by Philip Ball
Although no one could accuse Hahn of having sympathy for National Socialism, his response to the crisis in 1938 does him no credit. He went to speak with the institute’s sponsors, the Emil-Fischer-Gesellschaft, and returned on 20 March to tell Meitner that she must leave. He had been Meitner’s closest colleague for twenty years; now he presented himself as little more than a courier bearing bad news. ‘He has, in essence, thrown me out’, Meitner recorded angrily in her diary. Hahn’s wife felt shamed by the situation, which may have contributed to a nervous breakdown.
Meitner was arguably the best nuclear scientist in Germany, and neither the KWG’s director general Ernst Telschow nor its president Carl Bosch wanted her to quit. Both they and she hoped that a way might be found for her to continue her research, which seemed to be on the verge of something important. Her friends abroad were deeply worried. Debye’s former colleague Paul Scherrer wrote from Zurich inviting her to come and deliver a talk, and Bohr did likewise in Copenhagen; both were evidently offering escape routes from Germany. Yet still she hesitated, and weeks and months went by. By the time Meitner realized that emigration was the only realistic option and agreed to go to Copenhagen, where her favourite nephew Otto Frisch was working with Bohr, it was too late: she was refused a visa for Denmark.
Bohr, passing through Berlin on 6 June, was told by Debye that there was no great urgency about getting Meitner out of the country. He was mistaken: on the 14th Meitner learnt that not only was her resignation from the KWIC now expected, but that all technicians and academics were to be prohibited from leaving Germany. The Reich Interior Ministry wrote to Bosch on the 16th, saying that
political objections exist to issuing a foreign passport to Prof. M[eitner]. It is considered undesirable that renowned Jews travel from Germany abroad to act as representatives of German science or even, using their name and experience, to act in accordance with their inherent attitude against Germany. The KWG could surely find a way for Prof. M to continue to remain in Germany following her resignation as well and, as the case may be, to also work privately in the interest of the society.
The note added that Himmler himself had confirmed this view—evidently Meitner’s case was now known to him.
Debye wrote at once to Bohr in coded terms that never once mentioned Meitner but left no doubt about the meaning:
When we last spoke, I assumed everything was quite all right, but in the meantime it has become clear to me that circumstances have substantially changed . . . I now believe it would be good if something could happen as soon as possible . . . I have taken the responsibility of writing all this myself, so that you can see that I too concur with the opinion of the concerned party.
Bohr passed the letter to the physicist Dirk Coster, an old friend of Meitner at the University of Groningen, who had discovered the element hafnium in 1923 while working in Copenhagen with Hungarian radiochemist Georg de Hevesy. Coster had been arranging emergency help for several refugee scientists coming to Holland from Germany, and had already written to Meitner in May to invite her abroad. He and his colleague Adriaan Fokker in Haarlem began seeking a position and funds for her, but with little success: most potential donors had already committed what financial resources they had. Coster and Fokker petitioned the Dutch government directly to permit Meitner’s entry, and were granted permission when an unsalaried post was found for her at Leiden at the end of June.
But there was hardly any money to pay for her keep. With that in mind, Coster decided to go to Berlin to see for himself if Meitner’s departure was absolutely necessary—not even he and Fokker yet grasped the real urgency of her situation. He wrote to Debye saying that he was coming to look for an ‘assistant’. By coincidence, at the same time Meitner was offered a position in Stockholm alongside the Nobel laureate physicist Manne Siegbahn. She accepted, and Coster cancelled his trip, assuming that all was now in hand.
It wasn’t. Meitner had planned to leave for Stockholm in August, but on 4 July Bosch told her that the plans to prevent scientists from leaving Germany were to be enforced imminently. It was now or never. Debye alerted Coster by letter on the 6th:
The assistant we talked about, who had made what seemed like a firm decision, sought me out once again . . . He is now completely convinced (this has happened in the last few days) that he would rather go to Groningen, indeed that this is the only avenue open to him . . . I believe he is right and therefore I want to ask whether you can still do anything for him . . . If you come to Berlin may I ask you to be sure to stay with us, and (providing of course that the circumstances are still favourable) if you were to come rather soon—as if you received an SOS—that would give my wife and me even greater pleasure.
It wasn’t until 11 July that Coster received confirmation from officials in The Hague that Meitner would be admitted into the Netherlands. He set out at once for Berlin, where he stayed with the Debyes.
Only four people in Germany, aside from Meitner herself, knew of the plan to get her out: Debye, Hahn, Laue, and the science editor Paul Rosbaud, whose work for the KWG’s journal Naturwissenschaften had brought him into close contact with most of the country’s leading physical scientists. Coster had planned for Meitner to leave on the 13th; she spent the previous day working at the institute from early in the morning until 8 p.m., when she left to quickly pack her two small suitcases, assisted by a nervous Hahn. Rosbaud then drove the two of them to Hahn’s house, where she spent the night. There Hahn made slight but poignant amends for his earlier failure to defend her by giving Meitner a diamond ring inherited from his mother, as an emergency fund.
After dark on the 13th, Rosbaud drove Meitner to the train station. There they met Coster, who boarded with her, and they travelled across the border without incident. It was nonetheless a deeply harrowing journey for Meitner, who at one point lost her nerve and begged Rosbaud to turn back as they headed for the station. ‘At the Dutch border’, she later recalled,
I got the scare of my life when a Nazi military patrol of five men going through the coaches picked up my Austrian passport, which had expired long ago. I got so frightened, my heart almost stopped beating. I knew that the Nazis had just declared open season on Jews, that the hunt was on. For ten minutes I sat there and waited, ten minutes that seemed like so many hours. Then one of the Nazi officials returned and handed me back the passport without a word.
It was a narrower escape than even she recognized. Meitner’s Nazi neighbour Kurt Hess had realized that something was afoot and sent a note to the authorities to alert them. Only delaying tactics by two sympathetic policemen prevented Meitner’s arrest.
Once in Groningen, Coster sent a telegram to Hahn to say that the ‘baby’ had arrived. As the news spread, Wolfgang Pauli sent a characteristically witty note to Coster: ‘You have made yourself as famous for the abduction of Lise Meitner as for [the discovery of] hafnium!’
Debye’s defenders have argued that his actions in this case could not possibly be those of an anti-Semitic Nazi collaborator. And of course they could not. The political clampdown in 1938 meant that even Debye could no longer avoid the consequences of Nazi rule. But his courageous and humane intervention in Meitner’s flight must still be seen within the broader context of life in the Third Reich. We should not imagine that Debye’s assistance to Meitner, however praiseworthy, ‘explains’ anything: it was an act of human compassion towards a colleague, and does not in itself make Debye an anti-Nazi activist. Consider, for example, the case of Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s English daughter-in-law, who admired and befriended Hitler yet also saved several Jewish artists from the Gestapo.
In any event, Debye did not display much sensitivity in the matter. Even allowing for the caution that censorship of mail would recommend, his letter to Meitner in Sweden in November 1938 has a callow heartiness which seems to imply that her traumatic escape was just a brief distraction from the important business of doing science:
I very much hope that by now you have found your feet in your
new setting. That should not be difficult and with that everything has been settled. For as I know you, you will then automatically be completely happy because from that moment on you will be able to live entirely for science again.
On the other hand, Martijn Eickhoff’s attempt to turn the Meitner incident against Debye is contrived and incoherent. It was, says Eickhoff, ‘connected with a survival mechanism of ambiguity that Debye had developed and [was] primarily motivated by the desire to maintain the interests of his German science network; in the end [it] also rendered his own position secure’. How an action universally approved of by the few who knew about it supported a ‘survival mechanism of ambiguity’ is anyone’s guess—Eickhoff seems to invoke the bizarre image of Debye contriving to help a Jew in one case and then banishing others from the DPG the next, purely to keep his options open and his colleagues guessing. Likewise, to suggest that Debye, Nobel laureate, head of the DPG and director of the KWIP, was somehow furthering his own interests by doing what other anti-Nazi scientists had been doing for several years is ludicrous. But the real failing of these accusations is to imagine that morality is a one-dimensional affair, a single axis along which our actions shift us between the poles of sainthood and depravity.
The spy
If we want to see what genuine opposition could look like in Nazi Germany, we should turn to Paul Rosbaud, one of the key orchestrators of Meitner’s escape. Rosbaud was what we would now call a networker, intimately acquainted with most of the key physical scientists in Germany and abroad. His professional acumen in science communication and publishing led him after the war to set up the Oxford-based scientific and medical publishing house Pergamon Press with the later media magnate Robert Maxwell.
In National Socialist Germany, Rosbaud was not simply an anti-Nazi; he was a spy working for British intelligence, and his activities are somewhat inconvenient for those who argue that there was very little one could do genuinely to oppose Hitler’s regime. Rosbaud opposed them in every way he could, at immense personal risk, and in exploits that seem plucked straight out of a Boy’s Own post-war fiction. He joined the Nazi Party to gather information at high levels, he sometimes posed as a member of the German armed forces, and he supplied the Allies with important information on both the heavy-water operations for wartime nuclear research and the V-2 rocket work at Peenemünde. It is generally recognized that he was the informant code-named the Griffin by MI6, although, despite recent legal cases to force disclosure of official wartime secrets, this has never been officially confirmed.
Rosbaud’s motive for aiding the Allies was simple: he despised Hitler’s agenda. An Austrian from Graz, he studied science in Darmstadt and Berlin*8 before working for the mining, metallurgical and chemicals conglomerate Metallgesellschaft AG in Frankfurt. He became a scientific adviser for the Berlin-based metallurgical magazine Metallwirtschaft, in which capacity Rosbaud began to travel widely to visit scientists in Oxford and Cambridge, Copenhagen, Oslo and elsewhere. He got to know Einstein, Bohr, Rutherford, Hahn and Meitner, and served as an adviser to various scientific organizations in Europe. His horizons were broad indeed: his brother Hans was a leading conductor in Germany and a friend of Paul Hindemith, and Rosbaud enjoyed the lively, permissive milieu of Weimar Berlin, befriending artists such as the Bauhaus director Walter Gropius.
Some time in the early 1930s Rosbaud met the English intelligence agent Francis Edward Foley, who was working under cover at the British legation in Berlin as a passport control officer. It seems likely that their acquaintance began after the Nazis came to power, when Rosbaud began helping Jews to leave Germany and encountered Foley doing the same thing. Rosbaud never knew if he was ‘officially’ Aryan himself—he was illegitimate and had no knowledge of his father. This meant he was unable to provide evidence of his Aryan heritage as required in 1933. But he knew how to exploit the inefficiencies, loopholes and laziness of the Nazi bureaucracy, and simply enlisted an old family friend in Graz to masquerade as his father.
Rosbaud started to pass potentially useful information to Foley on an informal basis. Now an adviser to the publisher Springer Verlag, which produced the multidisciplinary Naturwissenschaften, Rosbaud was well placed to gather details of military-oriented research in Germany. Naturwissenschaften was edited by the Jew Arnold Berliner until Springer bowed to government pressure and removed him in 1935. To the disgust of the National Socialists, who arranged a boycott of the journal, it continued to accept articles by Jewish authors.
By April 1938 it became clear that neither Rosbaud’s wife Hilde nor their daughter Angela could safely stay in the country. With Foley’s help, Hilde obtained a visa for England, where she was soon joined by her daughter. Rosbaud could have left too, but elected to remain and fight the Nazis. Besides, the arrangement suited him, for it meant that his long-term lover could move into his house; he cared for his family, but his were the ways of a Weimar libertine. In 1939 he colluded with Foley to secure the ‘denial’ of his own application for an English visa, establishing a convincing cover for his informant activities. Around 1940 his link with the British Secret Service was made official: he subsequently reported to Eric Welsh of MI6, who oversaw much of the intelligence-gathering on German science.
It’s not clear what Rosbaud told the Allies during the war. Arnold Kramish alleged that he was the author of the anonymous Oslo Report sent to the British legation in late 1939, an important document that described a range of German ‘secret weapons’ and military strategies. However, the British officer in charge of scientific intelligence, Reginald Victor Jones, revealed in his memoirs published in 1989 that the report was the work of the industrial physicist Hans Ferdinand Mayer. Rosbaud did take part in the ‘day of wisdom’ visit to Peenemünde orchestrated (perhaps with a distinct lack of wisdom) by Wernher von Braun in 1941, allowing him to supply Welsh with a report on the rocket programme. In 1942 he travelled to Oslo in military uniform (probably of the Luftwaffe) to pass on information about German nuclear research to the Norwegian resistance, from where it could reach Welsh. It was partly through Rosbaud’s efforts that the Allies kept track of the German efforts to harness nuclear energy using heavy water made at a Norwegian hydroelectric plant, which was consequently the focus of attacks by the resistance and British bombers.
How Rosbaud survived the war without being discovered seems to have been a mystery even to him. ‘The last years have not passed without leaving marks upon me’, he wrote to his brother Hans in 1946. ‘There were too many in the underground who could not be saved and, at the end, only I slipped through by a hair’s breadth. My hatred of the Nazis has not diminished.’ Bound by British secrecy law, and in any case not one for self-glorification, he said nothing subsequently about his clandestine wartime activities.
That Rosbaud knew Debye and maintained cordial relations with him after the war is unremarkable in itself, for Rosbaud knew everyone. Nonetheless, this friendship has been advanced by chemist Jurrie Reiding in defence of Debye’s good character. Reiding has even claimed that Debye may have given Rosbaud information about German military research in the late 1930s. ‘Debye moved, as a prominent scientist and science manager, in higher Nazi circles’, Reiding writes. ‘He was on the board of the German Academy for Aviation Research and met Goering personally. Debye must have had thorough knowledge of German war technology . . . Therefore, the hypothesis that Debye was a secret informant for Rosbaud does not appear too bold.’
Neither, sadly, does it appear to be anywhere supported by hard evidence—Reiding can adduce only some ambiguous statements in a letter from Rosbaud to Debye after the latter had left Germany for the United States in 1940. Besides, although there is no doubt that Debye disliked the Nazis, friendship with Rosbaud is no gauge of political persuasion: for example, he also seems to have felt genuine regard for the geologist Friedrich Drescher-Kaden, who was an ardent Nazi.
If we wish to find heroes in the tale that this book relates, Rosbaud comes as close as anyone. But it is of doubtful
value to demand why there were not more like him among the German physicists. Not only is this degree of courage and resourcefulness exceptional, but the idea of actually aiding ‘the enemy’, rather than merely trying to moderate the excesses of the German leaders, would have been anathema to most Germans, insistent as they were on the false distinction between loyalty to the fatherland and loyalty to the government. It’s more instructive to recognize that there was no ambiguity about Rosbaud—we do not need to piece together his attitude towards the Nazis from hints, stray comments, ambivalent actions. This is what true active opposition and moral responsibility looked like. Rosbaud did not deplore the weaker responses in other less resolute individuals but, as we will see, he was a rather astute judge of character and not easily deceived by retrospective self-justification. He saw what went on, he spoke his mind, and he offers one of the most reliable moral compasses through the maze.
8
‘I have seen my death!’
When Max Planck promised Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels that the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics would explore new areas in ‘the field of atomic physics’, leading to ‘revolutionary innovations in public life’, he was alluding to possibilities in nuclear physics that he and his colleagues had only just begun to glimpse. They had discovered that the atomic nucleus harbours unimagined energy, and they suspected that a way might be found to unlock and harness it.
Even allowing for the compression of time that the backward glance imposes, the path from the discovery of atomic structure to the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seems frighteningly rapid. It happened within a generation: Marie Curie, who was there at the start, could reasonably have been expected to witness the devastation of the Japanese cities, had she not succumbed eleven years earlier to a particularly lethal form of anaemia induced by exposure to nuclear radiation in her research.