Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

[garcia]

Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

I didn't think that the first group (of scientists who fled pre-war Germany) were allowed to contribute significantly to the Manhattan Project, as they weren't trusted enough by the US military. Einstein certainly wasn't allowed to contribute much beyond a nominal amount.

yes, but what might they have achieved had they been working for a german state apparatus that not only did not regard them as subhuman, but recognised the potential significance of what they could discover? hitler did not pursue atomic research in earnest for various idiotic reasons, not limited to anti-semitism. speer again:

Around the same time the three military representatives of armaments production, Milch, Fromm, and Witzell, met with me at Harnack House, the Berlin center of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, to be briefed on the subject of German atomic research. Along with scientists whose names I no longer recall, the subsequent Nobel Prize winners Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg were present. After a few demonstration lectures on the matter as awhole, Heisenberg reported on "Atom-smashing and the development of the uranium machine and the cyclotron." Heisenberg had bitter words to say about the Ministry of Education's neglect of nuclear research, about the lack of funds and materials, and the drafting of scientific men into the services. Excerpts from American technical journals suggested that plenty of technical and financial resources were available there for nuclear research. This meant that America probably had a head start in the matter, whereas Germany had been in the forefront of these studies only a few years ago. In view of the revolutionary possibilities of nuclear fission, dominance in this field was fraught with enormous consequences.

...I was familiar with Hitler s tendency to push fantastic projects by making senseless demands, so that on June 23, 1942, I reported to him only very briefly on the nuclear-fission conference and what we had decided to do. 26 Hitler received more detailed and more glowing reports from his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, who was friendly with Post Office Minister Ohnesorge. Goebbels, too, may have told him something about it. Ohnesorge was interested in nuclear research and was supporting — like the SS — an independent research apparatus under the direction of Manfred von Ardenne, a young physicist. It is significant that Hitler did not choose the direct route of obtaining information on this matter from responsible people but depended instead on unreliable and incompetent informants to give him a Sunday-supplement account. Here again was proof of his love for amateurishness and his lack of understanding of fundamental scientific research.

Hitler had sometimes spoken to me about the possibility of an atom bomb, but the idea quite obviously strained his intellectual capacity. He was also unable to grasp the revolutionary nature of nuclear physics. In the twenty-two hundred recorded points of my conferences with Hitler, nuclear fission comes up only once, and then is mentioned with extreme brevity. Hitler did sometimes comment on its prospects, but what I told him of my conference with the physicists confirmed his view that there was not much profit in the matter. Actually, Professor Heisenberg had not given any final answer to my question whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept under control with absolute certainty or might continue as a chain reaction. Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star. Occasionally, however, he joked that the scientists in their unworldly urge to lay bare all the secrets under heaven might some day set the globe on fire. But undoubtedly a good deal of time would pass before that came about, Hitler said; he would certainly not live to see it...

...Our failure to pursue the possibilities of atomic warfare can be partly traced to ideological reasons. Hitler had great respect for Philipp Lenard, the physicist who had received the Nobel Prize in 1920 and was one of the few early adherents of Nazism among the ranks of the scientists. Lenard had instilled the idea in Hitler that the Jews were exerting a seditious influence in their concern with nuclear physics and the relativity theory.** To his table companions Hitler occasionally referred to nuclear physics as "Jewish physics"— citing Lenard as his authority for this. This view was taken up by Rosenberg. It thus becomes clearer why the Minister of Education was not inclined to support nuclear research.

** According to L. W. Helwig, Personlichkeiten der Gegenwart (1940), Lenard inveighed against "relativity theories produced by alien minds." In his four-volume work, Die Deutsche Physik (1935), Helwig considered physics "cleansed of the outgrowths which the by now well-known findings of race research have shown to be the exclusive products of the Jewish mind and which the German Volk must shun as racially incompatible with itself."

[Anton Gramscescu]

Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

If the Nazis had never come into existence, the intellectual history of the twentieth century would have been massively different. Forget the atom bomb - the exodus of scientists from Germany (and to a lesser extent the rest of Europe) to the United States was a key factor in the US' long-run economic success and is the really the only reason that American universities are today considered better than European ones (not that there aren't other factors, but it's hard to see how the chain of events that led to those other factors would have happened in the absence of tose scientists and then later the war). MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley: they'd still be good schools, but never would have benefitted from government research largesse the way they did and hence never would have become the hugely powerful research centres that tehy are today.

[Mitch]

Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

That's very true. I've read biographies of both Einstein & Richard Feynman, and a common feature is how much the big US universities fought over getting the big names in as professors.

And they did both actually teach whilst they they were there, rather than being a figurehead, so you'd have to say that they (along with all the others) must have had quite an effect on a generation of US scientists.

[garcia]

Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

wernher von braun was such hot property that his interrogation consisted of alternate teams of american and british officials begging him to join their scientific programs. he was captured in the west so the russians weren't allowed to speak to him but they smuggled an offer to him via the prison kitchen staff.

[ursus arctos]

Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

Feynman in particular is absolutely worshiped by generations of US scientists, not only those who had the chance to take his classes. His books and lectures are still among those most cherished by people in the field.

Einstein's intellectual impact was more on the people he worked with an the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, who then spread across the field in North America.

It is, to my mind, equally important that the many US universities Gramsci cites ceased to see themselves as finishing schools for the idle rich and realized that their exclusionary admissions policies had deprived them of huge volumes of "talent". Their rise is not at all unconnected with the decline of places like City College of New York and the traditional women's colleges, who had previously taught those people who the Ivies et al wouldn't take.

[Gangster Octopus]

Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

If you're going to mention US Universities etc. don't forget the amazing affect that the GI Bill had on US culture. I've often meant to start a thread on that. Is there any reading I can do?

[Anton Gramscescu]

Might it have been better if Germany had won WWI?

ursus arctos wrote:

It is, to my mind, equally important that the many US universities Gramsci cites ceased to see themselves as finishing schools for the idle rich and realized that their exclusionary admissions policies had deprived them of huge volumes of "talent".

That's it exactly - they simply started to conceive of their missions quite differently and acted accordingly. They never would have risen to global importance with their pre-1939 outlooks.