Serving the Reich

by Philip Ball

  But Tisdale was by no means sure that Debye could retain such autonomy at the KWIP, telling Weaver at the start of August that ‘under the present regime I have no confidence in the belief that he would have a free hand, nor be free from abuses imposed by the incompetence or worse of the present regime’. At this stage the Rockefeller Foundation was still wondering if it ought to continue with its pledge to the KWG.

  Planck was alarmed. He assured Tisdale that at the KWIP Debye alone would have ‘the power to decide on the selection of his co-workers, and to this extent the freedom of scientific research at the institute will be guaranteed in the most complete manner conceivable’. It was what Planck desperately wanted to believe, not just to secure the American funding but also because the physics institute had taken on a symbolic status for him. It was here, in a place relatively insulated from the manipulations of the Nazis, that German physics could be preserved until better times—which he was sure would not be so long in coming. For Planck the KWIP had become an ark that would rescue them from the deluge, and Debye the captain who would steer the ship into a safe port.

  Tisdale remained sceptical. Although he agreed with Planck that Germany needed a first-class physics institute, he admitted that ‘the appeal leaves me quite cold when I realize that because of the race prejudices they have exiled some of the very men who could have given them the physics which they now claim they so much need’. Planck was also having difficulty in persuading the Rockefeller Foundation that the Reich would keep its side of the funding bargain, as promised by Glum during the Weimar era. When Tisdale asked Planck in July for written confirmation that the German government would provide the 100,000 marks it had pledged, he admitted that ‘negotiations are interminably slow and met at every step by indecision and red tape’. Earlier that year he had made a direct appeal to Goebbels, reminding him what the institute might achieve under a man like Debye:

  There is no doubt that under his leadership, the institute, particularly in the field of atomic physics, would open up new areas of science, of which no one can tell in advance whether they might not, like the wireless waves or X-rays also discovered by German physics professors through purely scientific laboratory work, bring about revolutionary changes in public life.

  Planck had a shrewd idea of the propaganda minister’s priorities. If the delays persisted, he warned, and the Rockefeller Foundation decided to withdraw their support,

  an opportunity would be missed [to] build a plant which would benefit German science and the whole country and which would also be most effective in quelling international talk of the lack of understanding of the new government towards the maintenance of scientific research.

  Building the ark

  Whether or not Goebbels was swayed by this rhetoric isn’t clear, but in early 1935 Planck finally secured a promise that the Reich would provide ongoing financial support for the KWIP. In February he wrote to Debye in Belgium to say that construction of the institute could begin. It was to be located on land long assigned for the purpose next to Warburg’s institute in Dahlem, designed by the architect Carl Sattler, who had been responsible for the KWG’s Harnack House. Debye took active charge of the project when he returned to Germany, extracting a guarantee that the Reich would double its spending on the running costs within two years. Excavations began in October. One of the first structures to be built was the director’s house, allowing Debye to reside on site.

  Stark was not the only person unhappy about Debye’s appointment. In June 1935 Felix Krueger, the new rector of the University of Leipzig, wrote to the American consul in that city protesting at the Rockefeller funding of an institute that was about to poach one of his most eminent professors, by whose departure, he said, the university would be ‘seriously damaged’. Why build the institute in Berlin, he argued (to no avail), when Leipzig would provide a suitable site for it free of charge?

  Debye harboured no sentimental attachment to Leipzig, however, and he was excited by the prospect of leading such a well-equipped and independent laboratory. When Tisdale visited him in October, he reported that the Dutchman was ‘the only undepressed person I talked to in Germany’. Debye assured him that the state authorities would not get in the way: Rust, he said shrewdly, ‘knows little, is pretty much worried, and . . . can, if properly handled, be influenced’. The following summer, Tisdale and Weaver stopped in Berlin en route to Holland to check on how the money was being spent, and Debye gave them a tour of the new institute, of which the exterior had by then been nearly completed. By 1937 scientific research had begun, even though the institute was not yet officially inaugurated.

  Debye had two research priorities: experiments to investigate how substances behaved in large electric fields and at very low temperatures. In the summer of 1935 he visited the laboratories of Franz Simon at Oxford and Wander de Haas at Leiden, both of whom carried out low-temperature studies using the recently discovered technique of liquefying helium as a coolant. Debye was convinced that new kinds of physical behaviour could be discovered under such exotic conditions. At Leiden, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes had discovered in 1911 that metals can conduct electricity without any electrical resistance at very low temperature (the phenomenon of superconductivity), while the flow of liquid helium with no viscous impediment (superfluidity) was discovered at Cambridge University in 1937. Both are properties that result when quantum-mechanical principles begin to dominate the materials’ behaviour, which happens only as the disruptive influence of heat is frozen out.

  To provide the coolants for such experiments at the KWIP, a laboratory for making liquid air and liquid hydrogen was constructed in a building separated from the main block to minimize the damage of a potential explosion. But it was the high-voltage apparatus that most commanded the eye. Electromagnets capable of generating 2.8 million volts, built by Siemens & Halske, were housed in a quasi-Romanesque tower twenty metres high at the western end of the main wing.

  The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin-Dahlem, 1937. The tower housing the high-voltage equipment is on the left. Today this ‘Lightning Tower’ is a repository for the Archives of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

  As well as Debye, Laue and a third professor, the experimentalist Hermann Schüler, the institute had six junior researchers. Debye brought his former assistants from Leipzig—Ludwig Bewilogua, Wolfgang Ramm and the Dutchman Willem van der Grinten—and also took on the chemists Friedrich Rogowski and Karl Wirtz, and Heisenberg’s Leipzig student Carl von Weizsäcker. Weizsäcker had formed a close friendship with Heisenberg and would become something of a confidant. Over the next three years there were also many visiting guests from abroad.

  The atmosphere was rather more liberal than at the universities. As Wirtz recalled, this was not so much because the directors were permissive but because they were too preoccupied with their own work:

  It soon became apparent that the individual younger employee was granted a relatively independent existence, and complete independence in his choice of topics. I found this to be both pleasant and difficult . . . These freedoms were in part motivated by the personalities of the former directors. Both Debye and von Laue were preoccupied with their own work. Both were theorists and their assistants were not needed for immediate help with their own work . . . I also think of that time as being very productive, because I was gradually forced to become independent.

  Weizsäcker had similar recollections: ‘Debye was a very liberal director. He didn’t really give me a job, but told me that I should simply explore what interested me.’

  The high-voltage equipment at the KWIP.

  Not everyone thought well of Debye’s directorship. When Weaver visited Otto Warburg, still tenaciously maintaining leadership of the Institute for Cell Physiology in Dahlem, in 1938, he found him bitter and paranoid. Debye hadn’t once called on him since he arrived, Warburg complained, only to contradict himself by saying that Debye had repeatedly tried to speak with him but that he had refused to enter into discussion. ‘He
said’, Weaver reported back to his superiors,

  that the common notion that the government was irresponsible and wicked, while the professors were honest and idealistic is, in point of fact, exactly reversed, adding that the academicians are ‘rotten to the bone’. He insisted that Kühn, Debye and Butenandt are interested only in things which they calculate will advance their own personal position.*2

  Warburg’s assessment of Debye’s self-interest echoes that of several others who knew him only a little (see page 172). He is, however, a decidedly unreliable witness: in his meeting with Warburg, Weaver ‘got the impression of a man who . . . is very near the edge of mental instability’, with a ‘fairly well-developed persecution complex’. One can hardly be surprised at that: Warburg’s ‘non-Aryan’ ancestry would have made his position precarious even without his courageous complaints to Rust about the disruptive effect on his assistants of compulsory Hitler Youth parades. And it was surely enough to make anyone feel paranoid that, just a week before Weaver’s visit, Warburg had read his own obituary in Nature, having been mistaken for a namesake botanist who had emigrated from Berlin to Palestine.

  How Warburg managed to keep his place at the KWI throughout the Third Reich is something of mystery, even if officially he was exempt from the Civil Service Laws because his institute was funded by the Rockefeller. Some say that he enjoyed good connections, others that the hypochondriac Hitler hoped he might find a cure for cancer. When Warburg was dismissed in 1941, the decision was successfully appealed by Viktor Brack, the chief of staff at the Reich Chancellery. This was the same Brack who helped to engineer the ‘euthanasia’ of more than 50,000 Jews, gypsies and mentally ill people—another example of the deep and perplexing contradictions in the Reich, and a reminder that we are unwise to seek tidy consistency in the motives of its protagonists. Brack’s intervention undoubtedly saved Warburg from the camps; but Brack told him that ‘I did this not for you, nor for Germany, but for the world.’

  Poison pen

  As head of the prestigious new institute, Peter Debye evidently felt buoyant in 1936. While Planck seemed to be sinking further into despair, harassed by the ‘Aryan’ physicists who wanted him removed from leadership of the KWG, and while Heisenberg became increasingly isolated and demoralized at Leipzig, Debye had so far been able to shrug off most political interference and was riding the crest, apparently untouchable. At the end of the year his standing in German science was confirmed when he heard that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

  It’s not easy to describe in simple terms exactly what the award was given for. The announcement cited Debye’s ‘contributions to our knowledge of molecular structure through his investigations on dipole moments and on the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases’. In other words, this was one of those Nobels given for a body of work rather than a single discovery: through his studies of the interactions between matter, electricity and electromagnetic radiation Debye had helped to elucidate what atoms and molecules look like and how they behave. The prize confirmed Debye, once a prospective electrical engineer, as the world’s most distinguished ‘electrical engineer of molecules’.

  However much they welcomed international prestige for their intellectuals, the Nazis came to rue this particular form of recognition. At first they were laudatory: two days after the announcement on 12 November, Debye received a telegram of congratulation from Bernhard Rust. It would have pleased Rust that Debye told reporters he could not have achieved it without German support: ‘it would be fair to say: Germany and Holland have won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1936 together’.

  But on 23 November the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize was given retrospectively to the German writer Carl von Ossietzky, whose pacifism had consigned him to a concentration camp since 1933. Hitler considered this a blatant piece of politicking by the Norwegian Academy, and let it be known that the Reich held the Nobel organization in contempt. In January 1937 the government announced that thenceforth no German might accept a Nobel Prize. (The Nobel Committee ignored the edict, for example by awarding Otto Hahn the chemistry prize in 1944.)

  As a non-German, Debye was again exempt from this ruling. But nevertheless the German Foreign Ministry decided he should not attend the award ceremony. By the time they relayed that decision to Debye, he had anticipated as much and had cannily left already for Sweden, where he received his golden medal from the Swedish king Gustav V. So the German Embassy in Stockholm was forced into an unhappy compromise by cancelling any celebration in its premises.

  Does this, as some have claimed, show Debye to be a man determined to undermine, defy and oppose the Nazis? Certainly it suggests that he had no interest in courting political favour, but that was clear enough already. It is equally possible to interpret Debye’s actions over the Nobel as more evidence of his alleged egotism: he was not going to let politicking rob him of glory. Once again, we have only the facts, and they are such as to permit whatever interpretation one feels inclined to impose. There is nothing in Debye’s response here that is inconsistent with the picture of a man simply determined to avoid political interference as far as he was able. As with Planck’s insistence on commemorating Fritz Haber, this episode seems not so much an act of ideological defiance as a desire to do what one wishes. At any event, once garlanded, Debye let the matter drop: when he returned to Germany, he declined to offer future recommendations to the Nobel Committee.*3

  In the autumn of 1937 Debye was elected chairman of the German Physical Society (DPG). This became something of a poisoned chalice when, the following year, the Reich began to tighten its anti-Jewish laws, and the Ministry of Education announced the intention to put all scientific associations ‘on the same footing’—in other words, to ensure that they no longer had any Jewish members. The DPG had long manoeuvred to maintain its independence. It was partly with this in mind that Laue’s replacement as president in 1933 was the industrial physicist Karl Mey, who worked at Osram AG: a non-academic, it was thought, would be less susceptible to government pressure. Mey’s successor after the statutory two-year term of office—and Debye’s predecessor—was Jonathan Zenneck, director of the Deutsche Museum in Munich.

  Autonomy in Nazi Germany was relative at best, and came only at the cost of making concessions. The DPG was slower than most scientific bodies in purging its Jewish members, but it obliged the regime in some other respects. It was formally monitored by the Reich Education Ministry, to which the society would dutifully submit its candidates for the annual Planck Medal. In 1938 these were the French physicist Louis de Broglie, who suggested that quantum particles such as electrons might show wavelike behaviour, and the Italian nuclear scientist Enrico Fermi, working in Chicago. Fermi was initially the DPG’s preferred choice, but the society duly dropped him when the REM expressed concerns about his ‘racial type’: he had a Jewish wife.*4 Moreover, the DPG excluded ‘non-Aryan’ contributors from a special issue of the society’s journal Annalen der Physik in spring 1938 to mark Planck’s eightieth birthday. Debye objected at first to this censorship, but eventually acceded. Among those excluded was Debye’s old friend from his days with Sommerfeld, Paul Ewald, who was officially ‘a quarter-Jewish’ and moreover was married to a Jew. Ewald, who left Germany to work in England towards the end of 1938, expressed dismay that Debye had permitted this ideological interference, to which Debye replied that it would have been impossible to reach any other decision.

  Debye took the same line when similar restrictions were imposed on the celebrations of Sommerfeld’s seventieth birthday at the end of the year. The Jewish physicist Ludwig Hopf at Aachen, who had studied with Sommerfeld at Munich, wrote to ask if he might attend, but was told that this would not be possible and that matters were out of his hands. ‘I fear that these lines will not be pleasing to you’, Debye wrote, ‘but [I] consider it best for you to know how matters really stand.’ Despite the absence of much solace or sympathy in this communication, Hopf was more understanding than Ewald: ‘You obviously cannot
swim against the tide’, he graciously told Debye.

  Although the DPG made no formal move to expel its Jewish members before 1938, their position became increasingly untenable as they lost academic posts. Many left of their own accord: around sixty-five had done so by the end of 1937. The Dutch Jew Samuel Goudsmit, an overseas member of the DPG in the United States, resigned in protest at that time, saying ‘I am disappointed that the society has never as a whole protested about the sharp attacks on some of its most distinguished members.’ This was a fair criticism. The position of the DPG on the dismissals had always been that it would try to help individual members so affected while making no complaint about the principle that had created their predicament. Again, the emphasis was on what was deemed to be both effective and proper; public protests were thought to be neither. The DPG’s official proceedings made almost no mention of the expulsions, instead continuing to run meeting reports, obituaries and news about new members and business matters, as though nothing had changed. Even the emigration of such eminent figures as Franck and Born was not acknowledged.

  Nonetheless, the DPG arguably managed to evade the total ideological alignment witnessed in other scientific bodies—it never truly had a Nazi-appointed president, for example, and was slower to purge its Jewish members than was the German Chemical Society. Such laxity can hardly be considered a significant act of resistance, but it did eventually provoke official disapproval. Ever since the REM had assumed oversight of the DPG, it had sent its representative Wilhelm Dames to the society’s meetings. At the autumn joint meeting of the DPG and the German Society of Technical Physics (DTPG) in Baden-Baden in September 1938, Dames decided it was time to turn the screws. At this time the Nazis were preparing a new wave of anti-Semitic activity—the vicious Kristallnacht was just two months away—and Dames announced that all scientific societies were now to be ‘invited’ to comply with the ‘implementation of the Aryan principle’.