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A sad conclusion of Ute Deichmann's study of biologists in Nazi Germany is “that freedom of research does not depend on peace and democracy” (p. 331). Deichmann, a research fellow at the Institute for Genetics of the University of Cologne in Germany,
argues that science in general in Hitler's Germany displayed the characteristics of normal big science—that is, significant private and public funding—and that therefore genuine scientific research was not simply replaced by racist nonsense in the Third Reich. The lag in German biological research after the war, particularly in molecular biology, was due to three major conditions: the forced emigration of many biologists, most of them Jews; the “moral failure of German scientists after 1933” (p. 319) in their degrees of collaboration with the Nazi regime; and the ensuing international isolation of German biologists after 1933 and 1945. Deichmann disputes the conclusion of Paul Weindling (1989) that biology, among other sciences, was completely coopted by Nazi racial hygiene. Rather, “at no time was there a National Socialist biology with a uniform ideological objective” (p. 322). Deichmann sees a danger in Weindling's work of leveling instead of disaggregating scientists in their various supportive functions within the Nazi dictatorship. This approach is based on Deichmann's survey of biology as a whole rather than a study of its direct applications in “racial hygiene.” As her dissertation advisor, Benno Müller-Hill (1988), puts it in the foreword: “We preferred to focus on the defensive efforts by real scientists” (p. x).
Deichmann's conclusions are in line with much of the newest historical research on Nazi Germany. This research has found a variety of responses to National Socialism and thus draws the circles of differentiated moral responsibility more widely into a German society being decisively transformed by the intents and effects of Nazism. Indeed, instead of “defensive efforts,” the more appropriate terms mig