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By Root 1187 0

F. W. Aston, P. M. S. Blackett (who came originally to take a single course at the lab, then stayed on), the Japanese researchers Shimizu and Ishida, John Cockcroft, Norman Feather, and the Australian Marcus Oliphant, who would later help convince the Americans that an atomic bomb was feasible. Rutherford’s favorite, by most accounts, was the Russian Peter Kapitsa, who came first to the Cavendish in 1921 and established himself as a moving spirit there, a man in Rutherford’s image. Kapitsa liked driving fast on narrow English roads and plunging nude into English streams. More than once he pushed his lab machinery beyond its capacity, setting fire to cables and blasting overloaded electrical coils. (He wrote to his mother: ‘Today a new record was set for magnetic field strength. I would have gone higher but the coil burst. It was an impressive explosion.’) To this energy, to this intelligence and instrumental abundance, to this atmosphere charged with scientific excitement, the best physicists in the world were drawn.5

The pull was from Cambridge; the push came from the rise of political and religious oppression in Germany. Kapitsa, it may be recalled, was prevented by Stalin from returning to England following a visit home in 1934. The Soviets declared that ‘they could no longer dispense with his services, in view of the danger from Hitler.’ But the chief effect of Nazism’s advent was to drive scientists out of Central Europe, often first to Great Britain and then to the United States. Hitler came to power early in 1933. Almost immediately, groups of Fascist Brown Shirts demonstrated against university faculty who were Jewish or had married Jews, and within the first month of the regime orders from Berlin brought the dismissal of seven prominent scientists at Gottingen. Max Born, director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics and a later winner of the Nobel Prize, was put on paid leave; he used his salary to underwrite Jewish friends and relatives whose circumstances were worse than his. James Franck, who had won his Nobel in 1925, was initially spared despite his Judaism (recall that Franck had worked on gas during the First World War), but he soon resigned to protest that German Jews were being ‘treated like aliens and enemies of our country’. Between 1901 and 1932, one-third of Nobel Prizes had gone to German scientists. Roughly a quarter of these were Jewish. After 1933, nearly all Jewish scientists who wished to continue their work had no choice but to leave Germany. And not only Jews: the faculty at Gottingen was so demoralized that only a third of the mathematicians and physicists stayed in their jobs.6

Hitler looked upon Jews with murderous intent, and he had no particular use for physics. ‘If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!’ he reportedly declared. He did not altogether mean it, for, as war approached, scientific and technological work considered by the regime essential to preparedness went forward without great ideological encumbrance. (Frank Pfetsch notes that Jewish scientists and those with Jewish spouses were able to work throughout the war at the Zeiss glass and optical plant in Jena.) But many scientists understood the attacks on Jews as violations of academic freedom generally, as evidence that religious intolerance could be readily transformed into contempt for intellectuals and their work. Science did not end in Germany between 1933 and 1945, but it was decisively compromised in the way that academic work always is when racism taints it, when powerful ideologues insist on selecting its practitioners and commanding its direction. ‘National Socialism’, wrote Joachim Fest, ‘represented a politically organized contempt for the mind.’ A year after the mass dismissals at Gottingen, the mathematician David Hilbert found himself at a banquet seated next to Bernhard Rust, Hitler’s minister of education. ‘Is it really true, Professor, that your Institute suffered so much from the departure of the Jews and their friends?