The German Genius

a lot of people, and wholesale immigration not only risked displacing American scholars but also might trigger anti-Semitism. In the end the emergency committee decided its policy would be “to help scholarship, rather than relieve suffering.” Thus they concentrated on scholars whose achievements were already acknowledged, the most well-known beneficiary being Richard Courant from Göttingen. Fifty-one mathematicians were eventually brought to America before the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939; by 1945 the total was just under 150. 40 Every scholar, whatever his or her age, found work. Put alongside the 6 million Jews who perished in the gas ovens, 150 doesn’t sound like much, yet there were more mathematicians helped than any other professional group. 41
     
     
    To give a complete picture of German scholarship, however, we now need to describe three areas where, despite the crude anti-Semitism, despite the poor grasp of scientific principles and method which the likes of Hitler, Himmler, and Rust displayed, German scholarship did well. Rocket and jet technology were not the only fields where the Germans were strong.
    The first was the Nazi war on cancer. Because the Germans, as we have seen, led the way in regard to coal-tar derivatives—the basic process that had been behind the dye industry and then the pharmaceuticals industry—they were also aware that cancer was associated with many of the new products. By the same token, having invented x-rays, the Germans also noted—as early as 1902—a link between them and cancer, in particular leukemia.
    These results produced in Germany, first, a campaign to prevent cancer—anti-smoking campaigns started there well before anyone else had the idea, and men were warned to check their colons “as often as they checked their cars.” As early as 1938 German scientists had found a link between twelve different types of cancer and asbestos. 42 Richard (later Sir Richard) Doll, the Englishman who worked on the link between smoking and cancer in the 1950s, studied in Germany in the 1930s and was shocked to find Jews depicted as “cancers” and Nazi storm troopers as x-rays targeting these “tumours.”
    German scientists were among the first to explore the links between cancer and diet, especially food additives, and they were also the first to promote natural foods, in particular whole wheat bread (white bread being denounced as a “French revolutionary invention”). 43 The role of alcohol in causing cancer was suspected, but the Nazis went much further than anyone else in concentrating on the role of tobacco: smoking was banned in public areas, cigarette advertising was banned, “non-smoking” carriages were established on trains. The shine is taken off these stories when it is realized that tobacco consumption in Germany grew every year after Hitler came to power, so that in 1940 it stood at twice the level of 1933. It only fell in 1944, possibly due to rationing.
    “W HITE J EWS”
     
    In physics where, save for Lenard and Starck, Germany had a record second to none, much the same process repeated itself as had happened over biology. Just as Frisch had come under pressure because one of his grandparents may have been “non-Aryan,” so Werner Heisenberg came under similar pressure because he refused to recognize that “Jewish physics” (i.e., relativity theory) must be wrong or degenerate or both. He, Laue, Planck, and Walter Nernst refused to sign a manifesto organized by Starck pledging loyalty to Hitler. Each of these Nobel Prize winners insisted that physics had nothing to do with politics.
    Then, in 1935, Arnold Sommerfeld, sixty-six, was preparing to leave his position as professor at Munich after nearly thirty years (he had taken over from none other than Ludwig Boltzmann). Heisenberg was the natural successor, but he was held to be too much in thrall to the “Jewish spirit” in physics and so became one of the first to be referred to as a “white Jew.” He was attacked in the Nazi press and although he was supported by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, he didn’t get the job, which went to a much less able man. In his memoirs he passed over this incident, saying that so many friends and colleagues had to suffer so much worse. 44
    As the 1930s passed, physics began to take on an almost apocalyptic significance. In 1933, as Hitler came to power, Einstein was not the only German physicist abroad in the United States. So too was Otto