The Man Who Stalked Einstein (20 page)

More laconically, Einstein rejoined, “If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”

Over more than a decade of harassing Einstein and condemning the Jewish influence
in science, Lenard and Stark built a résumé that ingratiated them to the Nazi Party
hierarchy. They had stationed themselves where they needed to be to take advantage
should Adolf Hitler ever ascend to power. There were long odds against this happening
when Lenard and Stark wrote their 1924 honorific, “The Hitler Spirit and Science.”
Nonetheless, history eventually proved their faith to be well founded.

The Nazi takeover of government provided Lenard and Stark with an unprecedented platform
to express their concerns about the undue influence of Jews in Germany’s universities.
They escalated their vitriolic rants about the threat to German culture by the intrusion
of Jewish science. Lenard wrote in the popular right-wing daily
Volkischer Beobachter
:

It had grown dark in physics. . . . Einstein has provided the most outstanding example
of the damaging influence on natural science from the Jewish side. . . . One cannot
even spare splendid researchers with solid accomplishments the reproach that they
have allowed the relativity Jew to gain a foothold in Germany. . . . Theoreticians
active in leading positions should have watched over this development more carefully.
Now Hitler is watching over it. The ghost has collapsed; the foreign element is already
voluntarily leaving the universities, yes even the country.

Within a week of Hitler declaring himself Fuehrer, Stark wrote Lenard that it was
time that they press home their new advantage. They should proceed with their plans
to make science more German. Lenard visited Hitler soon after he became Fuehrer. They
told him that the German universities had decayed badly. There was a need to develop
talented new faculty and expel those who were unworthy. They lobbied for the Reich’s
adoption of the principles of
Deutsche Physik
, Lenard’s pseudo-scientific philosophical construct touting the superiority of the
Aryan race and denigrating Jewish scientific thought, which Lenard would publish in
four volumes during the following year of 1934.

Hitler welcomed the conversation. He had an interest in science, at least on a philosophical
level. He believed that science and religion were locked in an unceasing confrontation.
There can be no doubt about which side of the struggle he favored. “If, in the course
of a thousand or two thousand years,” he asserted in
Mein Kampf
, “Science arrives at the necessity of renewing its points of view, it will not mean
that science is a liar. Science cannot lie, for it is always striving, according to
the momentary state of knowledge, to deduce what is true. When it makes a mistake,
it does so in good faith. It’s Christianity that’s the liar. It’s in perpetual conflict
with itself.”

Hitler agreed with Lenard’s concept of
Deutsche Physik
. Indeed, well before Lenard’s vision had fully developed, Hitler had independently
written in
Mein Kampf
,

All human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before
us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact
admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher
humanity, representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word “man.”

Hitler took every opportunity to connect his philosophy with the
mythological past and fancied himself something of a romantic. In the following passage,
he laid it on thickly:

He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius
has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illuminated
the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over
the other beings of the earth. It was he who laid the foundations and erected the
walls of every great structure in human culture.

Lenard and Stark struck a respondent chord in their conversations with the Fuehrer
and his top leadership throughout the 1930s, as the Nazi hierarchy sought to conduct
scientific policy at the behest of racial ideology. As late as July 1937, Stark collaborated
with Gunter d’Alquen, the editor of the SS weekly
Das Schwarze Korps
, in writing for that publication an article entitled “White Jews in Science.” The
article proclaimed that it was not enough to simply exclude Jews from German cultural
life. Rather, the threat was severe enough that the Reich must extinguish the Jewish
spirit as represented by Albert Einstein.

“There is one sphere, in particular,” the authors said, “where we meet the spirit
of the white Jew” (meaning a non-Jew who thought like a Jew and was supportive of
Jewish thinking) “in its most intensive form . . . namely in science. To purge science
from this Jewish spirit is our most urgent task. For science represents the key position
from which intellectual Judaism can always regain a significant influence on all spheres
of national life.” They named Planck and Sommerfeld, among others, as white Jews and
concluded, “They must be got rid of as much as the Jews themselves.”

In what must surely rank as one of the most bizarre editorial decisions ever made
by a scientific journal editor, Sir Richard Gregory, then the editor of
Nature
, one of the world’s most respected and most read medical and scientific journals,
followed up on Stark’s article in
Das Schwarze Korps
by asking him if he wouldn’t care to expand on his views in
Nature
’s commentary section. Specifically, he asked Stark to write on the topic of “the
Jewish influence on science in Germany or elsewhere.” Stark took him up on it. His
article, “The Pragmatic and Dogmatic Spirit in Physics” asserted that “the manner
in which physical research is carried out and described depends on the spirit and
character of the men of science engaged upon it, and this spirit and character differ
individually, as do men, nations, and races.”

Stark described two “mentalities” in science. The pragmatic mentality began and ended
in reality. As representatives of the pragmatic mentality, he named Philipp Lenard
and Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand–born English physicist who detailed the principles
of nuclear decay and provided insights into the structure of the atom. He then described
the antipodal mentality, which he dubbed “the dogmatic.” Here, he named Einstein and
Erwin Schroedinger as exemplars.

Stark’s choice of Schroedinger is an interesting one. Schroedinger was awarded the
1933 Nobel Prize in physics just after he had left Germany in protest of Hitler’s
policies in general and the dismissal of physicist Max Born from his university position
in particular. The Nazis did not forget this slight. After brief stays at Oxford and
Princeton, in 1936, he unwisely accepted an appointment as professor of physics at
the University of Graz in Austria. His life was endangered by Hitler’s 1938 Anschluss
uniting Austria and Germany. Schroedinger managed to escape with his family via Italy
and ultimately finished out his career in the newly created Institute for Advanced
Studies in Dublin.

In
Nature
, Stark wrote,

[The dogmatic scientist] starts out from ideas that have arisen primarily in his own
brain or from arbitrary relationships among symbols to which a general and so also
a physical significance can be ascribed. . . . The pragmatic spirit advances continuously
to new discoveries and new knowledge; the dogmatic leads to crippling of experimental
research and to a literature which is as effusive as it is unfruitful and tedious,
intrinsically akin to the theological dogmatism of the Middle Ages.

Making direct reference to one of Lenard’s frequent complaints about Einstein, Stark
asserted, “The pragmatic spirit does not conduct propaganda for the results of his
research. . . . He finds his satisfaction in obtaining new knowledge.” Stark argued
that the opposite held true for dogmatic scientists, who, “almost before they have
published, a flood of propaganda is started.”

Stark had taken it upon himself to save German culture from Einstein and his dogmatic
imitators. “I also have directed my efforts against the damaging influence of Jews
in German science, because I regard them as the chief exponents and propagandists
of the dogmatic spirit.” One might imagine that these lines would have set off
Nature
’s publication of a firestorm of correspondence from those who wished to take issue
with such an extreme view, including the many Jewish scientists who had by then immigrated
to the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere in Europe. However, that was not
the case.
Nature
published only a single letter, and that one appeared six months after the appearance
of Stark’s article.

Given Hitler’s mandate, Lenard and Stark continued the drumbeat against Einstein
and, by proxy, all Jewish scientists. Despite his having emigrated weeks before the
passage of the Enabling Law, Einstein remained the principal target of Lenard’s and
Stark’s attacks as the living embodiment of Jewish scientific depravity. He would
remain so until their influence declined nearly two decades after Einstein and Lenard
first confronted each other at Bad Nauheim.

Lenard’s resentment of Einstein’s success and his rabid anti-Semitism underlay his
purge of Jewish academics that began soon after Einstein fled to America. His assertion
of Aryan scientific supremacy, couched in the principles of
Deutsche Physik
, gained currency among the Nazi leadership. The resultant policies proved popular
among many of Germany’s natural scientists, who, in the short term, prospered in the
absence of competition with the Jewish scientists they replaced. In the bizarre world
of Aryan science, lesser talents could succeed without having to confront the mathematical
intricacies of theoretical physics or the probing questions of talented Jewish theorists.

Lenard, however, viewed the transition from Jewish to Aryan scientists from a very
different perspective. Despite the fact that he was disdainful of the talents of most
Aryan physicists to the point of being unable to recommend them for the numerous vacant
university positions, the triumph of the Aryan physicist was inevitable. The Jewish
mind suffered an important inherent deficiency. In 1940, he wrote in the margins of
his 1922 edition of
Ether and Urether
,

How artificial as scientists those physicists must indeed be who still today hold
a “theory” with such sappy jests about space and time to be important. Sappy, I say,
because it in the essence underlies the Jewish inability with space and time. . .
. Just as the cubists had an inability to paint decently, so here lies together the
audacity and the inability they want to impose on others.

Upon Einstein’s departure, Lenard wrote a letter to Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment
and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, calling for the enforced abolition of all relics of
Einstein and his theory of relativity, as well as the dismissal of any supporter of
Einstein from his academic post—Jew or non-Jew. To do otherwise, he argued, would
be politically dangerous.

Lenard and Stark would get their way. They would live to see German science performed
as they had hoped, by Aryan Germans, at least for a while.

“‘German Physics?’ You will ask. I could also have said Aryan physics or physics of
the Nordic type of peoples, physics of the probers of reality, of truth seekers, the
physics of those who have founded scientific research,” wrote Philipp Lenard at the
outset of his four-volume master work,
Deutsche Physik
.

To those unfamiliar with the history of science, Lenard’s opening thrust must seem
an odd assertion. As opposed to pursuits like literature, philosophy, and history,
where cultural imprints are inevitable, shouldn’t science be blind to the national
origins of the research that defines its progress? How could it be otherwise? Some
new bit of knowledge discovered in Germany is published in an English language journal
and read in Korea, where researchers use the new information to redesign what had
been to that point futile investigations. The German discovery makes all the difference
in the Korean experiments, and mans’ understanding of his universe advances another
small step forward.

Predicting this response, Lenard assumed responsibility for both sides of the debate:

“Science is international, and it will always remain so,” you will want to protest.
But this is inevitably based on a fallacy. In reality, as with everything that man
creates, science is determined by race or by blood. It can seem to be international
when universally valid scientific results are wrongly traced to a common origin or
when it is not acknowledged that science supplied by peoples of different countries
is identical or similar to German science, and that science could only have been produced
because and to the extent that other peoples are or were likewise of a predominantly
Nordic racial mix. Nations of different racial mixes practice science differently.

The roots of
Deutsche Physik
can be traced to a particularly shocking episode that occurred during World War I.
The ensuing disagreement as to whom was at fault advanced nationalistic fervor among
Europe’s leading scientists and set the foundations for the internecine scientific
struggles that occurred in the postwar period. The 1839 Treaty of London guaranteed
Belgium neutral status in continental wars. However, Germany’s military brain trust
recognized that, by going through Belgium, it might outflank the French army, which
was concentrated in eastern France. Calling the treaty “a scrap of paper,” German
Chancellor Theobold von Beckmann Hollweg sent his armies into Belgium. What followed
has become known as the “rape of Belgium.” One and a half million Belgians fled from
the invading German army. Six thousand Belgian civilians died. The onslaught destroyed
twenty-five thousand buildings.