The passing down of knowledge imprints something on the lineage of scholars that is as unique as the genetic imprint of families. A philosophy. A construct. A way of looking at things. Now and again, though, mutations occur. As mentioned, Born’s student, Edward Teller, remains shrouded in controversy to this day. Raised in Budapest by a wealthy lawyer father and a talented pianist mother, the family was only nominally Jewish and well assimilated into Hungarian life. Teller’s desire to become a mathematician clashed with his father’s wish that he become an engineer. In 1926, Teller left Hungary for Karlsruhe to begin his education as a chemist. There, however, he received his first exposure to theoretical physics, a watershed in Teller’s life. He loved the purity of the mathematics and the large palette of the cosmos, the backdrop on which the theorists worked. He sought and received his father’s blessing to pursue his interest, but only after the elder Teller had traveled to Karlsruhe and was assured by his son’s professors that Edward had the talent to succeed.
Shortly thereafter, Teller moved to Munich to work with Sommerfeld. It was in Munich that Teller was involved in a streetcar accident that severed his left foot. The accident would require him to wear a brace and walk with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. After Munich, he was on to Leipzig and finally to Goettingen, where he attached himself to the exceptional group gathered around James Franck and Max Born.
Even though his status as a foreigner exempted Teller from the 1933 civil service law, the young man foresaw where things were headed. Germany would become a poor place for a deformed, ambitious Hungarian Jew wishing to build a career in theoretical physics. His education, training, and apprenticeships took him to London, then to Copenhagen to work for a year with Niels Bohr. By 1935, he had moved to the United States, to Washington, D.C. In 1939, he learned of experiments in Germany that showed the feasibility of a nuclear chain reaction that, if it could be controlled, would release enough energy to power a city or destroy one.
By this time, it was quite clear to all that Teller was an exceptional talent. Fermi and Szilárd brought him on to work with them on the construction of a nuclear reactor for purposes of peacetime energy. The emphasis of their work changed, however, as it began to look more likely that the United States might have to enter the war in Europe. Teller became involved in the Manhattan Project, participating at the highest level in developing a nuclear weapon.
It was when he joined the Manhattan Project that Teller became embroiled in controversy. While most of his colleagues backed the development of a fission, or so-called atomic, bomb that would make use of the German experiments, Teller felt strongly that there was an advantage in pursuing a potentially much more powerful fusion weapon, what would become better known as a hydrogen bomb. The debate brought out the darker side of Edward Teller’s personality, which began to dominate his relationships with other Manhattan Project scientists. In a passive-aggressive mood, Teller was frequently late in fulfilling his responsibilities. Worse, in some cases, he simply refused to perform his assigned tasks. Teller’s actions led to tensions with the other scientists, who already were irritated by his disruptive habit of playing the piano late into the night.
Teller might well have become just a footnote to the history of the development of the atomic bomb. However, in 1950, when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic device, President Harry Truman announced that the United States would respond with an even more powerful weapon. The Cold War was on. The United States would embark on the development of a fusion bomb. The work of designing a successful hydrogen bomb fell to Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam. Again, controversy erupted around Teller’s role in the project, in particular his calculations concerning the amount of hard-to-get tritium needed to conduct the chain reaction. Some of the scientists involved in the project believed that Teller intentionally misled supervisors by underestimating the amount of tritium needed for fear that a true assessment of the expense would terminate the project in its early stages.
Further disagreement occurred when it was time to parcel out the credit for success. “I contributed. Ulam did not,” the ninety-one-year-old Teller claimed in a 1999 interview. “I’m sorry I had to answer you in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with the old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and had difficulty getting people to listen to. . . . When it then came to defending that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, ‘I don’t believe in it.’”
Teller was not present for the detonation of “Ivy Mike,” the first successful hydrogen bomb, on November 1, 1952. He told the press that he felt unwelcome. Nonetheless, he took much of the credit for the proj-
ect’s success. To correct what his colleagues felt was a serious public misapprehension, Fermi convinced Teller to write an article for the journal Science about the development of the hydrogen bomb, entitled “The Work of Many People,” which appeared in February 1955. Teller later claimed that the article had been “a white lie.”
Teller was a conservative “hawk” who believed the communist threat could best be addressed by the continued development of advanced weaponry. He was suspicious of colleagues who he felt were soft on Communism or who held more liberal political views. Perhaps most telling, he provoked the outrage of his colleagues by testifying against Robert Oppenheimer during the McCarthy hearings of 1954 that ultimately denied Oppenheimer further security clearance to work on government projects:
In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him on numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent, I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express the feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands. . . . If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.
Enrico Fermi said of Teller that he was the only monomaniac ever to have several manias. In the end, Teller’s difficulties in getting along with his colleagues, his quirks, and his rants led to him becoming something of a caricature of a mad scientist. Many believe that Teller was Stanley Kubrick’s model for the crazed nuclear scientist portrayed in his 1964 satirical film, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In naming Teller the 1979 “honoree” of the Ig-Nobel Prizes, the sponsors of the award cited Teller’s “lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it.”
Edward Teller was a brilliant mind who doubtlessly believed wholeheartedly in the strength-through-power philosophy of Ronald Reagan, whom he greatly admired. Nonetheless, his relationships with colleagues suffered through innumerable incidents, and many did not forget. Upon his death in 2003, a fellow Manhattan Project scientist and Nobel laureate, Isidor Rabi, whose family had immigrated to the United States when he was a child, said, “I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller.”
Chapter 13
Some Say by Fire, Others Ice
The secretary knocked softly and waited until he heard a response before opening the door. He leaned forward just enough to insert his head past the jam to tell SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler that his mother was in the outer office. Should he escort her in? Himmler’s impatience sent the young man scurrying back to his desk. But by the time Himmler greeted his “Mutti,” his attitude had changed dramatically. In less than a minute, he had regressed forty years, back to his childhood when pleasing “Mutti” had dominated his thoughts.
Growing up in Bavaria, Himmler’s nondescript, nebbish appearance, social awkwardness, lack of athletic ability, and rigid obedience had earned him plaudits from his teachers and the scorn of his schoolmates. As an adult, these same qualities had brought him political power far
beyond even his mother’s fevered imaginings. At home in the Munich headquarters of the SS, he was admired for his cool efficiency and feared for the absence of any hint of human compassion. In the presence of his staunchly devout Roman Catholic mother, though, he was a different man. With a desperation he’d never managed to resolve in childhood, an empty place in his heart still sought her approval of his accomplishments and attention to her desires.
Despite how close he was to his mother, it was unusual for Mutti to visit him at work. He considered asking her outright why she had stopped by but thought better of it. There was a ritual order to their conversations as inalterable as High Mass. He listened as she fussed over his health. Was he getting enough sleep? Eating properly? Even the state of his bowels was a matter of motherly interest. He was used to this. He courteously submitted to her interrogation and waited.
Quite nonchalantly, several minutes into their conversation, his mother mentioned that she had received an unexpected visit from a distant friend of the family. Did he remember Annie Heisenberg. No? Well, she wasn’t sure. Perhaps they had never met. Annie was the wife of August Heisenberg. Mr. Heisenberg and Mutti’s father, Grandpapa Heyder, had both been teachers, rectors of their schools, and knew each other from their hiking club. Annie’s son, Werner, was in some kind of trouble. She wouldn’t ordinarily have bothered her Heinrich except that, as a mother, she could identify with her friend’s concerns.
Annie had told her that poor Werner had been the subject of a very unfavorable article in the SS weekly publication, Das Schwarze Korps. At first, Annie had dismissed it as nothing, but the more she thought about it, the more afraid she became. After all, there had been an earlier attack. She thought it had been written by a man named Menzel. Yes. She was almost certain that his name was Menzel. Would Heinrich please humor her and see what he could do to help her friend’s son?
Himmler was well aware that Werner Heisenberg was under fire. He had met the Nobel Prize–winning physicist on several occasions and found him to be a typical academic with his head in the clouds. Still, he was considered to be the most prominent scientist remaining in Germany now that the law reforming the civil service and the Nuremberg laws had flushed the Jews from the universities. With the Jews out of the way, Lenard and Stark had turned their attention to the “white Jews,” theoretical physicists like Heisenberg whom they viewed as improperly influenced by Albert Einstein.
Himmler refocused his attention on his mother’s voice. She had moved on to other topics, but it was this visit by Heisenberg’s mother that had been the reason for her decision to stop by and speak with her son. Several minutes later, after once again admonishing her Heinrich to take care of his health, she voiced the traditional Bavarian benediction, Gruess Gott, and left.
Himmler had his secretary bring him the SS’s files on Werner Heisenberg. What a mess this fellow had gotten himself into. For someone generally acknowledged to be a genius, he was not very smart at all. He had been swimming against the tide for years, flaunting his admiration of Einstein, Bohr, and other discredited theoreticians in the face of the Nazis’ new dialectic.
Himmler opened a packet of newspaper clippings. Johannes Stark had set his cat’s paw, a student named Willi Menzel, to author a propaganda piece for a January 1936 edition of Voelkischer Beobachter. Skimming quickly, several items caught Himmler’s attention: “theoreticians like Einstein . . . propagated their ideas in the manner characteristic of Jews and forced them upon physicists . . . ridicule men who criticized this new type of ‘science’ . . . the lofty spheres of the Einsteinian intellect.”
Further down, Menzel cited Lenard’s Deutsche Physik and lauded Lenard for “single-handedly” having held the proper name “German” above the adjective “Jewish.” The article closed with a battle cry: “We, the younger generation want to continue the fight today for German physics; and we will succeed in elevating its name to the same heights that German technology and science has already been enjoying for a long time.”
It was the usual propaganda, Himmler thought. Acceptance of the principles of Deutsche Physik had been a good litmus test for scientists’ allegiance to the Reich. Although Stark had proven a terrible administrator, full of grandiose plans that he would never be able to implement, Himmler couldn’t fault either Lenard or Stark for their enthusiasm. Nonetheless, watching the two scientists buffalo their colleagues into their way of thinking had made him cynical of their actual motives.
Heisenberg had played the fool. He should have known better than to respond to this pap. Publishing Menzel’s article had been an obvious trap, baited by Lenard and Stark to irk Heisenberg into publicly airing his impolitic views. Amazingly, Heisenberg had failed to recognize the danger. Just look at what he had written!
Ignoring Menzel, whom he considered merely a ghost writer, Heisenberg directed his readers to the true perpetrators: “On the authority of Ph. Lenard and J. Stark, two of the most senior and meritorious German physicists, W. Menzel offers arguments against theoretical physics . . . that appear erroneous and misleading to the majority of younger scientists.” Heisenberg adopted a paternalistic style, writing, “A serious analysis of this changed situation leads the exact sciences away from the naïve materialistic conception of the world.” In concluding, Heisenberg responded to Menzel’s challenge with one of his own. “The continuation of this research, which may well exert the greatest influence on the structure of our intellectual life as a whole, is one of the noblest missions of German youth in science.”
The newspaper had preceded Heisenberg’s words with a disclaimer: “Since we can by no means agree with the views expressed in this [Heisenberg’s] reply, we have turned to Professor Stark as an authority in the field of physics, asking him his opinion, which is printed subsequently.”
Doubtlessly, this had been the plan all along. Once Heisenberg had displayed his true stripes, Stark would get the last word. Himmler knew without looking what Stark must have written. He knew what he would’ve done; he wasn’t disappointed.
“For clarity’s sake,” Stark began, “It is essential that the preceding article by Heisenberg be rectified immediately. It is designed to give the impression to readers who are not physics experts that the great discoveries in physics of recent decades were an achievement of theory, and wherever possible even of Jewish theory.”
Stark depicted the whole of theoretical physics as a Jewish lie. It had not been theory but “careful observation and measurement by experimental physicists” that had led Germany to supremacy in the natural sciences. True Germans had discovered, for example, X-rays, radioactivity, and the effect of magnetic fields on spectral lines. “No productive experimental physicist,” he wrote, “uses Einstein’s relativity theories as a point of departure for research.” In the end, Stark took advantage of the opportunity Heisenberg had afforded him to paint the talented young physicist with the tarred brush of Judaism:
In his article, Heisenberg continues to advocate the fundamental attitude of Jewish physics even today. Indeed, he even expects that young Germans should adopt this basic attitude and take Einstein and his comrades as their models in science. . . . The article by the student Menzel is a welcome sign that young Germans are shunning the influence of Jewish physics and that they want to study physics in the same spirit that pervades Lenard’s recently published textbook, Deutsche Physik, which reflects physical reality without “the new systems of concepts.”
If only Heisenberg hadn’t stuck his neck out, Himmler thought as he turned to the last newspaper article in the file, the recent article in Das Schwarze Korps that Mutti had mentioned, the one entitled “White Jews in Science.” He noticed immediately that there was no byline; Stark had hidden behind a cloak of anonymity. No matter. Stark’s rhetoric was unmistakable. Again, he skimmed the text, retaining snapshots of the content:
. . . primitive type of anti-Semitism that limits itself to fighting against Jews alone. . . .
. . . not dealing with Jews per se, but rather wit
h the mentality, or rather bad mentality, they spread. . . .
When the carrier of this mentality is not a Jew but a German. . . .
. . . could also speak of Jews in spirit, of Jews by mentality.
. . . intellectual ties of white Jews to Jewish role models and masters.
All of this was well-worn, vintage Lenard. Stark in full rant. The pair of them had an insatiable appetite for Jew-baiting. But there was something new. This article named names. He slowed down and read more carefully:
The Jews Einstein, Haber, and their mind mates, Sommerfeld and Planck. Had they been allowed to have their way, in a few decades, the type of scientist that is productive and close to reality would have died out. National Socialism’s seizure of power has staved off this danger.
Himmler knew as well as Stark that Sommerfeld and Planck were both old and revered. They were untouchable. Their mention was merely Stark’s way of getting to his true target, Heisenberg.
How secure ‘white Jews’ feel in their positions is evidenced by the actions of the professor for theoretical physics in Leipzig, Professor Werner Heisenberg, who . . . declared Einstein’s relativity theory to be the obvious ‘basis for further research’ and saw ‘one of the noblest missions of German youth in science as the continued development of theoretical systems of concepts.
Nor had Stark forgotten an old slight that had made him look impotent to the Nazi leadership:
The Man Who Stalked Einstein Page 19