Science and the Swastika
Adrian Weale
Written to accompany the Channel 4 series but a worthwhile independent account in its own right, ‘Science and the Swastika’ charts the descent of the German scientific establishment from its pre-eminent position in world science at the beginning of the 20th Century, to a state of abject disarray in 1945, corrupted and debased by the influence of Nazism and its demands for scientific ‘backing’ for its racist ideology. Science and the Swastika describes how Nazi scientists shed their moral and ethical inhibitions and enthusiastically embraced a system which allowed them to conduct experiments on humans, and to justify the slaughter of hundreds of thousands more on bogus ‘eugenic’ grounds. It also charts the failure of the German Atomic Bomb project, crippled because of the persecution of Jewish scientists by the Nazis, which was probably five to ten years behind the Allied effort by the end of the war.
Book Details:
- Author: Adrian Weale
- Published Year: 2001
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Rights Sold
- UK: Macmillan
Adrian Weale
Adrian Weale was born in London in 1964 and educated at the Latymer Upper School, York University and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He served for several years as a military intelligence officer in the regular Army, before leaving to pursue a career as a writer and historian.
Since then he has written eight non-fiction books under his own name, and ghost written several more, primarily for former Special Forces personnel.
In addition, he has written widely for the UK national press and is a regular broadcaster on BBC TV and radio, specialising in military and intelligence related ...
More about Adrian Weale
Book Reviews
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"Science and the Swastika accompanies the Channel 4 TV series of the same name. But Adrian Weale's book is no mere add-on, it stands alone as a fascinating exploration of the terrible human cost of German technological and scientific achievements from the 1920s onwards. With Hitler's rise to power many of the stars of German science were driven out because they were Jewish. Of those that left, 11 went on to win Nobel prizes in science. As Weale so eloquently shows, with deterioration of the ethical climate, German science spiralled down into activities that would bring so many of its practitioners into the dock at Nuremberg after the war. Science and the Swastika is a searing indictment of the German doctors and scientists who aided and abetted the Nazi regime."
New Scientist