The Man Who Stalked Einstein (17 page)

Einstein, with his daring law, had hit the nail on the head. . . . Almost all confirmation
of Bohr’s theory, and with it, all spectroscopic confirmations, are at the same time
confirmations of Einstein’s law. . . . The Einsteinian proposition and Bohr’s contentwise
identical frequency conditions are currently one of the most certain laws that obtain
in physics. . . . The greatest significance, and equally the most convincing confirmation
Einstein’s proposition has received is by virtue of it being one of the prerequisite
conditions on which Bohr built his atomic theory. Almost all confirmations of Bohr’s
atomic theory are equally confirmations of Einstein’s proposition. . . . The discovery
of Einstein’s law is without any doubt one of the most significant events in the history
of physics.

Finally, at the very end, so there would be no doubt where he stood, Oseen gilded
the lily. “Its discovery to me appears to fully deserve a Nobel Prize in physics.”

Oseen’s mastery of mathematics and theoretical physics silenced Gullstrand, who most
vigorously opposed Einstein receiving the prize. Arrhenius was won over by the idea
that choosing Einstein might not only address the public mockery of the Academy but
also aid the process of renewing international scientific relations. Oseen capitalized
on the situation by proposing that the committee support Einstein for the reserved
1921 Prize and Bohr for 1922.

Gullstrand’s consolation was the 1923 Prize for the experimentalist Robert Millikan,
whose exhaustive investigations had proven the accuracy of Einstein’s law. Admonishing
the Lenard-led reactionaries who persisted in their senseless attacks on theoretical
physics, Millikan acknowledged the reciprocal debt that theory and experiment owed,
each to the other:

The fact [is] that science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.
. . . Sometimes it is one foot that is put forward first, sometimes the other, but
continuous progress is only made by the use of both—by theorizing and then testing,
or by finding new relations in the process of experimenting and then bringing the
theoretical foot up and pushing it on beyond, and so on in unending alterations.

The physics committee’s nomination of Einstein to the Nobel assembly was a welcome
one, allaying, as it did, broader concerns about what effect the failure to recognize
Einstein with a Nobel Prize was having on the reputation of the award. The announcement
of Einstein’s award was well received in many quarters. Worldwide, Einstein was a
popular figure whose frequent appearances on the international lecture circuit were
helping normalize scientific relationships among the countries that had opposed Germany
in the Great War.

Lenard seethed, as did other reactionaries who promoted the notion that, despite
his birth in Ulm, Einstein was not truly German. Paul Weyland, the demagogue who had
conspired with Lenard and others to bring down Einstein at the Berlin Philharmonic
lectures two years previously, traveled to Sweden just prior to Einstein’s Nobel Lecture
in an unsuccessful effort to mobilize dissent.

The machinations of the Nobel physics committee lay in the past that warm day in
Gothenburg in 1923 when, before an engaged audience, Einstein launched into his Nobel
Lecture. It was a day that bore witness to the accomplishments of a unique life. There
would be many such days during the next ten years. Yet all the while, the potential
for trouble was mounting. Back home in Berlin, a backlash was brewing against Einstein’s
activities during the war, his opposition to German nationalism, and his support of
the Weimar government. Germany was experiencing a rise in reactionary fervor. At the
root of it all were the Nazi Party and its “Fuehrer,” Adolf Hitler. The Lenards and
Weylands, the Goebbels, the Speers, and the Himmlers would soon have their day. Fingers
were being pointed. Einstein would not escape their notice.

At 8:30 on the evening of November 8, 1923, a pistol shot rang out in Munich’s Buegerbrauekeller
beer hall, followed closely by a shout of “Silence!” The overflow crowd of more than
three thousand anxiously complied. They had been listening to Commissioner Gustav
von Kahr, the chief official representing Germany’s Weimar government in Bavaria.
He had been in the midst of outlining his plans to implement his newly conferred state-of-emergency
powers to quell the violent civil unrest
plaguing the city. As Kahr stepped away from the podium, the throng turned as one
to the source of the interruption. Backed by six hundred armed SA storm troopers filing
into the main hall, Adolf Hitler, Erich Ludendorff, and Hermann Goering pushed their
way through the throng.

“The national revolution has begun,” Hitler announced. “No one may leave the hall.
. . . The Bavarian and Reich governments have been replaced and a provisional national
government has been formed. The barracks of the
Reichswehr
[the army] and police are occupied. The army and the police are marching on the city
under the Swastika banner.”

None of this was true, but the stunned crowd was in no position to doubt or to argue.
Hitler spirited von Kahr and two of his lieutenants, Lieutenant General Otto Herrmann
von Lossow and Police Chief Hans Ritter von Seisser, into a back room, where he threatened
the men with his pistol in an effort to get them to agree to join his revolution.
When the Weimar officials declined, as a compromise, Hitler accepted their oath that
the three men would not actively oppose the NSDAP. Immediately following their release,
they all reneged.

Hitler then returned to the main hall. Giving the impression that von Kahr had agreed
to switch sides, he announced, “The [Weimar] government of the November criminals
and the Reich President are declared to be removed. A new national government will
be named this very day in Munich. A new German National Army will be formed immediately.
. . . The task of the provisional German National Government is to organize the march
on that sinful Babel, Berlin, and save the German people! Tomorrow will find either
a National Government in Germany or us dead!”

In fact, neither event occurred. The ensuing comedy of errors, reminiscent of a Keystone
Cops film, ended ignominiously. During an effort to take over the Bavarian Defense
Ministry the following morning, Hitler’s attempt to oust the government and name himself
“Fuehrer” failed. Goering was shot in the groin. Hitler suffered a dislocated shoulder
when the man with whom he had linked arms in solidarity dropped to the ground and
pulled Hitler down with him. Hitler’s life was saved by his bodyguard, who threw himself
upon Germany’s future leader and absorbed several fatal bullets. In all, sixteen
Putschists
, four police officers, and a bystander were killed during the brief revolt.

Afterward, the Nazis scattered. Some of the leaders of the
Putsch
were arrested, while others, including Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering, and Ernst Hanfstaengl,
escaped to Austria. Hitler hid in the attic of Hanfstaengl’s country house on the
Staffelsee for two nights before being arrested the morning of the third day following
the debacle. Hitler blamed the failure of the
Putsch
on von Kahr, and while he was in no position to retaliate then, he certainly did
not forget. Eleven years later, on June 30, 1934—the “Night of the Long Knives”—the
Nazis eliminated their political competition, and Hitler settled his score with von
Kahr. Two SS officers arrested von Kahr in his Munich apartment. They severely abused
and beat him on his way to the concentration camp in Dachau, where, on the order of
the camp commandant, Theodor Eicke, he was shot to death.

Following Hitler’s arrest, he spent a fretful night in jail, certain he would be summarily
executed before daybreak. His spirits improved when he was told he would receive a
public trial in the People’s Court. He would use the opportunity—and this stage—to
good advantage. By turning the proceedings into an indictment of the Weimar government,
he secured a notorious living martyrdom that would serve him well when he sought to
revive his political career. Politically sympathetic judges gave him a sentence of
five years of imprisonment in Landsberg Fortress—the least onerous among the possible
punishments for high treason. The court later commuted his sentence after he had served
just nine months with the proviso that he refrain from speechmaking for at least several
years. During his time in prison, Hitler wrote his autobiography,
Mein Kampf
, a rambling anti-Semitic, anti-Marxist diatribe that detailed his strategy for the
ascent of the Nazis to ultimate political power.

For Philipp Lenard, Hitler’s beer hall
Putsch
was galvanizing. He felt impelled to express his boundless admiration for the man
who he believed had sacrificed so much for the cause of the German people. In his
1924 publication, “The Hitler Spirit and Science,” Lenard managed to combine his hero
worship for Hitler with his antipathy for the Jewish physicists who had come to dominate
German science. Written with Johannes Stark, the article was formatted as an open
letter to Germany’s newspapers and received wide distribution. Comparing Hitler’s
integrity and dedication to the great scientists of the past, the authors wrote,

That spirit of total clarity, of honesty towards the outer world and at the same time
inner uniformity, that spirit which hates any compromising activity because it is
insincere. But we have already recognized . . . this spirit in the great scientists
of the past: in Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Faraday. We admire and revere it in the
same way also in Hitler, Ludendorff, Poehner (the leaders of the Munich revolt) and
their comrades. . . . Consider what it means to be privileged to have this kind of
genius living among us in the flesh. . . . Experience reveals that the incarnations
of this spirit are only of Aryan-German blood. . . . But it is also much better that
the “man of the people” is doing it. He is here. He has revealed himself as the Fuehrer
of the sincere. We shall follow him.

The publication of “The Hitler Spirit and Science” was a watershed in Lenard’s public
expression of explicit anti-Semitic views. Lenard had, for the most part, kept his
peace in reacting to Einstein’s response to the lectures at the Berlin Philharmonic
and at the
Einsteindebatte
at Bad Nauheim. Even for several years thereafter, Lenard had been cautious about
openly engaging in anti-Semitic remarks. However, with the decline in his financial
circumstances and embittered by the death of his son from kidney failure, Lenard assumed
a more aggressive stance against Jewish involvement in German science. Comparing the
existential Jewish threat to the essential German-Aryan character with the terminal
events of the Greek and Roman civilizations, Lenard and Stark went on to warn their
readers,

But blood can also die out. . . . The exact same force is at work, always with the
same Asian people behind it that brought Christ to the cross, Jordanus Brunus to the
stake, and that shoots at Hitler and Ludendorff with machine guns and confines them
within fortress walls. It is the fight of the dark spirits against the torchbearers.
. . . Universities and their students have failed most of all precisely in those subjects
for which they should have set the pace long ago.

Lenard’s devolution toward open anti-Semitism advanced dramatically in response to
two related incidents that occurred in June 1922. On June 24, a car pulled up to the
vehicle carrying the German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, and men opened fire,
killing the car’s occupants. The Weimar leadership ordered German flags to be flown
at half-mast on June 27 and declared a national holiday of mourning. Lenard refused
to obey the government edict. Rathenau was a liberal, a Jew, and a friend of Einstein,
as well as a member of the despised Weimar government. The German flag atop the Heidelberg
Institute of Physics flew proudly at full salute.

What happened next is a matter of perspective. Lodging a grievance with Lenard, a
group of students from the university’s socialist league and a number of the Institute’s
workers sought to discuss with Lenard what they viewed as his dishonoring of one of
their heroes. Lenard’s refusal to enter into a discourse with the group led to what
Lenard later referred to as “the dangerous raid.” There are several versions of what
transpired; however, all accounts agree that Lenard suffered considerable psychic
trauma. The June 30, 1922, edition of
Neue Zurcher Zeitung
offered the following lighthearted account of a dangerous situation that could easily
have become violent:

Most amusing was the scene that caused both terror and laughter for the people of
Heidelberg. Professor Lenard [is] one of the finest physicists of Germany, famous
for his political squibs that he distributes among his most excellent colleagues.
Born as a Hungarian (many say as a Jew), he is all the more a German nationalist.
. . . A deployment of workers came across the New Bridge [of Heidelberg University]
around 6 PM. They noticed what they had already expected [that the flag was not at
half mast and that physics seminars had not been canceled]. At the same time, the
Free Union of Students complained to the Rector of the University. . . . Four policemen
climbed the stairs to request [compliance with the Ministry of Culture recommendations,
but Lenard] shut the door in their face.

Then, the workers united [in front of the institute] and intended to use force. At
the same time, nationalist students [in support of Lenard] aimed four water cannons
at the crowd from above, and—unfortunately—large rocks also were thrown, which had
obviously had been prepared beforehand. Only now did the workers seize the laboratory.
The female students took flight. The men grabbed the professor and forced the police
to lead him in a jeering deployment across the bridge to the student union house.

A large crowd formed and debated the issues. The district attorney arrived and tried
to deescalate the situation. . . . After an hour, a police officer announced from
the balcony that the professor would be taken into custody for his own protection.
. . . “There will be a car in a moment. . . .” The crowd objected. There were cries
of “He shall walk! We also need to walk to the jail! No car!” [An ombudsman announced]
“The man will walk, but you shall do nothing to him. I have vouched my life for this!”
[There was] thundering laughter. After a while an alleyway formed through the crowd.
. . . [One could see] the plaintiveness of this stumbling man in more detail, how
he was brought to safety trembling. All held true to their promise: . . . the police
did everything to keep the peace; the workers were full of discipline. When their
prisoner walked through the crowd, they laughed.