Serving the Reich
The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
This historical analysis of Heisenberg, Planck, Debye, and other German physicists during WWII “is a stunning cautionary tale, well researched and told” (Choice).
After World War II, most scientists in Germany maintained that they had been apolitical or actively resisted the Nazi regime, but the true story is much more complicated. In Serving the Reich, Philip Ball takes a fresh look at that controversial history, contrasting the career of Peter Debye, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, with those of two other leading physicists in Germany during the Third Reich: Max Planck, the elder statesman of physics, and Werner Heisenberg, who succeeded Debye as director of the institute when it became focused on the development of nuclear power and weapons.
Mixing history, science, and biography, Ball offers a powerful portrait of moral choice and personal responsibility, as scientists navigated “the grey zone between complicity and resistance.” Ball’s account of the different choices these men made shows how there can be no clear-cut answers or judgement of their conduct. Yet he also demonstrates that the German scientific establishment as a whole mounted no serious resistance to the Nazis, and in many ways acted as a willing instrument of the state.
Serving the Reich considers what this problematic history can tell us about the relationship between science and politics today. Ultimately, Ball argues, a determination to present science as an abstract inquiry into nature that is “above politics” can leave science and scientists dangerously compromised and vulnerable to political manipulation.
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award winner
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
German science led the world until Hitler ruined it, as British science writer Ball (Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything) claims in this fine account of how it happened. Ball builds his story around three Nobel laureates: Max Planck, Peter Debye, and Werner Heisenberg. Under anti-Jewish Nazi laws, a quarter of German physicists were dismissed. Planck (1858 1947), one of Germany's most respected scientists, appealed to authorities on behalf of Jewish colleagues, but refused to repudiate the law. A loyal patriot, he believed the legality of the dismissals did not make them right, but it made them incontestable. Heisenberg (1901 1976) endured attacks for advocating "Jewish" science (i.e., relativity and quantum physics), but participated in Germany's effort to develop an atomic bomb. Debye (1884 1966) directed the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, following Nazi policies while also helping Jewish scientists obtain jobs in other nations. He emigrated in 1939 only after the institute was ordered to concentrate on war research. Almost all non-Jewish German scientists fretted, compromised, and looked after their own interests. Others have vilified them as collaborators, but Ball, no polemicist, thinks this was a moral failure, common and not confined to Germans. This is an important, disturbing addition to the history of science.
