Hitler's Gift: The True Story of the Scientists Expelled by the Nazi Regime
272
Hitler's Gift: The True Story of the Scientists Expelled by the Nazi Regime
272eBook
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Overview
In this revelatory book, Jean Medawar and David Pyke tell countless gripping individual stories of emigration, rescue, and escape, including those of Albert Einstein, Fritz Haber, Leo Szilard, and many others. Much of this material was collected through interviews with more than twenty of the surviving refugee scholars, so as to document for history the steps taken after Hitler’s policy was enacted. As one refugee scholar wrote, “Far from destroying the spirit of German scholarship, the Nazis had spread it all over the world. Only Germany was to be the loser.”
Hitler’s Gift is the story of the men who were forced from their homeland and went on to revolutionize many of the scientific practices that we rely on today. Experience firsthand the stories of these geniuses, and learn not only how their deportation affected them, but how it bettered the world that we live in today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611459647 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 01/12/2012 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
David Pyke is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He has written several medical books and one on family planning with Jean Medawar. He also edited a posthumous volume of Sir Peter Medawar’s essays, The Threat and the Glory.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
German Science Before Hitler
In the first 32 years of the Nobel Prizes (1901-32) Germany won one third of all the prizes in science, 33 out of 100, Britain 18 and the USA 6.
From the nineteenth century German science led the world; its reputation in chemistry, physics, biology and medicine was rivalled, if at all, only by Britain. If scientific success can be measured by the award of Nobel Prizes, Germany's record far outshone that of any other country. Of all 100 Nobel Prizes in science awarded between 1901, when the awards were founded, and 1932, the year before Hitler came to power, no less than 33 were awarded to Germans or scientists working in Germany. Britain had 18 laureates; the USA produced six. German and British scientists together won more than half of all Nobel Prizes. Of the German laureates, about a quarter of the scientists were of Jewish descent, although the Jewish population made up no more than 1 per cent of the German people at the time.
There were special circumstances that fostered this pitch of achievement in German science, linked to German society and the development of the nation as a whole. The German empire came into being in 1871 with formidable military power inherited from Prussia, the founder state. It was Prussia, led by Otto von Bismarck, after three lightning wars in the 18 60s and early 1870s against Denmark, Austria and France, who established its king as German Emperor and stamped its authoritarian, militarist character on the new German nation.
A surge of confidence and national pride accompanied the creation of the German Reich, based on the Prussian army's power and the combined potential of Germany's unified people and resources. With a population bigger than that of France or Britain, and territories expanded by its war gains, Germany was in the ascendant — the most powerful nation in Europe.
Bismarck's recognition that military strength must be matched by industrial and economic efficiency set the scene for the founder years and the decades before the Great War, which saw a tremendous growth. The government encouraged research-driven industrial development, and German businesses led the world in running research departments alongside their manufacturing plants — a pattern which American industry later adopted with spectacular success. Industry courted the best academics for research and its practical application, and technical skill was supplied by Technische Hochschulen (technical universities). Conversely, the state-run universities favoured scientists who had worked in industry — a cross-fertilization which had enormous benefits for Germany's industrial growth. Chemistry led the way, and became a byword for progress and wealth.
Soon after his accession in 1888, Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck, the architect of Germany's greatness. The Kaiser, who regarded himself as leader of the nation's civil as well as its military life, was vain and unstable — perhaps hardly surprising in a man who gloried in the title of 'All Highest'. What he did have, however, was a respect for science and learning, whose achievements had done so much to advance Germany's industrial strength and enhance its prestige and military power.
This interest increased with Wilhelm's acquaintance with Walther Nernst, one of the founders of physical chemistry and director of experimental physics at Berlin University. Confident and decisive, Nernst was always open to new ideas, which he discussed with the Kaiser over meals and meetings at the Palace - a relationship which symbolized science's high standing in Germany. The Kaiser expanded on Nernst's proposals to set up a national science establishment, and the result was the creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, whose Founding Convention in January 1911 described chemistry and natural science, not colonial expansion, as 'the true land of boundless opportunities'. By the 1920s a network of Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWI) for chemistry, physical chemistry, physics and medical research, first in Berlin and then elsewhere in Germany, had become world leaders and are still, under the name of Max Planck Institutes.
Science entered a great age, with scientists as the new heroes in an environment uniquely shaped to draw out greatness. Public respect for science was close to reverence, hard to conceive from today's perspective of popular scepticism about the benefits of modern technology. Some described their work as if it was akin to a religious calling, and their faith seemed justified. In medicine and biochemistry they were defeating the scourges of disease and infant mortality. In applied chemistry they were revolutionizing industry. And in physics they were on the verge of discoveries which would open the way to a new universe.
The research that led to Germany's pioneering industrial production of synthetic dyes, reaping enormous commercial returns, also brought biological and medical breakthroughs. In medical science the great figures were Robert Koch, Rudolf Virchow and Paul Ehrlich — respectively the discoverer of the bacterium causing tuberculosis in 1876, the founding father of pathology and the originator of the chemical treatment of disease. It was the beginning of what Otto Warburg called 'that great age in which medicine and chemistry forged their alliance for the benefit of all mankind. He and another outstanding biochemist, Otto Meyerhof, were awarded Nobel Prizes for work on the chemistry of muscle and on respiratory enzymes respectively. Their learning was passed on to others, such as Hans Krebs, who went on to become Nobel laureates.
Berlin, centre of imperial power and scholarship, dominated the scientific scene, with its world-famous university and the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes; it was also the seat of the Prussian Academy and the National Physical Laboratory. In the capital city brash new wealth jostled with imperial pomp and the old governing class of the Prussian military and landowning aristocracy. It was also the artistic and cultural capital, with a flourishing salon society which cultivated creativity and honoured the great scientific intellects along with philosophers, writers and musicians.
At the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin, Fritz Haber, its director, showed how original research applied to technology could transform the nation's fortunes. But for him, Germany would almost certainly have lost the First World War within a year. His discovery of how to make ammonia, a crucial step in the manufacture of nitrates, which are a vital component of explosives, saved Germany, starved of the nitrates it had previously imported from Chile. A further consequence of Haber's work was the manufacture of artificial nitrate fertilizers, which are used today by farmers all over the world. Finally, Haber's research on the gases released from the industrial process produced poison gas in the form of chlorine, an unprecedented example of what science mobilized for war could do. Haber became a national hero for his war work, and he was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize for his work on nitrates.
In theoretical physics, Germany shone brightest of all, contributing more revolutionary discoveries than any other country in any science, at least until the United States took over as science's world leader half a century later. The 'golden age of physics began at the turn of the century; Berlin was central to its development, as Max Planck was to its success. Universally respected for his absolute integrity and devotion to German science, Planck was famous for his formulation of the quantum theory, recognizing that energy exists in quanta or finite amounts and was not, as had been thought, a continuum. This theory, published in 1900, was a foundation stone of atomic physics, leading Niels Bohr to postulate that quantal changes of energy were involved when electrons were lost or moved from one orbit round the atomic nucleus to another. Personally and scientifically Planck was thoroughly conservative and recoiled from his own findings, which clashed with the tenets of classical physics, and he preferred to look for ways to reconcile them.
The young Albert Einstein, working alone in Zurich, was inspired by the revolutionary implications of Planck's discovery; his famous paper on the photoelectric effect, published in 1905, confirmed Planck's quantum theory. His special theory of relativity challenged Newton's laws of physics, which had been unquestioned for two centuries. The theory of relativity seemed so outlandish that at first hardly anyone understood its importance; Planck was among the few who did, and in 1913 he and Walther Nernst, Berlin's two senior scientists, persuaded Einstein to join them in Berlin as head of the KWI for Physics. Original in every utterance and totally unconventional, Einstein added the shock of genius to Berlin's scientific establishment Another champion of Einstein's new theories was Max von Laue, a former student of Planck's, who won the Nobel Prize in 1914 for his discovery that crystals diffract X-rays, which proved that X-rays are electromagnetic waves. Von Laue was from an old landowning family of East Prussian nobility, the traditional backbone of the Prussian army, and not at all the sort of person to go in for science. He always had the bearing and bark of a Prussian officer, though he tried to soften this impression by taking elocution lessons.
Walther Nernst was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920 for discovering the third law of thermodynamics: the merging of total and free energy which occurs as absolute zero temperature is approached. The realization of this principle came while he was lecturing to his students during his first term in Berlin in 1905, and he was never slow to proclaim 'his' law. He also enjoyed being an entrepreneur, and a patent he took out on an improvement to a type of electric lamp made him a wealthy man.
Women who worked in science at the time were exceptional. Despite his conservatism, Planck appointed Lise Meitner, from Austria, as his assistant in 1912, and she enjoyed a long and fruitful working relationship with Otto Hahn. She was a physicist and Hahn was a chemist, but they are generally known as the discoverers of nuclear fission, the basis for the atomic bomb, in 1938 — mercifully not before, or Hitler's Germany might have been armed with atomic weapons.
When Planck retired as professor of theoretical physics in 1927 be was succeeded by the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger, whose papers on wave equations had caused a sensation the previous year. Schrödinger's wave theory, though different in its approach, led to similar conclusions as the quantum mechanics of Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan in Göttingen which interpreted the atom in completely different, mathematical terms. Kurt Mendelssohn, who was metaphorically cutting his teeth on the new physics as a young research graduate in the 1920s, describes the excitement and bafflement at the time of the Schrödinger/Born controversy: 'Most of the time at Heyl's [a coffee house close to the physics laboratory in Berlin] was, of course, devoted to the progress of physics, or rather to our frantic efforts to understand it ... the subject had now reached such a state of confusion that one could ask the silliest question without being branded a fool. After a year of calculation, correspondence and argument Schrödinger found a way out of the dilemma: both treatments were equivalent and correct, although expressed differently.
Groups of talented students and younger scientists gathered round the leading figures, who remained very much at the centre of events. At one stage during the 1920s Planck, Nernst, von Laue and Einstein regularly sat in the front row at the weekly physics seminars at Berlin University, a terrifying prospect for a young scientist presenting a paper.
Among the scientific centres of excellence outside Berlin, Munich, which was strongly Catholic, was highly influential. In particular Arnold Sommerfeld, professor of theoretical physics, was in close touch with Berlin's scientists and left his mark on a generation of physicists; he trained nearly a third of Germany's professors of physics and four of his students were awarded Nobel Prizes.
The other great cluster of scientific excellence in pre-Hitler Germany, rivalling even Berlin in physics and mathematics, was Göttingen. The ancient university city had no truck with Berlin's grandeur and showy style, cultivating instead a 'donnish provincialism'; but its academic community was world-famous. The town-and-gown atmosphere was perhaps akin to that of Cambridge; life revolved around the university in the city centre, which was small enough for people to walk everywhere, and even well-to-do houses took in scientific scholars as paying guests.
In the university close collaboration between physics and mathematics departments was encouraged by its leading mathematician, David Hilbert, and his younger colleague Richard Courant. Hilbert was also chairman of the prize committee for a curious award — a citizen of Göttingen had left a large bequest to whomever could solve the mathematical problem known as Fermât's Last Theorem. The committee was in no hurry to find the correct answer, as the interest on the fund was used to pay for lectures by visiting scientists, including Planck, Nernst, Sommerfeld and the Dane Niels Bohr. Göttingen's scholars flocked to hear guest lecturers — Bohr in particular was held in great esteem and affection, and his visit in summer 1922 became known as the Bohr Fest.
Göttingen's greatest theoretical physicist was Max Born, a man whom Bertrand Russell described, much later, as 'brilliant, humble and completely without fear in his public utterances'. At one time or another Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Eugene Wigner worked with him, all of whom, including Born himself, later won Nobel Prizes.
Max Born's father was professor of anatomy at Breslau and Max grew up in comfort, surrounded by his extended Jewish family and his father's scholarly and musical friends. One of them encouraged Max towards mathematics and astronomy rather than engineering, as he had first intended, and he became an exceptional student at Breslau University. After studying in Heidelberg and Cambridge he moved to Göttingen in 1908 and rapidly proved his brilliance in mathematical physics. He was enticed away to Berlin, then to Frankfurt, before accepting the Chair of Theoretical Physics at Göttingen. There was another vacant position and he lost no time in recommending his colleague and friend, James Franck, to head a second department of experimental physics.
Born was by now mainly interested in applying the quantum theory to the structure of atoms. He met James Franck daily, whose group was working in a similar field, comparing their findings with those of Bohr in Copenhagen. The result was the theory of quantum mechanics, which fitted another piece into the confusing picture of the new physics. Born's pupil Werner Heisenberg, a boyish German genius, worked on the problem too, and before long their joint paper with Pascual Jordan appeared in Zeitschrift für Physik in 1926. Born later wrote: 'It was a time of hard but successful and delightful work, and there was never a quarrel between us three, no dispute, no jealousy.' The new ideas were picked up with excitement and consternation by scientists elsewhere — notably Paul Dirac, who heard Heisenberg lecture in Cambridge, and Schrödinger in Berlin. In 1933 Heisenberg, Dirac and Schrödinger were awarded Nobel Prizes for this work; Born, by then in exile in England, had to wait two decades for his. James Franck had won his Nobel Prize in 1925 for formulating the laws governing the impact of electrons on an atom, another step in understanding atomic structure.
Göttingen attracted scholars from all over the world, including the United States. In 1927 Born had to put in a special plea to the Board of Examiners and the Ministry, for an American student of his who had fallen foul of German bureaucracy when applying for a doctorate. Born's intervention enabled the student to pass with distinction. He was Robert Oppenheimer, later director of the atomic bomb project. Many years later, Oppenheimer wrote:
Our understanding of atomic physics, of what we call the quantum theory of atomic systems, had its origins at the turn of the century and its great synthesis and resolutions in the 1920s. It was not the doing of any one man. It involved the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different lands ... It was a period of patient work in the laboratory, of crucial experiments and daring action, of many false starts and many untenable conjectures. It was a time of earnest correspondence and hurried conferences, of debate, criticism and brilliant mathematical improvisation. For those who participated it was a time of creation. There was terror as well as innovation in their new insight.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
List of Illustrations,
Foreword by Dr Max Perutz OM FRS,
Introduction,
1 German Science Before Hitler,
2 The Coming of the Nazis,
3 Einstein,
4 Rescuers,
5 Refugees to Britain — Physicists,
6 Refugees to Britain — Biologists and Chemists,
7 Refugees to the United States,
8 Those Who Stayed,
9 Internment,
10 The Bomb,
Epilogue,
Appendix I: Nobel Prize Winners Who Left Their Universities,
Appendix II: The Frisch-Peierls Memorandum,
Appendix III: 'That Was the War: Enemy Alien,
Selected Bibliography,
Notes,
