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

John Cornwell (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 13, 2003

When Hitler came to power in the 1930s, Germany had led the world in science, mathematics, and technology for nearly four decades. But while the fact that Hitler swiftly pressed Germany's scientific prowess into the service of a brutal, racist, xenophobic ideology is well known, few realize that German scientists had knowingly broken international agreements and basic codes of morality to fashion deadly weapons even before World War I. In Hitler's Scientists, British historian John Cornwell explores German scientific genius in the first half of the twentieth century and shows how Germany's early lead in the new physics led to the discovery of atomic fission, which in turn led the way to the atom bomb, and how the ideas of Darwinism were hijacked to create the lethal doctrine of racial cleansing.

By the war's end, almost every aspect of Germany's scientific culture had been tainted by the exploitation of slave labor, human experimentation, and mass killings. Ultimately, it was Hitler's profound scientific ignorance that caused the Fatherland to lose the race for atomic weapons, which Hitler would surely have used. Cornwell argues that German scientists should be held accountable for the uses to which their knowledge was put-an issue with wide-ranging implications for the continuing unregulated pursuit of scientific progress.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Neither Hitler's rocket blitz of England, nor his use of unprecedented weapons technology, nor--most horrifically--his systematic program of genocide could have been achieved without the purposeful work of Nazi physicists, biologists, mathematicians, and technicians. In Hitler's Scientists, John Cornwell asks:

"Were these cases of Germans behaving according to type as Germans? Or scientists in Germany behaving according to type as scientists?"

These chilling questions encompass two more specific points. First, did the scientists who developed poison gas weapons and concentration camps do it for scientific, personal, or political purposes? Second, can scientists claim to remain objective when funded by, and working for, military or government entities? Cornwell, whose last book was Hitler's Pope, takes a hard line against those scientists who stayed and helped the Nazis after Jewish scientists were expelled and Hitler's plans became clear. With the weight of evidence, Cornwell lays flat the various personal reasons the scientists gave for their actions during the war and shows that even before World War I, German scientists had shown themselves willing to subvert laws and morality in pursuit of money and power. Cornwell also clearly outlines the popular pseudosciences--"racial hygiene," astrology, glacial cosmogony--that drove Hitler's madness. Were there any German scientists who were swept up unknowing or unwilling in the Nazi war machine? It's unclear, but Cornwell's analysis of whether Werner Heisenberg was a "hero, a villain or a fellow traveler" is crucial to that question. Heisenberg's role in the Nazi's inability to complete an atomic bomb is still a riddle, but Cornwell presents all available facts and allows readers to draw their own conclusions. In his last chapters, Cornwell draws parallels between Hitler's scientists and those working in today's world of political anxiety, terrorism, and attacks on basic science. He demolishes once and for all the outdated, disproven, and dangerous notion of scientists working in a vacuum, free of the "taint" of the outside world, and answerable only to their funders. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly

Cornwell's devastating bestseller Hitler's Pope is a tough act to follow. Here, the author again claims the moral high ground to critique the ethical and political choices of scientists in Hitler's Germany and to caution that science under the Western democracies in the Cold War and the war on terrorism also wielded and continues to wield the "Janus-faced power for good and evil." Today's best writers on the Hitler era have outgrown the kind of marginalizing polemic Cornwell employs here. His analysis of Nazi science, while built on sound research and often thoughtful critique, sinks to the sensationalism of "Faustian bargains," "scientific prostitutions" and Arendt's "banality of evil." Unsavory concepts are qualified as "pseudo-science," "half-baked," or simply "science" in quotation marks so that the undiscerning reader won't mistake them for the real thing. All the hot-button issues are on display here: racial hygiene; eugenics; the Nazi purge of academia and Germany's forfeiture of its greatest physicists to the Allies because they were Jewish; and human experimentation on concentration camp inmates. The author also details the science of war in Germany, from rockets and secret codes to radar and the atomic bomb, and how the Allies plundered the country's military technology and expertise after the fall of the Third Reich. Cornwell is a gifted writer with a fascinating story to tell, which he ably and engagingly accomplishes despite the hyperbole. But in his pursuit of comfort in right over wrong, the author forfeits objectivity and perhaps a greater understanding of the sources and the whys of the Nazi phenomenon. Despite this,, the author's articulate though subtly lurid repackaging of Nazi-era crimes and curiosities should guarantee much attention and brisk sales with general readers. Illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1st edition (October 13, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670030759
• ISBN-13: 978-0670030750
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,136,112 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Ethics and science. May 28, 2005

By Palle E T Jorgensen VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Don't get distracted by the title! When I noticed it while browsing in the book store in an airport, I was at first worried that this would another one of these overly opinionated books, more interested in imposing a view on me the poor reader than in good writing, and in letting me make up my own mind. I started reading in the plane, and was pleased to find that the author manages to paint a captivating portrait of a group of German scientists who were faced with a Faustian choice; Fritz Haber (poison gas), Werner von Braun (rockets), Werner Heisenberg (atomic bomb), Otto Hahn (fission), Max von Laue (nuclear physics) to mention only a few. For the most part, the book reads like a novel, and with his superb writing, the author Cornwell brings the characters to life. Many of the German scientists in the 1930ties were Jewish, or partly Jewish, and they were dismissed by Hitler in 1933, or the years up to the war. Many of them emigrated, and others ended up in concentration camps. Some ( Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Hans Bethe, and more) went to the USA, and became the core of the team, the Manhattan Project who built the first atomic bomb, the one used by the US government against Japan in 1945.

The bigger picture in Cornwell's book is the role of ethics in science. By weaving together the individuals, their thoughts, their ambitions, and their flawed judgments, Cornwell is not excusing anyone, but rather, he is helping us understand that we all must take responsibility for our actions. We can perhaps understand how present day scientists, and in fact all of us are faced with Faustian choices of our own.

I liked this one of Cornwell's books a lot better than his perhaps better known one, `Hitler's Pope'. It had me hooked from the start, and I couldn't put it down. Cornwell is not just relying on old historical sources. Since Michael Frayn's play `Copenhagen' a few years ago about the meeting in Copenhagen in the fall of 1941 between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, new documents have been made available from Bohr's archives which help us understand Heisenberg's motives better. Cornwell displays a remarkable judgment in making use of them

My reading of Heisenberg: If you accept a dinner invitation with the Devil, it is best to eat with a tea spoon. While Heisenberg, a humanist at heart may have understood this, at least initially, he soon found himself, perhaps as a result of blind ambition, eating at the trough with both hands deep into the stew, all the way up to his elbows.

It is perhaps ironic that the theme of the Faustian choice has a prominent place in German literature, from the medieval "Faustus" tale to Goethe, Weber's Freischuetz, to Martin Luther's Protestantism, and to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (Mann's moral despair over his country's complacent embrace of Nazism).

In fact the theme of Cornwell's novel is universal, and it is as timely now as it was 60 years ago, and even 300 years ago. Review by Palle Jorgensen, May 2005.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Only 60 years ago ..... January 17, 2004

By David J. Field

Format:Audio CD

When I first bought this, I can not say I had high expectations. Some of the reviewers comments on the book made it sound a bit preachy - and maybe a bit dry. Instead, I discovered a well written historical treatise on the moral and academic climate leading to Hitler's rise to power - and the scientific environment in the German regime during the war with some new insights into the debate between Heisenberg and Bohr regarding the possibility of a Nazi atomic bomb. It is a revealing account of the treatment of Jewish academics before the war. Despite the unquestionable contribution of Jewish scientists to Germany's technological success, those in power altered their own history trying bury any evidence of Jewish talent. Even Einstein's equation E=mc^2 was claimed to have been stolen from a pro-Nazi scientist. The burning of books by Freud, Einstein and others in 1933 provides important insights into how a state can manipulate the views of their people. When Freud asked to emigrate, he was forced to sign a document that he had not been mistreated - to which Freud added "I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone." - a curious remark considering that his daughter Anna had just been interrogated for a full day by the Gestapo.
I am a scientist, so maybe I appreciated the scientific discussions in this book more than most. Still, I think this is a book worth the read. I may not be Jewish, but I think it is important to see how a state can twist history and redirect the views of both acadmics and its population. Cornwell does a good job providing insights into the rise of Nazi science in the decades before the war - and the attempts of German scientists to rationalize their implicit or explicit support for the Nazi regime. This is a story of Germany in the first half of the 20th century but it provides important insights into the role that science plays in our society, and the responsibilities that scientists share in the use of their science. It is hard to believe that all of this was all going on just 60 years ago (an historical blink of the eye). It makes you wonder whether it can happen again.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but unfocused February 25, 2005

By M. Anderson

Format:Paperback

At its core, "Hitler's Scientists" is an interesting account of science and scientists under Germany's National Socialism. It covers the various sciences and technologies with amazing breadth and does much to illuminate the characters, controversies, and conflicts of this era.

Had Cornwell stuck to those themes I would have enjoyed the book more. I'm not saying the book wood have been better; only that I would have liked it more.

The book starts with a very long diatribe positioning Cornwell's views on the ethics of science and scientists. I nearly gave up on the book before I reached the end of this discussion, but he did finally complete it and move on to the material for which I had obtained the book.

Or so I thought. Once the author began discussing actual science, he had backed up to an era long before Nazi Germany. I agree with the author that this is important in setting the stage for science in the 30's and 40's in Germany, but it just felt like too much. There was a lengthy discussion, for example, about the use of chemical weapons in WWI. Interesting... important... but Cornwell covers this in much more detail than several topics of science under Hitler.

When Cornwell does finally reach the age of scientists under Hitler, he does a compelling job describing it. Fortunately, this section makes up the bulk of the work. For this, the book deserves 3 stars, in spite of its other shortcomings. Although the book covers a broad range of topics, the primary area of scientific focus here is on nuclear research.

I did find, however, that even in this core section, the writing style of the author was a bit of a distraction. Cornwell frequently repeats himself, revisiting the same concept, in some cases, many times. Phrases like, "... which will be explored in the next chapter", or "... as we have already seen" are far too common.

What I found most to my dislike, though comes at the end of the work. Having left Hitler and Germany far behind, the author moves on to a discussion of further development of nuclear arsenals in the cold war era. Here the author lets through a clear view, shared with much of Europe that the USA's desire to develop defense against missile strike (SDI, or Missile Defense) constitutes agression because it would make the USA less susceptible to "mutually assured descruction". Futher, Cornwell indicates that the USA adopted in the 80's, if it hadn't always held, a cold war first strike policy when it came to nuclear weapons. Look, whether you agree with that or not, I found it an odd twist at the end of a book on "Hitler's Scientists".

So, to summarize, I found the beginning and ending of the book to be weak and unfocused, and the middle to be strong and on-point.