In the wake of the revolution in physics came theoreticians like Einstein who then strove to make physics into a purely mathematical system of concepts. They propagated their ideas in the manner characteristic of Jews and forced them upon physicists. They tried to ridicule men who criticized their new type of science with the argument that their intellect just could not aspire to the lofty spheres of the Einstein-
ian intellect—an intellect which says that Lenard does not consciously seek after the truth.
The recruitment of Lenard’s colleagues to his call to arms is most evident in Lenard’s 1929 diatribe, One Hundred Authors against Einstein, an omnibus of naysayers’ views of Einstein’s theories. The hundred “authors” of the title were a mixed bag, at best. Many of the contributors had little or no experience with high-energy physics. As noted by reviewer Albert von Braun, the inclusion of many of the authors was absurd:
Since zero always yields zero when multiplied by any finite number, the compilers might just as well have presented one thousand rather than one hundred of such authors without even the quintessence of their remarks being able to yield any weight other than zero.
Exuding the palpable disdain of a practiced wit, von Braun continued with a withering analogy:
They should have realized that just as it is true that a majority of votes at a ladies’ tea party can scarcely confirm Einstein’s theories, in the same way, the accumulation of verdicts by authors who command a little phraseology of Kant’s critical philosophy but who have not felt even a whisper of his genius can hardly present a case against relativity theory.
More laconically, Einstein rejoined, “If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”
Over more than a decade of harassing Einstein and condemning the Jewish influence in science, Lenard and Stark built a résumé that ingratiated them to the Nazi Party hierarchy. They had stationed themselves where they needed to be to take advantage should Adolf Hitler ever ascend to power. There were long odds against this happening when Lenard and Stark wrote their 1924 honorific, “The Hitler Spirit and Science.” Nonetheless, history eventually proved their faith to be well founded.
The Nazi takeover of government provided Lenard and Stark with an unprecedented platform to express their concerns about the undue influence of Jews in Germany’s universities. They escalated their vitriolic rants about the threat to German culture by the intrusion of Jewish science. Lenard wrote in the popular right-wing daily Volkischer Beobachter:
It had grown dark in physics. . . . Einstein has provided the most outstanding example of the damaging influence on natural science from the Jewish side. . . . One cannot even spare splendid researchers with solid accomplishments the reproach that they have allowed the relativity Jew to gain a foothold in Germany. . . . Theoreticians active in leading positions should have watched over this development more carefully. Now Hitler is watching over it. The ghost has collapsed; the foreign element is already voluntarily leaving the universities, yes even the country.
Within a week of Hitler declaring himself Fuehrer, Stark wrote Lenard that it was time that they press home their new advantage. They should proceed with their plans to make science more German. Lenard visited Hitler soon after he became Fuehrer. They told him that the German universities had decayed badly. There was a need to develop talented new faculty and expel those who were unworthy. They lobbied for the Reich’s adoption of the principles of Deutsche Physik, Lenard’s pseudo-scientific philosophical construct touting the superiority of the Aryan race and denigrating Jewish scientific thought, which Lenard would publish in four volumes during the following year of 1934.
Hitler welcomed the conversation. He had an interest in science, at least on a philosophical level. He believed that science and religion were locked in an unceasing confrontation. There can be no doubt about which side of the struggle he favored. “If, in the course of a thousand or two thousand years,” he asserted in Mein Kampf, “Science arrives at the necessity of renewing its points of view, it will not mean that science is a liar. Science cannot lie, for it is always striving, according to the momentary state of knowledge, to deduce what is true. When it makes a mistake, it does so in good faith. It’s Christianity that’s the liar. It’s in perpetual conflict with itself.”
Hitler agreed with Lenard’s concept of Deutsche Physik. Indeed, well before Lenard’s vision had fully developed, Hitler had independently written in Mein Kampf,
All human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word “man.”
Hitler took every opportunity to connect his philosophy with the
mythological past and fancied himself something of a romantic. In the following passage, he laid it on thickly:
He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illuminated the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of the earth. It was he who laid the foundations and erected the walls of every great structure in human culture.
Lenard and Stark struck a respondent chord in their conversations with the Fuehrer and his top leadership throughout the 1930s, as the Nazi hierarchy sought to conduct scientific policy at the behest of racial ideology. As late as July 1937, Stark collaborated with Gunter d’Alquen, the editor of the SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps, in writing for that publication an article entitled “White Jews in Science.” The article proclaimed that it was not enough to simply exclude Jews from German cultural life. Rather, the threat was severe enough that the Reich must extinguish the Jewish spirit as represented by Albert Einstein.
“There is one sphere, in particular,” the authors said, “where we meet the spirit of the white Jew” (meaning a non-Jew who thought like a Jew and was supportive of Jewish thinking) “in its most intensive form . . . namely in science. To purge science from this Jewish spirit is our most urgent task. For science represents the key position from which intellectual Judaism can always regain a significant influence on all spheres of national life.” They named Planck and Sommerfeld, among others, as white Jews and concluded, “They must be got rid of as much as the Jews themselves.”
In what must surely rank as one of the most bizarre editorial decisions ever made by a scientific journal editor, Sir Richard Gregory, then the editor of Nature, one of the world’s most respected and most read medical and scientific journals, followed up on Stark’s article in Das Schwarze Korps by asking him if he wouldn’t care to expand on his views in Nature’s commentary section. Specifically, he asked Stark to write on the topic of “the Jewish influence on science in Germany or elsewhere.” Stark took him up on it. His article, “The Pragmatic and Dogmatic Spirit in Physics” asserted that “the manner in which physical research is carried out and described depends on the spirit and character of the men of science engaged upon it, and this spirit and character differ individually, as do men, nations, and races.”
Stark described two “mentalities” in science. The pragmatic mentality began and ended in reality. As representatives of the pragmatic mentality, he named Philipp Lenard and Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand–born English physicist who detailed the principles of nuclear decay and provided insights into the structure of the atom. He then described the antipodal mentality, which he dubbed “the dogmatic.” Here, he named Einstein and Erwin Schroedinger as exemplars.
Stark’s choice of Schroedinger is an interesting one. Schroedinger was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize in physics just after he had left Germany in protest of Hitler’s policies in general and the dismissal of physicist Max Born from his university position in particular. The Nazis did not forget this slight. After brief stays at Oxford and Princeton, in 1936, he unwisely accepted an appointment
as professor of physics at the University of Graz in Austria. His life was endangered by Hitler’s 1938 Anschluss uniting Austria and Germany. Schroedinger managed to escape with his family via Italy and ultimately finished out his career in the newly created Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin.
In Nature, Stark wrote,
[The dogmatic scientist] starts out from ideas that have arisen primarily in his own brain or from arbitrary relationships among symbols to which a general and so also a physical significance can be ascribed. . . . The pragmatic spirit advances continuously to new discoveries and new knowledge; the dogmatic leads to crippling of experimental research and to a literature which is as effusive as it is unfruitful and tedious, intrinsically akin to the theological dogmatism of the Middle Ages.
Making direct reference to one of Lenard’s frequent complaints about Einstein, Stark asserted, “The pragmatic spirit does not conduct propaganda for the results of his research. . . . He finds his satisfaction in obtaining new knowledge.” Stark argued that the opposite held true for dogmatic scientists, who, “almost before they have published, a flood of propaganda is started.”
Stark had taken it upon himself to save German culture from Einstein and his dogmatic imitators. “I also have directed my efforts against the damaging influence of Jews in German science, because I regard them as the chief exponents and propagandists of the dogmatic spirit.” One might imagine that these lines would have set off Nature’s publication of a firestorm of correspondence from those who wished to take issue with such an extreme view, including the many Jewish scientists who had by then immigrated to the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere in Europe. However, that was not the case. Nature published only a single letter, and that one appeared six months after the appearance of Stark’s article.
Given Hitler’s mandate, Lenard and Stark continued the drumbeat against Einstein and, by proxy, all Jewish scientists. Despite his having emigrated weeks before the passage of the Enabling Law, Einstein remained the principal target of Lenard’s and Stark’s attacks as the living embodiment of Jewish scientific depravity. He would remain so until their influence declined nearly two decades after Einstein and Lenard first confronted each other at Bad Nauheim.
Lenard’s resentment of Einstein’s success and his rabid anti-Semitism underlay his purge of Jewish academics that began soon after Einstein fled to America. His assertion of Aryan scientific supremacy, couched in the principles of Deutsche Physik, gained currency among the Nazi leadership. The resultant policies proved popular among many of Germany’s natural scientists, who, in the short term, prospered in the absence of competition with the Jewish scientists they replaced. In the bizarre world of Aryan science, lesser talents could succeed without having to confront the mathematical intricacies of theoretical physics or the probing questions of talented Jewish theorists.
Lenard, however, viewed the transition from Jewish to Aryan scientists from a very different perspective. Despite the fact that he was disdainful of the talents of most Aryan physicists to the point of being unable to recommend them for the numerous vacant university positions, the triumph of the Aryan physicist was inevitable. The Jewish mind suffered an important inherent deficiency. In 1940, he wrote in the margins of his 1922 edition of Ether and Urether,
How artificial as scientists those physicists must indeed be who still today hold a “theory” with such sappy jests about space and time to be important. Sappy, I say, because it in the essence underlies the Jewish inability with space and time. . . . Just as the cubists had an inability to paint decently, so here lies together the audacity and the inability they want to impose on others.
Upon Einstein’s departure, Lenard wrote a letter to Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, calling for the enforced abolition of all relics of Einstein and his theory of relativity, as well as the dismissal of any supporter of Einstein from his academic post—Jew or non-Jew. To do otherwise, he argued, would be politically dangerous.
Lenard and Stark would get their way. They would live to see German science performed as they had hoped, by Aryan Germans, at least for a while.
Chapter 11
Deutsche Physik
“‘German Physics?’ You will ask. I could also have said Aryan physics or physics of the Nordic type of peoples, physics of the probers of reality, of truth seekers, the physics of those who have founded scientific research,” wrote Philipp Lenard at the outset of his four-volume master work, Deutsche Physik.
To those unfamiliar with the history of science, Lenard’s opening thrust must seem an odd assertion. As opposed to pursuits like literature, philosophy, and history, where cultural imprints are inevitable, shouldn’t science be blind to the national origins of the research that defines its progress? How could it be otherwise? Some new bit of knowledge discovered in Germany is published in an English language journal and read in Korea, where researchers use the new information to redesign what had been to that point futile investigations. The German discovery makes all the difference in the Korean experiments, and mans’ understanding of his universe advances another small step forward.
Predicting this response, Lenard assumed responsibility for both sides of the debate:
“Science is international, and it will always remain so,” you will want to protest. But this is inevitably based on a fallacy. In reality, as with everything that man creates, science is determined by race or by blood. It can seem to be international when universally valid scientific results are wrongly traced to a common origin or when it is not acknowledged that science supplied by peoples of different countries is identical or similar to German science, and that science could only have been produced because and to the extent that other peoples are or were likewise of a predominantly Nordic racial mix. Nations of different racial mixes practice science differently.
The roots of Deutsche Physik can be traced to a particularly shocking episode that occurred during World War I. The ensuing disagreement as to whom was at fault advanced nationalistic fervor among Europe’s leading scientists and set the foundations for the internecine scientific struggles that occurred in the postwar period. The 1839 Treaty of London guaranteed Belgium neutral status in continental wars. However, Germany’s military brain trust recognized that, by going through Belgium, it might outflank the French army, which was concentrated in eastern France. Calling the treaty “a scrap of paper,” German Chancellor Theobold von Beckmann Hollweg sent his armies into Belgium. What followed has become known as the “rape of Belgium.” One and a half million Belgians fled from the invading German army. Six thousand Belgian civilians died. The onslaught destroyed twenty-five thousand buildings.
The Germans had overrun Leuven in Belgium but were having trouble controlling an unruly populace. Belgian guerrilla fighters attacked without warning, exacted their damage, and disappeared into the narrow alleyways of the ancient city. Casualties mounted among the German troops at an alarming rate. The German army adopted a harsh policy of reprisals toward Belgian civilians that, on the night of August 25, 1914, culminated in the commission of wholesale atrocities. The invaders evicted as many as ten thousand Belgians from their homes, looted the Leuven food supplies, and set fire to two thousand houses. They also set fire to the library of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the repository of hundreds of thousands of rare books and irreplaceable medieval manuscripts.
The torching of Leuven set off a worldwide outcry. In the wake of England having declared war on Germany just three weeks earlier, a number of well-known British academics published a brief note in the Times of London protesting the destruction. Among the scientists signing the letter were William Crookes, who had briefly hosted Lenard in his laboratory during Lenard’s years of peripatetic training, and J. J. Thompson, a Nobel laureate for his work on elucidating the electron.
The German backlash was immediate and vigorous. England was responsible for the war. The English were trying to shift the blame for the war onto the shoulders of t
heir most effective economic competitor. Writers Ludwig Fulda, Hermann Sudermann, and Georg Reicke drafted the “Manifesto of the Ninety-three German Intellectuals.” The Manifesto, which received wide publication in newspapers throughout Europe, denied that the destruction of the Leuven library had been purposeful. Indeed, it was inconceivable that German soldiers could be responsible for wartime atrocities:
As representatives of German Science and Art, we hereby protest to the civilized world against the lies and calumnies with which our enemies are endeavoring to stain the honor of Germany in her hard struggle for existence—in a struggle that has been forced on her. . . . As heralds of truth we raise our voices against these.
Among the denials that followed were that Germany did not cause the current conflict, had not injured or killed a single Belgian citizen “without the bitterest defense having made it necessary,” and had not “without aching hearts” set fire to a portion of the city. The document concludes,
We cannot wrest the poisonous weapon—the lie—out of the hands of our enemies. All we can do is to proclaim to the world that our enemies are giving false witness against us. Have faith in us! Believe that we shall carry on this war to the end as a civilized nation to whom the legacy of a Goethe, a Beethoven, and a Kant is just as sacred as its own hearth and home.
Among those signing the Manifesto were the flower of German physics, including Nobel Prize recipients Wilhelm Wien, Max Planck, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, and Philipp Lenard. The Manifesto reflected a compromise among widely divergent viewpoints. There were those who feared that a too strongly worded document would incite a permanent backlash that would hinder relationships between scientists of different nationalities beyond the end of the war. In this camp was Max Planck. He was away from Berlin at the time but decided to lend his name to the Manifesto based on what Wien had told him; he asked his children to sign in his absence. Several years later, he regretted this decision and publicly reneged on his signature. A 1921 New York Times survey revealed that a number of other signatories felt the same way. Sixty of seventy-six intellectuals who survived the war either regretted their participation or claimed they had not so much as seen what they had signed.
The Man Who Stalked Einstein Page 15