In the 19th century, scientists, mainly from the USA, became interested in craniometry, the determination of intelligence through skull measurements. In his opening speech he said, ‘We must be prepared as well-no matter how painful it may be, and even precisely because it hurts-to accept the truth and face up to our responsibility to learn for the present and the future from the insight into the past’.ĭiscrimination based on science has a long history. In June 2001, Markl acknowledged the historical responsibility of the Max Planck Society at a scientific symposium entitled ‘ Biomedical Sciences and Human Experimentation at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes-The Auschwitz Connection’, which was held in conjunction with the historical research programme. First results have now been published ( Proctor, 2000 Sachse and Massin, 2000 Schmuhl, 2000). Its president, Hubert Markl, launched a research programme, History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the National Socialist Era, in 1999 to investigate the involvement of scientists of the KWS in Nazi crimes.
The Max Planck Society is currently engaged in coming to terms with its past. Many of them remained in renowned positions even after 1945, influential enough to delay an unbiased historical confrontation. And the scientists who provided the scientific backing were respected university professors or researchers of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS), the predecessor of the Max Planck Society. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and people with hereditary diseases were deprived of their human rights, herded into concentration camps, used for scientific experimentation and murdered. Society was to be cleaned of all alien contamination, hence the German phrase ‘Rassenhygiene’ meaning ‘racial hygiene’. The emergence of eugenics as an ‘applied science’ culminated in the horrendous atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Third Reich. They were used in the United States to justify slavery and the Indian wars, as well as later for the sterlisation of disabled people. Scientific theories and arguments were used to support the inferiority of other races, thereby legitimising crimes committed throughout history and all over the world. And at some point in history, prejudice found a faithful servant in science. It is one of the dark sides of man that we tend to decrease the value of others in order to raise ourselves.
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