History: I read this lengthy volume in one sitting, utterly gripped. John Cornwell writes elegantly and clearly, and, as a non-scientist, I found myself easily able to follow the science, writes Julia Neuberger.
But it is the history of that science, and the story of those scientists, and the moral questions they faced and modern scientists still face, that is so compelling.
For he gives us a portrait of an age when German science was the best in the world, peopled with brilliant physicists, chemists, mathematicians and others, Nobel prizes aplenty between them. Then he follows with the depiction of the time when many of those scientists were removed from their jobs. For they, or at least one of their grandparents, were Jewish.
Of those left unscathed, very few complained or took exception to the burgeoning might of the Nazi machine, and some of its weird scientific theorising.
To understand all this, Cornwell takes us back to before and during the first World War, when Fritz Haber, the Jew (though baptised), was working on poison gas. No-one who has read the appalling accounts of the gassing of soldiers, or seen the pitiful photographs and paintings of blinded, feeble, hopeless survivors, can fail to have been touched.
Yet Haber was a good German. He invented his poison gas for the glory of the fatherland. As far as we know, he had no qualms. His young wife committed suicide, probably at least in part because of his invention; the ultimate irony is that his gas was used to kill so many of his own Jewish relatives in the second World War.
There were many conservative scientists, loyal subjects of the Kaiser, nationalists and proud to be so. Scientists were civil servants, unquestioning servants of the state, expecting a fair amount of academic freedom in exchange for their unswerving loyalty. Haber, Planck, Nernst and others all signed the Fulda declaration, arguing that the German army and the German people were one, and being eloquent in the cause of science and chauvinism. Haber's good friend, Einstein, did not sign, unlike the other eventual Nobel laureates. Instead, he signed a declaration aiming for peace and internationalism, along with G.F. Nicolai, a Berlin doctor.
Those ultra-conservative state employees set the scene for what was to come later. Convinced that science was morally neutral, they invented poison gas, and helped in its manufacture. Yet they were shocked when the pseudo science of racial hygiene and eugenics really took hold in Hitler's Germany (it had been around in many nations before that point) and many of them were out of a job, and some even killed, for their ethnic ancestry.
Hitler got rid of his Jewish scientists, to the great gain of Britain and the US. Nazi scientists took over, while others failed to object to the racial laws and looked forward eagerly to their promotion now that the way was clear. In physics, the ideological leaders were Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, who were determined to stop Werner Heisenberg getting his chair. For Heisenberg, probably no Nazi despite his collusion, notably refused to take the oath of loyalty to Hitler for at least a year, and defended Einstein's theory of relativity against the new prevailing fashion.
Theoretical physics was perceived as Jewish, yet Max Planck, Laue, Nernst and Heisenberg all stayed theoretical. But it was not possible to divorce politics and science. The world was changing. These men should have got out, as others did. They should have felt guilty afterwards, as so very few did, as is clear from their discussions at Farm Hall after the war. They became wilfully blind to everything except wanting to get on with their work. Work on a possible atomic bomb, rockets, fission, were all their endeavours, and they knowingly used slave labour on their projects.
The question this book raises, apart from telling us the story and filling in bits hitherto unknown, is what would our scientists do now. Is science still morally neutral? Would most scientists still wish to be left to get on with their work? Or can they see that they must be human first and scientists second, that the purposes for which their discoveries might be used are relevant, and not morally neutral, and the methods by which their discoveries are made must be ethically sound?
Cornwell's development of this last and most important part of the book is somewhat sketchy. We have hints, and a few suggestions here and there of following Joseph Rotblat's excellent example. Yet medical research has always had to be watched closely, when the temptation to cut corners and to experiment on human beings without their consent is so strong.
Ethics committees and monitoring, are not just the absurd posturing of over-concerned busybodies, but are there because the scientific urge to experiment is so great - and human beings can be grossly and unnecessarily harmed. Cornwell points up the burning questions brilliantly in the telling, but his next book needs to ground the concerns into real questions about the future. Cornwell directs the Science and the Human Dimension project at Jesus College, Cambridge.
Having told the story, having begun to ask the questions, he leaves us with the fear that, should such extreme circumstances occur again, scientists might still be morally flawed, and much the same in wanting to be left alone, undisturbed in their work, regardless of what was going on around them.
Rabbi Julia Neuberger is Chief Executive of the King's Fund, London, and is working on a book on the theme: 'The Moral State We're In'
Hitler's Scientists: Science, War and the Devil's Pact By John Cornwell Viking, 535 pp. £20