BOOK MARK : Why Some German Scientists Sold Their Souls to Adolf Hitler

Werner Heisenberg’s decisions to remain in Germany after Adolf Hitler came to power and to play a prominent role in German nuclear research during World War II illustrate the dangerous compromises scientists often make in order to advance their theories, the author contends. An excerpt.

Like many progressive politicians and academics in Germany, Werner Heisenberg was at first appalled at the crudity of Adolf Hitler and the other National Socialist leaders and by the “excesses” of their new regime, but he greatly sympathized with the long-term national revival they promised. “Much that is good is now also being tried,” he wrote as late as October, 1933, “and one should recognize good intentions.” He and other scientists expected that the regime, like its immediate predecessors, would hardly last out the year. An urgent political response, had they with their “apolitical” attitudes even considered one, seemed to them unnecessary.

Because of this, Heisenberg and most other non-Jewish academics still in Germany did not make overt protestations like Albert Einstein’s. Nor did the obvious moral issue of anti-Semitism move Heisenberg and his colleagues to action. Although some no doubt sympathized with anti-Semitic policies, there is no direct indication that Heisenberg did so in the scientific sphere. Rather, he and his colleagues tended to regard anti-Semitism as a mere political issue--and thus an issue to be avoided entirely. The benefits brought by official anti-Semitism did not encourage them to do otherwise. Nevertheless, the plights of their closest Jewish colleagues and the damage to the German physics profession demanded a response.

With the regime in control of the legal apparatus and Hitler’s paramilitary organization in control of the streets, perhaps the most effective opposition Heisenberg and other academics could have launched in those early months would have been the political mobilization of the middle and upper-middle classes against the regime and its policies. But given the initial popularity of the regime, opposition would have been possible only if it had been mobilized well before 1933. That would have required a political sensitivity and commitment to democracy that did not exist. Individual professors who did attempt to spark a democratic opposition were regarded as examples of the futility of individual protest--precisely because they were alone.

A year earlier, Gerhard Kessler, a non-Jewish professor of economics in Leipzig, had sought to reach students and the public with pamphlets and lectures against National Socialist doctrine. His efforts were rewarded with mass demonstrations against him and the violent disruption of his lectures by rampaging students. He was dismissed from his post in April, 1933, was arrested by the Gestapo in July and emigrated thereafter to the United States under the threat of ending up in a concentration camp.

It could be argued that a mobilization of mass opposition could have been achieved in early 1933 had more non-Jewish academics followed the examples of physicists Einstein, James Franck and Fritz Haber: that is, had there been a simultaneous resignation of professors in moral indignation at the dismissal of their colleagues and the treatment of Jews in general. But Heisenberg, Max Planck, and other elite German physics professors were conscious of their positions as the prestigious creators of quantum physics, heads of major scientific institutions and leading representatives of German culture. They felt that their importance to their nation transcended their personal preferences.

Having failed in their efforts to keep their colleagues in Germany, Heisenberg turned to what seemed to him a positive response under the circumstances--finding worthy replacements to fill teaching chairs left vacant by dismissed or departing scientists. This new response may appear reasonable when viewed in terms of preserving German physics. Yet there is no indication that they ever reflected on a broader implication of this tactic, that the preservation of decent science under the Nazi regime would support the arguments that National Socialism was not so bad after all and that it was not fundamentally incompatible with the ideals of scientific inquiry. Nor did they appear to consider that the preservation of decent physics in such places as Gottingen might play into the hands of those who said that the Jewish professors were not needed anyway.

Most disturbing is the ethical implication that was ignored: to participate in finding a replacement for a man who had been unethically dismissed or who had resigned in protest could be seen as tacit acceptance of the grounds for dismissal and denial of the legitimacy of the protest. The Nazi regime confronted Germans with difficult moral and political decisions for which even the most upright among them were thoroughly unprepared.

Heisenberg and his colleagues compounded their failing by an unprincipled eagerness to prove their value to their government by creating the weapons of war. Ever since Archimedes built catapults for the king of Syracuse, ever since Francis Bacon declared that knowledge is power, science has been the handmaiden of every nation’s economic, military and political interests. Not until after World War II--after the advent of weapons of mass destruction and after the example of German scientists so willingly working for their government--have moral scruples played any role in the willingness of scientists to arm their respective nations.

Recent studies of the ways in which American physicists allowed themselves to be manipulated to serve Cold War military aims suggest that fundamental moral or ethical issues--those beyond feelings of patriotism and the desire to defend one’s culture--still do not play a significant role role in contemporary weapons research.

This helps explain why many of Heisenberg’s severest American critics remain sympathetic and more than politely cordial toward him, even while publishing the most devastating repudiations. It was as if they recognized how much they shared his difficulties, as if they only wanted him to admit what has become common knowledge since World War II: that scientists everywhere, no matter how devoted they may be to the search for truth and universal understanding, will work for their governments, whether worthy or loathsome, and that many will serve their governments by fashioning the weapons of war and destruction.

1991 by David C. Cassidy. Reprinted with permission from W.H. Freeman and Co.

BOOK REVIEW: “Uncertainity: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg,” by David. C. Cassidy, is reviewed on Page 2 of the Book Review section.