Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler

by PhilipBall (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2014

  $4.72

  Serving the Reich tells the story of physics under Hitler. While some scientists tried to create an Aryan physics that excluded any `Jewish ideas', many others made compromises and concessions as they continued to work under the Nazi regime. Among them were world-renowned physicists Max Planck, Peter Debye and Werner Heisenberg. After the war most scientists in Germany maintained they had been apolitical or even resisted the regime: Debye claimed that he had gone to America in 1940 to escape Nazi interference in his research; Heisenberg and others argued that they had deliberately delayed production of the atomic bomb. In a gripping exploration of moral choices under a totalitarian regime, here are human dilemmas, failures to take responsibility and three lives caught between the idealistic goals of science and a tyrannical ideology.