Kampfstoff-Forschung im Nationalsozialismus: Zur Kooperation von Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten, Militär und Industrie (review)

One question debated by historians of World War II Germany is why the Nazi dictatorship did not deploy chemical weapons. The birthplace of chemical warfare during World War I, Germany had continued development at the "forefront" of this chilling area in secret throughout the interwar period. By late 1936, the first known nerve agent, tabun, was developed in a laboratory of the I.G. Farben chemical firm, while the even more lethal soman was developed in 1944 by Richard Kuhn in one of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm institutes. Neither can German reluctance to deploy such weapons be explained by supply shortages: sufficient stockpiles existed of all but the most recently developed substances. And the idea that Hitler's personal experiences of gas warfare in World War I may have caused reluctance to order German forces to deploy such weapons is simply not consistent with his ruthlessness in other respects.

In a book based on extensive archival and secondary research, Florian Schmaltz provides a convincing set of answers to the question, one that emphasizes the German situation at particular points during the war. Throughout, the German military developed contingency plans for, and had access to, stockpiles of chemical weapons. But early on, the successful Blitzkrieg offensive did not require—indeed would have been impeded by—chemical weapons. In the middle part of the war, Germany appeared to be winning without deploying them; in the later stages, raw-materials shortages, Allied air superiority, and, crucially, a mistaken belief that the Allies also possessed nerve agents combined to eliminate chemical weapons from the list of military-strategic options for Germany.

Fascinating as these conclusions are, they represent only one small aspect of this impressive study. Schmaltz is actually much more interested in the organization and practice of poison-gas research in Nazi Germany, about which much less is known. His vantage point is the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS) and its institutes, for two good reasons. First, the society was arguably the most prestigious and important scientific-research organization in the world at the time, and several of its institutes were involved in research re-lating to chemical warfare; two of them had specialist chemical-warfare sections. Second, Schmaltz's focus is informed by his study's origins in an ambitious long-term project funded by the successor organization to the KWS, the Max Planck Society, on the history of the KWS during National Socialism. This is in fact the eleventh volume generated by the project.

Schmaltz's book is no mere institutional history though. Using a staggering array of archival sources from several countries, the author portrays the institutes he investigates quite convincingly as nodal points in networks of scientific communities, involving cooperation not just between institutes, but also with universities, and more importantly still, with industrial- and military-research establishments. He does much more than simply examine the contexts within which scientific knowledge is generated and communicated, being also keenly interested in the biographies of key figures who linked the various subcommunities. Finally, he uses the institutes as a means to explore issues relating not just to weapons research, but also to the use of concentration-camp inmates in the construction of facilities, experimentation on human subjects, and knowledge transfer to the Allied countries after the end of the war.

This is an ambitious effort, although its impact would have been greater still had the author focused more closely, consistently, and concisely on the most essential aspects of his subject. There is no question that the two institutes with dedicated chemical-warfare sections deserve greater consideration than the others, and, to be fair, this is what Schmaltz does. The question is whether the others—which did short-term contract research— deserve as much space as they get. And is it necessary to focus on all aspects of the activities of the two institutes with dedicated research establishments? Just to take one example: why...