The German Genius

polarized.
    Einstein’s persecution had begun early. He had come under attack largely because of the international acclaim he received after Arthur Eddington’s announcement in November 1919 that he had obtained experimental confirmation for the predictions of general relativity theory. Einstein had some support—the German ambassador in London in 1920 warned his Foreign Office privately that “Professor Einstein is just at this time a cultural factor of first rank…We should not drive such a man out of Germany with whom we can carry on real cultural propaganda.” Yet two years later, following the assassination of Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister, unconfirmed reports leaked out that Einstein was also on the list of intended victims, and he was described as an “evil monster.” 29
    When the Nazis achieved power ten years later, action was not long delayed. In January 1933 Einstein was away from Berlin on a visit to the United States. Despite facing a number of personal problems, he made a point of announcing he would not return to his positions at the university in Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft as long as the Nazis were in charge. 30 The Nazis repaid the compliment by freezing his bank account, searching his house for weapons allegedly hidden there by Communists, and publicly burning copies of a popular book of his on relativity. Later in the spring, the regime issued a catalog of “state enemies”: Einstein’s picture headed the list, and below the photograph was the text, “Not yet hanged.” He eventually found a berth at the newly established Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. When the news was released, one newspaper in Germany ran the headline: “G OOD N EWS FROM E INSTEIN —H E I S N OT C OMING B ACK .” On March 28, 1933, Einstein resigned his membership in the Prussian Academy of Sciences, preventing any Nazi from firing him, and was distressed that none of his former colleagues—not even Max von Laue or Max Planck—made any attempt to protest his treatment. He later wrote: “The conduct of German intellectuals—as a group—was no better than the rabble.” 31
    Einstein was by no means the only famous physicist to leave Germany. Some 25 percent of the pre-1933 physics community was lost, including half its theoretical physicists and many of the top people in quantum or nuclear physics. In addition to Einstein and Franck, there were Gustav Hertz, Erwin Schrödinger, Victor Hess, and Peter Debye, all Nobel Prize winners, plus Otto Stern, Felix Bloch, Max Born, Eugen Wigner, Hans Bethe, Dennis Gabor, Georg von Hevesy, and Gerhard Herzberg, as well as the mathematicians Richard Courant, Hermann Weyl, and Emmy Noether, described by Einstein as the best female mathematician ever. Roughly one hundred world-class colleagues found refuge in the United States between 1933 and 1941, and Leo Szilard worked hard in Britain to set up the Academic Assistance Council to provide jobs for displaced academics. According to John Cornwell, the German physics community did not shrink in absolute numbers because there were plenty of people to replace those dismissed, “but the quality of the scientists declined and basic research stagnated.” 32
    Max Planck tried to put in a good word for Fritz Haber, who had been forced to resign his post as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Physical Chemistry. Planck went to see Hitler and, according to what he himself later wrote, said that “there were different sorts of Jews, some valuable and some valueless for mankind” and that one had to make distinctions. Hitler rebuked him, saying, “That’s not right. A Jew is a Jew; all Jews cling together like burrs.”
    For scientists only slightly less famous than Einstein or Haber, the attitude of the Nazis was sometimes difficult to anticipate. Karl von Frisch was the first zoologist to discover “the language of the bees,” by means of which bees inform other bees about food sources through dances on the honeycomb. Frisch’s experiments caught the imagination of the public, and his popular books were best sellers. This cut little ice with the Nazis who, under the Civil Service Law of 1933, still required Frisch to provide proof of his Aryan descent. The sticking point was his maternal grandmother, and it was possible, he admitted, that she was “non-Aryan.” A virulent campaign was therefore conducted against Frisch in the student newspaper at the University of Munich,