John Cornwell: Hitler's Scientists

It may come as no surprise to New Zealand's beleaguered smokers that our current anti-smoking legislation has its roots in Nazi Germany. The Nazis were the first to ban smoking in public areas including offices and waiting rooms. They were also the first with bans on advertising cigarettes and to dish out ubiquitous health notices especially aimed at the young.

Their propaganda was perhaps a touch more zealous than today's. Tobacco apparently "reduced energy for work, it was a cause of impotence in men; it was an epidemic, a plague, a form of lung masturbation."

Just one of the many irony-laden facts John Cornwell provides in Hitler's Scientists. As well as being advanced in determining the link between lung cancer and cigarettes, Nazi Germany was also quick to see the cause of asbestosis and dietary and environmental links to cancer. Quoting Robert Proctor's Nazi War on Cancer Cornwell drives home an unpalatable point — that good science can happen in the name of an anti-democratic ideal. "Public Health initiatives were pursued not just in spite of fascism, but also in consequence of fascism."

The science did get a bit sinister, not to mention screwy, however, when anti-Semitism infiltrated the anti-cancer campaign — such as the film slide in which Jews were depicted as cancer cells and the curative x-rays targeting tumours were depicted as Nazi storm troopers.

Cornwell's absorbing analysis of Nazi scientific history does not dwell much on the atrocious human experiments of Joseph Mengele and his ilk. The few chapters on the science of death, thanatology, are thankfully brief, albeit no less sickening. Similarly Cornwell skips efficiently over the machines of war — the Panzer divisions, the U-boat and other technology of the Blitzkreig tactic.

And while there is a detailed exposition of Nazi rocket development and the race to gain the upper hand in radar and code breaking, Cornwell's focus is on a bigger picture — how scientists behave, their morals and ethics in the midst of a regime promoting slave labour, anti-Semitism and genocide.

Nowhere is the scientist's choice more poignantly demonstrated than in the story of Fritz Haber, a fiercely patriotic German Jew at the vanguard of poisonous gas warfare in World War I. Ironically, Haber promoted the use of hydrocyanic acid which would later become Zyklon B used for extermination in Hitler's death camps. Despite his devotion and fervent support for the Fatherland, Haber, like thousands of others, falls victim to Hitler's mass sackings of Jewish scientists and is forced to emigrate in 1934.

Cornwell is well-versed in moral quagmires, as his Hitler's Pope — severely critical of the role of Pius XII — attests. Here he delves deep into the development of the atomic bomb and in particular the role of Werner Heisenberg, the father of quantum mechanics. Was he a hero, a villain or fellow-traveller? "There is no evidence that Heisenberg ever regretted his wartime role and every evidence that he falsified his memory of it."

Cornwell gives lie to the idea that science can exist unsullied in a political vacuum and points out that the dilemma facing Nazi scientists still exists today. How should a good scientist armed with dangerous knowledge behave? Somehow Cornwell's answer — that scientists' only defence against "the prostitution and abuse of science" is to unite in unofficial constituencies and publicly communicate their concerns — gives scant comfort.

* Chris Barton is a Weekend Herald feature writer.
* Penguin Books, $29.95