Alongside the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, there exists another one. The idea that the soldiers of the Third Reich were simply following orders is now generally rejected and debunked. However, the other myth is as offensive and false as the narrative of a “clean Wehrmacht.” It is the idea that the rise of the Nazi Party was due to a kind of stupidity common to all its members and supporters. The narrative of soldiers forced to follow orders parallels the one portraying university professors and students as being absolved of any wrongdoing in the rise of the Third Reich and paints them as the victims of a brutish clique, of brutes who sought to wipe out civilized society.

In this regard, revisionists will often invoke the Nazi book burnings of 1933. The emphasis on who participated in this event is almost always put on the SA, otherwise known as the brown shirts, but it was the university students themselves who were at the heart of this event, and they had the help of their professors, too. Writing about this particular event of 1933, Lisa Pine, in her book Education in Nazi Germany, observes that

Once the Nazis came to power, students campaigned against Jewish and ‘unreliable’ professors and disrupted their lectures. Students organized and participated in book-burning demonstrations on 10 May 1933 in university towns across Germany. This was a public act ‘against the un-German spirit.’ Students seized ‘un-German’ books, including those of Marx and Freud, from the libraries and consigned them to flames, whilst shouting out slogans against their authors. Goebbels described the public book burning as a strong, great and symbolic act. The students were clear about their ideological ‘enemies’ and the National Socialist German Students’ Association planned the event carefully in advance so that the actions of 10 May 1933 were coordinated in university towns across the country.

Indeed, this image is quite different from the usual narrative given to us about brutes burning books out of sheer rage and stupidity. In regard to the Nazi Party itself, it is noteworthy that

Of the fourteen Germans who sat around a table at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, planning the killing process, seven held a PhD. (Robert Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust, 2012, p. 3)

Why is it that we keep pushing this idea that the adherents of National Socialism were uneducated and stupid? The author quoted above further explains that

Michael Wildt describes the leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, the people who “designed the institutions of murder themselves, offered ideological justifications for them, and personally supervised the implementation of mass murder on location” while leading Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando killing squads. He notes the remarkably high level of education achieved by these men. More than three-quarters had passed the Abitur, their university entrance exam. Of the 221 he researched, approximately two-thirds earned a college or university degree and one-third earned a doctorate. In the sample of law students, one third earned a PhD and two-thirds of students in the humanities earned that degree. This gives us a snapshot of the young educated Germans who made the Holocaust possible. (ibid)

Of course, plenty of stupid people were followers of German nationalism before and after the foundation of the Third Reich, but the predominant, false narrative nowadays, which claims that most supporters of Nazism were “mentally defective” or that they were representatives of a sort of “peasant consciousness,” is wrong. Hence,

Despite the presence of anti-intellectualism in the Nazi movement, however, we find a great deal of enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler in German universities. Student organizations had often turned Nazi even before Hitler rose to power, and the bulk of the faculty applauded Hitler’s rise in 1933. Viewed from another angle, we search almost in vain for evidence of opposition to the regime within the universities. (ibid, p. 62)

The answer to this dilemma can be summed up in one word: liberalism. It is liberals who keep pushing the idea that there is a straightforward link between intelligence and civilization. Yet was it not this same idea of civilization that furnished the ideological content for, and gave the impetus to, the genocide against the indigenous populations of the then-called “New World”? Let’s return to this book-burning event of 1933. The author Robert Ericksen describes the event thus:

Books came from public libraries, from lending libraries, from private collections, and even from university libraries. Student leaders gave speeches while the flames leapt skyward, celebrating the “cleansing” process. Prominent professors also spoke, which is the first significant indication that scholars accepted this violation of the written word and its importance to the world of ideas. The other indicator can be found in the lack of opposition by professors to the book burning. Instead, they participated by donating books, speaking in support, and joining the jubilant crowd to watch the flames. (ibid, p. 88)

It was a marvelous spectacle, perhaps criminal and barbaric if judged from the lofty perspective of hindsight, but nonetheless a spectacle created by individuals who, even today, we would consider smart and cultured. As for the economic background of these students, Michael Stephen Steinberg informs us that

The 1918 revolution had little effect upon the social composition of the student community. After 1918 the number of students rose much more rapidly than the population, but the working classes, who constituted between 50 and 60 percent of all Germans, contributed less than 2 percent of the students in 1928. (Steinberg, 1977, p. 22)

What is spoiled cannot but decay until it perishes; during this process, it rots everything it touches, and, by necessity, spoils the whole bunch. German nationalism was far from uncommon, outside or within any given institution, including academia. The NSDAP was the logical conclusion of such widespread nationalism. In the period of the Weimar Republic, these places, which we usually believe to be free of ideological struggles, played an integral role in the subsequent rise of the Third Reich. By 1927, National Socialism had become the norm in institutions of higher learning:

Their brown shirts identified them as members of the National Socialist movement, a small but growing right-wing political party which heretofore had aroused notice by the abortive beer-hall putsch of November 1923. […] Within four years, the brown shirts became ubiquitous at all universities, and their wearers had taken control of student council after student council. Long before the Nazis became a force in national politics, they were to become the dominant political force among students. (ibid, p. 72)

Furthermore,

For the most part, only those students whose backgrounds were working class were attracted to the Marxist groups. Jews, to be sure, were attracted by the Socialist hostility toward bigotry. But the vast majority of free students were upwardly mobile in social outlook and shared the suspicion of Marxism characteristic of the German middle classes. (ibid, p. 74)

Regarding professors, they were likewise complicit in the rise of nationalism in the years prior to the foundation of the Third Reich, but many were still supportive of the regime later on. In Chapter Two of her book, Education in Nazi Germany, Lisa Pine tells us that

Martin Heidegger, Professor of Philosophy, was elected Rector at the University of Freiburg in April 1933. He claimed that academic freedom now meant service to the ‘national community’ and talked of ‘conquering the world of educated men and scholars for the new national political spirit.’ Academic autonomy in teaching and research was subordinated to the interests of the Nazi state. By 1934, approximately 1,600 out of 5,000 university teachers had been dismissed. Many German academics emigrated. The sciences were particularly hard hit. The world-renowned physicist Albert Einstein was among the many scientists who left their posts at German universities to take up positions in America, Britain and elsewhere. Still, most university professors remained in their posts and many of them were supportive of the National Socialist government.

Do universities and other such institutions necessitate a conservative base and are they thus fated to lean on the side of reaction? To say it plainly: no, they don’t. But when a regime needs to perpetuate itself, it must reproduce the foundation that permits it to exist, which includes all the biases, bigotries, and inequalities that were necessary for its rise to power. It is the task of the proletariat to abolish all man-made inequalities; it is an instinctive reflex of reactionaries to resist and fight against this inexorable march of progress and to check the growth of the proletariat at every step. The extermination and colonial project that was designed by the Nazis required technical knowledge and was therefore unthinkable without the assistance of many intellectuals. Robert Ericksen shows the various nuances involved in regard to the complicity of the Nazi intelligentsia:

University-trained technicians, engineers, architects, doctors, and lawyers assisted at various stages in the process, helping make it possible to kill so many people so efficiently in such a short space of time. Here the universities can be seen to have contributed in two ways. First, they provided the training necessary for experts to do their jobs. Lawyers could write the laws, regulations, and policies by which victims were separated and denied their civil rights; historians could identify the peoples of Eastern Europe needing to be removed to make way for ethnic Germans; engineers could design the sealed trucks in which Jews could be gassed by carbon monoxide; and doctors could plan and conduct the experiments in which Jews and others were used as human subjects. Some of these activities were undertaken by specialists with university positions; all were undertaken by products of the universities. (Ericksen, 2012, p. 159)

The author concludes that

[I]t is impossible to imagine certain specific horrors of the Holocaust absent the training and expertise provided by German universities. (ibid)

Hence, the myth of clean hands in the academic world, the myth of clear-thinking critics setting themselves against a rising group of irrational brutes, is the self-serving narrative of the capitalist West. In the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, there was no battle of reason against unreason, of beauty against ugliness, of morality against immorality, but rather a class struggle between those who were privileged against those who were not, between owners of property and those without such means.