By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Ball, Philip. Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2014. Pp ix +303. Available on amazon.com.
With access to reams of correspondence, other archival material, and public records, Philip Ball provides a valuable account of how German scientists related to the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler. Ball identifies three prominent physicists, Peter Debye, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg to illustrate a range of response.
Ball begins with a discussion of the work and life of Peter Debye, whose major contribution is found in the field of chemical physics. Debye was a student of Arnold Sommerfeld, a mathematical physicist whose interests ranged from hydrodynamics to theory of electrical conduction, fields of study with military implications. So, too, were Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and other prominent physicists.
Debye, born in Maastricht, was never a German citizen but was at home in German culture. Known for his extraordinary intuitive insight and mathematical skill, Debye decoded the physical character of molecules, especially how they interact with light and form radiation. Never a member of the National Socialist party, he nevertheless served the Reich as head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.
In fact only a small minority of German scientists embraced National Socialism, but German physicists as a group failed to mount any concerted resistance to the autocratic and anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.
In a brief biographical sketch, Ball depicts Max Planck as a conservative or traditionalist, a member of the German elite who considered themselves to be custodians of German culture. Heisenberg seemingly shared Planck’s sense of national pride and patriotism as well as his sense of duty to the state.
Ball remarks that “Planck was temperamentally unfit for protests against constituted authority.” Given his dedication to service in the interest of the state, for him open defiance was unthinkable.
In May 1933 Planck visited Hitler. Hitler assured Planck that he was not anti-Semite, only anti-Communist. The New York Times reported the same month that “German scientists rally behind Hitler.” Such was not the case.
When Fritz Haber, as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, was forced to discharge all non-Aryans, he resigned. Writing to Bernard Rust, a Nazi functionary, he said. “My tradition requires of me that in my scientific position I consider only the professional accomplishments and character of the applicants when I choose my co-workers without asking about their racial make-up.”
Ball is convinced that by introducing their discriminatory and authoritarian policies in the form of new laws, the National Socialists exploited the German instinct for obedience to the state. One did not object to measures that were enshrined into law. The idea that laws could be criminal was virtually a contradiction in terms.
When Hitler came to power, some knew where Germany was heading, but the German citizenry as a whole seemingly did not. Europe, Ball explains, had no previous experience of state repression and legalized racism. After the turmoil of the Weimar Republic, people of all persuasions welcomed a firm conservative government. Given what seemed to be needed, coupled with political naiveté, few scientists spoke out publicly against the regime or actively opposed it.
In 1933 around a quarter of German physicists were Jewish. Many of the most notable were “non-Aryan.” Among those who faced exclusion by the anti-Semitic law were Albert Einstein, Max Born, Eugene Wigner, James Franck, Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Rudolf Peierls, Lise Meitner, and Samuel Goudsmit. Many of these names are now attached to physical laws, institutes, awards, and chemical elements.
Lise Meitner is of particular interest for a number of reasons. She was the first to recognize the implications of an experiment conducted by Hahn and Strassmann. Discussing their report with her nephew Otto Frisch, she was the first to conclude, after some quick calculation, that the nucleus of the uranium atom of their experiment had been split. “So that is where all that energy came from.”
When it became clear that she had to leave Germany to survive, the effort to get her out of Germany and into Stockholm via the Netherlands was high drama. As she was about to depart, Otto Hahn in seeing her off gave Meitner a diamond ring inherited from his mother as an emergency fund.
By her own account as she left by train, “I got the scare of my life when a Nazi military patrol going through the coaches picked up my [expired] Austrian passport…my heart almost stopped beating. I knew the Nazis had just declared open season on the Jews.”
Without possessions, she left Germany with only 10 marks in her purse. She remained in Stockholm for the rest of her life, but shortly after the war, she accepted an appointment as a visiting professor (1946-1947) at The Catholic University of America, where her brother-in-law, Rudolf Allers, was a professor in the university’s School of Philosophy. From that base she traveled to many universities giving lectures and being honored.
In 1945, Lise Meitner wrote to Hahn, “It was clear to me that even you and [Max von] Laue had not grasped the real situation. . . . 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 personal resistance either. Certainly to buy off your conscience 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.”
Years later, in 1958, when interviewed on her 80th birthday, she repeated the charge. “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.”
As he writes, Philip Ball is not oblivious to the fact that there are parallels to be drawn between the rise to power of the National Socialists in Germany and the recent centralization of power in the United States.
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(Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of The School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.)
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