Does science cause fascism?

    At a recent presentation pertaining to science and the Nazi era, the speaker suggested Nazi was the by-product of the scientific enterprise.  Needless to say, the author was a postmodernist.  Why postmodernists have such a hatred of science is beyond me, but the clear intention to degrade the social status of science by associating it with one of the most notorious incidents in modern history is a troubling phenomenon.  Not only was there an association, but rather the strong suggestion that it actually caused the horrific atrocities.  Was the speaker right?   Does science necessarily lead to fascism?  Clearly it does not.  One may point out the obvious: the Allied forces themselves were also driven by science, and had not established the repressive domestic regimes which led to the jewish Holocaust.  One may also point out that atrocities have occured all throughout history, including the history prior to the emergence of modern science. A more nuanced analysis would have peered into the German psyche rather than science as a phenomenon per se.  To gain an impression of its character, one may point to Gifford Pinchot's comments at the beginning of the twentieth century regarding the extension of forestry science to the United States. Pinchot, during his year-long travel throughout Europe, realized that North America would have to develop its own type of forestry.  The german model would not work given the submissive non-independent character of subalterns in the system; Americans, according to Pinchot, were simply too individualistic and rebellious.   This 'domesticity' trait obviously contributed more to the existence of german nazism, which was basically a top-driven social system requiring acquiescence throughout its various social strata--the same reason for which horses are domesticable but zebras are not.  Nonetheless, the principal error the author committed was simply one of determinism--attributing all cause to a particular structure, thereby obviating a detailed analysis of how that structure actually came to be.  The author had obviated the necessity of writing history.