What does physics have to do with politics? Or racism? The answer is nothing… unless we are talking about Germany in the first half of the 20th century. In that case, we must highlight the emergence of a pseudo-scientific movement embodied in the so-called Deutsche Physik, or German Physics, also known as Arische Physik, or Aryan Physics. This was not solely the domain of politicians, not even Nazi politicians, but rather something originated by Pan-Germanist academics. Some were even Nobel laureates, to further astonishment.

The roots of German Physics can be traced back to the beginning of World War I, when German troops invaded Belgium. One of the most affected cities was Leuven, where, following a strategy known as schrecklichkeit (terror), they sought to subdue resistance.

To achieve this, they executed the mayor and all the local police officers; they also executed the rector of its famous KU (Katholieke Universiteit, Catholic University), which suffered an infamous act on August 25, 1914. Its library, containing hundreds of thousands of volumes and medieval and Renaissance manuscripts of incalculable value, was burned in a bonfire after being doused with gasoline and incendiary tablets.

Deutsch physik
Arnold Sommerfeld. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

This gratuitous and unnecessary attack provoked worldwide indignation (after being rebuilt, the university would be destroyed again in the next war), and eight distinguished British scientists signed a public manifesto of protest. These were no ordinary figures; among them were the Scotsman Alexander Fleming, whose discovery of penicillin would earn him the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945, but also William Bragg (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915), chemist William Crookes (inventor of the cathode ray tube), mathematician Horace Lamb, physicist Oliver Joseph Lodge (the first to transmit a radio signal), William Ramsay (Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1907), Lord Rayleigh (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1904), and Joseph John Thomson (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906).

The German scientific community did not take this criticism well, and in 1915, sixteen illustrious German academics published a harsh response accusing the British of failing to understand their idiosyncrasies and asserting that years of understanding between their respective countries had just been shattered. Consequently, they advocated for ceasing the use of English when presenting their works and forbade their translation or publication in the Anglo-Saxon world. They even promoted the Germanization of terminology, advocating, for example, calling X-rays “Röntgen rays” (after their discoverer, the Rhinelander Wilhelm Röntgen), while simultaneously asserting that this did not represent a rejection of advances contributed by British scientists.

Among the signatories of this response were Arnold Sommerfeld and Johannes Stark. The former, a pioneer of atomic and quantum physics, would formulate the fine-structure constant in 1919 and supervise the doctoral theses of several future Nobel laureates. The latter, one of those laureates in 1919 for discovering the so-called Stark Effect (the shifting and splitting of spectral lines of atoms and molecules due to a static electric field), later became a fiercely anti-Semitic and zealous leader of Deutsche Physik during the Hitler regime.

Deutsch physik
Johannes Stark. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

However, not all German scientists endorsed that declaration. Max Planck, for instance, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics a year before Stark, distanced himself from the nationalist rhetoric of his colleagues and refused to associate with their aggressive anti-Semitism. He was one of the few who immediately recognized the validity of Albert Einstein’s revolutionary theories and maintained a friendship with him when everyone else questioned or even vilified him.

One of the most active in the latter was Philipp Lenard, a Hungarian naturalized as a German who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1905 for his research on cathode rays. He had expanded on Heinrich Rudolf Hertz’s theses on the photoelectric effect, reaching conclusions that could not be demonstrated until Einstein made his contributions, which turned him into a staunch enemy, much like he had previously viewed Joseph John Thomson (the protest manifesto signer who won the Nobel the following year) as a rival for refuting some of his errors.

Lenard, a fervent nationalist, believed the British merely stole ideas from Germans, although, in truth, the Frenchman Jean Perrin and the German Wilhelm Wien (incidentally, both Nobel laureates in 1926 and 1911, respectively) scientifically challenged part of his cathode ray research. In any case, it was evident that while science was experiencing a splendid cultural moment, it was also undergoing a turbulent one due to conflicts among its representatives.

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Phillippe Lenard. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

What came to be known as a “war of minds” continued even after the real war ended. The Treaty of Versailles, perceived in Germany as a vindictive act of revenge by the victorious powers, exacerbated the feelings of many, causing instability in the Weimar Republic and adding another ingredient to the recipe that would lead to the emergence of Nazism.

Among those most vocal about feeling the situation as an affront was Lenard, who participated in several anti-British propaganda activities and became even more radicalized when, on January 26, 1920, there was an attack on Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger.

The perpetrator was a former cadet of the naval academy named Oltwig von Hirschfeld, to whom the physicist sent a congratulatory telegram because Erzerberg, an opponent of the Kaiser and an anti-militarist, was considered left-wing. He wouldn’t last long, though, as in August 1921, he was assassinated, again by sailors. The following year, the Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau also fell to gunfire. In this case, he was a nationalist, writer, and liberal businessman, but since no one saw him that way and he supported paying reparations, the signing of a treaty with the USSR sealed his fate.

Deutsch physik
Walter Rathenau. Credit: Bundesarchiv / Wikimedia Commons

The fact is that the assassination caused a deep impression in the country, and flags flew at half-mast… except at the Radiological Institute that Lenard directed at the University of Heidelberg. For this reason, left-wing students organized a protest against him, making it necessary to provide him with protection. The late Rathenau had another blemish in the eyes of many: he was Jewish. The proverbial German antisemitism began manifesting itself more openly, and one of those who suffered from it was, as previously mentioned, Einstein.

His theory of relativity, published in 1905, had sparked great controversy due to its novelty and quickly placed him in the eye of the storm. Partly, this was due to the inevitable initial skepticism, as it refuted many principles his colleagues took for granted as indisputable. However, it was also partly because of his Jewish origin, which was far from ideal in that context of growing hostility. These factors combined to attempt to undermine his work, which he had published in two groundbreaking articles shortly after earning his doctorate.

One of these articles, titled A Heuristic Viewpoint on the Production and Transformation of Light (the basis for his 1921 Nobel Prize), explained the photoelectric effect, effectively overturning the work done until then by his colleagues, including the infamous Lenard. Thus, the leading figures of Deutsche Physik took it upon themselves to belittle him to the point that when Rudolf Tomaschek, an experimental physicist and follower of the movement, re-edited a multi-volume physics book on the state of the field, he didn’t even mention Einstein.

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Albert Einstein in 1921. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Sensing what was coming, Einstein left Europe to settle in the United States a year before Hitler came to power. Meanwhile, Lenard and Stark joined the Nazi Party and became champions of Deutsche Physik against Jüdische Physik (Jewish Physics), embodied by the exiled Einstein and Werner Heisenberg (a physicist and philosopher who formulated the Uncertainty Principle, fundamental to quantum mechanics, earning him the Nobel Prize in 1932). They denounced it as fraudulent and dangerous for corrupting prior science with its dogmatism and deductivism, to the detriment of inductivism and observation.

Lenard and Stark sought to Germanize physics and make it more “Aryan”, securing the regime’s support to achieve this. This led to the dismissal of scientists from universities who did not conform to Nazi parameters, a practice reinforced in 1935 by the Nuremberg Laws, which excluded Jews from academia.

While Lenard published a book in 1933 titled Great Men in Science, A History of Scientific Progress, in which he omitted 20th-century colleagues to avoid including Jews like the aforementioned or the Curies (it was in this work that he coined the term Deutsche Physik), Stark openly expressed his ambition to be considered an authority—not scientifically (which he was) but politically, following the principle of Gleichschaltung, which applied to all professions.

In this context, Heisenberg’s position was unique. He was only Jewish by blood, as he was raised as a Lutheran, and he refused to leave Germany, unlike about twenty leading Jewish scientists who did. This did not spare him from a harassment campaign spearheaded by Lenard and Stark. Despite this, the Nazi authorities did not persecute him as harshly as others. Why? For two reasons. The first was that, as a child, he attended the same school as Heinrich Himmler, fostering a certain friendship between their families. Reportedly, Werner’s mother approached the SS chief to ask him to leave her son alone. Himmler was receptive and interceded on his behalf in 1938, albeit demanding in return that Heisenberg refrain from mentioning Jewish colleagues like Bohr or Einstein.

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Werner Heisenberg in 1933. Credit: Bundesarchiv / Wikimedia Commons

The second reason, more crucial during World War II, was the atomic bomb. Uranverein (Uranium Club), the name of the German nuclear program, operated mainly at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, led by Heisenberg. In 1942, he told Albert Speer that achieving their goal before 1944 would be impossible without significantly more resources, despite having about seventy physicists working on it. Today, it is known that the German project lagged far behind the American Manhattan Project, and the war ended without Germany having an atomic weapon.

Reality is often stubborn. The exclusion of Jewish physicists, many of whom were leading figures, significantly weakened German science at the time. This exclusion also harmed a generation of young students whose education lacked quantum mechanics and relativity. This did not go unnoticed by the Nazi government, which had to adjust its stance, as evidenced by the Heisenberg case, to avoid losing technological ground. Consequently, Lenard, who had become Hitler’s advisor on physics, gradually lost influence, as did Stark, while the regime accepted scientific evidence supported by less extremist representatives.

After the fall of Nazism, Lenard was expelled from the university and died barely two years later. Stark was sentenced to four years in prison by a denazification court. Sommerfeld had moderated his stance over time, ultimately reconciling with Einstein and renouncing Nazism, making him a globally acclaimed scientist (he died in a car accident in 1957, the same year as Stark). Finally, Heisenberg declined a Soviet invitation and directed the Max Planck Institute, where, ironically, Germany’s first nuclear reactor was built.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on October 18, 2018: Deutsche Physik, la física germanizada y aria que algunos científicos nazis opusieron a la relatividad de Einstein

SOURCES

Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich

Dieter Hoffmann, Mark Walker, eds., The German Physical Society in the Third Reich: Physicists Between Autonomy And Accommodation

Mark Walker, Nazi science: Myth, truth, and the German atomic bomb

Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project, 1939-1945: A Study in German Culture

Natividad Carpintero Santamaría, La bomba atómica

Wikipedia, Deutsche Physik

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