The next day, Goebbels and Hitler staged a “Day of the National Rising,’ important as both the first day of spring and the day on which Bismarck had opened the German Reichstag in 1871. Hitler began the first session of his own Third Reich in a solemn ceremony staged in Potsdam, the Berlin suburb once the residence of the Prussian monarchs. Hindenburg, in his spike-topped helmet, symbolized the old order; Hither, the new. That night, long torchlight parades flowed through the streets of Berlin, and on March 23, Hitler’s public fawning complete, he proposed a “Law for Removing the Distress of People and the Reich.” It passed 441 to 84, in a stroke shifting the Reichstag’s powers to the new cabinet for the next four years. “Give me four years’ time and you will not recognize Germany!” he promised.10
Four days later, Goebbels proclaimed a boycott against Jewish businesses in retaliation for “the anti-German atrocity propaganda which interested Jews have started in England and the United States against the new Nationalist regime.” To silence protest from intellectuals, Goebbels announced, Jews will now be admitted “to universities and to the professions of attorney and physician” only in proportion to their numbers in the German population: then less than 1 percent. On the next afternoon, in Antwerp, Belgium, Albert Einstein arrived from the United States aboard the SS Belgenland and announced that he would not return to his Berlin home as long as anti-Jewish threats continued. For the next few months, Einstein said, he would stay in Belgium, a decision made more appealing by his friendship with the royal family.11
At Harnack House on the afternoon of Thursday, March 30, Szilard finally decided that things had gotten “too bad.” He locked his two packed bags and lugged them down the broad flagstone stairs to the high-ceilinged lobby and out to the porte cochere. He hailed a taxi, which first meandered through Dahlem’s suburban lanes, then charged into Berlin’s speeding traffic. At the massive red-brick Anhalter Station, Szilard bought a one-way ticket on the night train to Vienna, booking a berth in the comfortable first-class wagon-lit. As a porter heaved the two bags onto the overhead rack, Szilard sank into the upholstered seat of his empty compartment, no doubt relieved he was leaving but still anxious about the nightlong trip ahead.
The express eased from the noisy terminal, glided through Berlin’s suburbs, crossed rolling farmlands, paused briefly in Dresden, then snaked along the Elbe River under soaring sandstone cliffs. A police officer roused Szilard at the German-Czech border early Friday morning, read in the brown German passport that he was an assistant professor, asked a few routine questions, saluted, clicked his heels, and said, “Good night, sir!” Szilard sighed, recalling later that he had booked the more expensive wagon-lit for two reasons: He liked to travel in style, but more importantly, he hoped that officials would be less likely to interrogate first-class passengers carefully. This mattered to Szilard, for he had tucked into his bags small bundles of banknotes. Only when the train crossed into Austria and, later that morning, when it thundered across the Danube River bridge and swung into Vienna’s Nord-Bahnhof could Szilard feel safe.
At the German-Czech border after midnight the next evening—as the Nazis’ anti-Jewish boycott began—that same train from Berlin was overcrowded. Troopers questioned every passenger, holding back those deemed “non-Aryan” or seizing their most valuable possessions.12 This close call so frightened Szilard that anxiety about his personal safety endured for the rest of his life. From then on, he always kept two bags packed. But to mask his fears, Szilard made light of his escape years later, only using the incident to boast: “This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people; you just have to be one day earlier. . . ,”13
In Vienna, a city Szilard enjoyed visiting, he checked into the Regina, on Freiheitsplatz (now Rooseveltplatz), a small and elegant hotel overshadowed by the soaring spires and decorative tile roof of the Votivkirche. Built to resemble a French villa, the Regina had an imposing, high-arched dining room and an arcade facing the park in front. Immediately, Szilard cabled Bela in Budapest, calling him to Vienna for a “family conference.” To the brothers, this meant that Leo planned to dispense some serious advice.
In the newspapers Szilard read about the Nazis’ anti-Jewish boycott, which began on April 1, and from friends in Vienna he learned how academic dismissals in Germany were spreading. Szilard walked a block from his hotel to the University of Vienna’s Chemical Institute, and there called on his friend Hermann Mark, whose research had moved from X-rays to the study of synthetic plastic polymers. The two agreed to collaborate again, not on research this time but to help academic refugees find places to work and study outside Germany. Mark wrote letters on Szilard’s behalf and gave him money to help the cause.
From there Szilard called on the embassies of countries likely to accept academics: France, England, Switzerland, and the United States. At each stop he warned the political officer about Germany’s anti-Semitism and the exodus that had just begun. The embassy officials were polite but noncommittal.14
Szilard also called on Michael Polanyi’s brother Karl, an economist he had first met at Galilei Circle discussions in Budapest. Polanyi suggested that Szilard deal directly with the International Student Service (ISS) to create a system for relocating both faculty and students. He added that a personal friend, a charming Englishwoman named Esther Simpson, recently moved to Geneva and might help with an introduction to the ISS.
Szilard also took time from his rounds to call on Gertrud (Trude) Weiss, the woman he had first met in Berlin four years before. Following Szilard’s advice to become a doctor, Trude was now a medical student. She lived near the Regina in her parents’ large, comfortable apartment on Alserstrasse. She was delighted to see him and solicitous about the news of his close escape. The two had politely exchanged formal letters over the years and had begun to spark a friendship. Szilard called her T.W. or Kind (German for “child,” which he later abbreviated “Ch.”), but Trude found him captivating despite this condescension. In the years since she had left Berlin, Trude had remained infatuated with Leo. For his part, Leo was genial but seemed preoccupied with the academic refugees. “Now how can we get the others out?” Szilard asked Trude impatiently. “There’re so many people stuck, and how do we find jobs for them once we get them out?”15
When Bela arrived, the Szilard brothers talked over a long and sumptuous dinner in the Regina’s handsome dining room. Leo urged that they secure their savings in a Swiss bank, and the next day they boarded the elegant Orient Express for a ride along the Danube, through Salzburg, Innsbruck, and the Alps to Zurich. Bela alighted there, opened a bank account, and rented a deposit box. Leo rode on to Geneva, checked on the account he had opened three years before, and deposited the cash he had slipped out of Germany.
In Geneva, Szilard contacted the ISS through Polanyi’s friend Miss Simpson, who agreeably typed several letters for him; one, to Einstein, then staying in a cottage at Coq-sur-Mer on the Belgian coast, described Szilard’s plans to visit Oxford, where Einstein was soon to lecture.16
Back in Vienna a day or two later, Szilard met by chance a Berlin acquaintance, economist Jacob Marschak from Heidelberg University. A Russian who shared Szilard’s sensitivities to political events in Germany, Marschak agreed to help academic colleagues still in the country. But for this they needed some money, Marschak said, and took Szilard to meet economist Karl Schlesinger, a rich friend, at his luxurious apartment in the Liechtensteinpalais. With Schlesinger that day was Gottfried Kuhnwald, to Marschak a “shrewd and mysterious” person, who was an economic adviser to the Austrian government.17 Kuhnwald, who called himself “the last Austrian” and sported Franz Joseph sideburns, predicted that once the refugee flood hit, the French would pray for the victims, the British would organize their rescue, and the Americans would pay for it.18 Szilard tried to lighten the mood with a favorite joke: A rabbi says, “Old man with baby, cold, hungry, prays to God, who makes milk flow from the man’s breast.” “Why cou
ld not the Lord simply give money?” his student asks. Says the rabbi, “Why give money when you can make a miracle?”19
Through Schlesinger, Szilard met the economist Ignatz Jastrow, who in turn suggested approaching Sir William Beveridge, director of the London School of Economics (LSE). A tall and formal Englishman, Beveridge was visiting Jastrow to collaborate on the history of market prices and was staying at the Regina. When Szilard called on Beveridge there, he learned that word about academic dismissals had already reached London and that the LSE planned to hire one or two refugees. Moreover, Beveridge said he would plan a joint effort to receive academics displaced by the Nazis. Schlesinger, Marschak, and Szilard met Beveridge for tea, and with much prompting from Szilard, Beveridge vowed to form a refugee settlement committee in England and urged Szilard to come to London to “prod” him in this effort.20 A few days later, Szilard appeared in London.
“I intend . . . to stay in a hotel,” he wrote Bela shortly after arriving. “I do not intend to rent a house; I like mobility!”21 Szilard found a hotel near the LSE that seemed uniquely suited to his mood: the Imperial. On Russell Square in the heart of London’s Bohemian Bloomsbury neighborhood, this eccentric-looking hostelry had a decorated Edwardian Gothic facade that mimicked the cultural confusion of Vienna.22 Yet the London that Szilard came to resembled, in other ways, the Berlin he had fled. Unemployment was high, strikes were frequent, and the pressure for jobs was intense. How, he wondered, might hundreds of refugee scholars fare in this harsh climate?
Still, he would try to help, and from the Imperial, Szilard wrote to Beveridge, saying he had come to London “in order to meet Prof. Niels Bohr, of Copenhagen, and to discuss with him the whole situation.”23 The next day, April 23, Szilard wrote to Einstein, reporting that plans had advanced for aiding refugees, with funds possible from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. He described his own ambitious scheme for creating new boards and review committees to settle refugees and recounted meeting Beveridge and their plans to collaborate. Beveridge, in turn, would alert other peers and academics, Szilard wrote.24
“Your plan doesn’t really set me on fire,” Einstein replied, chiding his younger colleague for devising an overcomplicated scheme. “I believe, rather, that one ought to try to form a kind of refugee Jewish University which would be best placed in England.”25
Full of promise for settling refugees, Szilard wasted little time creating and mobilizing a network of concerned academics. From the Imperial, Szilard walked down busy Southampton Row to the LSE, where, with no formal introduction, he called on Harold Laski, a professor of politics and a prominent member of the British Labour party. The two agreed to identify famous persons who might serve on the board of a new group to aid refugees.26 Although later history gives him little credit, Szilard appears to have first proposed an Academic Assistance Council (AAC) to Beveridge in Vienna, then helped make it work by his energy and prodding in London. Szilard had also proposed, and helped organize, the council’s office in London as a clearinghouse to match refugees with placement offers.
Before receiving Einstein’s reply, Szilard wrote again, this time laying out his thoughts for founding a Palestine University for Jewish refugee scholars, a project then being promoted in England by Chaim Weizmann, a chemist and active leader of the World Zionist Organization.27
Szilard continued to “prod” Beveridge by calling on him at the LSE and by writing him letters. One letter outlined Weizmann’s plan to raise money for the Palestine University and another to fund an emigrants’ university somewhere in Europe. Szilard suggested that the refugee committees being founded around Europe needed to be coordinated, perhaps from England.28 During his first weeks in London, Szilard met with other academics, at times seeming to stage-manage the whole refugee effort. Szilard had no formal position and little power, but working as he preferred, behind the scenes, he pushed others to use theirs.
With news that “seems to open a new era” Szilard wrote Beveridge that physicist James Franck had resigned from Göttingen University and Michael Polanyi had left Berlin. Polanyi’s move had special poignancy for Szilard, who had failed in January to persuade his friend to leave. “It appears,” Szilard concluded, “that Hitler cured his rheumatism.”29 To Beveridge, Szilard assessed how he might be most useful: “I think it is not for me to represent officially our project” because of a “lack of knowledge and experience of the English way of doing things. . . .” Instead, Szilard vowed to contact other scientists and wealthy benefactors.30
Szilard’s prodding behind the scenes paid off, a network of support was patched together, and on May 24 a statement in the newspapers announced the creation of the AAC, endorsed “with forty-one signatures of men of distinction in every branch of science and the arts.”31 The Royal Society, Britain’s preeminent science association, offered the AAC two small rooms on the top floor of Burlington House, its neoclassic headquarters on Piccadilly in central London.32
Meanwhile, Szilard urged Benjamin Liebowitz, a physicist from New York whom he had met at New York University in 1932, to consult Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and, on his return to New York, to call on anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University. Szilard wanted Liebowitz to introduce Bohr and Boas, hoping these respected academics might publicize the refugees’ plight and rouse support in America.
On his own, Szilard kept busy by visiting as many academics as would see him: in London, mathematician Harald Bohr, Niels Bohr’s brother; in the small town of Harpenden, an hour’s train ride north of London, Sir John Russell, an agricultural chemist; at Trinity College in Cambridge, G. H. Hardy, a mathematician; and back in Bloomsbury, physiologist Archibald V. Hill and Frederick G. Donnan, a physical chemistry professor and department chairman at University College. Szilard coordinated the AAC’s efforts with the Committee of the Jewish Board of Deputies and met often with Weizmann about awarding fellowships to Jewish scholars.
When Szilard schemed to create a board of some twenty scientists to administer fellowships, he concocted, as usual, elaborate procedures for others to follow, including steps to select board members, review applications, and make awards. His rules allowed scholars to live anywhere in the world and only report their results annually. In this way, Szilard reasoned, the world’s best academic talent might spread to India, Egypt, and other developing countries, not just to England and North America. 33
“We were convinced that Szilard could be in two places at the same time,” recalled physicist Hans Bethe, who arrived in London from Germany in 1933. “There was much talk at that time about ‘making particles’ [which disintegrate then re-form inexplicably], and Szilard seemed to prove the point. He was a person who could be annihilated at one place and appear at another place, being re-created.”34
On May 12, Szilard disappeared from London and reappeared in Belgium on the first of several hasty trips to the Continent that spring. There he met with the rector of Liège University35 and, ignoring Einstein’s complaint about overwork, also called on him. The two colleagues reviewed their efforts to resettle German academics and discussed ways to found a refugee university—an idea they soon forgot as other placement efforts succeeded. Szilard left the meeting disappointed, without Einstein’s agreement to use his name in fund-raising for the AAC but still determined to “ask for his help in such a way as I think fit.”36
Back in London for a few days, Szilard then appeared around the University of Paris, and “on the train to Geneva” he wrote to Liebowitz in New York, urging that a refugee effort might be started in America by “next week.”37 In Geneva, Szilard brought together Dutch and Austrian academics with executives from the ISS and the Intellectual Co-operation Section of the League of Nations, also opening contacts among the ISS, the AAC, and the Jewish Board.38 His “brief report” to Beveridge from Geneva noted meetings with rectors of all four Belgian universities and with the president of the University of Brussels. At the ISS, Szilard invited Esther Simpson to join his refugee-settlement work in London, and s
he accepted. Although the AAC could only pay one-third her Geneva salary, she later recalled, “with the chance to help the sort of people I’d played chamber music with in Vienna,” his offer was irresistible.39
In the spring and summer of 1933, Szilard crossed and recrossed the English Channel, moving his savings among Swiss, French, and English banks along the way and finally collecting money and valuables from Bela’s safe deposit box in Zurich. On July 17, Esther Simpson began working with Szilard at the AAC, and within three weeks they were joined by Walter Adams, a young instructor from the LSE. But almost immediately Adams went to Germany to check on a list of scholars Szilard had compiled, leaving Szilard and Simpson to run the AAC.40
The news from Germany was grimmer by the day. In July the Nazis had dissolved all other political parties. When in Paris, Szilard had met with refugee professors who had organized as the Association of German Scientists Abroad,41 and in London he tried to affiliate this group with the AAC, offered to be its representative, and asked the AAC to find part-time secretarial help for the Germans.42 To place scholars outside England, Szilard met in Cambridge with the Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitza and urged him to inquire about academic openings during his forthcoming visit home.
To some people, Szilard’s own movements seemed amazing; to others, conspiratorial. In Cambridge that July, Prof. L. W. Jones, a representative of the Rockefeller Foundation then traveling in Europe, checked into his hotel and found Szilard waiting for him in the lobby. Szilard named several academics Jones should contact and questioned him about matching funds for refugee settlement. In his log for the foundation, Jones noted that Szilard “seemed to know intimately things which are not currently known to others in England.” Later the same day, Szilard followed Jones to London and approached him again. Szilard “appeared to be omnipresent without any official connection to any country,” Jones wrote. “Szilard had been in Switzerland, in France and in England and seemed to know everything being undertaken in these countries.”
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