The Senate of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society elected Carl Bosch, former director general of IG Farben and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, to succeed Max Planck as President on 29 May 1937. The office he assumed was a difficult one. The change of President was accompanied by major upheavals in the Society's management structure: the Nazis' "leader principle" was also to apply to the KWG from then on. In parallel, people in management positions, such as Friedrich Glum and Lukas von Cranach, had to leave their posts. As President, the rough and reserved Carl Bosch did not much shape the fate of the KWG, though he did several times use his considerable influence in society, to save Jewish scientists like Lise Meitner and Otto Meyerhof from persecution, ultimately in vain. He increasingly left the day-to-day business to his close colleague Ernst Telschow. Bosch himself went on numerous trips abroad, trying to fight his growing depression. In despair at the political situation in Germany, he died in Heidelberg in 1940.
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