Serving the Reich

by Philip Ball

  Dames was disgusted by how the physicists were conducting themselves. Both the DPG and the DTPG, he wrote to State Secretary Otto Wacker on 3 October, ‘have made only slight progress in their general National Socialist conduct’. At Baden-Baden, he said, the speech of Karl Mey, then president of the DTPG, ‘conspicuously lacked National Socialist references’. Worse, in referring to the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of electromagnetic waves Mey made reference to the half-Jewish Heinrich Hertz, despite having been ‘thoroughly informed about the position and wishes of the involved ministries’. Then at the official banquet, Dames continued with indignation, Mey

  gave an impossible incoherent talk before 800 mathematicians and physicists about the most insignificant matters—he was doubtless already tipsy—at the end of which he did not propose the usual toast to the well-being of the Führer and the Reich, but drank the first glass to the societies instead . . . Dr Mey’s blunder became particularly conspicuous when Prof. Esau [Abraham Esau of the University of Jena, director of physics for the Reich Research Council], with the best of intentions, made up for the toast to the Führer shortly after Dr Mey’s speech.

  All this, Dames insisted, offended several of the scientists present, who told him that ‘it would be impossible for them to continue to participate in the societies if conditions there were not changed along with the Jew question regarding membership and contributions to the societies’ publications’.

  As a result, Dames presented Mey with an ultimatum for the DTPG and DPG (whose president Debye was not at the meeting). The two societies would merge into one, which would provide an excuse for having their articles revised ‘to current requirements’. This would be done under the supervision of either the REM or the National Socialist League of German Technicians under Fritz Todt, an engineer and long-standing senior Nazi. (Mey decided that the former would be preferable.) The new regulations, said Dames,

  would also have to provide that only citizens of the Reich can apply for regular membership and foreigners would be admitted as special members, if necessary. Furthermore, it would also have to be pointed out that Jews may not be involved in the societies’ journals, either as editors or as contributors. The acceptance of contributions from members of the Jewish race will be restricted to exceptions (and only if they are exceptionally valuable); and in the review section reviews of papers by Jews should also be avoided.

  The exceptions in Dames’ letter only made the proposed regulations more offensive, if that is possible, since they acknowledge that the alleged worthlessness of Jewish contributions to science is just a fiction to be abandoned when expedient.

  Debye saw that these developments threatened to eclipse whatever autonomy the DPG could still claim. What is more, he was under pressure from members keen to parade their National Socialist credentials. Two of these, Herbert Stuart of the University in Berlin and Wilhelm Orthmann of the Industrial College of Berlin, organized a petition calling for the resignations of Jewish members. At this stage Dames’ warning of impending changes was no more than verbal—there was never an explicit order from the authorities about expulsions, but only an ‘anticipation of obedience’. But there could be no real doubt that the DPG was facing an ultimatum, and Debye seems to have concluded that more would be salvaged by being proactive than by waiting for an official command. So on 3 December he drafted a letter, which was discussed by the society’s board and sent out on the 9th. The final version said:

  Under the compelling prevailing circumstances, the membership of German Reich Jews in the German Physical Society in the sense of the Nuremberg Laws can no longer be upheld. In agreement with the Board of Trustees I therefore summon all members who fall within this provision to inform me of their withdrawal from the society.

  Heil Hitler!

  Peter Debye

  This letter has become the key exhibit for the retrospective prosecution of Peter Debye. Not only was he prepared to accede to this most overt of anti-Semitic measures, but he signed the letter with the Nazi salutation! For Sybe Rispens, who presented this letter in his 2006 book as though it was a revelation even though historians had long known of it, this was prima facie evidence of Debye’s collaboration with the National Socialists. Others have called the DPG dismissal letter a ‘turning point’ in Debye’s relationship with the state. But in truth it was no such thing. It has been rightly pointed out that one can deplore the letter without having to deplore Debye for writing it.

  To deal with the slightest issue first: the letter simply could not have been sent without the ‘incriminating’ ‘Heil Hitler’. As Mark Walker explains, ‘In the mid-thirties all officials, including professors, were obliged to place that phrase at the end of their letters. Even Max von Laue, who was known as an anti-Nazi, used it in his letters.’ Max Delbrück, who worked under Lise Meitner in Berlin before moving to the California Institute of Technology in 1937 on a Rockefeller fellowship to study genetics, made a wry remark on the issue apropos a letter written by Laue and Otto Warburg to Rust:

  The question was how would they sign it, with ‘Heil Hitler’ or not? The choice was either ‘Heil Hitler’ or the old conventional formula, ‘Mit vorzüglicher Hochachtung’ (With our greatest respect). They discussed it for a while and finally Laue said, if he said ‘with great respect’ it would be just a big lie, so I assume they wrote ‘Heil Hitler’.

  It would be absurd to suggest that Debye approved of the letter.*5 His original draft had ‘invited’ or ‘requested’ the resignations rather than more forcefully ‘summoning’ them. On the other hand, even in the final version these withdrawals were still being requested, rather than the Jews being told that they were expelled. One could read that either way: a ‘voluntary’ resignation potentially allowed the Jewish members to preserve some dignity, but it could also be interpreted as a hypocritical attempt to appear less dictatorial. It seems clear, however, that Debye wanted the tone to be placatory, even apologetic. His eldest grandson Norwig Debye-Saxinger has said that Debye contacted the affected DPG members to convey his personal apologies. When the letter was sent, owing to a clerical error, to Lise Meitner, who had just fled the country to Denmark and Sweden and who was in any case an Austrian, Laue wrote to her on 19 December telling her to disregard it, saying that its content ‘will not have surprised you’. He added that when he and Debye added the ambivalent ‘under the prevailing compelling circumstances’—implying a reluctant acceptance of matters beyond their control—some of the National Socialist sympathizers in the DPG committee had threatened to expose them in Das Schwarze Korps—to which Debye had apparently replied ‘I couldn’t care less!’ (The original German phrase is rather more delightful: ‘Das ist mir Wurst’, literally ‘That’s sausage to me’.)

  No, Debye would surely rather have not had to send the letter. The question is whether he should have let himself be forced to do so. If he had objected as president, he would sooner or later have been removed and almost certainly replaced by someone more politically acceptable; likewise if he had resigned. What, then, would such a gesture have achieved, except tighter political control of the society? Instead, when the REM finally told Debye officially in March 1939 that ‘an immediate settlement of the Jewish question within the Physical Society would be very welcome here’, the president was able to respond that this had already been addressed, and thereby to demonstrate that the society could take care of its own affairs without intervention.

  But was the moral price worth paying for what was after all a sham independence? If Debye had indeed resigned, that would be regarded today as noble rather than self-destructive. But both Debye and Laue, who was also on the DPG board, saw things differently. The prevailing view was that, rather than indulge in gestures deemed self-centred and futile, one must sigh, act with regret, and go home telling oneself that there was really nothing else to be done. If we are to pass judgement, it must be on the moral failings of this capitulation to fate rather than with shrill accusations of anti-Semitism or collaborati
on.

  Yet what is most troubling in the DPG’s decision is the apparent absence of any moral self-examination at all. The society’s treasurer Walter Schottky, a former student of Planck, had his eye primarily on the financial and international implications. He worried that the expulsions might provoke some foreign members to resign in protest, which would not only look bad for Germany but would also eliminate the ‘quite considerable foreign currency receipts’ of their subscriptions from the society’s coffers.

  It’s not clear that Debye’s letter allayed suspicions about the society’s political soundness anyway. ‘The DPG is still very backward and still clings tightly to their dear Jews’, sniffed the Reich University Teachers League after Debye’s letter was sent out. This Nazified group scoffed at the wording of the dismissal: ‘It is in fact remarkable that only “because of circumstances beyond our control” can the membership of Jews no longer be maintained.’ As though one should have to wait for such an exigency before dismissing them! As for Debye, Wilhelm Schütz of the University of Königsberg, a member of the DPG committee and a National Socialist, considered him disgracefully soft. In a letter to Herbert Stuart, Schütz wrote that ‘the handling of the Jewish question by the DPG demonstrates that Debye lacks the necessary understanding for political questions, which is what we should have expected. At that time I tried and failed to get a clear position from the chairman and thereby come to a definitive solution of the problem.’

  The letter did not in fact affect many of the DPG’s members. Contrary to Rispens’ suggestion that it resulted in the dismissal of a third of the society’s membership, by the winter of 1938 rather few Jews remained. Estimates vary, but the numbers seem sure to have been very small; there are records of only six or seven members resigning in response to the letter by the start of January 1939.*6 Despite Schottky’s concerns, no foreign members seem to have resigned in protest, although one must allow that they may not even have known about the affair. And those ‘non-Aryans’ who did tender their resignation seem largely to have considered that the DPG was faced with no alternative. One of them was the theoretical physicist Richard Gans, who later emigrated to Latin America. ‘I can assure you’, he wrote to a German colleague in 1953, ‘that I’ve never felt bitter about my expulsion from the German Physical Society, because I knew that there was an act of “force majeure” against the will of the society.’ When the exiled Jewish scientist Kasimir Fajans was interviewed during the FBI’s investigations into Debye on his arrival in the United States in 1940 (see page 172), he admitted that he was disappointed with Debye for not having the ‘moral stamina’ to resign rather than sign the letter; but he nevertheless ‘seemed to have a very high opinion of Debye’, saying that he was ‘interested only in science and not in politics’. Of course, the limited consequences and the forgiveness of the victims hardly mitigate the morality of the act itself. Rather, Gans’ remarks say much about how the situation was regarded by all parties: almost as an act of nature, against which the individual was powerless.

  In any event, Debye and his colleagues knew that the letter was merely completing a process that had already almost run its course. Debye himself remained determined to avoid ‘political’ matters as much as possible. He was always wary of meetings and speaking invitations that had a hidden agenda, for example withdrawing from an evening lecture in Danzig in 1939 when he heard that party members would be present.*7 There is little reason to believe that he cared to ingratiate himself to the Nazis.

  Debye and the Jews

  Perhaps the most damaging charge that the DPG letter has drawn against Debye is that it reflects an underlying anti-Semitism. In support of that idea, a letter from Debye to Sommerfeld in 1912 has been adduced in which he could be said to racially derogate the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest:

  If you are thinking of getting Ehrenfest, I cannot refrain from expressing some reservations. A Jew, as he openly is, of the ‘high priest’ type can have an extremely harmful influence with his twisted Talmud logic. Many a bright, not completely ready idea, which would otherwise be expressed with bold courage, can only too easily be nipped in the bud that way.

  Others have tried to insinuate that by failing to curb the Jewish exclusions, Debye was somehow condoning them. At the KWIP, says Martijn Eickhoff (see footnote, p. 130), ‘Debye engaged in an exclusive form of German science: physics were [sic] practised at the highest level and in principle there was no longer any place there for Jewish scientists with German nationality.’

  If this is the sole evidence for Debye’s ‘anti-Semitism’, it is scarcely worth bothering with. From today’s perspective his remarks about Ehrenfest are hardly tactful—and misplaced anyway, for Ehrenfest was a physicist of the first rank—but at worst they exemplify the pervasive racial and cultural stereotyping of the early twentieth century. The same applies to Debye’s remark to Sommerfeld, after Ehrenfest had secured an appointment at Leiden, partly on the recommendation of Einstein: ‘I think that the racial issue played a part, even if perhaps at a more unconscious level.’ There is here a hint of the common prejudice that the Jews look after their own, but such an immature remark by a young man is scant reason for a verdict of trenchant anti-Semitism.

  No one who knew Debye, including Jewish friends and colleagues such as his student Heinrich Sack (see below), has recorded the slightest suspicion that he harboured antipathy towards Jews. Debye’s son Peter insists that his father ‘was not interested if [a] man was Jewish or not Jewish or whatever the situation was; he was interested if the man had good ideas’—a testimony that, if no more than what filial devotion might command, nonetheless rings true.

  In his 2008 report on Debye commissioned by the NIOD, Martijn Eickhoff seemed determined to prove otherwise. Armed with a tiny collection of these and other injudicious but ambiguous comments from Debye’s early career, he asserts that the absence of such comments in his later years shows Debye concluded that anti-Semitism would no longer work to his advantage. I suspect this may be the first ever suggestion that public displays of anti-Semitism could be bad for your prospects in Nazi Germany.

  Eickhoff’s flimsy insinuations not only defame Debye but also cloud the whole issue of how to think about the response of the German scientists to the oppression of the Jews. It is all too tempting to suppose that no one would have tolerated the anti-Semitic laws without protest unless they were secretly in favour of them, and likewise that no one would have helped a Jew unless they were an anti-Nazi activist. Mark Walker has lamented this insistence on simple formulae:

  Today, among . . . contemporary Germans, if a German saved one Jew or if he stood up for the ideas of one Jew once, then this man was not an anti-Semite. However, among several Jewish scientists, Jews of today, if a German once did not stand up for a Jew, or once helped persecute a Jew, or once helped persecute the ideas of a Jew, then this man is an anti-Semite. And there’s really no chance for compromise there.

  Such attitudes, Walker rightly implies, wholly misunderstand the situation. For one thing, there was no stigma to being an anti-Semite in Germany (or Austria, or indeed most of Europe) in the early part of the century, and the National Socialist regime removed any vestigial inhibitions on that score—indeed, they made anti-Jewish sentiment a social and professional virtue. So there is simply no reason why latent anti-Semitism need surface only in unguarded remarks made in private. The real problem was not that there were hordes of closet anti-Semites, but that those who were not tainted with that prejudice felt so little compulsion to deplore it. If you were not Jewish, then on the whole it was a matter that didn’t concern you, even if you abhorred injustice and brutality. This is why Debye, like so many in Germany, was very ready to help his Jewish colleagues while making no public protest about the measures that had caused their difficulties. Heinrich Sack, for instance, was an able assistant to Debye in Zurich and Leipzig, and in 1933 Debye helped to arrange a position for him at Cornell University. He also assisted the Jewish chemist Hermann Salmang in fi
nding a job with a Maastricht ceramics firm after being dismissed from a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1935.

  Far more notable was Debye’s role in the departure from Germany of a particularly significant Jewish scientist, at no small hazard to himself. It was a loss that may have cost Germany dearly in wartime, but for which the rest of the world should be thankful. For shortly after she escaped, with Debye’s help, to Copenhagen, Lise Meitner conceived of the theory of nuclear fission.

  Escape from Berlin

  Meitner was one of the few Jewish scientists who managed to retain an academic post until just before the war began. True, she was dismissed from her position at the University of Berlin in 1933, barred from speaking at scientific meetings, and all but erased from the official narrative of German nuclear physics during that time, so that her joint discoveries with Otto Hahn at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry were attributed to him alone. Yet she was able to stay in active research at the institute until 1938.

  When German troops entered Austria on 12 March that year to be greeted by adoring crowds, being an Austrian Jew in Berlin was no longer merely anomalous but perilous. Events in Vienna made it very apparent what the Anschluss implied: Jews there were turned out of their homes, many were brutally beaten and spat on in the streets, some were murdered. Nazi sympathizers at the KWIC no longer moderated their language—the fanatical Nazi chemist Kurt Hess, next to whom Meitner had had to live for several years, proclaimed that ‘the Jewess endangers this institute’. It was an outrage to the likes of Hess that, while the institute for physical chemistry had long since purged its staff of non-Aryans after Haber’s departure and aligned itself to the regime, the chemistry institute’s director Hahn still permitted them to remain.