137 - Arthur I. Miller [20]
Even walking the streets was risky because the reds were arresting and summarily shooting anyone suspected of spreading discontent or who looked suspicious.
The backbone of the white army—the Berliners—was the Freikorps (Free Corps). This was made up of extreme right-wing fascist paramilitary units manned by combat-hardened ex-soldiers serving as mercenaries, former officers often with royal titles and students who had been too young to fight in the war and sought instant action against easy targets. They were financed privately by German industry and hated Communists. One unit of the Free Corps called itself the defender of the democratic spirit against Communists and Jews. From it emerged such staunch “defenders of democracy” as Rudolf Hess, who was to become Hitler’s deputy chancellor, and Ernst Röhm soon to command Hitler’s storm troopers. It was also to provide the start in life for the man who was to become Pauli’s closest colleague—Werner Heisenberg.
Preceded by a heavy artillery and mortar bombardment that created enormous damage and caused numerous civilian deaths, at the end of April the white army stormed Munich. Planes flew over, dropping leaflets telling people to surrender. There was heavy street fighting and massacres by both sides.
The fighting ended on May 8. Thousands of Red Army soldiers and civilian supporters had been killed—some estimates were as high as 20,000—in what became known as the white terror, wreaked mainly on the reds by the trigger-happy Free Corps. The white army estimated its losses at around 60. But the white terror was not yet over. People suspected of collaboration were summarily shot, stabbed, or beaten to death with rifle butts. Often they had been identified by spies who had infiltrated communist organizations, such as Corporal Hitler who had returned to decadent Schwabing. Munich, his favorite city, soon became the hot bed of his right-wing politics. The excesses of the Free Corps were so blatant that Lenin threatened to unleash Soviet forces on the area.
For Pauli, as for everyone, it must have been a traumatic and exciting time and also certainly dangerous. No doubt he wrote home about his experiences but sadly none of those letters remain. Perhaps Pauli’s father destroyed them when he fled Vienna in 1938. Pauli, himself, may have destroyed others when he left Europe in 1940.
Pauli meets Heisenberg
By 1920 peace had returned to the city. Pauli was now Sommerfeld’s deputy assistant. Among the students whose homework he had to correct was a young man called Werner Heisenberg.
Heisenberg was destined to become one of the great names in the history of physics. Even as a boy he was immensely competitive. He was not a natural athlete but trained with great determination and became an expert skier, runner, and Ping-Pong player. Like Pauli, he breezed through his classes at school and spent much of his time reading on his own, almost exclusively mathematics.
He had the look of “a simple farmboy with short, fair hair, clear blue eyes, and a charming expression,” his friends recalled. Heisenberg first encountered atomic physics at the age of eighteen, in 1919, reading Plato’s Timaeus while lying on a rooftop at the University of Munich during a break from his military duties as a member of the Free Corps, while rioting went on below him. (Five decades later Heisenberg was to recall those days as youthful fun, like “playing robbery [cops and robbers] and so on; it was nothing serious at all.” Perhaps. Or perhaps not.) Heisenberg was entranced with