Between 1946 and 1948, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) sent four representatives to Germany for extended visits to investigate how it could become involved in reconstructing the country. They were particularly interested in reorganizing the educational and science systems in a democratic manner and in reintegrating the conquered aggressor into the “family of nations.” They held numerous meetings with leading representatives of the Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG), the successor to the world-famous Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG), which had received considerable amounts of funding from the RF until the late 1930s, even after the Nazis came to power. As a result of its evaluation, the RF declined to provide the same level of support for the postwar MPG as it had for the prewar KWG. Although an obvious reason for the RF to distance itself from the KWG would be the latter's involvement in the crimes of the Nazi regime, as suggested by Paul Weindling in his analysis of the RF's funding policy for biomedical research in Germany in general,Footnote ¹ neither the RF interviews nor the evaluation reports mentioned the involvement of KWG scientists in biomedical crimes during the Third Reich.Footnote ² The reports did not even mention the Nuremberg medical trial, which took place between December 1946 and August 1947.Footnote ³

In fact, the RF emissaries, who took a relatively positive view of the KWG's scientific potential, interceded with the American military government several times on the KWG's behalf. At the same time, the RF's interviewers and the KWP/MPG interviewees were both pursuing their own individual agendas—attempting to position their organizations in the new world order of the Cold War. The records actually deal more with the protagonists' concerns about their own future position than with the experiences of the recent Nazi past. At the start of the 1950s, this jockeying for position meant that instead of moving closer together again, the RF and the KWG/MPG were moving farther apart.

This article will reconstruct the process of how these organizations moved together and apart. Initially it will focus on two issues: what had brought these two eminent organizations together between the two world wars, and how, if at all, the representatives of the RF and the KWG/MPG reflected on their relationships with the Nazi regime (which in some ways had overlapped) after World War II. Finally, I will interpret the events from a transnational perspective in the global context of the Cold War.

I take this approach for several reasons.Footnote ⁴ First, the two institutions were and are nationally based, in the U.S. and Germany, respectively. But ever since its foundation, the RF has seen itself as a “global player” that attempts to ignore “flags and boundaries,” while the KWG justified its position as the leading national scientific organization mainly through its international standing and recognition for its scientific achievements. Both organizations incorporated considerations beyond their own national context into their self-images, affecting their behavior. Second, science—especially top-class natural science research—is always a supranational activity that can be promoted or hindered by the general political situation but rarely prevented altogether. It is supranational not only with regard to international scientific organizations and conferences, but also because of the continual reception and demarcation of scientific projects, methods, and results in different countries, and the communication, interaction, and competition among scientists in different countries. Third, one of the determining factors in the relationship between the RF and the KWG was their mutual perceptions of each other and how each integrated the other's actual or perceived perception of them into their own strategies. Finally, the events, necessarily transatlantic, largely took place in a physical area that was, geographically, within the political boundaries of the former German Reich; its unity as a nation-state had, however, been destroyed and its new condition as a divided nation-state was still being negotiated, a process in which these discussions about science policy played a part. Of course, the KWG/MPG and the RF had no equal footing in this dialogue. Their transnational interactions portrayed here took place under the specific conditions of the allied rule over Germany as a conquered aggressor. How far these interactions expressed moments of a “consensual hegemony,” as scholars have recently described American science policy in postwar Europe, remains to be seen.Footnote ⁵

Philanthropy's Increasing Focus on Science or the Rationalization of Life

To this day, the Rockefeller Foundation's stated, immodest goal is “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” John D. Rockefeller established the Foundation in 1913 as an addition to the family's other philanthropic organizations, which were mainly active within the United States. Frederick Gates, Rockefeller's personal advisor and the primary administrator of his foundations, believed that disease was “the supreme ill of human life”Footnote ⁶ because—in his view—it caused poverty, crime, ignorance, vice, inefficiency, and “hereditary taint.” In Rockefeller's philanthropic worldview, the desire for health united rich and poor, and medical progress was one of the undeniable universal values on the planet. Rockefeller and Gates regarded tackling epidemics such as malaria, yellow fever, tuberculosis (TB), and hookworm; improving medical training; and developing public health systems around the globe based on the standards of the RF-funded centers at Johns Hopkins University or in Beijing as a way to spread Western civilization and its moral values (in their American variety) across Latin America, East Asia, and the Pacific.Footnote ⁷

Initially, Rockefeller philanthropy did not target the western Europe of Louis Pasteur, Rudolf Virchow, and Robert Koch. It was the military devastation and social upheaval of World War I that, according to Wicliffe Rose, RF trustee and director of the International and General Education Boards in 1919, ended the existing traditions and made old Europe “ready for new seed.”Footnote ⁸ The Foundation's first major activities in Europe set up a committee on TB prevention in Paris in 1917, soon followed by a European office for the RF, a public health program for Czechoslovakia in 1920, and a malaria prevention program in Italy in 1923.Footnote ⁹

The Foundation's trustees and officers did not see Germany as an equally well-prepared seedbed. Rather, and despite their reservations about the militant nationalism displayed by German academics during and after the war, the RF believed that the country's medical and scientific research was a source of new ideas, not just for rebuilding postwar Europe but also for the most controversial organizational and programmatic restructuring of the Rockefellers' philanthropic empire. By the time this process ended in 1928, most of the family's philanthropic organizations had been brought together under the umbrella of the Foundation, which was divided into the five main divisions of scientific research: the International Health Division, Division of Medical Sciences, Division of Natural Sciences, Division of Social Sciences, and Division of the Humanities.Footnote ¹⁰ They reflected the RF's new philanthropic direction: “The advance of knowledge is the sailing direction.”Footnote ¹¹

One man in particular, Raymond B. Fosdick, a Foundation trustee for many years and its president from 1936 to 1948, gave priority to the “science of man” rather than to education or welfare. He granted the division directors considerable scientific freedom, supported them in formulating their own areas of emphasis for scientific funding, and shrugged off the objections of the founders' generation, people such as Wicliffe Rose and Abraham Flexner, about radical changes to the RF's organizational structure and programs. In this manner, “the dynamic partnership between scientists and foundation managers” developed in the RF similarly to the way they did in other large American foundations. As Robert E. Kohler has shown, it was “characteristic of the interwar decades” and differed from both the older “style of patronage” and its “small-scale, personalized social relations” and from the “more impersonal,” bureaucratic “big science” structures that developed during and after World War II.Footnote ¹²

In several ways, scientific developments in Germany drove this restructuring. Since the launch of experimental physiology in the mid-19th century, German medical research had been at the forefront of international rankings. Richard M. Pearce, head of the Medical Education Board, and his staff viewed the uniquely close links between clinical practice, university teaching, and scientific research, both in institutional and personnel terms, as the ideal breeding ground for a rapid increase in medical knowledge and the equally rapid application of that knowledge. The German system became a model of support for medical centers in Europe and Latin America.Footnote ¹³ For this reason, and despite their political distance, the Foundation set up an aid program for German science in the early 1920s. The RF provided funds for the purchase of specialist international literature that institutions had not been able to obtain because of the war and high inflation, and for research grants to promising young researchers, to whom few jobs were available. The Foundation hoped these measures would help to secure the high standard of German medical research through the crisis of the postwar years.Footnote ¹⁴

During the second half of the 1920s, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society came into play in the wake of the RF's increasing focus on science in its philanthropic efforts. The KWG had been founded in 1911 in response to the crisis of the German university system and the simultaneous advance in American science since the turn of the century, watched nervously in Germany. The research institutes were to be funded through a mix of public funds, a foundation endowed by the Kaiser, and (it was hoped, initially realistically) through considerable donations from industry. They were to be free from university constraints and were to carry out research into areas at the boundaries of various disciplines or that lay between science and technology, providing new knowledge, regardless of whether it was immediately applicable. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWI) for Chemistry, Biology, and Physical Chemistry, to name only the first few founded, based their structures on the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (RIMR), founded in 1901 and which later became the Rockefeller University in New York.Footnote ¹⁵ In other words, these were pure research institutes with the best possible equipment. The heads of the institutes were chosen carefully, were regarded as leading scientists, and were given almost total freedom to choose their own topics of study, methods, and staff.Footnote ¹⁶ Although the Society's endowment base evaporated during the inflation in the 1920s, the Reich and the German Länder took over most of the financing, so that the KWG actually continued to expand. By 1933, roughly thirty KWIs existed, and by 1945, roughly forty. The RF alone had provided most of the funding for five of them, namely the German Research Center for Psychiatry in Munich (DFA, a KWI from 1925 onward), and the four Berlin KWIs for Brain Research, Cell Physiology, Physics, and Foreign and International Private Law.Footnote ¹⁷

The natural sciences enjoyed two major interfaces between the program of the RF and the research focuses of the KWG. One lay in the area of scientific medicine. In 1930, Alan Gregg, a medical scientist, became the head of the RF's Division of Medical Sciences. He had worked in almost all of the medical programs created by Rockefeller philanthropy, but he also had broad scientific training, particularly in psychiatry. He was an advocate of a holistic biomedical approach inspired by the philosophy of monism, described as “psychobiology,” which postulated that the body and the spirit formed a psychosomatic unit. Gregg wanted to redefine both the disciplinary boundaries within the biological sciences and what was regarded as valid research. He wanted to integrate psychiatry into general medical and clinical practice and see doctors' problem-solving skills extended to cover communal and social areas.Footnote ¹⁸ His psychobiological program became the unifying framework for the Rockefeller agenda of the 1930s; the Foundation proclaimed its “ultimate aim and central problem” to be the “analysis and rationalization of human behavior.”Footnote ¹⁹

Mainly on the insistence of its trustees, the RF kept its distance from the contemporary American eugenicists who were arguing for immigration limits and sterilizations based on genetic criteria.Footnote ²⁰ But to a large extent, it left Gregg free to cooperate with German eugenicists, at least if they were working in the well-known Kaiser Wilhelm institutes. Gregg was enthusiastic about Emil Kraepelin's research program at the DFA (KWI) for Psychiatry in Munich because it combined chemistry, experimental genetics, physiology, demography, and genealogy with the development of a database on criminal biology and a genealogical database of the “genetically diseased.” Between 1925 and 1935, the RF spent almost three million dollars on a new building and various research projects at this institute. Funding was soon cut back, however, when Ernst Rüdin, who had become director of the institute in 1931, emerged as a propagandist for Nazi racial hygiene and a coauthor of the 1933 Act on Forced Sterilization.Footnote ²¹ Between 1930 and 1935, the RF supported the creation of the “Genetic Index of the German People,” which was financed by the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft and coordinated nationally by Eugen Fischer, director of the KWI for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics. Between 1932 and 1935, the RF also provided funding for a project at this institute using research on twins to investigate hereditary diseases. The KWI for Brain Research was less obviously linked to Nazi racial policy, at least while led by Oskar and Cécile Vogt, who were driven out in 1937 by Nazi activists among their staff. The RF had clearly provided more than $300,000 in 1929 for the new institute building in Berlin-Buch, together with additional funding for projects linking experimental genetics, neuropathology, and psychological research with clinical observation and therapy.Footnote ²² Thus, Gregg and his division were deeply embedded in the German and international eugenic consensus of the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ²³

The RF also supported research approaches by KWG researchers that did not reflect Gregg's holistic-psychological views, which it included under the heading “rationalization of human behavior.” Warren Weaver, who was appointed director of the new Division of Natural Sciences in 1932 after a four-year search, also managed to unite more reductionist bioscientific approaches with the RF's new doctrine, seemingly without conflict with Gregg. Weaver was a classical physicist who realized that modern quantum physics could no longer be resisted. He convinced the trustees with his ideas on programs that combined the new physics with biology and, with the RF's financial support, became a “scientific manager” in the area of modern molecular biology and remained so until well into the 1960s.Footnote ²⁴ During the 1930s, reductionist approaches that attempted to explain life processes through physical and chemical processes were probably more popular in many bioscientific disciplines, whether psychiatry, physiology, endocrinology, or genetics, than Gregg's psychobiology. Gregg himself drew on the work of the cell physiologist Otto Warburg. In 1930, with Gregg's support, the RF approved about $650,000 for Warburg's new KWI building in Berlin-Dahlem. Warburg had written to Gregg in 1931:

In the first annual report that Weaver submitted to the RF's Board of Trustees in 1933, he expanded the latter's physio-chemical perspective on biology to a perspective on society in general:

In short, the increasing emphasis on science in American philanthropy during the 1920s brought the RF and KWG together. As part of this process, the Foundation's goal narrowed from “promoting the welfare of mankind” to the “rationalization of human behavior.” Instead of education, “advancement of knowledge” became the method of choice, and thus, RF officers, who increasingly had scientific training themselves, focused their interest on their politically dubious but scientifically renowned and productive colleagues in the KWG, regardless of whether the latter inclined more toward holistic or reductionist approaches to research, or preferred their own individual combination. Between 1925 and 1930, the RF not only financed the new KWG institute buildings for Psychiatric Research in Munich and for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch, but also agreed to fund two more institute buildings for Physics and Cell Physiology in Berlin-Dahlem. In addition, they provided numerous KWG scientists with fellowships and funded projects at a variety of other KWIs with smaller “grants in aid.”

The End of the Brief Dream of Science as a Unifying Force for Humanity

The rise of power of the Nazis in 1933 seriously disrupted the collaboration between the KWG and the RF, which both organizations highly valued and which was extremely lucrative for the KWG. It also presented a major challenge to the RF's basic principles of science policy, as Macrakis and Richardson have shown.Footnote ²⁷ Since its foundation, the RF had claimed to be able to ignore national boundaries. One almost mythical example was an entomologist who was researching malaria and how to control it in Central America. He assiduously collected mosquitoes between the front lines of the warring parties in a civil war during breaks in fighting, as he required the samples for his research.Footnote ²⁸

The Foundation had relatively few illusions about the nature of the Nazi regime and what it meant for the KWG. It had ample evidence: the support that Rüdin and his RF-funded DFA (KWI) for Psychiatry offered for Nazi racial policy; the dismissal of scientists (including a considerable number of former RF scholarship-holders) considered Jews according to the National Socialist Law for the Restoration of the Career Civil Service (Berufsbeamtengesetz) and the Nuremberg race laws (Rassengesetze); the campaign by Nazi activists against the politically unpopular Oskar and Cécile Vogt and their eventual expulsion from the KWI for Brain Research that the RF had set up for them; and the expulsion of Fritz Haber, with whom the Foundation had worked closely and who would rather resign his position as director than dismiss his Jewish coworkers as the Nazi laws required, resulting in the takeover of his KWI for Physical Chemistry by third-rate, party-loyal scientists.Footnote ²⁹ As early as summer 1933 the then-president of the RF, Max Mason, traveled to Germany to familiarize himself with the political situation. He found that opinions among German scientists differed. Some hoped that the situation would soon stabilize and return to normal, and wanted the RF to help in this process; others, especially those who had been dismissed, expected the RF to protest in the strongest terms. Overall, the RF president, and to an even greater extent the staff of its Paris office, took a more pessimistic view of the developments in science policy in Germany than their non-Jewish, German counterparts with whom they spoke.Footnote ³⁰ Eventually, Fosdick, who become president in 1936, concluded that there were places and times where “even collecting mosquitoes” could become impossible.Footnote ³¹

Yet the RF could not make up its mind to take decisive action. As late as 1937, the Foundation still felt obliged to maintain the political neutrality that it felt was essential as the basis for its science funding around the world:

Equally, it felt bound to honor its existing commitments. The decision actually to release the funding that it had approved for the KWI for Cell Physiology in 1930 and for Physics in 1933 was only made after an extended and controversial internal debate and despite very justified doubts about whether the KWG would be able to abide by the conditions that it had accepted in 1934–35, that the institutes would continue to be led, long-term, by outstanding scientists without any political compromises to the Nazi regime. The American press scathingly denounced the funding decisions as support for Hitler and his anti-Jewish politics.Footnote ³³ From then on, the RF approved no new institutional funding for Germany. Until the U.S. entered the war, however, it continued to award occasional fellowships and grants in aid for projects at various KWIs and German universities if it believed that the projects were located on the cutting edge of its psychobiology and experimental biology research agenda, that “objective scholarship” seemed possible (in particular in medical and natural-science disciplines), and if the recipients had not obviously acted as propagandists for the Nazi regime.Footnote ³⁴

On the other hand, the RF also funded the largest aid program for scientists who had been expelled of all the American foundations, totaling some $1.4 million. Overall, 303 scientists, including 26 former KWG staff, benefited from this program. The RF also insisted that scientific criteria take priority over social criteria in the selection of these fellows. As a result, many promising young scientists had better chances to receive support than scientific colleagues with less impressive credentials or even than the renowned, often demanding former KWI directors whose scientific capabilities had already peaked and for whom no adequate academic leadership position could be created in the countries to which they emigrated.Footnote ³⁵

Given this ambivalent attitude during the Nazi period, especially about the question of eugenics, the dwindling pledges of funding, and the support for emigrants along predominantly scientific achievement-oriented and less social criteria, the Foundation's officers' reservations about any new involvement by the RF in postwar Germany seem astonishing. But perhaps this very ambiguity is also the explanation for those reservations. Until 1940, the officers, particularly the division directors Weaver and Gregg, occasionally had to defend funding for German scientists against the criticism of trustees. After the war, they were in no hurry to go to Germany to gain their own impressions of the situation there, warning instead that science funding in Germany should not be restored too quickly.Footnote ³⁶ It was John D. Rockefeller III himself who was the first representative of the RF to visit Germany and Austria in the summer of 1946. Thereafter, he insisted that a representative of the Foundation go on an extensive fact-finding mission to determine the general principles for the RF's future work in the two countries.Footnote ³⁷ As a result, Albert Mann, who had previously been vice president of the General Education Board, went to Germany in January 1947 and traveled through the three western occupation zones. He had spent several weeks preparing himself and had been briefed by the directors of the RF's divisions, who had supplied him with lists of questions, funding provided to date, and the names of former fellows and other important people he should talk to.Footnote ³⁸ He also received the report of the committee of the National Academy of Sciences, which was commissioned by Vannevar Bush of the Office for Strategic Research and Development under the leadership of Roger Adams, the chair of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois, and which had recommended as early as July 1945 that the German science landscape be reconstructed, ushering in the science policy shift away from the Morgenthau Plan. The emigrant mathematician and trustworthy representative of German science Richard Courant, who transferred directly from Göttingen to New York University in 1934, had provided Mann with a list of contents. Mann, however, did not take advantage of the offer by Otto Meyerhof, the former director of the KWI for Medical Research and an RF fellow who had also emigrated, to advise him before his trip to Germany.Footnote ³⁹

While in Germany, Mann conducted dozens of interviews with the staff of the occupation authorities and, in particular, with university professors and KWG scientists that Adams und Courant had especially urged him to see. He returned to New York in February 1947, where he died immediately after his arrival and before he could edit his extensive notes.Footnote ⁴⁰

The New York office of the Foundation compiled a report based on Mann's notes. It contained careful, in some cases favorable, evaluations of the scientists he had interviewed and was discussed in April 1947 at the first staff conference on the situation in Germany.Footnote ⁴¹ During this meeting, Weaver, as the note-taker recorded, expressed himself in an “almost completely negative” manner and “with considerable emotion”:

Weaver had evidently lost faith not merely in German science but in any “objective scholarship” at all. Gregg, however, pointed out that because of the world economy and European politics, “we cannot leave Germany alone and pretend she is not there.”Footnote ⁴³ But he acted that way himself, ignoring Germany in his annual trips to Europe, which he had recommenced in 1945. It was not until 1949 that he entered the country again, and he was still so disgusted by the people he met there, who revealed themselves to him as “strangers to self-reproach and the responsibilities that attend freedom,” that on leaving the country he had to vent his feelings by writing in his official diary:

The directors of both the Natural and Medical Science divisions were so bitter about the effects of their support for science in Nazi Germany that they were at most prepared to provide funds to purchase international scientific literature, as the Foundation had done after World War I, and perhaps to help the very youngest up-and-coming researchers. To the astonishment of his colleagues in the Humanities Division, Weaver even offered to leave Germany in their hands for the next few years.Footnote ⁴⁵

The same opinion was put forward by a young and ambitious directorate assistant, Edward F. D'Arms, who had just moved to the RF's Humanities Division after spending two years with the Educational Affairs Branch of the American military government in Bavaria. He attempted to establish a reputation for himself by issuing an eleven-page criticism of the Mann report, in which he vehemently rejected the latter's criticism of the American occupational forces' policy toward the universities and research centers, and in particular of the institutional destabilization caused by an over-the-top denazification policy.Footnote ⁴⁶ He defended absolute priority being given to strict denazification and long-term reeducation, which, he claimed, had by no means been carried out to an adequate extent by General Clay, despite his public statements on the matter, and postulated “that temporary inefficiency of operations is preferable to Nazi-dominated efficiency.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The only person who doubted the usefulness of the occupiers' reeducation policy was Joseph Willits, the long-established director of the Social Sciences Division. He responded to the new recruit's educational ferocity with six “naïve” questions:

Despite all the debate, the RF leaders relatively quickly agreed on how to proceed. Initially, they decided to send a second person to assess the situation. Robert Havighurst, an educationalist from the University of Chicago with a background in natural sciences who had previously directed the RF's General Education Board for several years, traveled through Germany and Austria for several weeks in the autumn of 1947 and again a year later.Footnote ⁴⁹ After discussing his detailed reports, the RF laid the outlines of a future program for Germany, with a focus on youth work, education, teacher education, leader training, supplying public libraries with literature to strengthen democracy, and providing journalists and other mediators with training on democracy, mainly through international exchange programs. In other words, the measures focused mainly on reeducation, as John D. Rockefeller III had suggested in 1946.Footnote ⁵⁰

The promotion of scholarship was to take second place, with a concentration on the social sciences. With respect to the natural sciences, Havighurst recommended that the Foundation wait until the German science scene had reorganized itself and the basic needs of the population had been met to such an extent that resources such as building materials for reconstructing labs or food for experimental animals were actually available. Thanks partly to his interviews with KWG scientists, he had, however, discovered a few minor “bottlenecks,” such as the lack of laboratory vessels, photographic equipment, and a variety of chemicals. Here, the RF could help quickly and effectively, with little effort, to allow interrupted research to recommence.Footnote ⁵¹

Weaver angrily rejected this idea. He doubted very much, he said, whether it would be morally justified for the RF to do anything at all in Germany. Of course it was not possible to lump all sixty million Germans together in moral terms. But for him it was an “act of faith” that the reconstruction of Germany could not be treated as “business as usual,” with the usual division of labor between the various divisions. Until Germany functioned as a “democratic state in a society of nations,” he could not support any activities at all in the area of the natural sciences. Least of all could Germany be given better treatment than other needy countries that had been “on the side of the angels,” such as France, for which Weaver had already prepared a special funding program in 1945–46.Footnote ⁵² Willits felt this kind of vengefulness toward the German people as a whole was completely wrong and suggested that Weaver base his ideas not on the politics of the War Department but on the spirit of the American Quakers. This would not merely be Christian but also, in the spirit of General George Marshall's ideas, politically clever, because a prosperous Europe and a peaceful world needed a productive Germany.Footnote ⁵³

In fact, the RF's program for Germany did concentrate, until the end of the 1940s, on youth work, education, and cultural issues, focusing on exchange programs and assistance for public libraries. Weaver's Natural Science Division refrained in general from providing support for German scientists, let alone for research projects or institutions, whereas the Humanities Division was most involved. At the same time, Willits's Social Science Division also worked on developing scientific contacts with West Germany and Austria, although its work mainly focused on France.Footnote ⁵⁴ Despite all the political stipulations and Gregg's continued ambivalent attitude, the Medical Science Division awarded “special grants to Germany for European rehabilitation.” These amounted from 1946 to 1949 to the tidy sum of about $875,000, more than double the institutional support for French science in the same time period.Footnote ⁵⁵ These grants included scholarships to young German researchers from 1946 onward, increasing to several dozen after 1948. There were also travel stipends for established scientists, some of whom would have surely disgusted Gregg if he had known about their earlier activities. One of them was Wilhelm Rudorf, director of the KWI/MPI for Plant Breeding Research, who received a travel allowance in 1949. Of all the Kaiser Wilhelm institutes, it was Rudorf's that perhaps had the highest proportion of SS members among its staff; it had employed concentration camp prisoners in kok-saghys (caoutchouc, rubber) breeding at Rajsko, an auxiliary camp to Auschwitz; and it had, last but not least, been deeply involved in the agricultural and starvation policy of the General Plan for the East (Generalplan Ost).Footnote ⁵⁶

Weaver's unusually vehement outbursts during the debates on the RF's future activities in Germany expressed his deeper concern about the destructive potential of modern natural sciences when combined with military and political power. This concern had been provoked not merely by the sins of his scientific protégés in Germany, but, to an even greater extent, by those of his American colleagues in Los Alamos. The RF's annual reports and minutes of conferences during the immediate postwar period do not contain any explicit discussions of any unintended effects that the RF's support of science and especially of eugenics in Germany may have had, even though this support continued (to a decreasing extent) right until the U.S. entered the war. But by providing fellowships for men such as Niels Bohr and Harold C. Urey, and above all by financing the “184-inch cyclotron at the University of California,” which was supposed to serve only “the undiscourageable search for truth which is the noblest expression of the human spirit” when it was approved in 1940, the RF had ultimately played “an unwitting part” in the development of the atomic bomb.Footnote ⁵⁷

Fosdick, the president of the Foundation, devoted a long passage to the effects of the atomic bomb on the modern understanding of science in his review of the year 1946.

For Fosdick, the answer to this question was, in one sense, simple: it was not science that should be curbed, but rather that war should be prevented. The world order should be altered, and “understanding,” “tolerance,” and “moral agreement” should be promoted. On the other hand, this “approach to a solution” seemed difficult and time-consuming. It would require the efforts of the natural scientists' colleagues in the social sciences and humanities, but would they progress with their project “to build the moral and psychological sense of the fundamental unity of mankind” fast enough to keep up with scientific and technological development?Footnote ⁵⁹ In any event, any belief that “the advancement of knowledge” would immediately be used to promote “the welfare of mankind” had been lost by the end of the war, as had the whole basis for the RF's extensive cooperation with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes before World War II. In 1947–48, Weaver could see no other option than to avoid ever again contributing to a situation where scientific knowledge could get into the hands and minds of those who might misuse it, as the barbaric Germans had during the Second World War.

“… Our Hope: To Save Science, as Far as Possible …”

As was the case in the German universities, few people in the KWG raised questions about German scientists' involvement in or responsibility for the racial and war crimes of the Third Reich. On April 26, 1945, the Allies arrested Otto Hahn, director of the KWI for Chemistry, who had discovered nuclear fission and was spoken of as a probable candidate for the Nobel Prize, along with nine other German nuclear researchers and brought them to Reims before the entire group was interned for six months in Farm Hall. On May 4, even before the official end of fighting in Europe, Hahn's British captor confronted him in an afternoon meeting with the real conditions that had prevailed in the Nazis' concentration camps. A few hours later Hahn jotted down in his diary a disturbing series of uncommented notes that nevertheless revealed his priorities:

The Kaiser Wilhelm institutes had succeeded to varying degrees in protecting their scientific resources. Overall, however, they had been fairly successful, especially by transferring their institutes to the west, a process that began as early as 1943.Footnote ⁶¹ When Albert Mann toured the three western zones in January 1947, he visited almost a dozen of the forty or so institutes that still existed by the end of the war, focusing on those that had received funding from the RF. He ascertained that the KWIs located in the British-occupied zone enjoyed the goodwill of the controlling authorities, and that a large and active research cluster had already developed in the city of Göttingen. It included several KWIs and the Administrative Headquarters of the Society, which had relocated there and was led now by Otto Hahn, who had won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as president (elected with the approval of the British controlling powers), and Ernst Telschow as the long-term, shrewd general secretary.Footnote ⁶² Mann noted that Werner Heisenberg's KWI for Nuclear Physics and Cosmic Radiation, with its impressive range of equipment and numerous assistants, was “already a busy center,”Footnote ⁶³ but Heisenberg did not quite agree.Footnote ⁶⁴ He complained to Havighurst several months later that they lacked equipment and therefore he and his staff had to focus mainly on theoretical physics. Overall, Heisenberg was unhappy with his new location and would have liked to travel to the U.S. for a few months, but he did not make a good impression at a dinner that the British liaison officer gave in autumn 1948 for him and two colleagues in Göttingen during Havighurst's second visit. In his overriding desire for the situation to stabilize at long last, he rejected the idea of any kind of social reforms in postwar Germany and even asserted “that there is a biological inferiority of the lower classes.” In doing so he confirmed everything that the RF officers thought they had always known about the elitist class snobbery of German academics and strengthened their reluctance to give these mandarins any more funding. By contrast, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker took the opportunity to talk about the overdue opening-up of the universities to “children of poor families,” i.e., the democratization and dehierarchization of the highly selective German educational system, as demanded by the American reeducation policy. With his thoughts on social policy, Weizsäcker recommended himself to the Americans as “a man worthy of careful attention.”Footnote ⁶⁵

The KWI for Brain Research also had a scientist who was described as “impressive”: Alois Kornmüller. This KWI had moved its physiological department to Göttingen during the final weeks of the war, where the British had assigned it new premises in the former Aerodynamic Research Center, which now housed a number of different KWIs.Footnote ⁶⁶ When Havighurst visited Kornmüller in autumn 1947, Kornmüller's assistants had just managed to construct a makeshift encephalograph and had captured two cats “and were looking forward to using them for experimental subjects.”Footnote ⁶⁷ A year later, Struthers in the RF's Paris office pronounced his conviction that Kornmüller, an “amazingly brilliant, shy little person,” would make Göttingen an “outstanding center” in his field despite his “rather inadequate English and French.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Kornmüller's own progress report conveyed the same impression. Unlike some of the other reports included in the Festschrift für Otto Hahn in 1949, Kornmüller's did not limit itself to lamenting the resources that had been lost, but reported on the results of important new research about the way nerve cells worked and outlined a research program for the coming years.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nevertheless, the RF refused Kornmüller's immodest request, a few months after the currency reform, for 33,000 DM for personnel and equipment, including funds to be spent on “rabbits, cats, dogs, and if possible monkeys,” with a reference to the fundamental decision it still had to make on its future support for science in Germany.Footnote ⁷⁰

In the French zone of occupation, two bioscientific KWIs had located near Tübingen, which had escaped damage during the war. These institutes received support from the French military government, which had prevented troops from plundering the laboratories and had refrained from requisitioning institute buildings. Mann noted in January 1947 that the space for the numerous doctoral students and researchers at Adolf Butenandt's KWI for Biochemistry was cramped, but they had brought all their equipment, including their institute library, with them from Berlin, and the chemical industry of southwestern Germany was supplying them generously with the chemicals they needed. The monitoring officer, who had appropriate qualifications, had already supplied them with the most recent French specialist literature. The only thing that Butenandt felt was lacking was personal contact with his British and American colleagues and access to recent English-language literature, but the French officer had promised to petition the Allied Control Authority about these issues. Alfred Kühn's KWI for Biology was in a similarly favorable situation, and the two directors were working together closely.Footnote ⁷¹ When Havighurst visited Tübingen some months later, Butenandt impressed him “as being a person who calculates what he says, “not disingenuous, but always sounding out the implications of what he says”:Footnote ⁷²

Havighurst found Kühn “a very pleasant, alert old gentleman,” and in contrast to Butenandt, “totally ingenuous,” and “productive as ever”; he showered Havighurst with “reprints of recent articles” and, like Butenandt, assured him that “he lost only a half day of work in his laboratory due to the French occupation.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Thanks to Butenandt's and Kühn's activities in biochemistry and zoology in Tübingen, Havighurst concluded that “research is thriving in these areas.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Things were not going quite as well for the KWIs in the American zone. The American army had not consistently protected the institutes from looting and had requisitioned a large number of institute buildings for its own use. Neither of the RF's observers, Mann nor Havighurst, could avoid agreeing with the complaints of his interview partners and emphasizing on numerous occasions that the research policy of the French and British military governments was much more considerate and science-friendly than that of the Americans, with the result that the material situation of the institutes in the other zones was more favorable and research there had already recommenced, or in some instances had not been interrupted at all.Footnote ⁷⁶ In addition, there were numerous bureaucratic impediments. For example, Americans had forbidden Walther Bothe of the Institute of Physics at the KWI for Medical Research in Heidelberg to use his cyclotron because they suspected that his research might have “war use value”; he had to obtain permission for any and all research, which could only be “along approved lines”; and they forbade translations of recent articles by the institute into English, and thus the institute's attempts to link up with international research, with reference to the Trading With the Enemy Act. Yet the RF observers regarded Heidelberg, which had also suffered little damage, as the major up-and-coming research center in the American zone and found the KWI for Medical Research to be “especially active.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In fact, a few weeks after Mann's visit, the Americans allowed Bothe to restart his research using his cyclotron together with the only electron microscope in Germany and a generator; the purpose was in part to produce radioactive material for medical research. Nevertheless, in his 1949 report, he described the actions of the American military authorities as a continuous succession of impertinences by ignoramuses.Footnote ⁷⁸

Of the nine KWIs that Havighurst visited during the autumn of 1947, he assessed five as already very active and promising: the KWIs for Physics (Heisenberg, Göttingen), Brain Research, or to be precise its physiological section (Kornmüller, Göttingen), Biochemistry (Butenandt, Tübingen), Biology (Kühn, Tübingen), and Biophysics (Rajewski, Frankfurt). He saw two other institutes, the KWIs for Medical Research (Kuhn and Bothe, Heidelberg) and Cell Physiology (Warburg and Knaake, Berlin), as showing signs of producing productive research in the very near future. He was more circumspect about the prospects of the remaining two institutes: the KWI for Psychology (Nachtsheim and Gottschaldt, Berlin), the successor to the KWI for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, whose cooperation with Mengele in Auschwitz had become known in 1946; and the DFA (KWI) for Psychiatry (Scholz, Munich).Footnote ⁷⁹ Two years after the end of the war, in a country that was still in ruins, where Holocaust survivors and former forced laborers were still living in Displaced Person camps and tens of thousands in refugee camps, where hunger, shortages, the black market, and lack of housing were still characteristic of everyday life, and with the next cold winter upon them, the KWG was better off than many other areas of West German postwar society, where often the bare essentials were missing.

Campaigning on Science Policy in the Trizonal Area

The KWG's administrative headquarters had moved to Göttingen during the last few months of the war. Under the protection of the British military government, it continued its activities there as far as possible. For the headquarters' staff, however, the fact that most of its most famous institutes had been able to restart their research or in some cases had not had to stop work at all was not the most pressing issue in the immediate postwar years. For KWG president Otto Hahn and his general secretary Ernst Telschow, saving science meant, in the first place, saving the KWG's institutional unity.Footnote ⁸⁰

In November 1945, Captain Shulits of the Public Health and Welfare Branch of the American military government had issued a request for information to the RF. He wanted to know how the RF adjudged the KWG's role during the Nazi period, in particular with regard to “the putting out of Jews” and “the adoption of Nazi policies for science.” He wanted to know from a reliable source whether he would be acting correctly if, in a report requested by General Clay on the current state of science in Germany, he were to recommend that the KWG be dissolved as the umbrella organization for the various institutes. He personally viewed the KWG “as a distinct danger if allowed to continue as a central authority and the power to accumulate centralized funds and direction for running throughout Germany the organization as it existed in the past.”Footnote ⁸¹ The inquiry also extended to the “financial commitments on the part of the RF in its different divisions, particularly in reference to the KWG, covering the period just before Hitler's advent to the beginning of the war.” Because of its political sensitivity, the request was passed onto the president of the RF himself; however, Fosdick's succinct note was “No reply.”Footnote ⁸²

Shulit was able to see his “feeling” implemented even without the RF's support.Footnote ⁸³ In early August 1946, under pressure from the Americans and contrary to British wishes, the four Allied powers decided during one of their last joint sessions to dissolve the KWG. No corresponding implementation act was ever passed, however.Footnote ⁸⁴ Consequently, as Albert Mann noted in January 1947, there was “considerable confusion”; even in the American zone the decision of the Control Council was seen as a “burning issue against the Americans” and was regarded “as a major blunder and a serious disaster.”Footnote ⁸⁵ D'Arms, the new member of the RF staff who had criticized Mann's report so strongly, and who had himself been a member of the American military government at the time of the Control Council decision, felt it necessary to defend that decision. First, he said, the “decentralization of German affairs, governmental as well as educational, wherever possible,” was of paramount importance. Second, the American military government had been forced to respond to the particular situation in Berlin and to the Soviets' moves in the area of science policy (the University of Berlin was located in the Soviet sector, and the Soviets wanted to integrate the Berlin KWIs into the German Academy of Sciences which they controlled). For that reason, the Americans had pushed the plan for a Center for Advanced Studies involving the Dahlem-based KWIs “as a counterbalance.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Two months later, on September 11, 1946, the Max Planck Society was founded in the British occupation zone in response to the decision of the Control Commission and with the vigorous support of the British military government. Yet it did not receive its official listing in the Register of Societies until July 1947.Footnote ⁸⁷ The plan was that as soon as the dissolution order was implemented, the KWIs located in the British zone would be reunited as the MPG. Over the eighteen months that followed, the administrative headquarters of the MPG, led as before by Hahn and Telschow, was occupied mainly with dissuading the western military governments from implementing the decision to dissolve the KWG and with reuniting the MPG first with the KWIs located in the American zone and then with those in the French zone.Footnote ⁸⁸

During the course of these dogged attempts to preserve and reestablish its unity, these leaders reinvented the history of the KWG and developed a flexible use of the terms “pure” or “fundamental” research. They meant to defend the history of the KWG and to justify the existence of the new MPG. They exploited the RF in a variety of ways for this purpose. For example, during Mann's visit to Göttingen on January 21 and 22, 1947, he met with an “impassioned recital” by Hahn, criticizing the American denazification policy in general; the resulting headhunting of German scientists, which would, he claimed, destroy the German research scene; and the dissolution order in particular.Footnote ⁸⁹ According to Mann, Hahn stated “that the American reason for killing the Gesellschaft was that it was a very big, powerful trust and a Nazi organization” but that this was completely untrue. The report on Mann's trip does not reveal how he responded or to what extent he informed Hahn about the discussions that he had had with the Research Control Section of OMGUS shortly beforehand.Footnote ⁹⁰ At any rate, during the days that followed, Hahn and Telschow, who expected the dissolution order to be implemented at any moment, devoted themselves to compiling a memorandum for General Clay.Footnote ⁹¹

They started by listing the possible reasons against creating an umbrella organization for the existing KWIs, insofar as they had heard them mentioned informally. They then repudiated these accusations, using assertions that were partly true and partly, to their own knowledge, false, and in particular by carefully avoiding certain truths. First of all the KWG had not, they claimed, been a state organization, but “always a purely private organization,” namely a registered society.Footnote ⁹² Some of its funds had come from the state but no conditions had ever been attached to them. While Hahn may not have known it, Telschow certainly knew that some of the (greatly increased) funds provided by the state after 1933 and in particular during the war had indeed been linked to particular research requests.Footnote ⁹³

Second, they claimed, the KWG had not in any sense carried out extensive war research; rather, “even during the war it continued to focus to a very large extent on fundamental research, as its tradition dictated.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Where “certain” tasks related to the war economy had been carried out, these had always been of “scientific importance,” too. In fact, they claimed, foreign visitors who came to Germany after the war had repeatedly been amazed how little “war work” and how much “pure research work” had been carried out.Footnote ⁹⁵ By contrast, in 1943 Telschow had emphasized that of the “current forty-three research institutes,” twenty-seven were acting as “weapons or defense or special units” and “were partly engaged in work decisive for the outcome of the war.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Kuhn, who worked on poisons; Ludwig Prandtl, who worked on aerodynamics; and Werner Köster, a metals researcher who worked on special alloys for aircraft; were not merely KWG researchers but, like the former KWG president Albert Vögler and the general secretary Telschow himself, were high-ranking managers in the Nazi armaments machine. Like their colleagues Hahn, the chemist, and Butenandt, the biochemist, both of whom had procured war research assignments for their institutes, these men knew that there were no clear-cut epistemic boundaries between the projects that they liked to describe as “pure research” and those intended to be of use, sooner or later, to the armaments industry or in the war itself.Footnote ⁹⁷

Third, Hahn and Telschow claimed, the KWG's administrative headquarters had in no way acted as a “research trust.” Rather, it had “not [exerted] any influence at all on the institutes' scientific work” and had concerned itself only with the “correct use of funds,” and with relieving the institutes of all administrative tasks.Footnote ⁹⁸ Of all the claims made, this one perhaps came closest to the truth; however, it concealed the fact that Telschow had repeatedly acted as an intermediary between the Nazi authorities and the institutes, extolling the research capacities of the KWG scientists to the former and advising the latter of the research needs of the military or the armaments industry. Together with Herbert Backe, the KWG's vice president and also undersecretary of the Reich Ministry of Food, Telschow had also pushed for the establishment of numerous agricultural research institutes that were to contribute to research on the “East” and on “Lebensraum” in the context of the “Generalplan Ost.” Overall during the Third Reich, the KWG had functioned extremely successfully as an intermediary between science on the one hand and the state, military, and industry on the other.Footnote ⁹⁹

Fourth and finally, the two acted to preempt any suggestions “that the KWG had been oriented toward the National Socialists.” None of its presidents had been a party member, they claimed; rather, Max Planck and Carl Bosch had been among the regime's “harshest opponents.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ They did not mention the party membership of the last president to hold office during the war, Albert Vögler, who had committed suicide in 1945; vice president Backe, who committed suicide in 1947 while being held in preparation for the Nuremberg trials; or general secretary Telschow himself and a considerable number of KWI directors.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The second part of the memorandum outlined the advantages of a central administrative unit, particularly in view of the recent bizonal economic agreement. It would reduce the burden of administrative work on the individual institutes, secure the efficient use of funds, and make it easier to monitor the Allies' restrictions on research.Footnote ¹⁰² Finally, the memorandum pointed to the high level of respect that the KWG enjoyed abroad, stating that it had gained this respect not merely because of its scientific achievements but because of its successful struggle to protect its independence. The RF was cited as a star witness:

It is noteworthy that Hahn and Telschow did not mention international relations with other countries before, during, and after the war. Indeed, contacts with Great Britain and the U.S. had weakened after 1933 and even more so after the beginning of the war. Consequently, relations with neutral countries such as Switzerland and Sweden were further cultivated and those with countries allied to Nazi Germany such as Japan, Italy, and even Hungary and Bulgaria were strengthened.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Moreover, the KWG attempted to use the scientific resources of the occupied countries for itself, whether it was technical equipment in the Curie Laboratory in Paris, Norwegian heavy-water plants, or the seed collections of the Vaviloff's institutes in the occupied sections of the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Telschow presented the memorandum, signed by Hahn, to the American military government in Stuttgart in late February 1947. Colonel Brunton “found it excellent,” said that he would pass it on to General Clay, and also recommended that it be submitted by all the provincial governments in the bizonal area.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In the course of drafting a memorandum along these lines to be signed by all the Ministerpräsidenten (prime ministers of West German Länder), the narrative of the KWG's Nazi-era history was polished and a note was added that the Society had “tacitly” allowed “a large number of non-Aryan individuals and individuals with political difficulties” to work in the institutes.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This campaign failed, however, because of the resistance of the Bavarian Minister for Culture and his Ministerpräsident, Hans Ehard, who would vouch for the political independence of the KWG only until 1933.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Consequently, all of the KWG's Nobel Prize winners who had remained in Germany stepped up to the plate and sent a joint telegram to the military governors of the western zones. The American General Clay and his British colleague Robertson replied in a friendly but reserved manner, and the French General König did not respond at all.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Thus, the situation remained unclear, but given the extension of bizonal cooperation, the chance to attain at least a bizonal reunification of the organization seemed to have increased. Telschow journeyed tirelessly up and down the country, held briefing sessions with the administration authorities in each province, and prepared further campaigns with Colonel Brunton of the American Research Control Section in Stuttgart, who was well-disposed toward the KWG.Footnote ¹¹⁰ But in the summer of 1947, Hahn and Telschow felt it necessary to obtain a promise from the directors of the institutes in the American zone that they would remain in the KWG. If they, as the American side had suggested, should prefer “to continue their work alone, independently of a central administration unit,” they could expect, Hahn warned, “that they would soon be integrated into a university or put under the authority of a government agency in some form and would thus be subject to the principles of the state.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Whether this warning was actually necessary is an open question, but it was certainly understood.

Each of the institute directors in the western zones with whom Havighurst met during the autumn of 1947 sang the praises of the KWG. Rajewski of the Frankfurt KWI for Biophysics considered the KWG “of the highest importance” as it would relieve him of “a load of financial administrative responsibility.” Bothe and Kuhn of the Heidelberg-based KWI for Medical Research felt the former close “collaboration among the institutes” was now lacking. In Tübingen, Kühn, the zoologist, longed for “the old KWG,” and Butenandt, the biochemist, hoped that under the roof of the KWG he would finally have time to work “as he pleased.” While he had previously only needed half a day a month to write his reports, he now had to spend hours every day “filling out forms.” He believed that the KWG had only been targeted by the Allies because of the nuclear physics research done by Hahn and Heisenberg and that it was for this reason that they had all been “condemned.”Footnote ¹¹²

Havighurst himself felt his meeting with Telschow, in which the British liaison officer Fraser also took part, was the most important encounter. Telschow gave a detailed account of the progress of the negotiations on the continued existence of the KWG. He repeated the arguments given in the memoranda of spring 1947 and garlanded his account with the heartfelt declaration, though as unprovable as it was meaningless, “that the KWG actually fought Hitler more than any other scientific organization.” He also outlined the basic principles on which the future Max Planck Society was to be based, namely:

The KWG had, he said, always based its work on these principles but “the Nazi experience showed them how to protect scientific freedom and integrity better in the future.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Although both the director of the KWI for Cell Physiology, Otto Warburg, and colleagues in the RF had described Telschow to Havighurst as the “worst Nazi,” Havighurst was inclined to trust him as an expert in his field. Havighurst could understand “how some people would distrust [Telschow's] manner …, but my net reaction to him was favorable.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Three days later, at a meeting with Havighurst, Hahn reinforced the claims of his general secretary that the KWG had always been free of political influence “both during the Nazi period and in the future.” As proof, he cited his own KWI for Chemistry, which had always only carried out “fundamental research,” had published all its work right up until the end of the war, and had not concealed anything. Hahn did not mention that he and his staff, with their analyses of fission products, their experiments on isotope separation, and their determination of the purities of various uranium preparations, had been an integral working group in the “Uranverein” financed by the Army Weapons Office, the ultimate goal of which was, of course, the military use of nuclear energy.Footnote ¹¹⁶ But he did emphasize that in Fritz Strassman, with whom he had carried out and published experiments on nuclear fission in 1938, he had kept and protected a veritable opponent of the Nazi regime in his own institute.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Havighurst was impressed by the unanimous support for the KWG expressed by the ten western German KWG scientists he had interviewed, all of whom had argued forcefully for the continued existence of the organization. They left him with no doubt that the KWG would continue to be the most suitable way of organizing German research insofar as it was not taking place within industry. But to him, this did not mean recommending that the RF treat the KWG/MPG as a priority for its future program for Germany. He saw no need to provide large amounts of funding for this self-help organization for German science, which was obviously capable of carrying out its work. Quite the opposite. By the end of his sixty-day trip and the approximately 250 interviews he held, not merely with German scientists and university professors, but also with representatives of the public education system and in particular of youth work, the coordinated statements he was given by the KWG scientists reinforced his opinion that in this ruined, demoralized country, there were more important things for the RF to do. The political skills of a Telschow, the impassioned commitment of an Otto Hahn, and the hands-on attitude of a Rajewski should be enough to put the KWG and German science back on their feet through their own efforts, particularly since they could rely on the support of the British. Apart from occasional exchange scholarships for young scientists, the only institutional funding that the RF provided for the new MPG was a grant for the scientific documentation center in Göttingen, the Otto Hahn Library, with which it could “fill war gaps and [purchase] valuable periodicals and books from abroad.” The MPG's first yearbook in 1951, to mark forty years of the existence of the old KWG, emphasized this grant as its most important international contact after 1945.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The only problem that Havighurst saw on the horizon was the unpredictable attitude of the American military government.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In early September 1947, General Clay had finally signalled his willingness to negotiate with his British colleagues about a plan “for the formation of a bi-zonal association of research institutes which will be mutually acceptable.”Footnote ¹²⁰ But he still basically rejected the idea of a revival of the KWG, as he explained to Havighurst during their last meeting in late October 1947. Clay wanted research to be linked to the universities and was not in favor of a “separate research organization which could be run by the government.” When Havighurst pointed out that there was a trend in the U.S. itself toward state-supported large-scale research, Clay expressed himself less ambiguously: “That is partly because we see scientific research as of military significance and for that reason we must keep the German government separated from research.”Footnote ¹²¹

Telschow and Hahn's arguments that keeping the KWG/MPG as a separate organization would guarantee that research would be independent of politics were still fresh in Havighurst's mind, and he was evidently annoyed by Clay's intransigent attitude.Footnote ¹²² On Havighurst's last day in Germany, he held a long telephone conversation with Carl Nordstrom, chief of Research Control in the Economics Division of OMGUS and leader of the American delegation negotiating the future of the KWG. Nordstrom reassured Havighurst that after recent discussions with British colleagues and the Göttingen-based scientists, he was sure that agreement would be reached. Nordstrom had suggested only minor changes to the draft articles of association of the Society, ones that were acceptable to the German and British sides; after this, he would recommend that Clay accept the bizonal association, and he believed that in the end Clay would go along with his recommendation.Footnote ¹²³ The negotiations that took place around the end of 1947 and the start of 1948 did indeed progress fairly quickly, and on February 26, 1948, the MPG held its inaugural meeting as a bizonal science organization.

Defining Positions in Cold-War Science Policy: An Interpretation from a Transnational Perspective

We should not misunderstand the RF observers' concern for the continued existence of the KWG in postwar Germany. We cannot tell whether they actually believed the accounts of the Nobel Prize holders, the general secretary, or the postwar president of how distant the KWG had been from politics during the Third Reich, of its resistance to Hitler, of its protection of those who had been denounced or ostracized, and above all of its successful defense of “pure” fundamental research. What convinced them was the concept put forward by the leading KWG representatives of a non-university-based research organization that would be largely autonomous and independent of state directives and that would offer its scientists optimal working conditions. It would thus create a way for German science to help itself and redevelop its links with the international scientific communities under its own steam.