Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

322 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:321
chapter on the failure of denazification after the war will leave the reader
crying “When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”
The universities fare no better in Ericksen’s estimation. He follows the
careers and the careerism of individual faculty members and the corruption
of entire universities, the introduction of Nazi racial science, the Aryanization
of university faculty and students, and the quarantining of ideas of Jewish
origin from the academic life of the university. There were efforts to rid
Christianity of the Old Testament and to cleanse Jesus of his Jewishness; so
too did philosophers deny Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Husserl, and not just
Maimonides. Physics denied the contributions of Einstein and Planck.
Nobel Prize winners were cast aside and isolated; some collapsed under the
weight of their oppression.
Students betrayed their teachers, scholars their disciplines. Students
attacked their professors. They monitored their teaching and castigated
those who would not comply. Professors were craven; they lacked courage
even in the early days. No better than the general populace and perhaps
even more profoundly, they were enchanted by German nationalism and
seduced by their own sense of elitism and the prominence of their cultural
achievements to proclaim the master race. The structure of the university
from rectors to department chairs, the very advancement of careers,
depended on compliance and complicity. The faculty succumbed to the
addition of men—and they were almost inevitably men —without academic
qualifications but politically well connected to their inner circles. These
pseudo-scholars were hired and then promoted, put into positions of power
and influence where they used their newly won positions to instill cooperation
with the agenda of National Socialism and prominent scholars. Even
the most distinguished among them, such as Martin Heidegger, became
enthralled with the Nazi ethos and with Hitler and his henchmen.
Heroes were few and far between. Even the seemingly heroic, those
who became icons of the “good German” as opposed to the evil Nazi, do
not withstand the scrutiny of Ericksen’s critical eye.
As if that were not bad enough, Ericksen is equally critical of the halfhearted
and ineffectual postwar efforts to denazify German society, especially
once the responsibility for denazification was returned to German
rather than Allied hands and once the cold war made the Allies want to
contest for allegiance of the German people.
Ericksen understands the big picture, but the devil is in the details and
he has his facts down cold as well; detail follows detail to present a picture
that is both comprehensive and contemptible.
His final chapter is devoted to the implications of his research. Two
major elite institutions—the church and the university, the cornerstone of