Auschwitz and the wisdom of crowds

The vast majority of those killed at the Auschwitz complex, which consisted of three camps, were murdered simply because they were Jews.

Auschwitz accounted for the deaths of more than 1.1 million prisoners. Ninety percent of these were Jewish. One in six of all Jewish people killed in the Holocaust died at this complex.

By 1945 two out of every three of the nine million European Jews had been killed.

While the gas chambers accounted for most of the deaths, many people died of starvation, infectious diseases, the effects of forced labour and the camps' infamous "medical" experiments.

Though the Nazis carried it to its "logical" conclusion in an especially ruthless fashion, anti-Semitism was not peculiar to their particular party line.

Indeed, in the early twentieth century, eugenics itself was considered by many in academia and polite society to be a bona fide subject for scientific debate and exploration.

Perhaps not surprisingly, anti-Jewish sentiment also ran high in the corridors of some major universities, in Britain and the USA.

In the postscript to his novel Pantheon, Sam Bourne (aka journalist Jonathan Freedland) notes how US Ivy League colleges were involved with a practice known as "posture photography".

This involved taking official snaps of students in the nude with the aim – unbeknown to the students – of establishing a link between physical prowess and superior intellectual ability.

The practice was fuelled by a desire to prove the benefits of eugenics as a form of social engineering.

No less eminent thinkers than George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and the economist John Maynard Keynes were drawn to eugenics. For them it represented the best hope of preserving the best of humanity as it underwent what they saw as its inevitable evolution.

It is probably true to say that many, if not most, of those supporting the principle of eugenics at that time would have been horrified by anything approaching Hitler's "final solution".