The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Not all the German innovations in the war were as fruitless as the atom bomb. They had in the Me-262 the world’s first operational jet fighter, though in too few numbers to materially affect the course of the war. The brilliant marine engineer Helmut Walther designed the technology for Germany’s diesel submarines, which could achieve speeds underwater of 28 knots when conventional submarines were capable of barely 10 knots.15 Here too they were too late to have an effect. The Germans had their own form of radar and for a time appeared to be ahead of the Allies. And they had Enigma, their typewriter-like code machine, which, in its more developed forms, could produce 159 billion billion different ways of setting a message (159 followed by 18 zeroes). Its main effect on history is perhaps that the British device invented to cope with the codes the Germans sent led to the Colossus, in effect the world’s first computer.

  The Germans also looked at computers, or at least very advanced calculating machines. They were mainly the work of Konrad Zuse, an engineer who, as early as 1932, used a binary—on/off or 1/0—scheme, with holes punched in paper and pins that could be locked in place, to develop a machine that performed the “tremendous numbers of monotonous calculations necessary for the design of static and aerodynamic structures” in the aircraft industry.16 His machines, which had an electrochemical memory, were used by the aircraft industry to solve simultaneous equations associated with metals stress but were never employed in cryptanalysis and never developed further because the war ended too soon.

  Then there was rocket science. Under the 1919 Versailles Treaty, Germany was forbidden from forging large guns and had been famously forced to scuttle her fleet in Scapa Flow. Her army could not exceed 100,000 men, tanks and submarines were forbidden, and guns were not to exceed 105 mm. However, she secretly began to rearm, building ships under cover in Holland and Japan, and it was in these highly clandestine circumstances that her rocket development project took shape. The leading light was Wernher von Braun, though it was Hermann Oberth, a German-speaking Romanian, who in his 1923 book, published in Germany, first outlined how the problems of space flight might be solved by the use of alcohol and liquid oxygen, and liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, in a multistage rocket.17 Building on this, the motor car manufacturer Fritz von Opel financed a number of tests for rocket-driven road vehicles, all of which experiences came together in the army after 1933. Experiments were run on the remote island of Borkum in the North Sea, where the A2 rocket was developed, the prototype for the V1 and V2 rockets (V for Vergeltungswaffen = revenge weapons) that were to torment London toward the end of World War II. More was spent on this weapon in World War II than on anything else except the Manhattan Project for building the atomic bomb in the United States.

  The rocket development facility was established at Peenemünde in 1936 where at first Göring hoped for a rocket-assisted aircraft—it was only later that the pilotless plane, or drone, was conceived. The Germans were ambitious, seeking a missile that would have a range of 160 miles, with a payload of one ton, traveling at five times the speed of sound (at a stage when no rocket had ever broken the sound barrier).18 Three wind tunnels were built at Peenemünde to help scientists reproduce the conditions of supersonic flight.

  Hitler had high hopes for the pilotless rockets, in particular that they would terrify Londoners and encourage the British government to sue for peace. The pilotless rockets did see the light of day, roughly 11,000 of them being launched on Britain, of which about 3,500 landed in London or in the south of England (the rest crashed on the way or strayed off course), killing 8,700 and injuring three times as many. But the “terror effect” never materialized. In 1945, 118 German rocket scientists surrendered to the Americans and were taken en masse to Fort Bliss in Texas as part of the secret Operation Paperclip, to use their skills to develop the U.S. space program. In addition to von Braun, Ernst Stuhlinger’s expertise proved crucial to the American effort to launch its first satellite after Russia shocked the world by putting Sputnik I into orbit in October 1957.

  Poison gas was also developed. As early as 1936 Dr. Gerhard Schrader, working on insecticides at IG Farben, had discovered a substance he named Tabun, which attacked the human nervous system, disrupting a neurotransmitter that controls the muscles, causing the victim to choke to death. A year later his team came up with an even more powerful substance, isopropyl methylphosphorofluoridate, or “sarin,” which causes coma, nosebleeds, loss of memory, paralysis, trembling, and many other symptoms. Sarin was named in “honor” of its discoverers, Gerhard Schrader, Ambros, Rüdiger, and Van der Linde. Both substances were produced at a factory built in Silesia, where 12,000 tons of Tabun were found by the Allies in 1945. The Germans never used these agents, fearing they would provoke a deadly chemical war.19 (Hitler had himself been exposed to poison gas in World War I, and this may have been a factor.)

  By the 1930s, certainly by 1939, IG Farben was the largest company in Europe and the fourth largest in the world, behind General Motors, U.S. Steel, and Standard Oil. The company had followed the nineteenth-century successes in dyestuffs and pharmaceuticals by remaining at the forefront of “big chemistry,” meaning that by the time the Nazis achieved office, Germany led the world in synthetic fuels. It cost ten times more to produce than fossil fuels, but synthetic fuel was popular with the Nazis because its production was under their direct control and production figures could be kept secret. The same arguments applied to synthetic rubber, which IG Farben also manufactured on a grand scale. When the war began, Germany was threatened with a shortage of rubber, and IG Farben was pressed into service. Famously, the company settled on Auschwitz as the site for its rubber plant, apparently quite independently of Himmler’s decision regarding the siting of concentration camps.

  Over the years of war, IG Farben’s use of forced or slave labor in the production of synthetic fuel and rubber plants, plus substances like nitrogen, methanol, ammonia, and calcium carbide, rose from 9 percent in 1941 to 30 percent four years later.20 This resulted in twenty-four members of the board of IG Farben being tried at Nuremberg. Five were found guilty of “slavery and mass murder” and received between six and eight years imprisonment.21 President Dwight Eisenhower wanted the company broken up, but in fact it was folded back into three of the old companies, Bayer, BASF, and Höchst. In 1955, Friedrich Jaehne, who had been sentenced to a year and half at Nuremberg, was elected chairman of Höchst. A year later, Fritz ter Meer, also convicted of plunder and slavery at Nuremberg, was elected chairman of the supervisory board of Bayer. The Auschwitz plant continues to this day.

  Part of the chemists’ job was to investigate and systematize the science of mass murder—the design of ovens, the invention of more “efficient” gases, the ordered disposal of the “remains.” Eleven million Jews, according to Adolf Eichmann, were killed in the death camps, though a more widely accepted figure is six million. Kurt Prüfer, an engineer who designed furnaces for Topf and Son of Erfurt, was an important figure here.

  Though the sheer numbers of people gassed still have the power to astound us, it is the actions of the biologists that, even after all this time, must count as the greatest betrayal of the long tradition of German genius. Using newly opened archives in Berlin and Potsdam, Ute Deichman and others have shown that some 350 qualified doctors or university professors of medicine were involved in concentration camp experiments.*

  Professor Heinrich Berning of the University of Hamburg used Soviet prisoners of war for famine experiments, carefully noting what happened as they starved to death. At the Institute for Practical Research in Military Science, experiments were carried out on cooling, using inmates from Dachau. The ostensible reason for this research was to study the effects of recovery of humans who suffered frostbite, and to examine how well humans adapted to the cold; some 8,300 inmates died during the course of these “researches.” In the experiments on yellow cross, otherwise known as mustard gas, so many people were killed that after a while no more “volunteers” could be found with the pro
mise of being released afterward. August Hirt, who carried out these “investigations,” was allowed to murder 115 Jewish inmates of Auschwitz at his own discretion to establish a “typology of Jewish skeletons.” Homosexuals were injected with hormones to see if their behavior was changed.22

  Among the eminent scientists who are now known to have conducted unethical research (to put it no more strongly) are Konrad Lorenz, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, and Hans Nachtsheim, a member of the notorious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Genetics in Berlin. Lorenz’s best-known work before the war was in helping to found ethology, the comparative study of animal and human behavior, where he discovered an activity he named “imprinting.” In his most famous experiment he found that young goslings fixated on whatever image they first encountered at a certain stage of their development. Lorenz had read Spengler’s Decline of the West and was not unsympathetic to the Nazis.23 In that climate he began to conceive of imprinting as a disorder of the domestication of animals and drew a parallel between that and civilization in humans: in both cases, he thought, there was “degeneration.” In September 1940, at the instigation of the Party and over the objections of the faculty, he became professor and director of the Institute for Comparative Psychology at the University of Königsberg, and from then until 1943 Lorenz’s studies were all designed to reinforce Nazi ideology. He claimed, for instance, that people could be classified into those of “full value” (vollwertig) and those of “inferior value” (minderwertig).24

  Conferences were held to broadcast the findings of research carried out on concentration camp inmates, including one where 1,200 people in Dachau were deliberately exposed to mosquitoes (with a small box containing the insects strapped to their hands), or else injected with the glands of mosquitoes, to study the effects of malaria, then said to be threatening German troops in Africa. These experiments were carried out under the direction of Dr. Klaus Schilling, emeritus professor of parasitology at Berlin and at one time director of the Malaria Commission of the League of Nations. At least thirty people died as a direct result of these experiments.

  The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics was founded in 1927 at Berlin-Dahlem on the occasion of the Fifth International Congress for Genetics, held in the German capital. The institute, and the congress, were both designed to gain international recognition for the study of human inheritance in Germany because, like other scientists, its biologists had been boycotted by scholars from other countries after World War I. The first director of the institute was Eugen Fischer, the leading German anthropologist, and he grouped around him a number of scientists who became infamous.25 Nearly all of them supported the racial-political goals of the Nazis and were involved in their practical implementation—for example, by drawing up expert opinions on “racial membership” in connection with the Nuremberg laws.26 There were also extensive links between the institute’s doctors and Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. The institute was dissolved by the Allies after the war.

  One aspect of the role played by science in the Third Reich that has not received due attention is the polycratic nature of Hitler’s dictatorship, especially in the war years. Rather than being a tightly controlled regime, as the Nazis themselves advertised, so many people were clamoring for Hitler’s attention and approval, and authority was divided so much, that rivalries for the Führer’s favor created bottlenecks and gaps in lines of command that played havoc with the German war effort. The Vengeance rockets illustrate this point. Hitler was convinced they would wreak havoc in London, whereas in fact their chief effect was to draw resources away from aircraft production. This could have been predicted—it was predicted—but no one dared say it. As Norbert Elias has observed, this meant there were far more pressures on Hitler than may have appeared from the outside.

  This is underlined, in a way, by Trevor Dupuy’s figures about the fighting ability of German soldiers in World War II. Dupuy conducted the same exercise for the second war as he did for the first (see Chapter 29), comparing the combat effectiveness of the fighting men on both sides. His conclusion, which he wrote most reluctantly, because of his contempt for the Hitler regime, was that “the Germans consistently outfought the far more numerous Allied armies that eventually defeated them.”27 Across seventy-eight engagements for which figures were available, the average number of opponents a soldier killed was as follows:

  Attack:

  Successful

  ALLIES: 1.47

  GERMANS: 3.02

  GERMAN PREPONDERANCE: 2.05

  Failure

  ALLIES: 1.20

  GERMANS: 2.28

  GERMAN PREPONDERANCE: 1.90

  Defense:

  Successful

  ALLIES: 1.60

  GERMANS: 2.24

  GERMAN PREPONDERANCE: 1.40

  Failure

  ALLIES: 1.37

  GERMANS: 2.29

  GERMAN PREPONDERANCE: 1.67

  Average:

  ALLIES: 1.45

  GERMANS: 2.31

  GERMAN PREPONDERANCE: 1.59

  With the German preponderance so marked, and extending consistently across many battles, one may ask why they lost. The answer lies in part in Hitler’s polycratic style of government, but also in the fact that, ultimately, the Allied numerical and matériel strength was just too much. Therein, perhaps, lies a profound truth. If you want to win, you need friends. Making friends was the one thing the Nazis were not good at.

  38.

  Exile, and the Road into the Open

  Between January 1933 and December 1941, 104,098 German and Austrian refugees arrived in America, of whom 7,622 were academics and another 1,500 were artists, journalists specializing in cultural matters, or other intellectuals. The trickle that began in 1933 swelled after Kristallnacht in 1938, but never reached a flood. By then it had become difficult for many to leave, and anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant feeling generally in America, meant that many were turned away.

  Other artists and academics fled to Amsterdam, London, or Paris. In the French capital Max Ernst, Otto Freundlich, and Gert Wollheim formed the Collective of German Artists, and then later the Free League of Artists, which held a counter-exhibition to the Nazi Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) show in Munich. In Amsterdam Max Beckmann, Eugen Spiro, Heinrich Campendonck, and the Bauhaus architect Hajo Rose formed a close-knit group, for which Paul Citroen’s private art school served as a focus. In London such artists as John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, Ludwig Meidner, and Oskar Kokoschka were the most well known in an intellectual community of exiles that was about 200 strong, organized into the Free German League of Culture by the Artists’ Refugee Committee, the New English Arts Club, and the Royal Academy.

  A German Academy of the Arts and Sciences in Exile was established, intended as a form of resistance to Hitler. Thomas Mann headed the literary section (in America) and Freud the scientific division (in London).1

  In Germany itself, artists such as Otto Dix, Willi Baumeister, and Oskar Schlemmer retreated into what they called “inner exile.” Dix hid away at Lake Constance, where he painted landscapes; that, he said, was “tantamount to emigration.” Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel removed themselves to obscure hamlets, hoping to escape attention. Ernst Kirchner took his life.

  The immigration to the United States was the most important and significant. As a result, the landscape of twentieth-century thought was changed dramatically. It was probably the greatest transfer of its kind ever seen (see Chapter 39).

  In addition to the artists, musicians, and mathematicians who were brought to America, scholars were also helped by a special provision in the U.S. immigration law, created by the State Department in 1940, which allowed for “emergency visitor” visas, available to imperiled refugees “whose intellectual or cultural achievements or political activities were of interest to the United States.”2 Max Reinhardt, the theater director, Stefan Zweig, the writer, and Roman Jakobson, the linguist, all entere
d the United States on emergency visas.

  Of all the schemes to help refugees whose work was deemed important in the intellectual sphere, none was so extraordinary, or so effective, as the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) organized by the American Friends of German Freedom. The Friends had been formed in America by the ousted German socialist leader Paul Hagen (also known as Karl Frank), to raise money for anti-Nazi work. In June 1940, three days after France signed the armistice with Germany with its notorious “surrender on demand” clause, requiring France to hand over any non-French person to German authorities, the committee’s members held a lunch to consider what needed to be done to help threatened individuals in the new, much more dangerous situation. The ERC was the result, and $3,000 was raised immediately. The aim, broached at the lunch, was to prepare a list of important intellectuals—scholars, writers, artists, and musicians—who were at risk and would be eligible for special visa status. One of the committee’s members, Varian Fry, was chosen to go to France to find as many threatened intellectuals as he could and help them to safety.

  Fry, a slight, bespectacled Harvard graduate, had been in Germany in 1935 and seen what Nazi brutality was like. He spoke German and French and was familiar with the work of living writers and painters. Fry arrived in Marseille in August 1940 with that $3,000 in his pocket and a roster of 200 he had memorized, judging it too dangerous to carry written lists. These names had been collected in an ad hoc way. Thomas Mann had provided the names of German writers at risk, Jacques Maritain a list of French writers, Jan Masaryk the Czechs. Alvin Johnson, president of the New School of Social Research in New York City, submitted names of academics, and Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, supplied the names of artists.