The Technical University of Munich under National Socialism ed. by Wolfgang A. Herrmann and Winfried Nerdinger

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Reviewed by: Die Technische Hochschule München im Nationalsozialismus [The Technical University of Munich under National Socialism] ed. by Wolfgang A. Herrmann and Winfried Nerdinger Robert Fox (bio) Die Technische Hochschule München im Nationalsozialismus [The Technical University of Munich under National Socialism] Edited by Wolfgang A. Herrmann and Winfried Nerdinger. Munich: TUM University Press and NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, 2018. Pp. 368. Die Technische Hochschule München im Nationalsozialismus [The Technical University of Munich under National Socialism] Edited by Wolfgang A. Herrmann and Winfried Nerdinger. Munich: TUM University Press and NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, 2018. Pp. 368. Germany's Technische Hochschulen (higher technical schools) have never wanted for historians. The literature on them, much of it celebratory, is vast, and the flow shows no sign of diminishing. Today's Technical University of Munich, founded as a Polytechnic School in 1868 and renamed the Technische Hochschule of Munich (THM) in 1877, then the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in 1970, is no exception. Die Technische Hochshule München im Nationalsozialismus stands both within and outside the celebratory tradition. As the catalog of an exhibition marking the TUM's 150th anniversary, it has its celebratory side. But the joint sponsors of the exhibition, the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism (headed by Winfried Nerdinger) and the TUM (under rector Wolfgang Herrmann), had other aims besides celebration: an archive-based reexamination of the THM in the twelve years of Nazi rule that would explore the relationships between science and power in this mostcontested of contexts and test what survives of any idea of the neutrality of scientific and technological knowledge under a totalitarian regime. The result is chastening. Biographical sketches of professors and leading THM figures reveal a level of party membership that went hand in hand with apparent acquiescence in the dismissal of seventeen academic staff on grounds of race or political unreliability, and the withdrawal of four former students' doctorates. Notable among a minority of professors who successfully steered clear of Nazi ideology were Hans Fischer, Nobel Prize-winner in 1930 for his work on pyrrole and synthetic haemin, and Jonathan Zenneck, radio physicist and director of Munich's Deutsches Museum since 1933, seemingly protected as much by the brilliance of his public lecture-demonstrations as by his science. But these were outliers in an institution whose academic profile was fashioned by the nexus of political, industrial, and military interests of which it was an integral part. In a secondary literature that no longer sees good science and technology as incompatible with the priorities of dictatorship, areas of excellence are no surprise. Walter Hieber's laboratory for heavy metal research was a conspicuous beneficiary of the drive for self-sufficiency that began with Hitler's four-year plan in 1936. And intellectual as well as material advantages came easily to a school that was the trusted favorite of men such as Fritz Todt, former student and mastermind of the Reich's Autobahnbuilding program, and Willy Messerschmitt, graduate and part-time [End Page 910] extraordinary professor whose personal standing and closeness to Hitler contributed to Munich's preeminence, alongside Berlin, in aeronautical engineering. What still has the capacity to shock, however, is the fertility of the ideological soil that National Socialism was able to cultivate within the institution and in a city that was a Nazi stronghold. Images of a student parade in preparation for a book burning in the Königsplatz in May 1933 give chilling expression to a readiness for national revolution. It had taken ever deeper root among THM students since Hitler's Munich Putsch ten years earlier, when a THM student and a graduate had been among the sixteen Nazi dead. The political congruence between the student body and an overwhelmingly conservative professoriate has long raised challenges. The volume marking the THM's centenary in 1968 skated deftly over the Nazi years, barely mentioning Lutz Pistor, rector from 1938 to 1945, who worked tirelessly to promote alignment with the party and the war effort. It was not until the 125th anniversary, in 1993, that Ulrich Wengenroth finally addressed the THM's darker past in his contribution to a modestly produced volume published under his...