Hitler's Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil's Pact [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

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.