Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [151]
The 'Law for the Restoration of the Career Civil Service', passed on 7April, applied to some 2 million state employees. The law was designed to target the Nazis' political opponents, socialists, communists, and the Jews. Paragraph 3 contained the infamous 'Aryan clause': 'Civil servants not of Aryan origin are to retire.'30 The law defined a non-Aryan as a person who had one parent or grandparent who was not Aryan. Sixty-two years after their emancipation in 1871, German Jews were once again the subject of legalised state discrimination. It was the springboard for the Nazi persecution of the Jews that followed.
Universities were state institutions, and soon more than a thousand academics, including 313 professors, were dismissed or resigned. Almost a quarter of the pre-1933 physics community was forced into exile, including half of all theorists. By 1936 more than 1,600 scholars had been ousted; a third of these were scientists, including twenty who had been or would be awarded the Nobel Prize: eleven in physics, four in chemistry, five in medicine.31 Formally, the new law did not apply to those employed before the First World War, or who were veterans of that war, or anyone who had lost a father or son during the war. But as the Nazi purge of the civil service continued unabated and claimed an increasing number who were exempt, on 16 May 1933 Planck, as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, went to see Hitler. He thought he could limit the damage being done to German science.
Incredibly, Planck told Hitler that 'there are different sorts of Jews, some valuable for mankind and others worthless', and that 'distinctions must be made'.32 'That's not right', said Hitler.33 'A Jew is a Jew; all Jews stick together like leeches. Wherever there is one Jew, other Jews of all sorts immediately gather.' His opening gambit having failed, Planck changed tack. The wholesale expulsion of Jewish scientists would be harmful to Germany's interests, argued Planck. Hitler flew into a rage at the very suggestion: 'Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists.' 'If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!'34
In November 1918, in the immediate aftermath of defeat, Planck had rallied the dispirited members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences: 'If the enemy has taken from our fatherland all defence and power, if severe domestic crises have broken in upon us and perhaps still more severe crises stand before us, there is one thing which no foreign or domestic enemy has yet taken from us: that is the position which German science occupies in the world.'35 For Planck, who had lost his eldest son on the battlefield, all the sacrifices had to be worth something. As his disastrous meeting with Hitler came to an abrupt end, Planck knew that the Nazis were on the verge of achieving what no one else had: the destruction of German science.
Two weeks earlier, the Nazi physicist and Nobel laureate Johannes Stark had been appointed director of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, the Imperial Institute of Physics and Technology. Soon Stark wielded even greater power in the service of 'Aryan physics', as he was placed in charge of disbursing government research funds. From these positions of power he was determined to exact revenge. In 1922 he had stepped down from his professorship at the University of Würzburg to try his hand at business. Anti-Semitic, dogmatic and quarrelsome, Stark had alienated virtually everyone bar the like-minded fellow Nobel laureate and Nazi Philipp Lenard, the leading and long-time proponent of so-called 'Deutsch Physik'. When Stark wanted to return to academia after the failure of his business venture, no one who was in a position to do so was prepared to offer him a job. Already bitterly opposed to the 'Jewish physics' of Einstein and dismissive of modern theoretical physics, Stark was determined to have a say in all appointments to professorial chairs