There was rarely a meeting with the director that didn't feel destabilizing.

"He was hitting his table, yelling at me to the point that I could see him spitting," says Gabriel Lando, a theoretical computational physicist from Brazil and a former postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden.

For months, Jan-Michael Rost, the institute's director of finite systems, berated the young postdoc, calling him "autistic" and "f***ing useless," Lando says. He describes meetings in which Rost repeatedly banged on the table, shouting at him.

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"I think those were the worst moments of my life," says Lando, who arrived at the institute in 2020. "It took me more than a year to heal from it, to stop dreaming about it."

Lando's experience is far from unique.

For months, DW's investigative unit, along with German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, has probed cases of abusive behavior and toxic environments at Max Planck institutes across Germany.

We interviewed more than 30 scientists, most of them lured to Germany from Asia, the Americas and other parts of Europe with the promise of conducting world-class research.

More than half of them describe experiencing or witnessing misconduct perpetrated by senior scientific staff, often directors, but also group leaders, with women and people of color most at risk of abuse.

DW and Der Spiegel also reviewed detailed reports submitted to the Max Planck Society's complaint mechanisms, communications between victims and staff involved in reporting processes, and confidential documents that corroborated the accounts.

Our findings suggest a systemic failure to hold abusive staff members or their institutes accountable.

The Max Planck Society often builds its institutes around gifted scientists, who are free to organize their research and facilities as they please, handpicking researchers while guiding scientific breakthroughs.

Its model is rooted in a revolutionary principle developed by Adolf von Harnack, a theologian and patron of the natural sciences, who in 1911 led the precursor to the Max Planck Society.

Harnack believed that research could best be advanced through institutes centered on single scientists, who would then pursue their breakthroughs unrestrained.

The model has been successful — the Max Planck Society counts 31

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