Abstract
RESTRICTIONS on academic freedom in Germany, already sufficiently stringent, are to cut more deeply still into the roots of intellectual development. According to the Berlin correspondent of a Copenhagen newspaper, quoted in The Times of November 13, the German censorship will see in future all scientific works written for doctors’ degrees. This, it is said, is intended to guard against the introduction of theories offending against Nazi doctrines in politics, law, literature, and the population policy. In view of the distorted interpretation of certain scientific and historical facts which alone is acceptable officially in Germany to-day, it might be thought that any further bar to research or freedom of thought would scarcely be necessary to render any approach to originality innocuous. In order, however, to ensure that orthodoxy, or at least what is regarded as such, shall prevail over any attempt at a scientific and dispassionate examination of fact, which might lead to conclusions at odds with officially approved conclusions, decision as to the fate of any given thesis will not rest with an academic body, which at least might be expected to bring a trained and instructed intelligence to the examination of the bearing of an argument and the value of its evidence, but with the censorship. No thesis will even be submitted for scientific examination until it has passed the censor. Regimentation thus strikes at the very root of intellectual development and scientific training. These must no longer be concerned with the search for truth in the investigation of the facts of Nature and history in both the broad and narrower sense, but only with the fanatical application of a selective theory dictated by political prejudice.
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Politics and Academic Qualifications in Germany. Nature 144, 860 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144860a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144860a0