A Brill Calendar: September 3

Few nations were better equipped to deal with the intellectual aftermath of the World War 1914-1918 than Germany.

All around the country’s borders an unprecedented Great War had raged; but Germany itself remained unscarred. Similarly with the national territories of the main victors. And in spite of the flurry of political activity in November 1918, German education, science and scholarship accommodated itself quickly to a relative shortage of adolescent citizens. It is seldom that the classical saying to the effect that war is the universal producer has been illustrated more convincingly.

During the Weimar Republic – although even shorter-lived than the Hohenzollern Reich – the German contribution to European civilization and culture is second to none, with engineering and industrial processing and design acting as an avant-garde of modernity. It is an era in which Leyden Professors regard German as their main foreign language, with publishing companies like Springer and Bertelsmann as key-players.

And it is a country in which Prussian research and industry embody a hall-mark of excellence, a country hardly lacking scientific researchers. Two years and two days after the start of a Second World War it had become clear to Hitler’s entourage that conventional means of destroying human life would be inadequate. The first scientific experiment with the chemical compound Zyklon-B was conducted at Auschwitz, Galicia, after the camp was established April 27 1940.