by Philip Ball
The lack of resistance to the Jewish persecutions in and after 1933 does not necessarily indicate acceptance, but rather, in historian Ian Kershaw’s chilling phrase, ‘lethal indifference’. There is plenty of indication that ordinary Germans found naked displays of brutality abhorrent, but as a political and moral issue the ‘Jewish question’ simply did not seem to have much relevance for their daily lives. Sustaining this indifference, however, had to be an increasingly active decision: it meant turning one’s back, telling oneself that one was not personally responsible and was in any case powerless to do anything. ‘Self-preservation is not a particularly admirable instinct’, says Kershaw, ‘but especially in a climate of repression and terror it is usually stronger than the instinct to preserve others. It goes hand in hand with moral indifference and apathetic compliance.’ And such indifference and compliance, Kershaw believes, are common enough in liberal democracies, let alone in dictatorships. This attitude also captures something of the flavour of the scientists’ response to Nazism generally: it is not ideal, but it is none of our business so long as we can avoid its drawbacks. Why go looking for trouble?
Perhaps more surprising than any of this is the fact that Hitler’s role in the anti-Semitism that followed in the wake of the Nazi takeover was not immediately clear. Visiting scientists in Berlin in May 1933, Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation commented that the campaign of Jewish oppression ‘is the result of a very deep and general feeling on the part of the common people, and that the government is moderating rather than stimulating the campaign’. Hitler himself, said Weaver, is widely considered ‘an influence for moderation’.*3 He suggests that the Nazis were even a little taken aback by the depth of feeling that they had unleashed: ‘They are almost frightened by their own acts, and do not know which way to turn.’ Weaver adds that many Germans believed that Jews were agitators for Communism, while others felt that the Nazi anti-Semitism was not ideologically motivated at all but was a diversionary tactic to mask the country’s economic woes. Weaver was told that ‘the new government has to give the people something, could not give them work, so gave them the Jews instead’. That ruse, he said, ‘will not satisfy the crowd for long’.
The purge
The first of the National Socialists’ official anti-Semitic measures was presented as an attempt to reduce what many Germans regarded as the unhealthy control that ‘the Jews’ exerted on the nation’s commerce, culture and administration. The Civil Service Law of 7 April 1933 stipulated that ‘Civil servants who are not of Aryan descent are to be placed in retirement; in the case of honorary officials, they are to be dismissed from office.’ Such appointments included all university posts.
To be an ‘Aryan’, one needed to prove that both parents and grandparents were of Aryan stock—that is, non-Jewish.†4 People who had shown their loyalty to the nation by serving at the front in the First World War were exempt from the ruling—or at least, that was the principle. In practice these exceptions were subject to the whims of the officials. Warren Weaver describes one veteran scientist, wounded at the front, who was given the impossible task of proving his war record within twenty-four hours to avoid being sacked. ‘The world-renowned intellectual freedom of Germany’, Weaver concluded, ‘is a thing of the past.’
These measures seem unambiguously pernicious today. In Germany in the 1930s that was by no means clear. Some felt that formalizing the principles dividing ‘true Germans’ from ‘Jews’ could establish a basis on which they could coexist, and would restrain some of the excesses of anti-Semitic sentiment that threatened to erupt in German society. Even those who did speak out against Jewish exclusion were mostly careful to emphasize that it was the principle of discrimination that they contested, rather than that they were favourably disposed towards Jews. They typically sought to defend Jewish friends and colleagues, not some universal human right of Jewry. They did not question the distinction between ‘foreign’ Jews and the German Volk, nor challenge the völkisch ideology, but merely felt that this was an unseemly way to treat people. Even that feeling waned as the anti-Semitic laws made Jews ever less evident in daily life: their very invisibility helped to promote the lethal indifference that permitted Auschwitz.
The Civil Service Law fell particularly hard on German physicists, since around one quarter of them in 1933—and many of the most able—were officially ‘non-Aryan’. This situation was more acute than for the other sciences because physics, being a relatively new subject, had been less afflicted with the prejudices that militated against the advancement of those with Jewish heritage in more conservative and traditional disciplines.
Among those who faced exclusion by the anti-Semitic law were Albert Einstein, Max Born, Eugene Wigner, James Franck, Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Otto Stern, Rudolf Peierls, Lise Meitner and Samuel Goudsmit. Many of these names are now attached to physical laws and principles, institutes, awards, chemical elements: it is a roster of Germanic pre-eminence in mid-twentieth-century physics. Some of those affected left the country at once; Einstein was in the United States when Hitler came to power, and vowed not to return. Others, like Peierls, had seen which way the wind was blowing and already taken posts abroad. One or two, like Meitner, managed to stay for several years more, at increasing personal risk. No prominent ‘non-Jewish’ scientists quit Germany in protest at their colleagues’ plight, however. Erwin Schrödinger made no secret of his dislike of Nazi anti-Semitism when he left for Britain in 1933; but his wife was ‘non-Aryan’.
German theoretical physics was decimated. At the University of Göttingen, a major centre for this young discipline, a quarter of the faculty was lost. Often the dismissals were imposed in the most offhand and brutal way. The biochemist Hans Krebs at Freiburg, a student of Otto Warburg, was told without a moment’s warning to get out of the laboratory and never set foot in it again. ‘I don’t think he had time to pick up his handkerchief’, Warburg related. Krebs went to Cambridge, and won a Nobel Prize twenty years later.
The response of the German scientific community to these edicts looks today disturbingly compliant. Even a cynic would have to doubt that a governmental ban on racial minorities in the university posts of a modern European country would fail to incite mass protests and resignations. But in Germany in 1933 there was little more than private expressions of dismay, almost always with reference to the harm that was being done to German intellectual status and international reputation rather than to moral values. This is not to make some fatuous point about how much more ‘principled’ society has now become, but to illustrate how different German society was in the 1930s, and how differently even liberal intellectuals conceptualized and compartmentalized their place in that society.
But wouldn’t fear of reprisal, of arrest and the concentration camps, have understandably silenced protest? Certainly it is easy to demand bravery of others, especially in another time and place. However, while the Nazis had a thuggish reputation even before they became the ruling party, the Third Reich was not like Stalinist Russia—not in 1933, and not really subsequently. As we saw earlier, moderately criticizing the regime through official or popular channels might not even do much harm to one’s career. Max von Laue did nothing to disguise his anti-Nazi sympathies, but he remained a professor at the University of Berlin until 1943 and the assistant director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics throughout the war. The personal dangers of defying Hitler may, at least before the war began, have been more imagined than actual.
A stronger deterrent seems to have been the conviction that protest should be seemly and respect protocol. If official appeals were ignored, further resistance was deemed both improper and futile. Max Planck was representative of, and instrumental to, this attitude. According to John Heilbron, he was ‘temperamentally unfit for public protests against constituted authority’. For a man like Planck, dedicated to the service of the state and homeland, open defiance was unthinkable. If the government could not be dissuaded from its course in a decorous manner, t
hen there was nothing else to be done. It was precisely because Planck was regarded with such respect, and was seen as embodying the untainted spirit of German science, that his actions were regarded as exemplary: Planck would know what to do. And so whatever Planck did was the proper thing.
And what was that? Planck’s initial response to the dismissals reflected a common perception that they were nothing to be too concerned about, that this burst of anti-Semitism would relieve existing tensions and soon the situation would settle into a more tolerable state. He was on holiday in Sicily when the news broke, and at first he saw no pressing need to return and deal with the implications for the KWG, of which he was president. To those who were more worried than he, Planck suggested that they too take a break abroad—by the time you return, he told them, ‘all the troubles will be gone’. This looks now like indifference, but it is more properly seen as a grave misapprehension of the nature of the National Socialists—a fatal inability to smell their corruption, allied no doubt to a naïve faith that one’s leaders will ultimately see sense. It has been claimed that when Otto Hahn asked Planck whether there should not be some protest on behalf of those who had lost their jobs, he replied that this would be pointless. ‘If 30 professors appealed the new measures’, he said, ‘150 would counter them because they wanted the new positions.’*5
Planck’s complacency was shared by Heisenberg. Hearing of the intention of Max Born (a Lutheran with Jewish roots) to resign at Göttingen, Heisenberg wrote to him in June imploring him to stay for the sake of German physics. He told Born that Planck had ‘received the assurance that the government will do nothing beyond the new Civil Service Law that could hurt our science’—in other words, it would get no worse than this. ‘In the course of time’, he assured Born, ‘the splendid things will separate from the hateful.’*6
Even Born himself exhibited misplaced optimism. Despite Heisenberg’s appeals, he did leave Germany in 1933 to go to C,ambridge in England. But on a return visit three years later he was impressed by the efficiency of the ‘labour camps’ where well-fed and happy men seemed better off than they were while unemployed during the Weimar Republic. While Born was neither blind to nor uncritical of the virulent anti-Semitism he saw on that occasion, his remarks show that one cannot dismiss all that the scientists and other citizens tolerated as naïvety or patriotism. Born did share something of Heisenberg’s attitude that the barbarous excesses of the Nazis would soften with time.
Paul Rosbaud, an editor of the KWG’s scientific journal Naturwissenschaften, who had excellent contacts with many leading scientists in Germany, was dismayed and rather disgusted by the lack of backbone he saw among German academics. As he later wrote,
I remember one distinguished member of Göttingen University saying to me: ‘If they should venture to break our university to pieces by expelling men such as James Franck, Born, Courant, Landau [the latter two mathematicians], we shall rise like one man to protest against it.’ The next day, the newspapers reported that the same scientists and many others had been dismissed owing to their Jewish race and their disgraceful influence on universities and students. And all the other members of Göttingen University remained sitting and had forgotten their intention to rise and protest.
Rosbaud saw in this response an insidious blend of apathy, cravenness, self-justification and latent anti-Semitism:
The general excuse was: ‘We could not dare to protest, though the expulsion of our Jewish colleagues is completely against our views and even against our conscience. We could not think of ourselves but of the higher purpose, the university, the academy. We had to avoid the possibility of these institutions having any trouble or their being closed. This was our first duty and so our personal views and interests, as well as those of our Jewish colleagues had to be kept in the background.’
The sense of helpless fatalism among the academic scientists seems not so much misjudged as calculatedly self-serving. The Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, working at the University of Berlin in 1933 but shortly to leave for England, expressed the situation very well:
I noticed that the Germans always took a utilitarian point of view. They asked, ‘Well, suppose I would oppose this, what good would I do? I wouldn’t do very much good, I would just lose my influence. Then why should I oppose it?’ You see, the moral point of view was completely absent, or very weak, and every consideration was simply, what would be the predictable consequence of my action. And on that basis did I reach the conclusion in 1931 that Hitler would get into power, not because the forces of the Nazi revolution were so strong, but rather because I thought that there would be no resistance whatsoever.
But Rosbaud saw darker elements at work in the reactions of the academics:
Many of them added—and this was probably the first token of the beginning infection and confusion of mind—‘Besides, didn’t they [the Jews] really go too far with their abstraction in science, and didn’t they really go too far in accumulating Jewish collaborators? It is their own fault, and they must now pay for it. Perhaps they were really dangerous to our scientific life.’
Here he perceptively invokes a phenomenon now well attested: victims of discrimination become in fact despised, the object of anger and recrimination, considered to have ‘brought it upon themselves’. Certainly, we should not complacently imagine that in all this there was anything uniquely Germanic. ‘Would the populations of other countries have responded in more “honourable” fashion in similar circumstances?’ asks Ian Kershaw. ‘I suspect not.’
Meeting Hitler
It was customary for the president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society to meet with any new head of state. So it was that on 16 May 1933 Max Planck went to see Adolf Hitler in Berlin.
Understanding the behaviour of the German physicists under the Nazis is rarely a matter of simply collating the documentary evidence and totting up episodes of compliance or resistance. Much of the story lies beneath the surface, in what is unspoken, in ambiguous phrases and subtle interpretations of apparently bland formalities and formulas, in the evasions and contradictions and accusations, the inability of the protagonists to articulate their emotions and motivations even in their own private correspondence. One finds oneself negotiating a coded language, seeking hints and clues about the true meaning. Key events and turning points become Rashomon-like narratives in which multiple viewpoints leave one despairing at ever deducing who did or said what, and why. One can, in consequence, tell pretty much whatever story one chooses, and people have done so. With this collection of conflicting accounts, one often has no option but to fall back on subjective assessment, seeking for consistencies and contradictions of character.
Planck’s meeting with Hitler is one of these multiple narratives. No one knows exactly what transpired between the two men. There are even disagreements about how the encounter came about: was it an obligatory formality, or did Planck engineer the meeting in order to pursue some particular agenda? And if so, what was it? Was his main objective to appeal against the dismissals of the Jews? In any case, he did so.
Some accounts suggest that, confronted with Planck’s entreaties, Hitler flew into a rage and the physicist meekly fled. Einstein even claimed he heard that Hitler had threatened the ageing scientist with the concentration camp. Other reports imply that the meeting was cordial throughout, and that Planck emerged satisfied that he had bought the (relative) autonomy and security of German physics at the cost of a servile, self-imposed Gleichschaltung—the alignment with Nazi doctrine that the party demanded in all aspects of German society.
Let’s start with what Planck himself said about the event. In May 1947, just a few weeks before his death, he published in the Physikalische Blätter, the journal of the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, DPG), an article called ‘My visit to Hitler’. ‘After Hitler came to power’, he wrote,
I had the task as president of the KWG to wait upon the Führer. I thought to use the opportunity to say a word in favour of my Jewis
h colleague Fritz Haber, without whose process for making ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen the First World War would have been lost from the beginning. Hitler answered me with these words: ‘I have nothing against the Jews themselves. But Jews are all Communists, and they are my enemies, against them I wage war.’