The Regimentation of Chemical Education in Nazi Germany

Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org

For more than forty years, until 1939, chemical education in Germany was self-regulated by an organization called the Association of Laboratory Directors at German Universities (Verband der Laboratoriumsvorstände an deutschen Hochschulen), which collectively determined the guidelines for the pre-doctoral qualifying examination and issued unofficial certificates to students who passed. In 1939, however, the Reich Ministry of Education dissolved the Association and issued the first official national guidelines for chemical education, which were further refined during the early years of World War II. Along with this change came the first officially-recognized certifying examination for university chemists, conferring the title “Diplom-Chemiker” (Certified Chemist), an innovation carried over into the postwar era. But this long-desired official recognition of the German chemical profession was by no means an unmixed blessing. This paper will discuss the educational reforms as the final step in the regimentation of the German chemical profession and its integration into the militarized structure of National Socialist technology in preparation for war, a process fraught with negative implications for the quality of German chemical education.

Jeff Johnson: After receiving his Ph.D. in modern European history from Princeton University with a dissertation (which became his first book, The Kaiser’s Chemists (1990)), on the founding of the chemical Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in pre-World War I Germany, Jeffrey Johnson taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton and since 1986 at Villanova University, where he is currently Professor of History. His research and publications have focused on the history of chemists, chemical institutions, and the chemical industry in Germany during the period from the late nineteenth century through World War II. In 2011 he succeeded Christoph Meinel as president of the Commission on the History of Modern Chemistry in the Division of the History of Science and Technology of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science.