The Great Purge (1933)
The Great Purge (1933)
“If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!” — Adolf Hilter
Prior to the 1930s, Germany had dominated the natural sciences for more than one hundred and fifty years. Its reputation for excellence in chemistry, physics, biology, medicine and mathematics was rivaled, if at all, only by Britan (Medawar & Pyke, 2000). Of the 100 Nobel Prizes awarded between the years of 1901 and 1932 (the year before Hitler came to power), 33 had been awarded to Germans and/or scientists working in Germany. For comparison, Brits and scientists in British universities had won 18 and the United States a mere six.
Then, starting in 1933 with the Nazi party’s seizure of control in Germany and their passing of the Berufsbeamtengesetz (“Law for the Restoration of the Professsional Civil Service”), certain groups of public employees were dimissed from German universities. That is, civil servants who did not fit the Nazi racial or societal ideal had to leave their jobs in the name of “re-establishing a national and professional civil service”. In addition to bureaucrats, teachers, judges and other workers, scientists and academics were almost immediately affected, including at the world-leading institutions of the University of Göttingen and Humboldt University of Berlin (Heims, 1980 p. 165). By the middle of April, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union proclaimed a nationwide “action against the un-German spirit”. Not long after, public Nazi marches on and around university campuses were taking place and “bücherverbrennung” (book-burning ceremonies) were held in protest of literature found to be sympathetic with socio-democratic, left-leaning and/or “Jewish values”. In a series of letters to a colleague in America, John von Neumann (1903-57) (who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1930) wrote (Rédei, 2005):
“The news from Germany are bad: heaven knows what the summer term 1933 will look like.”
The term, indeed the coming years, became what has been later called a “great purge” of world-renowned scientists from Germany, the likes of which the world had never seen. The effect? The rise of the United States as the world’s center of scientifist research and the “death” of the University of Göttingen as a top tier research university (see essay below).
Background
On January 30th 1933, the President of Germany Paul von Hindenburg reluctantly appointed Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler to be the Chancellor of Germany. After two months in office, following the burning of the Reichstag building, the German parliament passed what has later been called the “Enabling Act” giving Hitler full legislative power for a period of four years. Following the death of von Hindenburg the year after, Hitler exploited the act to merge the offices of Chancellor and President, creating the new office of “Führer and Reichskanzler”. von Neumann, then in Budapest, wrote the following of these events in a letter to his colleague Veblen in Princeton in April of 1933:
Excerpt, letter from von Neumann to Veblen (April 3rd 1933)
It seems, that this Summer will be a endless series of sensations - and not always of the agreeable kind. [...] Please excuse in me that I am asking such a lot of questions. But you know, how these things interest me, and how little newspapers a[re] worth, if you want to find out anything.
[...]
The news from Germany are bad: heaven knows what the summer term 1933 will look like. The next programm-number of Hitler will probably be annihilation of the conservative-monarchistic-party [...] I did not hear anything about changes or expulsions in Berlin, but it seems that the "purification" of universities has only reached till now Frankfurt, Göttingen, Marburg, Jena, Halle, Kiel, Köningsberg- and the other 20 will certainly follow. [...] It is really a shame, that something like that could happen in the 20th century.
The Purge
More than 250 Jewish professors and employees were fired from the University of Berlin in 1933–34 and numerous doctorates were withdrawn. In May, some 20,000 books written by “degenerates” and opponents of the Nazi regime were removed from the university library and burned in the Babelplatz . Reportedly, Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels gave a speech for the occasion, proclaiming the death of “Jewish intellectualism” (Isaacson, 2007).
Among the most prominent Jewish scholars forced to emigrate was, as von Neumann writes in his letter to Veblen, mathematician Richard Courant (1888–1972), one of Göttingen’s three institute heads. He left Germany for Cambridge in 1933, as he was dismissed from his position, not for being Jewish (exempted a veteran of the First World War), but due to his membership in the social-democratic political left (Schappacher, 1991). A former student of David Hilbert (1862-1943), Courant first accepted a position in Cambridge, but grew homesick within a year and returned to Germany, only to realize that there was no way for him to stay permanently. He thus re-emigrated, this time to New York University where he would remain for the rest of his life, building up a large and flourishing mathematics department (Medawar & Pyke, 2000) there. Other students of Hilbert at Göttingen, including Felix Bernstein (1878–1956) and Edmund Landau (1877–1938) were also forced out, as was Hilbert’s student Hermann Weyl (1885–1955), three years after being appointed his successor. Initially having been offered von Neumann’s position at the Institute for Advanced Study, Weyl changed his mind as the political situation in Germany grew worse (Weyl was a Christian, but his wife Helene was Jewish), and joined the IAS in September of 1933 (see essay below).
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) who openly opposed the Nazi regime, happened to be visiting the United States when Hitler came to power. A visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology on and off starting in December 1930, Einstein and his wife Elsa last left Germany for in December 1932, prior to Hitler’s ascension (see essay below). Despite holding a chair as Professor of Physics at the University of Berlin, he feared for the safety of both himself and his family. That year, a German magazine printed a list of “enemies of the German regime” with an accompanying picture of Einstein marked “not yet hanged” with a $5,000 bounty (Jerome & Taylor, 2006).
When they closed up their summer house in Caputh in 1932, Einstein reportedly turned to his wife Elsa and said “Dreh dich um. Du siehst’s nie wieder” (Pais, 1982).
“Turn around. You will never see it again”
Einstein would go on to spend a period of time in the UK, before settling for good at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton alongside von Neumann and Weyl as one of the IAS’ six founding faculty members. Albeit from afar, he would play an instrumental role in the rescue operations that would take place throughout the 1930s. Writing to Professor Max Born (1882-1970) in Göttingen at the end of May, his mixed emotions of enthusiasm and desperation for the mission afoot are apparent:
Letter from Einstein to Born (30th of May, 1933)
Dear Born. Ehrenfest sent me your letter. I am glad that you have resigned your positions (you and Franck). Thank God there is no risk involved for either of you. But my heart aches at the thought of the young ones. Lindemann has gone to Göttingen and Berlin (for one week). Maybe you could write to him here about Teller. I heard that the establishment of a good Institute of Physics in Palestine (Jerusalem) is at present being considered.
[...]
Two years ago I tried to appeal to Rockefeller's conscience about the absurd method of allocating grants, unfortunately without success. Bohr has now gone to see him, in an attempt to persuade him to take some action on behalf of the exiled German scientists. It is to be hoped that he'll achieve something. Lindemann has considered London and Heitler for Oxford. He has set up an organization of his own for this purpose, taking in all the English universities. I am firmly convinced that all those who have made a name already will be taken care of. But the others, the young ones, will not have the chance to develop.
The “Lindemann” Einstein mentions in the letter is Frederic Lindemann (1886–1957), the most influential scientific advisor to the then-”MP in opposition for Woodford” Winston Churchill. Despite his German name, Lindemann was English and a physicist by training, and so got along with both Churchill, Einstein and their colleagues in government and academia, respectively. Looking to appeal to both his sense of humanity and military strategy, Einstein went to Churchill in the summer of 1933 asking for help in bringing Jewish scientists out of Germany (see essay below).
Of the meeting — which was held at Chartwell — characteristic of both men’s reputations for eccentricity, someone later wrote:
“Churchill wore a large Stetson hat and Einstein a white linen suit that looked like he had slept in it”
Known for his decisiveness, Churchill responded immediately by sending his friend Lindemann to Germany on a rescue mission to seek out and recruit Jewish scientists and offer them placements in British universities (Gilbert, 2007). Lindemann’s first visit was to physicist Max Born.
Born was one of six Jewish professors who in the spring of 1933 had been suspended from their positions in Göttingen as a result of the enactment of the Berufsbeamtengesetz. A future Nobel Prize winner, at the time he was among the world’s 3–4 foremost authorities on quantum physics, having supervised the likes of Pascual Jordan (1902-80), J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), Enrico Fermi (1901-54) and collaborated with Heisenberg, Pauli and Bohr. In his 1971 book The Born-Einstein Letters*, Born recounted his own version of the events that had ensued:
“One day (at the end of April 1933) I found my name in the paper amongst a list of those who were considered unsuitable to be civil servants, according to the new "laws". After I had been given 'leave of absence', we decided to leave Germany at once. We had rented an apartment for the summer vacation in Wolkenstein in the Grödner valley, from a farmer by the name of Peratoner. He was willing to take us in immediately. Thus, we left for the South Tyrol at the beginning of May (1993); we took our twelve-year old son, Gustav, with us, but left our adolescent daughters behind at their German schools.”
- Excerpt, The Born-Einstein Letters* by Max Born (1971)
On his way to Tyrol, on May 10th Born witnessed the book burnings first-hand and despite his typical quiet and calm demeanor reacted so furiously that his wife Heidi had to restrain him from intervening (Medawar & Pyke, 2000). Shortly after arriving at their destination, Lindemann visited, attempting to entice Born to accept a position at Oxford University. Having spent time in Cambridge in the 20s, Born instead chose to accept a position as a “research student” at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Later, in 1936, he accepted a position as the Tait professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where he remained until 1952 before retiring to Göttingen.
As Einstein’s letter to Born recounts, Lindemann also considered recruiting Born’s former students Walter Heitler (1904–1981) and Fritz London (1900–1954). Heitler was a German physicist who made contributions to quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory and had worked for a time as assistant to Schrödinger. Following his habilitation in 1929 under Born, he remained at the University of Göttingen as a privatdozent until 1933, when he was let go. Safely in the UK, Born later arranged for him to get a position as a research fellow at the University of Bristol, working under Nevill F. Mott. London, also a physicist, similarly lost his position at the University of Berlin following the enactment of the Berufsbeamtengesetz. A collaborator of Heitler, London had helped redefine chemical bonds in the age of quantum theory. Following his dismissal, he took visiting positions in England and France before, like many others, emigrating to the United States just before the war, in 1939.
The other professor Einstein mentions, James Franck (1882–1964), was a German physicist and the 1925 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics (joint with his frequent collaborator Gustav Hertz) for “their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom”. At the time of the purge in the spring of 1933, Franck was the head of experimental physics at the University of Göttingen, a position he had held for over thirteen years. A full professor, he was also the Director of the Second Institute for Experimental Physics in Göttingen. Alongside Born, Franck had built Göttingen’s physics department into one of the world’s finest (Rice & Jortner, 2010). Although exempt from the Berufsbeamtengesetz law as a veteran of the First World War, as Einstein recounts to Born, Franck nonetheless submitted his resignation at Göttingen, the first academic known to have resigned his position in protest of the law. After a brief visit to the United States, he later took up a position at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, before returning to the U.S. in 1938, accepting a job offer at the University of Chicago.
Physicist Hans Bethe (1906–2005) was dismissed from his job at the University of Tübingen in Germany on account of being Jewish and so left for England after receiving an offer for the position of lecturer at the University of Manchester through his doctoral advisor Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951) and his associate William Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971) there (Bernstein, 1980). Bethe joined the faculty of Cornell University in 1935 and contributed to the Manhattan Project as head of the theoretical division at Los Alamos. A nuclear physicist, through the course of his career he also made important contributions to astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics and solid state physics, winning the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967 for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis.
The Martians of Budapest
Einstein’s letter to Born also mentions the then-aspiring young Edward Teller (1907-2003), one of four prominent Hungarian physicists who, due to their Jewish origin and Hungarian universities’ openly antisemitic policies at the time, were compelled to leave Europe for America in the 1930s. Interestingly and consequentially, all four contributed significantly to the development of the first atomic bomb, alongside Franck, Bethe and others (see essay below).
Teller, a student of Born who would later be known colloquially as the “Father of the hydrogen bomb” had been in Copenhagen studying with Niels Bohr (1885-1962) until just before Hitler fame to power. He was in Göttingen in the spring of 1933. From there he immediately left for England with the help of the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian aid founded in 1933 at the encouragement of Einstein. In England, Teller was welcomed at the University College of London, before being offered a full professorship at George Washington University in D.C., which he accepted in 1935. His friend and later Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner (1902–1995) had at been at Princeton University since 1930. Before that, he too had been at the University of Göttingen working both as an assistant to Hilbert and alongside Weyl on group theory and its applications in quantum physics. Reportedly, when he was first recruited for a one-year lectureship at Princeton, his salary increased seven-fold from what it had been in Europe (Szanton, 1992). However, following the expiration of his term in 1936, Princeton chose not to renew his position and so Wigner had to move to the University of Wisconsin. There he stayed for two years before returning to Princeton in 1938 to commence work on the Manhattan Project.
Leo Szilard (1898–1964) who is best known as the discoverer of the nuclear chain reaction, similarly as Teller left Germany for England in 1933 (see essay below). Reportedly, he transferred his savings of £1,595 (about £100,000) from Zurich to London and was able to live in hotels without work for the first year. He eventually took up work as a physicist in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, working on radioactive isotopes for medical purposes. He travelled to U.S. as a visiting researcher in 1938–39, eventually settling at Columbia University. There, in collaboration with Walter Zinn (1906-2000), he took up the task of experimentally verifying the news (brought to America by Bohr in January 1939) that Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and Fritz Strassmann (1902-80) in Germany had observed barium in the residue after bombarding uranium with neutrons, demonstrating the previously unknown phenomenon of nuclear fission. Szilard and Zinn’s initial test that the fission of uranium produced more neutrons than it consumed helped Szilard later convince Fermi and Herbert L. Anderson (1914-88) to conduct large-scale fission experiments on uranium to verify the possibility of a sustainable nuclear chain reaction.
Although himself Italian and Roman Catholic by origin, Fermi was (like his German colleagues) forced to escape Mussolini’s fascist Italy in 1938 because his wife Laura was Jewish. The creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on induced radioactivity. Before the war, he had spent a semester studying under Born at the University of Göttingen. There, in the middle of the 1920s he first met the “father of quantum mechanics” Werner Heisenberg (1901-76) and his collaborator Wolfgang Pauli (1900-58). After this and several other research visits, Fermi eventually settled at the Sapienza University of Rome after obtaining a full professorship there in 1926. A Nobel laureate, upon his emigration to America in 1939, Fermi was offered positions at five different universities, eventually settling on an offer from Columbia , where he had given summer lectures in 1936. There, he conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States and with the help and encouragement of Szilárd, the first large-scale fission experiment using 200 kilograms of uranium oxide.
John von Neumann, alongside Wigner, was first recruited from Europe by Veblen to Princeton University in 1930. Him and Wigner had by that point collaborated on five papers and before that, attended the same Lutheran high school in Budapest in the 1910s. According to Wigner, they were invited to Princeton together on a recommendation from the university that they find and invite:
"..not a single person but at least two, who already knew each other, who wouldn't suddenly feel put on an island where they had no intimate contact with anybody. Johnny's name was of course well known by that time the world over, so they decided to invite Johnny von Neumann. They looked: who wrote articles with John von Neumann? They found: Mr. Wigner. So they sent a telegram to me also."
— Excerpt, John von Neumann* by Norman Macrae (1992)
von Neumann’s considerable research output taken into account, despite being 30 years old, he was offered a lifetime professorship at the newly-founded Institute for Advanced Study alongside Einstein and Weyl in 1933. He would later be instrumental in helping Kurt Gödel (1906-78) escape occupied Austria. Although not Jewish, Gödel’s association with the Vienna Circle and his doctoral advisor Hans Hahn (1879–1934) had made him a target. In a letter to the founder of the IAS Abraham Flexner (1866–1959), von Neumann in September 1939 pleaded (Rédei, 2005):
"The claim may be made with perfect justification that Gödel is unreplaceable for our education program. Indeed Gödel is absolutely irreplaceable; he is the only mathematician alive about whom I would dare to make this statement [...] I am convinced that salvaging him from the wreck of Europe is one of the great single contributions anyone could make to science at this moment."
Gödel was be offered a position at the IAS, which he assumed in 1940.
Those Who Remained
Einstein’s friend Max Planck (1858–1947) was 74 years old when the Nazis came to power. Although his friends and colleagues fled, himself, a Lutheran, tried to “persevere and continue working”, hoping the crisis would abate and the political situation improve. Later founder and President of the Max Planck Society Otto Hahn (1879–1968), despite supposed Jewish ancestry (Riehl & Seitz, 1996), too remained in Germany during the rise of the Nazis, discovering nuclear fission in 1938 and being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944. An opponent of national socialism, Einstein later wrote of Hahn that
“Hahn was one of the very few who stood upright and did the best he could in these years of evil” — Albert Einstein
Indeed, the only known case of a German scientist refusing on moral grounds to succeed an expelled Jewish colleague was Otto Krayer (1899–1982), who in response to a job offering at the University of Düsseldorf wrote the following in protest of the purge of his colleagues (Medawar & Pyke, 2000):
I prefer to forgo this appointment, though it is suited to my inclination and capabilities, rather than having to betray my convictions, or that by remaining silent I would encourage an opinion about me that does not correspond with the facts.
— Otto Krayer, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology in Berlin
In response, Krayer was dismissed from his post at the University of Berlin for refusing to accept the appointment. Wolfgang Haubner later reported about a meeting with Krayer in his diary on July 4th 1935, writing:
“On the way I spoke with Krayer who justified his refusal to return to Germany with the impossibility of taking the Hitler oath”.
Two years later, in 1937, Krayer was appointed as an Associate Professor at Harvard University. He lead Harvard’s Department of Pharmacology from 1939 to 1966, being awarded numerous academic honors. The news of his actions in 1933 became public in an article written by the son of Krayer’s doctoral advisor Paul Trendelenburg (1884–1931), who closed his essay with the following words:
“Considering the horrors of the Third Reich, his deeds should be a comfort to us. When looking for a role model for the young generation, it is found in Otto Krayer. May the memory of this one righteous person never fade.”
— Ullrich Trendelenburg
Those interested in reading more about the purge of scientists from Nazi Germany, although flawed, are encouraged to obtain the book Hitler’s Gift* by Medawar and Pyke (2000).
Have a good week,
Jørgen.
Related Privatdozent Essays
The Mathematical Center of the Universe, August 8th 2021
The Birth of the Institute for Advanced Study (1930), August 6th 2022
Einstein’s Emigration to America (1932), January 6th 2022
When Einstein met Churchill (1933), November 5th 2021
The Einstein-Szilárd Letter (1939), June 7th 2021
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References
Bernstein, J. (1980). Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy*. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02903-7.
Gilbert, M. (2008). Churchill and the Jews: A lifelong friendship*. MacMillan.
Heims, S. J. (1980). John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Isaacson, W. (2007). Einstein: His Life and Universe*. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Jerome, F., & Taylor, R. (2020). Einstein on Race and Racism* Rutgers University Press.
Medawar, J. S., & Pyke, D. (2001). Hitler's Gift: The true story of the scientists expelled by the Nazi regime*. Arcade Publishing.
Pais, A. (1982). Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein*. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Redei, M. (2005). John von Neumann: Selected Letters*. American Mathematical Soc..
Riehl, N., & Seitz, F. (1996). Stalin's Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet race for the bomb*. Chemical Heritage Foundation.
Rice, S. A., & Jortner, J. (2010). "James Franck 1882–1964: A Biographical Memoir" (PDF). U. S. National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 16 June 2015.
Schappacher, M. (1991). "Edmund Landau's Göttingen: From the Life and Death of a Great Mathematical Center" (PDF). The Mathematical Intelligencer. 13 (4): 12–18.
Wigner, E. P., & Szanton, A. (2013). The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner*. Springer.
* This essay contains Amazon Affiliate links
I remember someone once saying that the reason we won the war was that our German scientists were better than their German scientists. So many giants driven out of that one country! Thanks for this.
A fascinating history. Please write some more about the role the Academic Assistance Council, chaired by Ernest Rutherford, in saving scientists from Nazi Germany. From the editorial in Nature, May 12, 1934: "Upon the Council's records are the names of 1,202 scholars and scientific workers who have been displaced. Of these, rather more than a quarter, 389, have been permanently or temporarily-in the majority of instances only temporarily enabled to continue their work, 178 in the British Isles, 211 abroad. There remain 813 so far unsuccoured."