What Research, to What End? The Rockefeller Foundation and the Max Planck Gesellschaft in the Early Cold War Carola Sachse B ETWEEN 1946 and 1948, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) sent four representatives to Germany for extended visits to investigate how it could become involved in reconstructing the country. They were particularly interested in reorganizing the educational and science systems in a democratic manner and in reintegrating the conquered aggressor into the “family of nations.” They held numerous meetings with leading representatives of the Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG), the successor to the world-famous Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG), which had received considerable amounts of funding from the RF until the late 1930s, even after the Nazis came to power. As a result of its evaluation, the RF declined to provide the same level of support for the postwar MPG as it had for the prewar KWG. Although an obvious reason for the RF to distance itself from the KWG would be the latter’s involvement in the crimes of the Nazi regime, as suggested by Paul Weindling in his analysis of the RF’s funding policy for biomedical research in Germany in general, 1 neither the RF interviews nor the evaluation The original research for this article was generously supported by the MPG research program “History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the National Socialist Era” which was overseen by Reinhard Ru ¨rup and Wolfgang Schieder. The finalization and especially the translation costs were supported by the Faculty for History and Cultural Sciences, University of Vienna. I would like to thank the archivists of the Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY, and the Archives of Max Planck Society, Berlin. They most effectively helped me excavate the relevant materials. For several months in 2007 and 2008, I enjoyed the extraordinary services of the library of Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the most fruitful discussions within the Berlin School for Comparative European History, Free University of Berlin. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the German Studies Association’s Annual Conference 2005 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the Initiativkolleg “The Sciences in Historical Context” at the University of Vienna. For critical comments in these and further contexts I am particularly grateful to Young-sun Hong, Konrad H. Jarausch, Jan Mu ¨ggenburg, Volker Berghahn, Arnd Bauernka ¨mper, Kenneth F. Ledford, and two anonymous readers. I would like to thank Sorcha O’Hagan for the translation, Ina Heumann and Christian Forstner for reseach assistance, and Gayle Godek for extensive editorial work. 1 Paul Weindling, “‘Out of the Ghetto’: The Rockefeller Foundation and German Medicine after the Second World War,” in Rockefeller Philanthropy and Modern Biomedicine: International Initiatives from World War I to the Cold War, ed. William H. Schneider (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 208–222; Paul Weindling, “The Rockefeller Foundation and German Biomedical Sciences, Central European History 42 (2009), 97–141. Copyright # Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association doi:10.1017/S0008938909000041 Printed in the USA 97