Serving the Reich

by Philip Ball

  Prof. Prandtl is a typical scientist in an ivory tower. He is only interested in his scientific research which has made him world famous. Politically, he poses no threat whatsoever . . . Prandtl may be considered one of those honourable, conscientious scholars of a bygone era, conscious of his integrity and respectability, whom we certainly cannot afford to do without, nor should we wish to, in light of his immensely valuable contributions to the development of the air force.

  7

  ‘You obviously cannot swim against the tide’

  In 1936 Peter Debye, now director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics housed in its own premises in Berlin, decided that the newly constructed institute should be renamed in honour of the venerable colossus of German science, Max Planck. He anticipated resistance, both because traditionalists would be loath to disregard the imperial past and because Planck was considered politically suspect by the Nazi regime. Debye’s characteristic strategy was to make the decision a fait accompli by having the new name—the Max Planck Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics—carved in stone above the institute’s entrance, ingenuously claiming that he simply wanted to give Planck a pleasant surprise on the institute’s inauguration day. It is said that when the Nazis predictably ordered him to remove it, Debye instead covered it with a wooden plank—the pun works in German too.

  That was Peter Debye: boldly and wittily outflanking his opponents while shrugging off political attempts to control and manipulate his science. At least, so the story suggests. But there is no first-hand record of the ‘plank’ incident, and it is quite possibly no different to so many other tales in science history, retold for the sake of its lustre without regard to documentary evidence. All the same, Debye did rename his institute, and thereby set in train a process by which eventually the entire KWG, the research network at the heart of German science, became associated with the foundational role of Max Planck. It is today the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, and its research centres are all Max Planck Institutes.

  The clearest account of the renaming of the KWIP is given by the Rockefeller’s Warren Weaver during a visit to Berlin in January 1938. It corroborates Debye’s resolve, but with less swagger:

  We visit Debye’s institute, which has been essentially completed now for a few months. It has still not been formally dedicated, there being official trouble in connection with the name of the institute. On the outside of the building, over the front entrance, one finds the name—The Planck Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics—but inside in the entrance hall the plaque which bears an inscription to Planck is covered up with a cloth. Stark and Lenard both wrote letters to the minister [Rust] insisting that Planck was not a great enough physicist to warrant to name the institute after him. Debye has discussed this with the minister. He simply says Debye must be a little patient, and things will adjust themselves, although he cannot at the moment insist on a move which is opposed by strong party members. D. is completely untroubled by these circumstances, saying that the institute is open to scientific research, which is his only concern.

  Debye got his way. When the KWIP was eventually dedicated on 30 May 1938, it was as the Max Planck Institute—although this name was delicately omitted from the official invitation. To acknowledge the joint sponsors of the project, the entrance was adorned for the ceremony with two flags, bearing the stars and stripes and the swastika.

  Debye’s critics today have little regard for this ‘victory’, instead seeing in his role as KWIP director just another instance of his willingness to take positions of influence under a regime that no one could now fail to see as totalitarian, racist, corrupt and warmongering. That perspective sheds little light by itself. The real question is how Debye, who evidently would have preferred the Nazis never to cross his threshold, reconciled himself to the compromises that this entailed. The period that Debye spent as head of the KWIP—during which he became ever more central to German physics—and the circumstances that terminated this position are critical to the matter of how posterity should regard his moral conduct.

  The virtual institute

  When Debye was appointed director of the KWIP in 1934, there was nothing concrete for him to administer. Ever since its inception in 1914 the physics institute had existed only on paper, being little more than a mechanism for dispensing grants. The KWG had included a physics institute in its original plans, but the case for establishing it in Berlin was not strong, for the city already hosted the renowned Physical and Technical Institute. All the same, in January 1914 Planck, Haber and Walther Nernst persuaded the Prussian Ministry of Culture to lodge an application for building premises there. ‘The purpose of this institute’, that document proclaimed,

  will be to solve important and urgent problems in physics, and secondly to form associations of physical scientists specifically suited to the issues involved . . . The site of the institute should be in a small building in Dahlem, which provides the opportunity for meetings and for hosting archives, a library, and physical equipment.

  Einstein was proposed as the institute’s first director. The application was rejected by the finance minister on the day before the outbreak of the First World War. Surprisingly, it was revived in the midst of the war, despite there being no suggestion that the institute would be involved in military research. At this stage there was no longer talk of a building, however: the ‘institute’ would consist simply of a board of trustees who would allocate funds for research conducted elsewhere, making it in effect a grant-giving agency. Einstein was made director, and the board included Planck, Haber and Nernst along with representatives of the various governmental and industrial sponsors, including Friedrich Glum, a member of the Prussian Interior Ministry who became director general of the KWG in 1922. In 1921 Max von Laue was elected to the board and was soon thereafter appointed deputy chairman, taking over much of the administration as Einstein’s interest in the institute waned.

  For a time this arrangement worked well enough. For example, in 1918 the KWIP awarded Debye and his assistant Paul Scherrer in Göttingen money to buy new X-ray equipment. (The disruptions of the post-war situation meant that he didn’t get it until the summer of 1920, by which time he was in Zurich.) But by the late 1920s hyperinflation had severely depleted the KWIP’s financial resources, and it became clear that it would have rather little significance unless it were able to function as a centre of research itself. In 1929 the institute’s committee, probably motivated by Laue, appealed for a building. But who could pay for it?

  The biochemist Otto Warburg, whose physicist father Emil was on the KWIP board, had an answer. On a lecture tour of the United States during that year he had made contact with the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation. The foundation had already helped to fund the KWG’s activities earlier in the decade (see page 20), including the building of an institute for psychiatry in Berlin-Dahlem that opened in 1928. Warburg secured an agreement from the foundation to pay for an institute for cell physiology, and now the KWIP committee added a request for funds for a physics institute too.

  In February 1930 the Rockefeller Foundation sent Lauder Jones, its representative in Paris, to Berlin to consider the application. The institute, he reported back in what was intended as a recommendation, would be ‘erected primarily for Einstein and von Laue’. The Rockefeller’s management was sympathetic but wary of being saddled with an indefinite financial commitment, and wanted assurance that the state would be able to take over funding once the institute was up and running. Glum’s attempts to secure that commitment from the Weimar government were thwarted by bureaucracy, but nevertheless in April the Rockefeller’s administration approved a grant of $655,000 towards ‘land, buildings and equipment’ for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Cell Physiology, led by Warburg, and for Physics, led by Einstein and Laue. The physics institute would conduct experiments on molecular rays and magnetism, and would also have a theoretical division. In view of Einstein’s diminishing involvement, it was agreed that Laue would be
the ‘active’ director on the site; Glum admitted to Jones in January 1931 that it was no longer clear if Einstein would wish to be affiliated at all, or whether he would ‘prefer to stay in his own home to think’.

  By March it had become apparent that thinking was more attractive to the architect of relativity than trying to raise a building, and Planck began looking for a new director. He considered the experimentalist Hans Geiger, but his preferred choice was Nobel laureate James Franck at Göttingen. Nernst was about to retire from his position at the University of Berlin, and if Franck could fill the vacancy, he would be conveniently located to act as director of the KWIP too.

  As the financial and political disturbances in Germany grew more severe, Glum was forced to admit to Jones that the building would have to be postponed. Matters had barely progressed by the time Germany acquired a new government in January 1933 and descended quickly into dictatorship. Suddenly, providing funds for German science looked rather more fraught from the other side of the Atlantic. But promises were promises, weren’t they?

  Funding Hitler

  In late 1936 a reporter from the New York Times turned up unannounced at the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation, demanding a statement about the ‘large gift’ that the foundation had apparently made to the ‘Hitler government’. The Rockefeller staff told him that they ‘attempt to apply uniform and objective criteria to our projects, making no distinctions of country, race, creed, or politics’. But they were evidently discomfited, for of course such distinctions were precisely what the Hitler government had imposed in Germany.

  The Rockefeller’s funding of the two Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin threatened to become something of a scandal. The New York Times ran its story on 24 November under the headline ‘Rockefeller Gift Aids Reich Science’. The report quoted the foundation’s president Raymond Fosdick as saying that ‘The world of science is a world without flags or frontiers’, while at the same time he admitted ‘it is quite possible that the foundation would not have made the grant if it could have foreseen present conditions in Germany’. In response, Felix Frankfurter, a professor of law at Harvard and adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote to Fosdick personally to say that by giving money to the Nazis the foundation had ‘adulterate[d] the spiritual coinage of the world’. Fosdick could only reiterate that, as the New York Times had stated, this was not a gift to Hitler but merely the fulfilment of a pledge made in 1930.

  All the same, the Rockefeller directors in New York were anxious to know just how their money was being spent in Berlin. The officers on the ground, especially Jones, Wilbur Tisdale and Warren Weaver, had misgivings from the moment the Nazis came to power and had been keeping a wary eye on how matters were evolving. According to Alan Gregg, another Rockefeller ‘scout’ in the Paris office, Warburg said in October 1933 that he felt ‘the Nazi regime will not slacken its interest in the development of scientific institutes in spite of its anti-Semitic activities’. The following June, Warburg assured Tisdale that ‘less ignorant and more moderate forces are gaining ground’. But by July, Thomas B. Appleget in Paris admitted to his boss Max Mason in New York that he was worried about ‘the attitude of the present and future German governments to pure science’. The Berlin chemical institute, he said, is ‘now given over entirely to work in the field of chemical warfare; the institute in Munich [psychiatry] is almost entirely dominated by projects in the field of “race purification”’. The Nazis had appointed the Swiss-born eugenicist Ernst Rüdin as head of the Munich institute, where he advanced racial theories that endorsed National Socialist policy. ‘What’, Appleget added ominously, ‘might the physics institute be in five years?’

  But even if the Germans were discriminating against the Jews, Tisdale argued, wouldn’t it just compound the offence if the Rockefeller were ‘to follow their example and refuse opportunity to the Germans because they are Germans’? Besides, there were grounds for optimism. In July 1934 Planck conveyed to Mason news that he hoped would be reassuring: the KWIP had now confirmed its new director, the staunchly apolitical Peter Debye.

  James Franck’s departure from Göttingen and emigration to the United States in 1933 had stymied Planck’s original hope of making him the director, even though he initially regarded the move with complacency, telling Tisdale that he felt Franck would be able to return ‘within a year or two’.*1 By November of that year Planck had become more realistic and selected Debye as a replacement. At that time, the president of the Physical and Technical Institute in Berlin was Johannes Stark, who was predictably opposed to any choice backed by Planck. When in May 1934 he heard of Debye’s likely appointment, he wrote to the minister of the interior alleging quite untruthfully that Debye lacked experimental skills:

  Professor Debye is in my opinion not suitable to head an institute for nuclear research. He is an outspoken theorist and as such, is dependent for experimental work on the help of experimental physicists. Mr Planck is a pure theorist and does not know about the requirements for a physical institute.

  Stark was, however, somewhat equivocal in his criticism, probably because Debye’s work was not as deeply bound up with the relativity and quantum theory that he so detested. He is, Stark assured the minister, ‘the best theoretician to be working in a German university today and should therefore be given an appointment that induces and enables him to enlist a school of theoreticians who are better qualified than the formalists Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, etc. to promote the progress of physics instead of impeding it’. It looks almost as if Stark suspected (wrongly) that Debye might be turned into a useful ally.

  Debye had his own misgivings about Planck’s offer, fearing that the proposed simultaneous appointment at the University of Berlin would commit him to too much teaching. Besides, he told Tisdale in June 1934, he had heard that the contract for directors of Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes was not secure, but rather ‘an arrangement of convenience and can be broken by the state at will’. And he didn’t want to be caught out as he had been in Göttingen, unwittingly jeopardizing his Dutch citizenship by accepting an academic position in Germany. Neither did he relish the thought of another struggle like the one he had endured in coming to Leipzig, when, obliged like all German academics to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler in front of the dean, he had added by hand to the written declaration, ‘Given on the understanding that it will not affect my citizenship.’ To ensure that an appointment to Berlin would not compromise his nationality, he appealed at the highest levels. His case was brought before Holland’s Queen Wilhelmina, who renewed Debye’s citizenship and granted him permission to take the Berlin post. Meanwhile, Debye insisted to Bernhard Rust that it must be a condition of his move to Berlin that the usual German law on transfer of citizenship be waived.

  Why, if Debye was intent on pursuing a career in Germany, did his Dutch identity matter to him so much? It’s not as though he felt any strong affinity to or patriotism for the country of his birth: like many natives of Maastricht, he identified more with the polyglot character of Limburg than with the culture of Flanders and Holland. Debye was no doubt keenly aware of the special status he acquired as a non-German in a position of authority, which gave him more room to manoeuvre than a German national would enjoy. ‘Being a Dutch citizen at this time was extremely important’, his son Peter later explained, ‘because it gave us a certain immunity to everyday pressures that the German citizens were experiencing. This kind of isolation made our life much easier and kept us away from the anxiety and fear that forced people to refrain from any loud derogatory remarks [about the Nazis] anywhere in public.’ As a memo of the Rockefeller Foundation observed in October 1939, Debye’s ‘outsider’ position in Germany gave him ‘something like a diplomatic status’.

  Despite his hesitation, Debye seems already by April 1934 to have made up his mind. He was approached that spring by Sommerfeld, who wondered whether Debye might consider becoming his successor in Munich. Debye replied:

  I love Munich, and your presence, to
gether with the small laboratory where I could develop some experimental ideas with good people, is indeed attractive. But as things stand, I need to keep faithful to Planck and hope that I will be able to use my strength in the way he has planned.

  In July, Debye—on a visit to Liège in Belgium until the following April—formally accepted the KWIP post. This meant that he was also accepting the chair vacated by Nernst at the University of Berlin. But disputes about that post continued for over a year, so Debye (possibly to his relief) did not play any role at the university until March 1936, and did not deliver a lecture until the winter term.

  Debye had already impressed the Rockefeller agents as a forthright individual who could resist Nazi interference. When Warren Weaver visited him in Leipzig in May 1933, he heard how a student had challenged Debye openly about the idea of a foreigner holding a prestigious professorship in Germany. Debye had retorted that he did not discuss such questions with a ‘little man’, but that if a ‘big man’ came up and expressed the same opinions, he would leave at once. This emboldened attitude of nationalistic students towards professors who would once have been shown absolute deference was a sign of things to come, and one did not brush aside such complaints without risking the wrath of the Nazified student organizations. Yet Debye seemed hardly more perturbed when the ‘big men’ did intervene. When the Leipzig authorities questioned his selection of an assistant on the grounds solely of scientific merit rather than of political persuasion, Debye replied that ‘he would take a page from the book of the Führer and would be a dictator in his own laboratory’. This was a bold double bluff—while it sounds as though he is mocking Hitler, Debye knew that the Nazis wanted to see the Führer principle applied at all levels of society. His remark was interpreted by some as disrespectful, but Debye rode out the repercussions, and when Tisdale visited him in June 1934 he reported that ‘Debye seems to stand more firmly than ever because of his display of backbone.’