Just outside Braunschweig lies a 480-hectare site that has been used for research for decades - among others, the Thünen Institute, the BVL and the PTB are located here.
In the book "Ein Ort der Forschung" (A Place of Research), historian Daniel Jankowski from the Technical University of Braunschweig describes how this place came to be here in Braunschweig. It spans a wide arc over the eventful history of the site: in the 1930s, the National Socialists established top technological research here with the Aviation Research Centre (Luftfahrtforschungsanstalt, LFA) and put it at the service of their war plans. Braunschweig was to become the "city of aviators". In addition to the various research branches of this time, the book also deals with the role of the protagonists in this place - not least with the question of participation and responsibility of science and scientists who placed themselves in the service of National Socialism.
After the end of the Second World War, the site and especially the top-level research aroused the Allies' desires. Many of the research results, for example in the field of arrow wings, were subsequently transferred to American research programmes.
Parts of the research facilities were dismantled, but the site itself was preserved for science. In view of the food crisis in the post-war period, the Agricultural Research Centre (FAL) was established here. Jankowski describes the transformation of this science site from its foundation to the takeover of the FAL into the responsibility of the Federal German government in 1966.
