Serving the Reich

by Philip Ball

  Debye’s departure was painful; he must have suspected that it would be hard, if not impossible, to return. ‘I had to give up all these beautiful laboratories which I had built’, he recalled wistfully in 1964. ‘It cost a few million, you see. I had everything the way I wanted it—these high voltages and so on and at Cornell they had nothing.’

  A society at war

  Debye’s abrupt departure left the German Physical Society without a chairman. His deputy Jonathan Zenneck stepped in until a new leader could be selected—a process that was inevitably politicized. The Nazi sympathizers on the committee, Stuart, Schütz and Orthmann, favoured the experimental physicist Abraham Esau at Jena, who was head of the physics section of the Reich Research Council and had been a party member since 1933. But the moderates were able to engineer the election of Carl Ramsauer, an industrial physicist who, like Bosch at the KWG, could be considered politically sound while being somewhat insulated from state interference. Ramsauer was a former student of Lenard, but shared none of his mentor’s rabid anti-Semitism. He was a conservative and nationalist but not a party member. Ramsauer set the DPG on a course of partial, voluntary alignment. He implemented the Führer principle, as stipulated in the society’s new statutes of 1940 over which Debye had dragged his heels, and he acknowledged that the DPG had a duty to contribute to national defence. But he exercised that duty by strengthening ties with what had now become the German military-industrial complex, which was powerful enough to operate on its own terms and set its own (self-interested) priorities rather than being dictated to by the government.

  This strategy gave Ramsauer a strong hand for obtaining more funds for physics. He emphasized the discipline’s importance for national security at every opportunity, and in 1942 the DPG felt bold enough to complain to Rust that the fiction of a ‘Jewish physics’ had been so damaging that ‘German physics has lost its former supremacy to American physics and is in danger of continuing to lag behind’. True, the scientists didn’t expect a favourable response, and in the event they got none, owing to Rust’s notorious sloth and inefficiency. So the DPG began to exploit the greater interest in their work shown by other factions in the Nazi bureaucracy, particularly the head of armaments Albert Speer and Air Marshal Hermann Goering.

  Nuclear research was particularly valuable for gaining traction with the authorities. In March 1942 Ramsauer told General Georg Thomas, head of the Military Economic and Armaments Office, that ‘the large-scale research [in America] in the area of nuclear disintegration could one day become a great danger for us’. As a result of these petitions, says historian Klaus Hentschel, there was an ‘increasing acceptance of physics by the Nazi authorities’ during the later years of the war. Goebbels himself was ready to admit the wounds that Nazi policies had inflicted on their scientific capacity (while finding a suitable scapegoat), writing that

  our technical development both in the realm of submarines and of air war is far inferior to that of the English and the Americans. We are now getting the reward for our poor leadership on the scientific front, which did not show the necessary initiative to stimulate the willingness of scientists to cooperate. You just can’t let an absolute nitwit [meaning Rust] head German science for years and not expect to be punished for such folly.

  As a result of this belated enlightenment, science became rather well supported as the war progressed, even while the German economy as a whole became increasingly parlous. The KWG saw its funds swell from a budget of 5.5 million Reichsmarks in 1932 to 14.3 million in 1944. Ramsauer also won exemptions from active military service for many physicists, arguing that while the army could surely bear 3,000 fewer men, ‘3,000 more physicists could perhaps decide the war’. By the time he made this appeal, most people knew that the war was already decided—but naturally that only enhanced the impact of such promises. The petition was rather too late, however: of 6,000 scientists who the Nazis tried to recall from combat in 1944, only 4,000 returned, the others being either already dead or untraceable. Besides, some of these scientists decided not to waste their efforts on a war that was already as good as over, and so they used military contracts to pursue what were really just academic studies, while claiming that these were of profound military significance. On this basis, Max von Laue justified publishing a book on the theory of diffraction which could not be of the slightest value to the military. ‘If someone wanted to research persistently through the files of the final years of the war’, Laue wrote in 1946, ‘he would notice that absolutely everything conducted in science was “decisive for the war effort”.’

  Debye in America

  Debye’s arrival at Cornell was regarded with much suspicion. Why had he left it so late to leave Germany, unless he felt some loyalty to the country? At the end of August 1940, Samuel Goudsmit wrote to the FBI to say that

  Some of my colleagues think that [Debye’s] new position here may bring him into contact with scientific defense work and that he may have an influence upon the choice of personnel for that work. They fear that he is not reliable. My own opinion is that these suspicions are primarily caused by professional jealousy. I hope that I am right. Nevertheless the case seems important to me. Debye is such an outstanding man in his field with broad practical experience that it would be a serious handicap if, in an emergency our country would be unable to use his valuable knowledge because of unfounded suspicions. It seems in any case highly advisable to make sure just where he stands.

  It is possible in principle that Debye could indeed have intended to spy for the Nazis in America, and there have been recent speculations to that effect. But this would contradict just about everything else we know about his attitude to Hitler’s regime, and indeed about his character and conduct both before and after the war. The idea lacks not only evidence but logic and psychological plausibility.

  The FBI could not have known that, and it launched an extensive investigation on Debye, interviewing many of his peers and colleagues. The responses were strikingly polarized. People who had been close to Debye in Germany tended to speak well of him, to recommend him as a man of integrity who did not dabble in politics but lived only for science. But a few of those whose relationship was more distant were wary and critical. Several of them were Jewish émigrés; Goudsmit himself told the investigators that although he had not seen Debye since 1931, he was ‘suspicious of him, but this has no basis in facts’. The Polish radiochemist Kasimir Fajans, who left Germany in 1935, stated that Debye would turn a blind eye to anything problematic when expedient; another Jewish Pole, the physicist Roman Smoluchowski, who escaped from Warsaw in 1939 to come to Princeton, pronounced him ‘extremely mercenary as a scientist’. The German physicist Rudolf Ladenburg, who had worked at the KWIPC and the University of Berlin before emigrating to Princeton in 1932, concurred, saying that Debye was ‘not loyal even to the field of science, where money was involved’. Russian-born physicist Gregory Breit at the University of Wisconsin, who had been in the United States since the 1920s, attested that he could not rule out the possibility that Debye was working for the Nazis against his will. Others mistrusted him apparently because of his very brilliance. Wolfgang Pauli warned that Debye ‘could not be trusted’ and claimed that he was ‘in all probability very sympathetic to the German cause’—an accusation characteristic of the abrasive Pauli in being both withering and unfair. In America Debye rarely spoke about his attitude to Hitler’s regime—an unidentified FBI interviewee stated that he ‘has no emotional reaction whatever to the whole Nazi question’—but there seems little reason to doubt the testimony of Harvard chemist Frederick Keyes in 1940 that ‘Debye detests thoroughly all about Hitler and the Nazi government.’

  Potentially most damaging was the testimony of the most authoritative of the Jewish German physicists, Einstein. Although he never made it explicit, Einstein evidently did not think highly of Debye’s morality. As the FBI report attests,

  Einstein advised that he has never heard anything wrong concerning Debye but that he kno
ws the man well enough not to trust him; that he Einstein would accept things that Debye says as a scientist as being true but would not accept things that Debye says as a man as necessarily being true. Einstein continued that Debye is a very shrewd man of extraordinary intelligence, very versatile and having extraordinary ability to reach his goals and knows what to do to obtain immediate and personal advancement. Einstein said that he believes Debye is not a person of high loyalty and will use anything for his own advantage. Einstein stated that Debye acted very suspiciously abroad and did not act as a Dutchman. In explanation of this, Einstein said that Debye’s colleagues abroad had been persecuted since 1933 and that he [Debye] in no way tried to help them and did not attempt to aid them in securing positions elsewhere.

  This is a peculiar statement, not least because it is incorrect in the last respect. One can argue about the moral basis for his actions, but Debye evidently had helped persecuted colleagues to leave Germany and find posts elsewhere, including his assistants Heinrich Sack and Willem van der Grinten, and of course Lise Meitner. That Einstein was apparently prepared so definitively to make these claims without knowing exactly what had transpired in Germany since 1933 does him little credit.

  Einstein went on to sow seeds of doubt about Debye’s loyalties:

  Einstein said that he does not believe Debye’s work [at the KWIP] concerns military affairs but that Debye is capable of performing such work. He said that Debye may be all right but that if Debye’s motives are bad he is a very dangerous man. He also stated that Debye would be a good man for [German] espionage work as he has the facility of organization to perform such work. He said that it was his unbiased opinion that Debye should not be trusted with military secrets of the United States government, unless it has first been ascertained that Debye had severed all relations with German officials.

  It isn’t clear why Einstein had so jaundiced a view of Debye. When they first met around 1917, Einstein referred to him in only favourable terms, an ‘unspoiled soul’ whose scientific abilities he held in great regard. Gijs van Ginkel, the former managing director of the Debye Institute at the University of Utrecht, suspects that the relationship might have soured in the 1920s because the Debyes knew through a mutual friend in Zurich all the details of Einstein’s rather shabby treatment of his first wife Mileva Marić, and that Mathilde Debye made no secret of her disapproval. Debye’s opinion of Einstein seems to have declined too—his sister Caroline stated in 1970 that ‘he found Einstein in fact to be a windbag, a person who had been made too much of’. Debye may have resented Einstein for squashing his chances of gaining a professorship at Leiden University in 1912 by nominating Paul Ehrenfest instead.

  In any event, Einstein’s distrust caused Debye some discomfort, especially after Einstein received a strange letter from Europe in the spring of 1940. It was brought to his home in Princeton by a British intelligence agent, having been spotted in the mail by the censors. The letter was from a man in Switzerland who Einstein didn’t know, named Feadler (as the FBI transcribed it) or some such. (Possibly its author was one Hans-Werner Fiedler, on whose doctoral thesis under Heisenberg Debye had acted as an assessor.) This letter warned that Debye was close to Hermann Goering (which was true) and had quite possibly come to the US for a ‘secret purpose’, which the author hoped Einstein might establish.

  That last suggestion was mere conjecture. Nonetheless, ‘since I had no possibility to investigate the statements made in this letter’, Einstein later explained,

  I gave the information to one of my colleagues here with whom I am befriended. This was self-evident duty . . . Under the circumstances, I could not take the responsibility to throw the letter into the wastebasket.

  He passed the letter on to the palaeographer Elias Avery Lowe at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, who in turn forwarded it to a ‘Jewish academic’ at Cornell. The authorities there advised Debye of the charges.

  Unsurprisingly, Debye wrote rather stiffly to Einstein. ‘Those suspicions are entirely groundless’, he said. ‘I have left Germany because I was asked to change my Dutch citizenship into a German citizenship. [I] decided some months ago that under no circumstances would I return to Germany.’ According to the president of Cornell, Edmund Day, Debye dismissed the ‘Feadler’ letter as ‘symptomatic of the kind of hysteria which we are doubtless in for’. Day assured Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation that he ‘has every confidence that Debye is honest and loyal’.

  Einstein mentioned the ‘Feadler’ letter in his interview with the FBI, but Robert Ogden, dean of liberal arts at Cornell, considered it ‘the result of Jewish prejudice’—that is, of the bitterness that those forced out of Germany felt against others who, unaffected by the Nazi edicts, seemed heedless of their plight by remaining. Whether or not this accounts for Einstein’s feelings, he made them plain enough. When a reception dinner was held at Princeton to honour Debye in June 1940, Einstein ‘declined to attend’, according to Weaver. At that event, Weaver was told by the mathematician Oswald Veblen that ‘some of Debye’s colleagues obviously considered that he had been too tardy in coming to his conclusion [that he] could no longer associate himself in any way’ with Germany.

  Not all Jewish émigrés judged Debye harshly. James Franck, who would probably have headed the KWIP instead of Debye had he not been expelled from Göttingen, asserted to the FBI that ‘Debye is a man of high character and high ideals, he is totally trustworthy and would be totally loyal to the American government.’ But it is notable how differently Debye appeared when seen from afar, compared with the impression he tended to make at close quarters. Something about his manner in the world left the likes of Einstein and Goudsmit uneasy in a way that can’t be ascribed simply to professional jealousy.

  It took the American authorities the best part of four years to decide that Debye could be trusted. In April of 1944 the Army Service Forces stated that it saw no reason why he should not be permitted to participate in classified military research. By that stage it hardly mattered.

  Life in wartime

  Debye had already been contributing to the Allied war effort as best he could. As the FBI report noted, he wasted no time in telling scientists in America what the German physicists were up to in Berlin. Two weeks after his ship docked in New York, he met with Weaver to explain the situation. As Weaver put it:

  The army has made this move [at the KWIP] because of their hope (which Debye considers quite misplaced) that a group of German physicists working feverishly with Debye’s excellent high tension equipment will be able to devise some method of tapping atomic or subatomic energies in a practical way; or will hit upon some atomic disintegration process which will furnish Germany with a completely irresistible offensive weapon. That this is indeed the army’s hope and plan is supposed to be a great secret, and Debye himself is not supposed to know this. Nor is anyone supposed to know the German physicists who are entering into this scheme, although Debye has already told us who these are. Debye says that these German physicists very definitely have their tongues in their cheeks. With Debye they consider it altogether improbable that they will be able to accomplish any of the purposes the army has in mind; but, in the meantime, they will have a splendid opportunity to carry on some fundamental research in nuclear physics. On the whole Debye is inclined to consider the situation a good joke on the German Army. He says that those in authority are so completely stupid that they will never be able to find out whether the German physicists are or are not doing what they are supposed to do.

  Notice that Debye was not trying here to undermine Germany’s military research programme. Rather, he passed on this information with the view that it was of no real consequence, believing that the nuclear work was a waste of time and indeed little more than a joke. He told an American magazine for Dutch immigrants at the end of 1942 that ‘the chances are infinitely against the development of any really new and astounding weapons, on either side in the present war. Any “new” weapons will only be develop
ments of or improvements upon the present instruments of combat.’ That is not quite what the German physicists themselves believed, as we shall see. In any event, the information that Debye freely revealed about the German uranium research provided an important stimulus for the intensive effort at Los Alamos. It was this information that Einstein (evidently trusting Debye’s words and intentions at least to this extent) and Leo Szilard drew upon in their second letter to President Roosevelt in April 1940 imploring him to support large-scale research on the liberation of nuclear energy.

  Debye’s defenders today are understandably dismayed that his accusers can and will damn him for his actions in America whatever he did. If he had shown no interest in war research, that would have exposed lingering German sympathies. But since Debye did conduct defence work, he was clearly an opportunist, ingratiating himself with whoever held the reins of power.

  Yet if Debye was willing to conduct war work for the Allies but not for the Nazis, doesn’t that in fact show where his sympathies lay?

  It doesn’t show this at all. As Debye himself admitted to Einstein, he left Germany not because he objected to the military orientation foisted on the KWIP but because he could not retain his post unless he became a German citizen. Whether, had he been allowed to keep his Dutch passport, Debye would have stayed and pursued uranium research can only be a matter of speculation. While we simply do not know how ready he would have been to work for the German Army, it seems unlikely that he would have had any qualms about working on applications of nuclear energy per se. When asked by a Dutch newspaper in 1948 whether he had been involved in the American nuclear research, he evasively replied: ‘I could have done so, of course—we had already carried out researches in this area in Berlin—but as a Dutch citizen I did not consider it right. Besides, I had found other work at Cornell.’ This is a highly disingenuous remark. Not only is it unclear why being a Dutch citizen would in itself make nuclear work ‘not right’, but Debye knew very well that the real reason he was not asked to join the Manhattan Project was that he had no security clearance. It is no wonder that some people, then and now, accuse Debye of arranging facts to suit himself.