Hitler and Heisenberg

The Wall Street Journal December 27-28, 2014 Book Review “Serving the Reich” by Philip Ball, Chicago, $30, 303 pages Hitler and Heisenberg Werner Heisenberg thought that once Germany had won, the ‘good Germans’ would get rid of the Nazis. Fizzing The museum inside the former basement tavern where in early 1945 German scientists built a small nuclear reactor. Associated Press by Jeremy Bernstein The German scientists who remained in Germany throughout the Nazi period can be divided into three main groups. At one end were the anti-Nazis—people who not only despised the regime but tried to do something about it. They were very few. Two that come to mind were Fritz Strassmann and Max von Laue. Strassmann was a radiochemist—a specialist in radioactive materials—who was blacklisted from university jobs by the Society of German Chemists in 1933 for his anti-Nazi views. He was fortunate to get a half-pay job at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, which got some of its funding from industry. He and his wife (they had a 3-year-old son) hid a Jewish friend in their apartment for months. With the radiochemist Otto Hahn, he performed the 1938 experiment in which fission was observed for the first time. Von Laue won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1914. Soon after Einstein published his 1905 paper on relativity, von Laue went to Switzerland to see him. They remained friends for life. Under the Nazis, Einstein’s work was denounced as “Jewish science.” When a number of von Laue’s colleagues agreed to use relativity but attribute it to some Aryan, he refused. He always walked in the street with two bags so he would not have to give the Nazi salute. When he visited Einstein in Princeton in 1937 he said that he had to go back to Germany because he hated the Nazis so much that he needed to be close to them. The second and largest category of Nazi-era scientists is the people who referred to themselves as non-Nazi. These were German patriots who would have been happy to do without the Nazis but were not prepared to do anything about them. Otto Hahn was in this class, and so was the quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg’s case is particularly striking. He had been accused of being a “white Jew” because he collaborated with Jewish physicists like his mentor Max Born. He had to make an accommodation with Heinrich Himmler and was told never to mention Einstein in the future. In the summer of 1938 he was offered a lucrative job at Columbia University. I.I. Rabi, who was responsible for the offer, later told me that Heisenberg refused on the grounds that he did not want to lose his place in the German university hierarchy. Just after the war Heisenberg told the physicist Hans Bethe that he had wanted the Germans to win because if they lost, it would be the end of German culture. He explained that once Germany had won, the “good Germans” would get rid of the Nazis. The last category is German scientists who were outright Nazis. A striking example is the physicist Pascual Jordan, who collaborated with both Born and Heisenberg. In 1933, he joined the Nazi Party and never left. He was the only one of the founders of the quantum theory not to win a Nobel Prize. There were long memories. A unique case was that of Gustav Hertz, a Nobelist in physics. Not only did he have Jewish ancestry but he was a communist to boot. But he was hidden in the vast maze of the Siemens company, where he worked on the separation of uranium isotopes used to make fuel for nuclear reactors or weapons. When the Russians got into Germany, Hertz was sent to a scientific gulag on the Black Sea, where he continued his research. All of these categories are on exhibit in “Serving the Reich,” by the British science writer Philip Ball, though it is Mr. Ball’s contention that most scientists under the Nazi regime found themselves in a “grey zone between complicity and resistance.” I have been studying this subject for decades, but I found new things in Mr. Ball’s book. He has put the material together in an accessible way, and there is an extensive bibliography for people who would like to dig deeper. One of the things I learned more about was the case of Peter Debye, who is one of the three main subjects of Mr. Ball’s book, along with Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg. Debye was and is difficult to pin down. He was Dutch, although he had a German wife. He was educated in Germany, and in the 1930s he became the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, although he was a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. In 1938 he signed a disgraceful letter insisting that all Jews resign from the German Physical Society. One wonders how many were left. When war was imminent he came to the United States, then stayed at Cornell University for the rest of his career. He even became an American citizen. Mr. Ball describes Debye as “improvising” and a “man who assiduously avoided hard moral choices”; somehow I am reminded of the last line of my friend Tom Lehrer ’s song about Wernher von Braun ’s political flexibility: “ ‘Und I’m learning Chinese,’ says Wernher von Braun.’ ” I was especially interested in Mr. Ball’s discussion of Farm Hall, a manor house not far from Cambridge, England. When I visited it some years ago in the company of Michael Frayn, whose play “Copenhagen” explored some of Heisenberg’s ambiguities, I was surprised when he stopped the car in front of what looked like an ordinary row house. The facade concealed an elegant small estate. As the war in Germany was ending, the U.S. Army rounded up 10 scientists who were thought to have had something to do with Germany’s nuclear program. They included Hahn and Heisenberg, as well as von Laue, who protested that he had had nothing to do with it. (He soon returned to Germany and was instrumental in re-creating German physics.) These people were detained for six months at Farm Hall. What they did not know was that the entire place was bugged and everything that they said was recorded. A team of translators rendered the conversations so that they almost seem as if they are from a play. There were some extraordinary moments. One of them was when the Germans heard about Hiroshima. Heisenberg, still confident that the Germans had been far ahead of the Allies in development of a bomb, assured the others that, whatever it was, it was not nuclear. Mr. Ball notes that “Hahn, who had not been directly engaged in the uranium work and so had no reputation to defend,” told Heisenberg: “You’re just second-raters and you might as well pack up.” But some days later Heisenberg gave a brilliant seminar in which he explained how an atomic bomb works. Then there was the news that Hahn had won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of fission. The detainees were ecstatic. One oddity was that the Swedish Academy did not know where Hahn was, and he only learned of the prize from the newspapers. This surely is one of the strangest prizes ever given. It was only a few weeks after Hiroshima. Strassmann was left out, and so was Hahn’s old Berlin colleague Lise Meitner, who had been the first person to understand that what Hahn and Strassmann had observed in their 1938 experiment was fission. They themselves didn’t. The Cambridge don who now owns Farm Hall told us that he did not know its history when he bought it. But when he had some repairs done, a maze of wires was revealed. Why should we be interested in this now? There is a lesson to be learned. Before a fanatic regime came to power, Germany had the greatest scientific establishment ever created. In a very few years it evaporated. The ambience for doing science is fragile. I have colleagues in Pakistan who are informed that all true science can be found only in the Quran. China has spent fortunes creating a class of scientists, but not one truly revolutionary discovery in any science has come from China. Revolutionary science thrives on dissent. Without it, science becomes mundane. —Mr. Bernstein’s books include “ Hitler ’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall” and “Nuclear Iran.” Copyright@2014 The Wall Street Journal .

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