This massive reference work is a translation of thirty-two essays prepared for the German Research Foundation's (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) research project on its history, from its origins in 1920 to 1970. The eight-year-long project, begun in 2000, grew out of a trend for German institutions to examine their Nazi past. The Max Planck Society conducted a similarly richly funded project that resulted in numerous publications. The DFG was late in launching such a research project and insisted that the period before and after National Socialism should also be included.

The editors write that their aim was to undertake an institutional history, as well as a study of individual disciplines. Accordingly, this edited volume is divided into sections on the history of the institution, on natural and engineering science, on the history of medicine and bioscience, on the humanities and social sciences, and on science and science policy. In addition to chapters based on research in the DFG archives, it includes commentaries by several of the referees of the project. Mark Walker, one of the editors, wrote a short foreword in which he makes the valid point that it was more important in assessing the culpability of a scientist to know if he or she had contributed to a particular “National Socialist policy like autarky or racial hygiene rather than [joining] a political organization” (18). One way to conduct such an analysis is to track funding, of course. Walker writes that the contributions in this volume show that the DFG “furthered the goals of the National Socialist regime” (18), but the sheer volume of the contributions, their detail, and the fact that they cover the pre- and post-Nazi periods obscures this point considerably.

Several other shortcomings mar this volume as well. The contributors were given access to the foundation's rich archival holdings, but all but one of them neglected to include any secondary literature to contextualize the documentary material. When secondary literature is cited, it is exclusively German. For example, the chapter on cancer research does not refer to Robert Proctor's pioneering book on cancer in the Third Reich (The Nazi War on Cancer, 1999), a valuable study that could have helped contextualize the arguments of an otherwise pedestrian and narrowly focused chapter. Even when discussing the origins of this project, nothing is said about the fact that the flurry of research on Nazi Germany in the 1980s was fueled, in part, by the work of Americans such as Alan Beyerchen, who wrote an important study on physics in Nazi Germany (Scientists under Hitler, 1977). More engagement with international scholarship was necessary precisely because the German-language contributions were translated into English, presumably for the benefit of an international audience.

Patrick Wagner's more successful chapter, “‘Preserve of Full Professors’—On the History of the German Research Foundation between 1920 and 1970,” provides an overview of the “social space” (23) of the DFG, focusing on the privileged full professors who sat on the organization's committees and conducted peer reviews. This chapter is also much broader, for Wagner argues that DFG funding was intended for researchers in academe, not industry or state-run departments. The DFG allegedly focused on basic research, but Wagner shows that, at the same time, section heads such as Walter Gerlach, a basic researcher, also engaged in torpedo development during World War II. The DFG even “completely financed” (33) the Master Plan East (Generalplan Ost), as well as science and technology related to the war effort.

All in all, this research project would have benefited from a comparison with research funding and its organization in other countries. Given its narrow scope, the volume's audience will likely be limited to Germans interested in the foundation's history.