How the Nazis won their campus culture war Universities should be bastions of truth, not politics

On both sides of America’s Palestine campus wars, you find people making historical parallels. The protestors present themselves as the heirs to the Vietnam peaceniks, proudly bearing what Noam Chomsky called “the responsibility of intellectuals” and comparing their own run-ins with the police to the Kent State massacre. Their opponents take a different view. “Will Columbia be remembered as Heidelberg?”, the chair of Yad Vashem went as far as to ask: does Columbia risk alienating its Jewish students and scholars for good, and declining in prestige as a result?

This parallel — more “1933” than “1968” — has circulated widely in the months since 7 October. At the end of 2023, Niall Ferguson wrote a punchy essay on the “treason of the intellectuals”, contending that while American academia “has gone in the opposite political direction” to Germany in the Thirties, it has “ended up in much the same place”. It may be wise to cool down the rhetoric: Columbia in 2024 is very far indeed from Heidelberg in 1933. Still, the history of the universities under Nazism, and of historians under Nazism in particular, gives us good reason to be wary of the politicisation of higher education. Jonathan Haidt recently argued that “universities must choose one telos: truth or social justice”. And it is strange but instructive to recall that the Nazi universities emphatically chose “social justice” (as they would see it) over “truth”.

On 18 January 1934, almost a year after Hitler came to power, a historian named Ulrich Kahrstedt delivered a speech urging his colleagues at the University of Göttingen to do their bit for Germany’s “new culture”. His speech contained all the lurid images that one would expect. The Treaty of Versailles had been an intolerable humiliation; ethnic Germans over the border in Poland were routinely “hunted down and killed”. He reserved particular contempt for those in his faculty who seemed to care more about the plight of their Jewish colleagues than the misfortunes of their own race — those who shed more tears over the “daughter of the cattle dealer Levi not being accepted as a student” than over the “scores of German women who killed themselves after being violated by Negroes”.

Hitler, according to Kahrstedt, had come to rescue the Germans from this pitiable state, and in that task the universities had an important part to play. Kahrstedt’s audience was then well-primed for the climax of his speech:

“We reject international science, we reject the international republic of letters, we reject research for research’s sake. Here, medicine is taught and learned not to increase the number of known bacteria, but rather to keep Germans healthy and strong. Here, history is taught and learned not to say ‘how it actually was’, but to let the Germans learn from how it actually was. Here, the natural sciences are taught and learned not to discover abstract laws, but to help the Germans to sharpen their tools in the competition between peoples.”

These two neat rhetorical triads were then fittingly capped off with a third: “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

Not everyone was pleased with Kahrstedt’s performance. Two bigwigs of Göttingen’s history faculty, Karl Brandi and Percy Ernst Schramm, came under fire in his speech for having recently mingled with the enemy at a conference in Poland. Schramm had already aroused some suspicion for — to use a more modern vintage — “sharing a platform” with Jewish authors throughout the Twenties and early Thirties, and for supporting Hindenburg against Hitler in the presidential election of 1932. Though he embraced Hitler in 1933, proselytising the Nazi movement to Americans during a visiting professorship at Princeton, it seemed to have been too little, too late.

Brandi and Schramm may have objected to Kahrstedt’s speech, but their students in the audience lapped it up. Schramm, the Nazi students’ association declared, ought to be ousted from his professorship because he does not support a “view of history that corresponds to National Socialist thinking”. Wishing to reassert their honour, Brandi and Schramm challenged Kahrstedt to a duel — this sort of thing was, surprisingly, still not an uncommon occurrence in German academia at the time — but Kahrstedt demurred, and the matter was eventually resolved by the University’s rector. When Schramm joined the SA promptly thereafter, this may have been to cover his back further and to prove his Nazi bona fides to his colleagues and students.

Academics in Nazi Germany, after all, had to live in fear of both. “What has become of proud Heidelberg University,” the historian Otto Brandt wrote to his old teacher Hermann Oncken in 1934. “It is not the rector who is in charge but a wild student leader, in whose antechamber professors wait for more than an hour until they are generously admitted”. Oncken, as it happened, had reason to fear the strength of Nazi ideology within the universities. His opposition to the regime, however cautiously expressed, made him a hate-figure in the Nazi press, and he was forced to retire in 1935.

Oncken’s opposition marked him out among German historians. Schramm was much more typical. In 1937, the professor, a patrician Anglophile, found himself in Westminster Abbey for the coronation of George VI. When the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, privately asked him the question that every Englishman would ask their German friends in the long run-up to the Second World War — “Are you a Nazi?” — Schramm replied:

“With regard to rearmament, I am a 200 percent Nazi. With regard to the industrial peace, the consolidation of the peasantry, Kraft durch Freude, 100 percent Nazi. But racial theory, the Germanic cult, education policy, the Nazi worldview — I am a 100 percent opponent. I am not a member of the Party and must ask myself every night to what extent I agree with the Party’s aims and to what extent I reject them. The answer is different every night. This is not only my fate, but that of the German intelligentsia in general.”

Not all historians, of course, were as conflicted as Schramm — and some rejoiced in Hitler’s successes precisely because they seemed to herald a return to past glory. Otto Westphal, in an article called “Bismarck und Hitler”, described how the latter had surpassed the former in resolving the problems that had long bedevilled Germany. The medievalist Hermann Heimpel was satisfied that Hitler had learned the right lessons from Germany’s Middle Ages: the need for “unity, the rule of the Führer, pure statehood internally, a Westward mission externally”. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, Hermann Aubin waxed lyrical that “history has merged with the present in a magnificent arc”. For such men, to make political declarations like these had become the entire point of history.

Others, who had once enjoyed reputations of the highest scholarly propriety, were only too eager to render their services when the regime came calling. The elderly Albert Brackmann once had been committed to scientific rigour in history, but it appealed to his vanity that his research should contribute to the “struggle for the reconstruction of Europe” under Hitler’s leadership. He devoted his retirement from university life to finding ever more elaborate arguments in the distant past for Nazi eastward expansion, and to give some veneer of scholarly respectability for Germany’s wartime imperial plunder; for his trouble, the Führer awarded him the Adlerschild in 1941.

Some others dispensed even with the pretence of scientific scholarship, producing work that was little more than political propaganda, barely distinguishable from the eccentric rants of Alfred Rosenberg. This was encouraged by the Nazis’ sustained assault on the very notion of scientific scholarship in history, on the notion that historical inquiry ought to be based upon evidence and reason. The most fanatical Nazi historians believed neither in the possibility nor the desirability of history divorced from contemporary politics.

Hitler himself subscribed to such a position: on the very first page of Mein Kampf he describes how history was his favourite subject at school because it aroused his political passions. And of course Kahrstedt, in his speech on 18 January 1934, violently rejected the notion that the historian’s task is simply to find out “how it actually was” — here citing the 19th-century Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke — arguing instead that historians ought to devote their work wholly to contemporary political ends. We find something even more strikingly “postmodern” in the declaration of Moritz Edelmann, the editor of the Nazi historical journal Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (“Past and Present”), that history should “liberate itself from the dependence on the written source” in service of present needs.

The experience of the German universities in the Thirties should therefore disabuse us of various popular ideas. Students do not have a special affinity for social justice: their protests and obsessions do not need to be revered as though they contain moral truths inaccessible to others. Education in the humanities does not really instil “empathy” or “good citizenship”, whatever some of its advocates like to say. And if, finally, there is anything to be learned from this dark chapter in the history of scholarship, it surely is this: we cannot allow politics to supplant truth as the university’s highest end.

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Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian.

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