Hitler's Scientists

[Dave Monroe]

Cornwell, John.  Hitler's Scientists: Science,
   War, and the Devil's Pact.  NY: Viking, 2003.

When Hitler came to power in the 1930s, Germany had
led the world in science, mathematics, and technology
for nearly four decades. But while the fact that
Hitler swiftly pressed Germany's scientific prowess
into the service of a brutal, racist, xenophobic
ideology is well known, few realize that German
scientists had knowingly broken international
agreements and basic codes of morality to fashion
deadly weapons even before World War I. In Hitler's
Scientists, British historian John Cornwell explores
German scientific genius in the first half of the
twentieth century and shows how Germany's early lead
in the new physics led to the discovery of atomic
fission, which in turn led the way to the atom bomb,
and how the ideas of Darwinism were hijacked to create
the lethal doctrine of racial cleansing.

By the war's end, almost every aspect of Germany's
scientific culture had been tainted by the
exploitation of slave labor, human experimentation,
and mass killings. Ultimately, it was Hitler's
profound scientific ignorance that caused the
Fatherland to lose the race for atomic weapons, which
Hitler would surely have used. Cornwell argues that
German scientists should be held accountable for the
uses to which their knowledge was put-an issue with
wide-ranging implications for the continuing
unregulated pursuit of scientific progress.

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