Hitler’s Scientists

Introduction: Understanding the Germans

I have an early impression of my father holding me up to glimpse a black growling angel trailing fire in the moonlit sky across London: it was a V1 – a long-range pilotless ‘pulse-jet’ flying bomb, what today we would call a cruise missile. It was early summer of 1944 when the V1 rockets, known to Londoners as doodlebugs and flying bombs, first dived on the capital, ripping through buildings and shattering windows for hundreds of yards around. They made a hideous sound not unlike a powerful, faltering motor bike with a broken exhaust; when the engine cut out, people braced themselves for the explosion that would follow within about twelve seconds. Later came the V2s, ballistic missiles, more menacing because they hurtled through the stratosphere silently, carrying a larger warhead. It was possible to hear the whoosh and thunder of their supersonic atmospheric entry after the explosion on the ground. On the way back from primary school on the bus with my mother, I saw the devastation caused by a V2 rocket that landed on the borders of Wanstead and Woodford in the eastern suburbs of London. The missile had laid waste several acres of woodland and made an immense crater. A woman had been walking her baby, and the pram still hung high from the branch of a tree. Mother and child, and several other hapless pedestrians, had been killed outright.

For a boy born in London in May of 1940, conceived in the month when Britain declared war against Germany, it was as if the war had always been and always would be. War for a child was a permanent, puzzling crisis, as well as an occasional adventure: the race to the corrugated iron shelter when the sirens started up their melancholy chorus; finding silvery shards of shrapnel in the streets the morning after an air raid; gazing up at glittering barrage balloons which blotted out the sun like sailing whales. War for our parents and elder siblings was the devastation of the Blitz (which left 43,000 British civilians dead); the news of military casualties on land, sea and in the air; nights spent underground. We grew up associating these terrors and miseries with Germany and the German people; and, understandably, we saw the war with Hitler as our war.

In the summer of 1945 my mother took me to see German prisoners of war interned behind barbed wire at a transit camp on the Wanstead Flats, an expanse of parkland close to where we lived. They were lounging around, sun-tanned and relaxed; some wore gay kerchiefs around their necks, dark glasses and field grey forage caps at jaunty angles. One of them winked at me and pulled a funny face. It was hard to demonize Hitler’s fighting men in quite the same way after seeing them in the flesh. Yet, even after the war had ended, and the Victory party bunting had been taken down, the impression that there was something congenitally malevolent about German people persisted, exacerbated and deepened by a growing conversational acquaintance with an older generation that had fought in the Great War. My grandfather kept used brass shells from that conflict over the fire place and would take them down and polish them every day of his life. He talked of the days before the Great War when Germany’s navy was building battleships to threaten the Royal Navy. He spoke with awe of the vast stacks of German goods ‘dumped’ on the docksides of London, flooding England with cheap manufactured consumer products. There was a connection, he told me, between those battleships, and the stacks of cheap German goods – toys, tools, pens, kitchen utensils, lamps, scissors, sewing machines, typewriters – and the stacks of bodies heaped up behind the trenches. ‘The Germans,’ he used to say, ‘were too clever and too wicked by half.’ The remark anticipated another aphorism that echoed through my boyhood and youth: ‘The only good German is a dead German.’

German Science

Can we by studying the history of science in Germany in the first half of the last century draw significant conclusions about the relationship between science and the good society? Does doing science make human beings more rational, sceptical, internationalist, objective? And do we expect science to flourish better, and the discoveries of scientists to be used more responsibly and ethically, under democracies than under dictatorships?

Exploring the story of the German science communities during a period that spans two world wars is an essential part of attempting to understand the nature of science and the conduct of scientists in the twentieth and the new century. Recounting the drama of ideas and discoveries, probing the behaviour of Germany’s researchers – towards their disciplines, towards their governments and regimes, towards their fellow human beings – cannot be separated from the task of understanding science and technology and its impact on all of us since World War II.

This chronicle of German ‘science’, a word I frequently use in this narrative to include the natural sciences, medicine and technology, where the range of categories is implied, is written against the background of the current war on terror, the enlargement of the European Union and the ever-growing importance of Germany. Today, Germany, split for almost half a century, is assuming an increasingly powerful role at the centre of a Europe that stretches from the Atlantic to the borders of Russia and from the North Sea to the Aegean.

Understanding German science, however, is fraught with pitfalls, since the victors of the last war have tended to see themselves, understandably, in morally superior contrast to things German.

The indebtedness of Europe and North America to German influence – before the impact of Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler – has been powerful, complex and often ambivalent. The German term for science, Wissenschaft, incorporated traditionally a huge circuit of intellectual disciplines in which the German-speaking peoples, never forgetting Austria, excelled, and often took the lead, including history, literary and scriptural criticism, philosophy, theology and psychology, with far-reaching influences on Western thought. The roll-call of sublime genius – Bach, Goethe, Beethoven, Kant – was succeeded, beyond Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Frege, by the protean influences of Marx and Nietszche, thinkers fatally appropriated by the founders of Soviet communism and fascism. The early part of the twentieth century saw the dynamic influence of Max Weber in the social sciences, Ludwig Wittgenstein in philosophy, the unsettling impact of Freud, Adler and Jung, and the seminal if baleful musings of Martin Heidegger, who anticipated existentialism and the deconstructions that drove much of French post-war critical thought – Sartre, Ricoeur, Derrida.

Meanwhile, existing for the most part in philosophical and political limbo, while giving impetus to new technologies with the power to transform the world, the success of the natural and medical sciences in Germany was, before 1933, prodigious: Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen, discoverer of X-rays; Fritz Haber, who fixed nitrogen from the air; David Hilbert, who set for the world’s mathematicians sufficient tasks to keep them busy for a century; Max Planck, a founding father of quantum theory; Albert Einstein and his epoch-making theories of relativity; Werner Heisenberg and quantum mechanics. After more than half a century in which Germany built an unrivalled power-house of chemistry, organic, inorganic and industrial, German nationals, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, walked away with more than half the Nobel awards in every discipline of the natural sciences and medicine. In the meantime, a constituency of biologists and anthropologists had claimed that populations, society and history could be explained by a historico-biological theory of race, as spurious as it was menacing. Thus Darwin’s and Mendel’s explicators were appropriated by Ernst Haeckel and H. F. K. Günther, who in turn spawned ideas that were used to justify Hitler’s anti-Semitism and so-called racial hygiene.

Rediscovering what we nevertheless owe, and therefore share, with Germany is an essential part of understanding some of the leading ideas we have employed to understand ourselves and the nature of the world through the twentieth century. Germany’s decisive contributions to the natural sciences have been a crucial part of that process.

My generation, however, growing up in Britain in the immediate post-war era routinely characterized German science as Nazi science: at best, brutally efficient and militarized – the Blitzkrieg combination of Stuka dive-bombers, Panzer tanks and motorized infantry; the V1 and the V2 rockets, and U-boats – at worst, monstrously sadistic – experimentation on humans in the death camps. As late as the early 1960s the German scientist was still depicted in popular film culture as Peter Sellers’s Doctor Strangelove.

In contrast, Britain’s scientists, who led the scientific war against Hitler until America joined the conflict in 1942, were characterized in a gamut of movies, documentaries and popular war histories as ingenious boffins, effortlessly superior, and modest with it - eccentric civilians in threadbare tweed jackets creating wizardry like radar out of sheer native brilliance in the garden sheds of England. We were at our most offensive when Barnes Wallis invented his bouncing bombs to breach Germany’s hydro-electric dams on the Ruhr. ‘Bomber’ Harris’s ‘area bombing’ was portrayed as a strategic necessity. The story of British participation in the creation of the atom bomb, which Germany had failed to achieve, was not a celebrated chronicle, except to hammer home the point of failed Nazi science. Naturally, we assumed, the Nazis would have dropped an atom bomb on us if they had managed to create one.

Through the 1950s questions were increasingly raised about the political and moral dimensions of the science of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The debate continues to this day.

In time my generation, who were students in the late 1950s and early 1960s, came to ponder, and debate, the details of the British night raids on the civilian populations of Dresden, Hamburg, Lübeck and other German towns and cities. There was the exploitation of technology in a carefully judged combination of pressure and phosphorus bombs to create firestorms that incinerated hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children in order to break German morale as much as to hit industrial targets. There were the careful inquiries by RAF bombing experts of specialists like the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner about ancient buildings: not to preserve such structures, but to discover their combustible properties. The RAF raids on Hamburg which began on the night of 24 July 1943, known as Operation Gomorrah, culminated in an inferno four nights later – a fireball that surged two kilometres into the night sky, imploding oxygen and raising furious wind storms strong enough to uproot trees. Sugar boiled in cellars, glass melted and people were sucked down into the asphalt on the streets. On that one night an estimated total of 45,000 Germans died compared with a similar number killed in Britain during the course of the entire war. German estimates of civilians killed by Allied bombing of cities and towns in the Reich are 450,000 killed and 600,000 injured. It took another generation of Germans to speak loudly and clearly about the horrors that had been visited on their population.¹

By 1962 my generation had shared the eyeball-to-eyeball terror of the Cuban missile crisis and taken views on the nuclear arms race, the doctrine of tactical nuclear weapons as a response to a conventional Soviet invasion of West Europe. We had learned of the global effects of radioactive contamination from nuclear weapons testing, both East and West. By the 1970s we were learning about the indiscriminate and long-term effects of anti-plant agents and napalm in Vietnam. It is estimated that the United States was responsible for the destruction of some 30 per cent per year of food production in Vietnam in the course of a decade.²

Meanwhile, historians had long since taken a more detached and considered view of the imperial rivalries that prompted World War I, and the effect of the Versailles Treaty on the upheavals in Germany of the Weimar period that contributed to the growth of National Socialism. By the 1980s, as cruise missiles were shipped to West Europe and Ronald Reagan planned his Star Wars initiative, it was possible to disengage from the stark contrast between German or Soviet military science and military science under the auspices of the democracies. While bearing in mind the unique deeds of Nazism and its historical contexts – how can one forget them? – it was possible to rethink the political history of scientists under Hitler not just as Nazi or German scientists, but as scientists.

Science under Hitler

No account of scientists under the Nazis can be understood in the absence of the narrative that forms the first part of this book: the growth and success of the natural sciences, medicine, mathematics and technology in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Germany had become the international Mecca of science. Researchers, basic and applied, flocked to German universities from all over the world; learned German to read the leading science journals and to participate in conferences and seminars. Germany was well placed to take a leading role in the development of a new physics that would transform the technology of the century, involving from the outset Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, German-speakers all, alongside scientists from Denmark, the Netherlands, France and Britain. In turn, the new physics led to quantum mechanics and, ultimately, to nuclear physics, the science of the atom and the hydrogen bomb.

Yet by the beginning of World War I the reputation of Germany’s scientists had been tarnished in the eyes of its Western enemies. Germany was the first to torpedo a civilian ocean liner (even the great German novelist Thomas Mann rejoiced in the wondrous display of technology employed against the Lusitania). A year into the war, a large constituency of German scientists along with academics and intellectuals declared their subservience to the state and to the military. In April 1915, moreover, one of Germany’s most distinguished scientists, Fritz Haber, encouraged the army to use poison gas against the Allies, and provided the means to make it a reality. Germany’s scientists readily turned over their civilian science institutions, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, to poison gas research. Were these cases of Germans behaving according to type as Germans? Or scientists in Germany behaving according to type as scientists?

In the post-war era, despite lack of funding, boycotts on the part of the victorious nations and political and economic upheavals, science continued to prosper in Germany. The Weimar period saw remarkable developments in the new physics and collaboration with scientists from many nations. There were other, darker developments in the scientific milieu: an increase in antagonism towards the work of Jewish scientists and the growth of ‘racial hygiene’ encouraged by distorted versions of medicine, anthropology and evolutionary theory. But victimization of Jews within scientific communities occurred also in France, Britain and the United States.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, science, medicine and technology were pressed into the service of the new regime. The Third Reich called for a spirit of Gleichschaltung (marching in step): all the resources of the new regime were to work in coordination. Education, the media, psychology and communications were adapted to serve Nazi ideology in order to channel and shape public opinion in the National Socialist ‘revolution’. Scientists, with remarkably few exceptions, speedily acquiesced under those pressures. As the historian Joseph Haberer puts it, the scientific leadership engaged in ‘expediency and compliance’ and colluded with ‘victimization of members of the community’.³ Yet some groups – notably doctors and anthropologists – not only acquiesced but took a lead in promoting racist policies, and, in some cases, one segment of the scientific community oppressed and coerced another: experimental physics, in the view of some influential Nazi scientists, was more authentic than theoretical physics, which was deemed to be ‘Jewish’.

Hannah Arendt expounded famously in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961) her thesis of ‘the banality of evil’: the proposition that evil in the Third Reich arose out of the class of banal, amoral bureaucrats. Arendt’s perspective has been deepened, and at the same time challenged, by more recent insights and interpretations, shedding light on the behaviour of scientists, medical doctors and engineers in the Third Reich. One perspective argues that despite the apparent rhetoric of conformity in the Gleichschaltung, the inchoate nature of Nazi programmes encouraged forms of ‘auto-coordination’. The circumstance was augmented by the fear that hovered continually on the edge of each individual’s consciousness ‘by encouraging doubt over not belonging to a compelling movement of fellow citizens’.⁴ At the same time, and by no means contradictory to such a thesis, Michael Wildt’s study of what he terms the ‘generation of the unbound’ points to the careers of those who suddenly prospered after Hitler’s rise to power, and who, with the outbreak of war, saw no limit to their scope of action.⁵ Such a diagnosis may better explain a Wernher von Braun, and the ease with which he exploited slave labour, than Arendt’s analysis.

Nazi propaganda gave an impression of technocratic modernity matched with a restored and bracing naturalism – exercise, healthy living and outdoor pursuits. The making of the Volkswagen, the people’s car, and the great autobahns (known as ‘Adolf Hitler’s roads’) were symbols of a modernizing nation state, signalling, in the propaganda of the time, a marriage between motorized transport for all and the beauty and freedom of the landscapes of the Fatherland. Fritz Todt, who was in charge of the project, accepted the call for landscaped highways as crucial to the new Deutsche Technik, which transcended selfish, consumerist, profit-orientated capitalist motives. The pretensions to modernity were superficial; Nazi technocracy was seldom unmixed with mawkishly bucolic dimensions.

The rallies, using searchlight sky patterns; the clean lines of the new Berlin stadium for the 1936 Olympics; the neo-classical Nazi pavilion (designed by Albert Speer) out-frowning the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris; the emphasis on callisthenics and health programmes – like the Nazi anti-smoking, anti-drinking campaigns – all reinforced the bracing, clear-eyed image of Deutsche Technik to the outside world. Communications and new media, including the first use of magnetic tape (to record Hitler’s voice for posterity) and television (to broadcast the Berlin Olympics), flourished.

The veneer of modernization, however, did not indicate the flowering of a technocratic state, nor an ideal world for any form of intellectual endeavour, as the dismissals of Jewish researchers and the bonfires of books on 12 May, 1934 amply demonstrated. Basic science, deprived of many leading researchers, and oppressed from within and without by ideological pressures, did not entirely collapse, but neither did it thrive.⁶ As for applied science, technology and medicine, attempts on the part of certain groups to politicize science, creating such movements as German physics, a German biology and even a German mathematics, marked an era of division and decline, while the competition between overlapping power centres of industry, the SS, the armed forces, the civil service would result in prodigious waste and ineptitude. The Third Reich saw the misuse and misapplication of innovation, loss of freedom and diversity, neglect and decline in some branches of the natural sciences, physics in particular, and marking of time in others.

The strongest science-based imagery within the Nazi Weltanschauung was a bogus borrowing from anatomy, with an ominous continuity between the symbolic and the real – the body politic expelling the unwanted pathogen. The pseudo-scientific vision of National Socialist Germany was of a racially hygienic ‘body’, invoking the researchers and data of an expanding community of doctors, anthropologists and eugenicists. In the first wave of anti-Semitic measures hundreds of scientists were dismissed – expelled as if they were germs rejected by the body’s immune system. A generation of researchers faced the choice of condoning racist legislation or leaving Germany: they acquiesced. It would not be long before the ideologues of racial hygiene promoted sterilization and ‘euthanasia’ – the elimination of ‘lives not worth living’.

As the provisions of the Versailles Treaty were broken one by one, and Germany rearmed, powerful traditions of engineering and inventiveness gave the new Reich many apparent advantages in military applications, raising the familiar wartime spectres of science and technology as Pandora’s Box and Faustian bargain. In the 1930s and through the war German scientists and engineers developed an impressive list of innovations: proximity fuses, infra-red night sights, jet engines, radar, mechanical encryption, synthetic fuels, synthetic rubber, ballistic missiles, the snorkel and hydrogen-peroxide assisted submarines. From 1939 to the war’s end, scientists working under military control began research on nuclear chain reaction with the prospect of arming Hitler with an atomic bomb. In most of these activities, and especially missile research, development and production, exorbitantly resourced high-tech rational methods were employed for irrational goals. By 1943, however, and after years of selective suspension of the rule of law, few areas of science, technology, medicine and industry had not been tainted by brutality, slave labour, torture, human experiment without consent and casual murder.

Was the science of the Third Reich, oppressed by totalitarianism, secrecy, wasteful overlap and racist exclusions, therefore doomed to failure? Could this poisoned tree not bear the occasional good fruit? In recent years, historians have claimed, without attenuating their indictments of atrocious Nazi experimental research, that some areas of science flourished under National Socialism – for example, the regime’s war against cancer which saw pioneering epidemiological research of the highest quality.

But is there a clear demarcation – a discontinuity – where Nazi science starts and ends? Historians are revising their views. There was an assumption at the end of World War II that the dark shadow cast over Germany’s science during the period of the Third Reich was no more; that following the punishment of guilty individuals at the Nuremberg Trials, and the restoration of democracy, West Germany’s scientists made a fresh start. Historians of science, however, have brought to our attention more recently the issue, formerly taboo in German historical circles, of ‘fellow travelling’, arguing, even, that fellow travellers did more damage than card-carrying Nazi scientists, since they failed to challenge the consciences of the uncertain and the fence-sitters. According to this argument, the majority of Germany’s scientists carried a burden of guilt beyond the war’s end. Some critiques take the argument further, claiming that the taint was inherited in the West, as in the Soviet Union, through the scientific plunder carried out by the Allies after the war, in particular the evacuation of the Peenemünde team of rocketeers under Wernher von Braun, which had exploited slave labour. By the same token, the history of West Germany’s economic miracle, the zero hour growth of its industries under democracy, has been revised, especially in relation to companies like Mercedes Benz which switched speedily from war production to domestic products. In the words of Chris Keller in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, ‘what you have is really loot, and there’s blood on it’.

Science and Individual Conscience

Beyond all the collective political and moral issues, there are instructive matters of individual conscience and behaviour. A case in point is the head of the German atomic research project, Werner Heisenberg. Did he deliberately impede progress on a German atom bomb? Or did he simply fail through inadequate physics, then claim a retrospective moral superiority after the war for not succeeding? Whatever the case of his intentions, heroic or hypocritical, it is clear that the failure of the German atomic bomb was due at least in part to a reluctance on Heisenberg’s part to take responsibility for pressing for the priority of a highly speculative venture that would put an unbearable strain on Germany’s resources. That, as some historians have noted, was a pragmatic rather than a moral decision.

The significance of Heisenberg’s story, however, is its relevance to the question: how should any scientist behave when drawn into involvement with weapons of mass destruction? The issue was highlighted by the best-selling book by Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, first published in English in 1957, which suggested that Heisenberg and his colleagues may have behaved more morally than those scientists, many of them Jewish émigrés, who had worked on the Allied bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ‘It seems paradoxical that the German nuclear physicists, living under a sabre-rattling dictatorship,’ wrote Jungk, ‘obeyed the voice of conscience and attempted to prevent the construction of atom bombs, while their professional colleagues in the democracies, who had no coercion to fear, with very few exceptions, concentrated their whole energies on production of the new weapon!’⁷ The view, which caused consternation and indignation for another forty years (although Jungk eventually recanted his verdict), was given a further boost in 1993 by Thomas Powers’s Heisenberg’s War. Powers’s conclusion at the end of a 500-page book was that:

from the first weeks of the war until the last, Heisenberg was at the very heart of the German bomb programme; no physicist enjoyed greater respect from his colleagues or greater trust by the authorities. These considerations, taken as whole, lead me to conclude that Heisenberg consciously did what he could to ensure that there would be no ambitious German effort to develop atomic bombs.⁸

It was the apparently imponderable nature of Heisenberg’s true intentions that prompted Michael Frayn, in his play Copenhagen, to draw a parallel between Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum physics and the uncertainties of history and biography. For the historian, however, Heisenberg’s story demonstrates the importance of evidence in understanding the behaviour of scientists faced with extraordinary dilemmas and choices in the midst of war. In recent years the publication of the Farm Hall tapes – records of the conversations between detained German physicists, including Heisenberg, at the end of the war – have done much to dispel the ‘uncertainty’ that once shrouded the truth about Heisenberg’s state of mind and the German atomic bomb programme. The status of that evidence, along with recently released letters of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, with whom Heisenberg had a wartime meeting in Copenhagen, forms a concluding chapter of this narrative.

Ethics and Science

One of the toughest criticisms Michael Frayn encountered in the aftermath of his play was the charge that it exhibits a fashionable moral relativism. Some critics complained that by giving the audience a variety of versions of Heisenberg’s thoughts and motivations, Frayn appeared to be saying that it is impossible to arrive at a final judgment on Heisenberg’s intentions and behaviour. Frayn denies the charge.

On the face of it, scientists are no different from other human beings caught in complex moral dilemmas. But there is a problem. Scientists themselves frequently claim that basic science is morally and culturally neutral. At the level of molecules and particles, they argue, there are no ethics, no politics, no culture: water boils at the same temperature in Peking as it does in Berlin. Real scientists, basic scientists, they argue, generate knowledge; technologists, industry, governments apply it. Basic research under Hitler, according to this view, is the same as research under any other government or regime.

In Britain, for example, the one-time chairman of the Committee for Public Understanding of Science, Professor Lewis Wolpert, writes: ‘It is not for scientists to take moral or ethical decisions on their own: they have neither the right nor any special skills in this area. There is, in fact, a great danger in asking scientists to be more socially responsible.’⁹

How does this view operate applied, for example, to those German academic researchers during the war who were involved in exploiting data provided by human experiments in the death camps? As Joseph Rotblat puts it: ‘A scientist is a human being first, and a scientist second.’ A clear example of the depraved values of Wernher von Braun’s version of value-free science was a remark he made after the war: that he did not care whether he worked for Uncle Joe or Uncle Sam: ‘all I really wanted was an uncle who was rich’.¹⁰

In a history of the behaviour of scientists in wartime, moral judgments are inescapable. Overall I have been inclined in this narrative to adopt a utilitarian approach, judging the actions of scientists by the known, or at least probable, consequences of their discoveries and published knowledge. Focusing exclusively on consequences, however, may nevertheless fail to resolve the complexity of choices that scientists routinely face. Integrity for a scientist is not confined to choices made in isolation, socially and in time, but involves choices that affect the conduct of a scientist’s entire life project. A moral life involves a committed pattern of behaviour, beliefs and principles, leading to feelings and convictions of self-respect. In other words, how does a scientist look himself, or herself, in the mirror every morning?

How, moreover, do scientists behave, as members of a community of specialists? In the course of this narrative we constantly encounter the pressures and demands that are special to scientific disciplines, forming the context in which scientists struggle to attain integrity. Being a scientist involves an unusual degree of competition: for funding, academic and professional recognition, employment, promotion, publication. Competition to be first with a discovery, or publication, is uppermost in a scientist’s mind.

The loyalties of scientists are multi-layered and frequently in conflict – between family, institution, discipline, nation. Scientists are unusually dependent, compared with artists, writers or composers, say. They are dependent on superiors, patrons, fund-holders, paymasters of every kind.

Scientists, moreover, are constrained by high standards of intellectual integrity, strict codes of procedure in constructing experiments, devising research programmes, collecting data, reporting results. They inhabit a social framework which obliges them to cite, acknowledge, assess and endorse the work of colleagues.

Under the Third Reich, the pressures of competition, dependence and maintenance of standards were increased and exacerbated often to an unbearable degree by a regime determined to exploit every aspect of science and education to its own ends. At the same time, academic and professional integrity were distorted and corrupted by the need to survive, by the desire, in some cases, to thrive, under a depraved regime in which many norms of law – the treatment of ‘lives not worth living’, for example – had been suspended. At every stage of this narrative we shall see the presence of pressures, temptations and compromises, involving spouses, families, fear of loss of opportunity to do science; desire to receive credit, recognition, resources; conflicting loyalties, towards academic discipline, colleagues, institutions, student bodies and Fatherland. The choices made by scientists, moreover, had consequences not only for the circumstances of the moment but also for their ‘projects’ as integrated human beings and the morale of their milieu. These are the moral dilemmas ‘internal’ to their practice. But what of the extrinsic or external moral dilemmas?

Science and Democracy

There is a widespread view, first promoted by the Western Allies in the early stages of World War II, that science reaffirms the values of Western liberal democracy. At first sight the notion of a symbiosis between science and democracy presents a powerful alternative view to the ‘irresponsible purity’ endorsed by many scientists under the Third Reich. The danger is, however, that scientists working within more or less democratic societies are inclined to abdicate responsibility by assuming that their democratically elected leaders know what is best.

To assume that more or less democratic governments have tended to behave with integrity in the funding, administration and application of science and technology is naive, as the final chapters of this book will seek to demonstrate. Free and well-ordered science, albeit under the auspices of democracy, hardly made a return to the ideals of freedom and diversity in the post-war era, when East and West opposed each other in a climate of secrecy, suspicion, a nuclear missile arms race and the wholesale militarization of science, aided and abetted by industry and the universities. Nor have we seen since 1989 the emergence of a golden age for science as a post-Cold War peace dividend. Today, fourteen years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, we face alarming trends in the new era of biotechnology and genetics, the continuing pollution of the planet, new generations of nuclear weapons for pre-emptive use rather than deterrence, a multi-trillion-dollar strategic missile ‘shield’ and increasing incursions on civil liberties in the global war against terrorism.

Challenges to well-ordered science, responsive and responsible to society in an environment of democracy, include the collapse of ideals of free access to information, the spread of intellectual property ownership in the interests of profit rather than freedom of knowledge, the aggressive patenting of nature, attempts to break morally accepted guidelines on the exploitation of human embryos and cloning, continued abuse of the global environment and ecology, the further impoverishment of the developing world, continued research into biochemical weapons.

Scientists cannot ignore the auspices under which they work and receive funding, nor relax their moral and political vigilance, even if they believe that a democracy is the best of all possible worlds for the conduct of science. Pondering, as this book does in its frankly historicist conclusion, the moral and political predicament of scientists today, in the light of Germany’s scientific prostitutions in the first half of the twentieth century, prompts not only contrasts and parallels with the past but consciousness of present and future danger.

John Cornwell