Research project

While a consolidated state of research has been achieved on the history of science under National Socialism via non-university research organizations and universities in the German Reich, the international development of science in the Europe-wide sphere of rule of the Nazi regime has so far remained underexamined. The research project on the history of aeronautical research during the Second World War, focusing on the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA) Göttingen, intends to open up new perspectives. Alongside the German Aviation Research Institute (Berlin Adlershof) and the Braunschweig Aviation Research Institute, the AVA was one of the most important large-scale research facilities that expanded massively since 1933 in the context of the Nazi regime's armaments policy after the foundation of the Reich Aviation Ministry. No other aviation research institute operated outposts in occupied foreign countries ("Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren", the Netherlands, France, Austria, Norway, Ukraine and Latvia) to a comparable extent during the Second World War. From 1940 onward, the AVA either brought existing aeronautical research facilities under its provisional control or established new research bases in the territories occupied by the Wehrmacht. Personnel and institutional networks, communication structures, and the mobilization of experimental and theoretical research under wartime time constraints are analyzed to compare the patterns of militarization of research under Nazi occupation.