Sir

Alison Abbott reports on the Max Planck Society's recent efforts to shed light on its history, as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, during the Third Reich (Nature 403, 474– 475; 2000). This attempt is all the more important as investigations in the past encountered some reserve, whereas new information is now available and a new generation of science historians is examining the past, supposedly without any preconceptions.

However, the example of Hans Stubbe, first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Cultivated Plant Research (established near Vienna in 1943 and built up after the war at Gatersleben in East Germany) raises doubts as to the investigators' impartiality. Portraying Stubbe as “an opportunist, ruthlessly following any path that would help him to advance his research and career” and saying that he “collaborated with the SS to plunder valuable Russian collections of wild and cultivated plants” is unjustified.

The Russians themselves judged differently, since Stubbe received their backing to build the institute at Gatersleben and was highly honoured by the Soviet Union in spite of being an outspoken opponent of Lysenkoism — an intervention that saved East German genetics from the damage inflicted in other Eastern bloc countries. Contemporaries know that Stubbe protected several colleagues who faced difficulties with the Nazi or the East German system and enabled them to continue their work. He had himself been expelled from the KWI in 1936 for political reasons.

We can only beg those historians who never experienced a totalitarian regime to avoid hasty moral judgements and not to base their conclusions on what Jens Jessen has described in the German newspaper Die Zeit as “moral maximalism”, without any feeling for the unavoidable entanglement in guilt and the tragedy always involved in making any significant decision within a totalitarian system. We need a careful documentation of all the historical facts, but we can also ask that people be judged within the historical context in which they lived and worked.