The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science (German: Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften) was a German scientific institution established in the German Empire in 1911. Its functions were taken over by the Max Planck Society. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society was an umbrella organisation for many institutes, testing stations, and research units created under its authority.
History
Constitution
The Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG) was founded in 1911 as a research institution outside the university system in order to advance the interests of German state and capital through the development of scientific knowledge relevant to industrial and military application. The inaugural meeting was held on 11 January 1911. The constituent institutes were established in succession and placed under the guidance of prominent directors, whose ranks included the physicists and chemists Walther Bothe, Peter Debye, Albert Einstein, Fritz Haber and Otto Hahn; a board of trustees also provided guidance. Funding came from both business and government to reduce KWG's dependence on either source. It was also obtained from individuals, from the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science), and foreign sources. Outside Germany, the Rockefeller Foundation granted students worldwide one-year study stipends for whichever institute they chose. Some studied in Germany, in contrast to the German universities, with their formal independence from state administration, the institutions of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft had no obligation to teach students. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society and its research institutes were involved in weapons research, experimentation and production in both the First World War and the Second World War. During World War I, the group, and in particular Fritz Haber, was responsible for introducing the use of poison gas as a weapon. This was in direct violation of established international law.
Nazi era and World War II The Kaiser Wilhelm Society sacked its Jewish employees following the enactment of the Nazi Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in the spring of 1933. Fritz Haber was the only institute director who resigned to protest the instructions issued by the general secretary of the KWG, Friedrich Glum. The Jewish directors were retained for several more years. After the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws in the autumn of 1935, the KWG President Max Planck convinced the Rockefeller Foundation not to withdraw its funding for the construction of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (KWIP) in Berlin. He also successfully lobbied the Nazi government through his industrial connections to commit to financing KWIP's future operations. On 29 May 1937, Max Planck handed over the KWG presidency to the IG Farben founder and chairman Carl Bosch, based on the Society's decision to strengthen its industry ties. He had announced this step in early 1936. In October 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, the Heereswaffenamt (HWA) requisitioned the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics for military use and forced its Dutch director Peter Debye, who refused to change his citizenship, onto paid leave in the United States. Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn were appointed to oversee the economic and military application of research into nuclear fission under the new head, Kurt Diebner.
Involvement in the Nazi German nuclear programme In early February 1942, the KWG President Albert Vögler accepted to take back the nuclear power research at KWIP from the HWA at a meeting with the HWA head Wilhelm von Leeb and the HWA physicist Erich Schumann, but following a series of lectures that advertised the field the Reich Minister of Science Bernhard Rust assigned it to his Reich Research Council instead. As a result, the KWG "had changed from being a dependent research subsidy for the army to being even more dependent under the auspices of the Reich Research Council". However, after the appointment of Heisenberg as director of KWIP over Bothe, the Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer's support for Heisenberg improved the organisation's standing and allowed it to start building an underground facility for trials with the uranium machine. In mid-1942, Vögler, who was the chairman of Vereinigte Stahlwerke, a member of the Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft and the unofficial scientific advisor to Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring, persuaded Speer to transfer the Reich Research Council from Rust's ministry to Göring as the supreme commander of the Luftwaffe. Walther Bothe, the director of the Physics Division at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research (KWImF) in Heidelberg from 1933 to 1957, was a top member of Uranverein, which coordinated the German nuclear program during World War II. He tried to launch the first German cyclotron, for which he received support from Speer and the HWA, although the device had not yet been assigned any military use. The particle accelerator was completed by January 1944 and Speer visited the institute in May 1944 to monitor progress on the cyclotron. Bothe burnt classified reports on military research at the approach of the United States Army. Questioned by Samuel Goudsmit of the Alsos Mission, he revealed that the cyclotron had been expected to deliver radioactive material for nuclear weapons. The Chinese physicist He Zehui, who joined Bothe's KWImF team in 1943, worked with Heinz Maier-Leibnitz on completing a cloud chamber and discovered the phenomenon of elastic electron–positron collision before the war's end. She was also able to photograph the Bhabha scattering while at Heidelberg.
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