Political Science 101: Decolonising Curricula in Nazi Germany and Now

by Steven Tucker (December 2023)

We are always being told these days to ‘follow the science,’ as if such an instruction is automatically wholly apolitical and objective in nature. Yet, as I found when writing my new book Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets, this has far from always been the case. Sometimes, political extremists can get their hands on science’s tiller and steer it off in all kinds of wrong and dangerous directions.

For example, just like so many politicians in our own day, Adolf Hitler fancied himself a bit of an amateur scientist too, subscribing to profoundly warped eugenic notions which, notwithstanding their complete lack of truth, were still allowed to determine the future of an entire society—not to mention believing in mad nonsenses like World-Ice Theory, an early inverted Nazi version of climate-change.

Actually, Hitler’s level of specific scientific education was negligible, forcing him to promote a cult of the amateur and make self-proclaimed judgements based on intuition alone. Thus, he mistrusted German attempts to develop atomic bombs on the basis that such weapons, exploiting the findings of several well-known Jewish quantum physicists, were a mere “spawn of Jewish pseudoscience,” fearing that an atomic explosion would destroy the entire globe, Germany included, in a never-ending chain-reaction, thus rendering the impending conquest of Poland rather moot.

Hitler’s ideas about science education, meanwhile, were alarmingly similar to those of today’s Western diversity zealots, albeit in a reversed sense. For Hitler, the fragmented condition of the liberal, pre-Nazi German State was partly a result of the fragmented way science was taught in her schools. Under degenerate democracy, students had been allowed to develop into atomised individuals, with no wider sense of collective belonging to the Völk, or ‘Folk,’ the greater German people.

What was needed, was a way to bind them together into a more ethnically, nationalistically and ideologically völkisch State via complete reform of the curriculum so as to eliminate any sense of what we may now call ‘diversity’ from it. Science must become less an objective body of neutral and isolated facts, and more of a coherent, politically useful narrative, even if this narrative was a wholly false one. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that:

Science … must be regarded by the völkisch State as an instrument for the advancement of national pride. Not only world history but all cultural history [including the history of science] must be taught from this standpoint. An inventor must not only seem great as an inventor, but must seem even greater as a national comrade.

Today, Adolf may easily have found work somewhere like Sheffield University, certain of whose course documents caused a stir back in 2021, after arguing for the pressing need to ‘decolonise’ their science and engineering curricula along reverse-racial lines in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Apparently, to “incorporate historically marginalised or suppressed knowledge” was now suddenly deemed essential so that “all our students [i.e., the non-white, non-straight, non-male ones] have the opportunity to see themselves reflected in what they are being taught.” As I show at greater length in my book, that’s precisely what Adolf Hitler was saying in Nazi-era Germany—just from an excessively pro-white, not an excessively anti-white, perspective.

After all, if 1930s German schoolchildren saw that the realm of quantum mechanics was invented by a disproportionate number of Jewish scientists, as was factually the case, then they may become demoralised and put off pursuing future careers in those oh-so-valuable STEM subjects central to the future well-being of the German nation. Likewise, it is vital that in decolonised and diversified British classrooms today, STEM-averse schoolgirls are taught all about Ada Lovelace, arguably the world’s first computer-programmer, rather than Charles Babbage, the man who actually invented the Difference-Engine proto-computer she was able to program on, simply because Ms Lovelace happened to have been born with the correct set of chromosomes.

Even more reminiscent of a photographic-negative version of Nazi Germany came in the touring international museum exhibition 1001 Islamic Inventions, which originated in that traditional global centre of Islam, Manchester, in 2006. This had the apparent aim of convincing everyone white and European that all of their scientific inventions and discoveries were not, as they had previously been mistaught, the work of Caucasian individuals, but of brown and black-skinned Muslims, Arabs and Africans.

You might think this merely a reasonable attempt to highlight the inarguable fact that white people didn’t invent everything; after all, modern chemistry has substantial Middle Eastern roots, as shown by Arabic words like alcohol and alkali, whilst things as useful as soap and algebra were the commendable creations of Muslims too. But this was not all the exhibition taught. Actually, ancient Muslims invented the Rubik’s Cube, too, rather than that plagiaristic white Hungarian fiend Erno Rubik, on the curious grounds that the Banu Musa brothers of ninth century Baghdad had once manufactured some small toys which were nothing like them.

Meanwhile, Muslims also invented human flight, rather than the Wright Brothers, because in the ninth century a man named Abbas ibn Firnas strapped a special cloak to himself like Batman and jumped off the top of a tall mosque. He immediately plummeted to the ground and sustained “minor injuries” rather than actually flying but, nonetheless, explained the exhibition’s book-catalogue, “For Muslims, flight has a spiritual dimension,” as in all those stories about magic carpets, so, when you thought about it properly, they must have invented the aeroplane rather than some obscure American white men, just like how Jesus theoretically invented modern industrial mass-production techniques when feeding the five thousand.

Dams, glass, windmills, buildings, medicine, money, maths, geometry, art (albeit perhaps not human portraiture), libraries, bookshops, universities, towns, the countryside, paper, textiles, writing, agriculture, vaccines, clocks, music, cameras, the concept of personal hygiene, even the toothbrush—all were invented by Muslims. Five hundred years later, when white men from Colgate finally developed some toothpaste, this latter creation could at last be used.

Taken as a whole, this narrative is obviously not true. And yet, strangely, this did not prevent the exhibition touring such prestigious locations as London’s Science Museum, Washington’s National Geographic Museum and the New York Hall of Science, all of whose curators must have known full well it was a farrago of lies from start to finish. Furthermore, Britain’s Houses of Parliament, Brussels’ European Parliament Building and New York’s UN General Assembly all opened their doors to the travelling circus, just as they would to a similar display being staged by Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Amish.

Scientific bodies like the Wellcome Trust even helped fund it all. For some inexplicable reason, they all appeared eager to undermine the historical basis of Western civilisation itself, whilst falling over themselves to present Islam as the benign fount of all knowledge—well, almost all knowledge. At the end of the tie-in propaganda book, two pages were grudgingly appended naming six very minor white European scientific figures like Copernicus, Kepler and da Vinci, chosen for inclusion because “they were in harmony with or may [please note how much work that single word ‘may’ is made to perform here … ] have been influenced by Muslims.” No Einstein, by the way—not sure why that might be.

Such Islamic proselytisers sound equally as racially patronising as Adolf Hitler, who was once über-confident of winning his war against Stalin in the East on the grounds that “The Russians never invent anything” but merely copy the ideas of superior races like the Germans, akin to how white Westerners like Copernicus are today now suddenly revealed as wholly clueless without having first drawn inspiration from the far greater minds of the brown Muslim world. “These people are inferior to us,” said Hitler. “In the sphere of chemistry, for example, it’s been proved that everything comes to them from us.” Sounds just like what certain Muslims are saying about white Europeans today.

Hitler later launched his own well-funded travelling exhibition of racist scientific pseudohistory right across Europe, forcibly introducing millions of fascinated Frenchmen, Poles, Russians, Jews and Slavs to 1001 Aryan Inventions, such as the Panzer tank, Me-262 jet-fighter, V-1 flying bomb and Zyklon-B poison-gas. Up until about mid-1943, the rolling roadshow proved to be a great success.

Edited and extracted from Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets by S.D. Tucker, out now in hardback (Pen & Sword/Frontline Books, ISBN: 9781399073158). All references for material cited above can be found within. Buy it here (US) here (UK) or here (direct from publisher).

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Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with several books to his name. His most recent book, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, demonstrates how Nazi and Soviet-era scientific abuses are being directly repeated today amongst ideologically motivated academics in the woke West and will be out December 30. His previous book, The Saucer and the Swastika and Nazi UFOs, debunk various ridiculous contemporary neo-Gnostic pseudo-religions which exploit the popular online lie that Adolf Hitler secretly invented flying saucers as a bizarre neo-Nazi recruitment tool amongst the young and gullible.

NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast