by Philip Ball
What happened
It’s not clear that a similar assessment deals adequately with either Planck or Heisenberg. Planck was always acutely conscious of doing the right thing—his difficulty was in resolving conflicting notions of what was ‘right’. One can’t help but feel sympathy for this man, inculcated with a deep sense of duty towards the German state and culture, when suddenly faced with a government of such criminal depravity. Planck’s failure to recognize the gravity of the situation in 1933 cannot be attributed to stupidity or indifference, nor does his relatively feeble response to the encroachment of Nazi ideology seem (despite the accusations of Lotte Warburg) to have been due to cowardice. Rather, he was paralysed by a predicament for which his conservative education had never prepared him. He is, as Heilbron says, a genuinely tragic figure.
Heisenberg shared Planck’s patriotic commitment to Germany and German science, with which he identified personally to an unhealthy degree. And like Debye he made his science a refuge from moral dilemmas, a higher plane that one could inhabit nobly, untroubled by the ‘money-business’ of politics. After the war he presented himself as a covert opponent to the Nazis, saying for example to Goudsmit that ‘I knew . . . if we Germans did not succeed in undermining this system from the inside and finally to remove it, then an enormous catastrophe would break loose which would cost the lives of millions of innocent people in Germany and other countries.’ Not only is it hard to reconcile such comments with his wartime remarks (for example, that one must merely wait for the Nazis’ extremism to subside), but it is also difficult to understand what Heisenberg felt he was doing during that time to ‘undermine the system’, rather than to survive (and in some ways to flourish) within it.
What seems most to have compromised Heisenberg was a craving for approval—even that of a corrupt regime whose methods and principles he disdained—that seems concomitant with his inability to outgrow an attachment to youthful idealism. This aspect of his character surfaced in later life as an inclination towards philosophical mysticism, with which even his interpretation of quantum theory was not untouched. At the same time as insisting that his inaction and accommodation during the Nazi era was in fact the only form of ‘active opposition’ that could have had any effect, he sought an overblown metaphysical justification for his acquiescent conduct. The grand ‘movements of thought’ at such times, he said, were beyond the power of individuals to affect, and we must resign ourselves to what fate brings:
For us there remains nothing but to turn to the simple things: we should conscientiously fulfil the duties and tasks that life presents to us without asking much about the why or the wherefore. We should transfer to the next generation that which still seems beautiful to us, build up that which is destroyed, and have faith in other people above the noise and passions. And then we should wait for what happens.
One wonders, as Lise Meitner did: did Heisenberg ever really see ‘what happened’? In the 1930s the physicists already knew they were living in a thuggish, anti-intellectual state. But historians now widely agree that, towards the end of the war, any educated, well-connected person in Germany—and Heisenberg and Planck surely fit that description—will have had a good notion of the depths of its corruption: of the systematic genocide of the Jews that began in mid-1941. According to Mark Walker, ‘Heisenberg knew he was working for a ruthless, racist, and murderous state.’ He never condoned that, but his suggestions that it was the lesser evil and that its extremism would wane in time seem all too clearly now self-deceptions that he refused subsequently to acknowledge or even examine. Goudsmit complained to him, with some cause, in 1948 that ‘not one of the German colleagues has yet denounced Nazism and pointed out how its evil features are similar to the evil side of Communism’. But that was not quite the problem. No one doubted that most of the physicists had always disliked the National Socialists, and most of them were eager to say so; denouncing the Nazis was rather easy in 1948. Yet they seemed to feel that, merely by doing so, they disassociated themselves from Hitler’s regime and that this was the end of the matter.
While the formula that makes Debye ‘an ordinary man in extraordinary cirumstances’ risks generalizing his particular weaknesses, it rings true in the sense that there was nothing especially egregious in those failings. Debye’s occasional self-interest and limited moral engagement, Heisenberg’s insecurity and egotism, Planck’s prevarication and misconceived notion of duty—none are profound character flaws, and all would have been minor blemishes on a fundamentally decent nature in happier circumstances. It is the grave misfortune of these men that the enormity of the conditions in the Third Reich amplified these eminently forgivable traits, transforming them ruthlessly into what some have deemed to be irredeemable faults. That is no reason to excuse actions that have profound consequences, but neither should it allow us to define the person entirely by the actions. For this is surely the sobering and indeed terrifying nature of tyrannies: that they expose us mercilessly, finding our weaknesses and bloating them out of proportion. That is why the appropriate measure of our conduct is perhaps not so much what we did as how we deal with it subsequently.
Are scientists special?
Is there any reason to expect from Planck, Heisenberg and Debye something more than their compromised, halting and ambivalent moral stance, purely because they were scientists? Did their positions as leading members of the German physics community create obligations and expectations any more demanding than those one might impose on the general population? There is a widespread view that scientists are no more morally accountable than the rest of us. That is mostly a valid claim, although situations may surely arise—the development of nuclear physics is one such—in which the superior knowledge that scientists possess confers a special duty to consider the wider social and political implications of their research: they alone can evaluate how it might be used and abused. But the broader question is how morally aware and responsible the professional institutions and attitudes of science are.
We have seen how it was a common belief among German scientists between the wars that the proper and noble conduct of their profession entailed an ‘apolitical’ withdrawal from the messy, compromised power struggles of civic society into the realm of logic, abstraction and ‘truth’. Because he engaged with worldly affairs, Einstein was condemned sometimes even by those who revered his work for ‘making science political’. This conviction can still be detected in researchers today. Scientists pride themselves on offering facts, not opinions, and some insist on drawing a distinction between the purity of scientific discovery and the dirty realities of its application. To the public, this disengagement from the realities of commerce, societal considerations and politics is apt to make the scientist appear like an amoral Dr Strangelove.
The naïvety of such simplistic postures was exposed in Nazi Germany. On the one hand, an ‘apolitical’ stance left the scientists vulnerable to political manipulation; indeed, it became in itself a politically implicated position, since being apolitical prevented one from directly criticizing the government. At the same time it was a facade, for the scientists used the bait of nuclear power to extract funds from a somewhat sceptical regime—and if they did not get more than they did, it was because they lacked conviction in the real potential of their own research, and not because the money was not there for the taking. Few scientists would today deny that it is something of a game to obtain support from governments and companies increasingly interested in the short-term financial return from their investment in research. But they are more reluctant to accept that this makes science itself political and morally accountable. And this is not just because scientific discoveries have social consequences, but because the scientist becomes a player in the political landscape. Indeed, it is the very humanitarian motivation of a great deal of science, from drug research to energy technology, that gives it a moral and political orientation. If scientists wish to do good in the world—and most of them certainly do wish this—then they must se
e that this makes the very act of doing science a political one.
Evasions, delusions, diversions: these were how most scientists accommodated themselves, usually unwillingly and often unwittingly, to National Socialist Germany. As Alan Beyerchen says, ‘the truth was not that the scientists were political cowards, but that they did not know how to be political heroes’. Their vision was too narrow, their standards too conservative. It was not so much that these men blindly followed a redundant notion of duty, but that they seem actively to have constructed an idea of ‘duty to science’ as a way of denying broader responsibilities. As Debye put it in a letter to his compatriot Pieter Zeeman in Amsterdam in 1937, ‘It is always my custom to ask myself in what way I can be most useful for physics. That is the first consideration for me and other more personal considerations play a more secondary role.’
Ironically, it was Debye himself who pointed out that the German scientists sought refuge in their work. After his meeting with Warren Weaver in New York in February 1940, Weaver reported that
Debye comments that Hitler accomplished, by going to war, a complete identification of himself with Germany. Under peace, an intelligent citizen can perhaps distinguish between Hitler as an individual, his policies and principles, and the Fatherland. But in time of war this distinction goes by the boards. Debye says, for example, that he knows any number of fine, intelligent Germans who are working to the very limit of their capacity and energy (and it is a very high limit) on the specific jobs which have been assigned to them. Such persons find a sort of emotional relief in having a job in which they can work almost to exhaustion. They do not stop to question, or feel that it is possible to question, any matter of broad policy or general direction. What they do now, in time of war, they do not do for Hitler but for Germany. It is neither possible nor proper to worry about general policies; one only has to do his own individual job to the very limit of his ability.
This intention to work only ‘for science’, regardless of political or moral issues, troubled some commentators in the post-war nuclear age. The Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt examined the moral dilemmas of the nuclear physicists in his satirical 1962 play The Physicists, in which three physicists incarcerated in a lunatic asylum offer different views on how to reconcile their work with their responsibilities. One avows allegiance to his nation; another insists that ‘we have far-reaching pioneering work to do and that’s all that should concern us’. All three are guilty of overestimating the influence on politicians of their own opinions about how the ‘new and inconceivable forces’ they have unleashed should be used—as with many scientists of the early twentieth century, including Heisenberg and the hapless Bohr, their grand schemes of a new world order guided by scientific sages will barely even reach the contemptuous notice of their political leaders.
What could they have done?
How easy and how tempting it is, though, to condemn the German scientists by an accumulation of compromising particulars. One might say that Planck could have stood up to a knee-slapping Hitler, that he could have supported Einstein rather than requesting his resignation from the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Heisenberg might at the very least have desisted from advising his former colleagues in occupied Denmark that they must reconcile themselves to a German victory; he might have thought twice about giving propagandizing talks that polished his own profile in Nazi circles. Debye could have resigned his leadership of the German Physical Society rather than sign off that fateful letter with ‘Heil Hitler!’
But without the benefit of hindsight from a safe and comfortable viewing seat, what might we reasonably have expected the physicists to do differently? Hans Bernd Gisevius avers how hard it was to take an individual stand against the regime:
Let us not forget that totalitarianism and opposition are two mutually exclusive political ideas. In a democracy it is possible to practise opposition, but dictatorship permits no antagonists; it does not even put up with the lukewarm and the sceptical. Whoever is not for it is against it. Oppositionists must keep silent, or they must decide on underground activity.
Underground resistance and opposition are again two different matters. Opposition is struggle against an existing regime; it is an attempt to bring about a shift in course or a change in personnel without directly overthrowing a system. Opposition, therefore, recommends a more prudent policy, offers reasoned advice, tries to reform by appeal to the common sense of the rulers and attempts to win the favour of the voters; but the oppositionist under a totalitarian system must not try to reform at all. His good advice would only help the tyranny; any intelligent recommendation would support the reign of terror.
Gisevius’ remarks have been used to justify the relative complacency of the German scientists’ response to Hitler. The only alternative, they seem to say, was to do as Gisevius did and plot the violent destruction of the Nazi leaders, risking their own certain and immediate death. But Gisevius makes too extreme a case. A few scientists, such as Laue and Fritz Strassmann, were openly ‘lukewarm and sceptical’ about the regime—indeed, rather more than that—and yet they were, in some degree or another, ‘put up with’. Such dissent was not necessarily suicide, even professionally, although it could undoubtedly cause one trouble.
During the war itself, it was a somewhat different matter. Asking himself in his memoirs why he had not joined the Dutch resistance or given more aid to the Jews, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir showed commendable and even rather moving honesty:
I felt I had been a coward and an opportunist . . . I had on occasion, for short periods, given shelter to people who had to hide and I had once or twice just escaped being arrested. It was not enough . . . I had been afraid of having to face human cruelty, of having to face the risks of being questioned and tortured . . . I was not cut out for the “illegal” underground work.
He had always tried to avoid disagreements and conflicts, he said, but ‘during the war that was the wrong attitude’. So, Casimir concluded, ‘I think my behavior can be explained and, perhaps, partly excused, but even today that does not entirely remove my feeling of guilt.’ Whatever we feel about Casimir’s confession—and there is surely some moral bravery here to compensate for his self-avowed lack of physical bravery in wartime—such soul-searching is notably absent from almost all of the physicists who, not even the victims in an occupied country, actually worked in Nazi Germany and in some cases profited from it.
Far more problematic than the rarity of Laue-like opposition are two more general features of the scientists’ attitudes. The first is the almost total lack of a moral position. On several occasions, Planck, Heisenberg and Debye all showed courage in refusing to comply with political demands. But there is no evidence that in these cases their behaviour was informed by a broad moral perspective. They helped Jewish colleagues because they were colleagues, and not because they deemed it perverted to oppress and expel Jews. And they deplored this oppression not because it was inhumane but because it would damage German science. In resisting, they tended to defend not a moral principle but their own autonomy and traditions. Planck was determined to honour Haber not because this would symbolize resistance to anti-Jewish prejudice but because a failure to do so would violate his code of professional duty.
This does not mean that the scientists were blind to the inhumanity of anti-Semitism, and it would be unfair to imagine they were indifferent to it, let alone that they condoned it. But it testifies to a limited concept of where virtue lay. In this, the scientists’ stance was no different from that of much of the German population who did not actually applaud the anti-Semitic measures. Being scientists did not make these men any less sensitive to the plight of Jews; neither did it give them any greater ethical sensibility. Rather, it enabled them to convince themselves that adherence to professional standards, as far as was possible, was a form of ‘opposition’. But Beyerchen is right to conclude that in fact this ‘was not opposition at all . . . in an environment like that created by the Third Reich, politica
l opposition is the only opposition worthy of the name’. By assuaging consciences to no real effect, ‘professional opposition’ was, as Gisevius says, arguably worse than useless.
Second, and perhaps most troubling of all, there was an almost universal inability among the scientists to acknowledge or even recognize their failures in retrospect. It is one thing to display poor judgement, lack of resolve, or self-interest in a crisis; indeed, it is normal. It is another to express no remorse later—more, to reconfigure the historical narrative so that remorse is not even demanded. Nothing can excuse Carl von Weizsäcker’s suggestion at Farm Hall—which he never recanted—that the German nuclear scientists, threatened by a ruthless dictatorship, ‘obeyed the voice of conscience’ while the Allied scientists, with nothing to fear, created a weapon of immense destructive power. What is most alarming is not that the scientists sought to justify their actions, which is after all a universal human weakness, but that in some ways they did not even imagine any such justification was necessary. I believe that Peter Debye would have been surprised and astonished at the accusations made against him in 2006. He would have been right to consider them ill-posed and largely unjust, but wrong to be dismayed that such questions might ever be asked.