Ooh! This is actually a bit of a passive, niche interest of mine. It should be noted I am not a professional historian. I just read a lot of material and watch a lot of interviews and documentaries.
The Nazis fell behind in atomic research for a variety of reasons, each with its own underpinnings. One of the most interesting in my mind was organizational failings. Although many different groups were working in this area, the regime leadership was rather disconnected and didn’t prioritize a coherent or integrated research effort. They didn’t provide much funding either. In some ways this created more room for unstructured scientific inquiry and creativity, but it also meant that no particular group could make any real progress toward usable reactors or weapons.
Contrast this with the Manhattan Project in the US (and the UK’s efforts at radar), which was supported and managed from the highest levels of government with a figurative blank check and despite immense compartmentalization also had a high degree of integration among disciplines and sites. There was one goal.
In my view this is an interesting manifestation of the foundation of the Third Reich. In Martin Davidson’s The Perfect Nazi, Davidson notes that the Nazi party was in many ways a child’s cosplay turned into a nightmare. Davidson writes that one of the key failings of the regime is that it was run by broken people who had more of an interest in catharsis than any real sense of society, advancement, or cohesion.
For radar, RV Jones' "Most Secret War" has an anecdote where the British raid a German coastal radar site (in France), nab the radar operator and are annoyed to discover that they know almost nothing about German radar. Pre-war Germany is already a fascist dictatorship so "ham" radio operators are enemies of the state because they're outside of your centrally controlled narrative. Whereas pre-war Britain has the usual amount of amateurs with radios. So when war broke out and they're conscripting towns at a time the British would see you're a ham and divert you from infantry training or whatever and make you a radar operator - which means the average British radar operator actually has some idea how radio works but the Germans are obliged to basically just pick a soldier and train him to operate the radar from scratch.
This apparently had significant operational consequences because if you don't know how it works all you can do when there's a fault is order spare parts. So German radar stations would be offline more often and for longer. Although Chain Home's transmitters were wildly more powerful than anything even a rich British amateur might have seen before, not to mention operating on frequencies unachievable with prior technology, the principles were familiar.
That is a fantastic contribution to the conversation. I think I’ve heard or read accounts that, if I’d thought long and hard about, might have led me to understand this, but this is new information to me.
I have seen Most Secret War recommended to me by basically every physical and ebook seller I have an account with, so I guess it’s time to take one of them up on the offer. Thank you!
Depends on the research. For some areas such as gender science, they swooped in and literally burned decades worth of research [1]. And fwiw, even medicine was considered political - the term "Schulmedizin" was popularized by the Nazis who preferred esoterics, homeopathy and other quackery.
IMHO, it's more than warranted to call out parallels between events back then and events happening right under our noses today [2], not to mention the increasing and worrying trend of book bans [3].
Realizing that the book burnings in the 1930s were not performed by the dumb Nazi brutes we know from movies like Indiana Jones, but by student organizations (e.g. what should be sufficiently smart people) was a bit of a shock to me (not really anymore from today's point of view seeing how easy otherwise smart people get themselves into a spiral of hate and fascist ideology).
So, it was smart and young German students that wanted to get rid of most or all of the material produced by one of the earliest institutions on the planet dealing with controversial topics like birth control, LGBT, fetishism, sadomasochism and venereal disease.
The founder and most of the researchers there were Jewish, so I wouldn't discard an antisemitic motive behind that as well.
As you say, I always bought the "dumb nazis burned books" story, but this context makes me think about the event in a much different way.
