.

      But whatever went on was quietly forgotten after the Second World War. Although there was undoubtedly a story to be uncovered, it was thought wiser to leave it alone. By the Max Planck Society’s own admission, 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 СКАЧАТЬ