ABSTRACT
The Rockefeller Foundation’s (RF) financial support of clearly ideologically biased German research would cause precarious, if only temporary transatlantic alliances in the immediate vicinity of totalitarian politics. This chapter discusses the “sympathy for the devil”-assumption by hinting at somewhat different modes of coinstantaneous transatlantic funding during the 1930s in the case of Rockefeller’s transatlantic help for refugee scholars and in cases of simultaneous RF engagements for American knowledge production that ran counter to concepts of Nazi science. The RF’s involvement in the intricate constellations was not a random choice. The RF officers’ attitude towards Jewish scientists in Nazi Germany remained odd until the late 1930s. While there were clear signs of sympathies with the Nazi devil, the RF occasionally chose funding constellations that somewhat counterbalanced their delicate funding bias in Nazi Germany. RF president and renowned social engineer Raymond Fosdick started proclaiming around 1937 that Nazi ideology seriously frustrated funding plans in favour of “impartial” science.
