Institutions

Top scientists were more mixed up in the rearmament of the Third Reich and Nazi medical experiments than hitherto supposed. That is the conclusion of a six-year study by the Max Planck Society (MPG) on the history of its institutional forebear, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG).

Among other things, the study covers racial research and genetics at the KWG Institutes, arms research, agricultural research as part of Nazi expansionism, and the part the KWG played in ousting Jewish scientists. The history of the KWG in Nazi Germany is to fill 10 volumes; some of the findings have already been published, other publications are in the pipeline.

Part of the Nazi system

A number of scientists working for the KWG were also in the service of the military-industrial complex in the Third Reich. Susanne Heim, the head of this long-term research programme, sums it up: "As a rule the scientists formulated their research inquiries and proposals themselves. They knew how to adapt to the political climate: livestock-breeding researchers, for example, knew how to make a case for German 'agricultural autarchy' or for the knowledge to be gained about genetic damage, and quite generally how to present their work as vital to the war effort."

Many scientists, especially in weapons research, were in close contact with the Wehrmacht and industry and played key roles on working committees that geared research toward the practical exigencies of rearmament. A case in point was agricultural and breeding research: "There was a very close tie here between science and politics, primarily in the person of the state secretary and later minister of agriculture, Herbert Backe, who served as vice-president of KWG from 1941."

Under the direction of Eugen Fischer, the "Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics" (KWI, est. 1927) was closely aligned with the ideology of the Nazi regime and instrumental in laying the legal foundations for racist policies under the Third Reich. Fischer, along with the KWI director of psychiatry, Ernst Rüdin, also served the government as an expert in forced sterilizations. Brain researchers availed themselves of dissected concentration camp victims in considerable quantity. KWI anthropologists and heredopathologists worked hand in hand with the infamous concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele.

Promoting the scientific elite

The "Kaiser Wilhelm Society to Promote Science and Research" was founded in Berlin on 11 January 1911 under the presidency of the Prussian minister of culture and education, August von Trott zu Solz. Prussia thereby joined the international trend of setting up research institutes, and the new society attracted the interest of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The emperor gave his name to the self-governing society, which was mainly funded by private patrons but controlled by the State.

The idea was to establish and operate non-university research institutes chiefly in the natural sciences. The decentralized Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWIs) were to conduct basic research. To this end, scientists were released from all teaching duties and fitted out with state-of-the-art equipment and a sizeable staff of assistants. These comfortable conditions proved conducive to ground-breaking discoveries by the likes of Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and the subsequently eponymous Max Planck. But the chemist Fritz Haber also figured prominently at KWG: Haber produced poison gases for use in World War I.

After the Nazis took power in 1933, most of the leading researchers showed more concern for their careers than for the fate of their Jewish peers. Though the dismissals of some prominent Jewish scientists were delayed, according to the MPG study, the "Aryan clause" was applied to middle- and lower-level staff with celerity.

Belated investigation

After World War II, the KWG was reconstituted in Göttingen and transformed into the Max Planck Society in 1948. The latter took charge of most of the KWG institutes and their remaining assets.

Why wasn't the KWG's Nazi history thoroughly illumined until 60 years after the end of the war? Project manager Susanne Heime explains: "For one thing, many KWG staff were kept on by the MPG. Adolf Butenandt's long tenure as MPG's honorary president also served to delay rather than advance any efforts to probe the past. Yet the MPG's hesitancy also has to do with its view of itself as an association of highly qualified scientists whose only obligation was to their scientific work, which they regarded as to a certain extent politically neutral. They believed they could dissociate themselves from a few compromised exceptions (the 'incriminated')." According to the study, Butenandt (Nobel prize for biochemistry 1939) helped clear his colleagues of charges of Nazism after the war and adamantly upheld the notion of apolitical science wholly devoted to "pure research".

It's true enough that declarations of party loyalty were not absolutely required in the Third Reich. "Many gave a boost to the prestige of the Nazi State precisely in that they were regarded as serious scientists and not as Nazi party members." Project director Susanne Heim puts it this way: "What was distinctive about the Nazi regime was not that it forced scientists to conduct criminal experiments on human beings. What distinguished it from democratic systems was the suspension of moral principles." Indeed, the regime probably didn't have to spur many a researcher's scientific ambition – it simply gave them free rein.