The evolution of Nazi racial "science," from comic idiocy to horror and tragedy, is cleverly told by Ms. Pringle through a focus on one bizarre institution: the Ahnenerbe, a research foundation under the aegis of the SS. Before the war began, the Ahnenerbe (a word Ms. Pringle roughly translates as "something inherited from the forefathers") specialized in sending archaeological expeditions to sites where the ancient Aryans allegedly left traces - rock carvings in Sweden, temples in Tibet. Like the Nazi Party as a whole, this little niche of Himmler's empire was extraordinarily hospitable to lunatics and charlatans. One of its "experts," Karl-Maria Wiligut, claimed to be descended from the god Thor, though he was a psychotic and child molester who had spent time in a Salzburg mental hospital. More disturbing, however, was the Ahnenerbe's ability to attract genuine scholars - archeologists, linguists, biologists - who eagerly prostituted themselves to Himmler for fancy titl! es and research grants.

It was during the war that the Ahnenerbe's crackpot racial science showed its true face. The story of Nazi medical experiments on Jewish prisoners is well-known, but Ms. Pringle sheds new light on it, showing how such tortures were directly related to Nazi eugenic theories. In the most gruesome case, SS scientists selected prisoners from Auschwitz as exemplary Jewish racial types, then gassed them and stripped the flesh from their bones in order to preserve their skeletons for research. Such experiments were a natural conclusion of Nazi racial principles, which held that the survival of the fittest required extermination of the Jewish "bacillus."

This language, of course, is frighteningly similar to that used by Theodore Roosevelt, when he warned against "the worst stock" and "citizens of the wrong type." Indeed, when it came to eugenics, the Americans blazed the trail for the Germans. As Mr. Bruinius notes, the Nazi law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring, passed by Hitler in 1934, was modeled after, and explicitly referred to, California's sterilization law. Fittingly, then, it was World War II and the revelation of the Holocaust that discredited the eugenics movement in the United States - permanently, one would like to say, except that the discovery of increasingly powerful genetic tools makes its revival by no means unthinkable.

The lesson Ms. Pringle and Mr. Bruinius have to teach is a vital one for our technological age: that scientists are not the best guides to the use or implications of their own work. There will always be credentialed ideologues willing to misrepresent self-serving lies as scientific truths. To avoid the perversion of science, we need something more than science - we need wisdom, a quality that no amount of laboratory research can discover.

SOURCE: http://www.nysun.com/article/27946?page_no=1