Search results for "Nazi Germany"
showing 5 items of 15 documents
What's Nazi about Nazi Science? Recent Trends in the History of Science in Nazi Germany
2004
Books under review: Deichmann, Ute 2001. Fluchten, Mitmachen, Vergessen: Chemiker und Biochemiker in der NS-Zeit. Weinheim et al.: Wiley—VCH; Hausmann, FrankRutger (ed.) 2002. Die Rolle der Geisteswissenschaften im Dritten Reich 1933– 1945. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag; Maier, Helmut (ed.) 2002. Rustungsforschung im Nationalsozialismus: Organisation, Mobilisierung und Entgrenzung der Technikwissenschaften. Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag; Proctor, Robert N. 1999. The Nazi War on Cancer. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press; Segal, Sanford L. 2003. Mathematicians under the Nazis. Princeton/ Oxford: Princeton University Press; Szollosi-Janze, Margit (ed.) 2001. Science in the Third Reich. Ox…
Applied Mathematics versus Fluid Dynamics
2018
This paper investigates scientific, institutional, and political conflict and collaboration between two different disciplines in the first part of the 20th century: applied mathematics and fluid dynamics. It argues for the catalytic role of Richard von Mises (1883–1953) in this process and analyzes the reasons for von Mises’s considerable fame in the former and limited posthumous reputation in the latter field. I argue that von Mises’s contributions to fluid dynamics and aerodynamics suffered chiefly from two somewhat interconnected deficiencies compared to the work of his principal competitors. There was, on the one hand, von Mises’s methodological preference for applied mathematics as opp…
Science and ideology: The case of physics in Nazi Germany
2016
Science is not «above» politics and ethics: it is intrinsically political, and constantly raises ethical dilemmas. The consequences of evading such issues were made particularly clear in the actions of scientists working in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s. The accusation in 2006 that Dutch physicist Peter Debye was an opportunist who colluded with the Nazis reopened the debate about the conduct of physicists at that time. Here I consider what those events can tell us about the relationship of science and politics today. I argue that an insistence that science is an abstract, apolitical inquiry into nature is a myth that can leave it morally compromised and vulnerable to political manipula…
Mathematical Publishing in the Third Reich: Springer-Verlag and the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung
2000
Stiss. He was known to take interest in DMV affairs and they believed his views coincided with those current at the DMV board, in other words, with their own. Stiss had been a pupil of Ludwig Bieberbach (1886-1982), who in the Third Reich propagated an anti-Semitic, racial theory of Deutsche Mathematik and led a group of National Socialist mathematicians strongly opposed to the DMV. The DMV board hoped that Stiss might be able to reconcile his former teacher with the DMV, or at least safeguard it and its politics against the threat of political attack from Bieberbach's faction. In addition, Stiss had recently become a member o f the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei…
In the Service of the Reich: Aspects of Copernicus and Galileo in Nazi Germany’s Historiographical and Political Discourse
2001
ArgumentFocus of this paper is on the historiographical fate of Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei in Nazi Germany. Both played interesting roles in Nazi propaganda and the legitimization of Nazi political goals. In the “Third Reich,” efforts to claim Copernicus as a German astronomer were closely linked to revisionist policies in Eastern Europe culminating in the war-time expansion. The example of Galileo’s condemnation by the Catholic Church in 1633 became a symbol of its unjustified opposition to new “scientific” results, namely Nazi racial theory. After Catholic opposition against Nazi racial theory had reached a peak in 1937, the Galileo affair was turned into an instrument of Naz…