Immigrants from Europe’s physics community came to the United States between the years 1933 and 1941. Europe had seen a revolution in physics with the quantum theory of the atom in the 1920’s. The United States was well prepared to receive Europe’s best physicists since the universities had been working for over a decade to improve education in theoretical physics. Due to the rise of Nazi power, the practical applications of quantum theory were transplanted to America.

Nazi intentions were evident in Tubingen, the German city where the Jewish theoretical physicist Hans Bethe worked. They began with a boycott of Jewish stores after the National Socialists were elected to office. Then came laws that prohibited official appointments of anyone who had a Jewish grandmother. Between April and May of 1933, over 196 of Germany’s best scholars in mathematics, science, and physics were dismissed from their positions in the universities. All were Jewish. Entire departments were decimated. Only non-Jewish faculty remained. The list of purged faculty printed in the Manchester Guardian read like the Who’s Who of German scholarship. What was happening in Germany was well stated by the American Biologist, Selig Hecht, from Columbia University:

Hans Bethe

It is a really terrifying situation when viewed close to hand. Not merely the obvious agony which dismissed Jewish professors and others are up against, but the extraordinary callousness of the rest of the population in the face of it. Most people don’t give a darn; a large proportion is rather glad to see it all happen. Those extremely few who are upset by it are disinclined to do or say anything publicly or even privately. In Munich everyone says not to speak too loudly or one will land in Dachau (the nearest concentration camp).

Albert Einstein criticized the Nazis openly and condemned their attacks on Jews. He resigned his position at the Prussian Academy and became the first faculty member of Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein was despised by the National Socialists and certainly would have been dismissed had he not resigned. German universities proceeded to hire lesser talents to teach courses in applied physics that would produce inventions for the German war machine. The new theoretical physics that would produce atomic weapons was considered by the Nazis to be “Jewish physics” and not worthy of research.

Albert Einstein

For very readable source about Europe’s intellectual migration see:

The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960. Edited by Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusettes, 1969.

Question Gallery

1. Discuss the following statement: “Any attack upon freedom of thought in one sphere, even as non-political a sphere as theoretical physics, is in effect an attack on democracy itself.”
2. Discuss the ultimate irony of the Nazi policy on physics that considered non-theoretical physics good and Aryan, and theoretical physics as bad and Jewish.