Adolf Butenandt und die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft: Wissenschaft, Industrie und Politik im “Dritten Reich”

Edited by:
  • Wolfgang Schieder &
  • Achim Trunk
In German Wallstein: 2004. 456 pp. €34 3892447527 | ISBN: 3-892-44752-7
Top secret: Adolf Butenandt tried to destroy evidence of his research. Credit: ULLSTEIN BILD

Adolf Butenandt was the greatest non-Jewish German biochemist of the past century. In 1933, at just 30 years of age, he became a professor at the University of Danzig. At 33 he turned down an offer to become a professor at Harvard and accepted the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Biochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem, his predecessor, Carl Neuberg, having been sacked by the Nazis on account of his Jewish ancestors. Butenandt went on to receive a Nobel Prize in 1939 for his work on female sex hormones.

Together with Alfred Kühn, Butenandt solved the biochemical problem of the eye colour of mutant Ephestia moths, and convinced the chemical industry to finance his research. After the Second World War he became an influential figure in the Max Planck Society, which succeeded the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, serving as its president from 1960 to 1972. A biography of Butenandt by his former student Peter Karlson was published in 1990 but was little more than a hagiography: Butenandt was portrayed as being an immaculate scientist.

But in the records of the DFG, the country's main research funding agency, lurks another story, which came to light in 1983. The human geneticist Otmar von Verschuer told some colleagues in 1946 that his collaborator Josef Mengele had sent him 200 blood samples from the Auschwitz concentration camp, and that Günter Hillmann, who worked with Butenandt, helped with the analysis. Another of Butenandt's colleagues, Gerhard Ruhenstroth-Bauer, had meanwhile been helping Hans Nachtsheim to test children for epilepsy in a low-pressure chamber belonging to the Luftwaffe. During Butenandt's lifetime, the Max Planck Society turned a blind eye to these facts. But two years after Butenandt's death in 1995, Hubert Markl, the society's president at the time, set up an independent committee to investigate the society's past.

Butenandt had left his entire collection of papers to the society's archive, but stipulated that they remain closed to the public until 2025. Markl decided that this did not apply to members of the committee investigating the society's past. The first person granted access to the letters was science historian Robert Proctor. His findings, which appeared in 2000 as a preprint of the committee's report, were devastating. He revealed that von Verschuer had written to Butenandt disclosing that Hillmann was helping him to analyse the Auschwitz blood samples. Butenandt then asked Hillmann to destroy his (Butenandt's) documents marked “Geheime Reichssache” (top secret) before the Russians arrived. Hillmann arranged for them to be sent to Butenandt in Tübingen, but they then disappeared. We still do not know their secret.

The committee has now produced this book, edited by Wolfgang Schieder and Achim Trunk, which contains a dozen articles on various aspects of Butenandt's life. The committee is proud of the fact that it was written by historians, not scientists. Perhaps the most surprising aspect is that Proctor's article is not included. So what does the book tell us instead?

Schieder has written a piece about the best science in the Weimar Republic and the third Reich. He claims that Butenandt was a member of a nationalistic, anti-Semitic fraternity — he was no Nazi by ideology, but shared some of their views. Schieder's most startling discovery is that Butenandt was accepted as a Nazi party member on the same day in May 1936 that he was appointed as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm institute. Party membership was apparently the price he paid for the position.

Helga Satzinger writes about Butenandt's relationships with women. He accepted women in science only as technical assistants, and then only if they were single and attractive. He went on to marry his own technical assistant, who came from a high-class family, and they had seven children together. Butenandt never supported the two female professors in his faculty at the Kaiser Wilhelm institute.

A chapter by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger deals with Butenandt's work with Kühn. Amazingly, despite their collaboration, they did not publish a single paper together. Butenandt published his research with his postdocs, but never with equal partners — he wanted all the glory for himself.

Carola Sachse writes about Butenandt's friendship with von Verschuer. And Trunk provides a new suggestion about experiments that von Verschuer considered doing with the blood samples from Auschwitz. Trunk's proposition that von Verschuer was hoping to develop blood tests to identify different races, if true, makes his work even more sinister than was previously thought.

I think that a 450-page book about a great scientist should have at least one chapter dealing with his discoveries. What did he discover and when? Who with? What did he miss? There are a few answers here and there, but a single chapter would in my view have been a useful addition. Historians who believe that the content of science is a social construct may not mind, but scientists will.

I applaud the publication of this book, but am disappointed that it has been published only in German. Should the international community be denied the tale of this sad piece of history?