Susanne Heim, Carola Sachse, and Mark Walker have succeeded in organizing a collection of essays about the Kaiser Wilhelm Society that improves our understanding of the relationship between science and National Socialism. Published for the first time in English, the essays are a representative selection of work produced by a research program at the Max Planck Society (MPS), which took over the functions of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS) after World War II. All of them are noteworthy, in part because they utilize documents that are either newly discovered or newly available to scholars.

Thematically, the book is divided evenly into five sections, each of which represents the main areas of research at the program: the politics of the General Administration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, racial research, agricultural and breeding research in the eastern territories, military research, and the postwar legacy of the KWS at the MPS. The project's goal is to demonstrate that, although the KWS defended its autonomy from the regime, it “was very successful in advancing its own agenda, achieving its own goals, and prospering under Hitler” (4). Thus, the KWS did not engage in “passive opposition” to National Socialist policies with which it may have disagreed. In the process, it became “an integral part of the National Socialist system of domination that … culminated in genocide and war” (4).

In general, the individual contributions convincingly support this argument. Not only is Hans-Walter Schmuhl's contribution on the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research (KWIHF) among the more fascinating contributions, but it also clearly shows how the Third Reich enabled scientists to realize their personal research agendas and how those agendas simultaneously “dovetailed” with Nazi racial policies like Operation T4 (the mass murder of the disabled) (101). According to Schmuhl, a series of personnel and institutional changes beginning in 1937 at the KWIHF altered the institute's research agenda. Specifically, the institute's focus shifted from that of the “healthy to the diseased brain, the pathogenesis of individual diseases and disabilities moved into the foreground, and the question as to disposition and heredity became considerably more important” (107). In the process, Schmuhl argues that these doctors would have had little problem with the idea of “euthanasia,” which they regarded “as a chance to implement” their vision of psychiatry (108). The doctors of the KWIHF apparently had few qualms about using the brains of T4 victims for their own research agenda. Therefore, the KWIHF was intimately “interwoven” with the apparatus of Operation T4 (118).

In a similar vein, Susanne Heim's excellent essay on Kog-Sagyz, a natural rubber substitute, shows how agricultural research at the KWI was deeply intertwined with and dependent upon slave labor from Auschwitz. The KWI began trying to breed rubber plants as early as 1938, but the war placed a new urgency on this research as the regime wanted to limit its dependence on rubber imports. In 1941, the KWI was one of several institutes that fought to control newly captured Soviet resources. For security reasons, Himmler concentrated much of the land for growing Kog-Sagyz in the occupied territories, and in 1944 he facilitated the transfer of research facilities to Auschwitz, which “provided excellent conditions and an adequate supply of labor” (186). Thus, cooperation between the KWI and Auschwitz “became the main axis” of Kog-Sagyz research during the war (199).

Not all the essays, however, succeed equally in demonstrating the larger goals of the MPS research agenda. Bernhard Strebel and Jens-Christian Wagner make a valiant effort to examine forced labor in the KWI during the war but are hindered by a severe paucity of sources. Therefore, their contribution reads more like a chronicle of the primary evidence, and they are unable to reach any definitive conclusions about the use of slave labor. Their concluding remarks would have been more helpful if they had suggested how historians can pursue the question of forced labor at the KWI in the face of such a limited source base. Other contributions use highly specialized language and provided detailed explanations of scientific processes conducted at the various institutes. In some cases, such as Helga Satzinger's discussion of genetics and racial purity, this subtracts from the essay's effort to link KWI research with Nazi racial ideology.

The volume concludes with a brief section on how the scientists at the KWI/MPS confronted the legacy of the Third Reich. Carola Sachse's excellent piece is particularly fascinating in this respect. She adeptly shows how scientists, concerned about the skeletons in their own closets, were willing to ignore any wrongdoing during the Third Reich for the sake of continuing their research undisturbed. Ultimately, this is an excellent contribution to the history of science under the Third Reich.