ABSTRACT
In this chapter a range of materials are presented illustrating the nature of academic politics in the Third Reich. For many, modern academic culture is ‘a culture which has elevated venality into the cardinal academic virtue’; for ‘social ambition and professionalization’ go hand in hand with ‘an absence of moral inhibition’ (Burleigh 1994: 4–5). If that is so, then academic life under National Socialism is a dismal – but not totally untypical – episode in an unedifying story of relations between the modern academic and the state, and between academics and power both within and outside the university.
