A
library for the price of a book.
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 SeltzerA
library for the price of a book.
The
Middle East -- Context for Conflict: Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria, Lebanon,
Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf States. Historical
background and context for understanding today's news. This CD contains
the full text of 10 "Country Studies" published by the Federal Research
Division of the Library of Congress. Each country study is presented as
a single document, in plain text form -- easy to read, to print, and to
search (rather than as a collection of over 100 separate documents for
each book). The tables in the appendix of each book are presented as html
documents. In addition, we include: The 2003 edition of the CIA
World Factbook, an interlinked set of hundreds of HTML documents, with
detailed up-to-date reference information on every country in the world,
with images of maps and flags; and some classic works of history, literature,
and religion, including The Koran and books on the traditions of Judaism,
all in plain text form. Complete
table of contents Free sample: Iraq,
a Country Study.
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
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