Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

This sweeping history of (mainly) German science leading up to, during, and immediately following the Third Reich is chock full of scientific and human-interest tidbits. Cornwell is interested in discerning to what extent and how various titans of science responded Nazi ideology. He concludes with the assertion that scientists cannot remain morally neutral or aloof; inevitably, their ideas and actions as scientists are inevitably colored by practical and ethical judgments at every step. A very few, such as Lise Meitner and Max von Laue, are portrayed as heros, risking life and limb to resist Nazi oppression. A great many come off as Nazi hacks, driven by petty jealousies, ambition, political maneuvering for funding, and/or misplaced nationalistic fervor. Some, Werner Heisenberg in particular, appear enigmatically torn, shifting between loyalty to their regime and resistence to its monstrous agenda. In fact, Cornwell spends a good amount of time on Heisenberg and Nazi efforts to develop an atomic bomb, an effort that was plagued by inefficiency and blunders which contrasted so sharply with the Manhattan Project. Cornwell also delves deep into rocketry, code breaking, and a variety of developments in chemistry and weaponry. Surprising in a book about scientific ethics, he spends relatively little time on medicine and the concentration camps--not that there's any lack of information on that horrific subject. While Cornwell's opinions on ethics are reasonable, insightful, and well supported by facts, I found equally interesting his elegant character sketches of the various personalities, and his rather dramatic narratives about the rise and fall of certain technologies and the outcomes of the life and death scientific competition between each side of World War II. Who decides whether science will make the world better or worse? What is the proper relationship between the scientist and the state? What is the scientist's responsibility to morality that transcends the state? As Cornwell points out in his concluding chapters, these were huge questions during WWII, but no less so--perhaps more so--today. Science has a greater capacity than ever to do good or evil. The author does not presume to know all the answers, but he sure knows how to ask the right questions.

I was prepared to be somewhat bored by this lengthy compendium on the Nazi scientists, but found myself fascinated. John Cornwell has presented here two very important moral problems for a practicing scientist in just about any discipline, namely who owns the results of the scientific enterprise and to what uses should scientific discoveries be employed? Scientists still to a large degree work at the direction and with the financial support of the state or industry, or both. We hope that at least most of these activities are in the interests of society, but sometimes they are not, and in many cases we do not always know for sure. In Nazi Germany most scientists did not ask questions about the uses of scientific work at all, or they supported the activities of the government. The few that did raise questions were usually those oppressed by the regime (mostly Jews and dissidents). Even so there were clear examples of resistance. Albert Einstein had long recognized the dangers in militarism and had renounced German citizenship before Hitler rose to power. Heinrich Wieland stayed in Germany, helped Jewish scientists, and refused to use the Hitler salute. Max Born and Max von Laue generally worked against the Nazis. However these were more than matched by the complacent collaborators like Heisenberg, von Braun, Lorenz, von Weizäcker and others, as well as by the enthusiastic supporter of Nazism, including some Nobel Laureates like Lenard.

Some scientists then fell back on the "scientific discovery is neutral and we are not to blame for uses to which others put it." Some modern scientists still believe this today. However, the neutrality of science concept is unfortunately not easily defended in the light of such outrages as the prison camp experimentation of a Mengele. While I in principal favor free access to scientific knowledge, it is a responsibility of scientists, I think, to point out dangers and to oppose unethical methodology and uses of scientific research. There are grave dangers in allowing the system to run free with a technology that could destroy many innocent lives (weapons of mass destruction) or might even render the planet unlivable (as we seem to be slowly doing even without such weapons!)

This book is a wake up call and I think Cornwell can be forgiven if he is a bit "preachy" on the subject. Researchers need to understand the issues so that they are not lured into the same Faustian bargain made by most German scientists during the Hitler era. Scientists cannot remain aloof and pretend that nothing they do has any effect on the lives of people living on this planet. To do so would show them up as naive elitists who care for nothing but their own prestige. I thank whatever powers be that a few in Germany had the courage to speak up, but they were, alas, too few! Let us hope that future historians will not be able to say that about us!

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.

Whatever you think of his thoughts on the matter, this book is exceedingly well written and brimming with information about the history of German culture and science in the 20th Century that has too long been forgotten. I found myself unable to put this book down until I completed the part that covers Hitler's scientists, often taking the book along to places where I shouldn't have been reading. I delayed reading other books I needed to read for my teaching or for articles I am writing to finish this one.

This is a good, informative read. While I am hardly mathematically or scientifically minded, I never found myself backpaging or reaching for a dictionary or reference material on the Net to understand the great variety of topics that he discussed. I know I will return to sections of this book that discuss the sciences as places for instruction on how to write clearly about complicated issues.

The reality of much of Nazi Germany is that as a dictatorship formed as a last resort by German imperialism when it felt threatened with working class revolution in the early 1930s, Nazism came at a dreadful cost, though not one big German and World Capital (which generally welcomed Hitler in 1933-35)were not willing to pay. One of those prices was the inability to coordinate, to centralize, to rationalize, and the overwhelming centrifugal forces of rivalries of bureaucratic factions which made it very hard for the Hitler regime to accomplish much in the realm of centralized planning and coordination not only of science but of industrial development, direction of its military, or defense of the inhabitants against the Allied terror bombings.

Much of Cornell's story is the scientific version of what is a familiar story in Germany during Hitler of disasters, wrong turns, and quack minded boon doggles originated by Nazi leaders.
He also, interestingly enough, shows places where the Nazis were superior in their antismoking campaign and research into how tobacco caused cancer, while American and British governments were subsidizing tobacco and spreading smoking by giving free cigaretts to soldiers and sailors.

Cornwell paints a needed picture of the triumph of German science and technology from the late 19th Century up to the Hitler years. He often contrasts it to the weakness and lack of support of British science and technology. He's also quite careful to show that with a few exceptions like the pacifist Einstein German science put itself totally at the disposal of the Kaiser in the First World War, including Haber, the great Chemist, who masterminded and personally supervised the use of gas warfare. In passing, he is one of the few writers on German 20th century history to accurately note the privations Germans suffered under the British blockade that continued until 1919 and the awful exactions that were demanded of Germany by the treaty of Versailles.

When we get to the Nazi period, we find that like the rest of German bourgeois society, scientists who were not Jewish went along with the program, grudgingly in some cases, enthusiastically in others. He even cites the tragedy of Ilse Minter, a Jewish woman physicist who thought she would be spared because she was an Austrian citizen whose collaboration with German scientists even after she left Germany made possible German discovery of nuclear fission.

Throughout, Cornwell presumes an overarching moral superiority of British and American science and its collaboration their governments in war. It is this I question. I doubt the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagaski, or the greater numbers killed in the firestorm raid on Tokyo,or innocent people murdered in the firestorms of Wurzburg, Hamburg, and Dresden would absolve American and British scientists who perfected firestorm bombing, designed the Manchester, the B-17, the Mosquito, the B-24, the P51, and the B-29 and invented napalm for their collaboration with a murderous brutal war machine. There is no talk of Roosevelt's racist segregated state where lynchings of African Americans were still public events with people selling hot dogs and ice cream and speeches by politicians. Nor does he speak of the British Empire which held more than quarter of the Earth's population as colonial slaves, many of whom in the Arab East and Central Asia were policed from the air by RAF fighters and bombers.

Yet, I don't expect Cornell to share my rather different view of the war. What he shows, in my opinion is that German scientists were no different than anyone else. Science and pure intellect cannot transcend social and political evil in and of itself. Scientists can be no more or less racist, antiSemitic, greedy for their own power, than any other profession.

Without challenging the fundamental nature of society, led and controlled by institutions owned and controlled by the wealthy, without a social force with power to control that society, scientists in the US or Poland, Germany or France, cannot ipso facto be a source of resistance or revolution. They are too tightly tied to institutes, laborartories, universities controlled by big capital. They are on very short leashes.

However, I want to emphasize that this is an extremely readible book, well documented like Cornwell's other work. There is much here about how science works as a social unit there is rarely discussed elsewhere. In my opinion he very clearly settles the legend created after the Second World War by German scientists that they prevented a German nuclear weapon in World War II due to the opposition of Hitler. Like so many things under the Nazi regime, a German nuclear weapon was never constructed because the resources available from a weak and overstretched German war economy that could not manage the empire it had conquered were too thin. At the start of the war, the German government eschewed long-term programs because they had economic resources for a quick war and their wishful thinking made them think they had one. Later, the resources they had were nothing compared to what Washington or even London had.

Some of the reviews of this book fail to recognise one of it's fundamental messages: the total failure of an ideological and dogmatic approach to science within Nazi Germany. Watch the history or discovery channel on any given week and there is a fair chance you will watch an account of the wonder weapons that Germany nearly built. This book helps shatter the myth that Germany was more advanced.

It's coverage is broad, as such, if you want an exhausitve account of V2 production, Luftwaffe high altitude experimentation on concentration camp inmates or the merits of the tiger tank against the Sherman M4 you will find another book more helpful.

This book does give:
- an account of early 20th Century Science, as background and context. Racial theory, the study of skull shapes and sterilization of the "inferior" were not confined to Germany.
- the results of the exclusion/persecution of Jewish scholars and the benefit to the US and the allies.
- the evil of Nazi Science (slave labour, murder).
- the moral dilemas faced by scientists.
- the economic waste of Nazi Weapons programs e.g. V1 and V2. Although techically superb, the costs outwayed the benefits.
- conflicting groups failing to cooperate (SS, Luftwaffe, Army and Navy competing with similar projects.)
- following "stupid" concepts on the whim of a leader.

To be fair, the last to failings were/are shared by many countries, but not to the same extreme.

The impact of Nazi science on the remainder of the 20th century is also assessed. For example, the US space program and the willingness of the Allies to hire Nazi Scientists.

The book places the actual (and very real achievements) of Nazi science in the context of evil and ineffective use. Good book, very broad coverage. Raises numerous issues - a great start for further thought and study. Also, the book helps to put many of the "what if ...." books and TV shows in their true context (entertaining speculation).

The subhead of John Cornwell's "Hitler's Scientists" sets up the pointer to the wrong path he intends to take: a devil's pact implies that German scientists, like Germans generally, had to compromise their feelings in order to exist or to work in the Hitler regime.

Early in the book, Cornwell writes, "Fellow travelers did more damage than out and out Nazis, since they failed to challenge the conscience of the uncertain and the fence sitters." That assumes a point that needs proving, that there were a lot of fence sitters.

That there were some is certain. That they were other than outliers is doubtful. Some Germans fled the regime, but few of these were "Aryans." Lise Meitner wrote, after it was over, that she should have left in 1933. More sensitive than most, she finally developed doubts by 1938. There is little evidence here (or anywhere else) that German scientists, any more than Germans generally, objected to Hitlerism.

In "Hitler's Pope," Cornwell judiciously sifted the competing motives and influences on Cardinal Pacelli (Pope Pius XII by 1938), and rendered a harsh verdict on him. Cornwell does not hold Germans to such strict scrutiny.

Not that he absolves them. But it is not clear what line was crossed when, say, a doctor took the opportunity the regime offered to conduct hideous experiments on Jews that had not already been crossed by the whole nation on Kristallnacht -- if not very much earlier. It is not logical to say, as Cornwell implicitly does, that scientists, because they could do more damage, had a greater responsibility.

Nor does Cornwell really try to untangle the independent threads of nationalism and Hitlerism/Christianity/anti-Semitism. This does come up, especially in the case of Werner Heisenberg.

Heisenberg gets most attention because, as Germany's leading atomic theorist, he could, in principle, have given Hitler an A-bomb. In practice, he couldn't have. Heisenberg was an example -- there were many, many of them even Jews -- who rated loyalty to their German nation so high that they were ready to overlook many things. (Among the ironies, but never alluded to by Cornwell, was that when it came to "giving" A-bombs to hideous totalitarians, the Nazi fellow-traveler Heisenberg failed to do so, while the American Rosenbergs -- Jews, this is where the irony arises -- did not.)

There are ironies enough even if Cornwell missed that one. He starts with Fritz Haber, of Jewish heritage, who made science work for the Kaiser. For symmetry's sake, Cornwell might have gone back a little further and cast his net wider to ask, for example, whether a Hiram Maxim (inventor of a machine gun) was any different. (He was. Unlike Haber, he sold his scientific killing technology to all comers.)

Anyway, in his narrative of events, Cornwell, perhaps inevitably, gives an unbalanced picture by selecting out the fence sitters, never more than a tiny minority. The narrative benefits from revelations dating from as late as the `90s and suffers from being too brief and, in some areas, Cornwell's ignorance. His discussion of German naval technology is laughable.

(There are many, many careless but minor errors. Field Marshal von Rundstet's first name was Gerd, not Karl, for example.)

One difficulty is that Cornwell's topic is too big. Even though the tome is fat, much is skimmed over too lightly. He writes, "Nazi science . . . was by no means unique in practicing experiments on human subjects . . . The importance is where the lines are drawn."

True. One place they could be considered to have been drawn was that the experiments were celebrated by Naziism, usually not so in other countries. German callousness does seem qualitatively different.
In any event, Cornwell's history is not so bad as to be worthless. It should have been better. To the extent that it is good, it really does not advance the summary provided by William Shirer long ago in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." On the other hand, it does provide a general introduction in modern dress to this important subject.

The last section of the book, "Science from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism," would better have been left out. Whatever your views about patenting genes, that moral dilemma isn't in the same league with German scientific dilemmas (to the extent that Germans even thought of them as dilemmas) in the 1933-45 era.

The two great wars of the 20th Century were scientific wars, in that new inventions (radar, poison gas, nuclear weapons) were made and/or developed for use in the same war while it was in progress. Therefore, there is an obvious link between science, patriotism, and economics that is often overlooked in popular histories of the wars (or, rather, only the last 2 are considered). John Cornwell takes on the neglected territory of science in "Hitler's Scientists." At times he succeeds brilliantly, but at others, he seems bogged down in names and details. I can't help but think that a better book on this topic - one that focusses more on the science and less on the politics and ethics - could be written by a physicist (or chemist).

The opening chapters of the book set the scene by taking us back to Fritz Haber - pioneer of gas warfare - and the trenches of WWI. Oddly, this part of the book is the most interesting, possibly because Haber is such an interesting figure, especially when contrasted with the pacifist Einstein. The book then follows the path of the inter-war years, where Haber and his fellow Jewish scientists become forced from their posts (not only in Germany but in Italy and Hungary as well). Of course, the list of those persecuted is long - Szilard, Fermi, Meitner, and of course Einstein and Haber himself. Most of them would be instrumental in the creation of the Allies' atomic bomb.

The book is at its best when documenting the actual work of the scientists (and comparing them to their Allied contemporaries) and how they allow their ethics to slide. IG Farben's artificial rubber plant was built next to Aushwitz, and von Braun used many a slave labourer at Peenemunde and the other rocket sites. Heisenberg, as putative leader of the Nazi nuclear program, is also prominently featured. He is portrayed as a pompous, pathetic creature who, through self-delusion convinces himself he was a hero for "preventing" a Nazi Bomb. Unfortunately, there is too much filler in between - we learn nothing of von Braun's achievements nor how he overcame his difficulties to become the world's greatest rocket scientist. Similarly, we learn almost nothing of the medical experiments conducted by Mengele and others at the Death Camps (instead, we are referred to the work of other historians). Rather, we are treated to long passages of philosophical musings by the author - any given one of which is interesting, but there are too many and they are repetative.

Cornwell also fails in the obligatory final chapters where he tries to relate the lessons of the past to the current funding situation in the U.S. (and other western countries) where the "War on Terror" is subsuming all other considerations. Cornwell is absolutely correct that the current U.S. administration is scientifically short-sighted in only funding applied military research, while ignoring basic/theoretical work (and he also rightfully takes exception to its environmental policies). Unfortunately, he does not make a very convincing case. For example, he cites the statistic that well over half of the federal government's R&D budget is controlled by the Pentagon, but neglects to mention the fact that all branches of the military have basic research grant programs (uncontrolled by the granting agency and not necessarily for military applications). He also neglects to mention the large number of private foundations (Carnegie, Petroleum Research Fund, Henry and Camille Dreyfuss, Research Corporation) that support basic research. He also does not seem to grasp some of the ethical issues involved - he seems to think the greatest ethical dilemma facing biotechnology is the fact that cloned animals have a short lifespan, without ever mentioning the origin of stem cells (aborted fetuses), or the potential problems related to destruction of biodiversity. Finally, he tries to lay the decrease (as he sees it) in ethical awareness by researchers at the foot of the military and government, when most scientists (at least, those in the molecular sciences) blame capitalism - scientists need to follow the money to do research, and they aren't about to bite the hand that's feeding them (for example, by telling a pharmaceutical company that there are long-term detrimental effects related to use of their top-selling product). That Nazi scientists also followed the money makes this omission all the more ironic.

Thus, I will conclude this review with the same thought with which I started: This is an interesting book. It's even a relevant one, although the ethical dilemmas facing current researchers are different than those faced by scientists under Hitler, there are current ethical dilemmas at least as vital as those faced in Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, the author gets bogged down in general discussions on ethics and neglects the science too much for my liking.

This book is something akin to peeking under the shroud at the morgue - you know that what's under the sheet won't be pretty but you really want to look anyway. I have the same feelings about Nazi social programs and the people who carried it out. How could human beings do what they did to other human beings? As a scientist I wondered about Hitler's scientists: science is a neutral pursuit - the description of natural phenomena via natural means - but the use of and the approach of science is not always so pure.

Cornwell's book excels in giving detailed descriptions (without being monotonous) of the programs, the scientists, and the business structure that carried out the work. Some of the science was monstrous and is an almost universal human embarrassment (much of the human experiments.) Much of the science of the Reich, though, has proven itself to be extremely useful and beneficial.

One thing that differentiates Cornwell's book is that he looks hard at the `why?' questions. The book is as much an exploration of the human scientists as it is an exploration of the science. Science is, after all, performed by people with beliefs and agendas and Cornwell digs to understand these things for the major players. The book is written well and is very well documented. I highly recommend the book and look forward to more books by Cornwell.