Stark used his new power without restraint. As his first action, Stark ceased research funding for all theoretical work and even restricted what experimental work got funded to “Aryan” topics. He frequently reversed committee recommendations to fund a project with a terse “President Stark requests rejection,” with no further explanation.
For the next several years, as Deutsche Physik held sway, Lenard and Stark were riding high. In December 1935, when the two colleagues were enjoying their greatest influence, Stark was offered the chance to speak about how far the tenets of Deutsche Physik had taken Germany. On the occasion of the University of Heidelberg renaming its Institute of Physics the Philipp Lenard Institute, Stark revived the face of villainy that had weathered so many of his speeches to personalize his fears for German society. Stark took the opportunity to revile Albert Einstein and, by proxy, Jewish science:
A large group of people, primarily in physics, believe that to be able to arrive at results, or at least to come up with impressive articles . . . they must produce a mathematically lavishly dressed theory. . . . This type of approach is consistent with the Jewish peculiarity of making their own opinion, their own desires and advantage into the measure of all things and thus of scientific knowledge, as well.
Stark’s remarks to this point were covering familiar ground. Well into his address, Stark decided to take a chance by naming possible new targets for his future attentions:
Jewish physics . . . has been practiced and propagated by Jews, as well as their non-Jewish students and emulators, which logically have also found its high priest in a Jew, Einstein. Jewish propaganda has tried to portray him as the greatest scientist of all time. However, Einstein’s relativity theories were basically nothing more than an accumulation of artificial formulas based on arbitrary definitions. . . The sensation and propaganda of the Einsteinian relativity theory was followed by Heisenberg’s matrix theory and Schroedinger’s so-called wave mechanics, one as impenetrable and formalistic as the next . . . however, it has contributed no important new knowledge. This could not have been otherwise, since its point of departure, formalistic human opinion, was false.
Except for the younger timbre to his voice, an observer listening with eyes closed would be forgiven for mistaking Stark for Lenard. The day fairly bristled with the rhetoric of Deutsche Physik. There was a self-congratulatory air that must have given Stark a special level of confidence. He lauded Lenard for publicly facing down Einstein in the Einsteindebatte at Bad Nauheim and spoke of Einstein’s flight from his homeland. He spoke out against several respected scientists whom he called Einstein’s “German friends and supporters” and won encouraging cheers from his sympathetic audience by accusing them of continuing to act “in his spirit.”
Stark pointed out that Einstein’s main supporter, Planck, was still at the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society; his expounder and friend, Max von Laue, was still permitted to act as referee in physics at the Berlin Academy of Sciences; and the theoretical formalist, Heisenberg, whom he depicted as the essence of Einstein’s spirit, was supposed to be honored with a professorship. In view of these regrettable circumstances, which contradicted the National Socialist spirit, Lenard’s struggle against Einsteinianism should have been a warning. The responsible official advisors at the Culture Ministry had erred. It would have been much better if they had consulted with Philipp Lenard before filling professorial chairs in physics, including those in theoretical physics.
By this time, Planck and von Laue were so well established as to be untouchable, but Heisenberg was not. In designating Heisenberg the essence of Einstein’s spirit, and later calling him a “white Jew,” Stark was telegraphing a battle that had already begun. In choosing Heisenberg as his foe, Stark unknowingly had imperiled both his own standing among the National Socialists and the continued influence of Deutsche Physik.
Chapter 12
Academic Impurities
At 10:45 on the morning of May 16, 1933, Max Planck’s driver helped the dean of German physicists from the backseat of his car. Planck stepped onto the curb of Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, running alongside the Chancellery. Despite a cold, gusting wind tickling his memory of what had been a harsh winter, Planck stood motionless for a brief moment, surveying his surroundings. The Chancellery was an impressive Rococo palace that had served as the seat of German government since 1875. Planck once thought its graceful symmetry a harmonious example of Prussian architecture. That was no longer the case, not since the Weimar government had erected the crass, modern south wing in 1930. It was a stain that was impossible to ignore. For better or worse, change was inevitable.
As president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Germany’s most prestigious scientific organization, Planck had sought the opportunity to speak with Adolf Hitler, the newly appointed Chancellor, “on the current situation and future plans of the Society.” He had made certain to arrive at the Chancellor’s offices a few minutes early so he could settle his nerves and think about several issues that had arisen since Hitler had taken office. Chief among his concerns was a new law that mandated the dismissal of “non-Aryan civil servants.” The word “non-Aryan” was a euphemism for “Jewish.” Since all faculty and staff of German universities were classified as “civil servants,” the law threatened the continued employment of all Jewish professors. Indiscriminate enforcement of the new law would result in the dismissal of many of Germany’s elite physicists, chemists, and mathematicians and irreparably hinder the progress of German science for years to come. This would be Planck’s only chance to reason with Hitler. He would need to keep his wits about him if he were to have any chance of getting through to him.
As a secretary ushered him into Hitler’s office, Planck considered how he might most effectively address his concerns in a way that Hitler would understand. He decided to use as an example his Jewish colleague, Fritz Haber. The Nobel laureate had recently resigned his university position in protest of the new law. Haber was a national hero for his invention of processes for producing poisonous gases during the Great War, without which Germany would have lost from the start. Planck broached the subject delicately, but Hitler was immediately on the alert. “I have nothing against Jews as such,” Hitler said, “But Jews are all communists, and it is the latter who are my enemies; it is against them that my fight is directed.”
“There are different types of Jews,” Planck said, “Both worthy and worthless ones to humanity, with old families of the highest German culture among the former.” He suggested that a distinction should be made between the various sorts.
“That’s not right. A Jew is a Jew,” Hitler objected. “All Jews stick together like burrs. When there is one Jew, all kinds of other Jews gather right away. It should have been the duty of the Jews themselves to draw a dividing line between the various types. They did not do this, and that is why I must act against all Jews equally.”
Planck said, “Forcing worthy Jews to emigrate would be equivalent to mutilating ourselves outright, because we direly need their scientific work, and their efforts would otherwise accrue primarily to the benefit of foreign countries,”
The Chancellor ignored the comment. After an uncomfortable minute, Hitler said, “People say I suffer occasionally from nervous disability. This is slander. I have nerves of steel.” As if to prove how sturdy he was, he began to bang his fist on his knee. He spoke extremely fast, beating himself into a great fury. Planck was left with no other choice than to remain silent and to take his leave.
Enacted a month earlier, on April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service had been the brainchild of the Reichs-
minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick. He was the same man to whom Johannes Stark had turned for his appointment to the presidency of the Reich Physical and Technical Institute. The law called for mass dismissals from the civil service of several classes of individuals, without either benefits or pensions. Chief among those scheduled for dismissal were “civil servants who were not of
Aryan descent” unless they had already been employed by the civil service prior to August 1, 1914, or “who had fought in the World War at the front for the German Reich or its allies, or whose fathers or sons had been casualties in the World War.” Also named were “Civil servants who, based upon their previous political activities, cannot guarantee that they have always unreservedly supported the national state.” Finally, the law provided for transfers of individuals to lesser posts—at lower pay—at the discretion of the Reich. These dismissals and transfers were to be carried out no later than September 30, 1933, just months after the law went into effect.
There would be no mistaking the intent of the legislation. A series of “ordinances,” representing definitions or amplifications of the law, were issued over the next several months. The first ordinance was issued on April 11, 1933. Its goals were to clarify that “All civil servants who belonged to the communist party or to communist support organizations or substitute organizations are unqualified [for civil service]. They are therefore to be dismissed.” The law also grew more precise with regard to defining the term “non-Aryan” as “anyone descended from non-Aryan, and in particular Jewish, parents or grandparents, is considered non-Aryan. It is sufficient [to disqualify a person for service] that one parent or one grandparent be non-Aryan. This is to be assumed especially when one parent or one grandparent has practiced the Jewish Faith.”
All officials were to prove their ancestry by presenting certified documents like a birth certificate, the marriage certificate of their parents, or military papers. Finally, if there were some question concerning a civil servant’s ancestry, an opinion had to be requested of a “specialist on race research.”
The 1933 civil service law was the initial thrust of a comprehensive, long-term Nazi plan to restrict Jews from participation in public life, particularly in highly visible fields like academics, medicine, and law. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws further defined who was considered a Jew, prohibited sexual relations between Aryans and Jews, set quotas for Jewish students’ enrollment in universities, and prohibited the granting of doctoral degrees to Jewish students unless they had already completed writing their thesis. Laws passed in 1938 and 1939 completed the isolation of German Jews by forbidding most professional and financial interactions between Jews and non-Jews. For example, Jewish physicians could no longer treat Aryan patients. Loopholes were abolished that had allowed small numbers of Jewish professors to continue in their university positions for past meritorious service during the Great War.
One of the immediate casualties of the new law was Planck’s friend Fritz Haber, though his dismissal was self-inflicted. The sixty-five-year-old, 1918 Nobel laureate had revolutionized the production of fertilizer with his reaction of nitrogen and air to produce ammonia. In addition, he had been of great service to the Fatherland, though less so to humanity, with his invention of chlorine and other weaponizable gases, which Germany had used to great effect in World War I.
Haber noted in his April 30, 1933, letter of resignation addressed to the head of the Ministry of Culture, Bernhard Rust, that by dint of his employment as a professor at Berlin University having begun in 1898, he was entitled to remain in office despite having Jewish parents and grandparents. “But I do not wish to make use of this privilege for longer than is necessary to properly dispose of the academic and administrative functions vested in me through my offices,” he wrote.
Haber further explained,
My decision to request my discharge stems from the contrast between the tradition to which I have adhered up to now concerning scientific research and the changed attitudes which you, Mister Minister, and your Ministry represent as the vanguards of the great modern national movement. My tradition demands that in my choice of colleagues I take into account the professional and personal attributes of applicants to an academic position without inquiring after their racial characteristics.
Haber closed by reminding the minister of his contributions to Germany. Speaking of himself in the third person, he wrote, “You will understand that the pride with which he has served his German native country throughout his life now compels him to make this request for retirement.”
The remainder of Fritz Haber’s story is short and sad. Soon after he resigned his faculty position, Haber moved to a temporary lectureship in Cambridge, at least in part to escape the backlash over his resignation among his German colleagues. Soon after his arrival in England, Zionist Chaim Weizmann recruited Haber to the faculty of a new science and technology campus being built south of Tel Aviv, in Israel, that eventually would bear Weizmann’s name. Haber had been in ill health and died of heart failure en route to his new home.
Many of Fritz Haber’s extended family members would die in German concentration camps. However, his son by his first wife Clara managed to immigrate to the United States. In 1946, Hermann Haber committed suicide over the shame of his father having invented an early version of Zyclon B, the gas the Nazis had used to murder millions of Jews during the Holocaust. His death reprised his mother’s, who thirty-one years earlier had shot herself to death after the first combat deployment of Haber’s chlorine gas, near Ypern, during the Great War.
In writing his obituary of Haber, Max von Laue drew a parallel between the last years of his friend’s complex life and those of Themistocles, who “went down in history not as the pariah at the Court of the Persian king but as the victor of Salamis . . . [Haber] will be remembered as the man who had made bread out of thin air and who triumphed in the service of his country and of the whole of humanity.”
Another voluntary resignation drew even greater attention. The April 19, 1933, edition of the Goettinger Tageblatt carried the story of Professor James Franck’s resignation from Goettingen University. Franck had shared the 1925 Nobel Prize in physics with Gustav Hertz for his work on the interactions of atomic particles. Having once proclaimed that his god was science and nature his religion, Franck saw himself not as a Jew, but as an assimilated German citizen. Nonetheless, under Nazi law he was Jewish. Since he was a World War I veteran who had been decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class, and seriously injured in a gas attack, he was exempt from prosecution under the civil service law.
A number of friends advised Franck to continue in his professorship, arguing that the current situation was only temporary and that it would resolve itself. As one colleague said to him, “Nothing is eaten as hot as it is cooked.” Regardless, Franck was determined to resign in protest. He met with several friends to draft his letter of resignation and write a press release the evening before the newspapers broke the story:
I have requested of my superior that I be released from my office. I will try to continue to work in science in Germany. We Germans of Jewish descent are being treated as foreigners and enemies of the Fatherland. It is expected that our children grow up knowing that they are not permitted ever to prove themselves worthy Germans. Whoever has been in the war is permitted to continue to serve the state. I decline to take advantage of this privilege, even though I understand the position of those who today see it as their duty to stay resolutely at their posts.
The reaction to Franck’s resignation was vigorous and immediate. Forty-two of Goettingen’s faculty denounced Franck’s public withdrawal. Specifically citing Franck’s passage about Jews being treated as foreigners and enemies of the Fatherland, their statement read,
[Franck’s resignation] could seriously impede the domestic and foreign political activities of our government of the national renewal. We are in agreement that the form of the above tender of resignation is tantamount to an act of sabotage; and we therefore hope that the Government will carry out the necessary purging measures expeditiously.
The professors responsible for the document went on to explain that “due to the holidays, it was not possible to obtain the signatures of all the professors, but it can be relatively assumed that they approve of the above declaration.” The signatories further commented that Franck’s resignation had “even
irritated his fellow Jews at the Berliner Tageblatt, which immediately recognized that Professor Franck had made a fatal step that the Government cannot overlook idly.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the Goettinger Tageblatt sided with Franck, concluding its coverage as follows: “The decision of Professor Franck is to be rated largely, yes even solely, as a moral one. We hope and wish that this step, by which Franck destroys his life’s work and his life’s content, will have the effect that other scientists who would be forced to resign by the current regulations are kept for our scientific life.”
Franck received numerous private letters of support, but there was no open display of public protest. When fellow physicist Otto Hahn suggested to Planck that the two of them organize a demonstration of solidarity on Franck’s behalf, Planck saw only futility: “If you bring together thirty such men today, then tomorrow one hundred-fifty will come to denounce them, because they want to take their places.”
Within days, the university dismissed six other Jewish faculty members. It was only the beginning of the initial purge. Despite Franck’s desire to continue working in Germany, even if it meant working in industry, no company stepped forward to hire him. Things quickly degenerated for Franck and his family. They faced increasing harassment by brown shirts and neighbors to the point of fearing for their safety. In November 1933, James Franck moved with his wife and daughters to become a professor of physical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1938, Franck moved his family to Chicago, where he could more actively participate in the Manhattan Project. While contributing to the scientific underpinnings of bomb development, he simultaneously chaired the Committee on Political and Social Problems related to the atomic bomb. The committee generated what became known as the Franck Report, recommending that the United States abstain from dropping the atomic bomb on Japanese cities. Franck personally handed the committee’s report to Arthur Compton, an assistant to the U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, on June 11, 1945. It is uncertain whether Stimson ever reviewed the report or whether it even was considered in arriving at the decision to drop atomic bombs, without warning, on Japanese population centers.
The Man Who Stalked Einstein Page 17