Hitler's Scientists: Science, War and the Devil's Pact

  • John Cornwell
Viking: 2003. 544 pp. £20, $29.95
Credit: AL GRANT

Adolf Hitler's ignorance about science and its utility during the early years of the Third Reich have become part of legends passed down by scientists and administrators for the next generation. The most-often repeated anecdotes involve Hitler's meetings with Max Planck, Nobel prizewinner and science administrator, and Albert Speer, Hitler's armaments minister. According to Planck, when he tried to persuade Hitler that doing away with Jewish scientists might be harmful, Hitler reportedly dismissed the idea saying: “So we'll do without science for a few years.” Even during the Second World War, when leaders had begun to see the utility of science for the war effort, Speer related in his postwar memoirs that the concept of the atomic bomb “strained Hitler's intellectual capacity”.

The title of this book implies that Hitler had a stable of scientists who worked under his direction. This was not the case, but many scientists, physicians and engineers who worked in National Socialist Germany researched areas that supported National Socialist ideology. Others just happened to live and work there. To a certain extent, then, Cornwell distances himself from the Hitler leadership myth and acknowledges the existence of a “polycratic” regime run by competing Nazi institutions such as the army or civil service.

Cornwell, an author and journalist, is known for his best-selling book Hitler's Pope, which is based on archival research. But he admits that Hitler's Scientists is not based on original material. Instead, he has drawn together a history of German science in the first half of the twentieth century, concentrating on the Third Reich from a wide reading of secondary sources.

The time is ripe for this book. Over the past 30 years, historians have unearthed new material and provided fresh interpretations on topics such as Fritz Haber — chemical warfare pioneer, Nobel prizewinner and Jew — racial hygiene, medicine, physics, the German atomic bomb, rocket science and the leading German scientific institution, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. But this is the first book to pull these themes together.

Cornwell has written an engaging synthesis of the original research: articulate and intelligent, with an eye for telling detail or anecdote. His lively account is also a damning indictment: many scientists come across as depraved, amoral nerds who were willing to serve any regime if they got paid for it. Cornwell unearthed a quotation from Wernher von Braun, designer of the German V-2 'flying bomb' who went on to direct NASA's Apollo programme, illustrating that “he did not care if he worked for Uncle Joe or Uncle Sam: 'All I really wanted was an uncle who was rich'.”

Even though much of the book relies on previous work, Cornwell puts his own stamp on the literature and sometimes tells the story better than the specialists. There are also some refreshing new slants: most of the recent academic literature ignores decisively important areas for the war effort such as radar, submarines and codes.

Despite his familiarity with the recent literature, which usually provides a more nuanced account of science in the Third Reich than the contemporaneous reports and early postwar histories, Cornwell sometimes reverts back to the tone and interpretation of those earlier accounts. The author tasted the flavour of the world's attitude towards the Germans when he was a child growing up in England. He states that an aphorism that echoed through his boyhood and youth was: “The only good German is a dead German.” Others saw something “congenitally malevolent about German people”. Some of this anti-German attitude has remained in his psyche and surfaces from time to time in the book, even though he engages the newer interpretations. According to Cornwell, no scientist who worked in Nazi Germany is exempt from blame; even an academic scientist working on the purest research is guilty by association. Cornwell, however, wants all scientists to have a conscience, not just those who worked during the Nazi period.

Cornwell extends his period to reflect on the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and technology, and adds material that seems over-detailed and tangential. But like other recent books on science under the Nazis, the real story begins a century earlier. The first quarter of the book describes Germany in the early twentieth century as a scientific mecca, with scientists such as Haber developing poison gas for the fatherland. The science of eugenics, later so important to the Nazis, was also born in this era. Others have written about how science “survived the swastika”, but Cornwell emphasizes the strain of the Weimar period, when Germany was under the yoke of the Versailles Treaty and suffered because of the resulting economic problems. Science flourished there nevertheless.

The more sensational topics, such as medical experiments and slave labour, receive the most attention. There is one chapter on sciences that flourished under the Nazis, which includes a summary of Robert Proctor's book The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton University Press, 1999). But Cornwell ignores the literature that demonstrates that basic biological research also survived and thrived; he thinks it just stagnated. He also fails to mention the anomaly that three Nobel prizes were awarded to scientists of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the 1930s and 1940s for work they did during the Nazi period: Richard Kuhn in 1938 for his work on carotenoids and vitamins; Adolf Butenandt in 1939 for his work on sex hormones; and Otto Hahn in 1944 for his 1938 discovery of nuclear fission. He does, however, add some original research and comments to the controversy surrounding Werner Heisenberg's visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen.

Even if Hitler's Scientists is not based on original research and not all scientists belonged to Hitler, it is a useful compilation for readers who would like just one volume on science under the Nazis.