Hitler's and Stalin's Misuse of Science - When Science Fiction was Turned into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets

But should we be too surprised by any of this? No, because this exact same sorry process has happened time and again before, under the rule of totalitarian political cults like the Nazis and the Soviets, both of which vigorously promoted various pseudoscientific theories of ‘Aryan Science’ and ‘Marxist Science’ on the sole grounds that they were ideologically correct as opposed to being factually so.

Nazi racial pseudoscience and belief in nonsense like the ‘World Ice Theory’, which claimed that stars did not really exist and were actually just reflections of the sun off giant floating space-icebergs, were widely encouraged in the Third Reich, and used for long-term military weather-forecasting purposes. 

Likewise, the ideas of the renegade biologist Trofim Lysenko, who developed a deluded ‘anti-capitalist’ theory of genetics opposed to Darwin’s, were responsible for widespread famine in the USSR when Stalin allowed him to apply them practically towards the nation’s crop-harvests. Those academics and functionaries who disputed these clearly false pseudoscientific notions often found themselves in deep trouble – or, ultimately, dead.