Serving the Reich Read online

  This was, however, a dangerous game. Some outsiders drew the conclusion that quantum mechanics pronounced on free will, and it was only a matter of time before the new physics was being enlisted for political ends. Some even managed to claim that it vindicated the policies of the National Socialists.

  Moreover, if physics was being in some sense shaped to propitiate Spenglerism, it risked seeming to endorse also Spengler’s central thesis of relativism: that not only art and literature but also science and mathematics are shaped by the culture in which they arise and are invalid and indeed all but incomprehensible outside that culture. It is tempting to find here a presentiment of the ‘Aryan physics’ propagated by Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s (see Chapter 6), which contrasted healthy Germanic science with decadent, self-serving Jewish science. And given Spengler’s nationalism, rejection of Weimar liberalism, support for authoritarianism and belief in historical destiny, it is no surprise that he was initially lauded by the Nazis, especially Joseph Goebbels, nor that he voted for Hitler in 1932. (Spengler was too much of an intellectual for his advocacy to survive close contact. After meeting Hitler in 1933, he distanced himself from the Nazis’ vulgar posturing and anti-Semitism, and was no favourite of the Reich by the time he died in Munich in 1936.)

  One way or another, then, by the 1920s physics was becoming freighted with political implications. Without intending it, the physicists themselves had encouraged this. But they hadn’t grasped—were perhaps unable to grasp—what it would soon imply.

  3

  ‘The beginning of something new’

  Maastricht has always been proud that Peter Debye was born there. A bronze bust of the scientist is displayed in the City Hall, and Debye was present when it was unveiled in November 1939, shortly before he left Europe for good. In those troubled times, the (somewhat convoluted) address at the inauguration declared, Debye was ‘the loyal soldier and shield-bearer of and at the gate of civilization, [a] master of culture, who preserves the purity of spirit and elevates it to serve, indeed to deserve the Nobel Prize awarded to the great masters among mankind’.

  It is ironic that Debye’s Dutch nationality eventually precipitated the end of his career in German science, since in many ways he did not seem especially attached to the country of his birth. Rather, he identified more strongly as a Maastrichtenaar, a native of the capital city of Limburg, where the confluence of three cultures weakened any sense of national identity. In Maastricht, Debye said, one could use Dutch, Belgian or German currency—a symbolic indication of the city’s cultural fluidity.

  Peter Debye was born in 1884, the son of a metalworks foreman and a mother who worked as a ticket-seller at the theatre. They lived in a working-class district populated mainly by tradespeople, and until Debye went to school he spoke only the local dialect. It was expected at first that he would enter his father’s trade, but his mother had higher ambitions, sending him in spite of the cost to a good secondary school run by monks.

  He was an outstanding student in science, and so it was decided that he should go to college—an unusual step in view of his humble origin. University was out of the question, for Debye had not learnt the requisite Greek and Latin, so he went to the technical college at Aachen to study electrical engineering, which had become a popular subject thanks to the burgeoning electrification of daily life. The feeling was, he later explained, ‘that the best thing was for me to become an electrical engineer because I was interested in electricity and had done a lot of experiments myself and built a dynamo machine [at school]’. There was nothing surprising in the decision to continue his studies in Germany: he had already learnt good German at school, and Aachen was only twenty miles away from Maastricht. For electrical engineering, the only viable alternatives were Ypres in Belgium, or Delft. But Aachen was the cheapest option, and that was what mattered to a boy of modest means—it was, Debye said, ‘just a question of money’. He lived in a single room shared with another lad from Maastricht, and to further conserve his funds he went home at weekends. On Monday morning he would have to rise in time to take the one o’clock train to Aachen, arriving in time for the eight o’clock lecture despite the one-hour time difference.

  Peter Debye (1884–1966) at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics around 1936.

  Debye enrolled at Aachen in 1901. His abilities soon caught the eye of Arnold Sommerfeld, a young professor of engineering mechanics who had arrived at Aachen just a year before Debye. Sommerfeld found his promising student to be ‘a charming boy who looked out on the world and on life with intelligence and curiosity’, and he appointed him as his research assistant in 1904. Sommerfeld would invite his best pupils to his house for supper, where they would share a bottle of wine and talk—or for the students, mostly listen. ‘We came to his house in the evening at eight o’clock’, Debye recalled,

  had the evening meal, supper. And then you sit in his room. And in his room he began to talk. He talked about the things he was interested in, and you sat there as a kind of an audience. He asked you about it, although you did not know anything about it. He tried it out, so to say. And in this way I learned a lot.

  They were luckier than probably they knew. Whereas most German academics observed a stern, detached formality, Sommerfeld was generous and respectful, willing even to lend his students a few marks when they ran short. He didn’t pretend to be omniscient, but sought his students’ help to attack difficult problems. Although his post was in applied science, Sommerfeld’s principal interests lay in mathematical physics: he had studied with the mathematicians Ferdinand von Lindemann in his native Königsberg and Felix Klein at Göttingen, and his interests ranged from hydrodynamics to the theory of electrical conduction. At Aachen he lacked colleagues with whom he could discuss these things; Debye suspected that the efforts he put into teaching were partly to cultivate a group of like-minded individuals who could act as sounding boards. He had an eye for talent, but perhaps too a uniquely effective way of nurturing it. Although Sommerfeld’s contributions to physics were by no means inconsiderable, his most impressive legacy is his roster of students, which includes Heisenberg, Pauli, Hans Bethe, Max von Laue and Linus Pauling. Even among such glittering company, Sommerfeld apparently considered Debye his greatest discovery.

  When Wilhelm Röntgen appointed Sommerfeld head of the new Institute for Theoretical Physics at Munich in 1906, Debye went with him. There he frequented the Hofgarten Café in the gardens of the Royal Palace, where physicists and chemists convened for informal meetings at the Stammtisch, the table reserved for regulars. ‘Like the Viennese cafés we got the newspapers and we talked about God knows what’, Debye recalled. It was here, he claimed, that Max von Laue—sent to Sommerfeld by Planck because he was ‘too nervous’ for Berlin—realized that X-rays bouncing off layers of atoms would interfere with one another and enable researchers to peer into crystals. Around the table of the Hofgarten, said another of Sommerfeld’s students, the Pole Paul Epstein, ‘the physicists [would] talk really about what the purpose is of what they are doing and not just the outside appearance, and that would be a way to learn physics’.

  Debye also started up a club for the younger members of the faculty. It met every Tuesday between five and seven o’clock to hear a talk from one of them, after which they would retire to a restaurant for supper and then move on to a bowling club. Debye made things happen; he impressed his peers and superiors, and he was popular. According to Paul Ewald, another of Sommerfeld’s illustrious students, he was ‘even then an outstanding physicist, mathematician, and helpful friend’.

  Debye gained his doctorate in Munich in 1908, and three years later, on Sommerfeld’s recommendation, he took the seat in theoretical physics vacated by Einstein at the University of Zurich. There was little doubt by this time that he was destined to become a leading scientist. Some already considered him Einstein’s intellectual successor, and Einstein himself described Debye in 1920 as ‘Sommerfeld’s most brilliant student’.

  But circumsta
nces, or perhaps a restless nature, led Debye on a wandering course. He was at Zurich for just a year before moving to the University of Utrecht, where he hoped for more opportunity to do experimental work. When that failed to materialize, he moved to Göttingen in 1914, where he worked with the Swiss scientist Paul Scherrer on the new field of X-ray diffraction that Laue had initiated. By 1920 he and Scherrer had transferred back to Zurich, this time to the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). It was here in 1923, in collaboration with his assistant Erich Hückel, that he developed his important theoretical work on salt solutions, showing how electrical interactions between the dissolved salt ions affect one another’s properties.

  During his time at Utrecht, Debye returned to Munich to marry Mathilde Alberer, the daughter of the proprietor of his boarding house there. Their first son Peter was born in 1916 in Göttingen, followed by a daughter, Mathilde Maria (‘Maida’), in 1921 in Zurich.

  Having completed essentially all of his scientific training in Germany, Debye felt a strong allegiance to German culture. ‘I feel myself to be very “German”’, he wrote to Sommerfeld in 1912. ‘You should not even think that I could betray my German education, because it would be completely impossible for me even if I wanted to.’ This affinity for things Germanic, in the cultural rather than the nationalistic sense, was shared by other foreign scientists who worked, as it were, in the shadow of the German tradition. The Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, then based at Leiden, averred that

  A good deal of German culture had gone into my idiosyncrasy: I had learned much from German books, German was the first foreign language I spoke fluently, my father had been strongly influenced by the German philosophers.

  He added revealingly that this ‘made it difficult for me to identify Germany—even Nazi Germany—with the Devil’. Despite this regard for German culture, however, Debye evidently had no intention of ever becoming a German citizen. And his wife, by marrying him, forfeited her German citizenship and became Dutch.

  By the time Debye was appointed professor of experimental physics at the University of Leipzig in 1927, he had completed his major contributions to science. None of these had the iconoclastic aspect of relativity or quantum theory, and it isn’t easy to convey their significance or even their content to non-scientists. Yet Debye’s discoveries into the way light, electrical forces and molecules interact had immediate practical consequences in areas ranging from the design of batteries to the understanding of how liquids are structured. According to his biographer Mansel Davies, it is debatable ‘whether, in the broad area of molecular physics, any single individual since Faraday has contributed so much’. Since it is also debatable whether there is a less fashionable field of science than molecular physics, Debye’s scientific eminence has remained more or less unknown in the wider world. And yet he came to Leipzig as one of the major players in German physics, a theorist with an experimentalist’s acuity. And he seemed to have ascended to this height almost casually, to the chagrin of some of his peers. ‘Clever but lazy’ is how his fellow faculty member Friedrich Hund described him, saying that he would often spot Debye smoking a cigar or watering the roses in the institute garden when he should have been working. ‘Debye’, he concluded, ‘had a certain tendency to take things easy.’

  The idealist

  Shortly after Debye arrived at Leipzig, and largely at his recommendation, the university appointed a new professor of theoretical physics. Aged just twenty-six, Werner Heisenberg was the youngest incumbent of a physics professorship in all of Germany.

  Brought up in an austere, well-to-do and militaristic family in southern Germany, Heisenberg experienced little by way of emotional development or imaginative stimulation. As a result, he seems to have craved comradeship while possessing few of the characteristics that make it easy to come by. On the contrary, he was nervous, competitive, desperate for recognition, and inclined to withdraw, or occasionally to become angry, if slighted or bettered.

  Where Debye was able to penetrate swiftly to the physical core of a problem, Heisenberg tended to work in the other direction: from the concrete to the abstract. He was a gifted mathematician who could shape profound questions into formalized terms. For Heisenberg abstraction seemed to offer a degree of philosophical satisfaction, even consolation. He was arguably the most gifted physicist of his generation, an idealist to Debye’s pragmatist. It is with the nature of those ideals that historians have wrestled and argued, and continue to do so.

  Heisenberg spent his formative student years with Sommerfeld in Munich, where he arrived in 1920 amidst the political unrest that culminated in the failed putsch by the Nazi Party. These upheavals left Heisenberg with a disdain for politics, and he sought refuge in the youth movement called the New Pathfinders. In a reverence for nature, music and the Romantic German writers such as Goethe and Hölderlin, Heisenberg found a world that transcended the power struggles of the Bavarian Communists and National Socialists. It was the same release that he sought in physics.

  Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) in 1927.

  Heisenberg remained a youth leader well into his adult life; in these mountain hikes he assuaged a hankering after youth that began to seem increasingly peculiar as he grew older. When he married Elizabeth Schumacher, sister of the economist E. F. Schumacher, in 1937, he was thirty-five and she just twenty-two. This preference to be with people much younger than himself has been adduced as an indication of Heisenberg’s latent immaturity, although such an age disparity with their spouse was not uncommon for German academics, who often had to wait many years for a position that conveyed marriageable stability. Despite the solace Heisenberg drew from his marriage, the relationship was in some ways never a close one—Elizabeth admitted later that she and her husband never really got to know one another, and Heisenberg played very little part in bringing up his children. His somewhat awkward, occasionally insensitive and bristly persona was the outward manifestation of inner turmoil, anxiety, and a sense of loneliness and alienation, yet he was rarely able to confide any of this to his wife. Both his ambition and his craving for approval speak of a deep insecurity.

  The New Pathfinders yearned for a powerful leader who would deliver Germany from Weimar decadence and restore national honour. This did not mean that Heisenberg welcomed Hitler’s ascendancy, but it made him, like many Germans from upper-middle-class families, favourably disposed towards some aspects of the National Socialists’ policies, not least their militaristic truculence. ‘The beginning of something new and “solid” is not yet upon us’, he wrote to his father in 1922 with breathless anticipation. While it would be too much to regard the New Pathfinders movement as a precursor to the Hitler Youth, it was paramilitary, puritanical and nationalistic, and when such independent youth groups were outlawed in 1934, many members found continuity in transferring to the Nazi youth organization.

  During his Munich years with Sommerfeld, Heisenberg worked on the difficult but decidedly classical physics of turbulence in fluid flow. But Sommerfeld also conscripted his bright student in the quest to place quantum theory on a mathematical footing. Heisenberg’s success in describing certain aspects of the Zeeman effect—the influence of magnetic fields on light emission from atoms (page 24)—was related by Sommerfeld to Einstein in an enthusiastic letter at the start of 1922. When Heisenberg left Munich for Göttingen to complete his Habilitation (the postdoctoral qualification that entitles German researchers to hold a faculty post and supervise doctoral candidates) with Max Born, his heart was set on formalizing quantum theory. It was widely accepted that the matrix mechanics that he, Born and Pascual Jordan devised turned the ad hoc, qualitative picture of early quantum theory into a robust predictive science. In May 1926 Heisenberg arrived in Copenhagen as a university lecturer and assistant to Niels Bohr; over the following year they devised the Copenhagen interpretation, and Heisenberg revealed the irreducible uncertainty lurking in his matrices.

  He was, then, quite a catch for Leipzig. That was amply demonstrated three ye
ars after the appointment, when Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Ambitious though he was, he had the grace to be embarrassed by the award citation—‘for the creation of quantum physics’—for he made no pretence of having done anything quite so grand single-handedly. True, Schrödinger was rewarded the next year, but only in conjunction with the British physicist Paul Dirac. Other pioneers such as Wolfgang Pauli had to wait for over a decade more before their contributions were recognized by the Nobel Committee. But even though Heisenberg’s diffidence was genuine, the award cannot but have contributed to a growing conviction that he carried the fate of German physics on his shoulders.

  4

  ‘Intellectual freedom is a thing of the past’

  ‘Last week’, physicist Lise Meitner wrote from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin in March 1933 to her colleague Otto Hahn on a visit to North America, ‘we received instructions to raise the swastika flag next to the black-white-red one.’

  Adolf Hitler had been appointed Reich chancellor only at the end of January of that year, but already Germany was becoming a dictatorship. The transition from democracy to totalitarian regime was frighteningly swift, as Hitler moved immediately to eliminate political opposition. An arson attack on the Reichstag building on 27 February was blamed on Communist agitators, giving Hitler an excuse to declare a state of emergency, suspend civil liberties and impose press censorship. By fomenting general panic among the population, the Nazis also orchestrated justification for the Enabling Law ‘to remedy the distress of the people and the state’. When it was passed in March, the law gave Hitler power to legislate without the consent of the Reichstag and even to overrule the constitution. The Civil Service Law followed on 7 April, expelling not only Jews but also all potential opponents from places of power and influence. As historian Ian Kershaw says, ‘in 1933 the barriers to state-sanctioned measures of gross inhumanity were removed almost overnight. What had previously been unthinkable suddenly became feasible.’