Millions of viewers were awed by Jacob Bronowski’s famous 1973 documentary The Ascent of Man, a thirteen-episode series in which Dr Bronowski travelled far and wide tracing the historical relationship between science and society.
The Ascent of Man was a BBC/Time-Life co-production which complimented Kenneth Clarke’s earlier arts-oriented epic Civilization. It was apparently an inspiration for Carl Sagan’s later series Cosmos.
The following excerpt from The Ascent of Man is currently popular on YouTube. I have no clear memory of it from more than three decades ago, but it does seem vaguely familiar. It may well have been part of the input which helped fashion my opinions about World War Two during my formative years: a patchwork-quilt of information, mostly absorbed unnoticed via conversations, browsing books, magazines and newspapers or watching TV and movies.
In this clip, as the series reaches a crescendo, Bronowski speaks from Auschwitz. He bears grim witness to the death of four million inmates, including his own relatives. Brownowski says it is a case of science abandoned.
The first Auschwitz Plaque
At the time that The Ascent of Man was produced, the official plaque at the Auschwitz concentration camp stated that “four million people suffered and died here”.
Around 1990 this was replaced with a new plaque, which refers to the murder of “one and a falf million men, women and children, mainly Jews”. The discrepancy in the totals, to my knowledge, has not been officially explained and is rarely acknowledged. Before and after the change, self appointed guardians of historical orthodoxy have generally insisted that a grand total of six million Jews perished during the war.
The website Nizcor.org, which is dedicated to debunking what it describes as ‘Holocaust Denial’, has a webpage on the topic. It paraphrases an argument it says is used by ‘Deniers’: “Since the Auschwitz State Museum lowered its death toll to one million, the total number of Holocaust victims should be reduced by about three million.”
Nizcor rebuts that as follows: “… this is false. Few (if any) historians ever believed the Museum’s four million figure, having arrived at their own estimates independently“. Nizcor also claims: “In fact, to find many sources that do list four million dead, one has to find books published behin the iron curtain.”
If Nizcor is correct about this, how odd that Dr Bronowski, the BBC and Time-Life were all taken in by such a widely-discounted Soviet hoax!
Auschwitz Plaque post-1990
Jacob Bronowski died a year after The Ascent of Man crowned a brilliant career. It was a career that commenced with a PhD in mathematics at Cambridge in the mid-1930s. His literary output began in 1939 with a poetry book, followed by a discourse on William Blake published in 1943.
The website DrBronowski.com takes up the story (emphasis added): “his wartime work… began in 1942… he seems not to have been especially successful either at the Home Security Office, where he worked in the Military research unit under Sir Reginald Stradling, or in the unit run by J D Bernal. The government science adviser, Zuckerman, expressed his doubts about Bronowski’s suitability and competence for the work he was doing, which was in predicting the economic effects of bombing.”
Had he lived longer, would Jacob Bronowski have approved of the trend that accelerated following his death: the harrassment, jailing and all-round persecution of scientists and other intellectuals in western countries for posing unpopular questions about the history of World War Two?
Would Bronowski approve of the ‘Holocaust Gulag’?
Here’s the transcript of Bronowski at Auschwitz (emphases added):
Jacob Bronowski's Gravestone in Highgate Cemetry
That’s false, tragically false!
Look for yourself!
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers!
Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance; it was done by dogma; it was done by ignorance!
When people believe that they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of Gods!
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known. We always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal.
Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.
In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken”.
Leo Szilárd: Jewish scientist instrumental in the development of the Manhattan Project
I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilárd, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness.
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.
We have to close the distance between the push button order and the human act.
We have to touch people…
