Serving the Reich

by Philip Ball

  Instead of nuclear physics, Debye undertook rather more prosaic assignments for the war effort. He studied insulating materials used for radar systems, partly in collaboration with Bell Laboratories, which applied for permission to involve him in 1941. The company was told in December that Debye ‘should not be entrusted with any confidential navy matter’.

  Most importantly from both the scientific and military perspectives, Debye helped to develop synthetic rubber, sorely needed by the military after the American sources of rubber in the Far East were cut off by the Japanese offensive. Debye figured out how, by looking at the patterns in light passed through cloudy solutions of polymers, one could deduce the average sizes of the long-chain molecules. This solved an important problem in the young field of polymer science, and Debye’s results are still valuable today. He also worked on the theory of the flexibility and elasticity of these materials.

  Debye’s participation even in these defence projects was initially treated with almost farcical caution. He was allowed to visit defencerelated establishments or labs for meetings only if accompanied by a military policeman—as if, as one colleague put it, he might otherwise storm the place and blow it up. Debye’s colleagues found these restrictions both comical and deplorable. William Baker, a former director of Bell Laboratories, who worked on the radar project alongside Debye, commented that Debye ‘took it with immense good humour and, of course, endeared himself so quickly to the guards that they probably could have been enlisted on his side in any venture that he wished’.

  Letters to Berlin

  Had Debye really renounced Germany for good? According to his grandson Norwig Debye-Saxinger,

  Accepting the Baker [Cornell] lectureship was playing for time. He felt he had to get an employment commitment sufficient to bring over his wife and daughter . . . In the US, no one who dealt directly with Debye was confused about his intentions: he was here to stay and determined to keep his son here and bring his wife and daughter over.

  This claim is somewhat supported by Weaver’s comment in mid-April 1940 that ‘Debye has now practically definitely decided to remain in the United States.’ The Rockefeller Foundation awarded him a grant of $17,000 for research at Cornell over a period of three years. On 17 June Debye signed a contract for a permanent position at Cornell, becoming head of the department. This contract made Mathilde, then still in Switzerland, eligible for a US visa. Even if Debye had not yet decided to emigrate to the United States when he boarded the Conte di Savoia, then, it appears that this decision was made soon enough. There seems to be little to argue about here.

  But there is. The view of Sybe Rispens, reiterated in Martijn Eickhoff’s report for the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, is that Debye maintained secret contact with the German authorities while in America, hoping to ‘keep the back door open’ so that he might slip back into his post the moment this became feasible. In other words, he was acting as a shameless opportunist, his apparent allegiance to the United States being no more than a matter of expediency.

  It’s true that Debye never formally served notice of termination for his directorship of the KWIP, and seemed keen to keep the matter open. In the spring of 1940, as the agreed six-month period of absence approached, Bernhard Rust wrote to Debye at Cornell to ask what his plans were. He could conceivably have replied that he, his wife and his son, were now going to live in America, and that would have been the end of the matter. Instead it looks as though he was intent on sowing confusion. The first communication that Ernst Telschow of the KWG received from Debye in America was a telegram of 25 July, saying ‘My letters remain unanswered in the circumstances have decided to accept broader offer Cornell new letter in the post.’ Debye explained in a subsequent letter that he had written previously to ask about his status at the KWIP. There’s no telling if that is true.*2 In any case, at the end of August Telschow and Mentzel replied to say that they could extend his leave until 31 March 1941, but no further.

  Telschow now doubted Debye’s intentions. He wrote again to confirm that there was no question of resuming his Berlin directorship until after the war, and to probe more deeply: ‘It is curious that about four weeks ago a report appeared in the Dutch press that you had decided to remain in America permanently. I hear the same here repeatedly in scientific circles.’ It wasn’t surprising that these rumours had travelled, for Debye’s contract with Cornell in June had been reported in the New York Times. Debye’s response must have been infuriating: a postcard saying that he considered it important to be clear and honest—and nothing else.

  As the revised deadline approached, Telschow asked Debye again what he was intending to do. He received no reply, and on 1 April 1941 Debye’s leave was cancelled and his salary suspended. Mentzel issued a statement saying that he had entered employment in the United States ‘against the wishes of the government of the German Reich’. Nonetheless, Debye replied on 2 May to say, disingenuously, that he was ready to resume directorship of the KWIP ‘as soon as you are again able to guarantee that I will have the possibility to fulfil the corresponding obligations according to the conditions of my old contract’—that is, as a Dutch national. He followed this with a telegram to the Foreign Office in Germany on 23 June:

  Professor Debye states that he is prepared at any time to resume the directorship of the institute under the previous conditions as soon as this is possible there. Until then he requests further leave to give guest lectures at Cornell University.

  The telegram added that a more detailed letter would follow.

  There can be little doubt that Debye was now playing a game with Telschow and the authorities. But to what end? One key consideration is that, while Mathilde and their son Peter were now safely in America, his daughter Mathilde (‘Maida’) was not. Both she and Debye’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Alberer (‘Aunt Lisi’, who had largely brought up Maida) had remained living in the KWIP director’s house in Berlin. Debye’s grandson Norwig suggests that this was the motive for giving Berlin the impression he intended to return. As Mathilde later explained,

  Peter Debye continued the negotiations with the KWIP in order to keep drawing a salary during his absence. That has two aspects: on the one hand this was a source of income for his family members left behind in Berlin, to keep a roof over their heads in his KWIP house in Berlin; on the other hand, he gave the Nazis the impression that he wanted to return, so that they would not take action against his family.

  There seems good reason to believe that Debye wanted his daughter out of Germany. But why had she and Aunt Lisi stayed there anyway? Laue commented that he found it ‘strange’ that Maida remained in Berlin even after her mother left for America, although in fairness it was by that time an extremely delicate matter to cross any national borders. Debye had written ambiguously to Arnold Sommerfeld on 30 December 1939 that ‘Hilde [his wife Mathilde] and Maida prefer to wait here to see how matters develop’—but that may be merely cautious wording mindful of the postal censor, given that his wife took steps to leave soon after. It does seem that some plans were made for Maida to leave too: in June 1940 Mathilde wrote to Debye from Switzerland to say that their daughter was expecting to receive a visa so that she might join her in Lausanne. This authorization was apparently never forthcoming.

  Yet one has to accept that this aspect of the Debye family’s plans is murky, not least because in March 1942 Maida married the Moravian German Gerhard Saxinger, formerly in the Czechoslovakian army and now a German military photographer, who had previously rented rooms at the KWIP house. She was already pregnant when they married; her first child Norwig was born in August, and her second, Nordulf, a year later. Norwig suspects that this union may have sealed her decision to remain in Germany after all. It isn’t clear (nor terribly relevant to Debye’s own position) how she felt about that. Some have suggested that Debye’s daughter was sympathetic to the Nazis, others that she had mental-health problems, although both suggestions are emphatically denied by Norwig Debye-Saxinger.

/>   A memo for the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1940s inverts the later suggestions of Debye’s grandson and wife, saying that he was not so much preserving the director’s house for his daughter and sister-in-law as they were for him. Their presence, the report says, gave him a remaining toehold at the institute ‘so he won’t lose everything’. Whether it was a ruse or not, Debye did use his daughter’s residence explicitly to verify his own intention to return. On 12 June 1941 the German Consulate in New York interviewed Debye about his plans; he told them

  that his wife was born in Germany (Munich), that his daughter still lived in Germany and, as far as he knew, worked at the Ministry of Propaganda, and that he and his son . . . had spent most of their lives in Germany . . . and were therefore very eager to be able to live and work there again.

  Debye had apparently stated that he would be ready to forego his part of the director’s salary but requested that the rent and maintenance of the house still be covered for his daughter and sister-in-law.*3

  Debye surely did have genuine concerns about Maida and her Aunt Lisi, particularly regarding their financial security (although this situation must have improved after Maida was married and her husband helped her find a job in a government ministry). And apprehensions about their safety in Hitler’s state were not misplaced. When the Nazis discovered in 1941–2 that Debye had somehow managed to withdraw money from Germany, they suspected his sister and brother-in-law Hubert Niël in Maastricht. Niël was taken for questioning and imprisoned for six months. It’s not obvious that Aunt Lisi and Maida faced comparable risks, but in wartime Germany no one could be too sure what tomorrow would bring.

  Debye must have known that the director’s accommodation would not be held in abeyance indefinitely, however much he prevaricated. It was surprising that his relatives were permitted to stay there for so long after he left. When Werner Heisenberg was appointed new director of the KWIP in 1942 (see page 192), in theory he and his family could claim the house. But Maida and Lisi were still there, and Heisenberg was reluctant to force this delicate issue. The two were ordered to leave in May 1943, but they appealed to the Foreign Office, which wrote to the REM that ‘It would be undesirable for cultural and political reasons for a scientist of such importance [Debye] to be able to refer later to the fact that his family had not only been expelled from their home in Germany but also deprived of any maintenance.’ It was finally agreed that Debye’s daughter and sister-in-law would leave in August but that they would receive an allowance of 400 Reichsmarks a month, along with the peculiar right (if Heisenberg did not object) to take fruit from the trees in the garden of the director’s residence. Aunt Lisi went with Maida and her young family to live with their in-laws the Saxingers in Sudetenland, taking with them the ‘emergency money’ of Debye’s gold Nobel medal hidden in a baby’s nappy. However, as the Russians advanced through Sudetenland, Maida’s family were forced to flee, becoming refugees and losing touch with Debye in the United States for the rest of the war and its immediate aftermath. Around late 1945, Debye was able to establish only that his daughter had been ‘somewhere in Czechoslovakia’ towards the end of the war, and they were not reunited until 1948. Maida Debye-Saxinger and her sons eventually emigrated to America; she divorced Saxinger in the mid-1950s.

  Historian Dieter Hoffmann says that in maintaining contact with Germany, Debye was doing what many others did: ‘it was common for scientists leaving Germany—for whatever reason—to try not to burn their bridges with their former home. There are many possible reasons for this, including family and future pension or compensation claims.’ But why Debye, head of department and comfortably supported at Cornell, where he could stay for as long as he desired—and not even a German—would wish to do this is not at all obvious. Was he really hoping that he might some day go back to the KWIP to resume his unfinished research there? Would he have done so if Hitler had been victorious (which looked quite possible in 1941, until the United States and Soviet Union entered the war)? Would the lure of the well-equipped institute that he’d built up from scratch have been irresistible?

  We simply don’t know. Both the accusation that he was keeping the back door open and the supposition that he was stringing the Germans along to protect his family are guesses, and carry little weight either for attacking or for defending Debye. More to the point, both positions assume that he had a well-formulated plan—they succumb to the seductive fiction that humans understand and determine every aspect of their actions. It seems far more likely that, unable or unwilling to grasp the true political situation, Debye used prevarication as an ad hoc means of keeping the problem at arm’s length, planning only for the coming weeks. There was never any devious grand scheme, just a refusal to accept how things stood. One can judge Debye for that as one sees fit; but there is scant reason to regard him as a straightforward opportunist.

  Running away?

  In the simple-minded dichotomy that makes exiles from Nazi Germany blameless and those who stayed culpable, Debye also occupies an ambiguous position. Yes, he left—but only after the war had begun, and only because he had been removed from his post. He never once mentioned moral reasons for his departure, and it’s not impossible that, at least initially, he hoped to return. What do we make of that?

  The truth is that we should again make very little of it. It shows neither that Debye was ‘principled’, beyond the strongly held principle of retaining his Dutch citizenship, nor that he was opportunistic. Like countless others as war broke out, Debye was improvising. He had not expected the ultimatum about his directorship. His primary goal was to work unmolested; since that was impossible in Germany, he reluctantly took the chance that America offered.

  Besides, the moral dichotomy of stay-or-flee was more complicated. Max Delbrück had a dim view of cut-and-dried judgements on the matter:

  Many nasty things have been said about those who could have left and didn’t leave, like Heisenberg . . . I don’t agree at all with these derogatory comments. I don’t think that it was anything to my credit that I left at all. I think it was a question which could be answered one way or the other, and there is great merit on both sides . . . what is the moral argument [for] running away? It’s just running away, that you take the advantage that you can run away. If you imagine that the [regime] may last only a short while, then it’s important to see that some of the good people are staying.

  In some ways, Delbrück said, it could be harder for non-Jews to leave Germany:

  Going away without any kind of security—that means having a job somewhere else—was limited to those who had professions that were salable in another country and who had already professions or had some other ways of having private funds, or large funds that they could transfer, and could start a new life in a different country. But that was an infinitesimal part of the population . . . If you were non-Jewish and left you were certainly very suspect and couldn’t expect much help from the Jewish organizations . . . Why would the fellow leave if he didn’t have to? That was more the attitude really at the time. I mean I wasn’t applauded for leaving, but I was suspected of leaving by having some sinister motive imputed. And rightly so. There were certainly quite a few Nazi agents who did leave posing as adversaries.

  We saw earlier how, for Heisenberg and Planck, resignation was an abdication of one’s responsibility as a German and a scientist. Debye did not share, or at least did not articulate, their sense of a duty to ‘preserve German science’. Does that absolve him of blinkered, egotistical nationalism, or does it deprive him of an ‘honourable’ principle of loyalty, however misplaced?

  For Debye, such questions seem to have been irrelevant. By all appearances, he made his choices for immediate, pragmatic and personal reasons. A factor in his reluctance to accept the offers of positions in the United States during the 1930s, for example, was that his wife, who was from a working-class Bavarian family and had only a perfunctory education, spoke no English and preferred to live in Germany. Her unhappiness during his t
ime at the University of Utrecht contributed to his decision to return to Germany. However one chooses to weigh these personal obligations against any social and political responsibilities accrued from choosing to remain in Nazi Germany, one has to acknowledge that Debye’s predicament was not easy. Perhaps what matters most is not which decisions he made, but to what extent he was able and willing subsequently to consider their moral dimension. There is no record that he ever spoke of such issues.

  10

  ‘Hitherto unknown destructive power’

  The key historical question about the ethics of physicists working in Germany before the war commenced is how they accommodated their practices and institutions to the racist policies and dictatorial administration of the Nazi regime. But once hostilities began, the matter has tended to develop a different focus: more narrowly defined, more intimately bound up with science itself, and with implications that extend far beyond Germany. For historians examining this period, one of the crucial questions is whether these scientists were prepared and able to make a nuclear bomb for Hitler. No end is yet in sight for the controversy that this issue provokes, and at the centre of that storm is Debye’s former colleague at Leipzig and his eventual replacement in Berlin, Werner Heisenberg.

  The literally explosive implications of Hahn’s and Strassmann’s discovery of uranium fission in late 1938 were appreciated at once. At the same time that Paul Harteck and Wilhelm Groth at Hamburg told the Reich Ministry of War how the discovery might be exploited for energy and weaponry, James Franck’s successor Georg Joos at Göttingen heard the experimental physicist Wilhelm Hanle deliver a paper on how a nuclear reactor—a Uranmaschine, uranium machine—might be devised. Joos and Hanle sent a letter explaining this proposal to Wilhelm Dames at the REM, who passed it on to Abraham Esau of the Reich Research Council. On 29 April 1939 Dames and Esau convened a meeting of specialists—the first Uranverein—to discuss the matter, including Joos and Hanle, Walther Bothe and Hans Geiger. Peter Debye was invited but did not attend. Exploratory research on uranium fission began at Göttingen but did not get far before the physicists there were called to military service in August.