

Hitler's Scientists
Science, War and the Devil's Pact
Author: John Cornwell
Narrator: Simon Prebble
Abridged: 6 hr 22 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Listen & Live Audio
Published: 02/06/2025
Categories: Nonfiction, History, Wars, World War Ii, Science
Synopsis
After Hitler came into power in 1933, science and technology were quickly pressed into service by racist, xenophobic idealologies. 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 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 scientist 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 Scientist today prompts uncomfortable parallels with the past.