Chapter 9
Dangerous Choices
At 8:30 on the evening of November 8, 1923, a pistol shot rang out in Munich’s Buegerbrauekeller beer hall, followed closely by a shout of “Silence!” The overflow crowd of more than three thousand anxiously complied. They had been listening to Commissioner Gustav von Kahr, the chief official representing Germany’s Weimar government in Bavaria. He had been in the midst of outlining his plans to implement his newly conferred state-of-emergency powers to quell the violent civil unrest
plaguing the city. As Kahr stepped away from the podium, the throng turned as one to the source of the interruption. Backed by six hundred armed SA storm troopers filing into the main hall, Adolf Hitler, Erich Ludendorff, and Hermann Goering pushed their way through the throng.
“The national revolution has begun,” Hitler announced. “No one may leave the hall. . . . The Bavarian and Reich governments have been replaced and a provisional national government has been formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr [the army] and police are occupied. The army and the police are marching on the city under the Swastika banner.”
None of this was true, but the stunned crowd was in no position to doubt or to argue. Hitler spirited von Kahr and two of his lieutenants, Lieutenant General Otto Herrmann von Lossow and Police Chief Hans Ritter von Seisser, into a back room, where he threatened the men with his pistol in an effort to get them to agree to join his revolution. When the Weimar officials declined, as a compromise, Hitler accepted their oath that the three men would not actively oppose the NSDAP. Immediately following their release, they all reneged.
Hitler then returned to the main hall. Giving the impression that von Kahr had agreed to switch sides, he announced, “The [Weimar] government of the November criminals and the Reich President are declared to be removed. A new national government will be named this very day in Munich. A new German National Army will be formed immediately. . . . The task of the provisional German National Government is to organize the march on that sinful Babel, Berlin, and save the German people! Tomorrow will find either a National Government in Germany or us dead!”
In fact, neither event occurred. The ensuing comedy of errors, reminiscent of a Keystone Cops film, ended ignominiously. During an effort to take over the Bavarian Defense Ministry the following morning, Hitler’s attempt to oust the government and name himself “Fuehrer” failed. Goering was shot in the groin. Hitler suffered a dislocated shoulder when the man with whom he had linked arms in solidarity dropped to the ground and pulled Hitler down with him. Hitler’s life was saved by his bodyguard, who threw himself upon Germany’s future leader and absorbed several fatal bullets. In all, sixteen Putschists, four police officers, and a bystander were killed during the brief revolt.
Afterward, the Nazis scattered. Some of the leaders of the Putsch were arrested, while others, including Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, escaped to Austria. Hitler hid in the attic of Hanfstaengl’s country house on the Staffelsee for two nights before being arrested the morning of the third day following the debacle. Hitler blamed the failure of the Putsch on von Kahr, and while he was in no position to retaliate then, he certainly did not forget. Eleven years later, on June 30, 1934—the “Night of the Long Knives”—the Nazis eliminated their political competition, and Hitler settled his score with von Kahr. Two SS officers arrested von Kahr in his Munich apartment. They severely abused and beat him on his way to the concentration camp in Dachau, where, on the order of the camp commandant, Theodor Eicke, he was shot to death.
Following Hitler’s arrest, he spent a fretful night in jail, certain he would be summarily executed before daybreak. His spirits improved when he was told he would receive a public trial in the People’s Court. He would use the opportunity—and this stage—to good advantage. By turning the proceedings into an indictment of the Weimar government, he secured a notorious living martyrdom that would serve him well when he sought to revive his political career. Politically sympathetic judges gave him a sentence of five years of imprisonment in Landsberg Fortress—the least onerous among the possible punishments for high treason. The court later commuted his sentence after he had served just nine months with the proviso that he refrain from speechmaking for at least several years. During his time in prison, Hitler wrote his autobiography, Mein Kampf, a rambling anti-Semitic, anti-Marxist diatribe that detailed his strategy for the ascent of the Nazis to ultimate political power.
For Philipp Lenard, Hitler’s beer hall Putsch was galvanizing. He felt impelled to express his boundless admiration for the man who he believed had sacrificed so much for the cause of the German people. In his 1924 publication, “The Hitler Spirit and Science,” Lenard managed to combine his hero worship for Hitler with his antipathy for the Jewish physicists who had come to dominate German science. Written with Johannes Stark, the article was formatted as an open letter to Germany’s newspapers and received wide distribution. Comparing Hitler’s integrity and dedication to the great scientists of the past, the authors wrote,
That spirit of total clarity, of honesty towards the outer world and at the same time inner uniformity, that spirit which hates any compromising activity because it is insincere. But we have already recognized . . . this spirit in the great scientists of the past: in Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Faraday. We admire and revere it in the same way also in Hitler, Ludendorff, Poehner (the leaders of the Munich revolt) and their comrades. . . . Consider what it means to be privileged to have this kind of genius living among us in the flesh. . . . Experience reveals that the incarnations of this spirit are only of Aryan-German blood. . . . But it is also much better that the “man of the people” is doing it. He is here. He has revealed himself as the Fuehrer of the sincere. We shall follow him.
The publication of “The Hitler Spirit and Science” was a watershed in Lenard’s public expression of explicit anti-Semitic views. Lenard had, for the most part, kept his peace in reacting to Einstein’s response to the lectures at the Berlin Philharmonic and at the Einsteindebatte at Bad Nauheim. Even for several years thereafter, Lenard had been cautious about openly engaging in anti-Semitic remarks. However, with the decline in his financial circumstances and embittered by the death of his son from kidney failure, Lenard assumed a more aggressive stance against Jewish involvement in German science. Comparing the existential Jewish threat to the essential German-Aryan character with the terminal events of the Greek and Roman civilizations, Lenard and Stark went on to warn their readers,
But blood can also die out. . . . The exact same force is at work, always with the same Asian people behind it that brought Christ to the cross, Jordanus Brunus to the stake, and that shoots at Hitler and Ludendorff with machine guns and confines them within fortress walls. It is the fight of the dark spirits against the torchbearers. . . . Universities and their students have failed most of all precisely in those subjects for which they should have set the pace long ago.
Lenard’s devolution toward open anti-Semitism advanced dramatically in response to two related incidents that occurred in June 1922. On June 24, a car pulled up to the vehicle carrying the German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, and men opened fire, killing the car’s occupants. The Weimar leadership ordered German flags to be flown at half-mast on June 27 and declared a national holiday of mourning. Lenard refused to obey the government edict. Rathenau was a liberal, a Jew, and a friend of Einstein, as well as a member of the despised Weimar government. The German flag atop the Heidelberg Institute of Physics flew proudly at full salute.
What happened next is a matter of perspective. Lodging a grievance with Lenard, a group of students from the university’s socialist league and a number of the Institute’s workers sought to discuss with Lenard what they viewed as his dishonoring of one of their heroes. Lenard’s refusal to enter into a discourse with the group led to what Lenard later referred to as “the dangerous raid.” There are several versions of what transpired; however, all accounts agree that Lenard suffered considerable psyc
hic trauma. The June 30, 1922, edition of Neue Zurcher Zeitung offered the following lighthearted account of a dangerous situation that could easily have become violent:
Most amusing was the scene that caused both terror and laughter for the people of Heidelberg. Professor Lenard [is] one of the finest physicists of Germany, famous for his political squibs that he distributes among his most excellent colleagues. Born as a Hungarian (many say as a Jew), he is all the more a German nationalist. . . . A deployment of workers came across the New Bridge [of Heidelberg University] around 6 PM. They noticed what they had already expected [that the flag was not at half mast and that physics seminars had not been canceled]. At the same time, the Free Union of Students complained to the Rector of the University. . . . Four policemen climbed the stairs to request [compliance with the Ministry of Culture recommendations, but Lenard] shut the door in their face.
Then, the workers united [in front of the institute] and intended to use force. At the same time, nationalist students [in support of Lenard] aimed four water cannons at the crowd from above, and—unfortunately—large rocks also were thrown, which had obviously had been prepared beforehand. Only now did the workers seize the laboratory. The female students took flight. The men grabbed the professor and forced the police to lead him in a jeering deployment across the bridge to the student union house.
A large crowd formed and debated the issues. The district attorney arrived and tried to deescalate the situation. . . . After an hour, a police officer announced from the balcony that the professor would be taken into custody for his own protection. . . . “There will be a car in a moment. . . .” The crowd objected. There were cries of “He shall walk! We also need to walk to the jail! No car!” [An ombudsman announced] “The man will walk, but you shall do nothing to him. I have vouched my life for this!” [There was] thundering laughter. After a while an alleyway formed through the crowd. . . . [One could see] the plaintiveness of this stumbling man in more detail, how he was brought to safety trembling. All held true to their promise: . . . the police did everything to keep the peace; the workers were full of discipline. When their prisoner walked through the crowd, they laughed.
Resentful of his treatment at the hands of the mob and chastened by near death, he immersed himself in the speeches of Adolf Hitler and the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain exalting the Aryan race. Lenard was fully radicalized. He expressed his new worldview in a 1922 address at the University of Heidelberg, wherein he likened the activities of the Weimar government to the superstitious practices of the Middle Ages:
What is not consistent with reality can never affect people other than negatively. We should not be fooled to think that back then was the dark Middle Ages and now we live in enlightened, bright modern times. Today it is exactly as dark and dangerous, in fact darker and more dangerous, to announce a new knowledge and again precisely that knowledge, which is most important for men to know, as this knowledge provides the highest enlightenment in regard to the things around us and how these affect us. Today there are other powers, which prevent us from saying what is good for men and what not; however, it is exactly as dark as at the time of the witch trials or witch belief. Or is it more reasonable than witch processes, if you govern a people from a perspective, that this people bears the guilt for a war, which it has not caused? That is even darker than any witch belief; thus, there is no great difference between those times and today.
Professionally, Lenard became further entrenched in the science of the past. In his opposition to theoretical physics, he gave no quarter to any aspect of relativity. He gave no more credence to special relativity, the tenets of which he formerly had accepted, than he did general relativity. All that was needed was a proper venue for him to publicly express his philosophy. A perfectly suitable one was fast approaching. He began his preparations for the hundredth anniversary meeting of the same Society of German Scientists and Physicians that had met in Bad Nauheim two years earlier. The upcoming conference was scheduled for Leipzig in the fall of 1922. The meeting was an especially important one because German scientists were still not welcomed at conferences elsewhere in Europe and some were actively dissuaded from attending.
Still hoping to sway his colleagues away from Einstein’s theories, Lenard reconsidered his thoughts on ether, setting down his views in his 1922 edition of Ether and Urether. He proposed the existence of two ethers, both derived from previous models, to explain the observed physical phenomena. In this construct, every atom had its own ether, the amount of which varied according to the state of the atom. Lenard referred to this ether as “the ether of matter,” because each particle of matter could emit or absorb portions of its surrounding ether. The other ether, which Lenard termed “the urether,” he considered “the ether of space.” The urether was the medium that facilitated the passage of electromagnetic radiation at the speed of light, free of the burden of matter.
In the introduction to this revised edition of Ether and Urether, entitled “Exhortation to German Naturalists,” Lenard revisited a gripe he had leveled at Einstein in the past. He claimed that Einstein’s false promotion of his unproven theories was indicative of his poor character, and he charged the Society of German Scientists and Physicians with complicity. “It makes a difference,” he wrote, “whether mischief carries on only in the newspapers, or whether the Society, from which one expects a clear, elegantly balanced opinion, participated in this nonsense. . . . Much more disastrous still . . . [is] the concealed conceptual confusion which floats about Einstein as a ‘German’ scientist.”
In a remarkable demonstration of psychological projection, Lenard continued,
It is a well-known Jewish feature to quite immediately bring factual matters into the realm of personal disputes. . . .” The healthy German spirit . . . must deflect from itself the foreign spirit [of Judaism] which arises as a dark power everywhere and which is so clearly designated in everything that belongs to the theory of relativity. We live in no less a dark age than the Inquisition. . . . I want the German naturalists to make clearer sense, proving their worth to me by bringing the enlightenment to break the power of the dark spirit everywhere possible.
In this regard, Lenard was perpetually disappointed. Not only did his colleagues ignore the looming threat but also they objected strongly to his racial references. Years later, he wrote in the margins of the introduction to his copy of Ether and Urether, “The German naturalists of that time, indeed all of the university professors, were not of assistance. Only Adolf Hitler gave a basis eleven years later for breaking the power of the dark spirit even in science through his Third Reich.”
Leading up to the conference, Lenard and others attempted to provide experimental proof of ether, with its new duality, but their efforts were in vain. Regardless, Lenard was not dissuaded. His Heidelberg speech foreshadowed the arguments he planned for Einstein at Leipzig:
Now, Einstein says: I assume, that ether does not exist at all. If we don’t wish to see ether, space and heaven must be empty. Nothing should be between heaven and earth, only sordid matter, nothing else for natural scientists to encounter. This is assumed by the very same man [Einstein]. I have to present him here as a whole, because I consider it not right that one can and should distinguish between the man and the researcher, as both are coming from the same depth.
Lenard’s tone here is mocking. How is it even remotely possible that the universe could operate in the absence of at least one ether? Ridiculous, but especially so coming from a man who lives on the edge of sedition.
Thus I talk of this Mr. Einstein, who brings us [his concern for] Eastern Jews in the tens of thousands . . . while the same man, who has a very special relationship with those people who had been recognized in war times as traitors of the patrimony and who had been thrown out of the country or had been hanged. So, with this man the spaces of the sky are empty.
In the same presentation, Lenard reestablished one of his earlier objections to Einstein’s theories:
I am a friend of simple thinking, which has led to the greatest successes of natural scientists at all times. From the most simple thoughts have always arisen the greatest successes, in the most varied areas. Has Bismarck’s thinking been any different from simple? . . . The simple mind is a great German characteristic.
Thus, as he had asserted two years earlier at Bad Nauheim, the theory of relativity had an “exaggerated nature.” It failed the test of common sense. It was nothing more than a “hypothesis heap.”
Lenard expected to confront Einstein directly at Leipzig, as he had at Bad Nauheim during the 1920 conference. In this, he was disappointed. Einstein had been scheduled to present his latest considerations on relativity, but anxious colleagues convinced him to withdraw. The spread of open anti-Semitism among elements of the gathering, the threat that Lenard might be distributing his anti-relativity pamphlets, and that Einstein’s name had recently begun to appear on “death lists” offering a bounty for his assassination all spoke to the wisdom of canceling. It was too bad, in a way. Had he been there, he would have had the satisfaction of seeing Lenard’s consternation upon the announcement of Einstein having been selected to receive the 1921 Nobel Prize, which the Nobel Academy had reserved from the previous year. Instead, Einstein was on a steamship making its way toward a lecture tour he had hastily arranged in Japan.
The Man Who Stalked Einstein Page 13