The compelling story of leading physicists in Germany--including Peter
Debye, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg--and how they accommodated
themselves to working within the Nazi state in the 1930s and '40s.
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 after whom
Germany's premier scientific society is now named, 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's gripping exploration of
the lives of scientists under Nazism 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 three men and their colleagues made shows how there can be
no clear-cut answers or judgment of their conduct. Yet, despite these
ambiguities, Ball makes it undeniable 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.
