On 14 June 1946, Professor Julius Hallervorden, director of the Section for Histopathology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research (KWI für Hirnforschung, KWIHF), experienced the surprise of his life. Completely unexpectedly, the neurologist and psychiatrist Professor Leo Alexander, a Jew who had been forced to leave Germany in 1933 and was now conducting numerous interviews with German neurologists, psychiatrists, and neuropathologists on behalf of the American military government, appeared in Dillenburg, Hessia, where Hallervorden had landed with his department in 1944. Believing Alexander to be an ally in the struggle to preserve the KWIHF, Hallervorden threw caution to the wind and acknowledged forthrightly that in his department he had studied hundreds of brains that came from mentally ill and mentally disabled patients who had been killed in the course of the Nazi “euthanasia” program.

As far as his visitor's intentions were concerned, Hallervorden could not have been more wrong. Alexander's mission was to investigate the state of research achieved in National Socialist Germany; at the same time, he was collecting material to prepare charges in the Nuremberg Physicians' Trial. While no preliminary proceedings against Hallervorden were opened and he was not charged, his remarks in conversation with Alexander resulted in his role in “euthanasia” becoming public, so that in the aftermath – for instance, in connection with the Fifth International Congress of Neurology in Lisbon in 1953 – intense controversies about Hallervorden's wartime activities erupted on numerous occasions.

“Everything in the soldier's armor that is not iron is chemistry – even the tunic.”

PRELIMINARY REMARKS

Materials research and armaments research generally evoke images of artifacts made of iron and metallic materials. Although metals research represents a considerable portion of such work, over history both types of research have covered a constantly growing catalog of raw materials. The introductory quotation, a common saying at the Reich Ministry of Economics (Reichswirtschaftsministerium, RWM) during the National Socialist period, points to the importance of the chemical industry, and within this sector, expressly to the field of synthetic fibers and plastics. Research into raw and advanced materials is highly relevant for industry in all mass consumption societies, and even more so for national economies lacking raw materials. The greatest trade expense for industrialized European countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was always the import of textile raw materials, amounting to around one third of the cost of all commercial and industrial imported raw materials. Despite numerous successful innovations in the area of advanced textile materials research during World War I, by the end of the Weimar Republic more than 90 percent of all textile raw materials still had to be imported from abroad. While in times of peace a substantial portion of these were refined and then reexported for profit, alleviating the problem in terms of the national economy, the shortage remained unsolved in strategic terms.

As the 1939 Nobel Laureate and subsequent president of the Max Planck Society, Adolf Butenandt represented Germany's first-class research of his time like nobody else and received many honors during his lifetime. Yet, in recent years he has met increasingly with public criticism: he has been blamed for several things – in particular, his conduct during the National Socialist era. The most severe of these reproaches will be the issue of this essay: according to this charge, Butenandt had been at least aware of, if not actually involved in, the human experiments conducted by SS physician Josef Mengele in the Auschwitz death camp.

The first suggestion for a connection between Butenandt's institute and Auschwitz was detected by molecular biologist Benno Müller-Hill. This connection consisted in a project conducted by a colleague of Butenandt, the hereditary pathologist and physical anthropologist Otmar von Verschuer, for which he received blood samples that Mengele had acquired from Auschwitz. Müller-Hill then tried to reconstruct this venture. Though universally accepted, his reconstruction leaves some questions unanswered. Therefore, this chapter will first describe the key sources for the project so as to place this project and its personnel in historical context. Subsequently, Müller-Hill's reconstruction will be described and analyzed before an alternative reconstruction is introduced. Finally, some thoughts on the evaluation of this project will be offered.

As the British Royal Air Force stepped up their bombing attacks on the capital of the German Reich as part of the “Battle of Berlin” campaign, the General Administration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWS) became increasingly concerned about the safety of the staff in their research institutes in Berlin-Dahlem. After tough negotiations with the authorities, the KWS property department finally gained permission to convert the cellar of the Harnack House, the society's main meeting place and lecture hall and, as such, the representative heart of the KWS, into a bunker. As manpower was scarce, the General Administration was obviously glad when in early March 1944 a member of staff of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Physical Chemistry negotiated the placement of “further assistant workers… from a concentration camp.” Although it is not recorded whether concentration camp prisoners actually worked on the Harnack House, it speaks for itself that their forced labor on this symbolic place, so central to the corporate identity of the KWS, was even considered.

The subject of forced labor has not been dealt with, even peripherally, in most publications on the history of the KWS. The same is true of most publications on the history of the individual institutes. For this reason, this chapter will look into the extent of forced labor in the research institutions of the KWS.

The development of chemical weapons in World War I is closely associated with the name of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWS). Chemical weapons of mass destruction were researched and developed in the laboratories of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry (KWI für physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie, KWIPC) under the direction of Fritz Haber, and deployed by the German empire for the first time in Ypers in April 1915. A number of comprehensive studies have examined the history of the research, development, and deployment of chemical weapons in World War I. In contrast, very little is known about their further development during National Socialism at institutes of the KWS, the largest research organization in Germany outside of the universities. Military historians have asked why no chemical weapons were deployed in Europe during World War II. The production of chemical weapons has also been studied from the perspective of economic history. Yet, for a long time there was no comprehensive investigation into the research on chemical weapons in the Nazi regime. The following remarks are based on a study of all research projects at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes conducted during National Socialism on both developing chemical weapons and providing the protection against them required for their military implementation.

Of the over forty institutes and research facilities of the KWS that existed during the National Socialist period, seven institutes were involved in research on chemical weapons and defending against them.

The recollections and “retrospectives” occasioned by the respective anniversaries of the Max Planck Society (Max-planck-Gesellschaft, MPS) and Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWS) often give the impression that the years of the Third Reich had been an era of peril and courage for these organizations. For instance, in 1954 Otto Hahn, Nobel laureate and first president of the MPS, explained that only with the greatest of difficulties had it been possible “to maintain the Kaiser Wilhelm Society's independence, which at some point had been seriously at stake.”. Following the collapse of the Nazi regime, others, like Nobel laureates Richard Kuhn and Adolf Butenandt, darkly spoke of the “grave and manifold difficulties … during the increasingly deteriorating era of National Socialism” and “science treated as unworthy” with “disregard of its autonomy” during an era “we don't care to remember” and where “more than once everything had been at stake.”

A particularly impressive metaphor has been ascribed to Max Planck. According to Butenandt's interview with Kristie Macrakis in 1985, Planck described Nazi rule as “a thunder storm sweeping over us” that caused “some trees to come down.” Yet “there was no point” in “shouting at a thunderstorm,” he maintained. One had to wait until “the storm was over.” In reading those words, one almost sees those gentlemen opening their umbrellas, casting anxious glances to the sky to see if a branch was threatening to hit them on the head – huddled together, hoping that the bad weather would eventually move on.

In 1936, the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt (1878–1958) was forced to relinquish his position as director at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Biology in Berlin Dahlem due to National Socialist anti-Semitism. His emigration to the United States at the age of nearly fifty-eight meant leaving behind excellent working conditions, his editorship of important journals, and a highly influential position in German-language genetics. He was never able to achieve a comparable status in the United States. His position at the KWI in Berlin was assumed by Alfred Kühn (1885–1968). Goldschmidt and Kühn were representatives of different genetic concepts; the forced personnel change thus also meant a change on the scientific level.

Toward the end of World War II, Kühn collaborated with the biochemist Adolf Butenandt (1903–1991) to develop, supported by their staff, a model of the relation between gene and character. This model is valid even today as part of the “one gene-one enzyme hypothesis” and thus constitutes an important element of molecular genetics. The model concurred with the “theory of the gene” developed after 1914 by the school of Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945), which prevailed in further research including the mapping of the human genome. According to this theory, genes are corpuscular units, lined up in the chromosome like pearls on a string, each of which can be defined precisely with respect to their molecular size. Through enzymes, these units determine the hereditary characters of the cell.

Long after the end of the Second World War, many Germans still regarded the Autobahn network and the Volkswagen car as representative of the positive achievements of the Nazi period. Both were elements of the Führer's Motorization Program, which eventually laid the foundations for mass motorization in Germany but originally formed part of the preparations for war. One vital aspect of this program was an attempt to produce rubber for vehicle tires inside the Reich or in the conquered territories without using imported raw materials. A number of studies have investigated the research into Buna, a synthetic rubber. But there has been very little study so far of the kog-sagyz (caoutchouc) project, an attempt to grow natural rubber for industrial purposes on lands under German control. This project combined research, practical trials, processing, and marketing for a single product in a research network that was politically protected by the highest levels of government and made use of all the powers available under the Nazi regime. The project included the use of slave labor for scientific purposes in the Auschwitz concentration camp and plans to grow natural rubber in partisan-dominated territory for strategic military reasons.

This chapter will first investigate the development of rubber plant research in Germany and its expansion following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It will also examine the differing and often, conflicting interests of the institutions involved in the kog-sagy project.