National Socialists were anti-IQ tests
This will be a blog-post where I collect stuff on Nazis’ view on IQ. So far there is not much of this translated into English so I will have to search a bit for good text passages that I personally can understand.
The professionalization of psychology in Nazi Germany
One leading psychologist in particular created psychology theories that followed the National Socialist doctrines, the Nazi Erich Jaensch and his followers.
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As Ashkenazi Jews score higher on IQ tests than any other group Nazis of course had to attack the idea of the widely applied IQ tests. Yet they couldn’t abolish the test itself because it’s the most useful test in psychology and does in fact predict work performance to a higher degree than anything else. Basically, IQ tests in Nazi Germany had the standing they have in the modern Western society.
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Jaensch (1938b) and Friedrich Becker (1938a) of his school, for example, were of the opinion that the existing intelligence tests corresponded to the “Jewish way of thinking,” but not to the German type of intelligence.
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The old psychotechnical methods and intelligence tests, which were under fire from characterologists anyway, were now attacked with new political arguments. Friedrich Becker, from Jaensch’s school, criticized certain intelligence tests for favoring the “Jewish form of intelligence.” These “cerebral-intellectual meddlings” were especially to the taste of the so-called dissolution type of cultural decline according to Jaensch (Becker 1938a, pp. 33, 94). Schliebe (1937, p. 198) took pains to emphasize that the aptitude tests then employed by the army, the railways, and others had nothing to do with the old “Jewish” psychotechnics.
The 12-Year Reich
Grunberger, R. (1995). The 12-year Reich: A social history of Nazi Germany 1933–1945. Da Capo Press.
National Socialists, like socialists tend to be, were anti-intellectuals to a large degree and instead sought after a holistic worldview that could prove whatever their ideology was. So they used science to prove what they were feeling. And just like in USSR they were big anti-Semites which also meant that they had more reasons to fear intellectuals that very often were Jews.
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