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In 1997, the former president of the Max Planck Society, Hubert Markl, installed a presidential commission for research into the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS) under National Socialism. He appointed Reinhard Rürup and Wolfgang Schieder as undoubtedly independent and experienced historians to manage a huge research project which continued its work until 2005. The project's series of monographs, consisting of seventeen volumes and several thousand pages, has been available in full since 2008 - all of them in the German language. The volume presented here, edited by Heim, Sachse and Walker, covers a broad range of the most important research results in English. Its sixteen contributions are translations of chapters from the monograph series, preprints or articles published in other historical journals. The volume thus gives an excellent overview of the complex entanglement of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWIs) and their leading scientists with the National Socialist regime. The common starting point of all chapters is an understanding of the close relationship between science, society and politics, serving as resources for each other to mutual benefit. Although the KWS did retain its institutional autonomy, it formed an integral part of the system while simultaneously advancing its own...