Michael Thad Allen

This talk focuses on Auschwitz as the locus of the German state’s effort to dedicate the dynamic (and also unique) matrix of modern industrial states to genocide. What Loet Leydesdorff and Henry Etzkowitz call the Triple Helix of industry, scientific research, and the state is credited by them as just as vital to the life of modern economies as DNA, the “double helix” is to biological life. German historians of science have identified the origins of this unique fusion of institutions, the pursuit of knowledge and profit in early 20th century German science, especially the laboratory of Fritz Haber in the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft for Physical and Electrochemistry. Typically historians also point to the many “mega science” projects of America’s war effort in World War II, among which the Manhattan Project is perhaps the paradigm. But German science and industry had created the unique fusion of government, corporations, and academic research 20 years before. Ironically, although Haber was a German Jew, the institutional fusion to which his efforts gave rise, eventually led to Auschwitz. Only Auschwitz combined scientific research, knowledge-based industries, and slave labor. It is, so to speak, the “evil twin” of the Triple Helix, that in the United States led to an advanced consumer society.