Max Planck Society

The Max Planck Society is recorded here as one continuous institution under two names. It was founded on 11 January 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, a proposal by the theologian and historian Adolf von Harnack to Kaiser Wilhelm II for independent research institutes standing outside the university system, with Harnack as its first president and the Kaiser as its patron. Its constituent Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, existing largely on paper, was directed by Albert Einstein from its founding in 1917 until he emigrated in 1933. A separate constituent, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, founded 1927, is the atlas's own record of the war years: its director from 1942, Otmar von Verschuer, maintained direct contact with Josef Mengele, the SS physician at Auschwitz who had studied under him, and received blood and tissue specimens taken there from murdered prisoners for the institute's research into heredity and race. The Western Allies required the Kaiser Wilhelm Society's dissolution after the war for its collaboration with the Nazi regime; it was refounded on 26 February 1948 in Gottingen as the Max Planck Society, named for the physicist who had led it for much of the interwar period, and its president Hubert Markl issued a formal apology to the victims of the Anthropology institute's wartime research in 2001. Its administrative headquarters moved to Munich in 1960; its registered legal seat returned to Berlin, its original city, in 1992. It now runs more than eighty Max Planck Institutes across Germany.