East Germany: Silencing a Socrates

Chemist Robert Havemann is a tortured German intellectual who embraced Communism before 1933 as a way to oppose Nazism. Then a topflight scientist at Berlin's famed Kaiser-Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institute, he was saved from a Nazi death sentence when the German army argued that he could be more useful with his head on than off. As a result, he did chemical research for the Wehrmacht during World War II while locked up in Brandenburg Prison. After the war Communist Havemann became one of East Germany's star scholars, won the Patriotic Order...

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