In contrast, they received high positions in Turkey, Palestine/Israel, and. Egypt. ... The expulsion and forced emigration of (bio-)chemists from 1933 to 1939 - a quantitative .... well as during the French revolution and occupation of some of the western ...... received the 1936 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his contributions to our ...
1
The expulsion of Jewish chemists and biochemists from academia in Nazi Germany
Ute Deichmann, Institut für Genetik, Universität zu Köln, Zülpicher Str. 47, 50674 Köln, Germany
published in Perspectives on Science 7, 1-86, 1999.
I am grateful to Diana Barkan, Roald Hoffmann, Benno Müller-Hill, Ruth Sime, and Anthony Travis for critically reading earlier drafts of the manuscript and for helpful comments and to Aharon Loewenstein for helpful suggestions concerning chemistry in Palestine/Israel. This work was supported by a fellowship of the Sidney Edelstein Foundation and by grants Mu 575/8-1 and -2 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to Benno Müller-Hill.
2
Abstract In contrast to anti-Jewish campaigns at German universities in the 19th century, which met with opposition from liberal scholars, among them prominent chemists, there was no public reaction to the dismissals in 1933. Germany had been an international leader in (bio-) chemistry until the 1930s. Due to a high proportion of Jewish scientists, (bio-)chemistry was strongly affected by the expulsion of scientists. Organic and inorganic chemistry were least affected, biochemistry suffered most. Polymer chemistry and quantum chemistry, of minor importance among the majority of academic chemists (despite pioneering work by German scientists) was further weakened by the expulsion of renowned scientists. However, a look at the research carried out in Nazi Germany shows that no field of research "emigrated" as such, except research into molecular beams. The reception of emigré (bio-)chemists differed with respect to their field of research and the degree of competition in the host countries. Thus biochemists and physical chemists were accepted at American universities, whereas organic chemists were not. In contrast, they received high positions in Turkey, Palestine/Israel, and Egypt. After WWII, few emigrés were asked to come back. The delay of the resumption of international contacts by German (bio-)chemists contributed to the delay in rebuilding in particular German biochemistry, the physical chemistry of polymers, and physical organic chemistry.
Contents 1. Methodology and sources 2. Jews in German universities from the emancipation in the 19th century until 1933 2.1 Legal emancipation and the beginning of Jewish participation in German academia in the 19th century 2.2 Some remarks on the relationship between Jewish traditions and the successful participation of Jews in science 2.3 Academic anti-Semitism from the late 19th century to 1933 3. Legal measures for the dismissal and forced emigration of scientists in and after 1933 and some reactions in Germany
3
3.1 The Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service 3.2 Reactions of non-affected German scientists to the expulsion of their Jewish colleagues 4. The expulsion and forced emigration of (bio-)chemists from 1933 to 1939 - a quantitative analysis 4.1 Numbers of dismissals and emigrations in (bio-)chemistry 4.2 Losses at various universities and KWIs 4.3 Comparison of the losses by dismissal and emigration with those in biology and physics 4.4 Dismissals and emigrations in various chemical subdisciplines 5. An assessment of the impact of the expulsions on science in Germany 6. Impact of the forced emigration of Jewish (bio-) chemists from Nazi Germany on the host countries 6.1 Palestine/Israel 6.2 The United States 7. Summary and conclusion
1. Methodology and sources My analysis of the expulsion of Jewish (bio-)chemists from Germany and its impact relies largely on primary sources. It is based on the lives and research careers of (bio-)chemists who were either researchers (at least Ph.D.'s) at KWIs1 or 'habilitated'2 university teachers between 1932 and 1945, working at institutes of organic, inorganic and physical chemistry, as well as at biochemical departments in the medical faculty at all the 22 universities in Germany, all three in Austria, and the German University of Prague. Their names were extracted from registers of universities and from the annual reports of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in "Die
1
KWI for Chemistry (with exception of the department for physics), Biochemistry, Cell
Physiology, Physical Chemistry, Fibre Research, Leather Research, and the Chemical and Biochemical Institute of the KWI for Medical Research. 2
The Habilitation is an academic degree beyond the doctorate which allows the holder to
teach at a university.
4
Naturwissenschaften." With few exceptions, I do not include technical and pharmaceutical chemists.
535 (bio-)chemists were working at these institutions at the beginning of 1933 in Germany, and in 1938 in Austria and Prague. Several sources have been used to establish the list of those who were dismissed and those who emigrated. I brought together those whose names were absent after these dates, and removed those who were absent because of death. Using the International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés, 1933-1945 and other secondary literature, I identified the most prominent emigrés. Information concerning other emigrés was obtained from documents in various archives.3 In order to establish whether a person whose name was missing was indeed an emigré, data given in publications after 1933 (found with the help of the Science Citation Index) was sometimes useful, but those who were dismissed and did not emigrate or those who could not work scientifically after their expulsion could not be identified by this method.
Due to the institutional selection of (bio-)chemists in this study, researchers who worked in places other than those mentioned above, such as chemical departments of hospitals and physics departments, and those who were not yet 'habilitated' or had not yet received a Ph.D. by 1933, are not included in the statistics. Among these are the biochemists Erwin Chargaff and Ernst Boris Chain, who are, however, dealt with in the discussion of the impact of the dismissals and forced emigrations.
3
The Archive of the Max-Planck Society; the list of Displaced German Scholars (of the
Notgemeinschaft Deutscher Wissenschaftler im Ausland), which, however, is sometimes erroneous; files of supposed emigrés at the Society of the Protection of Science and Learning in the Bodleian Library in Oxford; the Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown; the collection of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars at the New York Public Library; and university archives in Austria and Germany.
5
In order to estimate the influence and the quality of (bio-)chemists' research, I reviewed Nobel Prizes, determined the number of citations in the Science Citation Index for the years 1945-1954, and relied on scientists that I interviewed. The Science Citation Index lists all scientific publications until 1954 cited in the years mentioned. Recognizable self-citations were not counted. It is clear that the number of citations reflects not only the scientific importance of a person, but may also depend on the availability of a particular paper, the prestige of the author and the field of research (Weingart and Winterhager 1984). In spite of this and other possible sources of error,4 a citation analysis of the research of groups of persons whose work covers a similar spectrum of subjects seems to be justified.
2. Jews in German universities from the emancipation in the 19th century until 1933 2.1 Legal emancipation and the beginning of Jewish participation in German academia in the 19th century Until the end of the 18th century, Jews in the German as well as other European states lived mainly in ghettoes. Due to external restrictions, and also to constraints set up by the Jewish communities themselves, religion, economic activities and nationality to a large extent constituted a unity. This cohesion started to break in the middle of the 18th century, and the collapse accelerated during the Enlightenment and its Jewish form, known as the 'haskalah', as well as during the French revolution and occupation of some of the western German states. These were particularly important factors for the opening of the ghettoes and gradual emancipation.
An outcome of haskalah in Germany was the emergence of reformist Judaism, which separated the national from the religious part of Judaism. This development was supported by the fact that the Jewish culture in Germany was under less rabbinical control than in East Europe and the Jewish population had more contacts with non-Jews. It was further supported 4
For example, the problem of multiauthorship could not be solved. However, this occurred
much less often than it does today.
6
by strong economic growth, in which Jews played an important role. The ideal of the enlightened reformist Jew, represented in the 18th century for example by the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, was to become a German citizen of Jewish faith and to be a part of the German nation on the basis of religious pluralism. However, as the following paragraphs show, the implementation of this ideal faced legal and other obstacles.
The governments of the German states were more reluctant than the French to fulfill the promises of Enlightenment with regard to equal rights for the Jewish minority. Significant changes in the laws of the German states concerning the legal status of Jews occurred only after France had granted full legal emancipation to its Jewish population: The National Assembly of France voted a decree of complete emancipation for Jews in September 1791. Consequently, walls between the ghettoes and Jewish closed quarters and Christian neighbourhoods were broken not only in French cities and provinces but, temporarily, also in the French occupied Rhineland (1792-3).
The German states differed significantly in their policy concerning the legal rights of Jews. 5 Many reforms, particularly the far reaching ones in Prussia where Jews became full citizens in 1812, were abolished after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, in which the German Confederation, headed by Austria under Metternich, replaced the German Reich. The articles of the Confederation gradually deprived Jews of the rights previously granted to them. Thus they again became subject to the Jewish annual tax and registration tax. They could not own land or exercise a trade or profession, and were denied the right to teach at universities. They were confined to authorized business which the trade guilds would not engage in, or money lending.
After the 1848 revolution there emerged a list of "fundamental rights of the German people," which established civil rights on a non-religious basis. They were included in the constitutions of most of the German states. But residence restrictions for Jews remained in 5
For further information on this topic see Richarz 1970, 83ff.
7
effect in most states until the 1860s, and only few Jews succeeded in becoming university teachers, because with the exception of the universities of Berlin and Bonn, all university senates were entitled to reject people on religious grounds. This applied to Jews but also to Protestants in Catholic dominated areas and vice versa. Even though the opportunities for academic employment were restricted -- until the late 19th century Jews were almost entirely excluded from full professorships -- many embarked on university careers. They often ended up in non-civil servant positions as unpaid Privatdozent (lecturer) or unpaid ausserplanmässiger Professor (associate professor) or in private practices such as physicians and lawyers. After the founding of the north-German Confederation in 1867 there were no statutory religious obstacles to a university career, but as I shall show later, baptism remained a great advantage.
2.2 Some remarks on the relationship between Jewish traditions and the successful participation of Jews in science How is it that despite great obstacles, a disproportionate number of Jews in Germany became secular scholars and scientists? One possible answer to this question lies in traditional Jewish education. The role this might have played has been discussed extensively.6 Jews in the ghettoes, to whom Christian intellectuals had paid little or no attention, had developed a high level of mainly religious scholarship. Learning in general has been highly valued in the Jewish tradition. The Talmud-Torah Schools and Academies of the Middle Ages (and of today) encouraged intellectual and dialectical thinking. Judaism, contrary to Christianity, is, arguably, largely an undogmatic religion with only little theology. Opposing views are encouraged and discussed.
However, as many historians and scientists have pointed out, this tradition became fruitful for science only when it was combined with a modern Cartesian way of scientific reasoning
6
See, for example, Feuer 1963, 297-318; Preston 1971, 158ff.; Pulzer 1992; Richarz 1970;
Volkov 1986, 1990, 1994; Lowenstein et al. 1997.
8
and methodology.7 The chemist Chaim Gilon emphasizes that the Jewish Talmudic tradition, in spite of the fact that it sharpens the intellect and encourages an attitude which is open to innovation, does not enhance scientific reasoning if it is not secularized. Although the Talmudic scholars are innovative, innovation is confined to a framework of old laws. The goal of Talmud has been the adaptation of the Torah to contemporary life. Scholars had to redefine the laws or define new laws by argumentation. The way of reasoning and thinking is often intricate and is aimed at making people "smart and wise."8 Many arguments arrive at a dead end. This is accepted - to put it simply - on the grounds that the Messiah will one day arrive and resolve all the outstanding problems.
In contrast, the main goal of science is to explain nature by proving, or disproving, hypotheses and by creating new laws if the old ones prove inadequate. It is not intended to make scientists wise by argumentation in the framework of old laws and concepts. Prior knowledge is a prerequisite, but not the main issue. Scientists pose questions about nature that they want to solve. Dead ends are excluded from scientific thinking, and if one person cannot find the solution to a question, then another person will probably find it.9
Some historians and sociologists relate a preference of Jewish scientists for theoretical fields to a prevailing Jewish tradition of learning. Thus according to Yakov Rabkin (1995, 25) an early socialization to the study of Oral Law with its emphasis on abstraction and reasoning results in this predisposition to theoretical rather than experimental fields.10 The perception of 7
See for example Feuer 1963, 297ff.
8
I thank Prof. Chaim Gilon (Jerusalem) for information and discussions on this topic in
December 1994 and May 1997. 9
Ibid.
10
Rabkin 1995, 8, 25. I don't know of any comparative studies into a possible impact of an
early socialisation in Catholic and Protestant traditions on predispositions to theoretical or empirical science. Robert K. Merton (1973) demonstrates the general importance of the Protestant ethos for scientific activities, he emphasizes its importance for both rationality and
9
Jews as primarily active in theoretical scientific fields was used by German anti-Semites in the 1920s and particularly during the Nazi era to reinforce a common prejudice against a "Jewish science" that is mathematical and abstract, as opposed to a "German" one that is illustrative (anschaulich) and concrete. The chemist and Nobel Prize winner Roald Hoffmann contradicts such a notion of the role of the Talmud. According to him, the emphasis on the real world and not on theoretical philosophical reflection is something that Jewish religious tradition and science, in particular chemistry, have in common. "The Talmud and the fifteen hundred years of commentary and responsa since then are a discourse ingeniously suspended between the hypothetical and the real, with an emphasis on the real. There is little theology as such in the Talmud. Instead the rabbis debate how one decides whether an edible side of beef found in the street is deemed kosher... Contact points with the real world and daily experience are what Talmud and science have in common."11
By accepting the Enlightenment, a large sector of those who were until then mainly observant Jews, raised in the Talmudic tradition, left this tradition behind, and many of them became scientists and secular scholars. The value attributed to education and scholarship became secularized and reinforced by contact with a German Christian dominated culture that had developed a high appreciation of scholarship and learning. The diminuition of the
reason, as well as practical deeds and thus empirical science. Max Weber (The Protestant Ethics), too, holds that Protestantism is greatly favourable to scientific activities. In my opinion, the elimination of images and religious acts from preceding Catholicism and the emphasis on the pure word and belief in Protestantism would render it likely that the percentage of Protestants has been not only greater among scientists in general but also among theoreticians. Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg are good examples. 11
Roald Hoffmann, "Science and Judaism," talk at the Technion, Haifa, June 11, 1996. I
thank Prof. Hoffmann for access to his manuscript. Roald Hoffmann and Shira LeibowitzSchmidt display their reflection and examples of the parallel ways to make sense in the material world of science and Jewish tradition in "Old wine, new flasks. Reflections on science and Jewish tradition". New York 1997: Freeman and Co.
10
importance of Jewish schools and the increase in the number of Jews in German Christian or secular schools indicates this secularization. The percentage of Jewish children in Prussia who attended Jewish schools fell to 50% until about 1850 and was only 16% in 1931 (Pulzer 1992, 7).
Significantly, the sociologist Lewis Feuer has looked at sociological and psychological factors which affected achievements in science. He claims that science flourished mostly during periods of liberalism, in which religion, be it Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, or Protestantism, did not have the power to suppress curiosity and thereby the pursuit of science. Emphasizing that the opening of the ghettoes was a prerequisite for the outstanding achievements of Jewish scientists in the 19th and 20th century, he compared the collapse of ghetto walls with the breaching of dams that had contained Jewish intellect and feeling. Whereas the transformation of Christian Western European thinkers from the religious to the scientific stages of thought was a more or less gradual process, lasting about two centuries and taking place in societies dominated by Christian traditions, it took place among Jews in the same geographical area within one generation. This leap from feudal Talmudism to the most advanced scientific thought produced a large number of talented, mostly liberal minded social and natural scientists in a short time, a process that Lewis Feuer called the "scientific revolution among the Jews" (Feuer 1963, 297-309).
A good example of a successful 20th century scientist emerging from the secularized Jewish tradition of learning is the chemist Ernst Boris Chain. In 1945 he shared the Nobel Prize with Fleming and Florey for one of the most important achievements in biochemistry of this century: the isolation and elucidation of the structure of penicillin. Chain was born in Berlin in 1906, his parents were Jews: his mother German, his father an immigrant from Russia. His grandfather had spent every free moment he could find in the study of Torah and Talmud. Chain wrote, "I was indoctrinated by both my parents with a maxim that was beyond discussion, that the only worthwile occupation in life was the pursuit of intellectual activities, and any career which was not a university career was unthinkable" (Clark 1985, 2).
11
...The same issue has been tackled by Yeshayahu Leibowitz. He rejects the widespread notion that the great Jewish scientists are gifts of Judaism to the world. According to him, the achievements of Jews in the outside world cannot be considered specifically Jewish. They were agents in various domains of culture who happened to have been born Jews. Leibowitz states that Jewish creativity exists only in connection with Torah and Mitzvoth: in the realm of praxis, a halakhic way of life, in the cultural sphere, religious thought in all forms, Aggadah, religious poetry, philosophy, and Mussar. Significantly, Einstein in his own work sees nothing that derives from a specifically Jewish source; it has no bearing on the character of the future of the Jews or Judaism. Indeed, "one may say of Einstein that he is the gift of the non-Jewish world to the Jewish people. Helmholtz and Mach founded the body of thought upon which Einstein built his theories; Poincaré was his mentor in mathematics; Fitzgerald and Lorentz were his predecessors in physics" (Leibowitz 1992, 206).12
In whichever way the influence of religious and scientific traditions on the large participation of Jews in science is assessed, it is obvious that the rapid transition from a halakhic way of life to modern science produced conflict and excommunication within the Jewish communities. The creation of psychoanalysis by Freud and the fact that for a long time most of its adherents and practitioners were Jews has often been considered to be a result of this transition and the psychological problems it caused. According to Roald Hoffmann, this transformation of the Jewish communities in Europe during the Enlightenment led, for psychological reasons, to a large percentage of Jews not only in psychology but in the sciences as well. When leaving the ghettoes, Jews gave up large parts of their traditions. They had, argues Roald Hoffmann, to find a new identity to replace their religious beliefs.13 On the one hand many Jews found a new spiritual center in the ideal of justice and social service, and were thus strongly attracted by socialism and communism. On the other hand, for many Jews 12
The historian Steven Lowenstein (1997, 303) comes to a similar conclusion concerning the
"Jewish element" in German culture. 13
Roald Hoffmann, "Science and Judaism."
12
an alternative way of making sense of this world was participation in science, which in many cases became a substitute for religion. Of course, in a similar way, this also holds true for many formerly religious Christians.
2.3 Academic anti-Semitism from the late 19th century to 1933 If the majority of Jews in Germany accepted the Enlightenment and gave up all or part of their practice of Judaism, this does not mean that they were accepted as fellow citizens by the Christian majority. From the beginning, legal obstacles to Jewish emancipation were accompanied by a secular anti-Semitism which developed quickly among leading Christian intellectuals in Germany and France. It rendered the acceptance of the emerging Jewish secular intellectuals as equals almost impossible for a long time. Thus, in the words of Paul Johnson, at one extreme, "following Voltaire, the rising European left began to see the Jews as obscurantist opponents to all human progress" (Johnson 1987, 309). At the other extreme, the forces of conservatism regarded the Jews as a homogeneous group intent on destroying the traditional order. Despite the contradiction, both themes were believed. As Paul Johnson (1987, 310) summarized, "..., when the ghetto walls fell, and the Jews walked out into freedom, they found they were entering a new, less tangible but equally hostile ghetto of suspicion. They had exchanged ancient disabilities for modern anti-Semitism." In Germany, anti-Semitism still had a strong religious base, but in the middle class and particularly among intellectuals it became increasingly secular, cultural, and racial.
Secular völkisch anti-Semitism was especially strong after the founding of the German nation in 1871. This can at least in part be explained by economic developments: Jews played an important role in the economic expansion of the early 1870s, called the "Gründerjahre." During this time, open anti-Semitism was discredited as vulgar (Mendelsohn 1973, 40). However, the two decades of economic depression, starting in the mid-1870s, saw a rise of virulent and organized anti-Semitism.14 The publication of a new edition (the third) of Wilhelm Marr's anti-Semitic book "The Victory of Judaism over Germanism" in 1879 led to 14
See for example Rocke 1993, 350.
13
the formation of an anti-Semitic league in Berlin. Court preacher Adolf Stöcker, a member of the Prussian parliament, inaugurated a series of demagogic speeches attacking Jews and demanded laws to deny equal rights to Jews.
His demands were rejected by Prince Friedrich, later Kaiser, and his wife Victoria, who despised anti-Semitism. But the anti-Semitic movement spread in the academic world, culminating in the so-called Berlin controversy of anti-Semitism about the role of Jews in Germany (Berliner Antisemitismusstreit), caused mainly by a respected professor of history at the University of Berlin, Heinrich von Treitschke, who became known for his claim 'die Juden sind unser Unglück' (the Jews are our misfortune). Von Treitschke belonged to a group of anti-Semitic professors that disseminated racial anti-Semitism, as opposed to the religious anti-Semitism that was prevalent before 1871. Von Treitschke considered Jewish cosmopolitanism as irreconcilable with German culture. He exempted a few politically conservative Jews such as the chemist Oppenheim and jurist Lewin Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt attempted to receive his habilitation in 1854, but was refused at the universities of Berlin, Munich, Freiburg and Vienna, since he was not baptized. Finally he was accepted in Heidelberg. As a renowned professor of trade-law, he criticized von Treitschke for his open anti-Semitism in a letter of 4 May 1881:
The Dutch, Italian, French Jews are self-evidently filled with an older and more intensive love for their state, because it has guaranteed them a human existence and full freedom of development already for several generations. It is understandable enough that patriotism could develop only slowly, when you find freedom outside and only slavery or discrimination inside. But still, in the short period of time, since Jews have been granted civil rights, their patriotism has made such immense progress ... Only by fully granting equal rights which we, by the way, will in no way, as you think, accept as gifts or charity, but to which we are morally and lawfully entitled,
14
can you compensate for those harms which millenia of pressure and shame have done to a noble race. ... I don't accept your Christian-Germanic state, because we are not a purely Germanic people and Christianity cannot be a state religion. The ethical part of the Jewish religion you have not attacked and will be hardly able to do so - and I do not want at all to argue with you about dogmata. Perhaps you realize now to what extent I was struck by your behaviour and how deeply I have been offended as a member of the attacked community, even as an 'exception.'15
This letter anticipates subsequent developments very clearly. Fifty years later the "Christian" was deleted from Treitschke's demand for a Christian-Germanic state. But Christians, with few exceptions, did not object to the new dimension of discrimination and persecution of Jews after 1933.
In 1879, however, a number of influential liberals not only disagreed with von Treitschke and Stöcker but condemned their attacks openly in a "declaration of notables." It was signed by seventy-three prominent Berliners, among them seventeen of von Treitschke's faculty colleagues, including the historian Theodor Mommsen, the medical scientist Rudolf Virchow, and the chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann who was elected rector of the university in 1878 (Mendelsohn 1973, 40; Ruske 1967, 48; Rocke 1993, 358). However, the anti-Semitic movement spread rapidly among students. In October 1880, Bernhard Förster, an actively antiSemitic teacher at a Berlin Gymnasium, began to circulate an academic petition with radical demands for restrictions on the right of Jews. Within two years, 255,000 people had signed
15
Letter by L. Goldschmidt, 4 May 1881, to H.v.Treitschke, quoted by G. v. Ubisch,
Lebenserinnerungen, 1955, unpublished manuscript, Heidelberg, University Library, p.58, (translation UD); L. Goldschmidt was a relative of v. Ubisch. For the disputes at the University of Berlin about the role of Jews in Germany, see, for example, Boehlich 1965.
15
the petition (Peters 1983, 94).16 At the same time the strongly anti-Semitic German Students Union (Verein deutscher Studenten) was founded in Berlin. Though A. W. Hofmann at first managed to prevent it from establishing a branch at the university, he was finally forced to admit it as a registered student society in summer 1881 (Peters 1983, 143). The Union spread quickly to other universities. In contrast to the situation in many Eastern Europe countries, they did not succeed in having a numerus clausus implemented for Jewish students until 1933. But students were the carriers of the National Socialist "revolution" at universities, which led to the purge of Jewish and liberal professors and students.17
Despite these anti-Semitic movements in the late 19th century, von Treitschke, Stöcker and their followers did not succeed in preventing the emergence of a patriotic German-Jewish bourgeosie (middle-class). German Jewish and Christian intellectuals not only shared habits of hard work, organisation, and punctuality, but Jewish religious and non religious thinkers were deeply rooted in German philosophical and literature traditions, and became famous scholars of Goethe, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, irrespective of anti-Semitic tendencies that were widespread in German literature or philosophy. One of them was Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), professor of philosophy at the University of Marburg, a follower of Maimonides and Kant. He argued that of all the modern nations, Germany was the one where reason and religious feelings were easiest to reconcile, because Germany, with its philosophical idealism, its reverence for pure religion and its ethical humanism, had been anticipated by Jewish history. He rejected strongly the supposed conflict between German culture and Jewish cosmopolitanism as nonsense based on ignorance (Johnson 1987, 403). 16
After having been publicly criticised because of his strong anti-Semitism in some
newspapers in the 1880s, Förster, who later married Elisabeth Nietzsche, lost his position, when he demanded that the Berlin city council be dissolved, (because of corruption and the like). After Bismarck rejected his anti-Semitic petition, Förster left Germany and founded the "Aryan" colony "New Germany" in Paraguay (Peters 1983, 94). 17
For the political role of students and their organizations in the Third Reich, see Grüttner
1995.
16
This view was shared by the majority of Jewish-German scientists, many of whom, like their non-Jewish colleagues, had strong backgrounds in German and Greek philosophy and literature. One of them was Otto Meyerhof, a biochemist who in 1923 shared the (1922) Nobel Prize for Medicine with Archibald Vivian Hill for his discovery of a constant relationship between oxygen-consumption and lactate metabolism in muscles, based on a correlation between biophysical and biochemical data. In 1938 Meyerhof was one of the last Jewish scientists to be dismissed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. He emigrated to France in 1938 and then in 1940 to the United States. Meyerhof, who also conducted several studies in natural philosophy, lectured on "Goethe's Method of Natural Research" (Über Goethes Methode der Naturforschung) at a meeting of the Rudolf Virchow Society in New York on the occasion of 200th anniversary of Goethe's birth in 1949 (Meyerhof 1950). The speech was given in German. Meyerhof's introductory remarks indicate his faithfulness to the German culture but also the great problems that this entailed in the immediate postwar period:
As we come together at the Rudof Virchow Society in New York in order to celebrate the memory of Johann Wolfgang Goethe on the occasion of his 200th birth, many of us do so with ambiguous feelings. We know that Goethe was the greatest person whom the German earth and the German intellect has donated to the world, the vivid expression of all embracing humanity. At the same time we know that the Germany of today has betrayed this heritage and violated it beyond any conceivable degree. Yes, for us who came together far from our home in an alien part of the world in order to celebrate Goethe, it is even easier to fulfill this task. We adhere to his cosmopolitanism, to the transnational, all-penetrating spirit (Geistige) of his being. Thus we preserve the pure flame of his vivid spirit, even if all places of Goethe lie in ruins as a horrible symbol of this betrayal.18 18
Translation UD. ("Wenn wir uns hier in der Rudolf Virchow Gesellschaft in New York
versammelt haben, das Andenken Johann Wolfgang Goethes anlässlich seines 200jährigen Geburtstages zu feiern, so tun viele von uns es mit zwiespältigen Gefühlen. Wir wissen, dass
17
One could argue that the events after 1933 demonstrate that the Jewish contribution to German culture was nothing but an illusion created mainly by Jews, an illusion that non-Jews did not share. However, it cannot be denied that Jews not only participated and played an important role in German culture and philosophy, but that there was also an influence by Jewish thinkers and scholars on their non-Jewish German colleagues. Prominent examples from the 18th century are the influence of Moses Mendelssohn on Gotthold E. Lessing and that of Spinoza on Goethe. As for academia, the public reactions in Germany to von Treitschke and subsequent developments show clearly that the majority of non-Jewish scholars had accepted Jewish emancipation, but they finally wanted Jews to become Christians. This holds true also for the historian Theodor Mommsen who was one of the strongest non Jewish critics of von Treitschke and a friend of the Jews. Mommsen regarded Christianity not so much a name for a religion but as "the only word expressing the character of today's international civilization in which numerous millions all over the many-nationed globe feel themselves united."19 Mommsen, in common with many other liberal intellectuals of his time, was not prepared to recognize the legitimacy of a recognizable Jewish existence in Germany.20
Goethe der Grösste war, den die deutsche Erde und der deutsche Geist der Welt geschenkt haben, der lebendige Ausdruck allumfassender Humanität. Wir wissen gleichzeitig, dass das Deutschland unserer Tage dieses Erbe verraten und geschändet hat über jedes vorstellbare Mass hinaus. Ja, dass wir hier fern von der Heimat in einem fremden Weltteil versammelt sind, um Goethe zu feiern, macht uns diese Aufgabe eher leichter, wir knüpfen an sein Weltbürgertum an, an das übernationale, allesdurchdringende Geistige seines Wesens. Wir bewahren so die ungetrübte Flamme seines lebendigen Geistes, wenn auch alle Goethestätten in Trümmern liegen als ein schauriges Symbol dieses Verrates.") 19
Quoted after Johnson 1987, 312.
20
See for example Volkov 1994, 42ff.
18
As a result, baptism strongly facilitated an academic career, even though, following the constitutions of 1867 and 1871, all restrictions on a university position based on religion were officially invalidated. Jewish-Orthodox university teachers, such as the renowned professor of classics Jacob Bernays, who in 1866 became Extraordinarius (associate professor with civil servant status) at the University of Bonn, were an exception. The mathematician Moritz Abraham Stern, who became full professor at the University of Göttingen in 1859, was the first non-converted Jew to receive a full professorship in Germany (Rocke 1993, 351).21
Various academic disciplines differed strongly in the extent to which they accepted Jews as faculty. Jews received university positions first in medicine, mathematics, natural sciences, geography and modern languages, but they remained excluded from other disciplines, particularly the humanities. Interestingly, in the United States, too, the percentage of Jews who were first accepted as faculty differed greatly from discipline to discipline. David Hollinger has shown that Jews, who generally had been given access to university positions to a significant extent only after World War II, had been most persistently excluded before that time from the humanities (Hollinger 1996, 8). In 19th century Germany, humanities, particularly the classics, were the most respected disciplines at universities. They remained closed to Jews (and also women) much longer than the less prestigious natural sciences, which, in addition, were international enterprises from the very beginning of modern science in the 16th century.22 Jews were represented among physicians and jurists much more strongly than in most other academic professions. This can be explained in part by the fact that in these fields careers were possible not only in universities but also in private practices. In addition, the study of medicine and law was deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition, a fact that might 21
In 1875, there were 20 baptized Jewish university professors in Germany as opposed to 10
non baptized. In 1909, 44 baptized Jews were full professors and chairholders as opposed to 10 non baptized (Volkov 1990, 156). 22
However, in spite of difficulties in the humanities, in the 19th as well as the 20th century,
some of the most renowned scholars in the classics, for example Bernays, as well as in history, for example Harry Bresslau, were Jewish.
19
explain the Jewish preference for medicine and law at American universities after World War II.23
Recent publications demonstrate that chemistry, too, was a field in which many Jews embarked on academic careers. Jews played an important role in chemical industry, particularly the dye industry that emerged in Germany in the second half of the 19th century (Travis 1993, 233-235; Rocke 1993, 350-357). Examples are Heinrich Caro, August Leonhardt, Ivan Levinstein, Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Ludwig Mond, and Arthur von Weinberg. In Germany academic chemists developed close links to research laboratories in industry. The fact that chemistry was a science with industrial applications and professional perspectives outside academia with its prevailing anti-Semitism, was encouraging for young Jews. Some of them managed to remain in academia. Chemists were among the first Jewish professsors at the University of Berlin, all of whom, however, might have been baptized (Rocke 1993, 351): Gustav Magnus became ausserordentlicher (associate) professor in 1833 and full professor in 1845; Karl Friedrich Rammelsberg became beamteter ausserordentlicher professor (associate professor with civil service status) in 1846; the Privatdozent Franz Leopold Sonnenschein had the best chemical laboratory at the university during the 1850s but became ausserordentlicher (associate) professor only in 1869. Albert Ladenburg (1842-1911) who in 1872 became full professor at the University of Kiel, was presumably the first nonbaptized chemist who received a full professorship in chemistry at a German university. In both academia and industry Jews were inventors of new processes, and often also consultants to industrial enterprises as well as for academic institutions. An example is Heinrich Caro of BASF, a central figure of dyestuff-industry, who designed Victor Meyer's new laboratory at the University of Heidelberg, at the time when Meyer replaced Robert Bunsen (1889) (Travis 1993). Caro was a Jew who came from an assimilated baptized family.
The German Chemical Society, founded by liberal-minded August Wilhelm Hofmann and other chemists in Berlin in 1867, had many members who were Jewish or of Jewish 23
Rabkin 1995, 20. Yakov Rabkin cites a study by S.M. Lipset and C.L.Ladd of 1960.
20
extraction, a fact that evoked the repeated criticism of the organic chemist Hermann Kolbe (Vaupel 1987, 528). In 1871 he stated that "the Chemical Society is after all already known as a hotbed of Jewry in chemistry" (Rocke 1993, 355). Kolbe was professor in Leipzig and, in common with Hofmann, one of the most renowned organic chemists. Unlike Hofmann, however, he displayed strong chauvinistic sentiments, and during the late 1860s extended his national prejudices against France to prejudices against the Jews.
Kolbe revealed his hatred for Berlin Jewry most explicitly in a dispute with the German Chemical Society in 1870. This dispute had a scientific background: Kolbe belonged to a minority of European chemists who did not accept the French-inspired new unitary theory in organic chemistry. When he embarked in polemics against French chemists, he expected support from the German Chemical Society, and was infuriated when the "Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft" printed a protest by the entire Russian Chemical Society against the nationalistic sentiments of Kolbe and other German chemists as part of the report of the journal's foreign correspondent. As a result, Kolbe became infuriated not only at the Russians and the German Chemical Society but also against Hofmann and his Jewish "henchmen." Rocke 1993, 354) Kolbe’s diatribe against fellow Germans eventually extended to German organic structural theory, the foundation of German classical organic chemistry and of the late 19th century dye industry.24
24
Interestingly, the representatives of "German chemistry" during National Socialism who
shared Kolbe's nationalism and anti-Semitism did not follow him in his rejection of structure theory. On the contrary: the organic chemist Carl Weygand, along with the physical chemist Karl-Lothar Wolf, tried to found "race-bound" "Gestalthafte Atomlehre," referring to Gestalt psychology and Goethe's concept of morphology. Weygand regarded the success of structure theory and its development to van't Hoff-Le Bel's stereochemistry in organic chemistry and to Werner's doctrine of coordination as a triumph of "schauende Naturforschung" (visualizing natural science) over positivism (Martin Bechstedt 1980, 157).
21
It is difficult to assess the full extent of the influence of Kolbe's political attitude and antiSemitism on German chemists. Otto N. Witt, from 1891 professor of technical chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin, and a known anti-Semite, worked closely with Caro for a time. He did not regard himself as anti-Semitic, although he did refuse to employ Jewish assistants. In contrast, Carl Graebe, since 1870 professor of organic chemistry at the University of Königsberg, was a liberal chemist who had many Jewish students and friends but still displayed reservation against the Jews and their "rituals" (Vaupel 1987, 528, 282).
It is true that there was a relatively large number of Jewish chemists (as well as other academics) active in Berlin. But a review of the list of presidents of the German Chemical Society shows that until 1933, apart from Richard Willstätter, no president was an unconverted Jew. 25 Those chemists of Jewish extraction who became presidents were already born as Christians, such as Adolf von Baeyer whose mother, herself baptized, came from a Jewish family or, like Fritz Haber, had undergone conversion. Thus even liberal chemists seem to have discriminated against Jews unless they were converts.
In the 1890s the "Zentralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens" was founded in order to represent Jewish interests. However, partly as a reaction to 19th century antiSemitism, the subsequent internecine disputes led increasingly to a replacement of the selfimage of Jews as a religious group by a broader ethnic one which included ancestry (Volkov 1994, 144). Jewish traditions not necessarily related to religion were continued in the family and among friends. But by far the largest part of German Jews regarded themselves as members of the German nation and people, without reservation. In contrast to the more recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern European countries, many of whom had arrived in Germany at the end of the 19th century, only a small percentage of German Jews were Zionists.
25
I have no information about whether or not Alfred Wohl, who was elected in 1932 and
forced to quit in 1933, was a convert.
22
The signing of the nationalistic and militaristic "Manifesto to the Cultural World" (Aufruf an die Kulturwelt) in 1914 by many Jewish scientists, and representatives of the humanities and arts is an often cited example of the strong patriotic feelings among Jews. This manifesto, signed by 93 representatives of the cultural world, was published shortly after the German invasion of neutral Belgium, and justified the violation of Belgium's neutrality and the destruction of Belgian cities by the German army as pure self-defense. Three out of fifteen scientists among those who signed were Jewish chemists or chemists of Jewish ancestry: Adolf von Baeyer, Fritz Haber und Richard Willstätter, all of them Nobel Prize winners or future Nobel Prize winners. Among the non-Jewish scientists who signed were the chemists Emil Fischer, Walther Nernst, Wilhelm Ostwald, the physicists Philipp Lenard, Max Planck, Wilhelm Röntgen and Wilhelm Wien, and the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, all except Wien and Haeckel Nobel Prize winners. Other Jewish signers were the Nobel Prize winner in medicine Paul Ehrlich, the artist Max Liebermann, and the famous director of a Berlin theater Max Reinhardt. Famous non-Jewish signers were the composer Engelbert Humperdinck, the liberal politician Friedrich Naumann, and the influential scholar of classics Ulrich von WilamowitzMöllendorff.26
Through this declaration and the identification with German imperial aims, German scientists isolated themselves from their European colleagues. The physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, in particular, upset his colleagues from other European countries when he made efforts to convince them to accept the German leadership in Europe because of the supposed German cultural superiority.27 According to Jacques Loeb the nationalistic attitude of German scientists could not only be referred to war-related nationalism:
I am very fond of Ostwald but I do not know any more what to say to him because his judgment, as that of most Germans, is completely obscure. The whole trouble comes 26
The manifesto is published in Lutz 1969, 74-78.
27
Svante Arrhenius to Jacques Loeb, 24 Nov. 1914, J. Loeb coll., Library of Congress, file
S.Arrhenius.
23
from their identifying themselves with their governments and their diplomatists. I think, in all seriousness, that as soon as this war is over we shall have to begin a campaign against the racial conceit which has been fostered systematically in Germany, Russia, and possibly in other countries, by irresponsible agitators who were tolerated if not supported by their governments. Unless this idea of "racial superiority" is abandoned, the hatred among the various nations will continue.28
Loeb and particularly Arrhenius helped German scientists after World War II return to the international scientific community. But they did not restore good relationships with Ostwald. During National Socialism, Ostwald's son, the colloid chemist Wolfgang Ostwald, justified the anti-Jewish German policy during several journeys to foreign countries (see below). Despite the outspoken nationalism of many prominent German-Jewish scientists, the racial superiority, anticipated by Loeb, manifested itself in new anti-Semitic tendencies and campaigns after World War I: the anti-Einstein campaign, launched by right-wing activists against the theory of relativity, but also directed against him as a Jew, being a well known example. Another example is the rejection of three Jews as professors at the University of Munich in the early 1920s, as a result of which Richard Willstätter resigned from his position as professsor of chemistry at this university as a sign of protest in 1924.
Despite these anti-Semitic incidents, Jews, who made up about one per cent of the German population, became an integral and influential part of German culture and science in Wilhelminian Germany as well as in the Weimar republic.29 Jews moved earlier than non-
28
Jacques Loeb to Svante Arrhenius, 14 Dec. 1914, ibid.
29
This is indicated by an increasing number of both marriages with non-Jews and of baptisms
(The following figures refer to members of the Jewish communities). Acording to Peter Pulzer (1992, 7), the number of marriages outside the Jewish community can be estimated as 4% between 1875 and 1879, and 24% between 1930 and 1933. It accelerated in urban areas, such that in Berlin 27% of Jews married non-Jews in the latter period, and 39% in Hamburg; the
24
Jews into the big cities, a fact that accelerated their cultural integration.30 Since the 18th century Prussian universities had been frequented by Jewish students, particularly the universities of Berlin, Halle, Königsberg and Frankfurt/Oder. Prussian Jewish communities, above all in Berlin and Königsberg, formed the center of the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany, and it was in Prussia that the Jewish population most significantly increased (Richarz 1970, 97). In the 20th century, too, Jewish students and professsors preferred universities in cities with a large Jewish population, such as Berlin, Frankfurt or Breslau, or in those with a comparably small amount of discrimination, such as Freiburg, Heidelberg, and Strassburg. This development of emancipation and assimilation was abruptly ended by Hitler's regime.
3. Legal measures for the dismissal and forced emigration of scientists in and after 1933 and some reactions in Germany 3.1 The Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service Nazi policy from the very beginning had as one of its main goals the "purging" of the entire civil service and public sector of Jews, people of Jewish origin, and those with leftist sympathies. Since in Germany all universities and technical universities were (and still are) state institutions, civil service laws and decrees applied to professors and lecturers at universities. These laws and decrees were soon extended also to independent professions, such as physicians and lawyers. The first and most important of these was the 'Law for the Restoration of the German Civil Service,' passed on 7 April 1933. As a consequence, all Jewish (non-"Aryan") and the very few outspoken liberal or left-wing university teachers were dismissed. This was soon followed by dismissals from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. "Nonnumber of conversions of Jews also increased: For the 19th century some 22,500 conversions have been estimated, for the first third of the 20th century at least 10,000 (ibid.). 30
Thus, in 1925, 30% of the Jews in Germany lived in Berlin, making up 4% of the city's
population. By 1933, 46% of the Jews, as opposed to 16% of the non-Jews, were in independent professions, and the majority of Jews belonged to the middle class (Preston 1971, 147).
25
Aryans" were defined as all persons with at least one Jewish grandparent, irrespective of their religion. Exemptions were made for World War I Jewish front line soldiers, but they no longer applied after the implementation of the Nuremberg laws in September 1935. Moreover, in many cases politically active National Socialist students organized rallies and boycotts against those Jewish university teachers who as war veterans were allowed to remain faculty members, thus forcing them to resign.
German laws came into force at Austrian universities immediately after the "Anschluß" on 13 March 1938. "Non-Aryans" were not permitted to swear the oath to Hitler that was mandatory for those who wished to retain their positions. They were in most cases dismissed in April 1938 along with politically undesirable persons, among them supporters of the former Dollfuß-Schuschnigg government as well as those with obvious Christian-socialist attitudes. The dismissals at the German University of Prague had already started at the end of 1938, and were completed after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
3.2 Reactions of non-affected German scientists to the expulsion of their Jewish colleagues It has often been asked: how this purge of Jews and those with Jewish ancestry -- who in most cases so strongly identified with the German nation and its culture -- could take place without any public response by their non-Jewish colleagues? There are three main explanations for this silence and absence of solidarity: obedience to the law, anti-Semitism, and self-benefit.
3.2.1 Obedience to the law As civil servants, German academics were required to obey the law. This applied also to the few Jewish full professors or directors of Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes who, not (yet) dismissed themselves, had to dismiss their fellow workers and did so. One of them was Fritz Haber, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, well known for his discovery of the synthesis of ammonia from its elements, and for initiating and organizing German gas warfare in World War I. However, after having dismissed his employees, Haber took a
26
remarkable decision. In spite of the fact that he was exempt from the expulsion order, he resigned from his position. He advised the Prussian Minister of Science, Art, and Education that "My decision to ask for resignation stems from the contrasting notion of the research tradition, the one in which I have lived till now, with the one which you, Minister, and your Ministry represent as part of the actual great national movement. Holding a scientific post, my tradition demands from me that, when choosing my workers, I consider only their scientific merits and character, without asking about his or her race."31 In the fall of 1933 he emigrated to England and died shortly afterwards in Basle.
Albert Einstein categorized the attitude of his German colleagues towards those affected by the laws as cowardice. In a letter to Max Born on 30 May 1933 he wrote, "You know that I have never thought favourably about the Germans (in respect to morality and politics). But I must confess that they have surprised me by the extent of their brutality and cowardice."
The Central Administration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG) also obeyed the orders of the National Socialist regime, despite its independence from the state. There was no effort to save more than a handful of top scientists such as Fritz Haber (here, too, the laws were strictly followed) (Abrecht and Herrmann 1990, 366ff). Such an attitude was not in accord with the Society' s rejection of moves towards governmental control in the past. The Secretary General of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Friedrich Glum, had consistently refused to give government officials of the Weimar republic important information necessary for assessing the use of 31
Archive of the Max Planck Society, Abt. 1, Rep.IA, 541/3, translation UD. ("Mein
Entschluß, meine Verabschiedung zu erbitten, erfließt aus dem Gegensatz der Tradition hinsichtlich der Forschung, in der ich bisher gelebt habe, zu den veränderten Anschauungen, welche Sie, Herr Minister, und Ihr Ministerium als Träger der grossen derzeitigen nationalen Bewegung vertreten. Meine Tradition verlangt von mir in einem wissenschaftlichen Amte, daß ich bei der Auswahl von Mitarbeitern nur die fachlichen und charakterlichen Eigenschaften der Bewerber berücksichtige, ohne nach ihrer rassenmäßigen Beschaffenheit zu fragen.")
27
financial contributions (Witt 1990, 652). In contrast, under National Socialism, the KWG did not even attempt to refuse information about the personnel of its institutes or to withhold such information in order to give those who were going to be dismissed more time to find a new post. When Fritz Haber, for example, tried to postpone the dismissal of his five assistants, the Central Administration insisted on strict obedience to the requirements of the law (Stoltzenberg 1994, 578).
In addition, it seems doubtful whether the KWG used the legal options to prevent dismissals. The civil service law had to be applied only to those Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWI) that were financed by the state to the extent of at least 50%, which in chemistry were the institutes for biochemistry, medical research, and physical chemistry and electrochemistry. The KWI for Leather Research was funded predominantly by the leather industry.32 The Central Society of the German Leather Industry asked the KWG to examine ways for keeping Max Bergmann in his position. It is remarkable that even the chairman of the National Socialist Betriebsorganisation of the institute, Martin Gierth, asked the KWG to support, together with the Central Society, Bergmann’s case at the Reich government, if the KWG were of the opinion that "the leave of Prof. Bergmann was a heavy loss for the institute and the German leather industry."33 Such an initiative by the KWG did not take place. Bergmann emigrated to the United States in summer 1933.
The laws and decrees aimed at the expulsion of scientists clearly defined who had to go and who could stay on. People who had proved their non-Jewish ancestry up to the generation of their grandparents had nothing to fear unless they were known to have socialist or communist 32
Thus the Centralverein der Deutschen Lederindustrie e.V. (Central Society of the German
Leather Industry) wrote to the KWG on May 16,1933, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Leather Research has been financed predominantly by the leather industry." Archive of the Max-Planck-Society, Berlin, Abt.1, Rep.1A/538/2. 33
Gierth, NSBO, 25 July 1933 to F. Glum, Archive of the Max-Planck-Society, Berlin, Abt.1,
Rep.1A/538/2.
28
sympathies. This was, as will be shown later, seldom the case among scientists. Thus, contrary to the situation in the Soviet Union under Stalin, almost no non-Jewish professor (by ancestry) feared that he would be the next to be dismissed. In addition, the almost complete lack of private protests, the very few signs of sympathy with those dismissed, and the fact that emigré students or lecturers considered it exceptional if they received help from their supervisors or heads of departments, indicate that a second reason, anti-Semitism, played a major role in the attitudes of non-dismissed professors towards their dismissed colleagues.
3.2.2 Anti-Semitism Non-Jewish German professors, with very few exceptions, did not object to the fact that fellow scientists were dismissed solely for racial reasons, even though this lay outside the domain of science and was in contradiction to the idea of scientific internationalism. This does not mean that all non-Jewish professors were Nazis or outspoken anti-Semites. However, dismissed Jewish (bio-)chemists and those who were removed from universities as students recalled in interviews with the author that some kind of anti-Semitism was apparent among almost all German university professors.34 Irrespective of their political stances, most nonJews did not believe that their Jewish colleagues had the same rights and obligations as Catholics and Protestants. Neither did most of them recognize that their colleagues were deeply disturbed by the expulsion and by laws which made them into second class citizens. 34
Author's interview with Prof. Erwin Chargaff, 28 January 1997, "Anti-Semitism was very
strong in Austria, but I did not experience significant anti-Semitism. It was obvious that as a Jew one could not get a regular position at a university. .... A career for Jews was much more likely in Germany than in Austria before Hitler, contrary to what Goldhagen wrote. ...Goldhagen is not right. This type of anti-Semitism (eliminatory anti-Semitism, UD) was not noticeable in Germany before Hitler. What you did notice were such questions as 'Are you a member of a fraternity?' Author's interview with Prof. Frederick Eirich, 30 January 1997, "(To be anti-Semitic) was good form to academics in Germany, and in Vienna, of course, too." Author's interview with Prof. Walther Jaenicke, 18 August 1996, "A certain anti-Semitism was inherent of the German bourgeosie at the time (in the 1920s, UD)."
29
The Jewish physicist James Franck who, as a former front line soldier was not dismissed from his position as full professor at the University of Göttingen in 1933, but resigned in order to protest against the dismissals, expressed these feelings in a letter to the rector of the University of Göttingen. He published paragraphs of this letter in a Göttingen newspaper, from which the following quotation is taken.35
I have asked my superior authorities to release me from my office. I will attempt to continue my scientific work in Germany. We Germans of Jewish descent are being treated as aliens and enemies of the Fatherland. It is demanded that our children grow up in the awareness that they will never be allowed to prove themselves as Germans. Whoever was in the war is supposed to receive permission to serve the state further. I refuse to make use of this privilege, even though I also understand the position of those today who consider it their duty to hold out at their posts.
Often those who were not affected did not perceive the consequences of the Civil Service Law for those affected and for science in Germany. Thus Werner Heisenberg wrote to Max Born, who had already emigrated to England, that Planck had been given the assurance by Hitler
35
Quoted from Beyerchen 1977, 17. ("Ich habe meine vorgesetzte Behörde gebeten, mich von
meinem Amte zu entbinden. Ich werde versuchen, in Deutschland weiter wissenschaftlich zu arbeiten. Wir Deutsche jüdischer Abstammung werden als Fremde und Feinde des Vaterlandes behandelt. Man fordert, dass unsere Kinder in dem Bewusstsein aufwachsen, sich nie als Deutsche bewähren zu dürfen. Wer im Kriege war, soll die Erlaubnis erhalten, weiter dem Staate zu dienen. Ich lehne es ab, von dieser Vergünstigung Gebrauch zu machen, wenn ich auch Verständnis für den Standpunkt derer habe, die es heute für ihre Pflicht halten, auf ihrem Posten auszuharren," quoted from A. Beyerchen, Wissenschaftler unter Hitler, Köln 1980, p.9).
30
"that apart from the Civil Service Law, the new government would not undertake anything that might impede our science."36
Max Born was visited by some friends and acquaintances after a newspaper in Göttingen had published a list of names of dismissed civil servants including his own. He recalled that most visitors offered their genuine sympathies to him, but others did not, including Alfred Kühn, then full professor of zoology at the University in Göttingen and former Social Democrat, who tried to console Born by saying "that we are in a crisis right now, comparable to a war; as one person dies, another survives in war, I had to consider myself to be among the losses" (Born 1978, 251). Kühn became a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in 1937 and was the most distinguished zoologist in Germany from the late 1930s to the 1960s. The young physicist Otto Heckmann infuriated Born: Assigned to replace Born as lecturer, Heckmann asked Born to give him his lecture notes (Born 1978, 252).
An extended correspondence between the two non-Jewish physical chemists Paul Harteck, an assistant to Haber at his Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, and KarlFriedrich Bonhoeffer, at the time full professor at the University of Frankfurt, reveals the change of atmosphere during 1933. Neither joined the Nazi party, both despised Nazi ideology, and Bonhoeffer (like other professors, see below) provided work conditions in his institute for "half-Jews" during the first years of World War II. In these letters Jewish colleagues were regarded as Germans until 1933, and liked or disliked as individuals. Bonhoeffer wrote, for example, on 6 January 1932, "Today [Otto] Stern visited me here. He told me many interesting things. I still believe that he is now our best man. In St. Moritz he met Langmuir. He conducted molecular beam experiments with ortho and para hydrogen, is able to split the rotation states magnetically and finds that ortho hydrogen is more magnetic than para hydrogen ..."37 (italics added). "Our" here refers to all German physical chemists.
36
Heisenberg to Born, 2 June 1933, quoted after Albrecht 1994, 46.
37
Paul Harteck papers, Rensellaer Institute, Troy, Part 1 MC 17, Box 1, translations UD.
31
Otto Stern was dismissed in 1933, emigrated to the United States and received a Nobel Prize in 1943.
In April 1933, however, after the implementation of the Civil Service Law, Bonhoeffer wrote, "Please write to me what is going on at the K.W.I. I would not have thought that the anti-Semitism would take on such vulgar forms, even though I have often gotten annoyed about the Jews. These methods are somehow shameful for us..."38 (italics added). The changed usage of "our" and "us" in the two letters indicates that already in April 1933 the Jews were being distanced from the German scientific community.
Though Bonhoeffer and Harteck remained friendly with some of their dismissed colleagues, particularly Adalbert and Ladislaus Farkas, they refused to express their solidarity with them as a people who were being treated injustly. Thus Harteck wrote to Bonhoeffer on 16 April 1933, "When you come to Berlin ...don't let the former members of the institute [KWI for Physical Chemistry] talk you into something. They tend to say 'the decent Aryans, too, had to sympathize and agree with them.'" The lack of sympathy and understanding becomes particularly clear with Harteck who in 1933 spent a year as research fellow with Rutherford in Cambridge. On 5 May, 1933 he wrote to Bonhoeffer, "... In London the Jews, ½ and ¼ Jews of Germany are gathering. If these people have ever had a liking for Germany, it can only have been a very superficial one, because now you really don't notice anything of it."
The correspondence later in 1933 concentrated on Harteck's need to find a new position. The resignation of Haber rendered the continuation of Harteck's assistantship uncertain (Haber's successor, the convinced National Socialist Gerhard Jander, informed Harteck in November 1933 that his post would not be continued after his return from Cambridge). Thus the dismissal of the Jews was of special importance for Harteck. Bonhoeffer, who informed Harteck about the developments in Germany, wrote to him on 22 June 1933: "There are many
38
Ibid., without exact date.
32
openings simultaneously, you should get one of them, actually." Harteck was appointed to one of them in 1934: he became successor to Otto Stern in Hamburg.
3.2.3 Self-Benefit Paul Harteck is typical of many young non-Jewish scientists who in chemistry (as in biology, and probably other sciences as well) filled most of the vacancies produced by the dismissals within a short time. Assistant professors became full professors, postdocs moved on and became assistant professors. Given the general background of unemployment among academics, a situation which in chemistry was exarcebated by economic depression and the subsequent cuts in industrial posts, this opportunity of rapid professional advancement supported an already widespread approval of Nazi politics among young academics. I consider the fact that many non-Jewish German scientists benefited from the expulsion of their Jewish colleagues to be the most important reason for the acceptance of the Nazi policy of expulsion. Self-benefit was also responsible to a large extent for the fact that the Nazi movement was particularly strong among German students. Those who competed for the available positions tried to enhance their chances, in some cases by denouncing others to be Jews or "half-Jews" or friends of Jews, and by joining the Nazi party. Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer described this atmosphere of denunciation at his institute in Frankfurt in May 1933.39
The organic chemist and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, Richard Kuhn, is an example of an academic who denounced Jewish colleagues in order to not face even small disadvantages or to acquire a bad reputation. As already mentioned, the vast majority of non-affected scientists followed the orders to dismiss Jewish workers. According to my understanding, Otto Meyerhof was the only head of department of a Kaiser Wilhelm or university institute who did not fill in the questionnaire with respect to his Jewish workers (Meyerhof was Jewish himself but allowed to stay on until 1938). But this fact was
39
Ibid.
33
soon noticed by Richard Kuhn, who notified the Secretary General of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Friedrich Glum on 27 April 1936,40
Allegedly, there are again three persons of non-Aryan extraction working with Prof. Meyerhof in the institute, (Mr. Lehmann, Miss Hirsch, and another lady whom I don't know yet), a fact which will lead to discussions about the KW Society in general and the institute in Heidelberg in particular. I suggest that after examining the questionnaires you give Prof. Meyerhof exact guidelines.
Needless to say, these three persons were dismissed, as was Meyerhof himself. He went to France and then to the United States, where he became visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Kuhn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938 (the Nazis did not however, allow Germans to accept the Prize after 1935), became one of the most influential chemists in the Third Reich. He was appointed head of the Association of German Chemists and of the Chemistry Section of the Reich Research Council.
The above mentioned colloid chemist Wolfgang Ostwald, a son of the famous physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, summarized the events in Germany in 1933 by using chemical terminology. He traveled several times to England and the United States between 1937 and 1939 at the invitation of scientific organizations. During these visits he made a determined effort to convince his American and British colleagues that the changes in Germany were necessary and beneficial. In one of his reports about these meetings to German authorities he wrote: "As chemists they understood me best when I spoke about our renewal as of a 'recrystallization' that is purification, stabilization, and restructuring" 41 ('Rekristallisation', d.h. Reinigung, Stabilisierung, Neuformung). It needed the political conviction and missionary 40
Archive of the Max Planck Society, Abt.1, Rep. IA 540/2, translation UD.
41
Reports by Wolfgang Ostwald to the authorities about his journeys, Federal Archive in
Koblenz, R73/13500 (translation UD); a detailed study by the author on Wolfgang Ostwald's political activities in Nazi Germany is in preparation.
34
zeal of Wolfgang Ostwald to euphemistically call the huge purge of Jews of German universities and society as a whole a 'recrystallization'.
3.2.4 Refusing compromises with the Nazis: Adolf Windaus, and Otto Krayer, "the only German gentleman" Nevertheless there were exceptions. Among them were those chemists who as institute or department heads helped "half-Jews" by giving them opportunities to work during the war: Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Freudenberg, Hermann Staudinger, Heinrich Wieland, and even SS member Otto Westphal. The law permitted the employment of "non-Aryans" for warrelated work, but it is known at least of Wieland that his help went beyond what was legally permitted, and of Bonhoeffer that he helped his co-workers beyond providing them with work.42 Max Volmer endangered his position and his life by receiving his former Jewish assistant Heinz Briske in his apartment in 1943, giving him advice and food for his children. Details about their help will be given in a future study by the author. Fritz Strassmann was the only chemist or biochemist I know who was honoured with a tree on the Avenue of the Righteous in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem (Sime 1996, 492).43 As assistant at the KWI for Chemistry he and his wife Maria hid the pianist Andrea Wolffenstein in their apartment for two months in 1943, endangering their lives and that of their three-year-old son. Andrea Wolffenstein survived (Krafft 1981, 46). Here I present two examples of non-Jewish professors who in 1933 acted quite differently from the great majority of their colleagues.
Adolf Windaus, Nobel Prize winner in 1928 for elucidating the structure of steroids, and director of the institute for organic chemistry at the University of Göttingen, is an example of a professor who defended his academic freedom by refusing to compromise with the Nazi activists. When a group of National Socialist students and doctoral students attempted, after 42
Author's interview with Prof Walther Jaenicke, Erlangen, 18 June 1996. Bonhoeffer's
brother Dietrich and brother in law were murdered by the Nazis at the end of the war for being active opponents to the regime. 43
Strassmann was honoured posthumously in 1986.
35
1933, to expel the only Jewish doctoral student at the institute, Klaus Neisser, Windaus reacted by asking the Prussian Ministry of Education for his own dismissal, a parallel to Fritz Haber's reaction though with a different effect. Windaus argued that because of his age, he could not tolerate the atmosphere at the institute, created by the political agitation. Interestingly, the Ministry accepted Windaus' conditions for staying on: The main activists had to move to another university. Windaus, who never used the Hitler greeting, was persuaded to stay in his position, since politicians considered the continuation of chemical research of a Nobel Prize winner more important than the fulfillment of political ideological demands. Klaus Neisser emigrated to Brazil in 1935 after completing his Ph.D., because by then it had become nearly impossible for Jews to receive any posts, even in industry.
Otto Krayer, pharmacologist, was, as far as is known, the only non-Jewish scientist who refused to accept a position that had become vacant by the expulsion of a Jewish colleague. As associate professor at the Institute of Pharmacology in Berlin he was offered the full professorship for pharmacology in Düsseldorf as successor to Philipp Ellinger who had just been expelled. Krayer not only declined this offer but pointed out the reasons for his decision in a letter to the Education Minister on 15 June, 1933 (Goldstein 1987, 153):
...the primary reason for my reluctance is that I feel the exclusion of Jewish scientists to be an injustice, the necessity of which I cannot understand, since it has been justified by reasons that lie outside the domain of science. The feeling of injustice is an ethical phenomenon. It is innate to the structure of my personality, and not something imposed from the outside.
It was not an open political protest, but an individual protest, a decision in accord to his ethical convictions. It immediately led to his dismissal. According to Erwin Chargaff, Krayer's attitude made a deep impression in England, where Sir Henry Dale called Krayer "the only German gentleman."44 At the end of 1933 Krayer 44
Author’s interview with Prof. Erwin Chargaff, New York City, 28 January 1997.
36
accepted an invitation from the Department of Pharmacology at University College London. In 1934 he went to the Pharmacological Institute of the American University of Beirut, and in 1937 he accepted a call as professor and director of the Pharmacological Institute of Harvard Medical School.
4. The expulsion and forced emigration of (bio-)chemists from 1933 to 1939 - a quantitative analysis 4.1 Numbers of dismissals and emigrations in (bio-)chemistry As I indicated above, my analysis is based on the biographies and research interests of those (bio-) chemists who, at the beginning of 1933, were university teachers or scientists at KWIs in Germany, or in 1938 university teachers in Austria -- a total of 535 (bio)chemists. At least 128 (23.9%) of them were dismissed between 1933 and 1938, and at least 108 (20.1%) emigrated. Twelve of these emigrés had not been dismissed; they resigned under pressure or emigrated for other reasons. Thus the total number of (bio-)chemists who were expelled from universities and Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (dismissed and/or emigrated) was 140 (26.1%). At least 122 (87% of them) had to give up their positions for "racial" reasons; they were either "non-Aryans" or married to a Jew. Among them were a few who were also politically undesirable, for example Professor Fuchs (Technical University of Aachen), member of the SPD, Professor David Holde, member of the SPD and the League for Human Rights, and Professor Isidor Traube, who had shown solidarity to the liberal Professor Gumbel in Heidelberg in the late 1920s. Both Holde and Traube taught at the Technical University of Berlin. Wilhelm Prandtl, Extraordinarius (associate professor with civil service status) at the University of Munich was known, according to an expert opinion by the NSDAP, as a very Christian (Catholic) man, who never used the Hitler greeting. When he was invited to visit a party meeting, he replied that he had nothing to do with the party.45 Prandtl was, however, not dismissed for this attitude, but because his wife was Jewish. He remained in Munich. During
45
BDC, REM file W. Prandtl, opinion of the NSDAP-regional leadership Munich of 19
October 1938.
37
the war his wife was drafted to do forced labor; in February 1945 she escaped deportation to the concentration camp in Theresienstadt, because of her bad health condition.46
There are several cases for which the reasons for dismissal and emigration have not been determined so far, but they were probably what were considered racial reasons. Some four per cent of those (bio-)chemists who were removed from their positions were dismissed for solely political or religious reasons. They include Otto Krayer, Karl Fries, associate professor and head of the department of organic chemistry at the chemical institute of the Technical University of Braunschweig, was forced into early retirement in 1938 because of conflicts at the institute.47 He was able to continue his research at the University of Marburg with Prof. Hans Meerwein. Wolf-Johannes Müller, full professor of physical chemistry at the Technical College of Vienna, was dismissed in 1938 because he was considered a friend of the Jews. He succeeded, however, in regaining his old position a year later. Soon afterwards, in December 1941, he died. Robert Wizinger-Aust, associate professor of organic chemistry and technology at the University of Bonn, was deemed unacceptable as university teacher for ideological reasons. The Organization of University Teachers at Bonn reproached him for being a follower of the kind of Catholicism characterized by a strong bond to the Pope, and this was considered a rejection of National Socialism.48 He was dismissed in August 1938 in spite of his strong nationalistic convictions. He emigrated to Switzerland and became lecturer at the E.T.H. in Zurich. In 1943 he became associate professor and in 1947 full professor.
4.2 Losses at various universities and KWIs 46
Information from Prof. Dr. Laetitia Boehm, UA München, 6.3.1996.
47
Information from the university archive Braunschweig. According to Prof. H. Hopf (letter
to UD, 13 August 1999) Fries was forced into early retirement because he rejected the habilitation of a young chemist, whose achievements he did not consider sufficient. This chemist was a National Socialist activist. 48
Expert opinion by the faculty body of the University Bonn of 19 July 1937, UA Bonn,
personal file R. Wizinger.
38
Universities and Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes were affected differently by the dismissals, as has been shown for the total of dismissals from universities by the American sociologist Edsall Hartshorne (1937), who carried out an investigation on German universities in 1937. As with my study on (bio-)chemists, Hartshorne confined his study to habilitated university teachers. My findings in many cases confirm those of Hartshorne (see table 1): The universities of Berlin and Frankfurt and, in chemistry, the TH Berlin and University of Vienna had the largest percentage of dismissals, followed by the Universities of Heidelberg, Breslau, Göttingen, and Freiburg. At the other end of the spectrum we find the Universities of Rostock and Tübingen with no dismissals in (bio-)chemistry. In order to draw conclusions from these data, one has to recall that the vast majority of those dismissed were Jews or people of Jewish extraction and that virtually no Jew or non-Aryan was left in his or her position. We therefore can use these figures as indicators of the percentage of Jews and people of Jewish extraction of all political opinions. Berlin, Frankfurt, Breslau, and Vienna were cities with large Jewish populations, and consequently many Jewish students and university teachers. The University of Frankfurt was founded as a reform university only shortly before World War I, and largely with funding from Jewish foundations, so that in some cases people could not be rejected for a post only because they were Jewish or liberal. Freiburg and Heidelberg were at the time relatively liberal towns and the universities were less anti-Semitic than other universities of smaller cities. On the other side of the spectrum there were universities such as those of Rostock and Tübingen where virtually none was dismissed. That means that there were virtually no Jewish (or left wing) university teachers before 1933. Professor of Botany Ernst Lehmann proudly stated in 1935 that Tübingen was already "judenrein" in 1932: "Tübingen has always known how to keep away Jewish professors without saying much about it" (Lehmann 1935).
The data also reveal differences in the percentage of total dismissals and dismissals in (bio-) chemistry, a fact which reflects the autonomy of the different faculties at universities. The University of Göttingen was well known for its eminent Jewish physicists and mathematicians who accounted for the large number of dismissals, whereas there were no Jewish biologists and chemists. In medical biochemistry one person, the associate professor Rudolf Ehrenberg,
39
was dismissed because he had a Jewish father. He could continue his work to some extent under Prof. Hermann Rein in Göttingen and was reinstated in his position in 1945.49 The University of Munich shows a different picture. Whereas the percentage of total dismissals was low, 8%, the figure for chemistry was 21%. Three out of fourteen chemists were dismissed: Kasimir Fajans, full professor of physical chemistry, who was Jewish, and the two Catholic associate professors, Wilhelm Prandtl, who was dismissed because his wife was Jewish, and Georg Maria Schwab, who had a Jewish father.
There were also remarkable differences in the dismissals from various KWIs. The KWI for Physical Chemistry was affected most: Its director Fritz Haber, all heads of department, and almost all assistants and researchers (20 chemists) were dismissed or resigned under political pressure. The department for Physiology at the KWI for Medical Research in Heidelberg was closed down after its director, Otto Meyerhof, was dismissed and emigrated in 1938. Three of his assistants and workers had been previously dismissed. Carl Neuberg was dismissed as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Insitute for Biochemistry in 1934.
A few physicists, including Lise Meitner, head of the department for physics, but no chemists, were dismissed from the KWI for Chemistry.50 The other KWIs in which chemists were working were not affected by the dismissals: The KWIs for Iron Research, Coal Research, Metal Research and, apart from Waldemar Weyl, Silicate Research (Albrecht and Herrmann 1990, 304-367). This means that there were no Jewish or left wing chemists at these institutes. These findings coincide with the fact that since the 19th century Jews were strongly underrepresented in the coal, iron and steel industries and in toolmaking, in contrast to light metal and consumer goods industries, and, later, chemical industry (Volkov 1994, 42).
49
Obituary on Rudolf Ehrenberg by Hans-Heinrich Voigt, rector of the University of
Göttingen, July 1969. I thank Prof. Maria Ehrenberg for access to the obituary. 50
On Lise Meitner, see Sime 1996.
40
4.3 Comparison of the losses by dismissal and emigration with those in biology and physics The losses in (bio-)chemistry, (26% dismissals and/or emigrations and 20% emigrations, see above) were significantly larger than in biology, where 13% were dismissed and 10% emigrated (Deichmann 1996, 25). Due to the use of different criteria, data concerning the dismissal and emigration quota in physics vary greatly betweeen 15.5% and 25%.51 Thus the dismissal and emigration quota in (bio-)chemistry seems to be as large as in physics. There are social reasons for the high percentage of dismissals in chemistry, related to the comparatively strong participation of Jews in academic chemistry, as opposed to biology.
In chemistry there had been, since the 1850s, job opportunities in industry, where antiSemitism was less of an impediment to Jews. Many Jewish students had studied chemistry in order to embark on industrial careers; others remained as university teachers -- usually in the lower position of an associate professor -- in academia or as researchers in Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. Erwin Chargaff recalled the situation at Austrian universities in the 1920s: "It was obvious that as a Jew one could not get a regular position at a university. There were Jews who were in private practice as physicians, lawyers, and in the financial trades."52 Chargaff studied chemistry after considering "that chemistry was the one science that most easily provided opportunities for employment, either in the field of teaching, or in research or industry." In 1850, Heinrich Caro decided to study chemistry for very similar reasons. In his biographical notes he stated: "This science was seen to be in itself attractive as well as having a powerful influence on all branches of the trades, which promised to become even more so.
51
Beyerchen 1977; Fischer 1988. Beyerchen mentions 25% dismisssals and Fischer 15.5%
emigrés in physics. These figures refer to Germany alone; they are related to all who were dismissed and emigrated. Assuming that, as in chemistry, at least 85% of the emigres were Jews or "non-Aryans" and that about 20% of those dismissed did not emigrate, Jewish ("nonAryan") physicists made up between 16 and 20 percent. 52
Author's interview with Prof. Chargaff, 27 January 1997.
41
That convinced me to take up the study of practical chemistry, and thus choose a profession in which efficiency and thoroughness would bring one recognition" (Travis 1998, 109).
It is well known that the fast developing chemical industry provided many posts for chemists from universities. Thus at the end of the 19th century, 68% of the chemists at 83 German chemical companies had received their Ph.D. at universities or technical universities (Volkov 1990, 227). Among them were many Jews, particularly in the dye industry (see under 2.3). The fathers of Fritz Haber, Georg von Hevesy and Ernst Boris Chain built up and ran chemical factories, the latter, as he later wrote, "grew up in an atmosphere of chemical industry and chemical research" (Clark 1985, 2). Michael Polanyi's father was an engineer, Eugene Wigner's father ran a tannery, and Eugene began his advanced studies as chemical engineer, as did Edward Teller. The high percentage of Jews in the medical and law faculties of universities has been similarly explained with reference to the job opportunities in private practices.
The careers of Jewish scientists at universities were invariably restricted by anti-Semitism which varied in the various disciplines. The differences in the losses by dismissals and emigrations after 1933 in various chemical subdisciplines are also interesting in this respect.
4.4 Dismissals and emigrations in various chemical subdisciplines53
53
The attributions of dismissals to various chemical subdisciplines were made according to
the institution in which (bio-)chemists worked before their dismissal. Thus biochemists who as MDs conducted their research in medical institutions, such as Gustav Embden and Otto Meyerhof, were counted as medical biochemists. However, non-medical biochemists who conducted their research in institutes of organic chemistry or the KWIs for Biochemistry or Cell Physiology, such as Carl Neuberg and Erwin Haas were considered under "organic chemistry," since a clear distinction between biochemistry and organic chemistry was not made at the time.
42
The losses by dismissals and/or emigration in the relatively new interdisciplinary fields of physical chemistry and medical biochemistry, 37% and 35%, respectively, were significantly larger than in organic and inorganic chemistry, with 22% and 20%. The losses by emigrations are similarly different: 32% in physical chemistry, 29% in medical biochemistry, 17% in organic chemistry, and 10% in inorganic chemistry. Physical chemistry was a relatively new, less respected field, and the institutes were less well equipped than those of organic chemistry. Jews gained access to positions or at least research facilities more easily. 27 of those 35 full professors, who were dismissed, were Jews or had Jewish ancestors (see table 2). According to available information, eleven of them were Jews in the religious sense, seven were Protestants, and one Catholic. At least three had one non-Jewish parent. Thus at least 4.9% of full professors of (bio-)chemistry (1933 and 1938, respectively) were Jews in the religious sense. This figure is much higher than the percentage of (non-baptized) Jewish full professors at German universities at the beginning of the 20th century established by Monika Richarz (1970, 217) (2% in 1909, and 1% in 1917).54
A look at these full professorships in chemistry shows that many of them were in physical chemistry and that full professorships at the less prestigious Technical Universities were frequent (see table 2). Of 31 full professors in physical chemistry in 1933 at German universities and technical universities (not all technical universities are included), and in 1938 at universities in Austria and the German universities in Prague, nine (29%) were dismissed because they were Jews or had Jewish ancestors. In addition the full professors of physical chemistry Carl Tubandt (U. Halle), Hans Zocher (TH Prague) were dismissed, because their wives were Jewish. Jews and other "non-Aryans" made up the majority of department heads and scientific workers at the KWI for Physical Chemistry under Fritz Haber. All of them were fired or, like Michael Polanyi and Herbert Freundlich, resigned under pressure. As pointed out above, Haber resigned from his position after he dismissed his Jewish workers.
54
A comparison with other disciplines is not possible, since there are no comprehensive
studies.
43
By contrast, only five out of 33 full professors in organic chemistry (15%) were fired because they were Jews or of Jewish extraction. Fritz Arndt and Wilhelm Traube were heads of divisions of organic chemistry at the Universities of Breslau and Berlin respectively, and Stefan Goldschmidt, Fritz Straus, and Alfred Wohl were heads of organic chemistry departments at technical universities. No head of one of the large chemical university institutes, usually institutes of organic chemistry, was fired, because none were Jews or "nonAryans." Richard Willstätter was the only Jew who had been given the position of head of the large organic chemistry institute at one of the 22 German universities. Willstätter had, however, resigned from this position already in 1924 in order to protest against several cases of anti-Semitism connected to appointments at the University of Munich.
The fate of Wilhelm Traube after his dismissal in 1934 is worth mentioning. He remained in Berlin, and was arrested in 1942. In September of 1942, at the age of 76, he was murdered by the Gestapo. The documentation at the cemetery for the Jewish community in BerlinWeissensee, where Traube had to be buried (despite the fact that he was Protestant), contains the note that Traube's body should be picked up at the Alexanderplatz police prison on 28 September 1942.55 The curator of the university learned about Traube's death only in January 1943. He responded by demanding that the bank return the pension paid to Traube's account after his death.56
The year 1942 marked the mass deportation of Jews. Arnold Berliner, the founder and former editor of the journal "Die Naturwissenschaften," an internationally leading scientifc journal until the 1930s, committed suicide when he was ordered to leave his apartment in Berlin in
55
Archive of Centrum Judaicum, Berlin. According to its head, Dr. Simon, Prof. Wilhelm
Traube was, contrary to the information given by Joseph S.Fruton (1990, 401) not murdered by National Socialists in his appartment on 28 September but by the Gestapo in their office. 56
Archive of Humboldt-University, Berlin, T87. Dismissed professors who as civil servants
officially became retired, received their pensions from the state.
44
June.57 As Ruth Sime has shown, Max von Laue expressed his deep disturbance about the deportations and suicides of colleagues and friends in letters to Lise Meitner (Sime 1996, 297).58 Among them were the physical chemist A. Byk, the wife of the discoverer of canal rays (Eugen Goldstein) and Traube.
In the medical faculty, medical biochemistry (physiological chemistry) was still one of the most marginalized disciplines during the 1920s. Up to the mid-1930s there existed only a few institutes and full professorships, and the subject became compulsory for students only in 1932. With the exception of Gustav Embden in Frankfurt and Bruno Kisch in Cologne, "nonAryans" did not gain access to any of the full professorships in medical biochemistry. However, they became heads of KWIs or departments of KWIs, devoted to the biochemistry of intermediary metabolism and enzymes: Otto Meyerhof, director of the department for physiology at the Institute for Medical Research, Carl Neuberg, director of the Institute for Biochemistry, and Otto Warburg, director of the Institute for Cell Physiology. Otto Warburg, whose father was Jewish, was the only "non-Aryan" who was not fired. 59 Research in enzyme 57
Obituary by Max von Laue, in: Die Naturwissenschaften 33, 17-18, (1946). The publisher
dismissed Berliner in 1935, after he had been editor for 22 years. 58
The biochemist Prof. Theodor Bücher told me of an event during his rigorosum (oral
examination of a Ph.D. candidate), in which Max Bodenstein asked him questions about kinetics. The exam took place in 1941, after Jews were forced to mark themselves with the Star of David. Von Laue, greatly disturbed, entered the room, without taking notice of the student, and started to talk to Bodenstein about a number of friends and colleagues who had just committed suicide as a reaction to this order (author's interview with Prof. Bücher, Munich, 14 June 1994). 59
This is largely due to the fact that Warburg’s KWI for Cell Physiology was erected in 1931
with the means of a foundation established by the Rockefeller Foundation which also provided large parts of the current budget. In addition, Warburg was protected by high-ranking NS politicians (occasionally people in this context refer to Hitler’s and Göring’s hope of the development of a medication against cancer). Thus Göring arranged a "recalculation" of
45
biochemistry was also carried out at the chemical department of the institute for pathology at the University of Berlin. Its head was associate professor Peter Rona, who contributed to the biochemical education of famous biochemists, among them many Jews, for example Ernst Boris Chain, and Fritz Lipmann. Rona moved after his dismissal to Budapest where he was born. Although protected by the Swedish embassy from deportation, he died in 1944, either murdered by Germans or from committing suicide.
The results of this study clearly show that physical chemistry and medical biochemistry were the disciplines in chemistry that were most affected by the Nazi policy of expulsion. In addition to looking at the quantitative losses, the following questions have to be answered in order to assess the impact of the expulsions for Germany: Who were the most eminent dismissed and emigré scientists? Which fields of research were not continued after the Jewish scientists left Germany or Austria? What other extended impacts did the expulsion have?
5. An assessment of the impact of the expulsions on science in Germany A comparison of the number of citations of emigrés and non-emigrés in the Science Citation Index for 1945-54 show that the losses for Germany were even more considerable than indicated by the number of dismissals and emigrations: non-emigrés were cited on the average 150 times, emigrés 360 times -- that is 2.4 times more than non-emigrés. Different fields of (bio-)chemistry were affected to a very different extent by the expulsions. If the Nobel Prize, the number of citations in the Science Citation Index of 1945-54, and individual major Warburg’s ancestry and made him a ”quarter-Jew” instead of a "half-Jew" (Albrecht and Hermann 1990, 371). When the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, on the initiative of Rudolf Mentzel, announced the dismissal of Warburg in 1941, it was the head of Hitler’s Reich chancellery, Philipp Bouhler, who was able to prevent the dismissal. He was alerted to Warburg’s difficulties by the wife of Walter Schoeller, a friend of Warburg and head of laboratory of the Berlin Schering AG. Mrs. Schoeller was a sister-in-law of Bouhler. Bouhler also helped Warburg, when he encountered great difficulties in 1943 due to denunciations from a person in his own lab (author's interview with Prof. Theodor Bücher, 14 June 1994).
46
contributions to (bio-)chemistry are taken as a measure of excellence, then the emigré scientists of table 3 are most eminent. For comparison with non-emigré (bio-)chemists, see table 4. Fritz Haber gained only few citations, presumably because he had published his most important scientific papers at the beginning of the 20th century. Otto Stern, too, was not cited according to his importance. Apart from the fact that there were few researchers in his field, he was one of the very few directors of institutes who did not put his name on the publications of his co-workers (at the time, directors were usually first authors of multi-authored papers).
Fritz Lipmann, Leonor Michaelis, and Max Perutz left Germany and Austria before the Nazis came to power, but they lost their German and Austrian citizenship and right to return only thereafter (Michaelis' name was included in the catalog of the University of Berlin until the mid-thirties). Gustav Embden did not emigrate, he died in Germany in 1933.60 Richard Willstätter, as mentioned earlier, resigned in 1924. In 1939 he escaped deportation to Dachau by emigrating to Switzerland. Except for Kuhn all persons mentioned were Jewish or had Jewish forebears. Werner Kuhn was a Swiss citizen who had lived in Germany since 1927. Appointed as full professor for physical chemistry at the University of Kiel in 1936, he accepted the call to the University of Basle in 1939; the increasing possiblity of a European war played a central role in this decision (Morris 1986). It should be mentioned that the Spanish biochemist Severo Ochoa worked as research assistant to Meyerhof from 1929 to 60
The internationally renowned biochemist Gustav Embden, whose father was Jewish, had
been full professor and head of the institute for Vegetative Physiology ever since the founding of the University of Frankfurt in 1915. On 25 July 1933 he ”died suddenly” (information of the Personalarchiv of the University of Frankfurt ). Embden asked for leave in summer 1933 in order to restore his health in a sanatorium (personal file Embden, university archives Frankfurt). According to a former student, National Socialist students attempted at the beginning of the summer semester 1933 to expel Embden from his position as head of the institute. Embden died a few weeks later from a heart attack, apparently as a result of stress brought on by this campaign (Dr. med. Hoffmann-Wülfing to the rector of the University of Frankfurt, 9 January 1947, university archive Frankfurt, Rektorat, personal file G.Embden).
47
1931 and from 1936 to 1937. He was not dismissed, but it can be assumed that the political developments, as well as the fact that Meyerhof would soon be dismissed, contributed to his decision to leave Heidelberg in 1937 and move first to England and in 1940 to the United States (Nobel Prize 1959). The Dutch physicist Peter Debye, director of the KWI for physics, received the 1936 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his contributions to our knowledge of the structure of molecules. He emigrated to the United States in 1940, when the institute was taken over by the War Ministry and Debye was urged to adopt German citizenship.
As these lists of eminent emigrés and non-emigrés indicate, the physical chemistry of polymers as well as intermediary biochemistry were affected particularly strongly by the dismissals and forced emigrations. In both fields, Germany had been the international leader during the 1920s. The pioneer of polymer, or macromolecular, chemistry was Hermann Staudinger, professor at the University of Freiburg, who in the mid-1920s demonstrated the existence of macromolecules by organic chemical methods. He sustained this concept against the almost total rejection by his colleagues in organic chemistry during the 1920s and early 1930s. In contrast to Staudinger, who considered polymer chemistry to be entirely a branch of organic chemistry, Herman Mark focused on the development of physical chemical methods for the study of polymers. He set up an interdisciplinary working group at IG Farben in Ludwigshafen in 1927 and then established a teaching and research program in polymer chemistry at the University of Vienna, where he became professor of physical chemistry in 1932 (see below).
In 1938, Mark, whose father was Jewish, was forced to emigrate. Many of his co-workers were dismissed and emigrated, too. Mark's work in Germany and Austria and his substantial influence on polymer chemistry in the United States will be examined below. Here I want to emphasize that his dismissal and that of many of his collaborators resulted in severe setbacks in the field of academic polymer chemistry in Germany and Austria. Staudinger never established an interdisciplinary teaching program in polymer chemistry, and remained the only lecturer in this field in his institute. In spite of his important work in establishing polymer
48
chemistry, he did not accept the physicochemical evidence for the flexibility of macromolecules. Even in the 1950s he stuck to the notion that macromolecules were stiff rods. He believed that he could deduce their length from a theory of the viscosity of a solution of rigid rods, a theory which proved untenable in this form. Although there were good physical chemists who focused on polymer chemistry in Germany, for example Günther V. Schulz, this field did not become influential at universities for decades after World War II.61
An example of an activity that disappeared completely was the molecular beam method developed by Otto Stern in the 1920s.62 In 1920/21 he conducted the famous experiment with Walther Gerlach, in which they provided evidence for the magnetic properties of the electron (spin). In the early 1930s, Stern determined the magnetic moment of the proton. He was awarded the Nobel Prize of 1943 for the development of the molecular beam method and the determination of the magnetic properties of the proton. After he and his co-worker Immanuel Estermann were forced to leave -- both received positions at the University of Pittsburgh -this research was not continued in Germany. The center of nuclear magnetic moments research moved to Columbia University, where Isidor Rabi, who had spent a post-doctoral year in Hamburg in 1929, introduced new and powerful molecular beam methods and founded a school that later achieved spectacular results.63 He received a Nobel Prize in 1944. Much 61
On Staudinger's research, see for example files of the German research association at the
Federal Archive Koblenz, R73; Morris 1986; Priesner 1980, 1987. I received additional information through interviews with Prof. Frederick Eirich, Herbert Morawetz, Helmut Ringsdorf and Dr. Magda Staudinger in 1996 and 1997. A study by the author on Staudinger's research during National Socialism, the political pressure put on him after Heidegger denounced him in 1933 as politically unreliable, and his rehabilitation is in preparation. 62
Otto Stern was a chemist who gradually concentrated on physical chemistry. Despite the
fact that his later experiments were in the forefront of physics (related to the quantum theory of the atom), he held a chair in physical chemistry. 63
Paul Forman (1998, 112) emphasizes Rabi's indebtedness to Otto Stern's pioneering efforts
toward molecular beam measurements of nuclear moments.
49
later, the whole field had to be re-imported to Germany, mainly by Hans Kopfermann, after World War II.
The forced emigration of physicists also affected some fields of theoretical chemistry in Germany, Walter Heitler and Fritz London being prominent examples. They were both dismissed from their positions as lecturer at the University of Göttingen (Heitler) and assistant to Erwin Schrödinger and assistant professor at the University of Berlin (London) in 1933 and first emigrated to England.64 In 1936, London went to France, and in 1939 to the United States, where he became professor of theoretical chemistry at Duke University; Heitler became professor in Dublin in 1941 and at the University of Zurich in 1949. In 1927, Heitler and London had described the chemical covalent bond in the hydrogen molecule on the basis of Schrödinger's wave mechanics and calculated to high accuracy the bond energy (HeitlerLondon Method). They thus contributed to the quantum-mechanical explanation of chemical valence forces. Chemists, however, who in most cases had only a poor education in mathematics, did not take notice of these explanations.
The physicist Hans Hellmann is of special importance for the development of quantum chemistry in Germany during the 1930s. Despite being not Jewish, Hellmann, who in 1932 became lecturer of physics at the Tierärztliche Hochschule in Hanover, was dismissed from this post because he was married to a Jewess, Viktoria Hellmann-Bernstein (Schwarz et al. 1999, 1: 18).65 He emigrated to the USSR, and in May 1934 became professor at the KarpowInstitute for Physical Chemistry in Moscow, where he became head of a research group in quantum chemistry. Until 1937, he worked under very good conditions. However, in March 1938 he was accused of being a spy and arrested; on the 29th of May 1938 he was shot at the age of 34 (Schwarz et al. 1999, 2: 69).
64
For London, see Gavroglu 1995.
65
See also Schimanski 1997, 133-5. Prof. Roald Hoffmann first drew my attention to
Hellmann.
50
Hellmann contributed to quantum chemistry in Germany mainly by two publications. In 1934 Hellmann, together with the physical chemist Wilhelm Jost, published an article in which they gave a quantum mechanical explanation of chemical forces that was not based on Schrödinger's complicated wave mechanics (Hellmann and Jost, 1934). As far as I know, this is the first publication in Germany in which the necessity of quantum mechanics for the understanding of the covalent bond was explained in a simple way, understandable to chemists. By that time, Hellmann had already emigrated. Hellmann's second important publication in German was his textbook Introduction to quantum chemistry (1937) that was based on his lectures at the Karpow-Institute in 1935/36, in Austria. As he pointed out in his foreword, he started to write the first chapter in 1933, supported by Prof. Jost, when he was still in Germany. The book presents and discusses the work of leading scientists and mathematicians, apart from Hellmann himself, for example Walter Heitler, Erich Hückel, Friedrich Hund, Robert S. Mulliken, Wolfgang Pauli, Linus Pauling, Edward Teller, and Hermann Weyl, on the application of quantum theoretical concepts to basic problems of theoretical chemistry, such as atomic orbitals and the nature of the chemical bond.
Heitler, London, and Hellmann were pioneers of quantum chemistry. When considering the great losses in theoretical chemistry caused by their dismissal and forced emigration one must, however, not forget that the founders of quantum chemistry in Germany, the physicists Erich Hückel and Friedrich Hund, who were not Jewish, remained professors at German universities. Hückel, who in 1930 became Privatdozent (lecturer) in Stuttgart, developed the concept of σ and π electrons in the double bond in 1931, two years before Linus Pauling who used a different mathematical method. The physical chemist Walther Jaenicke relates the apparent neglect of certain areas of theoretical chemistry in Germany to the overwhelming dominance of organic chemists, the majority of whom were reluctant to accept and apply theoretical considerations:
I consider the reason that some parts of theoretical chemistry were missing, particularly those dealing with quantum-theoretical foundations of the chemical
51
bond, was less a result of National Socialism but rather the fact that organic chemists were not open to new developments. Although quantum chemistry was founded in Germany through work done by Hund and Hückel, it was not continued there . In England and the United States, the dominance of organic chemistry was not so strong, thus other fields were able to develop more easily, and it was in the United States that the term 'chemical physics' was coined during the 1920s, a term that shows that the focus of physical chemistry had been transferred to physics. In Germany chairs of chemistry had been occupied by organic chemists. Erich Hückel, for example, did not get an opportunity to be heard.66
Erich Hückel attributed his difficulties in obtaining even a position as lecturer to the fact that he was doing 'quantum chemistry' and that physical chemistry at that time was considered something quite different (Hückel 1975, 136). Though he later discussed his work with Bernd Eistert and Karl Ziegler, and Hans Meerwein helped him get a position as associate professor for theoretical physics in Marburg in 1937, Hückel recalled that "chemists did not understand anything of what I did, and physicists at the time were not interested in chemical problems" (Hückel 1970, 185). In other countries, too, only few chemists, among them Christopher K. Ingold in England and Louis Plack Hammett in the United States, understood the importance of Hückel's work. As Jerome Berson has pointed out, theoretically arguing experimentalists in the United States preferred to rely on Pauling's theory of resonance, which, in contrast to Hückel's abstract mathematical theory did not require mathematics up to a certain level, and which could be applied using the symbols for bonds which chemists were used to (Berson 1996, 2931). In Germany, Rolf Huisgen, who taught about Hückel's results from 1949 in Tübingen, remained the only chemist to do so for many years.
66
Letter from Prof. Walther Jaenicke to the author of 21 July 1996, translation UD.
52
In biochemistry the field of intermediary metabolism was affected most by the expulsions.67 Through Gustav Embden's sudden death (following his dismissal in 1933) and the emigration of Erwin Chargaff, Hans Krebs, Fritz Lipmann, Otto Meyerhof, Carl Neuberg, Carl Oppenheimer, Peter Rona and Rudolf Schoenheimer, Germany lost most of its eminent representatives with the exception of Otto Warburg. The biochemists Embden, Krebs, Meyerhof and Neuberg contributed decisively to the elucidation of the first cycles of intermediary metabolism, research that began in 1910 with studies on the reactions of glycolysis and fermentation. Since 1933, too, the most important contributions to the field of biochemical reactions and mechanisms of intermediary metabolism came from German Jewish emigrés, most noticeably Fritz Lipmann and Rudolf Schoenheimer in the United States, and Hans Krebs in England.
Peptide and protein chemistry (founded by Emil Fischer) lost with the departure of Max Bergmann (the Jewish director of the Kaiser Wilhelm-Institute for Leather Research in Dresden) its most renowned and successful representative. In 1932, in cooperation with Leonidas Zervas, Bergmann developed the carbobenzoxy method of peptide-synthesis which made it possible for the first time to synthesize peptides of known amino acid composition (Bergmann and Zervas 1932). This was Bergmann's most eminent scientific contribution. His research after emigration and its impact in the United States, will be discussed under 6.2.
Some studies give the impression that the fields of intermediary metabolism and peptide chemistry disappeared from Germany by the forced emigration.68 A review of the biochemical research conducted in Germany after 1933 shows, however, that peptide and enzyme research (for example by Wolfgang Grassmann and Ernst Waldschmidt-Leitz) and the elucidation of metabolic cycles (for example by Carl Martius, Karl Lohmann, Feodor Lynen, and Robert Sonderhoff) were continued, notwithstanding the fact that the most important biochemical 67
For the impact of the forced emigration on biochemistry, see Nachmansohn 1979; Jaenicke
1989; Engel 1994. 68
For example Nachmansohn 1979; Engel 1994.
53
research during these years was the chemistry of natural products (for example the work on vitamins and hormones by Richard Kuhn and Adolf Butenandt).69
Robert Sonderhoff, a student of Heinrich Wieland at the University of Munich, used deuterium, discovered by Harold Urey in 1932, as a marker for acetic acid in order to elucidate its intermediary metabolism. Sonderhoff and Heinz Thomas were able to show that succinic acid was formed via citric acid, an important contribution to the elucidation of what was later called the citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle (after Hans Krebs who during the late 1930s nearly completed its elucidation) (Sonderhoff and Thomas 1937).70 The use of deuterium as a marker in intermediary metabolism research was, however, not continued after Sonderhoff's death in 1937. Using traditional chemical and biochemical methods, Carl Martius at Franz Knoop's institute in Tübingen, successfully elucidated many steps of the oxidative degradation of citric acid and suggested a pathway which proved correct (Martius 1937). Other researchers contributed to the elucidation of the biochemical reactions following the degradation of citric acid.71 It was Hans Krebs and W. A. Johnson in Sheffield, who in 1937 demonstrated that this pathway was in fact a cycle (Krebs and Johnson 1937).
Grassmann, a student of Willstätter and Bergmann's successor at the KWI for Leather Research, continued research on the synthesis of pure peptides and peptidases, research similar to Bergmann's. After 1937, however, he focused on applied research, for example the replacement of imported tannic materials by domestic ones. This had a greater chance of being supported because of the four year plan of economic autarky and war preparation. Waldschmidt-Leitz continued research on peptides until 1940, and then focused on investigating the occurrence of D-peptidases in sera of cancer patients, following a dicovery 69
Information on the research conducted in Germany from 1933 to 1945 was obtained from
the files of the German Research Association at the Federal Archive in Koblenz. An extensive study by the author on chemical and biochemical research in Nazi Germany is in preparation. 70
See also Witkop 1973, viii.
71
See Holmes 1991, 391-421.
54
by Fritz Kögl in Utrecht, who claimed to have found that the amino-acid glutamic acid would occur at up to 40% as D-glutamic acid in cancer tissues (all amino acids usually occur in the L-form). Kögl's research on D-glutamic acid in cancer tissues was based on fraud.72
X-ray crystallography of organic compounds, sometimes stated to have disappeared from Germany with the emigration of Hermann Mark and Reginald Herzog, was in fact conducted in several German laboratories, for example by Otto Kratky at the KWI for Physical Chemistry and Rudolf Brill at the Oppau research laboratory of I.G. Farben. This research was, however, mostly devoted to technically important macromolecules, such as cellulose and silk, and did not result in the elucidation of the structure of biologically important peptides and proteins, such as penicillin and hemoglobin, as was the case in England during and after the war by Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin and Max Perutz, respectively.
During the war, Richard Kuhn and his workers at the KWI for Medical Research in Heidelberg conducted research on bacteriostatic drugs which resulted in the synthesis of an antibiotic that acted when locally applied but was ineffective when taken orally (Kuhn, Birkofer, and Möller 1943). Heinrich Wieland and Adolf Windaus studied the structure of penicillin without much success. The underlying reasons that these biochemical research projects were either failures or could not compete with those in the United States and England cannot be dealt with here in detail. Apart from the emigration of the most eminent Jewish biochemists, such as Chain and Lipmann, the hierarchical structure of German academia and Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes played a role in this context. It prevented able young scientists, such as Sonderhoff, from founding research groups of their own. It appears that professors and funding organizations, such as the German Research Association (DFG), did not give these fields the priority necessary to compete with the research conducted in England and the United States. Butenandt, Kuhn, Wieland, and Windaus were themselves too pre-occupied by natural products research (which was close to classical organic chemistry) to launch a well funded project, for example on the use of deuterium for intermediary metabolic studies, as was the 72
See the rejection of Kögl's claims for example by Behrens et al. 1940.
55
case at Columbia University. The head of the department of biochemistry at Columbia, Hans T. Clarke, though not working in this field himself, was far-sighted enough to provide, together with the Rockefeller Foundation, all the necessary means for Rudolf Schoenheimer.
A review of science in Germany during the era of National Socialism shows that there are other cases in which German professors and directors of Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes did set up well-funded interdisciplinary research groups in new scientific fields that they considered important. An example is the interdisciplinary group of virus studies at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for biology and biochemistry with emphasis on basic research on Tobacco Mosaic Virus (Deichmann 1996, 210-214).
These examples indicate that German biochemistry, internationally leading in the 1920s, suffered a severe setback at the end of World War II. In order to catch up after 1945, German scientists had to cooperate with scientists in the United States and England. And here the fact that Jewish scientists had been expelled (and had not been asked to come back after the war) had a negative effect on the recovery of science in Germany: Since most non-Jewish German scientists had not protested against the expulsion of their colleagues in and after 1933, and in many cases benefited from it, communication, let alone cooperation with their colleagues, became very difficult, and in many cases impossible, for many years after the war.
6. Impact of the forced emigration of Jewish (bio-) chemists from Nazi Germany on the host countries. The majority of the emigrés (60%) emigrated at first to various countries in Western Europe, particularly the U.K. (31%). At the end of the 1930s, many emigrés had to emigrate a second time: they had been given only temporary positions in the U.K., and many European countries were occupied by the Germans. The U.S. became the country with the most emigrés in (bio-) chemistry (35%), followed by the U.K. (18%), Switzerland (7%), Palestine (5%), Turkey (4%), Sweden (3%) and Brazil (2%). Only about 50% of all emigré chemists received a tenured position at a university, around 20% of them a post in industry.
56
6.1 Palestine/Israel Only few (bio-)chemists from Germany emigrated to Palestine. Many younger immigrants from Germany later became academic chemists and biochemists. Due to the German occupation of East European countries and the policy of extermination, a number of scientists from these countries came to Palestine during the Hitler era, and the new European refugee chemists, among them many Hungarians, made up the great majority of the staff at The Hebrew University during the first decades after World War II.73
In the 1930s, research in Palestine was not sufficiently developed in order to attract prominent academics who became refugees after 1933.74 Particularly in the sciences, the shortage of money and insufficient equipment in laboratories was prevalent. Thus Chaim Weizmann, chemist himself and as a Zionist leader largely concerned with bringing scientists to Palestine, was unable to convince the most renowned German Jewish scientists, such as Einstein, Franck, Haber, and Willstätter and the already very respected younger scientists Fritz London and Otto Stern to come to Palestine. Thus Einstein, who was involved in founding The Hebrew University, which opened in 1925 as a research university, later doubted that high quality physical research could be carried out there. In addition, he rejected the American collegiate model that The Hebrew University Chancellor Judah Leon Magnes preferred over the German academic research system, as advocated by Einstein. Weizmann, too, became dissatisfied with the situation at The Hebrew University and founded an institute devoted to applied research in Rehovot, that was to become the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1949. The renowned biochemist Carl Neuberg did come to Palestine at the end of the 1930s, but he left the country shortly after, because he was too old to adjust himself to the local conditions
73
Information from Saul Patai, The Hebrew University, Dept. of Chemistry, 22 December
1994. 74
See for example Chayut 1994.
57
(he had been director of the KWI for Biochemistry until 1934). 75 Rudolf Schönheimer, too, who in the 1930s became one of the most renowned emigré biochemists in the United States (see below), tried to find a position in Palestine, but was unsuccessful.76
Despite the unfavourable conditions for research and the refusal of many prominent emigrés to even consider it as country of emigration, Palestine/Israel was probably the country in which chemistry benefited most from the immigrants from Germany. It was predominantly young scientists from Nazi Germany who had a decisive impact on basic science as well as industrial applications and war-related research. This held true in particular in organic and physical chemistry. First, I will present some of the medical biochemists who emigrated to Palestine.
6.1.1 Biochemistry Ernst Wertheimer, associate professor at the University of Halle until his dismissal in 1934, became co-founder of the Hadassah Schools of Medicine and Pharmacy of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Felix Bergmann, brother of Ernst David Bergmann, had studied chemistry, and at the same time medicine, at the University of Berlin. He left for Palestine immediately after completing his examinations in chemistry with Carl Neuberg in November 1933 and later became head of the School of Pharmacy of The Hebrew University. In his research he tackled a great variety of different topics in which he connected medical and chemical expertise in order to elucidate biological phenomena. For example, he synthesised new polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and investigated their carcinogenic properties. Bergmann, not a pharmacologist himself, was asked to establish an institute for pharmacology at The Hebrew University in 1950. He went to Boston to Otto Krayer in order to learn from 75
According to Prof. Felix Bergmann, Neuberg was warned by colleagues in the German
army that Palestine would be soon occupied by the German army (author's interview with Prof. Felix Bergmann, 27 December 1994). 76
Author's interview with Prof. Salome Glücksohn-Waelsch, the former wife of
Schoenheimer New York, 5 November 1996.
58
him. He knew about Krayer's morally outstanding behavior in Nazi Germany, and he got to know him as a very decent and fair person.77 In Boston, Felix Bergmann met colleagues who worked on the transmission of impulses in the nervous system. Back home, he started research on active compounds as physiological transmitters or inhibitors of the nervous system, in particular acetyl choline.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, too, became a medical biochemist at The Hebrew University. After completing his studies of chemistry and philosophy at the University of Berlin (Ph.D. in 1924) he studied medicine at the Universities of Cologne and Heidelberg. Due to anti-Semitism after the Nazi takeover, he had to take his MD at the University of Basle in 1934. In the same year he arrived in Palestine, where he began teaching chemistry at The Hebrew University and various high schools. He was a brilliant lecturer, and his teaching soon extended beyond the campus. For some years he worked as a high school teacher. The subjects on which he lectured ranged from physiological bases of mental processes to Maimonides and political issues, which reflected the breadth of his interests.
Andor Fodor from Hungary, a student of Emil Abderhalden in Halle, arrived in Palestine already in 1923 and became professor of biochemistry at The Hebrew University. He was the first science professor in Palestine/Israel. According to Prof. Ephraim Katzir, Fodor was a horrible scientist but a great teacher.78 With the exception of Felix Bergmann, who did not yet have an academic position in Germany, biochemists from Germany contributed to science in 77
Author's interview with Prof. Felix Bergmann, 27 December 1994.
78
Personal information by Prof. Ephraim Katzir, Beer Sheva, 27 May 1998. During the 1920s
and 1930s, Fodor belonged to a group of biochemists who claimed to be able to explain biological actions, for example enzymatic actions, by colloid chemistry, (for example the changing of dispersity), and not by chemical reactions. He became a scientific outsider also by the rejection of the then widely accepted peptide theory of the structure of proteins (see for example A. Fodor, Researches on the chemical structure of proteins and the actions of proteinases, Jerusalem 1939).
59
Palestine/Israel less by their scientific achievements than by their abilities as teachers, organizers, and -- in the case of Leibowitz, as philosophers and critics. As the following paragraphs show, this was different with the early emigrés of chemistry.
6.1.2 Ladislaus Farkas - the founder of physical chemistry What follows is a description and brief analysis of the influence on chemistry in Israel of the two chemists Ladislaus Farkas and Ernst David Bergmann. Ladislaus Farkas, who had been one of Fritz Haber’s assistants at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, together with his brother Adalbert Farkas, founded physical chemistry in Palestine/Israel.79 Adalbert Farkas had been assistant to Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer at the University of Frankfurt until 1933. He stayed in Palestine only for a few years and then moved to the United States, where he received a post in industry. After his dismissal in 1933, Ladislaus Farkas first went to England, where he was given a temporary position at Cambridge University. Haber had recommended Farkas as director of a department of physical chemistry at the Sieff Institute, and when Farkas met Weizmann in September 1934, he did not have an alternative offer. But, in addition, he was attracted by the challenge of creating a new department. Zionism did not play a role in Farkas' decision to move to Palestine. In 1935 Farkas became director of the department of physical chemistry at The Hebrew University, founded by him.
Until the war, Farkas continued and extended basic physical chemical research. Together with his brother Adalbert, who became his senior assistant, he continued research on the ortho - para conversion of hydrogen, which he had started under Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry. They pursued research on the natures of the chemistry of heavy hydrogen and para-hydrogen and their applications for elucidating chemical problems, particularly photochemistry of solutions, and catalysis of hydrogenation reactions. Investigating the hydrogenation of ethylene, acetylene, and benzene, and polymerization reactions of ethylene and butylene, the brothers also worked on the mechanism 79
Michael Chayut (1994) published a detailed study on the influence of Ladislaus Farkas on
physical chemistry in Palestine/Israel. See also Prof. Farkas 1998.
60
of the catalytic activation of hydrogen. They proposed the dissociation of hydrogen on the surface of a catalyst (Farkas and Farkas 1937).
During World War II, Ladislaus Farkas became Scientific Secretary of the Science Advisory Commission to the Palestine War Supply Research. Most of his research projects after 1939 were directed to applied research, and many of his students were supported by grants from industry. At the time, a rapid process of industrialization took place in Palestine, in which emigrés from Germany and other European countries played an important role. Due to the increasing enrollment of emigré students, the number of students at The Hebrew University increased tremendously, from 171 in 1932/33 to 1041 in 1939/40 (Chayut 1994). Farkas established relations with the major economic enterprises at the time, the citrus industry and Palestine Potash Limited at the Dead Sea. He developed methods for the local production of a variety of chemicals, such as chlorine ethane, chlorine ethene, and vitamin D, and contributed to the development of the industrial use of potash, bromine, and magnesium, found in compounds in the Dead Sea (Farkas and Wigner 1952; Prof. Farkas 1998).
After the war, Farkas' plans to resume basic research met with considerable resistance from the university administration, when he asked for re-investment in the laboratory. He wanted to embark on research into isotope and tracer chemistry for which he needed new equipment, and a long argument between Farkas and the administration followed. The Senator did not want to spend more money for research and teaching, arguing that the department had received considerable sums during the war. These experiences led Farkas to write to Weizmann that he doubted the possibility of doing scientific work in the future at The Hebrew University, unless funds for research and instruction were granted soon: "Otherwise, it is to be feared that all the efforts of the last 20 years will be wasted and our university will sink to a level even below that of other small universities in the Middle East" (Chayut 1994). Finally a compromise was reached.
61
When war started in Jerusalem in 1947 and the Arabs took the Mount Scopus Campus, the department of physical chemistry (as other departments) had to be resettled in the city. In December 1948, Farkas set off for the United States in order to purchase scientific instruments for his institute. He died when the plane crashed soon after taking off in Rome. He was fortyfour years old.
Farkas' impact on physical chemistry and its practical applications in Israel lasted until long after his death, as Dr. S. Wald from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.) pointed out in 1972: "Until today, one notices the impact which one single man who was a leader in the application of science, has had in Israel: Prof. Farkas, professor of physical chemistry at The Hebrew University. ... Furthermore, an impressive number of industrial-technological developments are due to him, his pupils and now in turn to their pupils. Such individuals are rare everywhere" (Wald 1992). As this quotation indicates, a large number of professors in chemistry at The Hebrew University and other Israeli universities were Farkas' students or their students. Among his students was Ephraim Katzir, chemist and molecular biologist and later president of Israel, who emphasized the fact that it was due to Farkas that modern chemistry was brought to Palestine/Israel and that he introduced contacts between university and industry. In addition, he recalled that Farkas was a very pleasant person.80 His successor Gabriel Stein received his M.Sc. with Farkas, and Ph.D. with Joseph Weiss in England, who was another of Haber's assistants in Berlin. Joshua Jortner and Raphael Levine, two of Stein's students, became influential physical chemists in Israel.
6.1.3 Ernst David Bergmann - influences in organic chemistry and politics Organic chemistry in Palestine/Israel was established by Max Frankel, who in 1925 left the University of Vienna and emigrated to Palestine, where he became head of the institute of organic chemistry at newly opened The Hebrew University. Frankel belonged to the pioneers, who built The Hebrew University virtually in the desert. Frankel, who became known for his typically German or Austrian habits, in later years became increasingly embittered because he 80
Personal information by Prof. Ephraim Katzir, Beer Sheva, 27 May 1998.
62
had been pushed into the background due to the influence of Ernst David Bergmann from Berlin.81 Bergmann, who came to Palestine in 1934, had a strong influence on research and teaching in organic chemistry particularly after World War II. In addition he contributed to science policy, and played a decisive role in initiating and conducting research for the military.
Bergmann began his research with studies on polycyclic aromatics, supervised by Wilhelm Schlenk at the University of Berlin. In 1928, he became Privatdozent (lecturer ) in Berlin, and in 1932, he co-authored a textbook.82 Schlenk, who was a friend of Haber, had to leave his position in Berlin for political reasons and was transferred to Tübingen in 1935. He was reproached by NSDAP officials for having remained alien to the [Nazi] movement and for continuing his contacts with Jews.83 The story of the book shows, however, that Schlenk, too, was ready to appropriate intellectual contributions of his Jewish colleague in order to maintain his reputation as textbook author. In 1939 the second edition of the book appeared, published by de Gruyter of Berlin, and with Schlenk as sole author (it is one of many examples of nonacknowledgement or stealing of Jewish intellectual property during the Nazi era. Otto Hahn's claim after the war that Lise Meitner had nothing to do with the discovery of nuclear fission is a similar case (Sime 1996, 341-3)). Schlenk informed Bergmann about his decision to omit his name before the book was printed. Bergmann's strong protests did not change Schlenk's mind; he replied that if Bergmann's name were included, the book would not be published at all.84 According to Felix Bergmann, Ernst's brother, 95% of the book had been written by Ernst David Bergmann.85 81
This is the opinion of Prof. Aharon Loewenstein, who thinks that Frankel basically was a
fine person (personal communication, Jerusalem, 18 May 1998). 82
Wilhelm Schlenk, Ausführliches Lehrbuch der organischen Chemie. Von Wilhelm Schlenk
and Ernst Bergmann, Bd. 1-2, Leipzig und Berlin 1932: Deuticke. 83
Berlin Document Center, file Wilhelm Schlenk.
84
Correspondence between Bergmann and Schlenk in the Weizmann Archives in Rehovot.
85
Author's interview with Felix Bergmann, 27 December, 1994.
63
The Bergmanns came from a German Zionist family, and the father was a rabbi in Berlin. When Ernst David Bergmann was dismissed in April 1933, Carl Neuberg recommended him to Chaim Weizmann who was looking for a director of the new Daniel Sieff Institute in Rehovot.86 Bergmann went to London, where a long friendship began between the two chemists. For several months, they organized coworkers and equipment for the institute. In January 1934, Bergmann arrived in Palestine, and the Daniel-Sieff Institute was opened under his directorship. From 1939, he worked on war-related research projects for the Ministry of Supply in England and also for the military in the United States.
When Bergmann returned to Palestine after World War II, he secretly worked on military projects. He grew closer to Ben Gurion, Weizmann's rival in the Zionist movement who in 1948 became Israel's first prime minister. Ben Gurion appointed Bergmann head of Hemed, the scientific department of Haganah, the Jewish Defense Force, which soon became the Israeli Defense Force, a position which Bergmann held until his death. After the foundation of the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1949 (the Daniel Sieff- Institute became its department of organic chemistry) Bergmann became scientific director. At the Sieff and, later, the Weizmann Institute a group of young people from Hemed worked under his guidance on weapons' development, some of which could in fact be used by the army. Indeed, much of the research was devoted to the needs of Haganah (Cohen 1998, 118). This met with strong opposition from Weizmann, Israel's first president. He loved Bergmann like a son, but strongly rejected the execution of research for the military at his Institute where he exclusively wanted pure and applied scientific research to be carried out.87 In his opinion, research for the military should be carried out in government research centers. He did not want the generals to decide about the research at his Institute and rejected any dependence on funds from the Ministry of Defense. Mainly for these differences concerning the concept of a national science 86
Ibid.
87
Personal communication by Prof. Ephraim Katzir, Beer Sheva, 27 May 1998. See also
Cohen 1998.
64
(some personal problems, in which Mrs. Weizmann and Bergmann's second wife, Hani Bergmann, were involved, contributed to the strains) the relation between Weizmann and Bergmann deteriorated to such an extent that in 1951 Bergmann had to leave the Weizmann Institute.
In 1950, he was appointed professor of organic chemistry at The Hebrew University. The organic chemistry department was divided into two, one headed by Max Frankel, the other by Bergmann. Bergmann's students, many colleagues, and politicians were impressed by his grasp of fundamental knowledge, his energy and talent for organization.88 Chaim Gilon, professor of organic chemistry at The Hebrew University, who was in close scientific contact with Bergmann for two years, emphasized his great knowledge in all fields of chemistry, which he taught in nine parallel lectures: 89 "His lectures were brilliant. He was a very ambitious and a very capable man. Having an excellent memory, he could tell every student who asked him about organic syntheses the page number of the pertinent volume of a journal or book which contained the answer."
Among Bergmann's main fields of research were: 1. Reactions of metals with aromatic compounds (a continuation of his work with Schlenk); 2. Natural products, especially in connection to medicine (he isolated these substances in order to modify them chemically and test their biochemical behaviors); 3. Physical methods in organic chemistry (for example dipole moment, UV calculations and quantum mechanics); 4. Fluorine chemistry. Chaim Gilon said, "He had the courage to enter new scientific areas, for example he went into nuclear physics and from there to nuclear medicine. He always saw the application side of science. Coming from a German origin, he never spent a wasted minute, and he embarked on many activities apart from his research. Thus he became scientific adviser to Ben Gurion, and it is due to Bergmann's influence that science in Israel became highly respected and by that gained much more support financially than before. If Bergmann had concentrated his forces, he 88
See, for example, Ginsburg 1963.
89
Author's interview with Prof. Chaim Gilon, 14 and 27 December 1994.
65
would presumably have achieved more in his own research."90 Joseph Klein, professor of organic chemistry at The Hebrew University, recalls, "He was a good teacher for students who wanted to learn. His lectures were well prepared, but not interrupted by nice stories. He worked hard until the last day of his life."91
Bergmann transferred from Germany to Israel not only his fields of research but also typically German attitudes, such as punctuality, and high demands on himself and his students. But, as Chaim Gilon recalls, he also changed some of his attitudes after his emigration. Thus he was able to combine his sense of order with Israeli improvisation, and though he did not become close to his students, he treated them in a friendly way. He remained excited by science his whole life. Bergmann helped science in Israel become respected and well funded by, among other things, emphasizing its potential or real importance for the military. Thus Bergmann's greatest contribution to Israel was, as Ephraim Katzir emphasized not through his science, but mainly in politics and defense activities.92 Bergmann's wife Chani Bergmann gave a similar assessment:
Bergmann had worked 18 years, from 1933 till 1951, with Weizmann, and then another 18 years together with David Ben Gurion, in a partnership which greatly influenced Israel's development. He became a personal adviser to Ben Gurion and Shimon Peres and a scientific advisor to the Minister of Defense under Ben Gurion. He dreamt together with Ben Gurion of greening the desert, improving the scientific educational system, developing a militarily self-reliant and strong Israel. He planned the nuclear research programs with Shimon Peres as well as the Dimona facilities.93
90
Ibid.
91
Personal communication, 23 November 1994.
92
Personal Communication, 27 May 1998. Ephraim Katzir got to know Bergmann well
directly after World War II. 93
Personal communication, 17 December 1994.
66
In his analysis of the early history of Israel's nuclear project, Avner Cohen (1998) emphasized Bergmann's decisive role in convincing Ben Gurion that nuclear energy might be the key for the survival and prosperity of Israel, because nuclear technology would create unprecedented options for both civilian and military applications. In 1952 Ben Gurion founded the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) on Bergmann's insistence; Bergmann was appointed its first chair. Cohen demonstrated that Bergmann's wish to model Israel's nuclear program on French lines, that is state-sponsored, project-oriented big science aimed primarily at the production of nuclear materials, met with strong opposition from the nuclear physicists in the IAEC. To them nuclear research and teaching, not production, had the highest priority, and they wanted the IAEC primarily to support and coordinate academic research. In addition, they resented Bergmann's authoritarian management style as chairman, which one of them (Zvi Lipkin) later described as a "Russian or Prussian regime" (Cohen 1998, 130). Under the Minister of Defense Pinhas Lavon, the physicists succeeded for some years to carry out their nuclear research in an academic environment at the Weizmann Institute; the budget for nuclear research was cut (Cohen 1998, 133). Only after Ben Gurion came to power again, in 1955, first as Minister of Defense and then as Prime Minister, did Bergmann's influence grow again, and the nuclear project received first priority.
Bergmann's energetic dedication not only to science and teaching, but predominantly to politics and military applications of science, is reminiscent of the career of Fritz Haber. As advisor to Ben Gurion, Bergmann contributed decisively to the construction of the nuclear plants in Dimona, aimed at civilian and military purposes. This parallels Haber's initiation and organization of gas warfare in World War I. However, I see a decisive difference in the fact that Haber prolonged a war by introducing internationally banned chemical weapons that served entirely the nationalistic ambitions of a would-be superpower, whereas Bergmann placed himself at the disposal of a country that had become a homeland for many of those expelled by this same aspiring super power, and the survivors of the shoah. The political
67
implications of Bergmann's nuclear option and the long term impact of the implementation of his concept of big science on science in Israel have been dealt with elsewhere.94
There is not doubt that many German-Jewish emigré scientists and scholars contributed greatly to the emergence of Palestine's and then Israel's universities as leaders in the Middle East that even reached international standards within a short time. In his foreword to The Hebrew University's semi-jubilee volume of 1950, Albert Einstein emphasized the importance of universities and of science for the development of Israel. But at the same time he warned against certain attitudes, such as a narrow utilitarian spirit, undue nationalism, purely formalistic observance of religious doctrines, and provincialism that might endanger the possible beneficial influence of science on the development of any country. Einstein ends by expressing his hope that the university "will become a factor in Israel in strengthening the spirit of mutual understanding among men, which comes with selfless striving after truth." 95 The great influence that Ladislaus Farkas and Ernst David Bergmann had on science in Palestine/Israel when they were still quite young can be related in considerable part to their personalities. It is also due to the fact that in their adopted homeland there was almost no competition in their respective scientific fields and, in the case of Bergmann, that he was given an extraordinary amount of power because of the contingencies of war research and the military defense economy in Israel after 1948. Farkas and Bergmann might not have become so influential had Fritz Haber or Richard Willstätter emigrated to Israel.
With respect to the possible influences that individual emigré scientists might have displayed, Roald Hoffmann perceives a great difference between the United States and Israel. He said to me: "In Israel, Ernst David Bergmann was extremely powerful. He dominated Israel's organic chemistry for many years. In the beginning it was good, later it seems to me 94
Most recently in Avner Cohen, Israel and the bomb, New York 1998: Columbia Univ.
Press. 95
Foreword to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1925-1950. April 1950. Semi-Jubilee
Volume. Jerusalem: Goldberg's Press.
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less so. Whereas in the United States it was not possible for the German refugees to duplicate the German hierarchical system, it was possible in Israel." Carl Neuberg, one of those old German-Jewish emigrés who did not succeed to adjust themselves to the American system, set the values differently. In 1955 he concluded an expert opinion on Yeshayahu Leibowitz, at that time a biochemist at The Hebrew University, as follows: ”As I remember, L. was a pleasant individualist and his personality was about the opposite of what is called in the United States cooperative.”96
6.2 The United States If the German refugee chemists were less dominant in the United States than in Israel, one has to ask first: To what extent were they given academic positions in the United States? The answer differs greatly with respect to various chemical disciplines. Two emigré scientists, the biochemist Rudolf Schoenheimer and the polymer chemist Herman Mark provide case studies of the integration and influence of German Jewish scientists into the American scientific communitiy.
German Jewish emigrés in the United States became most influential in biochemistry. It was a field that in the United States was comparatively under-developed, and in which Germans were more advanced. Biochemistry became a niche for emigrés, among them the most talented biochemists of this century. It is an example of a whole discipline that was changed dramatically by the refugees.97
6.2.1 Influences in biochemistry by younger scientists - the example of Rudolf Schoenheimer
96
American Philosophical Society, Chargaff papers, file Leibowitz.
97
On the development of biochemistry in the United States, see Kohler 1982. I thank Robert
Kohler for discussions on this subject. The great achievements of German Jewish biochemists are described in a comprehensive study by Nachmansohn (1979).
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As was the case with many other German refugees, most of the older and already successful biochemists, such as Otto Loewi, Otto Meyerhof, and particularly Carl Neuberg, had problems adjusting themselves to the new situation, i.e. lower salaries, smaller laboratory space, fewer co-workers and assistants (if at all). Otto Loewi did not flee immediately when Hitler entered Austria because he was completing an important experiment. He was imprisoned for two months, made his way to England, and in 1940 to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the New York University College of Medicine as research professor of pharmacology, an unsalaried post. He was supported by the Emergency Relief Committee, and his research was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation for several years. In the beginning he lived on 70 cents a day for food and had a very cheap room. He was compelled by the Germans to sign over his Nobel Prize money. According to an official of the Rockefeller Foundation, Loewi was apparently happy at work, but the salary matter touched his pride, because he did not like to be supported by any emergency committee but wanted the money to come from a regular university appointment. The official was told by a colleague not to bother further about Loewi. "It takes time for a distinguished emigré like Loewi to get adjusted to a simpler life."98
Max Bergmann was the only biochemist of this generation, that is of those who had an influential position in Germany before they were forced to leave, who managed to found a biochemical school in the United States. As mentioned earlier, Bergmann, formerly director of the KWI for leather research in Dresden and professor at the city's Technical University, left Germany in summer 1933 and received a position at the Rockefeller Institute of Medicine. His co-worker Leonidas Zervas, who had developed with Bergmann the carbobenzoxy method of peptide synthesis in 1932 (see above), followed Bergmann to New York. At the Rockefeller Institute, Bergmann founded an influential school of protein chemistry, himself continuing research in the tradition of Emil Fischer. On the one hand he worked on analytical methods to determine the amino-acid composition of peptides, and on the other he conducted studies into 98
RAL to FBH in Sept. 1940, Rockefeller Archive Center, Collection Rockefeller
Foundation, Record Group 1.1 Series 200 (US), Box 103, Fldr. 1251-2.
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protein-degrading enzymes and peptide synthesis. Among his co-workers were Joseph Fruton and Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat, and, some years later, William H. Stein and Stanford Moore. By synthesizing peptides of known composition with the help of the carbobenzoxy method, as substrates for pepsin and other proteinases, Fruton was able to show that these enzymes can indeed hydrolyze simple peptides. Thus he removed prevailing objections to the peptide theory of protein structure (Fruton 1979).
In cooperation with Stein, Bergmann developed the first reliable method of determining the amino acid composition of proteins ("solubility product method"). The breakthrough in the methodology of separation and analysis was achieved after Bergmann's death (in 1944) by Moore and Stein, who received the Nobel Prize in 1972. They succeeded in using chromatography for the separation of amino acids. To render amino acids visible, they used ninhydrin, discovered by Siegfried Ruhemann in Cambridge in 1910.99
Most of those who transformed the discipline of biochemistry in the United States, belonged to a younger generation of extraordinarily gifted scientists. Eminent examples are Rudolf Schönheimer (later Schoenheimer) and Fritz Lipmann, the latter ranking among the most important biochemists of this century. Since Lipmann left Germany before 1933 with the help of a fellowship, he was not a refugee in the strict sense. However, like other refugees, he could not return to Germany later.100
Schoenheimer, born in Berlin, studied medicine at the University of Berlin and after receiving his degree in 1922 worked as a resident pathologist at the Moabit hospital in Berlin. He became interested in the problem of arteriosclerosis and studied this condition in experimental animals using cholesterol. Recognizing his lack of knowledge in biochemistry, he studied for three years at the institute for physiological chemistry under Karl Thomas in 99
For the history of peptide chemistry see Srinivaran et al. 1979; Wieland 1991.
100
On Lipmann's life and work, see his autobiography (1971), and Kleinkauf, von Döhren,
and Jaenicke 1988.
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Leipzig, supported by a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1926, Rudolf Schoenheimer became assistant to Ludwig Aschoff at the institute of pathology at the University of Freiburg, as well as a lecturer.
A detailed study on the development of Schoenheimer's research was published by Robert Kohler (1977), who showed that the scientist who had the strongest influence on Schoenheimer and the development of his general concept of research was Ludwig Aschoff. Aschoff regarded metabolic disorders as arteriosclerosis and gallstones as chemical disorders of the cholesterol metabolism and not as merely anatomical diseases. Therefore he cooperated with the organic chemist Adolf Windaus with whom he studied the metabolism of sterols, for example cholesterol, for many years. At the beginning of the 1930s, Schoenheimer developed a research concept which was different from Aschoff's and Windaus'. He started to look at, and finally placed at the center of his interest, the intermediary metabolism of cholesterol, which was regarded as nearly metabolically inert. His work was supported by the Josiah Macy Foundation from 1931.
Until then, the well known cycles of intermediary metabolism, such as glycolysis, also called the Embden-Meyerhof cycle, urea cycle and citric acid cycle, (both of which were elucidated by Hans Krebs in 1932 and 1937, respectively), had been discovered without tracer methods (see above). It is true, Georg von Hevesy, since 1926 professor for physical chemistry at the University of Freiburg, in 1923 used for the first time a radioactive isotope (the lead isotope 208Pb, at the time thorium D) for tackling a biological question, he used it as an indicator for the study of the absorption and translocation of lead in plants (Hevesy 1923). The toxicity of these heavy metal tracers, however, rendered them unsuitable for most applications in biology and medicine. Von Hevesy started in the early 1930s to use artificial radioactive isotopes of light elements, such as radio-phosphorus, as indicators and to apply this method to medical problems. Being of Jewish ancestry, von Hevesy resigned from his Freiburg position in 1934, shortly before he would have been dismissed, and emigrated to Denmark where he worked at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen. In 1943 he emigrated to
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Sweden. He received a Nobel Prize in 1943 for his development of the tracer method. An account of the life of this exceptional scientist and the development of his research has been given by his co-worker Hilde Levi (1985). Schoenheimer's last study completed in Freiburg was also conducted without using isotopes. Together with Fritz Breusch he developed chemical and physiological methods for examining the influence of foodstuffs and drugs on the synthesis and decomposition of cholesterol in mice.101 These experiments led him to the insight that in the mammalian tissue "cholesterol is continuously being formed and destroyed," which Schoenheimer was soon to be able to confirm unambiguously.
However, his work in Germany was suddenly terminated. Being Jewish, Schoenheimer was dismissed in 1933 by Freiburg rector Martin Heidegger. He emigrated to the United States, where Aschoff helped him get a post as researcher in the department of Hans Clarke at the Columbia School of Physicians and Surgeons. Clarke had founded a large biochemistry department, similar to that established by Frederick Hopkins at Cambridge University. This biochemistry laboratory became one of the international leading centers of biochemical research in the United States, in part due to the influence of emigrés from Germany and Austria, in particular Rudolf Schoenheimer. As was pointed out by Erwin Chargaff, one of the biochemists at Columbia, this was not only due to their particular research program and expertise, but also to their attitude towards science: "The contribution of the few Europeans was large; we introduced a much sharper scientific atmosphere. American natural science was given breath by the Europeans. By that I mean a certain seriousness with which you conduct science."102 Chargaff emigrated to the United States in 1935 and is best known for having shown (1949-1952) that the molar ratio of particular bases of DNA (adenine and thymine, on the one hand, and guanine and cytosine, on the other), is close to one, a result that was decisive for the subsequent elucidation of the double helix structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick.
101
Schoenheimer and Breusch 1933, see also Kohler 1977.
102
Author’s interview with Prof. Erwin Chargaff, New York City, 28 January 1997.
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After his emigration, Schoenheimer adapted his research program to the study of the intermediary metabolism of sterols and fatty acids, using von Hevesy's tracer concept and deuterium, discovered by Urey in 1932. The Rockefeller Foundation had established a fund to enable chemists trained in deuterium techniques to apply their special knowledge to biochemical problems, and this had a decisive impact on Schoenheimer's work. In 1934 David Rittenberg came from Urey's group to the laboratory of biochemistry at Columbia University where Schoenheimer had become head of a research group. Schoenheimer's and Rittenberg's success with deuterium for problems of intermediary metabolism convinced the Columbia group and the head of the department, Hans T. Clarke, to develop a serious program in the medical and biological application of isotopes.
Schoenheimer and Rittenberg used deuterium as a tracer for studies of fat and cholesterol metabolism. They carried out a few experiments on sugar formation and later worked on amino acid and protein metabolism. If any deuterium-containing substance, for example cholesterol, is metabolized in an animal, the isotope produces heavy water that can be detected in serum, urine, etc., indicating how much of the material administered was metabolized in the organism. Schoenheimer and Rittenberg developed methods of preparing almost all physiological compounds with deuterium, making it possible for the first time to follow their transport from the intestine and their metabolism.
When the heavy isotope of nitrogen, 15N, became available in 1937, Schoenheimer and his colleagues used it for amino acid metabolism, developing two general methods for the synthesis of amino acids and similar substances containing 15N.103 The principle of the 15N method is analogous to the deuterium method but the synthetic methods as well as the analysis of 15N require different approaches, developed by Schoenheimer. His laboratory was the only one for some time that used 15N to study intermediate metabolism. Schoenheimer's expectation that the "determination of the 'half life time' of organic substances" in the
103
See for example Schoenheimer and Rittenberg 1939.
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organism would bring a completely new insight into physiological and probably pathological reactions proved true.104
In 1942, "The dynamic state of body constituents", containing three lectures which Schoenheimer presented at Harvard University, was published, after his untimely death in 1941. Clark and Schoenheimer's associates Rittenberg and Sarah Ratner revised Schoenheimer's drafts. As is indicated by the general title of the lectures, Schoenheimer presented in them "some results of modern biochemistry which suggest that all constituents of living matter, whether functional or structural, of simple or of complex constitution, are in a steady state of rapid flux"(p.3).
In his first lecture Schoenheimer discussed historical developments of theories concerning the role of food for the animal organism and the importance of the availability of labels for organic molecules as prerequisites for experiments to support this view of a "rapid flux": In the middle of the 19th century, Hermann von Helmholtz, for example, compared the animal with a combustion engine (the food representing the fuel, and the organs the working part). Later the German physiologist Rubner and the American biochemist Folin developed a concept of the interaction between the diet and the whole organism. They suggested that the mechanical parts are subject to continual wear and tear and must constantly be regenerated by food materials.
According to all subsequent theories, the structural elements of the body are primarily in a fixed or stable state. Most of the knowledge of intermediate metabolism was the result of equilibrium experiments that could give little insight into the nature and extent of those chemical reactions between body constituents that do not produce metabolic end products. Attempts to label organic molecules, for example by replacing hydrogen atoms by halogens in fatty acids, greatly affected their chemical properties. Only after Urey discovered and 104
Schoenheimer's report to the Rockefeller Foundation in April 1938, RAC, Collection
Rockefeller Fundation, Record Group 1.1 Series 200, Box 130, Fldr 1604.
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concentrated deuterium and other natural isotopes could organic molecules be marked with isotopes of elements that occur naturally in these molecules, the most important at the time being deuterium and 15N.
This account makes it clear that apart from the influence that Aschoff, von Hevesy and Urey had on Schoenheimer's research, and apart from his ability and drive to develop basic biochemical questions and new methods for their solution, the research conditions he was given in the United States were crucial to his success. Schoenheimer did not receive a high position -- when he died he was still an associate professor -- but he was given the opportunity to found a center of research into biochemistry of metabolism at Columbia Medical School, financially supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.
His personality played a role, too. Erwin Chargaff, who had worked in the same laboratory as Schoenheimer, described him as emotional and dynamic. Frank Blair Hanson also of the Rockefeller Foundation, characterized Schoenheimer as a dynamic person, with a great deal of drive.105 According to Hans T. Clarke, "one of Schoenheimer's most striking characteristics was his ability to correlate pertinent facts from highly diversified branches of knowledge and bring them to bear upon problems under immediate consideration. He not only sought the advice of experts in fields other than his own, but freely discussed his scientific plans with his colleagues as well as his direct collaborators. He led his research group with tact, understanding and constant stimulation" (Clarke 1941).
Schoenheimer's personality might have played a role in focusing his interest on the metabolism of substances such as cholesterol, (previously largely considered as inert) and to develop methods to find more and more evidence for the "dynamic state of body constituents." He met a tragic end: On 11 September 1941, he committed suicide at his home at the age of
105
FBH, October 25, 1935, ibid.
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43, stating in various notes that he intended to end his life because of mental depression and personal troubles.106
Schoenheimer might have received a Nobel Prize, had he not died so early. Among his students was Konrad Bloch, who, after studying chemistry at the Technical University in Munich, was forced to leave Germany and received his Ph.D. in 1938 under Schoenheimer. Bloch successfully discerned the intermediate reactions in the synthesis of cholesterol by using deuterium-marked acetic acid, an achievement for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1964 (together with Feodor Lynen of Munich). A review of the history of research into sterols shows that it started in Germany in the 1920s through work conducted by Heinrich Wieland and Adolf Windaus. They succeeded in elucidating the structure of the first sterols. Schoenheimer's and Bloch's research are examples of the transfer of research to the United States.
6.2.2 The founding of academic polymer chemistry by Herman Mark Polymer chemistry is an academic field in which a single person, Herman Mark, gained enormous influence in the United States. Mark obtained his Ph.D. with Wilhelm Schlenk at the University of Vienna and in 1922 moved, at the suggestion of Fritz Haber, to the KWI for Fiber Research in Berlin. 107 The director, Reginald Herzog, wanted him to elucidate the molecular structure of cotton, cellulosic natural material and rayon, with X-rays -- work that had been started by Michael Polanyi. In the mid-1920s Mark was among the first scientists to show that the concept of macromolecules, as proposed by Hermann Staudinger, was compatible with the results of X-ray crystallography. In common with organic chemists and colloid chemists, most X-ray crystallographers at that time rejected the possibility of the existence of macromolecules.
106
New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 23 1941.
107
On Herman Mark's life and work, see Bohning and Sturchio 1986; Mark 1993; Morawetz
1995; Reinhardt 1998.
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In 1927, Mark became head of a division of polymer chemistry at the Central Research Laboratory of IG Farben at Ludwigshafen under Kurt H. Meyer. Mark's work focused on physical techniques, such as X-ray and electron diffraction, viscosity and osmotic measurements of polymers. He assembled a team of organic and physical chemists and physicists to study the structure and synthesis of polymers and other chemicals. They worked on the synthesis of polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, and the synthetic rubbers Buna N and Buna S on a somewhat larger scale (Bohning and Sturchio 1986, 19).
In pure research, a major undertaking was the solution of the structure of cellulose. In 1926 the American botanists O. L. Sponsler and W. H. Dore proposed, based on X-ray data, that cellulose consisted of long chains of glucose units, but this was inconsistent with chemical evidence that cellulose could be degraded to cellobiose.108 Mark and Meyer solved the X-ray diffraction pattern to yield a structure in agreement with the chemical evidence (Meyer and Mark 1928; Morawetz 1995). Mark was interested in the relationship between the molecular characteristics of polymers and their technologically useful properties. On the basis of the cellulose crystal structure, the energy required to break its covalent bonds, and using spectroscopic data, he calculated the ultimate strength of an "ideal cellulose fiber" (Morawetz 1995). Meyer gave Mark freedom to conduct research that was not necessarily related to industrial applications. For example, he carried out the first electron diffraction studies of gases, and he determined the bond length and bond angles for various organic molecules, such as carbon tetrachloride and benzene. In 1930 he concluded that the data for cis-1,2108
The idea that cellulose has a macromolecular structure and consists of long chains of
cellobiose, bound to each other by covalent bonds, was first presented by Karl Freudenberg in 1921. He provided the evidence by means of organic chemistry some years later (Freudenberg and Braun 1941). Based on studies of the artificially synthesized long-chain polyoxymethylenes, which he regarded as models for cellulose, Hermann Staudinger, too, stated that cellulose represents a linear long chain macromolecule. However, he did not deal with the question of cellobiose units and the way they were connected (Staudinger et al. 1927).
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dichloroethane were incompatible with free rotation, greatly impressing the young Linus Pauling when he visited the laboratory (Morawetz 1995).
In 1932 Meyer left the IG due to disagreements at board levels concerning the future of the company.109 Soon after, he accepted an appointment at the University of Geneva, because he considered it impossible to obtain a professorship at the Technical University of Berlin, a position he would have preferred. Hermann Mark, too, left the IG after he was advised by the chairman of the board, Dr. W.K.Friedrich Gaus, to look for a university position outside Germany. If Hitler came to power, it was reasoned Mark would not be promoted (Bohning and Sturchio 1986, 29-30). In autumn of 1932, Mark accepted a professorship at the University of Vienna as successor to Rudolf Wegscheider. He retained good contacts with the IG which continued to pay his salary for several years. With this support from the IG and from other industries, Mark set up an institute for polymer research and teaching as an interdisciplinary activity, the first one at a university at that time. He started courses there with Philip Gross, Franz Patat, Anton Wacek, and Otto Kratky, giving the introductory courses himself. His industrial sponsors liked the fact that Mark had developed a teaching and educational program in polymer chemistry, and sent him many students. Though he did not do much consulting for industry, participants in Mark's program went to the I.G. or other companies such as Continental, Michelin, and CIBA.
In his research, Mark laid more emphasis on kinetics and the mechanism of polymerization reactions than on synthesis, because IG Farben was doing so much in this latter area (Bohning and Sturchio 1986, 33). For the characterization of polymers he needed viscosity, osmotic, centrifuge, and diffusion measurements. Among the colloid chemists he employed for this work were Frederick Eirich, Max Bunzl, Herbert Margaretha; physicists included Hans Thirring, Robert Simha, and H.Dostal. Together with the Dutch physical chemist Roelof Houwink, Mark developed a non-linear version of Staudinger's law of the viscosity of macromolecules that accounted for the flexibility of these molecules. This reformulation of 109
Bayer archive in Leverkusen, file Kurt H. Meyer.
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Staudinger's law formed a central point of a long-lasting controversy with Staudinger who, as mentioned above, held fast to the idea of macromolecules as long stiff chain molecules.110
After the Anschluss and following a short imprisonment in Vienna because of his friendship with the former Chancellor Dollfuss, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1934, Mark fled to Canada via Switzerland and England. Many of his students and co-workers had to leave Austria, among them the following individuals who later set up institutes of their own or headed industrial laboratories: Frederick Eirich, Herbert Margaretha, Wacek, E. Suess, Robert Simha, Eugen Guth, and Hans Motz. Mark became head of research at the Canadian International Paper Company in Hawkesbury, Ontario. They renewed the offer they had given Mark before 1938, which he had declined.
After two years, Mark decided that in Hawkesbury it was impossible to pursue his broad scientific interests. The du Pont company, with which Mark had worked on developing viscose fibers to be used in tire cords, offered him a du Pont consultancy with an academic position at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Thus in 1940 he moved to Brooklyn, where he became adjunct professor and was assigned to the Shellac Bureau, a small laboratory supported by industry, whose task was to characterize shellac chemically. Since the material was imported from India, and access became difficult during the war, Mark was given the task of searching for synthetic substitutes.
The fact that Mark was given the opportunity to develop a teaching program in polymer chemistry and a research center in this field was largely due to the support of a single man, the dean of Brooklyn Polytechnic, Dr. Raymond Kirk. Thus in addition to Peter Hohenstein, an organic chemist and former student of Mark's in Vienna who was already at the Shellac Bureau, Mark could employ Robert Simha, another former student, and Turner Alfrey, to 110
See various articles by Hermann Staudinger, Herman Mark, and Kurt H. Meyer in the
Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft between 1928 and 1935, and the account by Claus Priesner (1980).
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establish a teaching program which began in September 1940. Since the literature in polymer chemistry was almost totally in German at the time, it was important that all these people could understand German (Alfrey could read it). As in Vienna, Mark taught the introductory course himself. Many students came immediately, mostly from industry.
Research until 1945 was largely devoted to wartime projects. Mark received large grants from the military and the government. With the substantial funding he could hire many people. Among the researchers who joined Mark during the early forties (in addition to those already mentioned) were Isidor Fankuchen and Kurt G. Stern (another German refugee), who set up the ultracentrifuge at the institute, Paul M.Doty, A.V.Tobolsky, and B.H. Zimm. They investigated synthetic rubber and its properties, for example emulsion polymerization (Hohenstein and Mark 1936) and the mechanical properties of polymers (Alfrey 1948). Other work was done on the permeability of membranes with the help of osmotic measurements, work that was related to the improvement of gas-masks (Bohning and Sturchio 1986, 58). After the war Mark's former co-worker from Vienna, Frederick Eirich, and Herbert Morawetz joined Mark at Brooklyn Polytechnic.
The polymer activities at Brooklyn Polytechnic led in 1947 to the foundation of the "Institute of Polymer Research," the first such graduate program at an American university. In contrast to other departments of polymer chemistry, as for example at the University of Illinois under Carl S. Marvel which focused on either synthesis, characterization, or properties of polymers, Mark pursued the idea of creating a new discipline that covered all the aspects of polymer research (Bohning and Sturchio 1986, 35). Bringing together physicists, chemists and technicians, Mark succeeded in founding modern polymer science as a multidisciplinary academic discipline. The Polymer Research Institute soon became the international leader in this field and remained so for decades after World War II. Together with Eric Proskauer, Mark founded the Journal of Polymer Science in 1946, three years after Hermann Staudinger had transformed the Journal für Praktische Chemie into Journal für Makromolekulare Chemie. In
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August 1943, the first issue of the Journal für Makromolekulare Chemie appeared. The second part of this issue appeared in June 1944.
Mark’s contribution to polymer science in the United States was less in the scientific field than in organizing research and teaching. His major scientific achievements took place while he was still in Germany and Austria. This development of his interest in organizing polymer science started in Germany when he set up the laboratory at IG Farben and the polymer teaching and research program at the University of Vienna. It was enhanced in the United States through support from the army and government during the war. After the war he extended his organizational talents to projects outside the United States. For example, as chairman of the founding committee of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, he set up a polymer research program at this institute.
In summary, Herman Mark's success in founding polymer chemistry as a discipline in American academia is unique with respect to the influence of a single German or Austrian emigré chemist. Several factors, related to Mark himself and to his environment, account for it. First there was Mark's vast experience in basic and applied polymer science that he received in Germany and Austria and that was not yet widespread among chemists. Second, a far-sighted man, the dean Dr. Kirk, provided Mark with the support he needed at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Third, Mark's teaching program was of great interest to American industry, and the war provided a need for the kind of research Mark was about to start. Thus his work was amply supported after he came to the United States in 1940.
It can be assumed that Mark's personality accounted for his success, too. All written sources, and the descriptions given by his former students and colleagues characterize Mark as a uniquely pleasant personality who laughed a lot and had a strong tendency to forget about
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unpleasant things.111 Sheldon Atlas described him as "a class of himself, a scholar, gentleman, humanist, bon vivant, an athlete." Herbert Morawetz emphasizes Mark's intuition: "He had what you call in German ‘Fingerspitzengefuehl’ (a quick intuition). I remember him talking about his visit to Ziegler and his excitement about Ziegler's results at a time when the chain molecules produced by the Ziegler initiator contained only a very few monomer residues. Mark had a great feeling of what might become important, and he used his energy to create an international community of polymer scientists." Helmut Ringsdorf, who got to know Mark in Brooklyn and during Mark's later visits to Marburg and Mainz, admired Mark "because he was interested in young people to an unusual extent. Each time he was here, he was ready to talk to them for hours. He never dominated them but encouraged the students without saying, 'this we did already years ago.'"
His readiness to forget unpleasant things also applied to his contacts with former Nazis, again a singular act among German emigrés, many of whom acted very differently in this respect. Thus among the many foreign scholars whom Mark invited to Brooklyn was Kurt Hess, who was not only a former member of the NSDAP, SA and SS, but who also denounced Lise Meitner to the authorities when she was still at the KWI for Chemistry (Sime 1996, 1845). Despite the controversy with Staudinger, Mark invited him to give a lecture in 1957. Staudinger, who still believed that macromolecules were stiff rods, was received in Brooklyn as the pioneer of polymers, the person "who led the crusade for polymers" (Dr. Atlas). However, Staudinger's institute in Freiburg had become "scientifically middle aged" (Prof. Ringsdorf), and modern polymer science had to be brought back to Germany by younger scientists.
6.2.3 Emigrés in organic, inorganic, physical chemistry, and industry
111
Author's interviews with Dr. Sheldon Atlas (New York City, 17 November 1996), Prof.
Frederick Eirich (Hightstown, NJ, 30 January 1997), Prof. Herbert Morawetz (Brooklyn, 4 November 1996), and Prof. Helmut Ringsdorf (Mainz, 20 August 1996).
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In contrast to polymer chemistry, there was almost no influence by German emigrés on American academic organic and inorganic chemistry, and only little in physical chemistry, apart from polymer chemistry. The reason, as I see it, is that no emigré organic or inorganic chemist received a professorship or chair in the United States at all, apart from Max Bergmann, whose work was predominantly in biochemistry. Emigré organic chemists from Germany gained influential academic positions after their emigrations (apart from Israel) in Turkey (Fritz Arndt), Egypt (Alexander Schönberg), inorganic chemists in Brazil (Fritz Feigl), and England (Fritz Paneth), that is, apart from England, in countries at the periphery of the scientific centers of Western Europe and the United States. Those organic chemists who came to the United States, however, ended up in industry, despite good teaching credentials. Among them were Fritz Straus, formerly professor at University of Berlin, and Arnold Weissberger, formerly lecturer at the University of Leipzig.
This picture changed in the next generation of emigrés. An example is Prof. Ernest Eliel who obtained his Abitur in Cologne in 1938 and came to the United States in 1946 after an odyssey which included internships in Edinburgh, Canada, and Trinidad, and studies at the Universities of Edinburgh and Havana. In 1948 he became a member of the department of chemistry at Notre Dame University, in 1960 professor of organic chemistry, in 1964 head of department, and in 1972 professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Why did emigré organic chemists from Germany not gain access to American academia? In part, the reason lies in the already existing strong schools of organic chemistry in the United States and different focus in research interest, such as petroleum-based products rather than coal products. Organic chemistry had expanded dramatically in the wake of the First World War when German products were cut off.112 Moreover, the fact that the internationally most
112
There was for example the large chemistry department at the University of Illinois at
Urbana headed by Roger Adams, which was preeminent in the field of organic syntheses and
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renowned German organic chemists, with the exception of the already retired Richard Willstätter, were not Jewish and thus not forced to emigrate, contributed to the lack of interest in emigré organic chemists in the United States. In this context it is interesting that Adolf Butenandt and Adolf Windaus in 1935 received an offer from Harvard University and the University of Chicago, respectively (which they declined).113
The situation was a bit different in physical chemistry. As John W. Servos has demonstrated, physical chemistry had become a strong discipline in the United States in the 1920s. Whereas at the beginning of the century, American students and postdocs went to Germany, in particular to Wilhelm Ostwald, to study physical chemistry, they went to Europe in the 1920s, for example to Copenhagen or Göttingen, to study theoretical physics in order to become better physical chemists (Servos 1990, 277). By 1933, the year in which the first issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics appeared, leadership of the new chemical physics, born like its predecessor physical chemistry in Europe, had passed to the United States, as names like Henry Eyring, G.N.Lewis, Robert S. Mulliken (Nobel Prize 1966) and Linus Pauling (Nobel Prize 1954) indicate (Servos 1990, 321).
Many of the German emigré physical chemists in the United States ended up without permanent positions, such as, for example, Hans Beutler, formerly head of department at the KWI for Physical Chemistry, Otto Redlich, associate professor at the University of Vienna, Alfred Reis, associate professor at the Technical University of Berlin, or they took up employment in industry, as for example Jacob Bikerman, assistant at the KWI for Physical Chemistry, Hans Cassel, lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin, and Gertrud Kornfeld, lecturer at the University of Berlin. Some received permanent positions at American
physical chemistry (Morris 1989, 70). And at Harvard, there was the eminent organic chemist James Conant and, as his successor in the mid-thirties, Louis Fieser. 113
Concerning Butenandt see Karlson 1990, 93; concerning Windaus: A. Windaus to the
curator of the University of Göttingen, 21 February 1935, Berlin Document Center, REM-file A.Windaus.
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universities: Herbert Freundlich, Kasimir Fajans, Immanuel Estermann, Karl Söllner, Otto Stern, and Kurt Wohl.
Otto Stern was the most eminent physical chemist from Germany. He and his co-worker Immanuel Estermann were given positions at the Carnegie Institute (now Carnegie-Mellon Institute) in Pittsburgh. This was due to the intervention of the president of the university, Dr. Thomas Baker, who visited Germany in July 1933 and engaged Otto Stern, Immanuel Estermann, and Ernst Berl, formerly professsor of chemical technology at the Technical University in Darmstadt.114 Together with Estermann, Stern established a molecular beam laboratory at the Carnegie Institute and continued to work in this field which he had developed in Hamburg in the late 1920s and for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1943. In spite of the possibility of continuing research work, Stern never regained the level of the Hamburg laboratory in Pittsburgh, largely due to the fact that there was little interest from the faculty and no support from the top after the first year.115
This was because Stern's division, in the beginning modeled after the German institute, had to give up some of its autonomy after the president fell ill and finally retired. For example, the graduate program in physics, started by Stern and Estermann, had to be shut down in 1934. Research was also impeded by the fact that there was not a proper laboratory in the building and by several other disturbances. Stern, who was used to the autonomy and authority of professors at German universities, neither emotionally nor by his attitudes adapted himself to the situation in Pittsburgh. Thus, according to Estermann, Stern was not diplomatic, he "would make it completely obvious if he didn't like the dean." Not only his work but also his manners separated him from his colleagues and students: "If things didn't come his way he would retire into his corner, and pick up his marbles and go home, so to speak; which made 114
Dr. Thomas Baker to the Emergency Committee, 3 March, 1934, New York Public
Library, collection: emergency committee in aid of displaced foreign scholars, file E. Berl. 115
Transcript of a tape-recorded interview with I. Estermann by John L. Heilbron, 13
December 1962, American Institute of Physics, p. 20.
86
life even more difficult." He remained an outsider at the Carnegie Institute because, as Estermann recalled, "his whole personality is not suited to an American university."116
Stern left Pittsburgh after his retirement in 1945 and settled in Berkeley. The University of California completely ignored the fact that he was in Berkeley and never asked him to join the faculty, which they could have done even without pay, as Estermann recalled, since Stern did not need the money.117 As mentioned earlier, Stern's work is an example of a scientific field which after emigration was not continued in Germany. Estermann had fewer problems than Stern, but finally decided to leave Pittsburgh as well. During the war he became a consultant on the Manhattan project. The third German emigré at Pittsburgh, Ernst Berl, apparently had fewer problems. According to Baker, Berl "is adapting himself admirably to our institution and is meeting with great success."118
As mentioned above, many emigrés found it easier to receive a post in industry, and some became successful industrial chemists. Among them are Gertrud Kornfeld and Arnold Weissberger. Kornfeld had been Privatdozent (lecturer) for physical chemistry and assistant to Prof. Max Bodenstein at the institute for physical chemistry of the University of Berlin. Her foci of research were photochemistry and reaction kinetics. After she was dismissed, she received excellent referee opinions concerning her abilities as researcher and university teacher from Bodenstein and physicist F. Paschen.119 However, her attempts to find a post in England were unsuccessful, and she went to Vienna, where she received a fellowship from the
116
Ibid., p. 20-21.
117
Ibid., p.22.
118
Dr. Thomas Baker to the Emergency Committee, 3 March, 1934, New York Public library,
collection: emergency committee in aid of displaced foreign scholars, file E. Berl. 119
SPSL, Bodleian library Oxford, file Gertrud Kornfeld, Bodenstein, 12 June 1933; Paschen
to A.V.Hill, 14 July 1934.
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American Association of University Women in 1935. In 1937 she emigrated to the United States, where she gained a post at the research laboratory of Eastman Kodak in Rochester.120
As Privatdozent (lecturer) for organic chemistry at the University of Leipzig, Arnold Weissberger, being Jewish, was dismissed as demonstrator in October 1933. His venia legendi (right to teach at a university) was not yet withdrawn because he had served as a front line soldier in World War I. Weissberger gave an account of his transition to industry at a symposium on "the contemporary chemical industry and chemical education."121 When Burckhard Helferich, full professor for organic chemistry at the University of Leipzig who unsuccessfully had tried to help Weissberger become associate professor in 1933, gave him the advice to find another position, Weissberger used the spring vacation to go to Amsterdam and Brussels, where he met the physical chemist Jacques Errera. He mentioned the possibility of a position at Ghent in Swart's laboratory. However, the position had been made on condition that it should not be offered to a former member of the German army. Errera lent him money for a trip to England in order to see the Academic Assistance Council (AAC). In London Weissberger found out that he had already been chosen by N.V.Sidgwick with a three years fellowship by the AAC. Thus after finishing his lecture courses in July, he went to Oxford to work with Sidgwick. It should be mentioned that according to Prof. Gibson, an expert referee for the AAC, Weissberger was not suitable for industry.122 In his third year Weissberger was offered a position at Kodak in Rochester, and he joined the Kodak research laboratories in their synthetic chemicals department in 1936.
With more than 100 patents mostly dealing with the manufacturing of colour film and methods for developing film, he helped Kodak become competitive in areas of organic 120
Unfortunately the company did not keep records concerning Kornfeld and Weissberger,
who, like Kornfeld, ended up at Kodak. 121
Undated. I thank Prof. John Spalek, Albany, for access to this document from the Arnold
Weissberger's at his disposal. 122
SPSL, Bodleian library Oxford, file Arnold Weissberger.
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chemistry in which the Germans (Agfa) were leaders. One notable result achieved by Weissberger and his chemist colleagues during World War II was the development of nondiffusing couplers by a technique different from the one the Germans had invented shortly before. Couplers are chemical compounds that form dyes when combined with photographic developing agents. This process was developed by the German chemist Rudolf Fischer in 1912. Non-diffusing couplers greatly simplify the production of dyes. According to Dr. Wesley T. Hanson, director of research and head of Kodak's colour photography division in the years following World War II, Weissberger's inventions "vastly improved the colours in the dyes used in Kodak film, making them more stable and producing sharper pictures" (Fowler 1984).
An example of a successful emigré industrial chemist of the next generation is Alfred Bader.123 Born in Vienna in 1924, he emigrated to England after the Anschluss in 1938 at age 14. In 1940 he was interned in Canada as an "enemy alien" for more than a year. Later he studied engineering chemistry in Canada and took his Ph.D. in chemistry with Louis Fieser at Harvard University. He received a post with the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in Milwaukee in 1950. He recalled that it was difficult for Jewish chemists to receive posts in industry in the early 1940s and that the situation improved only in the 1950s.124 At the same time he founded, together with Jack Eisendraht, the Aldrich company which in 1975 merged with the biochemical supplier Sigma. The combined company became the most successful company of fine chemicals in the United States.
7. Summary and conclusion The results of this study support the view that it was primarily the state of development of a particular scientific discipline in a host country and the degree of competition that accounted for the reception of German refugee (bio-)chemists. Here I have focused on the impact of the forced emigration of (bio-)chemists to Palestine/Israel and the United States. In the United 123
On Alfred Bader's life and work, see his autobiography (1995).
124
Personal communication, Philadelphia 31 January 1997.
89
States, biochemistry was a superb niche for refugees because of their advanced education and expertise. Some refugees were accepted also in physical chemistry, a discipline in which the United States had caught up with Germany and in some areas had become more advanced than Germany. In general, refugee organic chemists did not get positions in American academia, with the exception of Max Bergmann, whose work was in biochemistry. The most renowned German organic chemists were not Jewish, and organic chemistry in the United States was already too advanced and moving in new directions to be interested in German chemists other than the most renowned ones, who were not Jewish (except for the already retired Richard Willstätter). In addition, it may be asked whether Jews in the United States, as in Germany, had less access to positions in the established scientific discipline of organic chemistry than in the newer fields of, for example, physical chemistry? Individuals such as Hans T. Clarke or the president of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Thomas Baker, were sometimes decisive in providing work possibilities and funding for refugees. Special research programs to develop fields between biology, physics, and chemistry, such as the program of the Rockefeller Foundation, supported biochemists particularly, or researchers engaged in related fields in the United States.
The Rockefeller Foundation also provided the means by which George de Hevesy was able to continue and extend his research into radioactive isotopes and their applications at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen. The situation in England was similar to the United States; most positions for refugees were provided in biochemistry and physical chemistry (and in industry). Among the biochemists who received university positions in England were Hermann Blaschko, Ernst Boris Chain, Hans Krebs, Hans Laser, Hermann Lehmann, and Albert Wassermann. The chemist Max Perutz, who founded the laboratory for molecular biology at Cambridge University in 1947, left Vienna for Cambridge already in 1937. In physical chemistry Franz (later Sir Francis) Simon became professor at the University of Oxford and scientific advisor to Winston Churchill. Michael Polanyi, who in 1933 became professor of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester, quit physical chemistry some
90
years later. He became professor of social sciences at that university and an important philosopher. Joseph Weiss became professor at the University of Durham in 1937.
In Palestine/Israel young chemists acquired an unusual amount of influence in academic chemistry because the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, a chemist himself, succeeded in getting the necessary funds to set up a new research institute, and because he was unable to convince several renowned German Jewish scientists to move to Palestine. The situation was similar in other countries at the periphery of science but with a strong interest in building up scientific disciplines and institutions, in particular Turkey, where chemistry at universities became strongly influenced by German refugees. Fritz Arndt, for example, established organic chemistry and Felix Haurowitz biochemistry at the University of Istanbul. Alexander Schönberg, who in the mid-thirties became professor of organic chemistry at University of Cairo and director of the chemical institute, contributed decisively to the development of a modern chemistry education in Egypt.
A review of the careers of the most successful and influential (bio-)chemists of Jewish ancestry in Germany and the later various host countries casts considerable doubts on the validity of the above mentioned widespread notion that it is in the more theoretical sciences the Jews were (and are) are most successful (see under 2.2). It is true that Jews have made up a large percentage of mathematicians and theoretical physicists worldwide, including Nobel Prize winners in the latter field. However, the results of my study show that there are also plenty of outstanding contributions by Jews to experimental and applied fields of science. There were, for example, many German Jewish Nobel Prize winners in chemistry and medicine until the 1940s, all of whom were committed experimenters. A few examples will suffice: Adolf von Baeyer, whose mother was Jewish, was awarded the Prize for his work in synthetic organic chemistry, particularly for his structural work on indigo. Fritz Haber's work on the synthesis of ammonia from its elements was experimental as well as theoretical, with the clear goal of industrial application. Haber’s wartime work on developing and applying poisonous gases as chemical weapons is well known. In the years following World War I, part
91
of the research at Haber's KWI for Physical Chemistry was devoted to applications, for example the search for gold in the sea, and the ongoing development of poisonous gases and pesticides.
Richard Willstätter received a Nobel Prize in 1915 for his investigations of plant pigments, particularly chlorophyll. Otto Stern held a professorship in theoretical physics at the University of Rostock before he was appointed professor of physical chemistry at the University of Hamburg. According to his long-standing co-worker Immanuel Estermann, Stern was far more interested in experimenting than in theory.125 Estermann recalls that nobody except Stern continued experiments in the area of the Stern-Gerlach experiment, which found the unusual magnetic properties of electrons (spins), strongly explained by quantum theory. The experimental technique was too difficult for most people, and in other areas results could be obtained with much less effort and less time. "Stern really had the tenacity of a bull-dog when it came to this kind of experiment."126 Stern, who received an education in chemistry and then shifted to physical chemistry, did not make use of Planck's work on physics because he found it far too formal. For example, he rejected Planck's approach to treat electromagnetic forces or the thermodynamic properties of dilute solutions as pure abstractions resulting from the properties of mathematical functions.127
Georg von Hevesy was a dedicated experimenter, whose way of working was sometimes hazardous. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1943 for his work on radioactive inorganic isotopes and their applications in biology and medicine. Perhaps the most rigid experimenter in biochemistry was Otto Warburg who until the end of his life carried out his own experiments. He greatly influenced Otto Meyerhof, Hans Krebs, and Fritz Lipmann. 125
Transcript of a tape-recorded interview with I. Estermann by John L. Heilbron, 13
December 1962, American Institute of Physics, p. 4. 126
Ibid., p. 16.
127
Interview with O.Stern by Thomas S.Kuhn and Frederick Hund, 29 May 1962, American
Institute of Physics, p. 3.
92
According to Lipmann, Warburg’s insistence on letting experiments speak and keeping interpretation to a minimum dominated his (Lipmann’s) generation of biochemists.
Ernst Boris Chain's work on penicillin was strongly guided by an interest in application. At the beginning of his career, while still in Berlin, he was quite explicit about his preference for applied as opposed to pure science, while later in life "he would usually emphasize the virtues of a proper 'mix' between the two" (Clark 1985, 6). According to Ronald W. Clark (1985, 6), many of Chain's colleagues in Berlin remembered how he would say, while still in Germany: "In pure science if what you do is a success you write a paper; if it is a failure you write a paper. With applied science it is harder. If what you are doing works it is a success; if it does not it is nothing more than a failure."
The famous German Jewish chemists of the 19th century (apart from von Baeyer and Haber) such as Heinrich Caro, Paul Friedländer, Carl Liebermann, Ludwig Mond, and F.L.Sonnenschein, were highly successful experimenters, either in academia or in industry. As pointed out above, in the 20th century Ernst David Bergmann and Herman Mark were examples of Jewish German or Austrian emigrés who placed a strong emphasis on applied science and who, in addition, were very active organizers of science. With respect to the impact of the forced emigration in the 1930s it can be assumed that individuals such as Haber, Mark and E.D.Bergmann would have raised significantly the standard of applied chemical research in Germany and Austria under a different regime, particularly during World War II, had they not been expelled. After all, the German scientific community as a whole (Jewish and non-Jewish alike) had made substantial contributions to the war effort between 1914 and 1918.128
This leads back to the question raised at the outset: what was the impact of the expulsion of chemists for Germany? The loss of eminent scientists, which was particularly large in 128
On the war-time efforts of scientists, particularly chemists, during World War I, see for
example Stoltzenberg 1994 and Johnson 1990.
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biochemistry and some areas of physical chemistry, is the most direct and conspicuous impact. In addition, it appears that the expulsion of scientists and the silence or acceptance of the antiJewish measures by the majority of their non-Jewish colleagues as well as the support of the German war efforts by many scientists had another, long lasting, effect. It led to the international isolation of German scientists for many years. This was least detrimental in organic and inorganic chemistry but most harmful in dynamic biochemistry, physical chemistry of polymers, and physical organic chemistry -- new fields of research in which Germany had fallen behind the most (in the latter case mainly by reasons other than the forced emigration). The isolation prevented German (bio-)chemists from learning from American and British colleagues for at least a decade after the end of World War II. Sir Francis (Franz) Simon, is one of many who, due to the moral failure of German scientists during the 12 years of National Socialism and afterwards, declined an invitation by Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer to participate in a meeting of the Bunsen Gesellschaft in Germany in 1951, and explained his reasons as follows.129
In my opinion German scientists as a group lost their honour in 1933 and did nothing to get it back. I admit that you cannot say that everybody should have risked his position or life but such risks were no longer necessary after the war. The least you could expect after all that happened was that German scientists, as a group, would
129
Meiner Meinung nach haben die deutschen Wissenschaftler in ihrer Gesamtheit ihre Ehre
1933 verloren und haben nichts getan, um sie wieder zugewinnen. Ich gebe zu, man kann sagen, dass es nicht jedermanns Sache ist, seine Stellung oder sein Leben zu riskieren. aber nach dem Krieg war das ja gar nicht nötig. Das Wenigste was man nach all dem Unglück, das angerichtet worden ist, erwarten konnte, war, dass die deutschen Wissenschaftler in ihrer Gesamtheit oder durch ihre wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften öffentlich und klar gesagt hätten, dass sie, was vorgefallen war, bedauerten. Ich habe nichts von so etwas bemerkt (F. Simon 22 March 1951 to K-F Bonhoeffer, Archive of the Max-Planck-Society, Berlin, Nachlass KF Bonhoeffer, (translation UD).
94
state publicly and clearly that they regretted what had happened. I did not notice anything of this kind.
Few emigrés were asked to come back. Only three emigré chemists returned to positions at German universities before retirement: Stefan Goldschmidt, Hans Kröpelin and Georg Maria Schwab. A general offer to all emigrés to come back, as an acknowledgement that the dismissals were an injustice, was never made. After his retirement in England (Londonderry Laboratory, Durham) in 1953, Fritz Paneth accepted a position as director of the new MaxPlanck-Institute for Chemistry in Mainz. Fritz Arndt and Alexander Schönberg came back to Germany after their retirement in Turkey (1955) and Egypt (1957), respectively.
As honorary professors they participated actively in scientific life at the University of Hamburg (Arndt) and the Technical University of Berlin (Schönberg), but both of them had to undergo long trials of restitution in order to be accepted as professor emeritus in Germany and thus entitled to pensions (Singer 1987). Almost all former Nazi professors either remained in their positions or were reinstated with full salary and pensions some years after they were removed by the Allies. In contrast, many refugees had to fight for their pensions in court. As Erich Singer stated, this caused "much bitterness, skepticism and mistrust" (Singer 1987). In 1978, President Sadat conferred on Schönberg the order of the republic 2nd class for his merits in science and science policy in Egypt. According to Schönberg's student and coworker during his last decades in Berlin, Erich Singer (1987), Schönberg treasured this award more than the Iron Cross of World War I or the Bundesverdienstkreuz.
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103
Table 1: Dismissal and Emigration from Universities and Technical Universities. Data for the dismissal of university teachers in their totality are from Hartshorne (1937), data for the dismissal/emigrations of (bio-)chemists are my own. The number of Technical Universities is not complete. University (U.) or Technical University (TH)
U.Berlin
Number of univ. teachers 1932/33 (Hartshorne 1937)
% Number of dismissals dismissals (total) (Hartshorne 1937)
746
242
32.4
Number of (bio-) chemists 1932/33 (my analysis)
39
Number of dismissals/ emigrations of (bio-) chemists (my analysis) 21
% dismissals/ emigrations of (bio-) chemists
53.8
U.Frankfurt
334
108
32.3
19
8
42.1
U.Heidelberg
247
60
24.3
18
3
16.6
U.Breslau
311
68
21.9
9
3
33.3
U.Göttingen
238
45
18.9
14
2
14.2
U.Freiburg
202
38
18.8
10
3
30.0
U.Hamburg
302
56
18.5
11
2
18.1
U.Köln
241
43
17.4
5
1
20.0
U.Kiel
207
25
12.1
10
1
10.0
U.Leipzig
379
43
11.4
20
3
15.0
U.Königsberg
203
23
11.3
6
1
16.6
U.Halle
220
22
10.0
6
2
33.3
U.Greifswald
144
14
9.7
7
0
0
U.Marburg
172
15
8.7
9
0
0
U.Jena
199
17
8.5
8
0
0
U.München
387
32
8.3
14
3
21.4
U.Bonn
309
24
7.8
15
2
13.3
U.Erlangen
115
8
7.0
9
1
11.1
U.Rostock
120
5
4.2
7
-
-
U.Tübingen
185
3
1.6
9
1
11.1
U.Gießen U.Münster
no
data
existing
9 9
0 0
0 0
U.Würzburg
9
1
11.1
27
13
48.1
TH Breslau
6
1
16.6
TH Darmstadt
7
2
28.5
TH Karlsruhe
6
2
33.3
TH München
11
3
27.2
U.Wien U.Graz
25 11
10 1
40.0 9.0
8
0
0
15
3
20.0
TH Berlin
U.Innsbruck U.Prag
104
Table 2: Full professors in Germany in 1933, Austria, and CSSR 1938 who were dismissed and/or emigrated because they were Jews or had Jewish forebears. Except for those who were only heads of divisions, all were heads of institutes. Name Sub-discipline University (U)/ Technical university (TH) Fritz Arndt (head of division) organic chemistry U. Breslau Wilhelm Traube (head of organic chemistry U. Berlin division) Richard Willstätter (retired in organic chemistry U. Munich 1924) Fritz Haber physical chemistry U. Berlin George de Hevesy physical chemistry U. Freiburg Kasimir Fajans physical chemistry U. Munich Otto Stern physical chemistry U. Hamburg Julius von Braun inorganic chemistry U. Frankfurt Fritz Paneth inorganic chemistry U. Königsberg Gustav Embden medical biochemistry U. Frankfurt Bruno Kisch (head of division) medical biochemistry U. Cologne Felix Ehrlich agricultural biochemistry U. Breslau Werner Lipschitz pharmacology U. Frankfurt Stefan Goldschmidt (head of division) Fritz Straus Alfred Wohl Gustav Bredig Franz Simon Lothar Wöhler Ernst Berl Walther Fuchs
organic chemistry
TH Karlsruhe
organic chemistry organic chemistry physical chemistry physical chemistry inorganic chemistry technical chemistry technical chemistry
TH Breslau TH Danzig TH Karlsruhe TH Breslau TH Darmstadt TH Darmstadt TH Aachen
Hermann Mark Wolfgang Pauli Otto Fürth Otto Loewi Emil Abel Albin Kurtenacker
physical chemistry physical chemistry medical biochemistry pharmacology physical chemistry inorganic chemistry
U. Vienna U. Vienna U. Vienna U. Graz TH Vienna TH Brünn
105
Table 3. The 25 dismissed and/or emigré (bio-)chemists, who received the most citations in the Science Citation Index 1945-54 and/or a Nobel Prize or distinguished themselves by individual major scientific contributions. U.: University; TH: Technical University; KWI: Kaiser Wilhelm Institute: Med. Res.: Medical Research; ass.: assistant; res.fel.: research fellow. Name discipline Citat Nobel Institution in Dism./ Countries of First position ions Prize Germany/Austria Emig. emigration after emigration Max Bergmann chemistry/ 1880 KWI Leather Res. 33/33 US Rockefeller Inst. biochemistry (director) of Medical Res. Konrad Bloch chemistry/ 1169 1964 TH Munich 33/33 Switzerland, Columbia U. biochemistry (student) US Ernst Boris Chain chemistry/ 588 1945 U. Berlin 33/33 U.K. Oxford U biochemistry (res. fel.) Erwin Chargaff chemistry/ 1424 U. Berlin (ass.) (33)/33 France, US Columbia U. biochemistry Gustav Embden biochemistry 269 U. Frankfurt, died 33/ in 1933 Felix Haurowitz biochemistry 671 German U. Prague 38/39 Turkey U. Istanbul (ass.prof.) Hans Krebs biochemistry 2529 1953 U. Freiburg (ass.) 33/33 U.K. U.Sheffield Fritz Lipmann biochemistry/ 1783 1953 KWI Med. Res. -/32 Denmark, US Carlsberg. Biol. chemistry (res.fel.) Inst.,Copenh. 1936 U. Graz (prof.) 38/38 US Univ. College Otto Loewi pharmacology/ 513 N.Y. biochemistry Otto Meyerhof biochemistry 1467 1923 KWI Med.Res. 38/38 France, US Inst. Biol. Phys. (director) Chimique, Paris Leonor Michaelis biochemistry 1703 U. Berlin - /23 Japan, US Rockefeller Inst. (ass.prof.) of Medical Res. David biochemistry 1492 R.Virchow Hosp., 33/33 France, US Sorbonne Nachmansohn Berlin, (ass.) Carl Neuberg chemistry/ 1221 KWI Biochem. 34/38 Netherlands, biochemistry (director) Palestine, US Max Perutz chemistry/ 352 1962 U. Vienna - /37 U.K. Lab. Molec. biochemistry (student) Biol.Cambridge Rudolf biochemistry 1508 U. Freiburg 33/33 US Columbia U. Schoenheimer (lecturer) Richard Willstätter chemistry/ 1556 1915 U. Munich (prof. - /39 Switzerland biochemistry until 1924) --Fritz Arndt organic 629 U. Prague 33/33 Turkey U. Istanbul chemistry Ernst D. organic 688 U. Berlin 33/33 Palestine D.Sieff (WeizBergmann chemistry (lecturer) mann) Inst. U. Heidelberg 33/33 U.K., Royal Hosp., Rudolf Lemberg organic 645 chemistry (lecturer) Australia Sidney --Fritz Haber physical 419 1919 KWI Physical - /33 U.K. chemistry Chem. (director), U. Berlin (prof.) George de Hevesy physical 1383 1943 U. Freiburg (prof.) (34)/34 Denmark, U. Copenhagen chemistry Sweden Werner Kuhn physical 1449 U. Kiel (prof.) - /39 Switzerland U. Basle chemistry Hermann F. Mark physical 661 U. Vienna (prof.) 38/38 U.K., Industry, chemistry Canada, US Canada Otto Stern physical 98 1943 U. Hamburg 33/33 US Carnegie Inst., chemistry (prof.) Pittsburgh KWI Physical 33/33 U.K. U. Durham Joseph J. Weiss physical 742 Chem. (ass.) chemistry
106
Table 4: The 25 non-emigré (bio-)chemists who received the most citations in the Science Citation Index 194554 and/or a Nobel Prize or distinguished themselves by individual major scientific contributions. Name Discipline Citat Nobel Prize ions Emil Abderhalden* biochemistry 1465 Adolf Butenandt chemistry/biochemistry 1235 1939 Hans Fischer chemistry/biochemistry 1326 1930 Richard Kuhn chemistry/biochemistry 2777 1938 Karl Lohmann chemistry/biochemistry 744 Feodor Lynen chemistry/biochemistry 601 1964 Otto Warburg biochemistry 2971 1931 Heinrich Wieland chemistry/biochemistry 1849 1927 Theodor Wieland chemistry/biochemistry 720 Adolf Windaus chemistry/biochemistry 1179 1928 Kurt Alder Otto Diels Karl Freudenberg Kurt Hess* Burckardt Helferich Walter Hückel Ernst Späth Hermann Staudinger Georg Wittig Karl Ziegler
organic chemistry organic chemistry organic chemistry organic chemistry organic chemistry organic chemistry organic chemistry organic chemistry organic chemistry organic chemistry
265 667 1473 797 608 541 1212 1890 459 790
Arnold Eucken Otto Hahn Günther V. Schulz Carl Wagner Otto Kratky
physical chemistry radiochemistry physical chemistry physical chemistry physical chemistry
997 507 1315 898 552
1950 1950
1953 1979 1963
1944
* Abderhalden gained a large number of citations, because his fraudulent work on defense enzymes was then widely accepted in Germany (Deichmann and Müller-Hill 1998); a considerable part of the work by Kurt Hess, too, proved to some extent to be not reliable.
