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When the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) was founded as the West German section of Pugwash in the late 1950s, several high-profile scientists from the Max Planck Society (MPS), especially nuclear physicists, were involved. Well into the 1980s, institutional links existed between the MPS, the Federal Republic's most distinguished scientific research institution, and Pugwash, the transnational peace activist network that was set up in 1957 in the eponymous Nova Scotia village following the publication of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. At the beginning, the two organizations’ relationship was maintained primarily by the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. However, the relationship was difficult from the start, and the distance between them grew during the rise of détente in the 1970s, when the scientific flagship MPS was deployed more and more frequently in matters of foreign cultural policy on behalf of West Germany and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a whole. This article explores the resources and risks of transnational political engagement during the Cold War, focusing on the individual strategies of top-ranking researchers as well as the policy deliberations within a leading scientific organization along the chief East-West divide: the front line between the two German states.

In June 2001, the then president of the Max Planck Society addressed a formal apology to survivors of Nazi medical crimes. Starting from this ritual of repentance, the paper examines the participants’ diverse views of how to deal with the medical crimes of National Socialism. In comparison with the DGPPN, it asks about possibilities of going beyond historical retrospection to fulfil the imperative of remembrance.

This introductory essay elucidates the purpose and major themes of the special issue. The contributors to the issue provide an in-depth look at the Pugwash Conferences for Science and World Affairs (usually referred to as just Pugwash) to explore important themes in Cold War history. Among other topics covered in the issue are the impact of Pugwash in many countries, the nature of its organization, and the distinctive way in which it worked, as well as its importance for the relationship between scientists and the Cold War states and its role as a political actor and as a transnational actor. All of these issues and more make Pugwash a compelling subject for scholars of the Cold War.

Between 1946 and 1948, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) sent four representatives to Germany for extended visits to investigate how it could become involved in reconstructing the country. They were particularly interested in reorganizing the educational and science systems in a democratic manner and in reintegrating the conquered aggressor into the “family of nations.” They held numerous meetings with leading representatives of the Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG), the successor to the world-famous Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG), which had received considerable amounts of funding from the RF until the late 1930s, even after the Nazis came to power. As a result of its evaluation, the RF declined to provide the same level of support for the postwar MPG as it had for the prewar KWG. Although an obvious reason for the RF to distance itself from the KWG would be the latter's involvement in the crimes of the Nazi regime, as suggested by Paul Weindling in his analysis of the RF's funding policy for biomedical research in Germany in general, neither the RF interviews nor the evaluation reports mentioned the involvement of KWG scientists in biomedical crimes during the Third Reich. The reports did not even mention the Nuremberg medical trial, which took place between December 1946 and August 1947.

The Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (MPIMG) in Berlin-Dahlem dates its establishment to 1964. Its homepage makes no mention of its predecessor institutes, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics (KWIA) and the subsequent MPI for Comparative Genetics and Hereditary Pathology (MPIVEE). This article traces the two critical phases of transition regarding the constellations of academic staff, institutional and epistemic ruptures and continuities specific to the era. Only one of the five department heads from the final war years, Hans Nachtsheim, remained a researcher within the Max Planck Society (MPG); he nevertheless continued to advocate the pre-war and wartime eugenic agenda in the life sciences and social policy. The generational change of 1959/60 became a massive struggle within the institute, in which microbial genetics (with Fritz Kaudewitz) was pitted against human genetics (with Friedrich Vogel) and managed to establish itself after a fresh change in personnel in 1964/65. For the Dahlem institute, this involved a far-reaching reorientation of its research, but for the genetically oriented life sciences in the Max Planck Society as a whole it only meant that molecular biology, which was already being pursued in the West German institutes, gained an additional facility. With this realignment of research traditions, the Society was able to draw a line under the Nazi past without having to address it head-on.