Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler by Philip Ball
| Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler by Philip Ball | |
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| Category: History | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: This book casts a forensic eye on nuclear physicists the layman may or may not have heard of, and tries to be the definitive look at how they acted in Nazi times. It must have come the tiniest quantum leap away from that intent. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 320 | Date: October 2014 |
| Publisher: Vintage | |
| ISBN: | |
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Picture yourself in Nazi Germany, at any time of the Reich's powers. What do you do, and how do you behave? Do you recognise the fact Jews are being oppressed and have been since the first days of the Nazi regime? Do you do anything about this, or are you aware of the problems the country has had due to losing the Great War and having the whole Weimar Republic and hyperinflation, and just look after number one? Now picture yourself as a scientist. All you've known your adult life has been to furthering your knowledge in, say, physics. Do you again work purely for your own ends? For the country's – knowing all about its rulers? Or can you segregate your bosses and their leaders from your needs, and perhaps seek knowledge for the sake of the world? It's probably not a conundrum that has hit you before, given its scientific bent, but it's worth looking at what was going on at that time. Which way did Planck walk? Did Heisenberg have principles? *
It perhaps is best if you come to this excellent, supremely well researched book with some interest in the answers to these questions. Disappointingly to some, the subtitle is rather guided and guarded – there are no Wernher von Brauns here, for the physics being looked at is often the modern, theoretical, quantum kind. But it did certainly inspire many a problem in Nazi times, with the idea that some people (ie Jews) were just getting it wrong – committing bad science because they knew no better – even being written down by the Fuhrer himself. Some people took objection to quantum physics just because they could hardly understand it, or equate it with what they knew. It obviously was a plot instigated by people who were appointing their own friends to the prime slots in faculties and universities, so it was only right that within months of Hitler taking charge there were edicts against Jewish professors, so they could be replaced as head honchos by saps, idiots and Party boot-lickers. Pity the man (Debye) then, who stayed in his job, even as far as appearing to some historians to this day as a Nazi sympathiser, knowing the alternative would be so much worse for science. Think on the man who had to dismiss Einstein from his papers and lectures purely because Einstein the Jew had gone to, and stayed in, America, and while being so right about so much was so wrong for the Nazis. And pay attention when it's these people who bring in the nuclear age, and atom bomb warfare, with the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938…
This is, to repeat, a supremely well researched book. I certainly took note of the author not so much when he said this was this, but rather that was not that – the research to affirm the negative is so much denser and time-consuming than that for the positive. But it does at times make the book a little too academic. Certainly the first couple of chapters have the formula skewed greatly towards science and against history, and some of the physics – where the author tries to differentiate his triad of main biographical concerns as regards the type of man they were by way of the type of science they did – is not easy for the layman. But from the nature of a German scientist in that era right up to all the Nazi laws and letters from Hitler's coterie, the book proves its definitive nature on every single page.
So there's not much of the Allied race to capture scientists and get them on their side, although that does come in to it, and with the specialised brains under study this book does not have quite as general populist appeal as it might. The author is smart enough to know that. The book can be a muddle at times – weaving history of science into Nazi history into biography, but that's obviously part of the intent, and only parallels the muddle of moral complexities the whole situation led to. There were, have been and still are, too many grey areas regarding what happened – did people stay in office too long for their modern appraisal for their sake, or for science's, or should that not matter? Like a quantum particle, however, it's impossible to pin down both the nature and the direction of these people, and for the book to have such forensic detail as it does is a marvel. It isn't for everyone, and again the author knows that. He knows an awful lot about his subject, as well as how to impart his erudition in a welcome and intelligent manner.
I must thank the publishers for our review copy.
- Yes, those are the best ever physics puns I've got on this website and I'm not at all ashamed of it.
From scientists to women in one fell and foul swoop - Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower shows what the fairer sex were doing directly for, and alongside, the Nazi war machine.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler by Philip Ball at Amazon.com.
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