Serving the Reich

  Philip Ball is a freelance writer who lives in London. He worked for over twenty years as an editor for Nature, writes regularly in the scientific and popular media, and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and the wider culture.

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2014 by Philip Ball

  All rights reserved. Published 2014.

  Printed in the United States of America

  23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20457-4 (cloth)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20460-4 (e-book)

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226204604.001.0001

  Originally published by Bodley Head, 2013.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Ball, Philip, 1962–

  Serving the Reich : the struggle for the soul of physics under Hitler / Philip Ball.

  pages ; cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-226-20457-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-20460-4 (e-book)

  1. National socialism and science. 2. Nuclear physics—Germany—History—20th century. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Science—Germany. 4. Science—Moral and ethical aspects—Germany. 5. Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik. 6. Germany—History—1933–1945. 7. Planck, Max, 1858–1947. 8. Debye, Peter J. W. (Peter Josef William), 1884–1966. 9. Heisenberg, Werner, 1901–1976. I. Title.

  QC773.3.G3B35 2014

  530.0943'09043—dc23

  2014010718

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  Serving the Reich

  THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF PHYSICS UNDER HITLER

  Philip Ball

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  CHICAGO

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction: ‘Nobel Prize-winner with dirty hands’

  1. ‘As conservatively as possible’

  2. ‘Physics must be rebuilt’

  3. ‘The beginning of something new’

  4. ‘Intellectual freedom is a thing of the past’

  5. ‘Service to science must be service to the nation’

  6. ‘There is very likely a Nordic science’

  7. ‘You obviously cannot swim against the tide’

  8. ‘I have seen my death!’

  9. ‘As a scientist or as a man’

  10. ‘Hitherto unknown destructive power’

  11. ‘Heisenberg was mostly silent’

  12. ‘We are what we pretend to be’

  Epilogue: ‘We did not speak the same language’

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Image Credits

  Index

  Preface

  There is a view becoming increasingly prevalent today that science is no more and no less than a candid exploration of the universe: an effort to find truths free from the ideological dogmas and ambiguities that beset the humanities, using a methodology that is fixed, transparent and egalitarian. Scientists are only human, to be sure, but science (in this view) is above our petty preoccupations—it occupies a nobler plane, and what it reveals is pristine and abstract. This is a time when one can claim without fear of challenge that science is ‘disembodied, pure knowledge’. There are scientists and science advocates who consider that historians, philosophers and sociologists, by contrast, can offer little more than compromised, contingent half-truths; that theologians spin webs out of vapour, politicians are venal and penny-pinching vote chasers, and literary theorists are brazen clowns and charlatans. Even the historians, philosophers and sociologists who study science itself are often regarded with suspicion if not outright hostility by practising scientists, not just because they complicate science’s tidy self-image but because some scientists cannot imagine why science should need this kind of scrutiny. Why can’t scientists be left alone to get on with the business of excavating truth?

  This Panglossian description doubtless betrays my scepticism. These trends wax and wane. It is a commonplace to say that scientists once served God, or at other times industry, or national glory. Only a few decades ago science seemed to be happily swimming in the cultural mix, enchanting us with dazzling images of chaos and complexity and looking for dialogue with artists and philosophers. But assaults from religious and political fundamentalists, posturing cultural relativists and medical quacks have understandably left many scientists feeling embattled and desperate to recapture a modicum of intellectual authority. And it remains the case that science has a means of investigation that works and can provide reliable knowledge, and of this its practitioners are fittingly proud.

  Yet an insistence on the purity of science is dangerous, and I hope that this book will suggest some reasons for saying so. In studying the responses of scientists working in Germany to the rise of the Third Reich, I could not but be dismayed at how the attitudes of many of them—that science is ‘apolitical’, ‘above politics’, a ‘higher calling’ with a stronger claim on one’s duty and loyalties than any affairs of human intercourse—sound close to statements I have heard and read by scientists today.

  Peter Debye, who is one of the key figures in this story, was also considered a scientist’s scientist. An examination of Debye’s life shows how problematic this persona may become when—as is often the case—life calls for something else, something that cannot be answered with a quip or an equation, or worst of all, with the defence that science should pay no heed to such mundane matters.

  Debye, like many of his colleagues, doubtless did what he was able in extraordinarily difficult times. Whether or not one feels inclined to criticize his choices, the real problem for scientists in Germany in the 1930s was not a matter of personal shortcomings but the fact the institution of science itself had become an edifice lacking any clear social and moral orientation. It had created its own alibi for acting in the world. We must treasure and defend science, but not at the cost of making it different from other human endeavours, with unique obligations and ethical boundaries—or a unique absence of them.

  Debye’s story was first brought to my attention by science historian Peter Morris, and he has my deep gratitude for that. My attempts to navigate through the turbulent currents of this particular time and place have been made possible, and hopefully saved from the worst disasters, by the extremely generous help of many experts and other wise voices, and here I am grateful to Heather Douglas, Eric Kurlander, Dieter Hoffmann, Roald Hoffmann, Horst Kant, Gijs van Ginkel, Mark Walker, Stefan Wolff and Ben Widom. Norwig Debye-Saxinger was very gracious in discussing with me some sensitive aspects of his grandfather’s life and work. The Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, New York, made my visit very comfortable and productive.

  My agent Clare Alexander, and my editors Jörg Hensgen, Will Sulkin and his successor Stuart Williams at Bodley Head have been as supportive and reliable as I have come, with much gratitude, to anticipate. I am particularly grateful on this occasion for Jörg’s perspectives on German culture and history. I was very glad to have benefitted once again from the sensitive and reliable copy-editing of David Milner. As ever, my wife Julia and my family are my inspiration.

  Philip Ball

  London, March 2013

  Introduction:

  ‘Nobel Prize-winner with dirty hands’

  Very few great twentieth-century physicists are household names, but Peter Debye must enjoy, if that is the right word, one of the lowest returns of fame within this pantheon. Partly this reflects the nature of his work and discoveries. Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Stephen Hawking have become regarded, in many respects quite rightly, as pronouncing
on deep mysteries about the nature of the physical world. Debye, in contrast, made his largest contributions in an abidingly unfashionable field of science: chemical physics. He decoded the physical character of molecules, and especially how they interact with light and other forms of radiation. His range was remarkable: he helped to understand, for example, how X-rays and electron beams can reveal the shapes and movements of molecules, he developed a theory of salt solutions, he devised a method for measuring the size of polymer molecules. For some of this work he won a Nobel Prize in 1936. He has a scientific unit named after him, and several important equations bear his name. None of this sounds terribly earth-shaking, and in many ways it is not. But Debye is rightly revered by scientists today as someone with phenomenal intuitive insight and mathematical skill, who could see to the heart of a problem and develop its description in ways that were not just profound but useful. It is very rare to find such theoretical and pragmatic sensibilities combined in a scientist.

  His colleagues spoke warmly of him; his obituaries were uniformly admiring. He fathered a loving family, and exuded the air of a hale, dependable, outgoing spirit, liking nothing more than a hike or a spell of gardening with his wife. There was, admittedly, nothing unconventional in his character, in the manner of Einstein or Richard Feynman, to snare the imagination—but wasn’t that in itself something of a virtue?

  So it came as a shock when, in a book called Einstein in Nederland published in January 2006 by Dutch journalist Sybe Rispens, Debye was accused of Nazi collusion. In an article written for the Dutch periodical Vrij Nederland to coincide with the book’s publication, Rispens characterized Debye as a ‘Nobel Prize-winner with dirty hands’. He was never a member of the Nazi Party, Rispens admitted, but he was a ‘willing helper of the regime’ and had contributed to ‘Hitler’s most important military research program’. Rispens described how, from 1935 until he left Germany at the end of 1939, Debye had been head of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, where subsequently work had been conducted on the military uses of nuclear power. And as the chairman of the German Physics Society in 1938, Debye signed a letter calling for the resignation of all remaining Jewish members of the society—an action that Rispens called ‘effective Aryan cleansing’. Even while Debye was in the United States during the war (where he remained at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, until his death in 1966), he had maintained contact with the Nazi authorities, in Rispens’ view keeping open the possibility of returning to his post in Berlin once the hostilities were over.

  Debye’s conduct in Nazi Germany had previously been presented largely as that of an honest man forced unwillingly into compromises by a vicious regime whose excesses finally drove him into exile. That Debye might have had more selfish motivations was a decidedly unwelcome idea. One commentator argued that this suggestion of hitherto unimagined complexity and controversy in the life of a revered physicist left his admirers feeling ‘deprived of a hero’.

  It’s not clear that Rispens’ accusations would have been afforded much attention by scientists, however, had it not been for the response that followed in the Netherlands. Two universities associated with Debye’s name panicked and rushed to distance themselves. The Debye Award for Research in the Natural Sciences was instituted in 1977 by Debye’s friend, the industrialist Edmund Hustinx, and was administered by the University of Maastricht. In February 2006 the university asked the Hustinx Foundation for permission to drop Debye’s name from the award, saying that he ‘insufficiently resisted the limitations on academic freedom’ during the Nazi era. ‘The Executive Board considers this picture difficult to reconcile with the example associated with a naming of a scientific prize’, declared a press release from the university. And the University of Utrecht, which hosted the renowned Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, likewise announced that ‘recent evidence’ was ‘not compatible with the example of using Debye’s name’, which would henceforth be dropped from the institute’s title.

  Those actions contrasted with the response of the chemistry department of Cornell University, which had long been proud to have Debye among its alumni. The department commissioned an investigation into the allegations in collaboration with historian Mark Walker of Union College in Schenectady, a leading authority on German physics during the Third Reich. It concluded that Debye was neither a Nazi sympathizer nor an anti-Semite, and that ‘any action that dissociates Debye’s name from the [department] is unwarranted’.

  Walker and other historians of science insisted that Rispens had given a polarized caricature of Debye which obscured the fact that his response to Nazi rule was no different from that of the vast majority of German scientists. Very few of them actively opposed the Nazis inside Germany—scarcely any non-Jewish professors, for example, resigned their posts or emigrated in protest at Hitler’s discriminatory Civil Service Laws of 1933. But by the same token, only a small minority of scientists enthusiastically embraced the poisonous doctrines of the National Socialists. Most scientists in Germany, the historians pointed out, made accommodations and evasions in the face of the intrusions and injustices of the Nazi state: perhaps lodging minor complaints, ignoring this or that directive, or helping dismissed colleagues, while failing to mount any concerted resistance. They were primarily concerned to preserve what they could of their own careers, autonomy and influence. Debye was one of these, no better and no worse than a host of other famous names.

  Whatever the merits of Rispens’ claims—and I shall examine them in this book—the ‘Debye affair’ reopened a long-standing and controversial debate about the actions of the German physicists during Hitler’s rule. Did they demonstrate any serious opposition to the autocratic and anti-Semitic policies of the National Socialists, or did they on the contrary adapt themselves to the regime? Should we consider these scientists to have occupied a special position, with obligations beyond the quotidian, by virtue of their social and professional roles, their international connections and their scientific and philosophical world views? Was science itself commandeered by the National Socialists for its ideological and military programme? Was it, as some have said, destroyed by the state’s racial policies? Or did it survive and in some respects flourish, at least until the bombs began to fall?

  One thing is clear: these questions, and the consequent implications for the relationship of science and the state, will not be addressed by the ‘persistent and virulent use of the Janus-like combination of hagiography and demonization, the black-and-white characterization of scientists’ that Walker feels has often blighted earlier attempts to comprehend science in the Third Reich. There is even now a tendency to present the choices that the scientists in Germany made in straightforward categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, which moreover tend to be categories determined by the omniscient hindsight of champions of tolerant liberal democracy. One does not need to be a moral relativist to find dangers in such a position. There are a few heroes and villains in this tale, to be sure. But most of the players are, like most of us, neither of these things. Their flaws, misjudgements, their kindnesses and acts of bravery, are ours: compromised and myopic, perhaps, yet beyond good and evil—and human, all too human.

  Three stories

  This is true of the three figures examined in this book, whose case histories illuminate, in their contrasts and their parallels, the diverse ways in which the majority of scientists (and other citizens) situated in the grey zone between complicity and resistance adjusted to Nazi rule. It is precisely because Peter Debye, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg were neither heroes nor villains that their stories are instructive, both about the realities of life in the Third Reich and about the relationship between science and politics more generally. The roles of Planck and Heisenberg have been examined by historians in great detail; Debye has in the past been considered a minor and almost incidental figure, which is precisely why the recent eruption of the Debye affair is significant. Yet despite the immense amount of research on the German
physics community under the Nazis, historians still disagree profoundly and even passionately about how it should be judged.

  In the contrasting situations and decisions of Debye, Planck and Heisenberg we can find some context for approaching this question. The lives of the three men intersected and interacted in many ways. Debye and Heisenberg shared the same mentor and worked side by side in Leipzig in the early 1930s. Planck encouraged the careers of both, and they saw him as a father figure and moral beacon. Debye insisted, against the wishes of the Nazis, on naming the physics institute that he headed in Berlin after Planck. When Debye left for the United States after war broke out, Heisenberg was his eventual replacement.

  Each of these men was a very different personality. It is clear that none of them was enthusiastic about Hitler’s regime, yet all were leaders and guides of German science—managerially, intellectually and inspirationally—and they each played a major part in setting the tone of the physics community’s response to the Nazi era. Each of them served the German Reich, both before and during that era, and while that was not the same as serving Hitler, let alone accepting his ideology, none of them seemed able to consider carefully how, or if, there was a distinction. Planck was the conservative traditionalist, a representative of the old Wilhelmite elite who considered themselves to be custodians of German culture. Such men were patriots, confident of their status in society and conscious that their first duty was obedient service to the state. Heisenberg shared Planck’s patriotism and sense of civic duty, but lacked his preconceptions about the codes of tradition. For him, the hope for a resurgence of German spirit after the humiliation of the First World War lay with a youth movement that celebrated a romantic attachment to nature, to comradeship and frank engagement with philosophical questions. Just as Heisenberg had no qualms about shaping the revolutionary quantum theory, which Planck had reluctantly helped to launch, into a world view that cast doubt on all that went before, so he felt little allegiance to the conservatism of Prussian culture. And Debye is the outsider, who carved out an illustrious career in Germany while steadfastly refusing German citizenship. Faced with the interference and demands of the National Socialists, Planck fretted and prevaricated. Heisenberg sought official approval while refusing to recognize the consequences of his accommodations. Debye is in many ways the most ambiguous of the trio, not because he was the most cunning but perhaps because he was a simpler, less reflective man: the ‘scientist’s scientist’, truly ‘apolitical’, for better or worse, in his devotion to his research.