by Peter Watson
Einstein’s persecution had begun early. He had come under attack largely because of the international acclaim he received after Arthur Eddington’s announcement in November 1919 that he had obtained experimental confirmation for the predictions of general relativity theory. Einstein had some support—the German ambassador in London in 1920 warned his Foreign Office privately that “Professor Einstein is just at this time a cultural factor of first rank…We should not drive such a man out of Germany with whom we can carry on real cultural propaganda.” Yet two years later, following the assassination of Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister, unconfirmed reports leaked out that Einstein was also on the list of intended victims, and he was described as an “evil monster.”29
When the Nazis achieved power ten years later, action was not long delayed. In January 1933 Einstein was away from Berlin on a visit to the United States. Despite facing a number of personal problems, he made a point of announcing he would not return to his positions at the university in Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft as long as the Nazis were in charge.30 The Nazis repaid the compliment by freezing his bank account, searching his house for weapons allegedly hidden there by Communists, and publicly burning copies of a popular book of his on relativity. Later in the spring, the regime issued a catalog of “state enemies”: Einstein’s picture headed the list, and below the photograph was the text, “Not yet hanged.” He eventually found a berth at the newly established Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. When the news was released, one newspaper in Germany ran the headline: “GOOD NEWS FROM EINSTEIN—HE IS NOT COMING BACK.” On March 28, 1933, Einstein resigned his membership in the Prussian Academy of Sciences, preventing any Nazi from firing him, and was distressed that none of his former colleagues—not even Max von Laue or Max Planck—made any attempt to protest his treatment. He later wrote: “The conduct of German intellectuals—as a group—was no better than the rabble.”31
Einstein was by no means the only famous physicist to leave Germany. Some 25 percent of the pre-1933 physics community was lost, including half its theoretical physicists and many of the top people in quantum or nuclear physics. In addition to Einstein and Franck, there were Gustav Hertz, Erwin Schrödinger, Victor Hess, and Peter Debye, all Nobel Prize winners, plus Otto Stern, Felix Bloch, Max Born, Eugen Wigner, Hans Bethe, Dennis Gabor, Georg von Hevesy, and Gerhard Herzberg, as well as the mathematicians Richard Courant, Hermann Weyl, and Emmy Noether, described by Einstein as the best female mathematician ever. Roughly one hundred world-class colleagues found refuge in the United States between 1933 and 1941, and Leo Szilard worked hard in Britain to set up the Academic Assistance Council to provide jobs for displaced academics. According to John Cornwell, the German physics community did not shrink in absolute numbers because there were plenty of people to replace those dismissed, “but the quality of the scientists declined and basic research stagnated.”32
Max Planck tried to put in a good word for Fritz Haber, who had been forced to resign his post as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Physical Chemistry. Planck went to see Hitler and, according to what he himself later wrote, said that “there were different sorts of Jews, some valuable and some valueless for mankind” and that one had to make distinctions. Hitler rebuked him, saying, “That’s not right. A Jew is a Jew; all Jews cling together like burrs.”
For scientists only slightly less famous than Einstein or Haber, the attitude of the Nazis was sometimes difficult to anticipate. Karl von Frisch was the first zoologist to discover “the language of the bees,” by means of which bees inform other bees about food sources through dances on the honeycomb. Frisch’s experiments caught the imagination of the public, and his popular books were best sellers. This cut little ice with the Nazis who, under the Civil Service Law of 1933, still required Frisch to provide proof of his Aryan descent. The sticking point was his maternal grandmother, and it was possible, he admitted, that she was “non-Aryan.” A virulent campaign was therefore conducted against Frisch in the student newspaper at the University of Munich, and he survived only because there was in Germany in 1941 an outbreak of nosema, a bee disease, killing several hundred thousand bee colonies. This seriously damaged fruit growing and at that stage Germany had to grow its own food. The Reich government concluded that Frisch was the best man to rescue the situation.
According to recent research, about 13 percent of biologists were dismissed between 1933 and the outbreak of war, four-fifths of them for “racial” reasons. About three-quarters of those who lost their jobs emigrated, the expelled biologists on average proving considerably more successful than their colleagues who remained in Germany. The subject suffered most in two areas: the molecular genetics of bacteria, and phages (viruses that prey on bacteria).
By one of those quirks of statistics we now know that doctors were more enthusiastic Nazis than members of any other profession—44.8 percent of German doctors joined the NSDAP.33 It helped that, in the Weimar Republic, the doctor/patient ratio had been confined to 1 in 600. As Jewish doctors were expelled (some 2,600 by 1939), their non-Jewish colleagues were more in demand than ever.
In fact, the focus of modern historical research has shifted from a concentration on the small minority of medical men who specialized in “racial science” to the broader picture of whether Germany’s doctors as a whole modernized too quickly in a “hard” scientific sense, at the expense of proper professionalization, involving greater ethical and socializing training. Thanks to widespread social insurance, Weimar Germany had a surfeit of doctors, 13 percent of them Jewish. In 1933, 36 percent of medical students were Jewish and so, when the racial laws came in, non-Jewish doctors and medical students had every reason to be grateful to the Nazis. As things now stand, the question as to whether German doctors were less “socialized” than in other countries has not been settled, but undoubtedly doctors were overrepresented in the NSDAP.34
Psychoanalysis came under attack because it was seen as a “Jewish science.” The Berlin Psychoanalytic Society was purged of its Jewish members, and the leadership passed to M. H. Göring, cousin of Reichsmarschall Hermann. He let it be known that one of the basic texts of psychoanalysis in the Third Reich would be Mein Kampf. The German Society for Psychotherapy was renamed the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy under its new president, Carl Jung, though Adlerians were equally strongly represented.35 Jung was later to argue that he did all in his power to help Jewish colleagues, but Freud had long suspected him of anti-Semitism (see Chapter 30) and, certainly, in his theoretical work, Jung targeted Freud, arguing that the founder’s “soulless materialism” was a reflection, in part, of his Jewishness. Julius Streicher joined in.36 The Nazification of psychology was completed with the takeover of six of fifteen full professors of psychology at German universities, in which chairs were occupied by Jews, and a purge of the German Society for Psychology and the Berlin Psychological Institute, where the offices of the director were ransacked for evidence of “treason” (nothing was found but the director, Wolfgang Köhler, one of the founders of the Gestalt school, subsequently resigned, his life having been made intolerable). It was a rude shock too when, in October 1933, psychoanalysis was banned from the Congress of Psychology in Leipzig. Psychoanalysts, in increasing numbers, looked to the United States.
American psychologists were not especially favorable to Freudian theory—William James and pragmatism were more influential. But the American Psychological Association did set up a Committee on Displaced Foreign Psychologists and by 1940 was in touch with 2,169 leading professionals (not all psychoanalysts), 134 of whom had already arrived in America: Karen Horney, Bruno Bettelheim, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and David Rapaport among them.
Freud was eighty-two and far from well when, in March 1938, Austria was declared part of the Reich. Several sets of friends feared for him, in particular Ernest Jones in London but even President Franklin Roosevelt asked to be kept informed. William Bullitt, U.S. Ambassador to Paris, was instr
ucted to keep an eye on “the Freud situation,” and he ensured that staff at the consul general’s office in Vienna showed “a friendly interest” in Freud. Ernest Jones hurried to Vienna, having taken soundings in Britain about the possibility of Freud settling in London, but when he arrived, Jones found Freud unwilling to move. He was persuaded only by the fact that his children would have more of a future abroad.
Before Freud could leave, his “case” was referred as high as Himmler, and it seems it was only the close interest of President Roosevelt that guaranteed his ultimate safety. The Nazis insisted that Freud settle all his debts before leaving and sent through the exit visas one at a time, with Freud’s own arriving last. When his papers did at last materialize, the Gestapo also brought a document, which he was forced to sign, which affirmed that he had been properly treated. He signed, adding, “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.”
In 1934, Bernhard Rust, the Third Reich’s education minister, asked David Hilbert, the mathematician, how Göttingen—the home of Gauss, Riemann, and Felix Klein, and a world center of mathematics for 200 years—had suffered after the removal of Jewish mathematicians. “Suffered?” Hilbert famously replied. “It hasn’t suffered, Minister. It doesn’t exist any more!”37
After Hitler’s inquisition had become plain for all to see; emergency committees were set up in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, Sweden, and Switzerland, of which two may be singled out. In Britain the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) was formed by the heads of British universities, under William Beveridge of the London School of Economics. By November 1938 it had placed 524 persons in academic positions in 36 countries, 161 in the United States. Not only mathematicians were helped, of course. A group of refugee German scholars established the Emergency Society of German Scholars Abroad. This sought to place colleagues in employment where it could, but also produced a detailed list of 1,500 names of Germans dismissed from their academic posts, which proved useful for other societies. The Emergency Society also took advantage of the fact that in Turkey, in spring 1933, Atatürk reorganized the University of Istanbul as part of his drive to Westernize the country. German scholars (among them Paul Hindemith, as we have seen, and Ernst Reuter, later mayor of West Berlin during the blockade) were taken on under this scheme and a similar one, in 1935, when the Istanbul law school was upgraded to a university. These scholars established their own academic journal since it was so difficult for them to publish either back home or in Britain or the United States. The German journal in Turkey lasted for only eighteen issues, which are now collectors’ items. It carried papers on anything from dermatology to Sanskrit.38
A more enduring gift from Hitler was a very different periodical, Mathematical Reviews. The first issue of this new journal went largely unremarked when it appeared—most people had other things on their minds in 1939. But, in its quiet way, the appearance of MR, as mathematicians soon began calling it, was both dramatic and significant. Until then, the most important mathematical periodical, which abstracted articles from all over the world, in dozens of languages, was the Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete, launched in 1931 by Springer Verlag in Berlin. In 1938, however, when the Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita, a board member and Jewish, was dismissed, several members of the international advisory board resigned. An article in Science reported that papers by Jews now went unabstracted in the Zentralblatt and American mathematicians, watching the situation with alarm, considered buying the title. Springer wouldn’t sell but suggested two editorial boards, which would have produced different versions of the journal, one for the United States, Britain, the Commonwealth, and the Soviet Union, the other for Germany and nearby countries. American mathematicians were so incensed by this insult that in May 1939 they voted to establish their own journal.39
As early as April 1933, officials at the Rockefeller Foundation began to consider how they might help individual scholars. Funds were found for an emergency committee, but it had to move carefully; the Depression was still hurting, and jobs were scarce. In October that year, Edward R. Murrow, vice chairman of the committee, calculated that upward of 2,000 scholars, out of a total of 27,000, had been dropped from 240 institutions. That was a lot of people, and wholesale immigration not only risked displacing American scholars but also might trigger anti-Semitism. In the end the emergency committee decided its policy would be “to help scholarship, rather than relieve suffering.” Thus they concentrated on scholars whose achievements were already acknowledged, the most well-known beneficiary being Richard Courant from Göttingen. Fifty-one mathematicians were eventually brought to America before the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939; by 1945 the total was just under 150.40 Every scholar, whatever his or her age, found work. Put alongside the 6 million Jews who perished in the gas ovens, 150 doesn’t sound like much, yet there were more mathematicians helped than any other professional group.41
To give a complete picture of German scholarship, however, we now need to describe three areas where, despite the crude anti-Semitism, despite the poor grasp of scientific principles and method which the likes of Hitler, Himmler, and Rust displayed, German scholarship did well. Rocket and jet technology were not the only fields where the Germans were strong.
The first was the Nazi war on cancer. Because the Germans, as we have seen, led the way in regard to coal-tar derivatives—the basic process that had been behind the dye industry and then the pharmaceuticals industry—they were also aware that cancer was associated with many of the new products. By the same token, having invented x-rays, the Germans also noted—as early as 1902—a link between them and cancer, in particular leukemia.
These results produced in Germany, first, a campaign to prevent cancer—anti-smoking campaigns started there well before anyone else had the idea, and men were warned to check their colons “as often as they checked their cars.” As early as 1938 German scientists had found a link between twelve different types of cancer and asbestos.42 Richard (later Sir Richard) Doll, the Englishman who worked on the link between smoking and cancer in the 1950s, studied in Germany in the 1930s and was shocked to find Jews depicted as “cancers” and Nazi storm troopers as x-rays targeting these “tumours.”
German scientists were among the first to explore the links between cancer and diet, especially food additives, and they were also the first to promote natural foods, in particular whole wheat bread (white bread being denounced as a “French revolutionary invention”).43 The role of alcohol in causing cancer was suspected, but the Nazis went much further than anyone else in concentrating on the role of tobacco: smoking was banned in public areas, cigarette advertising was banned, “non-smoking” carriages were established on trains. The shine is taken off these stories when it is realized that tobacco consumption in Germany grew every year after Hitler came to power, so that in 1940 it stood at twice the level of 1933. It only fell in 1944, possibly due to rationing.
“WHITE JEWS”
In physics where, save for Lenard and Starck, Germany had a record second to none, much the same process repeated itself as had happened over biology. Just as Frisch had come under pressure because one of his grandparents may have been “non-Aryan,” so Werner Heisenberg came under similar pressure because he refused to recognize that “Jewish physics” (i.e., relativity theory) must be wrong or degenerate or both. He, Laue, Planck, and Walter Nernst refused to sign a manifesto organized by Starck pledging loyalty to Hitler. Each of these Nobel Prize winners insisted that physics had nothing to do with politics.
Then, in 1935, Arnold Sommerfeld, sixty-six, was preparing to leave his position as professor at Munich after nearly thirty years (he had taken over from none other than Ludwig Boltzmann). Heisenberg was the natural successor, but he was held to be too much in thrall to the “Jewish spirit” in physics and so became one of the first to be referred to as a “white Jew.” He was attacked in the Nazi press and although he was supported by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, he didn’t get the job, whic
h went to a much less able man. In his memoirs he passed over this incident, saying that so many friends and colleagues had to suffer so much worse.44
As the 1930s passed, physics began to take on an almost apocalyptic significance. In 1933, as Hitler came to power, Einstein was not the only German physicist abroad in the United States. So too was Otto Hahn, lecturing at Cornell.45 That left Lise Meitner in charge at the KWI for Chemistry back in Berlin. She was Jewish but Austrian and so, for the time being, did not come under the racial laws.46 She watched as former colleagues were dismissed or left on their own initiative, including Otto Frisch, her nephew, with whom she had often played piano, who was dismissed from his post in Hamburg, and Leo Szilard, Hungarian-Jewish, who left for England “with his life’s savings hidden in his shoes.”47 It was to be Szilard, famously, who, when safely in London that September and crossing Southampton Row at some traffic lights, had the idea of a chain reaction, which would be self-sustaining and produce an explosion. (He patented the idea and assigned it to the British Admiralty on condition that it be kept secret.) Meanwhile Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist based in Rome, had, without knowing it, split the uranium atom, though it was two Germans, Ida and Walter Noddack, at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, who first recognized this.
In 1936 Hahn and Meitner were nominated for the Nobel Prize by Max Planck, Heisenberg, and Laue, apparently in an attempt to protect their Jewish colleagues.* But when the Anschluss occurred in March 1938, Meitner and Hahn’s protection was removed at a stroke. Carl Bosch, who had worked on the nitrate-fixation process with Haber, managed to get Meitner permission to travel and she went to the Netherlands, with just two suitcases and a diamond ring Hahn had given her so she would have something to sell.48
