THE KAISER WILHELM SOCIETY

The Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWS) was one of the most important scientific institutions in the twentieth century and for modern science. In 1911, the German state, private industry, and science came together to establish an institution consisting of scientific institutes outside the university system with world-class facilities and researchers who had been liberated from teaching obligations. The first institutes were funded largely by private donations and were devoted to subjects of interest to German industry. The German or Prussian state also contributed, with the result that the KWS was a hybrid public–private institution.

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWIs) quickly established a reputation for excellence in scientific research, boasted many Nobel laureates, and became the envy of other scientists inside and outside Germany. The KWS managed to thrive through the First World War, the postwar inflation, the new German experiment with democracy, and onset of the Great Depression. When Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor in 1933, the KWS was the most important institution in German science, and German science arguably led the world.

The relationship between science and society should be seen not only in terms of politics influencing science, or even science influencing politics, but more with the two serving as resources for each other, as Mitchell Ash has argued. National Socialism had a profound effect on German science, just as German scientists had a profound effect on the Third Reich.

BACKGROUND

The story of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (KWI für Physik, KWIP) begins with Albert Einstein. In 1914, Max Planck lured his young colleague to Berlin with an attractive package of positions and benefits that allowed Einstein to work without any teaching obligations. Two years later, Einstein published his work on general relativity and quickly became famous. In 1917, Einstein was given a “paper” Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) including a salary, an office, and grant money he could dispense. Four years later, Einstein received the Nobel Prize. Max von Laue, also a Nobel laureate, became the second director of the institute and handled most of the administration. Einstein was one of the few German scientists who had real political significance in Germany because of his fame, outspoken internationalism during the First World War and Weimar Republic, public advocacy of Zionism, and public criticism of anti-Semitism. When the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933, Einstein was in the United States, where he stayed.

Max Planck, another Nobel laureate for physics who became president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, KWS) in 1930, wanted very much to establish a “real” KWIP. He managed to do this with money from the American Rockefeller Foundation, despite the Foundation's misgivings about the policies of the National Socialist (NS) government. After all, this came after the purge of the German civil service in 1933 and passage of the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935.

The history of the sciences in National Socialism can be analyzed in a number of very different ways. These include the relationships between science and ideology, the interdependence of academic and state institutions, scientists' behavior toward persecuted colleagues, and the participation of scientists in the preparation and execution of the crimes of the Nazi state. However, there is another dimension to this subject – one that concerns those sciences, or more precisely, techno-sciences, whose very research topics and structures were of keen interest to every modern state, especially to one with such a great military potential as Germany.

The integration of such sciences into the National Socialist state was therefore initially a question of neither ideology nor morality. Many of the actors – scientists, engineers, politicians – simply took this for granted, as have most historians in retrospective. Indeed, why should it be surprising or especially significant to find cooperation between aerodynamic scientists and aircraft design engineers or between research institutes and the air force, and to see scientists, industrialists, the military, and ministerial officials working together in the techno-sciences during the Nazi period?

A study of the literature published to the present shows two historiographic tendencies. First, a techno-science like aerodynamics and hydrodynamics has served to illustrate the supposedly deadlocked structures of the organization of science under National Socialism. Second, the importance of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics research during the Nazi period has been understood as a chapter in a continuous, long-term development.

CONSTRUCTED CONTINUITY – MANUFACTURED SUPPRESSION

Contemporary discussion of the “zero hour” (Stunde Null) – sometime between the end of war and monetary reform – was replaced long ago by historiographic discussion of a dominating continuity, especially with regard to West German economic and science elites. On the other hand, in a 1995 article, Mitchell Ash concluded that personal continuity in the scientific community did not happen of its own accord. In fact, it was constructed with persistence and finesse in the course of the denazification of “incriminated” individuals and networks. This chapter will use this thesis to demonstrate that the associated mental procedure – in popular psychology referred to as the “repression” (“Verdrängung”) of participation in National Socialist rule, violence, and crime – was more than just an unconscious psychological process. At the same time, it was a communicative process used by the scientific elites while reconstituting their disciplines and institutions in postwar Germany. As such, it was bound to a manner of discourse that first had to be established, tested, and agreed upon; its message, however, had to be adjusted repeatedly to accommodate the changing political constellations and social contexts of the postwar era. But “repression” was not only a mental but also an active process, when scientific communities unburdened themselves of overly “incriminated” colleagues and tried to drive them out of their circles. That is, “repression” was multifaceted, a carefully and elaborately manufactured product of individuals, institutions, and networks. It was a constitutive element of the construct “continuity.”

Whether it makes sense to investigate the political views and behaviors of a natural scientist is a valid question. Certainly it does not do justice to the lifetime achievement of a natural scientist to look at him first and foremost as a homo politicus. However, the opposite is also true: scientific research is located in a social and political context, which conditions this research in any number of different ways. Without any reference to the political situation in which scientists work, the historical dimension of their scientific activity cannot be sufficiently understood.

In the history of German science, this is especially true for the period of the fascist-totalitarian dictatorship of National Socialism. There is a common misconception that National Socialism was hostile to science. In fact, this regime offered previously inconceivable opportunities for professional development to scientists, or at least to those who were not ostracized or driven out of the country. Of course, the Nazi dictatorship also tempted scientists to disregard ethical principles and even to participate in research directly connected to the regime's crimes against humanity.

Therefore, it is legitimate to conduct a biographical investigation of Adolf Butenandt's political posture during the National Socialist period. Between 1933 and 1945, Butenandt experienced a spectacular scientific ascent. As a biochemist and director of one of the most important institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWS), he was one of the leading natural scientists of the Third Reich.

Since 1933, and even more so during this war, here in Germany we differentiate between domestic materials and thrift materials. The domestic metals include, first of all, iron and steel in all their forms, followed by the light metals aluminum and magnesium as well as the highly valued, most important heavy metal, zinc. … In this German team of metals, aluminum and magnesium are the weighty forwards and halfbacks who decide the number of victorious goals.

Because of the experience of World War I, a main focus of National Socialist economic and technology policy was the erection of a blockadeproof “armed state.” Since the availability of raw materials was especially poor with regard to the metals important for armaments, considerable efforts were made to extract metallic substitutes from domestic natural resources. Of the nonferrous metals, the application of zinc, aluminum, and magnesium was pushed in order to replace such metals as copper, bronze, and brass in armaments production. Beyond calculations about materials strategy, National Socialist technology ideologues stylized the philosophy of substitute materials as an element of their “techno-policy.” Moreover, in this process the research of German metals scientists served as proof of the superiority of “German technology.”

The alloys connoted by the disagreeable term “substitute material” (Ersatzstoff) were assigned the ideologically correct term “domestic material” (Heimstoff) which could be extracted from the “soil of the home country” (Heimatboden) or the “native clod” (heimische Scholle).

I always countered the “gossip” … that there was something improper about your takeover of the KWI for Biochemistry. If a vacant post is offered to someone, they should take it without misgivings. That goes without saying. You will have noticed that also in the United States nobody harbors any resentment against you. You have won favor everywhere – not least among the women.

In this passage in a letter written to Adolf Butenandt in April 1954, Carl Neuberg was alluding to a dark chapter in the relationship between the two scientists. The National Socialists' ouster of his predecessor and Neuberg's subsequent exile from Germany played a significant part in Butenandt's achieving his distinguished career in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWS) and Max Planck Society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, MPS). Yet, the manner in which Neuberg himself exonerated Butenandt for taking over the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry (KWI für Biochemie, KWIBC) illustrates the remarkable nature of postwar relations between German scientists and their exiled colleagues. The facts of the case require careful interpretation, looking beyond the conciliatory façade of mutual esteem.

At the time of his expulsion, Neuberg was certainly bitter. Yet two decades later he seems to have raised the issue out of the blue while writing this letter. Up until then, Butenandt had neither directly enquired about the attitude of his American colleagues toward him nor had he mentioned the existence of what Neuberg describes as “gossip.”.

Since National Socialism was an essentially dictatorial system, many historians assume that it tried to impose total control and ideological alignment on all fields of scientific research. Some main features usually attributed to National Socialist science policy are the primacy of race ideology, closing off international exchange, and, above all, the rejection of “pure research” in favor of research that was “useful” for the nation. Ironically, references to research fields that allegedly remained untouched by these ideological guidelines complement rather than contradict this view. Because the Nazi research administration was utterly incompetent and disorganized, some historians claim, there were “free spaces” enabling scientists to pursue their research in relative independence. According to Kristie Macrakis, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology (KWIB) in Berlin was such an island of excellence and “normal” research in an ocean of rigorously politicized science. Under the astute direction of Fritz von Wettstein, Macrakis claims, it was not only able to conduct “pure genetic research untainted by the needs of the government” but also served as a refuge for dissident scientists. It is, however, rather questionable whether “pure research” in the Third Reich was such a heroic endeavor as this interpretation suggests. As Ute Deichmann has shown, research funding was by no means distributed only according to party memberships and “ideological” preferences. The support for the biological sciences was especially generous, and large parts of it were distributed to the elite institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWS).