by P. D. Smith
Marcus Karenin represents the fulfilment of Rufus’s dream. After the Last War, Karenin also has his eyes fixed on the final frontier: ‘This ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit will reach out’.82 This is the vision of man’s heroic destiny that Otto Mandl described to Leo Szilard in 1932, a vision that Szilard thought could be realized only with nuclear physics. In William Cameron Menzies’ utopian movie Things to Come (1936), for which Wells wrote the screenplay, Karenin becomes the Faustian leader Cabal. At the end of the film, with the stars of the universe as his backdrop, Cabal speaks directly to the audience, his eyes burning with a disturbing intensity:
For Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet and its winds and waves, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain it. Then the planets about it. And at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.83
But, as The World Set Free showed, this beguiling dream of the atom could become a nightmare. The same gleaming metropolis that is powered by atomic energy might one day cower from the threat of atomic bombs. Perhaps it was just such a thought that crossed Leo Szilard’s mind as his ship approached the skyline of New York for the first time in 1931.
Ominously, Frederick Soddy speculated that ‘the legend of the Fall of Man’ may have originated with an ancient and now forgotten civilization which discovered atomic energy ‘before, for some unknown reason, the whole world was plunged back again under the undisputed sway of Nature, to begin once more its upward toilsome journey through the ages’.84 Only the elemental force of the atom could – to use the infamous phrase of the general in charge of America’s cold-war nuclear weapons, Curtis E. LeMay – blast a civilization back to the stone age.
In the year Szilard first read The World Set Free, the American physicist and rocket pioneer Robert Goddard wrote a fan letter to Wells telling him that The War of the Worlds had made ‘a deep impression’ on him as a teenager. Indeed, Goddard’s papers are full of references to Wells. Ironically, his letter came a few months before Wells predicted guided missiles in a BBC radio talk.85 Wernher von Braun was also inspired by science fiction and was a keen fan of the German War of the Worlds, Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf zwei Planeten (‘On Two Planets’, 1897).86 ‘I shall never forget how I devoured this novel with curiosity and excitement as a young man,’ wrote von Braun. ‘From this book the reader can obtain an inkling of the richness of ideas at the twilight of the nineteenth century upon which the technological and scientific progress of the twentieth is based.’87 Both the dream of space travel and the dream of atomic energy first took shape in the pages of fiction. But alongside both these dreams, the nightmare of the superweapon – today’s weapons of mass destruction – also took root.
When The World Set Free fell into Leo Szilard’s hands in 1932, just as he was hesitating over whether to continue working in physics, his mind was uniquely primed to receive both the scientific and the social message of Wells’s novel. It is perhaps the clearest example of fiction influencing science. Wells’s novel supplied one of the sparks needed to make Szilard burst into creativity. As the fuse burnt in his mind, Europe descended into chaos. The countdown to war had begun.
It had been a dramatic year in physics. After the electron and the proton, the third elementary particle – the neutron – had been discovered. The veils were being stripped away from the atomic nucleus. Scientists were now using machines to smash atoms, transmuting matter into different chemical elements. It was an almost godlike power, beyond the dreams of any previous generation of scientists, and one for which the alchemist Faust would have sold his immortal soul. But still the goal of atomic energy remained elusive. The following year, his mind still buzzing with the possibilities opened up by H. G. Wells’s novel, Leo Szilard would realize how to do this.
In 1932, Szilard approached Lise Meitner at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Dahlem about collaborating on nuclear experiments. Although they had taught together on courses, Meitner doubted that Szilard’s background in probability theory and statistics would make him the ideal partner in her ongoing attempts to probe the structure of the atomic nucleus. It’s tempting to speculate about what might have happened if they had indeed begun working together in 1932. Within months, Szilard had discovered how to use the neutron to release the power of the atom. But by then fascism had intervened and Szilard had left Germany for England. Had he stayed, it is possible that Germany and not the Allies would have discovered the secret of the atomic bomb.
11
Eureka!
And if some physicist were to realize the brightest dream of his kind and teach us to unlock the energy within the atom, the whole race of man would live under the threat of sudden destruction.
William McDougall, World Chaos: The Responsibility of Science (1931)
At noon on 30 January 1933, millions of Germans were listening to the radio as Adolf Hitler was sworn in as the new German Chancellor. Leo Szilard was living at Dahlem in the faculty club of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Harnack House. He had a small room on the third floor under the eaves, usually reserved for visiting scholars. It was a temporary measure while he decided what to do next. Perhaps for the first time, Szilard felt truly alone and without a clear sense of where his life was going. His closest scientific friends – Einstein, Wigner and von Neumann – were all working in the United States now. He knew it was only a matter of time before he too would have to leave Germany. But where should he go? And what should he do? There was the possibility of teaching physics in India, but the New World also beckoned. The only thing he knew for certain was that remaining in Berlin was no longer an option.
Although the Nazis were the largest single party in the German Parliament, the Reichstag, they didn’t yet have a majority. New elections were scheduled for 5 March 1933. Szilard could see that Germany was headed for disaster under Hitler, but his fellow Hungarian, Michael Polanyi, who worked at the KWI for Fibre Chemistry in Dahlem, was less concerned. Polanyi believed that ‘civilized Germans would not stand for anything really rough happening’, Szilard recalled.1 Like many others, he placed his faith in the Germany of Goethe, Beethoven, Hermann von Helmholtz and Max Planck – a land with rich traditions of culture, scholarship and science. But Leo Szilard had a more realistic approach:
Germans always took a utilitarian point of view. They asked, ‘Well, suppose I would oppose this thinking, what good would I do? I wouldn’t do very much good, I would just lose my influence. Then why should I oppose it?’ You see, the moral point of view was completely absent, or very weak…2
On 3 February, Szilard travelled home to Budapest. He warned his family that it was time to leave. ‘Hitler and his Nazis are going to take over Europe,’ he told them. ‘Get out now. Leave Europe – before it’s too late!’3 Having delivered this blunt warning to his bemused relatives, he returned to Berlin in time to see the Reichstag go up in flames at the end of the month. When Szilard voiced his suspicions to Polanyi that the Nazis were behind the fire, his friend was shocked. ‘Do you really mean to say you think that the Secretary of the Interior had anything to do with this?’ Polanyi asked, incredulously. Szilard could only shake his head in despair at his friend’s naivety and told him to accept a lectureship in chemistry he had been offered at Manchester University in Britain. Polanyi demurred, for a while at least.4
The next day, Hitler declared a state of emergency and suspended the parts of the Weimar constitution that protected civil liberties. The playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht saw the writing on the wall and fled his homeland immediately. He was just the kind of radical intellectual whom Hitler hated. The black, gold and red flag of the Weimar Republic was lowered over Berlin. The Republic, which had filled Albert Einstein with such wonderful hope for the future of Germany after World War I, was now in its dying days. Einstein would soon be abused in German newspapers and his name banned from physics classe
s.
On 20 March, the first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, began receiving inmates. Soon even Weimar, the former capital of the Republic and once home to Goethe, Schiller and Bach, would have its own concentration camp – Buchenwald. After 1943, forced labour from a sub-camp of Buchenwald known as Mittelbau-Dora would build Wernher von Braun’s V-2 missiles in secret factories, buried deep beneath the Harz mountains. At least 20,000 of Mittelbau-Dora’s prisoners died in the process, many times more than were killed by the missiles themselves.
The day after Dachau opened its gates, Lise Meitner wrote to Otto Hahn, who was lecturing in America, to tell him that the KWI had been ordered to fly the new Nazi national flag. ‘It must have been very difficult for Haber to raise the swastika,’ she wrote. But, like Michael Polanyi, she still trusted in the decency of ordinary Germans and hoped for the best. Hitler would moderate his views and govern in a ‘conciliatory’ way, she believed.5
Albert Einstein had spent the winter and spring teaching in America. On 28 March he arrived back in Europe and, appalled by events in his homeland, immediately renounced his German citizenship. It was the second time he had done so, having rejected the land of his birth as a teenager to escape military service. It was the last straw for Leo Szilard. He grabbed his two suitcases, which for some time now had been packed and ready to go, and took the first Vienna-bound train out of Berlin. He travelled first class, hoping that he would not be questioned too much by the secret police. ‘The train was empty,’ Szilard remembered. ‘The same train on the next day was overcrowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis.’6
Within a week of Szilard’s flight from Berlin, Hitler’s regime had passed a law banning ‘non-Aryans’ from government positions. This included university lecturers. For now the nichtarisch Lise Meitner was safe, as she was an Austrian national. Her nephew, Otto Frisch, was less lucky and left for London. For most Jewish academics it was the end of their careers, in Germany at least. At German universities, 20 per cent of scientists were Jewish. In physics the proportion was even higher.7 Students and lecturers failed to speak up as their Jewish colleagues were expelled in April and May. Max Born, Einstein’s radical friend and sparring partner over quantum theory, was among those dismissed. He learnt from a newspaper article that he had been sacked as head of the Göttingen Institute for Theoretical Physics, where he had worked for twelve years. ‘It seemed to me like the end of the world,’ he wrote later. ‘I went for a walk in the woods, in despair, brooding on how to save my family.’8
For now at least, Fritz Haber, a baptized Jew who had served at the Front in World War I, was safe. But he was ordered to get rid of his Jewish staff. Among them was Irene Sackur, daughter of Otto Sackur, the young chemist killed while experimenting on chemical weapons in 1915. This was a step too far, even for Haber. At the end of April he handed in his resignation. His letter to the Nazi minister of education spoke of the pride with which he had served his German homeland for his entire life. In America, Otto Hahn had defended Hitler’s actions to the media, claiming that the ascetic German Führer ‘lived almost like a saint’.9 On his return he temporarily took over Haber’s Institute. The Jewish members of staff were dismissed.
Haber was a broken man. He was suffering from chronic angina and had now been forced out of the research institute to which he had devoted his entire life. For a proud man, it was deeply humiliating. To friends, the 64-year-old admitted feeling profoundly bitter.10 Einstein wrote him a pointed letter saying he was pleased to hear that ‘your former love for the blond beast has cooled off a bit’.11 Haber had only months to live. Forced into exile by the country he had tried to save with his chemical superweapon, he spent his last days wandering rootlessly through Europe. In July 1933 he visited London, staying at a hotel on Russell Square in Bloomsbury while he explored the possibility of working in England. He met Frederick G. Donnan, a tall and rather dashing professor of chemistry at nearby University College London, who sported a black eyepatch. During World War I, he had worked on the production of mustard gas. Now he was attempting to arrange a fellowship for Germany’s leading chemical warfare expert.
In the summer of 1933, another scientist who had fled Hitler’s Germany was living on Russell Square. Leo Szilard had brought his two suitcases to the Imperial Hotel, less costly than Haber’s hotel but just down the road. There Szilard stayed until the autumn, when he moved to the Strand, where he found a room at an even better rate.
Before travelling to London, Leo Szilard had spent some days in Vienna. Here he had called on Gertrud (Trude) Weiss, a quiet 24-yearold woman with a striking full-moon face and dark, lustrous eyes. They had met in 1929 in Berlin, where she was studying biology and physics at the university. In her spare time she also worked on a film magazine, Close Up. Friends recall the two of them at Eva Striker’s bohemian parties, deep in discussion about films such as Fritz Lang’s latest movie, Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon, 1929), the ‘first serious space travel film’. It is rumoured that the young Wernher von Braun helped with the cutting-edge special effects.12
Szilard had formed close friendships with several women, but the opposite sex always remained something of an enigma to the peripatetic scientist. A childhood companion, Alice Eppinger, fell in love with him and even followed him to Berlin. But although their families hoped they might marry, Szilard felt unable to propose. He broke the news to Alice as gently as he knew how. He used an example from a popularization of science he was reading, Maurice Maeterlinck’s La Vie des abeilles (‘The Life of the Bee’, 1901). ‘In each family there are three kinds of bees,’ Szilard told her. ‘A queen, workers and drones. Imagine this is a family of bees and I am a worker.’ Understandably, Alice looked puzzled, so he quickly added: ‘Listen Alice, I am not the marrying kind. I do not want to have children. I am a worker, not a drone.’13
It was the truth, but it broke Alice’s heart. In 1938, a friend who was concerned about his lack of a career, bluntly advised Szilard to marry at the first opportunity, ‘preferably a woman who considers the realities somewhat more than you do’.14 Szilard objected that this solution was far too ‘drastic’. ‘Anyway,’ he replied, ‘why should a woman who has sense of reality mary [sic] a man who has none.’15 As usual, his logic (if not his English) was flawless. Despite this, Leo Szilard did eventually marry, although it took him until 1951 to propose to Trude Weiss.
As well as renewing his friendship with Trude in Vienna, Szilard applied his organizational skills to the plight of his fellow academics exiled from Germany. By chance, the Director of the London School of Economics, William Beveridge, was staying at his hotel. Szilard introduced himself and suggested that a committee should be formed to provide assistance. Beveridge was impressed: ‘He suggested that I come to London and that I occasionally prod him on this, and if I prodded him long enough and frequently enough he thought he would do it,’ said Szilard. He left promptly for London. ‘In a comparatively short time,’ Szilard added, ‘practically everybody who came to England had a position, except me.’16
This was the beginning of the Academic Assistance Council (AAC). The Council, which changed its name in 1935 to the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), dedicated itself to helping academics fleeing from the Nazis. From 1933 until the beginning of World War II, the SPSL quietly rescued about 1,200 scholars and their families from Germany, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Italy. The organization still exists and is now known as the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics.
Leo Szilard arrived in London in April. He checked into the Imperial Hotel, overlooking the elegant gardens of Russell Square designed in the previous century by Sir Humphry Repton. The British Museum and Library, University College (UCL) and the London School of Economics were all within a fifteen-minute walk. T. S. Eliot – known as the ‘Pope of Russell Square’ – worked in his garret office at number 24 for the publisher Faber & Faber, and in nearby Gordon Square was the
fine Georgian townhouse where Virginia Woolf had once lived. In the previous century, a young Charles Darwin had lived nearby. As usual, Leo Szilard liked to be at the centre of things.
In summer 1933, two very different scientific refugees – Haber and Szilard – were staying in this part of London. That year there had been a price war between Russell Square’s two main hotels. Both had advertised in The Times, the Hotel Russell offering ‘Bedroom, bath and breakfast’ at 10s. 6d. and 12s. 6d., the Imperial Hotel advertising the same at 9s. 6d. and 7s. 9d. Unlike most refugees, Fritz Haber didn’t need to economize, and booked into the Hotel Russell. Leo Szilard, who was effectively running the AAC for no pay and living off his refrigerator patents, chose the cheaper one.17 For the scientist who once declared that ‘there is no place as good to think as a bathtub’, what made the hotel irresistible were its famous Turkish baths.18
Politically, the nationalist Haber and the socialist Szilard had little in common. However, unlike the purist Ernest Rutherford, for whom knowledge was its own reward, both men were enthralled by the idea of science as power. Neither Szilard nor Haber had set out in their scientific careers intending to create new weapons, but both scientists were to play key roles in developing a new generation of scientific superweapons. Haber thought that chemical weapons would make him the saviour of his country. Szilard, an internationalist fired by an idealistic vision of how science should transform human life and society for the better, wanted to save the world by building the atomic bomb before Hitler. These two very different characters were both doomsday men.
