The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science (German: Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften) was a German scientific institution established in the German Empire in 1911. Its functions were taken over by the Max Planck Society. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society was an umbrella organisation for many institutes, testing stations, and research units created under its authority. Constitution The Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG) was founded in 1911 in order to promote the natural sciences in Germany, by founding and maintaining research institutions formally independent from the state and its administrations. The institutions were to be under the guidance of prominent directors, which included the physicists and chemists Walther Bothe, Peter Debye, Albert Einstein, Fritz Haber and Otto Hahn; a board of trustees also provided guidance. Funding was ultimately obtained from sources internal and external to Germany. Internally, money was raised from individuals, industry and the government, as well as through the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science). External to Germany, the Rockefeller Foundation granted students worldwide one-year study stipends, for whichever institute they chose, some studied in Germany. In contrast to the German universities, with their formal independence from state administrations the institutions of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft had no obligation to teach students. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and its research facilities were involved in weapons research, experimentation and production in both the First World War and the Second World War. During the World War I, the group, and in particular Fritz Haber, was responsible for introducing the use of poison gas as a weapon. This was in direct violation of established international law. The Holocaust During World War II, some of the weapons and medical research performed by the KWI was connected to fatal human experimentation on living test subjects (prisoners) in Nazi concentration camps. In fact, members of the KWI of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, particularly Otmar von Verschuer received preserved Jewish bodies and body parts such as eyes for study and display from Auschwitz. These were provided by his pupil Dr. Josef Mengele from prisoners in his charge. He specialized in examining twins, and their genetic relationship, especially for their eye colour and other personal qualities. As the American forces closed in on the relocated KWI, the organization's president, Albert Vögler, an industrialist and early Nazi Party backer, committed suicide, knowing he would be held accountable for the group's crimes and complicity in