Serving the Reich

by Philip Ball

  We have seen already how ‘non-Jews’ mostly accepted these events without demur—some through fear for their position and prospects, some from fatalism or a determination to ‘preserve German science’, some because they stood to benefit from or simply agreed with the new law. Others offered lame excuses. Warren Weaver wrote of the KWG’s secretary Friedrich Glum that he ‘makes his defense of the situation with his eyes down on the table. His defense is moreover unimpressive and shallow.’ In response to Weaver’s protestations, Glum retorted by citing American prejudice against black people. Weaver pointed out that the difference was that he and other liberals did not endorse, defend or excuse this. Glum fell silent. ‘Only in the case of a few really noble and courageous men, such as Planck, does one meet sincerity or anything approaching frankness’, wrote Weaver.

  Even the scientists who ‘assisted’ or ‘defended’ their Jewish colleagues failed to see that their actions ultimately facilitated and even endorsed the process. They would, with expressions of regret, help Jewish scientists find positions abroad, but would offer little support for those rare individuals like Courant who tried to stay. By participating in the process of finding replacements, they were tacitly accepting the legitimacy of the reasons for the vacancy. Heisenberg, having failed to persuade Born to stay in Göttingen, accepted an appointment to his vacated post, although political machinations ultimately prevented him from taking it.

  Lacking any experience of organized resistance to the state, the scientists had no idea what else they could do. They hoped that their compliance would limit state intrusion. ‘The watchword’, according to Beyerchen,

  was that those who could should stay. The goals of these leaders were to minimize individual hardships, reverse the dismissals and resignations when possible and, above all, to maintain the international standing of German science . . . The worst of National Socialism would pass, these men felt, but the importance of science for Germany’s reputation would endure.

  They discovered soon enough that the worst was not going to pass quickly. After August 1934 all civil servants were required to sign an oath of allegiance to Hitler in person: the final seal on the Führer state. Heisenberg and Debye in Leipzig signed in January 1935, their university having been Nazified with barely a murmur. ‘Swastikas can be seen everywhere’, wrote the visiting Italian scientist Ettore Majorana, adding that ‘the Jewish persecutions delight most Aryans’. Students began to abuse remaining Jewish professors openly and mounted demonstrations against the ‘non-German spirit’. The university was given a new constitution which adopted the ‘Führer principle’ (incontestable leadership by a single individual), and a new rector, Arthur Golf, who stated that students and professors would thenceforth be ‘comrades under Hitler’. The ‘Commitment of the Professors at German Universities and Colleges to Adolf Hitler’ had been celebrated in November 1933 at a meeting of the National Socialist Teachers League in Leipzig’s Albert Halle, organized by Johannes Stark, with an address by the rector of Freiburg, philosopher Martin Heidegger.

  By 1935, one in five scientists in Germany—one in four in the case of physicists—had been dismissed. And several (but by no means most) positions of power and influence had been filled by mediocre individuals promoted because of their obedience to the party. Moreover, the Nazis seemed to begin insisting not just on who did science, but on what science was done. In June 1933 Interior Minister Frick had proclaimed that ‘With all respect for the freedom of science, let us postulate that service to science must be service to the nation and that scientific achievements are worthless when they cannot be utilized for the culture of the people.’ In a speech to professors in Munich, the Bavarian state minister for instruction and culture advised that ‘From now on, the question for you is not to determine whether something is true, but to determine whether it is in the spirit of the National Socialist revolution.’

  If that sounds like anathema to good science, however, in practice such empty slogans made little difference: the Nazi leaders were in no position to evaluate these distinctions, and weren’t greatly interested in them anyway. As we shall see in Chapter 6, the encroachment of Nazi ideology in physics was not a state-sanctioned enterprise but an ultimately fruitless attempt at self-promotion by a few eminent yet embittered individuals.

  Einstein expunged

  When Hitler was made chancellor in January 1933, Albert Einstein was visiting the California Institute of Technology. On 10 March he announced that he would not return to live in his native country: ‘As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality before the law prevail . . . These conditions do not exist in Germany at the present time.’ He returned briefly to Europe before settling at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and in May he wrote from Oxford to Max Born in the Italian Tyrol. What he said would surely have scandalized his patriotic colleagues:

  You know, I think, that I have never had a particularly favourable opinion of the Germans (morally and politically speaking). But I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise to me.

  He was talking not just about the Nazis but also his former friends and associates, who had decided that Einstein’s refusal to come back to a country that excluded Jews from full citizenship was an act of gross treason. The Prussian Academy of Sciences was outraged by that. As its president, Max Planck was expected to write a letter of condemnation to his friend. He did so, his feeble premise being that Einstein’s comments and actions were not useful:

  By your efforts, your racial and religious brethren will not get relief from their situation, which is already difficult enough, but rather they will be pressed the more.

  In other words, Planck was insisting that Einstein should accept anti-Semitic discrimination in silence so that it did not get even worse. After all, Planck had once told Einstein, the value of an act lies with its consequences and not its motives. While that might be debatable philosophically and theologically, it was a useful position for the German physicists, who could then justify any decision on the grounds that it alone held out hope of making things better, or at least not making them worse. Acting on principle was, in this view, egotistical and irresponsible. Even Laue concurred, writing to Einstein that ‘Here they are making nearly the entirety of German academics responsible when you do something political.’

  But Einstein would not back down. ‘I do not share your view’, he told Laue,

  that the scientist should observe silence in political matters, i.e. human affairs in the broader sense . . . Does not such restraint signify a lack of responsibility? . . . I do not regret one word of what I have said and am of the belief that my actions have served mankind.

  This is really the point: for Einstein, ‘political’ meant ‘human affairs in the broader sense’, and thus, questions of right or wrong, fair or unjust, kind or cruel. Laue, as we have seen already, did not turn a blind eye to these matters—he found the Nazis repugnant and challenged them on many occasions. He did not lack responsibility. But he would not have considered these brave acts of defiance to be ‘political’. Even he could not see beyond the narrow conception to which the German academics clung, in which ‘political’ meant something close to ‘unpatriotic’—a word or action that did not simply defy some ugly or stupid decision by a government official but which questioned the legitimacy of the German state. Laue was unable to connect his strong sense of personal morality to a duty to ‘serve mankind’. The Fatherland had laid claim to any such duty. For Planck that claim was incapacitating.

  Besides, while Planck and Laue may not have been right that Einstein was aggravating the situation, they had reason to think so. Consider what Joseph Goebbels had to say on the matter: ‘The Jews in Germany can thank refugees like Einstein for the fact that they themselves are today—completely legitimately and legally—being called to account.’ It was that ‘legitimately and legally’ that stymied Planck.*3


  When Einstein failed to explain his conduct to the Prussian Academy, the presiding secretary, meteorologist Heinrich von Ficker, urged Planck to demand Einstein’s resignation. He did this too—but Einstein got there first, tendering his resignation before Planck’s sheepish letter arrived. That angered the Prussian minister for cultural affairs—none other than Bernhard Rust, who had not yet been appointed to the REM. Rust demanded that the academy discipline Einstein for his ‘agitation’. Hadn’t he been saying vile things about Germany? Admittedly, the only evidence of this came from American newspaper reports, but nonetheless . . . Another of the academy’s secretaries, the orientalist Ernst Heymann, drafted a hurried statement while Planck was away on holiday in Sicily:

  The Prussian Academy of Sciences heard with indignation from the newspapers of Albert Einstein’s participation in the atrocity-mongering in France and America . . . The Prussian Academy of Sciences is particularly distressed by Einstein’s activities as an agitator in foreign countries, as it and its members have always felt themselves bound by the closest ties to the Prussian state and, while abstaining strictly from all political partisanship, have always stressed and remained faithful to the national idea. It has therefore no reason to regret Einstein’s withdrawal.

  Heymann saw no irony in issuing this declaration of political impartiality on 1 April, the day on which the Führer called for a boycott of Jewish businesses. Indeed, the REM had hoped to parade Einstein’s dismissal as a trophy in this anti-Semitic spree.

  Laue was affronted by the slur to Einstein’s reputation, and demanded a meeting of the academy’s committee to review the matter. But the committee merely endorsed the wording, in what was for Laue ‘one of the most appalling experiences of my life’. Planck, however, was aware that posterity might judge Einstein’s withdrawal very differently, and in the minutes of the academy’s meeting on 11 April he noted the unquestioned and abiding importance of Einstein’s work before implicitly reversing Heymann’s judgement: ‘Therefore it is . . . deeply to be regretted that Einstein has by his own political behaviour made his continuation in the academy impossible.’ In his letter to Rust informing him of Einstein’s resignation, Planck wrote ‘I am convinced that in the future the name of Einstein will be honoured as one of the most brilliant intellects that has ever shone in our academy.’ Such attempts to claw back credibility doubtless undermined whatever political credit Planck had gained from Einstein’s resignation in the first place.

  On 5 April Einstein responded forcefully to Heymann’s accusations with a public statement:

  I hereby declare that I have never taken any part in atrocity-mongering, and I must add that I have seen nothing of any such mongering elsewhere. In general, people have contented themselves with reproducing and commenting on the official statements and orders of responsible members of the German government, together with the program of the annihilation of the German Jews by economic methods. The statements I have issued to the press were concerned with my intention to resign my position in the academy and renounce my Prussian citizenship; I gave as my reason for these steps that I did not wish to live in a country where the individual does not enjoy equality before the law, and freedom of speech and teaching. Further, I described the present state of affairs in Germany as a state of psychic distemper in the masses and made some remarks about its causes . . . I am ready to stand by every word I have published.

  The following day Einstein also wrote privately to Planck, making the same defence but in milder terms. He tried to make his friend see the matter for what it was by removing the Jewish context, as if trying to help a child to put himself in another’s shoes:

  I ask you to imagine yourself for the moment in this situation: assume that you were a university professor in Prague and that a government came into power which would deprive Czechs of German origin of their livelihood and at the same time employ crude methods to prevent them from leaving the country . . . Would you then deem it decent to remain a silent witness to such developments without raising your voice in support of those who are being persecuted? And is not the destruction of the German Jews by starvation the official program of the present German government?

  Einstein was no saint, yet there is immense forbearance in his refusal to hold Planck’s actions against him: ‘I am happy that you have nevertheless approached me as an old friend and that, in spite of severe pressures from without, the relationship between us has not been affected. It remains as fine and genuine as ever.’

  The Prussian Academy, meanwhile, was unrelenting. Ficker doubtless knew he had no case to assert, but he responded to Einstein’s declaration with moustache-twirling bluster:

  We had confidently expected that one who had belonged to our academy for so long would have ranged himself, irrespective of his own political sympathies, on the side of the defenders of our nation against the flood of lies which has been let loose upon it . . . Instead of which your testimony has served as a handle to the enemies not merely of the present government but of the German people.

  In other words, patriotism should override any ‘political sympathies’ on behalf of oppressed Jews. Ficker and Heymann added in a separate letter that even if Einstein hadn’t been involved in ‘atrocity-mongering’, he should at least have done something ‘to counteract unjust suspicions and slanders’. Ficker does not appear to have been a Nazi sympathizer, neither is he here attempting to cover up or justify anti-Semitism. Rather, for him—and, one must conclude, for Planck—this is beside the point. He is insisting that, however one feels about the political ‘Jewish question’, the first duty is to defend Germany’s honour.

  To behave in that way, Einstein told Ficker and Heymann by return of post, ‘would have been equivalent to a repudiation of all those notions of justice and liberty for which I have stood all my life . . . By giving such testimony in the present circumstances I should have been contributing . . . to moral corruption and the destruction of all existing cultural values.’ That, he added, was why he resigned, ‘and your letter only shows me how right I was to do so’.

  As a result of Einstein’s resignation, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, of which Einstein was also a member, took fright and sent him a nervous letter from which one can sense the academicians fretting that they might be deemed politically unsound if they do not follow the Prussians’ lead.*4 They asked Einstein to clarify ‘how you envisage your relations with our academy after what has passed between yourself and the Prussian Academy’. Einstein’s response might be paraphrased as ‘now you mention it, I don’t particularly want to be a part of your organization either’. But this, he said, is for a different reason:

  The primary duty of an academy is to further and protect the scientific life of a country. And yet the learned societies of Germany have, to the best of my knowledge, stood by and said nothing while a not inconsiderable proportion of German scholars and students and also of academically trained professionals have been deprived of all chance of getting employment or earning a living in Germany. I do not wish to belong to any society which behaved in such a manner, even if it does so under external pressure.

  These remarks reveal that it is not just in retrospect, within a different social and political context, that it becomes possible to speak of the morality of the situation. Einstein is not demanding that anyone resign or even refuse outright to comply with the Nazi strictures, but merely that one should not carry on as though all is well. Planck’s view that nothing could be done, and the attitude of Ficker and Heymann that nothing needed to be done, were in the end indistinguishable in their consequences. ‘When faced with a choice between endangering their academy or acquiescing in the racist purge of the Prussian Academy of Sciences’, writes Mark Walker, ‘the academy scientists surrendered their independence and became accomplices by helping the National Socialist state force the Jewish scientists out of the academy. No “Aryan” scientists resigned in protest. Indeed there is no record of a scientist even considering resignation.’ This statement probabl
y reflects Planck’s position, but is perhaps too generous overall: there seems good reason to suppose that many others in the academy did not just acquiesce in the anti-Semitic purge but actively approved of it.

  Politically worthless

  Planck’s reluctant compliance did him no favours with anyone. It was clear that his heart wasn’t in the persecution of Einstein, all the more so when he proposed Laue, Einstein’s friend and a committed supporter of his theories, as Einstein’s successor for the non-teaching professorship that the academy awarded. Philipp Lenard, a fierce critic of Einstein both scientifically and politically, objected, calling Planck ‘politically so worthless a character’, while Lenard’s associate Johannes Stark commented that ‘if Planck and Laue retain influence, it will have a worse effect than if Einstein himself were there’.

  Stark decided that to counteract this pernicious influence he would seek government support to get himself elected to the academy. The proposal for Stark’s membership was drawn up by the experimental physicist Friedrich Paschen, who had previously joined Laue in opposing Heymann’s cavalier press statement about Einstein. Paschen warned Ficker that to object to Stark’s application would be ‘tactically a false step and even dangerous’. Laue nonetheless succeeded in getting the motion blocked in December. When as a result Stark spitefully fired Laue from his consultancy to the Physical and Technical Institute of the German Reich (PTR) in Berlin, of which Stark was the president, the previously submissive Ficker circulated some of the vicious things that Stark had been saying about Planck, Laue, Haber and others. In January 1934 his nomination was withdrawn. The episode makes clear how hard it is to discern where the battle lines were drawn—critics of Einstein were not necessarily friends of outright Nazis like Stark, while Einstein’s sometime supporters were not immune to political expediency.