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

Cornwell, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142004804 ISBN 13: 9780142004807

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2004

Synopsis

An eye-opening account of the rise of science in Germany through to Hitler’s regime, and the frightening Nazi experiments that occurred during the Reich

A shocking account of Nazi science, and a compelling look at the the dramatic rise of German science in the nineteenth century, its preeminence in the early twentieth, and the frightening developments that led to its collapse in 1945, this is the compelling story of German scientists under Hitler’s regime. Weaving the history of science and technology with the fortunes of war and the stories of men and women whose discoveries brought both benefits and destruction to the world, Hitler's Scientists raises questions that are still urgent today. As science becomes embroiled in new generations of weapons of mass destruction and the war against terrorism, as advances in biotechnology outstrip traditional ethics, this powerful account of Nazi science forms a crucial commentary on the ethical role of science.

About this title

About the Author

John Cornwell is in the department of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University. He is a regular feature writer at the Sunday Times (London) and the author and editor of four books on science, including Power to Harm, on the Louisville Prozac trial, as well as Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII and Breaking Faith: Can the Catholic Church Save Itself?

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Hitler's Scientists

Science, War, and the Devil's PactBy John Cornwell

Penguin Books

Copyright ©2004 John Cornwell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0142004804

Chapter One

Hitler the Scientist

On his twenty-seventh birthday, 23 March 1939, Wernher vonBraun, Germany's brilliant young rocket engineer, met Adolf Hitlerfor the first time. The F|hrer had agreed to be briefed on theprogress of the army's advanced ballistic missile programme atKummersdorf West, a research facility south of Berlin.

Walter Dornberger, von Braun's superior, has left an eye-witnessimpression of Hitler's encounter with one of the most significanthigh-tech inventions of the century. It was, he reported, 'a cold,wet day, with an overcast sky and water still dripping from therain-drenched pines'. Hitler's thoughts seemed elsewhere. 'Hisremarkably tanned features, the unsightly snub nose, little blackmoustache and extremely thin lips showed no sort of interestin what we were to show him.' Dornberger put on a series ofdemonstrations of roaring rockets and guidance systems to impresshis F|hrer: he demonstrated the power of a 650-pound thrustrocket motor, then showed off one with a 2,200-pound thrust forcomparison. But Hitler 'kept his eyes steadfastly fixed on me',wrote Dornberger. 'I still don't know whether he understood whatI was talking about.'

Next the young von Braun, a fleshy-looking young man ofJunker stock, gave a presentation of the internal workings of an A3rocket using a cutaway model; Hitler apparently listened, closely atfirst, but then stalked off shaking his head as if uncomprehending.Another static demonstration took place, this time with an A5,which was to precede in development a much larger and moresophisticated missile-the A4, the army's missile of choice as along-range weapon.

At lunch Dornberger sat diagonally opposite Hitler. 'As he atehis mixed vegetables and drank his habitual glass of Fachingenmineral water ... [Hitler] chatted with Becker about what theyhad seen,' wrote Dornberger. 'I couldn't tell much from whatwas said, but he seemed a little more interested than during thedemonstration or immediately after.' Later Hitler made the laconicremark, 'Es war doch gewaltig!' (That was tremendous). Dornbergerremained puzzled. The visit had seemed 'strange' to him, 'ifnot downright unbelievable'. Dornberger had been used to visitorsbeing 'enraptured, thrilled, and carried away by the spectacle', likeLuftwaffe chief Hermann Goering, who, on being shown therocket hardware, leaped about laughing and slapping his thighswith unrestrained glee.

Reflecting on the episode after the war, Dornberger wrote thatHitler did not grasp the significance of missile technology for thefuture. 'He could not fit the rocket into his plans, and what wasworse for us at that time, did not believe the time was ripe for it.He certainly had no feeling for technological progress, upon whichthe basic conditions for our work depended.'

The episode encapsulates Hitler's approach to new technology:his tendency to make decisions in isolation, depending on thecertitude of his personal intuition and inspiration, rather than onthe basis of careful inquiry and the conclusions of committees. Asit happened, Hitler was right to be suspicious of the imminenteffectiveness of ballistic missiles in 1939; nor did his apparentlukewarm reaction indicate an unwillingness, as Dornberger infers,to fund further research, at first on a medium level of priority. Intime, however, the story of the F|hrer's decisions and ambitionsfor the Nazi rocket programme-a technology in which Germanywas a generation ahead of the rest of the world-would revealprofound flaws in his capacities as leader of one of the most advancedscientific nations. Hitler became seriously interested in rockets onlyat a point when defeat seemed inevitable: the deployment of theV2 was to be no more an act of ritualistic vengeance, a gestureof what the novelist Thomas Mann described as 'technologicalromanticism', than a rational strategy that could help win the war.

Hitler's Bio-political Rhetoric

Hitler's knowledge and appreciation of science and technologywere warped, degenerate and profoundly racist. At the Nurembergtrials of the Nazi leadership, Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and hisArmaments Minister from February 1942, proclaimed that he,Speer, was 'the most important representative of a technocracywhich had showed no compunction in applying all its know-howagainst humanity'. In a statement to the judge, Speer commentedthat in a mechanized age dictatorships required, and had produced,a type of individual who took orders uncritically. 'The nightmareof many people that some day nations will be dominated by technology,'he declared, 'almost came true in Hitler's authoritarian system.Every state in the world is now in danger of being terrorized bytechnology. But this seems inevitable in a modern dictatorship.Hence: the more demanding individual freedom and the self-awarenessof the individual. The former Nazi minister hadrevealed no such refined ratiocinations while serving the ThirdReich, yet faced with the hangman's noose he admitted the insidiousexploitation of science and technology in Hitler's totalitarianstate, while intimating future dangers for the victors of WorldWar II.

What was absent, however, from his 'confession', which alludesprincipally to weapons technology, communications and the media,was an acknowledgement that Adolf Hitler's view of science, at itsmost influential at the outset of the regime, featured crudeborrowings from the ambit of pathology and racist 'genetics', toarticulate his notion of the German nation state and its destiny.Hitler's favoured rhetorical metaphors, as he rose to power, havebeen described as 'bio-political'. Hitler subscribed to the idea ofthe German nation state as a type of anatomy, subject to circumstancesof health and disease like the human body.

Hitler betrayed a profound ignorance of Mendelism and particulateinheritance. His 'biological' notions of race evidently foundtheir origins in Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, the French nineteenth-centuryman of letters and early exponent of racial theory, anda tradition of latter-day racist 'philosophers': Houston StewartChamberlain, Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz. Hitlerbelieved that the purity of the Germanic-Aryan race had beencompromised through a 'blending process'. The task ahead was toencourage and preserve uncontaminated stocks of Aryan blood.

By 1925, as Hitler completed his political testament Mein Kampf,the racist epithets of Teutonic supremacy, culled from the pamphletsof his lean days in Vienna, were giving way to a vulgarizedversion of geopolitics, Lebensraum-the quest for living space, alliedto pseudo-scientific quasi-medical imagery. He harped on theintroduction of undesirable hereditary strains into the healthyNordic body, the Volkskvrper, and extraneous factors operating likepathogens. Jews were invaders, undermining the integrity of theGerman organism-bacilli, cancers, gangrene, tumours, abscesses.His political programme was seen in terms of cures, surgery, purgingand antidotes. He lamented in 1925 that the state did nothave the means to 'master the disease' which was penetrating the'bloodstream of our people unhindered'. Such ideas, bogus asthey were pernicious, culled from the so-called discipline of racialhygiene, contained inevitable propensities towards solutions whichsaw the German Volk as a patient, the Jew as a sickness and Hitleras the beneficent physician.

The images of Jews as a disease were all too familiar by themid-1930s as the ideological bio-political content merged withNazi medical science. The cofounder of the Nazi PhysiciansLeague, Kurt Klare, talked of the 'decomposing influence ofJewry'. The vvlkisch body was in need of 'cleansing', according tothe physician and Nazi plenipotentiary Dr Gerhard Wagner. Hencethe race laws of 1935 were underpinned by images of immunityand calls for radical therapy, the 'cauterizing of the tumour'. By1940, Hitler was seen as the great 'healer'. In a basic text, explainingthe necessity of the invasion of Poland, the Nazi publicist ErnstHiemer declared that from Poland 'these Jewish bacilli crossed overto us, bringing the Jewish sickness to our land. Our people almostdied from this sickness, had Adolf Hitler not delivered us in thenick of time.' As the war progressed, the bio-rhetoric saw theconvergence of images that argued a continuity between medicalmetaphor and prophylactic realism, hastening to an inevitable conclusion.Jews were not only a parasitical invasion of the host bodyof Germanhood, they were responsible, it was claimed, for actualcurrent epidemics in the East requiring immediate isolation andquarantine-degenerate euphemisms for the ghettos and the camps.In the pathological paradox that frequently attends science assalvation, the purveyors of death thus become those who respectand preserve human life. Just as a physician acts to cut away aninfected appendix from a patient, the 'Jew', as declared by Auschwitzphysician Fritz Klein, 'is the gangrenous appendix in the bodyof mankind'.

Hitler and the Bomb

As Hitler's thoughts turned to the conquest of Europe, however,his need to understand the power and scope of applied science andtechnology for war-making assumed a practical urgency. He waskeenly interested in weapons and quick to grasp how a piece ofequipment worked. It was often remarked that he could rephrasea long-winded technical account with a terse, highly accuratesummary. Speer wrote that Hitler 'was antimodern in decisions onarmaments'. Hitler opposed the machine gun because, accordingto Speer, 'it made soldiers cowardly and made close combat impossible'.He was against jet propulsion, because he thought its extremespeed was an obstacle to aerial combat, and distrusted Germanattempts to develop an atomic bomb, calling such efforts, accordingto Speer, 'a spawn of Jewish pseudo-science'.

On 23 June 1942, Albert Speer discussed the atomic bomb withHitler. Speer wrote in his memoirs that the F|hrer's intellectualcapacity was quite obviously strained by the idea, and that 'he wasunable to grasp the revolutionary nature of nuclear physics'. Speernoted that out of 2,200 points raised in his conferences with Hitler,nuclear fission was raised only once and then only briefly. Hitler,it seemed, had acquired a garbled version of atomic science fromhis photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, who in turn had picked itup from a minister who was sponsoring an atomic research projectfor the Post Office. Speer, meanwhile, reported that the head ofthe official nuclear research programme, Werner Heisenberg, hadbeen unable to confirm that a chain reaction could be controlled'with absolute certainty'. There had been suspicions among thescientists that a chain reaction, a release of massive energy in fissilematerial by the instantaneous splitting of its atomic structure, oncestarted, would continue on through the material of the entireplanet. Speer wrote that in consequence Hitler was 'plainlynot delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rulemight be transformed into a glowing star'. Hitler, Speer went on,liked to joke that the scientists 'in their unworldly urge to laybare all the secrets under heaven might some day set the globe onfire'.

Yet when Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939 therewere physicists in Germany who knew at least as much, if not more,than the Anglo-Americans, and who were organizing researchprogrammes for harnessing the power of the atom as a weapon. Infact, it had been a German, Otto Hahn in Berlin, assisted by FritzStrassmann, with crucial input from Lise Meitner and her nephewOtto Frisch, who first discovered nuclear fission, or the splittingof the atom, in December of the previous year, even thoughit had probably been first achieved, unwittingly, by Enrico Fermiin Italy.

At the same time, at Peenem|nde on the Baltic coast some 200miles north of Berlin, the German army had by 1939 gatheredhundreds of scientists and engineers with unprecedented researchand development facilities to create and mass-produce supersonicrockets to enable Hitler to strike at his enemies hundreds of milesdistant. In the last year of the war the rocket scientists were drawingup plans for booster rockets that would carry payloads as far as 400miles and even beyond. Had the Third Reich been first to constructan explosive nuclear device, or even a 'dirty bomb' composed ofconventional explosive and radioactive materials, it is likely thatits first employment against an enemy would have involved deliveryby long-range guided missile, and history would have been verydifferent. There can be little doubt that Hitler would have used anatom bomb had he possessed one. Albert Speer remembers Hitler'sreaction to the final scene of a newsreel in the autumn of 1939. Inmontage a plane dives towards the British Isles: 'A flash followed,and the island blew up in smithereens.' Speer wrote that Hitler'senthusiasm was unbounded. Similarly, when Walter Dornberger,head of the German rocket development project, spoke with Hitlerabout the potential of ballistic missiles in the summer of 1943, a'strange, fanatical light' came into the F|hrer's eyes. Hitler declared:'What I want is annihilation-annihilating effect.'

Historians of science have argued to this day about the feasibilityof a Nazi atomic bomb. It is clear that Hitler's scientists hadnot overcome the main technological problems by the end ofthe war; it is also apparent that Germany lacked the matiriel, themanpower and economic resources necessary to develop such aweapon during the war. Hitler's racist policies, moreover, hadresulted in the dismissal of hundreds of key Jewish physicists,skilled in theoretical and nuclear physics. Hitler's ignorance ofscience and technology, scientists and engineers, as well as thegrotesquely inefficient and corrupt 'polycratic' nature of thepower structures of the Third Reich, undermined Germany'sability to win a long-term war based on sophisticated science andtechnology calling for massive resources. The Manhattan Project,the American atom bomb programme, involved two separate paths-a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb-while the researchand development involved some 150,000 personnel and anexpenditure of $2 billion at the time. America could call on thesevast resources without strain. With Germany, lacking capacity inevery area of weapons production, the case would have beendifferent.

But Germany's failures in science and technology were systemicand wide-ranging. When Hitler went to war in 1939, Germany'seducation system, once the envy of the world, was in chaos,along with the country's national policies for the fostering andexploitation of science and technology.



Continues...

Excerpted from Hitler's Scientistsby John Cornwell Copyright ©2004 by John Cornwell. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0142004804
• ISBN 13: 9780142004807
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 577