Nazis and the Physics Connection

When the Nazi government seized power, they started removing Jews from more and more positions, including the civil services, and the science departments of Germany. Those physicists who saw the writing on the wall fled to either UK (like Schrodinger) or the US (like Einstein), writes Adam Becker in What is Real?

 

The great physicist, Enrico Fermi, wasn’t a Jew. But when Mussolini aligned with Hitler, Fermi came under suspicion since his wife was a Jew. To make matters problematic, Mussolini’s new laws had made it illegal to take “more than pocket change” out of Italy. Neils Bohr broke an unwritten rule of the Nobel and told Fermi that he (Fermi) was in the running for the Nobel that year. Perhaps Fermi, should he win, could consider escaping from Stockholm with the prize money to start a new life? Fermi agreed, but it was touch and go – his wife’s passport had been confiscated, which meant she couldn’t come to Stockholm. Fermi managed to pull a few strings to get her passport in time. From Stockholm, the two went to Copenhagen and found that “the wheels of American immigration (were) greased by the words ‘Nobel Prize winner’” and thus landed in the US. He would play a major role in the building of the atomic bomb.

 

Bohr, himself a Jew, would escape to neutral Sweden soon after the Nazis took over Denmark. Depleted of the cream of the physics, the Nazis would put Heisenberg in charge of their own nuclear weapons program, a strange choice since he was a pure theoretician, not an experimental guy. Perhaps it helped that Heisenberg felt it was his duty to help his (German) government, and not get into the politics of what their views were. It is often easy to judge such people with the benefit of hindsight, and Heisenberg would always be looked upon with disgust and suspicion by his fellow physicists after the Allies won.

 

These were only a few high-profile physicists impacted by the Nazis, but many other lesser-known names fled Germany. Such a mass exodus had two consequences beyond World War II, starting with the shift in physics from Germany to essentially the US, and eventually to English replacing German as the de facto language of physics.