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"This is a history of one of the oldest and most important scientific societies, the German Physical Society, during the Nazi regime and immediate postwar period. When Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Physical Society included prominent Jewish scientists as members, including Fritz Haber and Albert Einstein. As Jewish scientists lost their jobs and emigrated, the Society gradually lost members. In 1938, under pressure from the Nazi Ministry of Science, Education, and Culture, the Society forced out the last of its Jewish colleagues. This action was just the most prominent example of the tension between accommodation and autonomy that characterized the challenges facing physicists in the society. They strove to retain as much autonomy as possible, but tried to achieve this by accommodating themselves to Nazi policies, which culminated in the campaign by the Society's president to place physics in the service of the war effort"--

The historical and scientific literature is replete with the extraordinary story of the 1931 winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology, Otto Heinrich Warburg. What all publications have in common when telling the Warburg story are two main themes, his religion, and his theory as to the cause of cancer. A recent biography of Warburg that has garnered a great deal of attention in the media has again targeted his theory on cancer and the role glucose plays in tumor survival. Earlier biographers while addressing his personal life to some degree, have shied away from, or have only tangentially addressed the issue that Warburg was gay or in the vernacular of the era a homosexual. In what has been called by some historians as the great intellectual migration 1500 Jewish scientists trained at some of the best institutions in the world fled for the United States or other safe havens following the ascension of Adolf Hitler. Among those who fled were physicists such as Albert Einstein, as well as numerous biologists, most of whom would go on to become Nobel laureates. While his Jewish colleagues fled Germany, Warburg opted to stay, where he not only survived the war, but thrived. While the story of the Jewish scientist who survived Nazi Germany is extraordinary and to this day leaves many unanswered questions, it is but half the story, it is the other half of the Warburg story that has all but been erased. While in no way an attempt to minimize what we now know about the ultimate plight of millions of Jews; I however, have chosen to focus the plight of gay men under Nazi rule and to point out that the 1931 winner of a Nobel Prize Otto Warburg was gay and the often-neglected fact that he was in a loving relationship with his partner, right-hand and on occasion his protector for over 50 years, Jacob Heiss.

Durante dos siglos Alemania ha cultivado el militarismo y la guerra. Eso ha llevado al país primero a la unificación, luego a dos derrotas en las guerras mundiales. Incluso el nacionalsocialismo se puede por un lado considerar hijo de una mentalidad orientada a lo militar. Todo ello básicamente cambia después de 1945. Aunque Alemania sea parte de la alianza OTAN y durante la Guerra Fría fuese de ambos lados frontera entre las dos partes contrapuestas, la inclinación prevalente del pueblo y de los representantes de la cultura ya no es a favor de las armas. Este cambio se debe no solo a la re-education decidida por los aliados y a la saturación después de tanto sufrimiento, sino también al trabajo consciente de investigadores para la paz. En el presente artículo se individúan las personalidades de este ámbito más relevantes de la posguerra en: Theodor Ebert, teórico y experimentador de la defensa civil noviolenta; Ekkehart Krippendorff, sofisticado y coherente paladín de una política ética dentro de una actitud filo-anarquista, y finalmente Hans-Peter Dürr, físico quántico que fundamenta sobre bases científicas una nueva forma de pensamiento sobre la paz. ; During two centuries Germany has been cultivating militarism and war. This led the country first to unification, then to two defeats in the world wars. Nazism too can be considered in a sense as a son of a mentality oriented towards the military. All this basically changes after 1945. Despite its being a member of the NATO and a frontier on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, the prevailing tendency of people and of the representatives of culture is not anymore en favour of the arms. This change is not only due to the re-education of the allies and to saturation after long suffering, but also to the conscious work of peace researchers. In this article the most important personalities of the postwar era in this field are considered to be the following ones: Theodor Ebert, theoretician and practitioner of the civilian nonviolent defence; Ekkehart Krippendorff, sophisticated and coherent advocate of ethic politics with a filo-anarchistic attitude, and finally Hans-Peter Dürr, quantum physicist who lays the scientific basis of a new peace thought.

In Totalitarian Science and Technology Paul Josephson considers how physicists, biologists, and engineers have fared in totalitarian regimes. Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin relied on scientists and engineers to build the infrastructure of their states. The military power of their regimes was largely based on the discovery of physicists and biologists. They sought to use biology to transform nature, including their citizens, with murderous effect in Nazi Germany. They expected scientists to devote themselves entirely to the goals of the state, and were intolerant of deviation from state-sponsored programs and ideology. As a result, physicists, biologists, and engineers suffered from the consequences of ideological interference in their work. Many lost their jobs; others were arrested and disappeared in prisons. In physics, this meant rejection of the theory of relativity, in biology in the USSR, the rejection of modern-day genetics.In this revised, on-line edition, Josephson also analyzes the uses of science and technology in such authoritarian regimes as the Soviet Union, National Socialist Germany, North Korea, the People's Republic of China, and Cuba. He argues that politics plays an important role in shaping research and development in all countries, but nowhere with greater risk to citizens and the environment than in closed political systems. ; https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/facultybooks/1001/thumbnail.jpg

A biography of the experimental physicist Franz Simon, describing his early life in Germany, his move to Oxford in 1933, and his experimental contributions to low temperature physics. This volume is distinctive for using new source materials and the broad setting of five competing nuclear programmes

A biography of the experimental physicist Franz Simon, describing his early life in Germany, his move to Oxford in 1933, and his experimental contributions to low temperature physics. This volume is distinctive for using new source materials and the broad setting of five competing nuclear programmes

"Planck's Law, an equation used by physicists to determine the radiation leaking from any object in the universe, was described by Albert Einstein as 'the basis of all twentieth-century physics.' Max Planck is credited with being the father of quantum theory, and his work laid the foundation for our modern understanding of matter and energetic processes. But Planck's story is not well known, especially in the United States. A German physicist working during the first half of the twentieth century, his library, personal journals, notebooks, and letters were all destroyed with his home in World War II. What remains, other than his contributions to science, are handwritten letters in German shorthand, and tributes from other scientists of the time, including his close friend Albert Einstein. In Planck : Driven by Vision, Broken by War, Brandon R. Brown interweaves the voices and writings of Planck, his family, and his contemporaries--with many passages appearing in English for the first time--to create a portrait of a groundbreaking physicist working in the midst of war. Planck spent much of his adult life grappling with the identity crisis of being an influential German with ideas that ran counter to his government. During the later part of his life, he survived bombings and battlefields, surgeries and blood transfusions, all the while performing his influential work amidst a violent and crumbling Nazi bureaucracy. When his son was accused of treason related to a bombing, Planck tried to use his standing as a German 'national treasure,' and wrote direct letters to Hitler to spare his son's life. Brown tells the story of Planck's friendship with the far more outspoken Albert Einstein, and shows how his work fits within the explosion of technology and science that occurred during his life. The story of a brilliant man living in a dangerous time, Brandon Brown gives Max Planck his rightful place in the history of science, and shows how war-torn Germany deeply impacted his life and work"--