Physics And National Socialism

"[The author] has done a great service to historians of modern physics by editing this first anthology of primary sources, excellently translated into English... The texts are well selected and range widely, from private correspondence and official memoranda to articles dealing with physics in a propagandistic or popular manner... Many of the sources are extremely interesting and appear here for the first time. Their value is further enhanced by the editor's cross-referencing and detailed notes... [The book] is also a fine introduction to the entire subject. [The] 101-page 'introduction' gives an admirable survey of German physics during the Nazi period as well as a thorough discussion of the historiography of the subject... [The book] is of such quality and usefulness that were I to choose a single book on the history of physics in the Third Reich this might well be the one." H. Kragh, Centaurus

The treatment of German physicists under the Nazi regime had far-reaching consequences both for the outcome of the Second World War and for the course of science for decades thereafter. Although this fact has been known from a few famous episodes, it has not been dealt with thoroughly by scholars because it involves two very different disciplines. Political historians have cautiously left it to historians of science, who in turn have shied away from it out of ignorance of the political intricacies. Alan D. Beyerchen here examines this history in detail, basing his research on archival materials in Germany and the United States and on tape-recorded interviews with leading physicists. At least twenty-five percent of Germany's academic physicists who were working in 1933 lost their positions during the Nazi period. The victims -- Jews and other "politically unreliable" persons -- included some of Germany's finest scientists. Those who remained faced opposition not only from Nazi officials but also from certain members of their own community, notably the Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. Beyerchen describes the mechanisms of prejudice, the reaction to the dismissals, and the impact of the "Aryan physics" movement which ultimately failed.

This 1993 book provides a survey of the development of scientific disciplines and technical projects under National Socialism in Germany. Each contribution addresses a different aspect which is important for judging the interaction between science, technology and National Socialism. In particular, the personal conduct of individual scientists and engineers as well as the functionality of certain theories and projects are examined. All essays share a common theme: continuity and discontinuity. All authors cover a period from the Weimar Republic to the post-war period. This unanimity of approach provides answers to major questions about the nature of Hitler's regime and about possible lines of continuity in science and technology which may transcend political upheaval. The book is also the most comprehensive to date on this subject, and includes essays on engineering, geography, biology, psychology, physics, mathematics, and science policy.

The compelling story of leading physicists in Germany—including Peter Debye, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg—and how they accommodated themselves to working within the Nazi state in the 1930s and ’40s. After World War II, most scientists in Germany maintained that they had been apolitical or actively resisted the Nazi regime, but the true story is much more complicated. In Serving the Reich, Philip Ball takes a fresh look at that controversial history, contrasting the career of Peter Debye, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, with those of two other leading physicists in Germany during the Third Reich: Max Planck, the elder statesman of physics after whom Germany’s premier scientific society is now named, and Werner Heisenberg, who succeeded Debye as director of the institute when it became focused on the development of nuclear power and weapons. Mixing history, science, and biography, Ball’s gripping exploration of the lives of scientists under Nazism offers a powerful portrait of moral choice and personal responsibility, as scientists navigated “the grey zone between complicity and resistance.” Ball’s account of the different choices these three men and their colleagues made shows how there can be no clear-cut answers or judgment of their conduct. Yet, despite these ambiguities, Ball makes it undeniable that the German scientific establishment as a whole mounted no serious resistance to the Nazis, and in many ways acted as a willing instrument of the state. Serving the Reich considers what this problematic history can tell us about the relationship between science and politics today. Ultimately, Ball argues, a determination to present science as an abstract inquiry into nature that is “above politics” can leave science and scientists dangerously compromised and vulnerable to political manipulation.

This book details the effects of the Nazi regime on the German Physical Society.

This a paperback edition of Professor Walker's full-scale examination of the German efforts to harness the economic, military and political power of nuclear fission between 1939 and 1949. The book explains clearly, in terms that the non-specialist can understand, what was involved in the Germans' quest, and in what ways the German scientists succeeded or failed in the development of 'the bomb'.