by Philip Ball
While the KWG was not exactly Nazified in 1937, then, neither did it thenceforth mount any effective resistance to the wishes of the government. It expelled the remaining Jewish members, including Lise Meitner, even though she continued to work at Hahn’s institute in Berlin.
White Jews
This outcome did not afford the Deutsche Physiker much satisfaction, and in 1937 Stark decided it was time to find another line of assault on his enemies in theoretical physics. Planck’s influence was evidently waning, and now Stark found a new target: a young professor who was enjoying the fame that Stark so coveted and who had made quantum theory an even more impenetrable thicket of mathematical formalism, who supported Einstein’s ideas, had been awarded a Nobel Prize at the absurdly premature age of thirty-one, and now looked about to be appointed as Sommerfeld’s successor in Munich. Stark began a crusade against Werner Heisenberg.
Heisenberg had been in Stark’s sights ever since he had refused to attend the rally of the National Socialist Teachers League in Leipzig in November 1933. On that occasion Stark hoped to agitate Heisenberg’s students into protest, but Heisenberg defused the situation by inviting the leader of the local Nazi Students League to his house and persuading him that he was a trustworthy, albeit ‘apolitical’, professor. Emboldened by this victory, at the gathering of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians in Hanover in September 1934 Heisenberg defended relativity and quantum theory against Stark’s accusations that they were speculative. There he even mentioned Einstein by name, earning him a reprimand from the Nazi chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.
But by 1935 Heisenberg was deeply disheartened by the political climate. His sense of patriotism and honour was disturbed after the Nuremberg Laws had removed the exemption from dismissal for Jewish veterans of the First World War. He had even risked damaging his reputation and prospects by registering that displeasure at a faculty meeting. His words of protest, however, show how the Nazis had already set the parameters of the debate: Heisenberg said he doubted ‘that the measures now being taken are consistent with the intention of the law, according to which front veterans also belong to the Volk community’. In other words, it was not the principle of an exclusive national community that he challenged, but who was selected for membership.
On that occasion Heisenberg had considered resigning (or so he claimed), but was dissuaded by Planck, who cautioned once again that this would be a futile dereliction of duty. ‘It is to the future that all of us must now look’, the older man advised: they must hang on regardless, for Germany’s sake. Like most of his peers, Heisenberg withdrew into physics. ‘The world out there is really ugly’, he wrote to his mother, ‘but the work is beautiful.’
The immediate trigger for Stark’s attack on Heisenberg in 1937 was a long-running dispute about the successor of Arnold Sommerfeld, who two years earlier had been due to retire from his professorship in Munich. It was no secret that Sommerfeld wanted Heisenberg to have the post, and it was said that the ‘list’ of candidates submitted by the university to the Bavarian administration contained his name and no other.
Stark and Lenard hoped that Sommerfeld’s departure could be used to free the Munich faculty from his baleful support of ‘Jewish physics’. In an address at the new Philipp Lenard Institute for Physics in Heidelberg in December 1935, Stark called Heisenberg a ‘spirit of Einstein’s spirit’. This speech was printed in the January issue of the party periodical Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte. In February Heisenberg placed a response in the Völkischer Beobachter, although it was printed with a further comment from Stark. Concerned about the damage to his career and reputation, Heisenberg sought an audience with Rudolf Mentzel, Rust’s deputy at the REM, at which he argued that theoretical physics was important and needed to be defended against the diatribes of the Deutsche Physiker. Probably because of internal party politics rather than scientific judgement, Mentzel looked favourably on the appeal, but advised Heisenberg to send a letter to all German university physics professors asking if they took the same view. Together with Max Wien, a physicist at Jena, and Hans Geiger—both carefully selected as experimentalists sympathetic to his cause—Heisenberg drafted the letter, which demanded that the attacks of Stark and Lenard should cease for the sake of Germany’s international reputation. Nearly all of the seventy-five professors who received the letter signed their approval.
Thus Stark had succeeded only in showing the REM that there was scarcely anyone else on his side. To make matters worse, he was forced to resign as head of the German Research Association in November 1936 after squandering its funds on a hare-brained idea to extract gold from the moors of southern Germany. But this apparent victory did little to improve Heisenberg’s mood. Despite marrying in early 1937, he found himself mired in despair and gloom in Leipzig, apparently close to a breakdown and admitting that, when he was not with his new bride, ‘I now easily fall into a very strange state.’ In March he was finally offered Sommerfeld’s professorship, which he accepted but deferred until August. That turned out to be a mistake, because it gave Stark the chance to intervene again.
In July Stark published in Das Schwarze Korps a new, trenchant vilification of Heisenberg, along with others who colluded in the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ in physics without being Jews themselves. These people, he said, were ‘White Jews’—a designation calculated to make them the legitimate targets of all the abuse previously heaped on the Jews themselves. Planck, Sommerfeld and their circle were denounced as ‘bacterial carriers’ of the Jewish spirit who ‘must all be eliminated just as the Jews themselves’. And none more so than Heisenberg, ‘this puppet of the Einsteinian “spirit” in new [Weimar] Germany’. Even today, Stark claimed, the core of Heisenberg’s students ‘still consists of Jews and foreigners’. The young pretender himself was the ‘Ossietzky of physics’, implying that he was no less dangerous to German culture than the dissident Carl von Ossietzky who the previous year had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (see page 121)—and that Heisenberg, like Ossietzky, should therefore be in a concentration camp. A disgusted Peter Debye showed the article to the senate of the KWG, reporting that ‘it was condemned by everyone with whom I spoke’.
Heisenberg was now in a bind. He had to extricate himself from the ‘White Jew’ accusation without appearing to distance himself from Einstein’s ‘Jewish’ physics. His response was telling: it was not enough simply to defend his good character, he also sought official sanction from the state leaders. Thus he directed his appeal to the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, insisting that he must either have complete vindication at the highest level or he would resign and emigrate. He reminded the authorities that he had plenty of offers from abroad, in particular from Columbia University in New York. Having previously refused to ‘desert’ Germany in the face of the Nazi excesses, he thus contemplated it, or at least threatened it, now to save his ‘honour’. As historian Paul Lawrence Rose argues, Heisenberg’s counter-attack on Stark should not be interpreted as a rejection of Nazism or anti-Semitism; it was driven by pride, anger, and fear for his reputation.
In cases like this, one needed to exploit personal connections for all they were worth. Heisenberg’s mother was acquainted with Himmler’s mother, and she argued her son’s good character in a way that Frau Himmler would appreciate: as mother to mother. Frau Himmler promised that she would get her Heinrich to ‘set the matter back in order’. ‘There are some slightly unpleasant people around Heinrich’, she admitted, ‘but this is of course quite disgusting. He is such a nice boy—always congratulates me on my birthday.’
Himmler, however, at first remained neutral. He simply requested a detailed response from Heisenberg to the accusations made by Stark, while at the same time ordering an investigation into Heisenberg’s character. The Gestapo and SS bugged Heisenberg’s house, placed spies in his classes, and questioned him on several occasions. This exhausting and frightening process finally resulted in a report that exonerated Heisenberg, portraying him as an ‘apolitical’ scientis
t who was basically a good patriot with a positive attitude towards National Socialism. It explained that Heisenberg had initially been trained in ‘Jewish physics’, but claimed that his work had become increasingly ‘Aryan’. True, he did not show the antipathy towards Jews that one might hope for, but perhaps he would develop the proper attitude in due course.
Himmler received the report in the spring of 1938, but to Heisenberg’s immense frustration he did not act at once. Finally in July he was prevailed upon to write to Heisenberg, saying ‘I do not approve of the attack of Das Schwarze Korps in its article, and I have proscribed any further attack against you.’ He invited Heisenberg to discuss the matter with him ‘man to man’ in Berlin later in the year. The invitation was, despite Heisenberg’s eagerness, never fulfilled, but the two men remained in cordial contact through the war. Given the other demands on Himmler’s time, the attention he gave to this matter is in fact rather remarkable. Mark Walker attests that Himmler was very interested in science and considered himself something of a patron of scientists. A personal letter and invitation from Himmler was more than most of them might have expected.
It was nonetheless a ruthless kind of patronage. When Himmler explained his decision on Heisenberg to the head of the Gestapo Reinhard Heydrich, he wrote with icy pragmatism that ‘I believe that Heisenberg is decent; and we cannot afford to lose this man or have him killed, since he is a relatively young man and can bring up the next generation.’ Moreover, Himmler concluded with a bathetic indication of his scientific ignorance, ‘we may be able to get this man, who is a good scientist, to cooperate with our people on the cosmic-ice theory’. To Heisenberg’s good fortune, it seems he was never asked to give an opinion on the matter.
Himmler also added chilling words of advice in his letter of exoneration to Heisenberg, saying ‘I would consider it proper, however, if in the future you make a clear distinction for your listeners between the recognition of the results of scholarly research and the personal and political attitude of the researcher.’ In other words, Heisenberg would do well not to mention Einstein. He got the point, and obeyed.*6 He had already indicated that intention in a letter sent in March to Ludwig Prandtl, an expert in aerodynamics at Göttingen, who had tipped off Heisenberg that exoneration from Himmler was on its way:
I never was sympathetic toward Einstein’s public conduct . . . I will gladly follow Himmler’s advice and, when I speak about the theory of relativity, simultaneously emphasize that I do not share Einstein’s politics and world view.
Having been granted his wish to ‘set the record straight’ with the guarantee of an article in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenschaft, the house journal of the Deutsche Physik movement, he pursued this concession doggedly over the next few years, again asking Himmler to intercede when difficulties arose. That his article, ‘Evaluation of the “modern theoretical physics”’, was not actually published until 1943 rather defeated its original object. He consented therein to the usual compromise of acknowledging Einstein’s discoveries while suggesting that they would have happened anyway:
America would have been discovered if Columbus had never lived, and so too the theory of electrical phenomena without Maxwell and of electrical waves without Maxwell, for the things themselves could not have been changed by the discoverers. So too undoubtedly relativity theory would have emerged without Einstein.
These accommodations and entreaties to the Nazis may seem hard to understand today. Could Heisenberg really have imagined, after an episode like Stark’s attack, that things were going to get any better? That, if he could only ‘clear his name’, somehow the relationship of physics with the National Socialist state could be set back on track? But it was not naïve optimism that kept him bound to the Fatherland, but rather, ‘an unbreakable attachment to Germany [that] his entire life and upbringing had instilled in him’, as his biographer David Cassidy puts it. To Heisenberg, Cassidy says, ‘remaining in Germany was apparently worth almost any price, as long as he could continue to work and teach’. What is more, Heisenberg had developed a conviction that his own fate was tied to that of the whole of German physics; if he left, nothing would remain. But as Cassidy points out, ‘by seeing himself in such a grandiose rationalization for remaining in Germany, he more easily succumbed to further compromises and ingratiation with the regime’.
In fact things really did improve eventually for Heisenberg, if not necessarily for German physics: by 1944 he was celebrated in Goebbels’ weekly propaganda newspaper Das Reich as a ‘German national leader’. This only lends weight to Rose’s accusation that ‘Heisenberg’s notion of “responsibility” as the acquisition of influence in Nazi circles was actually a rationalization of collaboration and of self-interest.’
What of the Munich post that had prompted Stark’s assault? In that regard Stark was indirectly successful, preventing Heisenberg ever from becoming Sommerfeld’s heir. The position fell foul of political wrangling between the REM, the SS, the Munich faculty and the Nazified University Teachers League, out of which Sommerfeld’s replacement emerged on the eve of war in 1939, in the form of an undistinguished mechanical engineer named Wilhelm Müller, who opposed the ‘new’ physics and would teach only the classical variety. When Walther Gerlach, an expert in quantum theory at Munich, complained to the dean of the university that no theoretical physics was now being taught there, he was curtly told that
If you only understand theoretical physics to mean the so-called modern dogmatic theoretical physics of the Einstein—Sommerfeld stamp, then I must inform you that this will indeed no longer be taught at Munich.
The wrong battle?
The battle fought within German physics in the 1930s was not that of apolitical scientists against the National Socialists, but of Einstein’s supporters against Deutsche Physik. One might have expected the National Socialists to embrace a view of physics that discredited Jews, but they were not quite as foolish as that. Physics under the Nazis was never really hijacked by ideology, for the political leaders were primarily interested in practical outcomes and not academic disputes. An internal REM memo to Bernhard Rust on the controversy over ‘Jewish physics’, probably sent by the ministry’s undersecretary (who here seems concerned that the blundering Rust might make a fool of himself), advised that ‘In the case of a purely scientific dispute, in my opinion, the minister should keep himself out of it.’ Until nuclear fission was discovered in 1938, the new theoretical physics was of little interest to the authorities, as it seemed to be largely irrelevant to the war preparations. And once atomic power looked possible, it was clear that the Aryan physicists’ advocacy of practical experiment over abstract theory could not deliver results. Rather, it was evidently the proponents of ‘Jewish’ quantum theory and relativity who truly understood the secrets of the atomic nucleus, and even the Nazis could see that they were the only ones likely to put the discoveries to good use.
Deutsche Physik also floundered through the political ineptitude of Stark and Lenard. Stark in particular was apt more to antagonize than to persuade the party officials. ‘Had he been less crazy’, science historian John Heilbron comments laconically, ‘he would have been much more dangerous.’ The Aryan physicists made wild blunders, but more incapacitating was their failure to appreciate that to get your way in Nazi Germany you needed to do more than regurgitate approved doctrines, prejudices and formulas. You needed to be able to manipulate the competing power blocs, to exploit the right contacts and forge useful alliances. Stark often backed the wrong horse—he had no more judgement in politics than he did in science.
As a result, the attempt of Deutsche Physik to take over the academic system failed. But its opponents had to tread a fine line, so that their defence of Einstein’s theories did not risk endorsing his unpopular political views. So long as they agreed to avoid too explicit an acknowledgement of the architect of the theory of relativity, they could generally get their way. During the war Heisenberg regularly omitted Einstein’s name from the public le
ctures that he was asked to deliver to spread German culture in occupied territories. Indeed, historians Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker suggest that Deutsche Physik collapsed partly because it was rendered otiose by the compromises made by the mainstream physics community, which demonstrated, to the leaders’ eventual satisfaction, ‘their willingness and ability to help further the goals of National Socialism’.
The struggle against Deutsche Physik, although frustrating for the German physicists who rejected it, offered a convenient narrative after the war by supplying a criterion for partitioning physicists into those who were Nazified and those who resisted them. In this view, if you had opposed Aryan physics, you had in effect opposed the Nazis—all the guilt of the National Socialist era could be transferred on to Lenard, Stark and their supporters. Better still, one could use this division to apportion scientific competence: the Aryan physicists were universally poor scientists, their opponents always proficient.
But the truth was that, while the dispute rumbled on through the late 1930s, the Nazis tightened their grip on German science regardless. In some disciplines, such as chemistry, scientists fell into line in short order. In a few, such as anthropology and medicine, the collusion of some researchers had horrific consequences. Physics was another matter: just docile enough for its lapses, evasions and occasional defiance to be tolerated. The physicists were errant children: grumbling, arguing among themselves, slow to obey and somewhat lazy in their compliance, but in the final analysis obliging and dutiful enough. If they lacked ideological fervour, the Nazis were pragmatic enough to turn a blind eye. Their attitude is conveyed perfectly in a description of Ludwig Prandtl sent by the local Nazi coordinator (Kreisleiter) in Göttingen to his superiors in May 1937. As we saw, Prandtl had supported Heisenberg against Stark’s attacks, and he had appealed to Himmler about the damaging effects on German science of the Deutsche Physiker attacks. The Kreisleiter’s letter makes it clear how indifferent the Nazis were to such arguments, and how meaningless or even contemptible the notion of a ‘duty to science’ was to them. All that mattered was whether the scientists were prepared to lend their efforts to mobilization of the Fatherland, which Prandtl did willingly: