by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
Zeilsheim and Frankfurt Jewish listing
The certification of Michael Danos’s residence at Zeilsheim DP camp is signed Sidney Flatow, UNRRA Team 503. The listing of Michael Danos in the Jewish community document is in his ITS (International Tracing Service) file [see Sources]. Simon Mirkin’s ITS file contains a document headed ‘Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American Occupied Zone’, dated December 1946, which gives Zeilsheim as his current address.
HIAS
This is the US-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, in operation since the late nineteenth century and active after the war in helping care for and resettle Jewish DPs in Europe.
Chapter 8: Olga, from Flensburg to Fulda
Principal sources are Olga and Mischka’s letters; Olga’s diary; Simon Mirkin’s 1946 letter to Olga; and interviews with Jan Danos and Arpad Danos.
Mary Sakss
Mary listed her profession as ‘singer’ on the DP documents in her ITS file. There are a number of photographs of her performing, sometimes in Latvian national dress, in the Danos papers (which include some of Mary’s papers, sent to Olga after her death).
British zone work requirement for DPs
The British zonal authorities announced at the end of April 1946 that work would become mandatory for DPs, and this new policy became operative in October. UNRRA, however, was unhappy about it, and its implementation seems to have been patchy at best. As of 20 June 1946, only about 30 per cent of employable DPs were in fact employed, and of those, 80 per cent were working for UNRRA; see Wolfgang Jacobmayer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum heimatlosen Auslánder (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), pp. 159–61, and UNRRA’s monthly labour reports, in the UNRRA archives, S-0425-0010-13. On the difficulties of setting up small businesses without German credentials (Meisterbriefe), see Tillmann Tegeler, ‘Esten, Letten und Litauer in Nachkriegsdeutschland’, in Christian and Marianne Pletzing (eds), Displaced Persons: Flüchtlinge aus den baltischen Staaten in Deutschland (Munich: Martin Meindenbauer, 2007), p. 24.
Simon and Boris Mirkin
Information on their wartime experiences comes from Simon’s 1946 letter to Olga and their ITS files.
Princess Volkonsky’s story
The memoir, well known in its time and translated into various languages, is Princess Peter Wolkonsky [Sophia A. Volkonsky/Volkonskaia], The Way of Bitterness: Soviet Russia, 1920 (London: Methuen, 1931).
An excerpt appears in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine (eds), In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Repatriant’s visit
Voluntary repatriation of ‘displaced persons’ to the Soviet Union was possible, free of cost, and strongly encouraged by the Soviets, but few took advantage of it because of dislike of the Soviet regime or fear of being arrested on return. Letters from relatives, such as Olga received from Arpad Jr, were let through by the Soviets in order to encourage repatriation.
Chapter 9: Student in Hanover
The principal sources for this chapter are my interviews with Bičevskis and Stauvers; Mischka’s diary; and correspondence between Mischka and Olga, and between Mischka and Nanni.
Hanover after the war
I have drawn on Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Perry Biddiscombe, The Denazification of Germany: A History 1945–1950 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2007); and Douglas Botting, In the Ruins of the Reich (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985). The quotations are from British war correspondent Leonard Mosley, in Botting, p. 22, and from Botting, p. 164.
DP student life
Bella Brodzki and Jeremy Varon, ‘The Munich Years: The Students of Post-war Germany’, in Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (eds), Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution: Proceedings of the International Conference, London, 29–31 January 2003 (Osnabrück: Secolo-Verlag, 2005), p. 156.
Latvians in German universities
Information, statistics and student names are from the ‘Latvian students in universities in British Zone’ section in the ‘Report on German Universities, March 1946’, UNRRA archives, S-0408-0033-06; the Stauvers interview; and Juris Andrejs Zusevics (ed.), Zelta Lapas Gaisma: Latviesu Student Eiropas augstskolas pec otra pasaules kara (Holland, MI: Amerikas Latviesu Apvienibas Latviesu Instituts, 1990).
Theoretical positions at Hanover TH filled by experimentalists
Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 172.
Michael Danos as physicist
See the recollections of Walter Greiner, Jan Rafelski, Max Huber, Vincent Gillet and Evans Hayward in Walter Greiner (ed.), Proceedings of the Symposium on Fundamental Issues in Elementary Matter, 25–29 September 2000, Bad Honnef, Germany: In Honor and Memory of Michael Danos (Debrecen: EP Systema, 2001), pp. 415–30.
Soviet zone of Germany
On the situation in universities, see Taylor, Exorcising Hitler, p. 329 and Biddiscombe, Denazification, p. 137; on travel in and out of the zone, see J.P. Nettl, The Eastern Zone and Soviet Policy in Germany 1945–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 260–3.
Mischka as pole vaulter
Mischka vaulted a personal best of 3.7 metres at the British zonal championships in 1946. He was aiming at 4 metres, if he could only get a decent pole, at a time when 4.5 metres was the world record. (Now, with fibreglass poles, it is over 6 metres.)
Job with Jensen
Mischka was working as Jensen’s assistant since at least June 1948. His original title was Leiter, with a salary of DM 80 a month. When Steinwedel, Jensen’s former assistant, left for Heidelberg, Mischka took over as Jensen’s official Wissenschaftlicher Assistent.
Chapter 10: Physics and Marriage in Heidelberg
Principal sources are correspondence between Mischka and Olga; the musing ‘Quasi-kruzhki Elsewhere’ on the Heidelberg Tea Colloquium; Berthold Stech’s memoir ‘J.H.D. Jensen: Personal Recollection’; interviews with Helga Danos; and letters to Mischka from Nanni Schuster.
Jensen
J.H.D. (Hans) Jensen (1907–1973) received his doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 1932 and then worked there as a lecturer (Privatdocent). An older colleague at Hamburg, the chemist Paul Harteck, brought him into the wartime Uranium Club, and they wrote some important papers together on separation of uranium isotopes. In 1933, he joined the National Socialist German University Lecturers’ League, which at Hamburg was more or less obligatory if you wanted to be habilitiert (that is, receive the second doctorate), and became a candidate member of the Nazi Party in 1936, the year of his Habilitation, and a full member in 1937. His postwar Persilschein from Heisenberg argued that he had joined these organisations only in order to avoid unnecessary difficulties in his academic career. After the war, he was professor of theoretical physics at Hanover TH, and then became an ordinarius professor (at the top of the academic ladder) at the University of Heidelberg in 1949, which remained his base for the rest of his career. In the 1950s and 1960s, he held visiting professorships at a number of universities in the United States. In 1963, he won the Nobel Prize for physics (with Maria Goeppert-Meyer) for their work on the nuclear shell model.
Development of physics in Germany
I have drawn particularly on Klaus Hentschel (ed.), Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1996), including biographies of Jensen, Bothe et al.; Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); and Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1960). On physics at the University of Heidelberg, my main source was Charlotte Schönbeck, ‘Physik’, in Wolfga
ng U. Eckart, Volker Sellin and Eike Wolgast (eds), Die Universität Heidelberg im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer Medizin Verlag, 2006), pp. 1087–149.
Nobel laureates
Listed at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country #Germany, accessed 27 August 2016. Rudolf Mössbauer was a student of the Heidelberg experimentalist and Tea Colloquium participant Heinz Maier-Leibniz, who Misha thought should have shared Mossbauer’s 1961 Nobel Prize (‘Quasi-Kruzhki’ musing).
Chapter 11: Olga’s Departure
This chapter draws largely on the correspondence between Mischka and Olga.
Olga’s changing birthdate
Misha gave Olga’s birth date as 1897 in ‘Stories from my Grandfather’s Time’. According to her AEF DP registration, dated 15 January 1946, she was born on 2 November 1899. Another record in the same ITS file, dated 26 July 1948, gives the date as 2 October 1905.
Authoritarian personality theory
On its application by US agencies in Germany, see David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification and the Americans, 1945–1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 65–6. Misha’s version is in his musing ‘Psycho-sociology in Germany’.
DP departures
See notes for chapter 12, below.
Daniel Kolz
In addition to Helga Danos’s testimony, there is also a fragment in German in Olga’s papers (3/23) suggesting a romantic dimension to the relationship.
Music in postwar Germany
I have drawn on Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007); Monod, Settling Scores (‘beasts of war’ quotation, p. 39); and Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Harper, 2009), pp. 373–85.
Chapter 12: Mischka’s Departure
The principal sources for this chapter are the correspondence between Mischka and Helga in Heidelberg and Olga in New York; interviews with Helga Danos; and Helga’s long letter to her parents about their trip.
Haxel
Otto Haxel (1909–1998) came to Heidelberg from Göttingen, where he had worked under Heisenberg and collaborated with Fritz Houtermans (which perhaps explains why Mischka had so many Houtermans stories). At the time of his move to Heidelberg, he and Jensen were collaborating on work on the nuclear shell model (‘magic numbers’), which in turn was related to Mischka’s dissertation topic and first publication.
Michael Danos: work and publications in Heidelberg
In an application for federal employment in the mid 1950s, Misha described his work for Jensen as ‘theoretical research in nuclear physics, particularly interaction of electromagnetic radiation with atomic nuclei. Includes: quantum theory, electrodynamics, hydrodynamics’. In his subsequent position with Haxel, he did ‘experimental work on the physics of surfaces, particularly metal surfaces. Includes: work with Geiger counters, electronics, ultra violet radiation, x-rays’. His publications in these years were:
Helmut Steinwedel and Michael Danos, ‘Proton Density Variation in Nuclei’, Physical Review, vol. 79, no. 6, 1951, pp. 1019–20. This letter was published immediately after a letter by Helmut Steinwedel, J. Hans D. Jensen and Peter Jensen, entitled ‘Nuclear Dipole Vibrations’, in the same issue.
Michael Danos, ‘Has Pressure Direction?’, American Journal of Physics, vol. 19, no. 4, April 1951, p. 248. This was the journal Mischka identified as low-status; he later left the article out of his CVs.
Michael Danos and Helmut Steinwedel, ‘Multiple Oscillations of Protons v. Neutrons in Atomic Nuclei’, Zeitschrift für Naturforschung 6A, 1951, p. 217.
M. Danos, ‘Resonances in (y, n) Processes’, in Zeitschrift fur Naturforschung 6A, 1951, p. 218.
An additional article by Michael Danos and Helmut Steinwedel was reported in their Physical Review letter to be forthcoming in Sitzungsberichten den Heidelberger Akademie, Wiss. Math.natur Klass but does not appear in any of his CVs.
Mary Sakss
The story of her denunciation and failure to get a US visa is in the musing ‘Donosi v. Informers’. Her ITS file confirms her plans to emigrate to the United States but does not indicate an outcome. With regard to age, she was Olga’s older sister by several years, but the 1945 DP registration in her ITS file gives her date of birth as 1898. A later German ID in the same file gives it as 1908.
US immigration and anti-Communism
My sources on this debate are Robert A. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 1924–1952 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957); Carl J. Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Gil Loescher and John A. Scanlan, Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1986); and Haim Genizi, America’s Fair Share: The Admission and Resettlement of Displaced Persons, 1945–1952 (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1993).
DP departures
The great majority of DPs had left by the time Mischka and Helga did—almost a million, which is about the number of DPs that were initially on UNRRA’s books. More than three hundred thousand of the group had gone to the United States, but both US and overall numbers were dropping sharply in 1950–51. Statistics are from Kim Salomon, Refugees in the Cold War (Lund: Lund University Press, 1991), p. 191. The quotation on ‘the final rush’ is from Wyman, DPs, p. 202.
USS General Ballou
Information on sailing is from the IRO records in Archives nationales (Paris), AJ/43/271.
Afterword
Misha’s New York employment
The Columbia starting date could have been backdated, in which case the period of his unemployment could have lasted until the autumn of 1952, as Helga’s account suggests. There is a fuzziness in the documents that suggests something is being glossed over: for example, Misha’s application for naturalisation in the mid 1950s appears to conflate his employment history after arrival with Helga’s.
Tadasu Okada (also known as James T. Okada)
According to Okada’s petition for naturalisation, lodged in New York in 1950, he was born in Numaza, Japan, on 17 November 1884 (www.fold3.com/document/22454494/, accessed 12 August 2016). The US Social Security Death index gives his birthdate as 18 November 1894 and the date of his death in Miami, Florida, as June 1987 (www.myheritage.com, accessed 12 August 2016).
Olga’s marriage to Tadasu Okada
A diary entry for 9 March 1955 says she has been Olga Okada for seven months. A letter from Okada to Misha (‘Michika’), 1 October 1954, states that he is now a ‘legal husband’.
Miami Herald article
Although there is no byline, the author was probably Jack Bell, nicknamed ‘the Miami Herald towncrier’ in one of Olga’s several diary entries about him (‘towncrier’ is in English).
Olga’s land
Tadasu Okada continued to live on the property after Olga’s death, according to Helga’s recollection. There is no will in her papers, and it appears that no attempt was made to distribute it to her sons. Arpad did write to Tadasu after her death enquiring about her estate (Nachlass— not specifically land), but Tadasu’s answer is unknown.
Misha’s German and French collaborations in the US years
Walter Greiner, ‘Michael Danos as I Remember Him’; Max G. Huber, ‘Trespassing Frontiers—the Legacy of Michael Danos’; and Vincent Gillet, ‘In Memory of Michael Danos’, in Greiner (ed.), Proceedings of the Symposium on Fundamental Issues in Elementary Matter, pp. 415–16, 420–3 and 423–4.
‘Case studies’ article
The article using the experiences of Mischka, Olga and Bičevskis is Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘“Determined to Get on”: Some Displaced Persons on the Way to a Future’, History Australia, vol. 12, no. 2, 2015, pp. 102–23.
Victor Klemperer gives one in his memoir I Will Bear Witness. Many more have been collected in Walter Kempowski, Der Rote Hahn: Dresden im February 1945 (Munich: Knaus, 2001), one of
the volumes in his monumental ‘collective diary’ of German experience in the Second World War, Das Echolot (‘Echo Soundings’).
Sources
Danos papers
I have roughly catalogued the papers of Michael and Olga Danos into ten folders, numbering the separate files within them, which usually contain one document or letter. Many of the letters are undated, but I have generally been able to establish an approximate dating on the basis of content. They are mainly in German, as are the diaries, though Latvian, Russian, English and (in Olga’s diaries) Italian also make their appearance. Misha’s diaries also contain some copies of letters to various addressees. These papers are currently in my possession, but will be deposited with other papers of Michael Danos in the University of Chicago’s Special Collections, which already contains a complete printout and electronic copy of the collected musings.
I have anglicised the spelling of some family names (as was sometimes done within the family): Misha’s grandmother Julija Viksne becomes Julia, and his aunt Meri (Mērija) Sakss becomes Mary. I retain the ‘Sakss’ spelling, though it is grammatically wrong for a woman in Latvian, because this was the name on Mary’s identification documents in Germany.
Michael Danos: Musings
‘Musing’ was Misha’s term for the short writings on particular subjects, ranging from physics to current affairs, and from history to autobiography, that often originated as emails to me when he was at home in Washington and I was at work in Chicago in the 1990s. In a note on ‘How to Read Musings’ (24 March 1993), he wrote that they ‘are to be understood to be only hints, sketches, of the material, the essence of the subjects, incomplete. They are not fragments of chapters or of essays. They are more like the wire skeletons sculptors use to support the clay which will be the sculpture.’ Some of them, however, were reworked and expanded over a period of time and became small essays. The musings on the Dresden bombing, the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Riga, and the Heidelberg physics Tea Colloquium constitute valuable eyewitness testimony, and I have tried to quote them almost in full.