by Philip Ball
This situation left Paul Rosbaud thoroughly disillusioned. In a letter to Samuel Goudsmit in 1948 he wrote that
Most of our old friends are either back in their jobs or at least denazified or busy to get testimonials—and they will get their testimonials . . . They will show you some nice letters from people whose names I don’t want to tell you and you will learn from these letters that they have been very nice fellows and sometimes have even said nasty things about Adolf.
The denazification of German science was actively obstructed even by those who had had no sympathy for the National Socialists. The prevailing attitude was one of resentment at the intrusions of the occupying Allied authorities, which led to a closing of ranks and a feeling of solidarity between the most unlikely of bedfellows. Even relatively blameless individuals refused to condemn those who had been clearly implicated in the Nazi regime. Walther Gerlach, for example, issued a Persilschein for the SS officer Rudolf Mentzel, with whom he had by no means seen eye to eye during the war.†9 And Laue and Sommerfeld supported efforts to lighten the sentence meted out to Stark at Nuremberg—an expression not, it seems, of saintly forgiveness but of professional allegiance.
Others drew an invidious parallel between the purging of Nazis after the war and the persecution of ‘non-Aryans’ before it. Faced with accusations against the unambiguously pro-Nazi Pascual Jordan and Herbert Stuart, Otto Hahn complained that ‘we had enough trouble with all that snooping and telling off during the Third Reich’. For Hahn, denazification involved ‘attacks against the science of our nation’—once again it seems he felt that the ‘integrity’ of German science must be defended at all costs and could be detached from the political agenda of the Third Reich.
These prevarications and evasions during denazification meant that it quickly became impossible to construct a clear picture of how the Nazification of German society had proceeded in the first place. ‘It was one of the most depressing experiences I ever had as a historian’, says Klaus Hentschel, ‘to see reflected in the documents how very soon after 1945 the chance of coming to grips with the National Socialist regime was allowed to slip away, thus missing the opportunity to make a frank assessment of the facilitating conditions the regime had set.’
This refusal to address wartime conduct continued to frustrate scientists outside Germany for many years. It did not seem to matter what one had done, so long as one could say (often quite truthfully) ‘I never liked the Nazis.’ The prevailing attitude was not guilt or remorse but self-pity and resentment at the indignities now being inflicted. Visiting Germany in 1947, Richard Courant, the mathematician who had been forced out of Göttingen in 1933, despairingly described its residents as ‘absolutely bitter, negative, accusing, discouraged and aggressive’. Hartmut Paul Kallmann, post-war director of the former KWI for Physical Chemistry in Berlin, who as a ‘non-Aryan’ had been dismissed under Haber’s directorship in 1933 and had worked for IG Farben during the war, wrote to the émigré Michael Polányi in 1946 saying that ‘the tough momentary situation [here] is deplored much more than the evil of the past 10 years . . . The masses still don’t know what a salvation the destruction of the Nazis was to the whole world and to Germany as well.’ ‘It is a difficult problem with the Germans’, Margrethe Bohr told Lise Meitner two years later, ‘very difficult to come to a deep understanding with them, as they are always first of all sorry for themselves.’
Sometimes it was worse than that, for one should not imagine that all Germans felt an urgent need to distance themselves from the Nazis. In 1947 the president of the polytechnic at Darmstadt complained that for some students ‘it seemed that the only thing the Nazis had done wrong was to lose the war’. Kallmann eventually quit Germany in 1949, giving up his positions at the chemistry institute and the newly created Technical University in Berlin because he was disgusted at the Nazi mentality that, he felt, still dominated academia.
Heisenberg exemplifies this denial of the past. He was apt to refer to ‘the bad side of Nazism’, with the implication that there was a ‘good’ side too. He seemed, even after the revelations of Auschwitz, to remain stubbornly blind to the character of his leaders, insisting that if Germany had won the war then in time—he gave it fifty years—the Nazis would have become civilized. ‘He still goes on defending all the evil things in Germany as being the normal by-products of any social revolution’, wrote Goudsmit to Rosbaud in 1950 after meeting Heisenberg in the United States. That Heisenberg could peddle this naïvely optimistic line in 1947 even to one refugee physicist in Britain who had lost his job and then friends and relatives in the concentration camps makes it clear that there is something to be explained in Heisenberg’s character which accusations of ambition and arrogance don’t quite account for.
An aversion to self-examination has been disturbingly long-lived in German science. In the KWG’s institutes for anthropology, medical sciences and psychiatry there was far graver accommodation and active collaboration—sometimes with horrific consequences—than one finds in the compromises and prevarications of the physicists: for example, Otmar von Verschuer, director of the KWI for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics considered Joseph Mengele to be his collaborator.*10 This ugly legacy has been well documented, yet even in the 1980s the Max Planck Society was reluctant to face up to it. When, after becoming MPG president in 1997, the biologist Hubert Markl bravely commissioned a project to investigate the society’s role in Nazi Germany, there were grumbles that the programme would foul the society’s own nest. Only in 2001 was the MPG ready to make a public apology and admission of guilt and complicity for the criminal medical research of Mengele and his ilk. At a conference to which the few survivors of the atrocities were invited, Markl said
I would like to apologize for the suffering of the victims of these crimes—the dead as well as the survivors—done in the name of science . . . when I apologize here personally and for the Max Planck Society representing the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, I mean the honestly felt expression of the deepest regret, compassion, and shame over the fact that scientists perpetrated, supported, and did not hinder such crimes.
Paul Lawrence Rose argues that there is a trait specific to German culture that led to an inability—not simply a ‘refusal’—on the part of the scientists and other intellectuals to appraise their behaviour under the National Socialists in the kind of moral terms that other Western nations might have expected. Rose even goes so far as to treat the ‘German’ mentality as distinct from what he calls ‘Western’. He adduces a centuries-old tradition in Germany of equating morality with individual autonomy of thought (Innerlichkeit), not with external actions such as resisting political evil. Faced with a corrupt state, this tradition required that one seek only to preserve some ‘inner freedom’, while permitting and even demanding complete obedience to the rulers. It is in this sense, says Rose, that the population of Wilhelmite Germany could believe themselves to be free even under an authoritarian monarchy, while those who went into voluntary exile from the Nazis, such as Thomas Mann, were widely held in contempt by those who remained, even if they disliked the Nazis, for treasonous dereliction of ‘German culture’.
Although the assertion of a ‘German mentality’ seems troublingly close to that of a ‘Jewish mentality’, Rose’s analysis does seem to fit with the attitudes of Heisenberg and Weizsäcker, whose sometimes perverse statements and actions during and after the war cannot plausibly be ascribed to latent Nazi sympathies. ‘The conditioning of German culture and behavioral patterns made the mentality and feeling of Heisenberg and his colleagues an alien intellectual and moral universe that their Allied counterparts could only regard with disgust and bemusement’, Rose asserts. Many Germans today will attest to this attitude among the generations brought up in the first half of the twentieth century.
While it seems simplistic to lay all the moral myopia at the doorstep of pre-war ‘German culture’—it will not get us far in understanding the diversity of responses from the likes of Laue, Schrödi
nger, Planck, Rosbaud and Debye—it does appear that the self-justification of German scientists after the war was not so much an act of evasion as a genuine belief that there was nothing to feel guilty about. And to outsiders, this attitude did and does remain nigh incomprehensible. To feel no responsibility at having worked under, and in some sense for, a racist, genocidal gang of criminals seemed to indicate a sheer absence of moral reason. That clash of values can be discerned in the lengthy exchange of letters between Lise Meitner and the astrophysicist Walter Grotrian, who were friends in Berlin before Meitner fled. Wishing to resume relations after the war, Meitner wrote to Grotrian to say that she needed to know from him how he could have reconciled himself to visiting an observatory in Tromsø in occupied Norway, as though nothing were amiss in his dropping by on behalf of his Nazi leaders—an action in many ways comparable to Heisenberg’s and Weizsäcker’s trip to Copenhagen in 1941. Grotrian seemed merely baffled by her complaint, so Meitner spelt it out for him: ‘it remains incomprehensible to me that a fair-minded scientist—and that is what I have always known you to be and valued you for—would consider it an appropriate mission to organize scientific work in an unlawfully occupied country for the benefit of those in power’. Grotrian replied that he had at that time accepted the ‘official’ reasons for why the Germans had invaded Norway, even if they were later shown to be fallacious, and that his visit had been purely scientific. ‘With your completely different kind of attitude’, he wrote, ‘you are unlikely to understand my way of acting.’ Meitner could not reconcile why such a basically decent man could have ever, by 1940, considered the Nazis to be leaders with whom one could and should work. Grotrian, who had even enlisted in the Luftwaffe, failed to see where the problem lay.
Many scientists outside Germany felt by the late 1940s that their German counterparts had an easy ride. Some in the United States were particularly dismayed to see Germans, unabashed at their wartime research, being granted special dispensation to enter the country and work for the American government, most notoriously, the architect of the V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun.*11 ‘It is, in most cases, morally wrong for our scientists to collaborate with these imported colleagues’, wrote Goudsmit. ‘Those who opposed the excesses of the Nazi regime, were nevertheless in agreement with its policy of an imperialistic Germany, ruling the world. I know of only very, very few who clearly saw the German errors and acted accordingly.’
‘Armorers of the Nazis’?
It was partly to counter the distortions propagated by the German physicists that Goudsmit wrote his 1947 book on the Alsos mission. In a review of that book, the Manhattan Project physicist Philip Morrison wrote:
The documents cited in Alsos prove amply, that no different from their Allied counterparts, the German scientists worked for the military as best their circumstances allowed. But the difference, which it will never be possible to forgive, is that they worked for the cause of Himmler and Auschwitz, for the burners of books and the takers of hostages. The community of science will be long delayed in welcoming the armorers of the Nazis, even if their work was not successful.
Laue felt stung into reply, notwithstanding Morrison’s remark that ‘brave and good men like Laue could resist the Nazis even in the sphere of science’. Rightly regarded outside Germany as almost unique among German scientists in the integrity of his resistance to Hitler’s rule, Laue commanded an unparalleled degree of respect and moral authority. Yet his behaviour in the immediate post-war period is more ambivalent, displaying unseemly haste to lay the past to rest in the interests of his profession and his nation. What he offered to Morrison’s charge was an apologia—honest, sincere and in many ways commendable, but an apologia nonetheless:
Ever since war between civilized states relapsed once more into the old barbaric ‘total’ war between people, it has been no easy matter for an isolated citizen of a warring nation to withdraw himself altogether from war service . . . If one or other among the German scientists found it possible during the war to avoid being drawn with his work into the maelstrom, it is not allowable to conclude that it was so for all.
The directors of the larger research institutes in particular were under the absolute necessity of putting the facilities of their institutes at least partially and formally at the service of the war effort. Open refusal on their part, immediately classable as ‘sabotage’, would have led inexorably to catastrophic consequences for themselves. On the other hand, an (often fictitious) compliance with the demands of the armed forces had advantages which our opponents should recognize as legitimate.
Laue argued that most of the science done in Germany during the war was ‘honest, solid scientific investigation, following steadily in the steps of the preceding peacetime research’ and had ‘nothing whatsoever to do with Himmler and Auschwitz’. Besides, he said, while recognizing ‘what unutterable pain the mere word Auschwitz must always evoke’ in Goudsmit, this must surely make him incapable of unbiased evaluation. ‘How careful one must be’, Laue wrote, ‘in passing judgment on events which took place under a tyranny.’ One cannot help being moved by his final appeal not to let the bitterness and hate linger:
We recommend as the foundation of every utterance of peace politics, in great and small things alike, the words which Sophocles puts in the mouth of Antigone, citizeness of a victorious state: ‘To league with love not hatred was I born.’
Yet Morrison, a scientist of uncommon wisdom and humanity, was not dissuaded. ‘Many of the most able and distinguished men of German science’, he replied,
moved doubtless by sentiments of national loyalty, by traditional response to the authority over them, and by simple fear, worked for the advantage of the Nazi state. These men were in fact the armorers of the Nazis. Professor Laue, as the world knows and admires, was not among them. It is not for the reviewer to judge how great was their peril; it is certainly not for him to imply that he could have been braver or wiser than they. But it was sentiments like theirs, weaknesses like theirs, and fears like theirs which helped bring Germans for a decade to be the slaves of an inhuman tyranny, which has wrecked Europe, and in its day attacked the very name of culture.
It is not Goudsmit, Morrison wrote, who should feel an unutterable pain when the word Auschwitz is mentioned,
but many a famous German physicist in Göttingen today, many a man of insight and of responsibility, who could live for a decade in the Third Reich, and never once risk his position of comfort and authority in real opposition to the men who could build that infamous place of death.
When Meitner saw Laue’s exchange with Morrison, she told Otto Hahn that he ‘is not helping Germany but risks achieving the opposite’. For Morrison’s last response came closest to the real point. What those who had faced the Nazis needed to hear in the late 1940s was not an explanation of how the German scientists had calculated the ‘advantages’ of faked compliance, nor how they had quietly got on with innocuous research under the shadow of an oppressive regime. For it was now apparent that the Nazis were not merely coercive tyrants, but perpetrators of unthinkably depraved criminality. Where then, in Laue’s noble words, was there any sense of the scientists’ horror at having worked within and, for whatever reasons, on behalf of a regime that gassed families and tossed their skeletal corpses on to a pile?
Lise Meitner realized this, and not just because she knew that the same fate was so nearly hers. Her response to the revelations as the Allied troops reached Dachau and Buchenwald was the true and proper one that no other physicist seemed able to adduce in their cautiously worded regrets. She simply sat by the radio and wept. ‘Someone’, she wrote to Hahn, interned at Farm Hall in June 1945, ‘should force a man like Heisenberg and many million others to look at those camps and at the martyred people.’
In this letter Meitner felt compelled to say to Hahn things that would otherwise have obstructed the friendship that she wanted to resume:
It was clear to me that even people like you and Laue had not grasped the real situatio
n . . . This is, of course, Germany’s misfortune, the fact that all of you had lost your standard of justice and fairness . . . You have all worked for Nazi Germany as well and have never even tried to put up a passive resistance either. Certainly, to buy off your consciences you have helped a person in distress here and there, but you have allowed millions of innocent people to be slaughtered without making the least protest.
If we might feel inclined to respond to Morrision’s remarks, despite his frank humility, that ‘that’s easy for him to say’, the same will not do with Meitner. Not only had she experienced life under the Nazis, but she had, in her view, been complicit in it. That it should be Meitner who first acknowledges this, and not Heisenberg or Debye or poor, shattered Planck, not even Laue—this is in the end the worst of it all. ‘Today I know that it was not only stupid but very unfair of me not to have gone away immediately’, she told Hahn. She was tormented by that thought. But she had no illusions about her colleagues. ‘You did not have any sleepless nights’, she told her old colleague, asking him to read her letter only ‘with confidence in my unshakeable friendship’. ‘You did not want to see it; it was too inconvenient.’
Hahn did eventually see, perhaps, but it took many years. In 1958 he wrote to Meitner on her eightieth birthday, almost echoing her earlier words:
We all knew that injustice was taking place, but we didn’t want to see it, we deceived ourselves . . . Come the year 1933 I followed a flag that we should have torn down immediately. I did not do so, and now I must bear responsibility for it.