Saturday 13 September 2014

SERVING THE REICH: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler by PHILIP BALL

SERVING THE REICH: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler
PHILIP BALL
Vintage, 2014, 320 pages, $19.99 (pb)


Review by Phil Shannon

Nuclear physicists in Nazi Germany did not build an atomic bomb but, as the science writer, Philip Ball, shows in Serving the Reich, this was more by good fortune than by clever (mis)management by the likes of one of the regime’s favourite scientists, Werner Heisenberg, whose reputation-salvaging claim to have deliberately ‘falsified the mathematics’ to sabotage Hitler’s nuclear war option has been roundly discredited.

Such self-exoneration, says Ball, was common to almost an entire cohort of non-Jewish German physicists who, although rarely Nazi sympathisers or anti-Semites, colluded with the Nazi regime’s military ambitions and racial ‘cleansing’ policies.

The physicists either carried out the required dismissals of their Jewish colleagues, did not resign their academic posts or emigrate in protest, or self-interestedly welcomed the career advancement opportunities suddenly opened up by the purge of Jewish physicists.  Expressions of dismay were voiced privately not publicly whilst disapproval of Nazism was at best symbolic – Professor Max von Laue, Einstein’s friend, never went outdoors without a parcel under each arm to avoid having to give the obligatory, raised-arm ‘Heil Hitler’ salute.

The over-riding motive for the physicists’ “lethal indifference” was to maintain the intellectual status of German science and the best way to do this, they reasoned, was by protecting themselves from the Gestapo’s gaze.  Their social position and consciousness, however, also predisposed them to collaboration, however reluctant.  Intensely patriotic, they were privileged members of a conservative intellectual elite that was often “favourably disposed towards some elements of a totalitarian state”.  They believed that their first duty was obedience to the German state, including a genocidal, warring Nazi one.  The law was the law, reasoned the physicists’’ intellectual and institutional leader, Max Planck, and if respectful petitioning through official channels proved inadequate then there was nothing to be done.

The physicists were, writes Ball, “more tragic than despicable” in seriously misapprehending, or selectively denying, the true nature of Nazism but some were also compromised by mixed attitudes to fascism, like Heisenberg who believed that, over time, ‘the splendid things will separate from the hateful’.

Whilst it is understandable that fear of reprisal made a heads-down silence attractive, what is ultimately damning about the physicists’ behaviour was their “almost universal inability … to acknowledge, or even recognise, their failures in retrospect” when the concentration camp no longer threatened.

As electronic bugging of their conversations, when prisoners in England after the war, revealed, there was an almost total lack of remorse or moral self-examination.  Some even took the perverse moral high ground by arguing that the ‘democratic’ Allies actually built and used a nuclear bomb but totalitarian Germany did not.  This ignores the main reasons for the Nazis’ nuclear tardiness – the purge of Jewish physics talent (one quarter of the profession) which seriously depleted the relevant skills base, and the Nazi rulers opting for their V1 and V2 rocket program as more technically feasible than atomic bombs in a fast-narrowing timeframe.

Nazi Germany, says Ball, exposed the ‘apolitical’ stance of the German physicists as a delusion.  It prevented them from criticising their governmental paymasters and turned their retreat to ‘pure’ science into de facto professional support for the regime’s political program.  Their failure to see that science can not be “morally neutral” resulted in their political failure to resist Nazism.

The social and political implications of scientific research are inescapable, says Ball, not just in the specialist field of nuclear physics, with its still deadly applications of nuclear energy and weapons, but equally as much, concludes Ball, in contemporary, and potentially calamitous, technologies such as genetically modified crops, nano-technology, fossil fuels and all things military.  Contemporary scientists supporting such research may care to reflect on the damage done to society by Hitler’s physicists who tried, and failed, to remain ‘above’ politics.

HELL-BENT: Australia’s Leap into the Great War by DOUGLAS NEWTON

HELL-BENT: Australia’s Leap into the Great War
DOUGLAS NEWTON
Scribe, 2014, 344 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Behind all the froth, then and now, about the noble cause of the first world war (defence of freedom by Britain and its allies against German aggression) lay a far less exalted reality, writes Douglas Newton, retired University of Western Sydney historian.   The war’s “grand plan” for Britain, called, candidly enough, ‘The Spoils’, by the British Colonial Secretary, was to divvy the world up amongst the victors.

Territorial claims by Britain and its allies (France, Italy and Tsarist Russia) were pegged out in the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific, with the British Dominions (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa) instructed to begin the conquest of the German colonies in these regions as, in the words of a secret British cable, an ‘Imperial service’ on behalf of London.  Australia was given carriage of New Guinea, the Marshall Islands and Nauru in what Newton aptly calls a “war of brigandage”. 

Australia’s war role was tied to London’s war aims through the bonds of Empire loyalty.  So devoted was the Australian Government, in fact, that its commitment of its entire Navy and some 20,000 expeditionary troops was made forty hours ahead of the British Cabinet decision to declare war on Germany.  Australia’s generous, early gift strengthened the hand of the warmongers in the British Liberal government which was sharply split between ‘Liberal Imperialists’ and neutralists.

Newton documents the eagerness with which Australian politicians made a “rapid and reckless leap, without any conditions or limits” into the looming conflagration that was to claim 18 million lives.  Although Australia’s decision was made by just four Cabinet members of Joseph Cook’s federal Liberal government, the entire Australian political establishment was war-minded.

The British Governor-General to Australia happily noted that both the Cook Liberals and Andrew Fisher’s Labor Opposition were ‘full of zeal’ for war.  Engaged in a national election campaign at the time, they competed in what Newton calls a “love-of-empire” auction.  Labor boasted its support for conscription and its defence spending when in government from 1910-13, with Fisher now pledging to help and defend Britain “to our last man and our last shilling”.  ‘In times of emergency’, he declared, the Labor Opposition would ‘stand behind the government in all measures ... to assist the Mother Country’.

Labor’s unity pledge on war was partly driven by a concern for “political safety” in response to the Liberals’ electoral opportunism, summed up by a Liberal Senate candidate who noted that ‘the European situation affords Liberals in Australia excellent material for a good war-cry during the current campaign’ allowing them, writes Newton, to attack Labor in a “khaki election” as “traitorous, a friend of Germany and a nest of Irishmen disloyal to Empire”, no matter how fanciful this description was.   As symbolised by Labor’s most hawkish figurehead, Billy Hughes, the party’s fundamental political values were in alignment with the needs of the “rich men, corporate lawyers, mining tycoons, bankers and reactionary publicists” who, says Newton, formed Hughes’ ultra-patriotic Australian National Defence League.

Labor’s decision to back the war dealt the official ALP Opposition, and its affiliated trade unions, out of influence at a time when there was “no sign that Australians were being eaten up with anxiety that they might miss the war”.  The real opposition, says Newton, was left to the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, socialists, and anti-militarist radicals, feminists and Christians.  An internationalist, working class, anti-war party would have responded differently to the war but the Australian Labor Party politicians were no Bolsheviks.

Neither is Newton, who argues that the Great War was not escapable for Australia, “nor should Australia have stood aside from it”.  This may be true but only for a country under capitalist management accepting its role as a regional branch obedient to the Head Office of the imperialist British Empire brand.

Nevertheless, Newton’s book, despite adding copiously to the already-mountainous documentary heights of high diplomatic manoeuvring, has useful context.  Sounding almost like Lenin explaining the old axiom that war is politics by other means, Newton notes that the Australian military “fought for the empire, and all it stood for – class distinction, reservoirs of cheap labour … captured markets and resources …”.

Newton also, thankfully, plays truant from that school of Australian war history which glories in the current celebratory clamour of the centenary of the ‘Great War’ whilst, most valuably, arguing that we should “think critically about the nation’s descent into war – in the past, in the present, and in the future”.  Such radical reflection, it is abundantly clear, will come, not from the descendants of the political, military and media elites which took us to calamity in 1914, but from the heirs of the war’s dissenters.