The Mental Aftermath: The Mentality of German Physicists 1945-1949

The history of science and technology in National Socialist Germany is currently a very active field of research. In recent years there have been many superb studies of large scientific institutions and professional societies, of industrial and military science, of universities and of individuals—studies that together help fill in aspects of the historical landscape that were previously sketched only in outline, if at all. The new research shows that scientists were far more closely tied to National Socialist techno-scientific and military structures than was previously understood. Not surprisingly, a recurring theme is the postwar “forgetting” and silencing of the Nazi past, a phenomenon that explains in part why it has taken so long for so much of this history to be written, or even addressed. In his introduction to this volume Klaus Hentschel tells of his complete dismay when, as a young historian, he realized how quickly after 1945 Germans...