Abstract
IT would be difficult to find a more complete and cynical indifference to freedom of thought andintellectual expression than appears in the speech, as reported in the Times of October 6, delivered by Dr. Frank, the Reich Commissar for Justice, on October 4 to the joint meeting of the Association of German Jurists, the Foreign Political Department of the Nazi Party and the teachers of economics in uni versities and other places of higher education. Dr. Frank is reported to have said: “as the pursuit of knowledge is the service of truth it must necessarily beservice to National-Socialism. We insist that the unity of the philosophy which lies at the basis of National-Socialism must not be challenged by any body.” The exclusive and inviolable identification of philosophic truth with the principles and ideas of a dominant political faction, has a familiar ring which would have provoked no surprise had it come from the mouth of a politician, but its uncompromis ing terms are startling when uttered by a commissar for justice, who has been responsible for the recent reorganisation of jurists throughout Germany. More was to follow. Dr. Frank went on to say, “Our aim must not be originality or novelty in books, but the promotion of national welfare, of national safety, of national wealth and national solidarity. There must be no more battles of theory among you.” He goes on to bid the teachers of law and economics show the way to German intellectual life by their good example. By a strange perversion of logic, policy dictated by political expediency is made the touch stone of truth and teaching, research and speculative thought are to be conditioned by predetermined conclusions, outside the terms of which they may not stray. The restrictions placed on the study of race and the history of culture are evidently now to be extended to jurisprudence and economics.
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Nazi Philosophy and Truth. Nature 134, 564–565 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134564c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134564c0