War, national chauvinism, and arrogance are the great engines of
human technological progress, whether this upsets our optimistic,
self-congratulatory mythologies or not. Hitler's Scientists
traces the development of German science from before World War I
until the defeat of fascism at the end of World War II. It
consolidates in one volume many familiar threads - the development
of atomic and quantum physics, the invention of rocketry and
ballistic missiles, the first creation of weapons
of mass destruction, the beginnings of modern medicine and
epidemiology, the perfection of aviation and undersea travel, the
economic impact of organic chemistry and evolutionary biology, the
race-based "science" of eugenics, and the increasingly necessary
detection strategies of radar, sonar, code-making, and
-breaking. The ascension of Nazi science cannot be
understood without a thorough understanding of the German academic
system, a system in which Jews played a disproportionately
significant part until they were no longer allowed to do so.
Nor can Nazi science be appreciated in a
vacuum; British and American science closely paralleled German
science, and a shared collaboration reigned among the Western
powers until the bared fangs of competition shattered the
collegial bonds. Cornwell tells this complicated tale
eloquently and efficiently, digesting the conclusions of hundreds
of volumes into one manageable tome.
Certain stories stand out. The mystery of theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, who led the Nazi atomic bomb program, is one of these. Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen and Thomas Powers's book Heisenberg's War, argue that Heisenberg intentionally dragged his feet so that Hitler would not be given the ultimate weapon, but Cornwell challenges this hypothesis. True, Heisenberg was not a Nazi and probably detested the gauche arriviste Hitler, but Heisenberg was a Junker, a German nationalist, and a willing accomplice to the purging of Jews from German physics. This purge paradoxically made it possible for the Allies, through the American Manhattan Project, to taste the sins of atomic bomb development first.
Another cautionary tale is that of Wernher von Braun, the
brilliant rocket scientist who perfected the V-1 and V-2
blitzkrieg missiles at Peenemunde. Von Braun became
the target of all the Allies' affections after the war. His
recruitment by the Americans, and that of scores of his
colleagues, gave the USA a great boost in the space race that
constituted part of the Cold
War between the USA and the USSR. It did not matter to either
superpower that German rocket science had used slave labor and
thus contributed to the Nazi "Final Solution," or Holocaust.
German arrogance was also their undoing in code-breaking and radar technology. The German Enigma machine codes were considered unbreakable, and the Nazis' confident but faulty judgment on this point probably caused the war to end a couple of years earlier than it would have otherwise. If Hitler had had two more years, would Germany have developed the bomb? Would the USA have dropped their bomb on fellow Caucasians? We shall never know.
This last point may seem gratuitous and silly. If the
Allies could firebomb Dresden and peenemunde, surely they would
have had no compunctions about nukes over Berlin. This is
where Black's book, War Against the Weak, comes in. It is a
history of America's campaign to create a master Nordic race
through eugenics, selective breeding, and forced
sterilizations. Eugenics
was a hot topic in turn-of-the-century America. The USA was
awash in a sea of European immigrants, and also faced burgeoning
numbers of Blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans. A small
group of U.S. scientists did not want to lose the country to a
growing mass of "social undesirables." Funded by the
Carnegie Institution, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and
other corporate philanthropies, and championed by progressive
thinkers like Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned
Parenthood), and Oliver Wendell Holmes, eugenicists backed
marriage prohibitions between the races, passive euthanasia and
forcible sterilization of epileptics, alcoholics, petty criminals,
and the mentally challenged, and the social isolation of the poor
from the growing middle class. Twenty-seven states and the
U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned these racist laws, and willing U.S.
corporations like IBM created recording devices to manage this
grand social experiment. Legitimate progressive movements
like birth control and the development of psychology were tainted
by their willing associations with the eugenics
movement.
The eugenicists were crusaders. They shared their scientific rationales with academics from Europe, including Germany. Eugenics strategies concocted at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island were exported. The Rockefeller Foundation supported German eugenicists with massive financial grants, and eventually, this Nordic vision of Valhalla caught the attention of a German politician on the rise, Adolf Hitler. The culmination of this movement was the Nazi Final Solution, the horrific experiments conducted by doctors like Josef Mengele at Auschwitz, the extirpation of Jews and Gypsies.
These are strong statements. They deserve thorough
documentation, and that is what Black and his team of fifty
researchers in four countries provides. These two books are
difficult reading. They challenge convenient
shibboleths. Both Cornwell and Black are to be commended for
taking an unwieldy amount of disparate and scattered sources, and
weaving coherent
narratives therefrom.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzerseltzer@seltzerbooks.com
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