Hitlers Scientists, John Cornwell
Hitlers Scientists, John Cornwell
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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

Published: 02/06/2025


Synopsis

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 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.

About John Cornwell

John Cornwell is the New York Times bestselling author of Hitler's Pope and many other books on Catholicism, a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and the Sunday Times (London), and a historian based in Cambridge, England. In 2019 he won the coveted Wilbur Award for best American magazine feature on religious affairs. He is widely known as a trusted expert on the Vatican and the modern papacy.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Raza

I am a history buff especially history of the 2nd World War, not only the conflict itself but the events leading upto it, the various contributing factors and as well as the aftermath. The mental state of the German Volk, the inner workings of the German Reich,, the persona of the Fuhrer have always......more

Goodreads review by Phillip

The Nazi war machine had several parts: the scientific researchers, corporations, and the military. Many scientists may not have been Nazis but did serve their Fatherland in their development of weapons like the V2 and early jet plane technology. John Cornwell dwells less on the morality of the scie......more

Goodreads review by Erik

I picked up this book as a corrective to the stuff I've read and seen about Nazi 'wonder weapons' during WWII--things like 'foo fighters', flying saucers, antigravity devices and the like. While they are glancingly mentioned as unrealized projects, this book actually has a much broader and more seri......more