Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [25]
Dismissed outright, put ‘on leave’ from their universities and institutes, treated with unspeakable rudeness by colleagues and former friends (the Berlin University physiologist Wilhelm Feldberg was summoned one morning in April 1933 and told, ‘Feldberg, you must be out of here by midday, because you are a Jew’), and horrified by portents foretold by widespread book burnings that May, Jewish scientists, a good number of them nuclear physicists, made exodus out of Germany. Many found welcome in Britain. Albert Einstein was in California when Hitler took power and the Reichstag burned. He had long faced anti-Semitism in Germany, including from physicist colleagues, but had nevertheless thrived at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. The triumph of Nazism, however, made him doubtful of returning. While in New York, he found in a German newspaper a photograph of himself captioned ‘not yet hanged’. News that his home near Berlin had been searched and its garden dug up settled the matter: he gave up his German citizenship, stopped briefly in Belgium, then went to Christ Church, Oxford, for a stay. He did some lecturing and appeared, in October 1933, at a Royal Albert Hall rally on behalf of scientific refugees. That same month he sailed for the United States, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Max Born, the eminent physicist dismissed from Gottingen, moved first to the Italian Tyrol. There he fielded invitations from, among others, Oxford’s Frederick Lindemann, who arrived in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce to recruit him, and P. M. S. Blackett of Cambridge, whose offer Born accepted. It was a demotion, from head of a prestigious institute to ‘research student’ status, but Born found his new post stimulating and enjoyed the experience. In 1935 he was given the Chair of Physics at Edinburgh. Born hated Nazism, but he could not bring himself to work on the atomic bomb; he would shun the path taken by many of his colleagues and spend the war in Scotland.8
Fritz Haber had shown his zeal for Germany during the First World War, when he not only pioneered the manufacture of chemical weapons but found a new technique for making ammonia, a vital component of high explosives. After the war, he evaded the Locarno Treaty’s ban on poison gas by experimenting on animals, in the process developing the pesticide Zyklon B, which would be modified somewhat and used to murder millions of his fellow Jews in the Nazi extermination camps. This loyal service was not enough to win him Hitler’s favor. Though Haber was not himself dismissed, his Jewish staff were fired, and his work thus seriously restricted. Haber had been widely condemned by British scientists for his work on gas, but in 1933 the scientific republic had grown attentive to the oppressions of Nazism toward all its members, and what his son calls ‘the old-boy network’ secured for Haber a position at Cambridge. Rutherford, however, refused to meet him, and others in his lab treated him coldly. On a visit to Switzerland the following year Haber died of a heart attack.9
Franz (later Francis, then Sir Francis) Simon trained at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, specializing in low-temperature physics. He was Professor of Physical Chemistry at Breslau when Hitler came to power in early 1933. The same Frederick Lindemann who tried to entice Max Born to Oxford arrived at Simon’s door that spring and offered the German a place in Oxford’s Clarendon Lab. ‘How would you like to go to England?’, Simon asked his wife, Charlotte, that evening. ‘Rather today than tomorrow,’ she answered. Managing to take with him not only his family but vital equipment from his Breslau lab, Simon left for Oxford over the summer. The salary was low, the lab shockingly primitive, but jobs in wealthier places, despite Simon’s qualifications, were in short supply. The family found a house in north Oxford that became a refuge for other Jews living in the city or passing through, and Simon’s colleagues