Hitler's Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil's Pact

Abridged
Author: John Cornwell
Narrator: Simon Prebble
Genres: History
Publisher: Listen & Live Audio
Date: November 2003
Length: 6 hours
Ratings:
  • Book Rating: 3/5
Formats:
  • CD
  • WMA

Overview

From the bestselling author of Hitler’s Pope comes a gripping, in-depth account of Germany’s horrific abuse of science and its consequences- then and now.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Germany was the Mecca of science and technology in the world. However, by the beginning of the First World War, Germany began to display some of the features that would blight the conduct of ideal science through the rest of the century. After Hitler came to power in 1933, science and technology were quickly pressed into service by racist, xenophobic ideologies. From 1939 to the war’s end, scientists working under military control began research on nuclear chain reaction with the prospect of arming Hitler with an atomic bomb. By 1943, few areas of German science, technology, and industry had not been tainted by degenerate exploitation of slave labor with attendant brutality, human experimentation, and mass killing. How German scientists behaved in the era spanning the beginning of the First War and the end of the Second raises many questions, disturbing and relevant to this day, about how scientists act under pressure of social and political circumstances and events. In pondering the moral and political predicament of the unregulated pursuit of scientific progress, Hitler’s Scientists today prompts uncomfortable parallels with the past.

Reviews (3)

German scientists and nazi Germany

Written by Ward Kelly on March 27th, 2008

  • Book Rating: 4/5

This was a very interesting book. It delved into every avenue of science and the Nazi regime. It discussed individual German Jewish scientists, and their exile, the German scientists who remained and served the Nazi regime...some willingly, others stayed to try to thwart Nazi destruction of areas of science, the machines and their impact on the war and the aberrant scientific policies of the Nazi's and how they effected millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, handicapped, mentally deficiant, children and many others.

Hitlers scientists

Written by Charlie Dixon on November 26th, 2007

  • Book Rating: 2/5

Long and drawn out, too much uninteresting info, more like a detailed history lesson. A few interesting parts but far and few between. Not what I was hoping for.

Science in the Third Reich

Written by Anonymous on April 28th, 2006

  • Book Rating: 4/5

Good discussion of science in Germany (and elsewhere) under the Nazis. Want to know why Hitler never got the Bomb? It's all here. Last part is the weakest, with lots of handwringing and pontificating about WMD after the war. Still, a good book for those interested in science and the history of WW II.