Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (review)

Contrary to what one might expect, historian Kristie Macrakis is not referring to members of oppressed ethnic or religious minorities in the title of her book Surviving the Swastika. Rather, she is referring to the existence and survival of a major German scientific institution during the Nazi period. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society was founded shortly before the First World War and oversaw a whole range of important scientific institutions. It was—and, in the form of its successor, the Max Planck Society, still is—a cornerstone of the scientific community in Germany.

After several decades in which historians of science have generally neglected the history of scientific institutions in Nazi Germany, Macrakis presents the first study to focus on the complex interaction between the Nazi administration and the semiprivate Kaiser Wilhelm Society. She shows that the Society was not totally controlled by the Nazis: the leadership of the Society could, to some extent, protect its institutions from the influence of National Socialism. The Society discovered niches in the complex power structure of the Third Reich that allowed it to continue science “as usual” (p. 5)—at least to the extent that a science purged of Jewish and socialist scientists can be considered “usual.” This relative independence, Macrakis argues, helped account for the fact that high-quality science continued to be practiced in Germany after the Nazis seized power.

In assuming this position, Macrakis is contributing to a trend in current scholarship that is challenging the notion of the Nazi State as a homogeneous construction. Indeed, Nazi Germany did not possess a unified and centralized policy regarding science, but rather implemented a disunified policy through rival institutions (p. 96). The Kaiser Wilhelm Society is one example of how an important German institution could manipulate the power struggles within the Nazi administration to gain a certain amount of autonomy. However, it is important to note that the National Socialist administration permitted this autonomy only within a certain framework: it was tolerated only under the premises that the Society would dismiss Jewish scientists and would participate in military research.

In two case studies—one on basic biological research in different Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, and the other on research-related uranium fission—Macrakis details the ways in which basic research flourished in Nazi Germany. She concedes that the Kaiser Wilhelm Society could not protect Jewish scientists from being forced out of their positions, but claims that equivalant non-Jewish scientists generally took over these positions. While her description of atomic research in Germany is very penetrating and clearly proves that German scientists were not technically and scientifically advanced enough to produce an atomic bomb, her case study of biological research seems to be strained in order to fit her general thesis regarding the relative autonomy of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. She claims that the cognitive content of the science of racial hygiene and eugenics did not change much after the Nazis seized power, whereas the uses toward which such “knowledge” was directed altered dramatically (p. 130). Although accurate, this thesis overlooks the fact that it was precisely the stability of content that characterized eugenics under Nazi Germany. While the scientific assumptions of eugenicists in other European countries and the United States underwent important changes in the 1930s, the takeover helped to insulate German eugenicists and racial hygienists against any challenges to their basic assumptions. The clashes between the members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychiatry and their foreign colleagues indicated the extent of these differences.

Providing a detailed description of the functioning of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society after 1933 and its relationship to the Nazi administration, Macrakis’s well-written book is a valuable and important contribution to the history of science in Nazi Germany. Even if she overstresses her thesis about the relative autonomy of the scientific institutions in her description of the life sciences, she succeeds in proving that...