by Philip Ball
But surely there are, Planck alleged, ‘all kinds of Jews, some valuable for mankind and others worthless, and among the first old families with the best German culture, and that distinction must be made’. To which Hitler responded: ‘That is not right. A Jew is a Jew. All Jews stick together like leeches.’
But, Planck continued, ‘it would be self-mutilation to make valuable Jews emigrate, since we need their scientific work’. Hitler said nothing in direct response to this,*7 but merely ‘uttered some commonplaces’ before falling into an unsettling disposition. ‘People say that I suffer from a weakness of nerves’, he advised Planck. ‘That is slander. I have nerves of steel.’ Whereupon the Führer slapped himself on the knee, spoke increasingly fast, ‘and whipped himself into such a frenzy that I had no choice except to fall silent and leave’.
Many questions arise. How did Planck really feel about the Jews? Was Hitler truly so heedless of the damage his racial policies wreaked on science? And was Planck really left with no choice but to ‘fall silent and leave’—to conclude that the best he could do was to administer the new laws as gently as possible? What else could one realistically expect of Planck and his colleagues in these circumstances?
It is important to recognize how Planck’s article came about. It was solicited by the editor of the Physikalische Blätter, Ernst Brüche, as part of an effort to explain—and in part to exculpate—the actions of the German physicists before and during the war. Planck was very frail by this time, and the article was written with his help by his wife Marga, who edited the text so as to shield her husband from possible criticism.
What should we make of Planck’s remark that some Jews are ‘valuable for mankind and others worthless’? Was Planck suggesting that some Jews specifically are ‘worthless for mankind’, or implying that this is the case for any subset of humanity, including Jews? If in any event he allowed that some Jews had no value, did this reflect his personal view or was it just an attempt to pacify the Führer and obtain concessions? The question is complicated by the fact that Planck himself apparently did not originally phrase the issue in quite these terms. Instead of ‘valuable’ and ‘worthless’, he drew the distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Jews, a standard formula at that time for distinguishing between assimilated and unassimilated Jews: those who had fitted into German society and those who remained ‘alien’. In any event, this is a recurrent problem: how to assess statements of prejudice in the comments of non-Nazis forced to do business with their leaders. Is this merely a compromise (and if so, is it justifiable), or does it imply some acceptance of the ideas in both parties?
One of the oddest aspects of Planck’s account—Hitler’s claim to have ‘nothing against the Jews’—is corroborated by Lotte Warburg, sister of the biochemist Otto, in her description of a visit from Erwin Schrödinger’s wife Anny in July 1933. Frau Schrödinger told her host that Hitler
said to Planck that he was not an anti-Semite, as people always label him; he is only against Communism, but the Jews have all become Communists. That is the only reason to fight them. Planck had the impression that Hitler is now very tired of the entire Jewish business, but that he cannot stop it.
We must of course be very wary of placing any interpretation on remarks framed by a psychotic mind. It’s conceivable, however, that Hitler might have been artfully foreclosing the discussion. If Planck had come all ready to appeal against anti-Semitic discrimination, where could he go with that if Hitler proclaimed that he had nothing against the Jews after all?
Was that Planck’s main intention for the meeting in any case? As we saw, Heisenberg wrote to Born two weeks afterwards to say that he understood Hitler to have promised Planck that beyond the Civil Service Laws, nothing else would be done that might hurt German science. This leads historian Helmuth Albrecht to conclude that Planck was essentially brokering a deal: if we go along with these laws, you’ll leave us be. That interpretation, Albrecht says, is certainly consistent with the fact that state funding of the KWG increased subsequently. And Planck’s later action suggests that he felt some arrangement had been reached, even if it was not the one he’d have privately preferred: he wrote to Hitler acceding euphemistically that the KWG was ready for ‘the consolidation of available forces for an active contribution to construct our fatherland’. Or as the New York Times saw it in May 1933: ‘German scientists rally behind Hitler.’
But Planck may not have really felt he had achieved anything worthwhile. The Jewish novelist Jakob Wassermann told his friend Thomas Mann in Switzerland that Planck had been ‘utterly crushed’ by the meeting, and that it had revealed to him the crude demagoguery of the new rulers: as Wassermann put it, ‘disciplined thought must attend to the arrogant, dogmatic expectorations of a revolting dilettantism, bow, and withdraw’.
Nonetheless, Albrecht’s view of the meeting between Planck and Hitler as an accommodation that bought some autonomy, allowing science to remain ‘apolitical’, seems to have been a perception that others besides Heisenberg shared. Obviously, such an outcome was sheer fantasy. It was worse than a fantasy: it was a deliberate delusion and a recipe for inaction. The Nazi state had no intention of granting scientists any exemption from Gleichschaltung. Perhaps their only respite was that, as Paul Rosbaud put it, ‘Nobody of the Nazi leaders had any idea for what science can be used.’ All the same, they treated the scientists like other academics, which meant insisting on empty, childish displays of loyalty, making students march in quasi-military parades, and when the time came, sending them all to the front to fight. Where science seemed able to serve the leaders’ bidding, for example in chemistry (making armaments) or anthropology (devising crude, anti-Semitic racial doctrines), it did so. Experimental and classical physics was of value for aeronautics, ballistics and the creation of military instruments and weaponry. But until almost the eve of war, the new quantum, relativistic and nuclear physics did not appear to be of much use to anybody.
5
‘Service to science must be service to the nation’
One aspect of Planck’s account of his meeting with Hitler that we can accept without question is his concern about the fate of Fritz Haber, the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Dahlem. Despite having Jewish parents, Haber had been baptized and occasionally attended church. It made no difference within the dogma of Aryanism. The Jew-haters knew that their enemies never changed under the skin.
Haber had been immensely useful to imperial Germany. Not only, as Planck told Hitler, had he invented the process by which nitrogen was converted into ammonia, an essential precursor for explosives, but also he had masterminded the production of chlorine gas for chemical warfare.*1 No one could accuse Haber of lacking dedication to the military applications of chemistry. Shortly after chlorine was released on the battlefield at Ypres in 1915, he departed to supervise its use on the Eastern Front—the day after his first wife Clara (also a chemist) committed suicide by shooting herself with her husband’s military pistol, apparently in shame and horror at the direction his research had taken. Yet Haber expressed no regrets about this wartime work, and poison-gas research continued at his Berlin institute after the war. The cyanide gas Zyklon A was developed there in the 1920s as an insecticide; the Nazis found another application for the later modification, Zyklon B.
Haber’s work on chemical weapons has often been presented as evidence that he was an amoral monster—and as such, an aberration in science. But it was an almost universally accepted duty to make one’s services available to the military during wartime. Haber’s war work gained him the respect of his contemporaries—it made him a noble German, and no one doubted his patriotism. Besides, he hoped that the shock of chemical warfare would bring an end to the stalemate of trench warfare, forcing an early resolution to the war and so ultimately saving lives.
In 1933 many of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes were in an ambiguous position with regard to the Civil Service Law. Since they were funded
by a partnership of government and industry, most of their staff were not exactly government employees. Haber’s KWIPC was different, however, for it was under direct government control. The new law did not threaten Haber personally since his war record exempted him, but he was told to purge his staff of Jews. The institute had a high proportion of ‘non-Aryan’ researchers—about one in four, which to anti-Semites was more evidence of how the Jews looked after their own. It’s understandable that they should do so, averred Bernhard Rust, head of the scientific branch of the Reich Education Ministry (REM), who was responsible for implementing the changes. But, he insisted, ‘I cannot allow it . . . We must have a new Aryan generation at the universities, or else we will lose the future.’ Rust assured the good German Jews that ‘I deeply feel the tragedy of persons who inwardly want to consider themselves part of the German Volk community and work within it . . . But the principle must be carried out for the sake of the future.’
Ordered to dismiss many of his key staff members, Haber felt that the only honourable course was to tender his own resignation too. He stepped down with great dignity, writing to Rust in April:
My tradition requires of me that in my scientific position I consider only the professional accomplishments and character of applicants when I choose my co-workers, without asking about their racial make-up. You cannot expect that a sixty-five-year-old man will change this way of thinking which has guided him for thirty-nine years of university life.
The Nazis ‘stand before the pieces of a broken glass’, the demoralized Haber told the Rockefeller’s Warren Weaver in May. ‘They now realize that they did not really wish to break it—and they don’t know what to do with the fragments.’ Weaver saw Haber as ‘a pathetic yet noble figure. He has saved out of the wreck the only thing he could possibly save—his own self-respect.’
Remembrance day
Haber’s resignation left Planck distraught, but his response shows how a slavish devotion to an obsolete sense of propriety paralysed him. ‘What should I do?’ he asked Lise Meitner when she protested the injustice. ‘It is the law.’ Planck knew that the legality of the dismissals did not make them right—but in his view it made them incontestable. As Alan Beyerchen puts it, ‘One was faced with the contradictory position of protesting the illegality of the law, a concept which might make sense in Anglo-Saxon countries but did not in Germany.’
The fiction of the KWG’s autonomy was brought home to Planck when it came to selecting Haber’s successor. Planck proposed to Rust that this be Otto Hahn. Instead Rust appointed August Gerhart Jander, a rather undistinguished chemistry professor at Göttingen but, crucially, a loyal party member. He was to be assisted—in effect, commanded—by Rust’s deputy Rudolf Mentzel, who thereafter turned up at meetings of the KWG senate in his SS uniform. Jander was ineffectual, but in 1935 he was replaced by Peter Adolf Thiessen, an ‘Old Fighter’ of the Nazi Party and a wholly competent scientist, who turned the institute into an efficient instrument of the regime. Its work became increasingly focused on chemical warfare, while evening gatherings and camps for ‘the deepening of comradeship’ were toasted with tankards of foaming beer.
Wasn’t this an indication of what would befall all of German science if its leading representatives resigned their posts—that it would either be run by incompetents or become subservient to the Nazi agenda? That is what Planck and Heisenberg feared. For Heisenberg, to simply down tools and leave the country was a dereliction of duty, not a moral act of protest.
Poor Haber left Germany a broken man. The pain of rejection by the country he loved is clear in the plaintive words he wrote to Carl Bosch from England in December 1933: ‘I never did anything, never even said a single word, that could warrant making me an enemy of those now ruling Germany.’ The following month he died in Switzerland of heart disease. The KWG’s Naturwissenschaften, which staunchly resisted Gleichschaltung, carried an obituary from Laue in which he insisted on Haber’s place in German culture: ‘He was one of our own’, he wrote.
Planck, Laue and others decided there should be a memorial meeting on the first anniversary of Haber’s death, 29 January 1935, to be held at the KWG’s headquarters at Harnack House in Berlin. But researchers at most of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes were not formally included in the official ban, and several of them came, knowing that this would be duly reported to the authorities. They included Carl Bosch, Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, their students Fritz Strassmann and Max Delbrück, and Planck himself. No one was quite sure if the gathering would be prevented by force, but in the event it was well attended and passed peacefully. Planck said a few words of appreciation to their former colleague: ‘Haber remained true to us’, he proclaimed, ‘we will remain true to him.’
The Haber memorial has sometimes been paraded as evidence that German scientists did mount opposition to the Nazis. But it wasn’t really that at all, less still a symbolic protest against anti-Semitism. For Planck it was simply a proper observance of tradition: in requesting permission for the event from Bernhard Rust at the REM, he defended it as an ‘old custom’ with no political connotations. Although Rust replied sternly, saying ‘Haber has done a lot for science and for Germany, but the NSDAP has done a lot more’, he gave Planck permission to proceed with the gathering. And once the ministry forbade any university professors from attending, saying that this would be regarded as a provocative act, the academics stayed away.*2 Even Laue complied, rightly assuming that Nazi spies would be at the event.
So the Haber memorial was, in effect, state-sanctioned, albeit reluctantly and accompanied by a predictable refusal of permission to publish the proceedings. Historian Joseph Haberer delivers a damning but at least partly warranted judgement in calling the Haber memorial ‘a device for justifying the collapse of civic courage’. The gathering showed once more how the National Socialists might tolerate what they regarded as professional antics and rituals among the scientists, perhaps recognizing that by discharging their grievances in an apolitical manner these insignificant concessions could facilitate a more general compliance.
And Planck gave ample evidence of his willingness to compromise. He spoke again of Haber’s accomplishments on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the KWG in 1936 (and was reprimanded for it), but he kept Haber’s name mostly absent from the published record of that event. Planck also marked this celebration with a telegram to Hitler thanking him for his ‘benevolent protection of German science’.
Under National Socialism, Planck later claimed, the KWG found it expedient to behave ‘like a tree in the wind’, bending when necessary but becoming upright again when the pressure passed. He never really saw that the bending was all the Nazis cared about.
The end of mathematics
Haber was not the only Jew to resign in protest at the Civil Service Law despite having no formal obligation to do so. The German scientific community was equally shocked by the decision of James Franck to vacate his chair as professor of physics at Göttingen. Franck, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1925 for his research on the quantum theory of the atom, had been awarded two Iron Crosses in the First World War, and so was an exempt veteran by any standards. But he explained that he could not remain employed by a state that made his children second-class citizens, and neither would he stand back and watch others being unjustly dismissed. Some of his colleagues tried to dissuade Franck on the grounds that, as the young physicist Rudolf Hilsch put it, ‘nothing is eaten as hot as it is cooked’: the heat would pass. But a greater number of academics deplored this blatantly ‘political’ act, especially when Franck’s resignation letter was published in the Göttinger Zeitung. Forty-two members of the Göttingen staff signed a petition calling it ‘equivalent to an act of sabotage’.
Franck didn’t leave the country at once: he stayed in Göttingen, hoping to find a non-academic post. ‘There is, of course, no chance of this’, Max Born wrote to Einstein in June. By this time Born himself had already decided to quit Göttingen and was in the Italian Tyrol considering various
job offers in the United States and France. Shy of publicity, he did not wish to pursue Franck’s bold course. ‘I would not have the nerve to do it’, he confessed to Einstein, ‘nor can I see the point of it.’ ‘As regards my wife and children’, he added,
they have only become conscious of being Jews or ‘non-Aryans’ (to use the delightful technical term) during the last few months, and I myself have never felt particularly Jewish. Now, of course, I am extremely conscious of it, not only because we are considered to be so, but because oppression and injustice provoke me to anger and resistance.
Also ousted at Göttingen was the mathematician Richard Courant. But he did not go easily, electing instead to contest the situation. It was hopeless, all the more so after a smear campaign alleged he had been a Communist. What eventually sealed Courant’s decision to emigrate, however, was his fears for his family—not so much about their being in physical danger, but about the danger of infection from the poison seeping into German society. ‘My youngest son’, he later wrote, ‘did not seem able to understand why he should not be in the Hitler Youth, too.’
Göttingen had been a jewel of mathematical physics, but the dismissals and resignations all but destroyed its scientific standing. Others who left included the Hungarian physical chemist Edward Teller, the mathematician Hermann Weyl, Franck’s son-in-law Arthur von Hippel, the naturalized Russian Jew Eugene Rabinowitch, and the physicist Heinrich Kuhn. Many of these, like Franck himself (who settled at the University of Chicago) would carry out vital war research for the Allies, particularly on the Manhattan Project. Teller would become one of the key agitators for the post-war development of the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. Shortly after the exodus, the mathematician David Hilbert found himself seated next to Bernhard Rust at a banquet. The minister asked him, ‘And how is mathematics in Göttingen now that it has been freed of the Jewish influence?’ Hilbert replied, ‘Mathematics in Göttingen? There is really none any more.’