Sideshows

Charles Maier

German Resistance against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad 1938-1945 by Klemens von Klemperer
Oxford, 487 pp, £45.00, April 1992, ISBN 0 19 821940 7

With the collapse of Communism and the disorientation of the Marxist Left, a poignant revaluation has overtaken the history of the European Resistance in World War Two. The gradual disappearance of the survivors would in itself have led to a dissipation of the Resistance’s sacred aura; but politics as well as demography is now at work. Of course, the history of the Resistance has always been especially vulnerable: for four decades in Italy it served to legitimate the vision of a Left that could embrace Communists and non-Communists alike; in France it justified the creation of the Gaullist Republic; in Yugoslavia it helped for forty years to hold together a precarious nationhood; in the Soviet bloc it furnished credentials for the Communist Parties that monopolised power after Hitler’s armies had been cleared out. In the early post-war years a source of pride and solace, the Resistance has by now become a troublesome, sometimes tiresome legacy.

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Vol. 15 No. 22 · 18 November 1993 » Charles Maier » Sideshows (print version)
page 18 | 2238 words

Letters

From Hilary Rose

Charles Maier (LRB, 18 November), commenting on a study of German war resisters, suggests that the disorientation of the Marxist Left has opened the way for a revisionist approach to the history of Nazism. Max Perutz’s review of a biography of Heisenberg and of the Farm Hall transcripts in the same issue goes some way to making Maier’s point for him. Perutz sees Heisenberg as a German patriot, out of sympathy with the Nazis, and the German physicists as a group reluctant to try to build an atomic bomb because the idea was abhorrent or at best impracticable. This is a kinder judgment than a number of previous historians have been prepared to make. Although they have only just been published in full and are currently being presented as if novel, extracts from the Farm Hall transcripts have been available for many years. They were drawn on by Robert Jungk in his pioneering book Brighter than a Thousand Suns in 1958 and quoted by Joseph Haberer in his excellent analysis of scientists under the Nazis, Politics and the Community of Science in 1969. Haberer quotes verbatim from the transcripts and summarises the initial reactions of the interned physicists at Farm Hall to the news of Hiroshima thus:

All the interned scientists, with the exception of von Laue and possibly Hahn, reacted in the following pattern: first, despondency and questions about how and where did we fail? How did the Americans do it? Expressions of personal failure and self-castigation followed: if they had worked harder, had tried to convince the Government to give full support, they probably would have beaten the Americans. A search for scapegoats followed these first two reactions. This included recriminations by some younger scientists to the effect that older colleagues, especially Heisenberg, had blundered and were to blame for the failure. Scientific leaders (such as Heisenberg and Weiszäcker) blamed the German Government for shortsightedness and for failing to support ‘real’ science.

This does not sound like the response of men pleased that they had diverted the Nazi Government’s atomic effort into the building of power plants. Only later (‘after the initial shock had passed’) did the physicists begin to develop the argument that they had not wished to build a bomb anyhow. In other contexts this belated expression of moral principle might be interpreted as little more than self-justificatory sour grapes. Haberer’s pains taking catalogue of the German non-Jewish scientific community’s complacent co-operation with Nazism from its early days in power until the final collapse in 1945 leads him to describe it as ‘the politics of prudential acquiescence’, a political stance that he also applies to the US physicists in their relationship to US post-war nuclear policy, of which J. Robert Oppenheimer’s conversion to the case for the H-bomb (‘It was technically sweet; we had to go ahead and do it’) stands as the epitaph.

Unlike the many millions who died, German scientists had a relatively good war and many, even those who had been responsible for the murderous science of the concentration camps, went on to have a good peace, picking up the threads of their respectable careers, culminating in scientific directorships and Nobel Prizes, with scarce a pause for breath. If, half a century on, we are to learn anything from this terrible history, the last thing that is needed is retrospective moral absolution.

Hilary Rose
London WC1