The Man Who Stalked Einstein (23 page)

As a secretary ushered him into Hitler’s office, Planck considered how he might most
effectively address his concerns in a way that Hitler would understand. He decided
to use as an example his Jewish colleague, Fritz Haber. The Nobel laureate had recently
resigned his university position in protest of the new law. Haber was a national hero
for his invention of processes for producing poisonous gases during the Great War,
without which Germany would have lost from the start. Planck broached the subject
delicately, but Hitler was immediately on the alert. “I have nothing against Jews
as such,” Hitler said, “But Jews are all communists, and it is the latter who are
my enemies; it is against them that my fight is directed.”

“There are different types of Jews,” Planck said, “Both worthy and worthless ones
to humanity, with old families of the highest German culture among the former.” He
suggested that a distinction should be made between the various sorts.

“That’s not right. A Jew is a Jew,” Hitler objected. “All Jews stick together like
burrs. When there is one Jew, all kinds of other Jews gather right away. It should
have been the duty of the Jews themselves to draw a dividing line between the various
types. They did not do this, and that is why I must act against all Jews equally.”

Planck said, “Forcing worthy Jews to emigrate would be equivalent to mutilating ourselves
outright, because we direly need their scientific work, and their efforts would otherwise
accrue primarily to the benefit of foreign countries,”

The Chancellor ignored the comment. After an uncomfortable minute, Hitler said,
“People say I suffer occasionally from nervous disability. This is slander. I have
nerves of steel.” As if to prove how sturdy he was, he began to bang his fist on his
knee. He spoke extremely fast, beating himself into a great fury. Planck was left
with no other choice than to remain silent and to take his leave.

Enacted a month earlier, on April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional
Civil Service had been the brainchild of the Reichs-
minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick. He was the same man to whom Johannes Stark
had turned for his appointment to the presidency of the Reich Physical and Technical
Institute. The law called for mass dismissals from the civil service of several classes
of individuals, without either benefits or pensions. Chief among those scheduled for
dismissal were “civil servants who were not of Aryan descent” unless they had already
been employed by the civil service prior to August 1, 1914, or “who had fought in
the World War at the front for the German Reich or its allies, or whose fathers or
sons had been casualties in the World War.” Also named were “Civil servants who, based
upon their previous political activities, cannot guarantee that they have always unreservedly
supported the national state.” Finally, the law provided for transfers of individuals
to lesser posts—at lower pay—at the discretion of the Reich. These dismissals and
transfers were to be carried out no later than September 30, 1933, just months after
the law went into effect.

There would be no mistaking the intent of the legislation. A series of “ordinances,”
representing definitions or amplifications of the law, were issued over the next several
months. The first ordinance was issued on April 11, 1933. Its goals were to clarify
that “All civil servants who belonged to the communist party or to communist support
organizations or substitute organizations are unqualified [for civil service]. They
are therefore to be dismissed.” The law also grew more precise with regard to defining
the term “non-Aryan” as “anyone descended from non-Aryan, and in particular Jewish,
parents or grandparents, is considered non-Aryan. It is sufficient [to disqualify
a person for service] that one parent or one grandparent be non-Aryan. This is to
be assumed especially when one parent or one grandparent has practiced the Jewish
Faith.”

All officials were to prove their ancestry by presenting certified documents like
a birth certificate, the marriage certificate of their parents, or military papers.
Finally, if there were some question concerning a civil servant’s ancestry, an opinion
had to be requested of a “specialist on race research.”

The 1933 civil service law was the initial thrust of a comprehensive, long-term Nazi
plan to restrict Jews from participation in public life, particularly in highly visible
fields like academics, medicine, and law. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws further defined
who was considered a Jew, prohibited sexual relations between Aryans and Jews, set
quotas for Jewish students’ enrollment in universities, and prohibited the granting
of doctoral degrees to Jewish students unless they had already completed writing their
thesis. Laws passed in 1938 and 1939 completed the isolation of German Jews by forbidding
most professional and financial interactions between Jews and non-Jews. For example,
Jewish physicians could no longer treat Aryan patients. Loopholes were abolished that
had allowed small numbers of Jewish professors to continue in their university positions
for past meritorious service during the Great War.

One of the immediate casualties of the new law was Planck’s friend Fritz Haber, though
his dismissal was self-inflicted. The sixty-five-year-old, 1918 Nobel laureate had
revolutionized the production of fertilizer with his reaction of nitrogen and air
to produce ammonia. In addition, he had been of great service to the Fatherland, though
less so to humanity, with his invention of chlorine and other weaponizable gases,
which Germany had used to great effect in World War I.

Haber noted in his April 30, 1933, letter of resignation addressed to the head of
the Ministry of Culture, Bernhard Rust, that by dint of his employment as a professor
at Berlin University having begun in 1898, he was entitled to remain in office despite
having Jewish parents and grandparents. “But I do not wish to make use of this privilege
for longer than is necessary to properly dispose of the academic and administrative
functions vested in me through my offices,” he wrote.

Haber further explained,

My decision to request my discharge stems from the contrast between the tradition
to which I have adhered up to now concerning scientific research and the changed attitudes
which you, Mister Minister, and your Ministry represent as the vanguards of the great
modern national movement. My tradition demands that in my choice of colleagues I take
into account the professional and personal attributes of applicants to an academic
position without inquiring after their racial characteristics.

Haber closed by reminding the minister of his contributions to Germany. Speaking of
himself in the third person, he wrote, “You will understand that the pride with which
he has served his German native country throughout his life now compels him to make
this request for retirement.”

The remainder of Fritz Haber’s story is short and sad. Soon after he resigned his
faculty position, Haber moved to a temporary lectureship in Cambridge, at least in
part to escape the backlash over his resignation among his German colleagues. Soon
after his arrival in England, Zionist Chaim Weizmann recruited Haber to the faculty
of a new science and technology campus being built south of Tel Aviv, in Israel, that
eventually would bear Weizmann’s name. Haber had been in ill health and died of heart
failure en route to his new home.

Many of Fritz Haber’s extended family members would die in German concentration camps.
However, his son by his first wife Clara managed to immigrate to the United States.
In 1946, Hermann Haber committed suicide over the shame of his father having invented
an early version of Zyclon B, the gas the Nazis had used to murder millions of Jews
during the Holocaust. His death reprised his mother’s, who thirty-one years earlier
had shot herself to death after the first combat deployment of Haber’s chlorine gas,
near Ypern, during the Great War.

In writing his obituary of Haber, Max von Laue drew a parallel between the last years
of his friend’s complex life and those of Themistocles, who “went down in history
not as the pariah at the Court of the Persian king but as the victor of Salamis .
. . [Haber] will be remembered as the man who had made bread out of thin air and who
triumphed in the service of his country and of the whole of humanity.”

Another voluntary resignation drew even greater attention. The April 19, 1933, edition
of the
Goettinger Tageblatt
carried the story of Professor James Franck’s resignation from Goettingen University.
Franck had shared the 1925 Nobel Prize in physics with Gustav Hertz for his work on
the interactions of atomic particles. Having once proclaimed that his god was science
and nature his religion, Franck saw himself not as a Jew, but as an assimilated German
citizen. Nonetheless, under Nazi law he was Jewish. Since he was a World War I veteran
who had been decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class, and seriously injured in
a gas attack, he was exempt from prosecution under the civil service law.

A number of friends advised Franck to continue in his professorship, arguing that
the current situation was only temporary and that it would resolve itself. As one
colleague said to him, “Nothing is eaten as hot as it is cooked.” Regardless, Franck
was determined to resign in protest. He met with several friends to draft his letter
of resignation and write a press release the evening before the newspapers broke the
story:

I have requested of my superior that I be released from my office. I will try to continue
to work in science in Germany. We Germans of Jewish descent are being treated as foreigners
and enemies of the Fatherland. It is expected that our children grow up knowing that
they are not permitted ever to prove themselves worthy Germans. Whoever has been in
the war is permitted to continue to serve the state. I decline to take advantage of
this privilege, even though I understand the position of those who today see it as
their duty to stay resolutely at their posts.

The reaction to Franck’s resignation was vigorous and immediate. Forty-two of Goettingen’s
faculty denounced Franck’s public withdrawal. Specifically citing Franck’s passage
about Jews being treated as foreigners and enemies of the Fatherland, their statement
read,

[Franck’s resignation] could seriously impede the domestic and foreign political activities
of our government of the national renewal. We are in agreement that the form of the
above tender of resignation is tantamount to an act of sabotage; and we therefore
hope that the Government will carry out the necessary purging measures expeditiously.

The professors responsible for the document went on to explain that “due to the holidays,
it was not possible to obtain the signatures of all the professors, but it can be
relatively assumed that they approve of the above declaration.” The signatories further
commented that Franck’s resignation had “even irritated his fellow Jews at the
Berliner Tageblatt
, which immediately recognized that Professor Franck had made a fatal step that the
Government cannot overlook idly.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the
Goettinger Tageblatt
sided with Franck, concluding its coverage as follows: “The decision of Professor
Franck is to be rated largely, yes even solely, as a moral one. We hope and wish that
this step, by which Franck destroys his life’s work and his life’s content, will have
the effect that other scientists who would be forced to resign by the current regulations
are kept for our scientific life.”

Franck received numerous private letters of support, but there was no open display
of public protest. When fellow physicist Otto Hahn suggested to Planck that the two
of them organize a demonstration of solidarity on Franck’s behalf, Planck saw only
futility: “If you bring together thirty such men today, then tomorrow one hundred-fifty
will come to denounce them, because they want to take their places.”

Within days, the university dismissed six other Jewish faculty members. It was only
the beginning of the initial purge. Despite Franck’s desire to continue working in
Germany, even if it meant working in industry, no company stepped forward to hire
him. Things quickly degenerated for Franck and his family. They faced increasing harassment
by brown shirts and neighbors to the point of fearing for their safety. In November
1933, James Franck moved with his wife and daughters to become a professor of physical
chemistry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1938, Franck moved
his family to Chicago, where he could more actively participate in the Manhattan Project.
While contributing to the scientific underpinnings of bomb development, he simultaneously
chaired the Committee on Political and Social Problems related to the atomic bomb.
The committee generated what became known as the Franck Report, recommending that
the United States abstain from dropping the atomic bomb on Japanese cities. Franck
personally handed the committee’s report to Arthur Compton, an assistant to the U.S.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson, on June 11, 1945. It is uncertain whether Stimson
ever reviewed the report or whether it even was considered in arriving at the decision
to drop atomic bombs, without warning, on Japanese population centers.

Franck was appalled by the government’s disregard of his committee’s report and at
the resultant destruction of human life. He spent much of the remainder of his long
life arguing for restraint in punishing the vanquished enemy. “The feeling of revenge
is, of course, strong in Jewish circles,” Franck wrote to his friend, Albert Einstein,
after the war. “If that goes on, the Nazis will have won in their battle for demoralization
of the whole world. . . . I will have no part in the punishment and gradual elimination
of the innocent.”

Despite his reputation for pacifism, Einstein would have none of this. Einstein responded,
“The Germans slaughtered millions of civilian’s according to a carefully conceived
plan. . . . They would do it again if they could. The few white ravens among them
changes absolutely nothing. . . . Dear Franck! Keep your hands off this foul affair!”