munich

German science suffered less damage during the Nazi era than has been commonly assumed, despite the forced exodus of Jewish researchers and some of the worst medical crimes ever reported, according to a controversial new book.

Author Notker Hammerstein, a respected professor of history at the University of Frankfurt, argues that only a few non-Jewish scientists felt threatened by the Nazis, despite the regime's anti-intellectualism. His book on the history of Germany's research council, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), The DFG under the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, was commissioned by the DFG.

Although all Jewish scientists were expelled from their university chairs as one of the earliest acts of the Nazi regime, the quality of research did not fall significantly behind other countries, Hammerstein claims.

He argues that the academic mainstream in Germany adjusted rapidly to the new political environment. Academics were mainly concerned to save or promote their own careers and disciplines. They failed to recognize that ‘normality’ served an illegitimate totalitarian system, he concludes.

Rudolf Mentzel, whose presidency effectively wiped out Germany's research council. Credit: MAX PLANCK SOCIETY

In 1933 the DFG was forced to abandon its founding principles, and peer review was replaced by favouritism and arbitrary decisions, says Hammerstein. When Rudolf Mentzel, a 36-year-old chemist, was made president in 1936, “the DFG basically stopped existing”.

But, given the extraordinary circumstances, Hammerstein finds that a relatively normal academic life was maintained at universities. Although Hitler and the Wehrmacht bosses had little interest in research, good science continued to get money. “Mentzel could not afford to fund only dead-losses and ideologists,” says Hammerstein.

The ideological blindness of some scientists was extreme. Physicists such as Mentzel's predecessor Johannes Stark, and Philipp Lenard — both Nobel prizewinners and convinced anti-Semites — proclaimed a vaguely romantic “German Physics”, which denied Einstein's “Jewish” theory of relativity.

Hammerstein's assessment has already been disputed. “The emigration of Jewish scientists led to a crucial decrease of Germany's intellectual competitiveness from which we still have not recovered completely,” says Ernst-Otto Fischer, who won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1970.

Ernst Klee, author of several books about medicine in the Nazi era, says that Hammerstein has downplayed the DFG's involvement in medical war crimes. After 1940, funding applications were approved for research that included lethal experiments on humans. The DFG also supported what it called research into “the genetic disposition of the offspring of vagabonds, robbers and gypsies”, but which historians believe was nothing more than a front for their extermination.

Hammerstein says that most DFG funds supported ‘normal’ research, unrelated to Nazi ideology, but Klee accuses him of simply trying to save the DFG embarrassment.

The book was commissioned in 1995 by former DFG president Wolfgang Frühwald to mark the research council's 75th anniversary. Frühwald said at the time that a critical assessment would be more appropriate than a “normal sort of celebration”.

Wolfgang Schieder, a professor of history at the University of Cologne and an expert on fascism, defends Hammerstein. Sensitivity to Nazi issues, he says, often causes emotional reactions: “It is much easier to write about an eighteenth century problem.”

The Max Planck Society (MPS), Germany's main non-university research organization, is also confronting its Nazi past. A five-year research programme by non-MPS scientists will examine the history of its pre-1945 predecessor, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. It was launched this month with an international meeting in Berlin on science during the Nazi era.