Abstract

The remarkable career of the nobel laureate Adolf Butenandt in Germany before 1945 and especially after the second world war is well known. But in recent years several publications have questioned his personal behaviour in the Third Reich. But all these articles interpreted Butenandts career and his attitude from our knowledge today about Nazi Germany. From archival sources this article will view on the situation in the 1930s and will show that Butenandt was originally not the first choice of the government for the position of director at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Biochemistry. Finally it is shown, that Butenandt did knew what was going on behind the scenes, because through his close connections with officers of the Rockefeller Foundation he got several information on the selection