Facade of one of BAM's main buildings, historical view
Source: BAM
Three departmental research institutes, the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM ), the Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe (BGR ) and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB ), which are subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi), are having their past during the Nazi era and the post-war period investigated in a research project supported jointly with the Ministry.
Today's Federal authorities go back to predecessor institutions that were founded in the 19th century and also existed during the Nazi era. They fulfilled important tasks in research and science and placed themselves in the service of the regime after 1933.
The research project aims to answer two important questions: Why did scientists in different authorities, most of whom did not see themselves as political, so willingly make important stabilizing contributions to the armament and warfare of the inhuman Nazi regime? And how did they and the authorities in which they worked deal with the terrible Nazi past and their own guilt after 1945?
The research project, which starts on 1st October 2020, will be headed by the two renowned historians Prof. Dr. Helmut Maier (Bergische Universität Wuppertal) and Prof. Dr. Carsten Reinhardt (Universität Bielefeld), who have already presented studies on the Nazi history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. It is planned to run for three years. The results will be presented at two international conferences, in several monographs and in a biographical subproject on perpetrators and persecuted persons.