Making of the Atomic Bomb

by Richard Rhodes

  The attack on liberalism would be comical if the Protocols had not found such vicious use. Liberalism “produced Constitutional States . . . and a constitution, as you well know, is nothing else but a school of discords, misunderstandings, quarrels, disagreements, fruitless party agitations, party whims. . . . We replaced the ruler by a caricature of a government—by a president, taken from the mob, from the midst of our puppet creatures, our slaves.”664 A touching loyalty to the Russian ancien régime surfaces from time to time and must have given European readers pause:

  The principal guarantee of stability of rule is to confirm the aureole of power, and this aureole is attained only by such a majestic inflexibility of might as shall carry on its face the emblems of inviolability from mystical causes—from the choice of God. Such was, until recent times, the Russian autocracy, the one and only serious foe we had in the world, without counting the Papacy.665

  In brief, the Elders have stage-managed the invention and dissemination of modern ideas—of the modern world. Everything more recent than the Russian imperial system of czar, landed nobility and serfs is part and parcel of their diabolical work. Which helps explain how so obscure a study as physics came in Germany in the 1920s to be counted part of the Jewish conspiracy.

  The Elders work to establish a world autocracy ruled by a leader who is a “patriarchial paternal” guardian. Liberalism will be rooted out, the masses led away from politics, censorship strict, freedom of the press abolished. A third of the population will be recruited for amateur spying (“It will then be no disgrace to be a spy and informer, but a merit”) and a vast secret police will keep order.666 All these were Nazi strategies, and certainly Hitler’s debt to the Protocols is evident in Mein Kampf and explicitly acknowledged.667

  Russia’s contribution to German anti-Semitism was plagiarized from a work of political satire, Dialogues from Hell Between Montesquieu and Machiavelli, written by a French lawyer, Maurice Joly, and first published in Brussels in 1864. Montesquieu speaks for liberalism, Machiavelli for despotism. The concoction of the Protocols was probably the work of the head of the czarist secret police outside Russia, a Paris-based agent named Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky. Borrowing and paraphrasing Machiavelli’s speeches without even bothering to change their order and attributing them to a secret Jewish council, Rachkovsky was attempting to discredit Russian liberalism by showing it to be a Jewish plot. A St. Petersburg newspaper serialized the earliest version of the Protocols in 1903. It was one of three books belonging to the Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna—the other two were the Bible and War and Peace—found among her possessions at Ekaterinburg after the murder of the imperial family by Communist revolutionaries on July 17, 1918.

  That coincidence returned the Protocols west. Fyodor Vinberg, who arranged the German translation and publication of the Protocols in Berlin in 1920, was a colonel in the Imperial Guard. The Czarina had been an honorary colonel of his regiment and he had worshiped her. He escaped to Germany at the end of the Great War convinced that her murderers had been Jews. Thereafter revenge on the Jews was the central fixation of his life. He was a friend to Hitler’s advisers, particularly the Nazi Party “philosopher,” Russian-born Alfred Rosenberg, who published a study of the Protocols in 1923.

  The fiction of a Jewish world conspiracy had practical value for the Nazi Party. As it had done for earlier anti-Semitic parties, writes Hannah Arendt, who was on the scene as a student in Berlin in the 1920s, it “gave them the advantage of a domestic program, and conditions were such that one had to enter the arena of social struggle in order to win political power. They could pretend to fight the Jews exactly as the workers were fighting the bourgeoisie. Their advantage was that by attacking the Jews, who were believed to be the secret power behind governments, they could openly attack the state itself.”668

  The fiction also served for propaganda, to reassure the German people: if the Jews could dominate the world, then so could the Aryans. Arendt continues: “Thus the Protocols presented world conquest as a practical possibility, implied that the whole affair was only a question of inspired or shrewd know-how, and that nobody stood in the way of a German victory over the entire world but a patently small people, the Jews, who ruled it without possessing instruments of violence—an easy opponent, therefore, once their secret was discovered and their method emulated on a larger scale.”669

  But the scurrilities of Mein Kampf, which on the evidence of their incoherence are not calculated manipulations but violent emotional outbursts, demonstrate that Hitler pathologically feared and hated the Jews. In black megalomania he masked an intelligent, industrious and much-persecuted people with the distorted features of his own terror. And that would make all the difference.

  * * *

  A German journalist had the temerity in 1931 to ask Adolf Hitler where he would find the brains to run the country if he took it over. Hitler snapped that he would be the brains but went on contemptuously to enlist the help of the German class that still resisted voting the Nazis into power:

  Do you think perhaps that, in the event of a successful revolution along the lines of my party, we would not inherit the brains in droves? Do you believe that the German middle class, this flower of the intelligentsia, would refuse to serve us and place their minds at our disposal? The German middle class would take its stand on the famed ground of the accomplished fact; we will do what we like with the middle class.670

  But what about the Jews, the journalist persisted—those talented people, war heroes among them, Einstein among them? “Everything they have created has been stolen from us,” Hitler charged. “Everything that they know will be used against us. They should just go and foment their unrest among other peoples. We do not need them.”

  At noon on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler, forty-three years old, gleefully accepted appointment as Chancellor of Germany. With the Reichstag fire and the subsequent suspension of constitutional liberties, with the Enabling Act of March 23 by which the Reichstag voluntarily gave over its powers to the Hitler cabinet, the Nazis began to consolidate their control. They moved immediately to legalize anti-Semitism and abolish the civil rights of German Jews. Meeting at his country retreat in Berchtesgaden with Joseph Goebbels, now his propaganda minister, Hitler decided on a boycott of Jewish businesses as an opening sally.671 The national boycott began on Saturday, April 1. Already during the previous week Jewish judges and lawyers had been dismissed from practice in Prussia and Bavaria. Now newspapers conveniently published business addresses and teams of Nazi storm troopers stationed themselves at storefronts to direct the mobs. Jews caught in the streets were beaten while the police looked on. The boycott was a nationwide German pogrom and it lasted through a violent weekend.

  A month earlier, the evening after the Reichstag fire, Wolfgang Pauli had dropped in on a Göttingen group that included Edward Teller. The group had discussed Germany’s political situation and Pauli had declared emphatically that the idea of a German dictatorship was Quatsch, Pauli’s favorite dismissal: rubbish, mush, nonsense. “I have seen dictatorship in Russia,” he told them. “In Germany it just couldn’t happen.”672 In Hamburg Otto Frisch had mustered similar optimism, as indeed had many Germans. “I didn’t take Hitler at all seriously at first,” Frisch told an interviewer later. “I had the feeling, ‘Well, chancellors come and chancellors go, and he will be no worse than the rest of them.’ Then things began to change.”673 The Third Reich promulgated its first anti-Jewish ordinance on April 7. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, the harbinger of some four hundred anti-Semitic laws and decrees the Nazis would issue, changed Teller’s life, Pauli’s, Frisch’s, the lives of their colleagues decisively, forever. It announced bluntly that “civil servants of non-Aryan descent must retire.”674 A decree defining “non-Aryan” followed on April 11: anyone “descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents.”675 Universities were state institutions. Members of their faculties were therefore civil servants. The new law
abruptly stripped a quarter of the physicists of Germany, including eleven who had earned or would earn Nobel Prizes, of their positions and their livelihood.676 It immediately affected some 1,600 scholars in all.677 Nor were academics dismissed by the Reich likely to find other work. To survive they would have to emigrate.

  Some had already left, among them Einstein and the older Hungarians. Einstein read the signs correctly because he was Einstein and because he had borne the brunt of the attack since immediately after the war; the Hungarians had become connoisseurs by now of advancing fascism.

  Theodor von Kármán departed first, from Aachen. He had pioneered aeronautical physics; the California Institute of Technology, then vigorously assembling its future reputation, wanted to include that specialty in its curriculum. Aviation philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim was prevailed upon to contribute. The Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, with a tenfoot wind tunnel, began operation under von Kármán’s direction in 1930.

  Caltech also courted Einstein. So did Oxford and Columbia, but he was attracted to the cosmological work of the dean of Caltech graduate studies, a Massachusetts-born physicist of Quaker background named Richard Chace Tolman. Ongoing observations at Mount Wilson Observatory, above Pasadena, might confirm the last of the three original predictions of the general theory of relativity, the gravitational red-shifting of the light of high-density stars. Tolman sent a delegation to Berlin; Einstein agreed to visit Pasadena in 1931 as a research associate.

  He did, twice, returning to Berlin between, dining in Southern California with Charlie Chaplin, viewing a rough cut of Sergei Eisenstein’s death-obsessed film Que Viva Mexico! with its sponsor Upton Sinclair. As his second visit approached, in December, Einstein was ready to reassess his future: “I decided today,” he wrote in his diary, “that I shall essentially give up my Berlin position and shall be a bird of passage for the rest of my life.”678

  The bird of passage was not to nest in Pasadena. Abraham Flexner, the American educator, sought out Einstein at Caltech. Flexner was in the process of founding a new institution, not yet located or named, chartered in 1930 with a $5 million endowment. The two men strolled for most of an hour up and down the halls of the club where Einstein was staying. They met again at Oxford in May and once more at the Einsteins’ summer house at Caputh, outside Berlin, in June. “We sat then on the veranda and talked until evening,” Flexner recalled, “when Einstein invited me to stay to supper. After supper we talked until almost eleven. By that time it was perfectly clear that Einstein and his wife were prepared to come to America.”679 They walked together to the bus stop. “Ich bin Feuer und Flamme dafür” Einstein told his guest as he put him on the bus: “I am fire and flame for it.”680, 681 The Institute for Advanced Study would be established in Princeton, New Jersey. Einstein was its first great acquisition. He had suggested a salary of $3,000 a year. His wife and Flexner negotiated a more respectable $15,000. It was what Caltech had been prepared to pay. But at Caltech, as in Zurich before, Einstein would have been expected to teach. At the Institute for Advanced Study his only responsibility was thought.

  The Einsteins left Caputh in December 1932, scheduled to divide the coming year between Princeton and Berlin. Einstein knew better. “Turn around,” he told his wife as they stepped off the porch of their house. “You will never see it again.”682 She thought his pessimism foolish.

  In mid-March the Nazi SA searched the empty house for hidden weapons. By then Einstein had spoken out publicly against Hitler and was returning to Europe to prepare to move. He settled temporarily at a resort town on the Belgian coast, Le Coq sur Mer, with his wife, his two stepdaughters, his secretary, his assistant and two Belgian guards: assassination threatened again. In Berlin his son-in-law arranged to have his furniture packed. The French obligingly transported his personal papers to Paris by diplomatic pouch. At the end of March 1933 the most original physicist of the twentieth century once again renounced his German citizenship.

  Princeton University acquired John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner in 1930, in Wigner’s puckish recollection, as a package deal. The university sought advice on improving its science from Paul Ehrenfest, who “recommended to them not to invite a single person but at least two . . . who already knew each other, who wouldn’t feel suddenly put on an island where they have no intimate contact with anybody. Johnny’s name was of course well known by that time the world over, so they decided to invite Johnny von Neumann. They looked: who wrote articles with John von Neumann? They found: Mr. Wigner. So they sent a telegram to me also.”683 In fact, Wigner had already earned a high reputation in a recondite area of physics known as group theory, about which he published a book in 1931. He accepted the invitation to Princeton to look it over and perhaps to look America over as well. “There was no question in the mind of any person that the days of foreigners [in Germany], particularly with Jewish ancestry, were numbered. . . . It was so obvious that you didn’t have to be perceptive. . . . It was like, ‘Well, it will be colder in December.’ Yes, it will be. We know it well.”684

  Leo Szilard in Berlin debated his future in a musing letter to Eugene Wigner written on October 8, 1932.685 He was apparently still trying to organize his Bund: the knowledge had got into his blood that he had work to accomplish at the moment more noble than science, he wrote—bad luck, it couldn’t be distilled out again. He understood he wasn’t allowed to complain if such work commanded no office space in the world. He was considering a professorship in experimental physics in India since it would be essentially only a teaching post and he could therefore turn his creative energies elsewhere. Only the gods knew what might be available in Europe or on the American coast between Washington and Boston, places he might prefer, so he perforce might go to India. In any case, until he found a position he would at least be free to do science without feeling guilty.

  Szilard promised to write Wigner again when he had an “actual program.” He did not yet know that his actual program would be organizing the desperate rescue. He parked his bags at the Harnack House in Dahlem and sat down with Lise Meitner to talk about doing nuclear physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. She had Hahn, and Hahn was superb, but he was a chemist. She could use a jack-of-all-trades like Szilard. But the collaboration was not to be. Events moved too quickly. Szilard took his train from Berlin, the train that proved him, if not more clever than most people, at least a day earlier. That was “close to the first of April, 1933.”686

  If Pauli, safe behind the lines in Zurich, had misread events before, he was clear enough once the new law was announced. Walter Elsasser, among the first to leave, chose neutral Switzerland, entrained for Zurich and homed on the physics building at the Polytechnic. “On entering the main door of this building one faces a broad and straight staircase leading directly to the second floor. Before I could take my first step on it, there appeared at the top of the stairs the moon-face of Wolfgang Pauli, who shouted down: ‘Elsasser,’ he said, ‘you are the first to come up these stairs; I can see how in the months to come there will be many, many more to climb up here.’ ”687 The idea of a German dictatorship was no longer Quatsch.

  Longstanding anti-Semitic discrimination in academic appointments weighted the civil service law dismissals in favor of the natural sciences, fields of study that had evolved more recently than the older disciplines of the liberal arts, that German scholarship had looked down upon as “materialistic” and that had therefore proved less impenetrable to Jews.688 Medicine incurred 423 dismissals, physics 106, mathematics 60—in the physical and biological sciences other than medicine, an immediate total of 406 scientists. The University of Berlin and the University of Frankfurt each lost a third of its faculty.

  The promising young theoretical physicist Hans Bethe, then at Tübingen, first heard of his dismissal from one of his students, who wrote him to say he read of it in the papers and wondered what he should do. Bethe thought the question impertinent—it was he who had been dismissed, not the student—and asked for a copy of the
news story. Hans Geiger was professor of experimental physics at Tübingen at the time, having moved there from Berlin. When Bethe joined the faculty as a theoretician in November 1932, “Geiger explained his experiments to me, and in other ways made a lot of me, so all seemed to be well on the personal level.” Sensibly, then, Bethe wrote the vacationing Geiger for advice.689, 690 “He wrote back a completely cold letter saying that with the changed situation it would be necessary to dispense with my further services—period. There was no kind word, no regret—nothing.”691 A few days later the official notice arrived.

  Bethe at twenty-seven was sturdy, indefatigable, a skier and mountain climber, exceptionally self-confident in physics if still socially diffident.692 His eyes were blue, his features Germanic; his thick, dark-brown hair, cut short, stood up on his head like a brush. His custom of plowing through difficulties eventually won Bethe comparison with a battleship, except that this particularly equable vessel usually boomed with laughter. He had already published important work.

  Born in Strasbourg on July 2, 1906, Bethe moved during childhood to Kiel and then to Frankfurt as his father, a university physiologist, achieved increasing academic success. He did not think of himself as a Jew: “I was not Jewish.693 My mother was Jewish, and until Hitler came that made no difference whatever.” His father’s background was Protestant and Prussian; his mother was the daughter of a Strasbourg professor of medicine. He counted two Jewish grandparents, more than enough to trigger the Tübingen dismissal.

  Bethe began university studies at Frankfurt in 1924. Two years later, recognizing his gift for theoretical work, his adviser sent him to Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich. Sommerfeld had trained nearly a third of the full professors of theoretical physics in the German-speaking world; his protégés included Max von Laue, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg. The American chemist Linus Pauling came to work with Sommerfeld while Bethe was there, as did the German Rudolf Peierls and Americans Edward U. Condon and I. I. Rabi. Edward Teller arrived from Karlsruhe in 1928, but before the relationship between the two young men could develop into friendship Teller was incapacitated in a streetcar accident, his right foot severed just above the ankle. By the time the amputation healed, Sommerfeld had gone off on a sixtieth-birthday trip around the world, leaving Bethe, who had just passed his doctoral examinations, to look for a job on his own; missing Sommerfeld, Teller chose to move on to Leipzig to study with Heisenberg. Bethe went to the Cavendish on a Rockefeller Fellowship, then to Rome, before accepting appointment at Tübingen.