Since Geiger refused to help challenge his Tübingen dismissal, Bethe appealed to Munich. “Sommerfeld immediately replied, ‘You are most welcome here. I will have your fellowship again for you. Just come back.’ ”694 After a time in Munich Bethe was invited to Manchester, then to Copenhagen to work with Bohr. In the summer of 1934 Cornell University offered him an assistant professorship. One of his former students, now on the Ithaca physics faculty, had recommended him for the post. He accepted and shipped for America, arriving in early February 1935.
Teller took his Ph.D. under Heisenberg at Leipzig in 1930, stayed on there for another year as a research associate, then shifted to Göttingen to work in its Institute for Physical Chemistry. “His early papers,” Eugene Wigner writes, “were entirely in the spirit of the times: the expanding world of the applications of quantum mechanics.”695 Teller probed the more developed part of physics—chemical and molecular physics—with vigorous originality, producing some thirty papers between 1930 and 1936, most of them written with collaborators because he was sloppy at calculation and impatient with the detailed effort of following through.
“It was a foregone conclusion that I had to leave,” Teller remembers. “After all, not only was I a Jew, I was not even a German citizen. I wanted to be a scientist. The possibility to remain a scientist in Germany and to have any chance of continuing to work had vanished with the coming of Hitler.696 I had to leave, as many others did, as soon as I could.” The director of his institute, Arnold Eucken, “an old German nationalist,” confirmed Teller’s conclusion as they left on the same southbound train for spring vacation in March 1933.697 “I really want you here,” Teller remembers Eucken equivocating, “but with this new situation, there is no point in your staying. I would like to help you, but you have no future in Germany.”698 The problem then was where to go. Back in Göttingen after a tense confrontation with his parents in Budapest—they wanted him to stay in Hungary—Teller sat down to apply for a Rockefeller Fellowship to Copenhagen to work with Bohr.
In Hamburg Otto Frisch decided he would have to take Hitler seriously after all. Frisch, a personable young experimentalist with a gift for ingenious invention, worked for Otto Stern, the tubby Galician who apprenticed under Einstein and who had barked at Ernest Lawrence four years previously to get busy on his notion of a cyclotron. Stern was “quite shocked,” Frisch writes, “to find that I was of Jewish origin, just as was he himself and another two of his four collaborators.699 He would have to leave and the three of us as well,” although “the University of Hamburg—with the traditions of a Free Hansa city—was very reluctant to put the racial laws into effect, and I wasn’t sacked until several months after the other universities had toed the line.”
Before the Nazis promulgated the civil service law Frisch had applied for, and won, a Rockefeller Fellowship to work with Enrico Fermi in Rome. The program was designed to free promising young scientists from their immediate duties for a year of research abroad, after which they were expected to return to duty again. At a time of crisis the foundation unfortunately chose to enforce its rules narrowly. Frisch was soon “very disappointed and at first rather disgusted when [the foundation] told me that, the situation having changed because of the Hitler laws, they had to withdraw [their] offer of a grant because I no longer had a job to come back to.”700
In the meantime Bohr turned up in Hamburg. He was traveling throughout Germany to determine who needed help. “To me it was a great experience,” Frisch writes, “to be suddenly confronted with Niels Bohr—an almost legendary name for me—and to see him smile at me like a kindly father; he took me by my waistcoat button and said: ‘I hope you will come and work with us sometime; we like people who can carry out “thought experiments”!’ ” (Frisch had recently verified the prediction of quantum theory that an atom recoils when it emits a photon, a movement previously considered too slight to measure.) “That night I wrote home to my mother . . . and told her not to worry: the Good Lord himself had taken me by my waistcoat button and smiled at me. That was exactly how I felt.”701
Stern, secure personally in independent wealth and international reputation, set out to find places for his people. “Stern said he would go traveling,” continues Frisch, “and see if he could sell his Jewish collaborators—I mean find places for them. And he said he would try to sell me to Madame Curie. So I said, ‘Well, do what you can. I’ll be very grateful for anything you can do. Just sell me to whoever wants to have me.’ And when he came back [from visiting laboratories abroad] he said that Madame Curie had not bought me, but Blackett had.”702 Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, London-born, tall, a Navy man, with a lean, vigorous face, was one of Rutherford’s protégés and a future laureate. He had just departed the Cavendish for a workingmen’s college in London, Birkbeck, after a furious argument over the extent of the Cavendish teaching load. “If physics laboratories have to be run dictatorially,” Blackett had sworn, emerging white-faced from Rutherford’s office, “I would rather be my own dictator.”703 Birkbeck was a night school; experimenters could work at peace all day, except when Blackett’s automatic cloud chamber, triggered by a passing cosmic ray, went off like a cannon in their midst. It was temporary duty. Frisch took it. When the appointment ran out the following year he crossed the North Sea to Copenhagen to work with the Good Lord.
He had the comfort of knowing that for the immediate future his aunt was safe. Lise Meitner was forbidden as of the following September to lecture at the University of Berlin, but because her citizenship was Austrian rather than German she was allowed to continue her work at the KWI. She had a subterfuge to confess, however. When Hahn, who had been lecturing on radiochemistry that spring at Cornell, returned hurriedly to salvage what he could from the wreckage of the Institutes’ staff, Meitner sought him out. Her nephew explains:
Lise Meitner had always kept quiet about her Jewish connection. She had never felt that she was in any way related to Jewish tradition. Although she was, racially speaking, a complete Jew, she had been baptized in her infancy and had never considered herself as anything but a Protestant who happened to have Jewish ancestors. And when all this [anti-Semitic] trouble began she felt, perhaps partly to let sleeping dogs lie and partly not to embarrass her friends, that she would keep quiet about it. It was rather an embarrassment when Hitler forced it all out into the open, so to say, and she had to go and tell Hahn, “You know, I am really Jewish and I am apt to be an embarrassment to you.”704
At Göttingen the Nobel laureate James Franck, a physical chemist, had a talk with Niels Bohr. Though Franck was Jewish, he was exempt from the civil service law because he had fought at the front in the Great War. He was no less outraged. The problem was deciding what to do. He listened to many people, but he told a friend long afterward that it was Bohr who persuaded him: Bohr insisted that individuals really were responsible for the political actions of their societies.705 Franck was director of Göttingen’s Second Physical Institute. He resigned in protest on April 17 and made sure the newspapers knew.
Max Born shared Franck’s convictions and admired his courage but disliked public confrontation.706 Placed on indefinite “leave of absence” as of April 25, but hearing from the university curator that arrangements might eventually be made to reinstate him, Born responded brusquely that he wanted no special treatment. “We decided to leave Germany at once,” he writes. The Borns had already rented an apartment in an Alpine valley town for the summer; they slipped the possession date forward and went early. “Thus we left for the South Tyrol at the beginning of May.”707 He passed the news to Einstein via Leiden. “Ehrenfest sent me your letter,” Einstein responded on May 30 from Oxford, which was courting him. “I am glad that you have resigned your positions (you and Franck). Thank God there is no risk involved for either of you. But my heart aches at the thought of the young ones.”708
The young ones—the scientists and scholars just beginning to establish themselves, as yet unpublished, without international reputation
—needed more than informal arrangements. They needed organized support.
* * *
Leo Szilard’s early train delivered him to Vienna, where he put up at the Regina Hotel. The news of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service reached him there, probably in the lobby, and he read the first list of dismissals. That outrage sent him into the street to walk. He encountered an old friend from Berlin, Jacob Marshack, an econometrician. Szilard insisted they had to do something to help. Together they went to see Gottfried Kuhnwald—“the old, hunchbacked Jewish adviser of the Christian Social party,” a Szilard admirer explains. “Kuhnwald was a mysterious and shrewd man, very Austrian, with sideburns like Franz Josef. He agreed at once that there would be a great expulsion. He said that when it happened, the French would pray for the victims, the British would organize their rescue, and the Americans would pay for it.”709
Kuhnwald sent the conspirators to a German economist then visiting Vienna. He advised them in turn that Sir William Beveridge, the director of the London School of Economics, was also visiting Vienna at that time, working on the history of prices, and was registered at the Regina. Szilard bearded the Englishman in his room and found he had not yet thought further than the modest charity of appointing one dismissed economist to the school. That response was at least three orders of magnitude too timid for Szilard’s taste and he prepared to assault Sir William with the truth.
Kuhnwald, Beveridge and Szilard met for tea and Szilard read out the list of academic dismissals. Beveridge then agreed, Szilard’s admirer writes, “that as soon as he got back to England and got through the most important things on his agenda, he would try to form a committee to find places for the academic victims of Nazism; and he suggested that Szilard should come to London and occasionally prod him. If he prodded him long enough and frequently enough, he would probably be able to do something.”710
The busy economist required very little prodding. Szilard followed him to London and on a weekend at Cambridge in May Beveridge convinced Ernest Rutherford to head an Academic Assistance Council. The council announced itself on May 22, proposing “to provide a clearing house and centre of information” and to “seek to raise a fund.” Among the distinguished academics who signed the announcement besides Beveridge and Rutherford were J. S. Haldane, Gilbert Murray, A. E. Housman, J. J. Thomson, G. M. Trevelyan and John Maynard Keynes.
At about the same time a similar response was building in the United States. John Dewey helped assemble a Faculty Fellowship Fund at Columbia University. There were other immediate private initiatives such as the hiring of Hans Bethe at Cornell. The major U.S. effort, the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, was organized under the auspices of the Institute for International Education.711
Szilard beat the bushes that summer. He did not feel he could properly represent the Academic Assistance Council (though he ran its office for the month of August as an unpaid volunteer), so he traveled and worked to coordinate existing groups and start new ones. A “long and satisfactory interview” early in May with Chaim Weizmann elicited support from English Jewry.712 Einstein had thought of creating a “university for exiles”; Szilard, working through Léon Rosenfeld, convinced him to devote his prestige to the common effort instead.713 In Switzerland he nudged the International Students’ Service and the Intellectual Cooperation Section of the League of Nations; in Holland he nudged a nervous and disorganized Ehrenfest, who had a small fund available to support visiting theoretical physicists.714 The university rectors in Belgium were “sympathetic,” Szilard reported back to Beveridge, but “war reminiscences make it difficult to establish in Belgium any organization for the helping of German scientists.”715
The Bohrs coordinated their own exhausting efforts with Szilard’s. Bohr convened his usual summer conference in Copenhagen, but this time, writes Otto Frisch, “he proposed to use [it] as a sort of labour exchange.” Frisch found it “a confusing affair, with so many people and so little time to sort them out.”716
It was Bohr with whom Edward Teller had hoped to work when he applied in Göttingen for a Rockefeller Fellowship. The foundation denied him an award on the same grounds it had removed Otto Frisch’s: because he had no place of employment to return to. James Franck and Max Born interceded on Teller’s behalf with the English, and shortly there arrived not one but two offers of temporary appointments. Teller accepted an assistantship in physics at University College, London. From there, at the beginning of 1934, with the Rockefeller to secure him, he shifted to Copenhagen.
Szilard had help from an American, a Columbia University man, a physicist named Benjamin Liebowitz who had invented a new kind of shirt collar and established himself in the business of shirt manufacturing.717 At forty-two, Liebowitz was seven years older than Szilard. The two men had met when Szilard had visited the United States briefly in early 1932 and had renewed their acquaintance afterward in Berlin. Like Szilard, Liebowitz had taken up unpaid relief work. The two threw in together, the New Yorker supplying Szilard with a useful American connection. Liebowitz characterized the German situation vividly in a letter back to New York in early May:
It is impossible to describe the utter despair of all classes of Jews in Germany.718 The thoroughness with which they are being hounded out and stopped short in their careers is appalling. Unless help comes from the outside, there is no outlook for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, except starvation or [suicide]. It is a gigantic “cold pogrom” and it is not only against Jews; Communists of course are included, but are not singled out racially; Social Democrats and Liberals generally are now or are coming under the ban, especially if they protest in the least against the Nazi movement. . . .
Dr. Leo Szilard . . . proved to be the best prognosticator—he was able to foresee events better than anybody else I know. Weeks before the storm broke he began to formulate plans to provide some means of helping the scientists and scholars of Germany.
Szilard was becoming nervous about his own lack of anchorage. He had not, he wrote another friend in August, “dismissed the idea of going to India, neither has this idea grown stronger.”719 He was not opposed to America, but he would very much prefer to live in England. Although he was “rather tired,” he felt “very happy in England.” His happiness darkened to gloom as soon as he looked ahead: “It is quite probable that Germany will rearm and I do not believe that this will be stopped by intervention of other powers within the next years. Therefore it is likely to have in a few years two heavily armed antagonistic groups in Europe, and the consequence will be that we shall get war automatically, probably against the wish of either of the parties.”720
That prepared him for that cool, humid, dull day in September when he would step off the Southampton Row curb and begin to shape the things to come.
* * *
Einstein crossed the Channel to England for the last time on September 9 and came under the flamboyant protection of a Naval Air Service commander, barrister and M.P. named Oliver Stillingfleet Locker-Lampson, who had the peculiar distinction of having been invited, while serving under the Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, to murder Rasputin, an invitation which uncharacteristic discretion led him to decline.721 Locker-Lampson sent the distinguished physicist off the next morning to a vacation house isolated on moorlands on the east coast of England. Einstein had left Belgium at his wife’s insistence: she feared for his life. While she organized their emigration he settled in at Roughton Heath, walking the moors “talking to the goats,” he said.722 There he learned of the suicide of Paul Ehrenfest, one of his oldest and closest friends, on September 25; Ehrenfest had tried to kill his youngest son and blinded him and then killed himself.
The largest public event of the rescue was a mass meeting in Royal Albert Hall, the great circular auditorium in London below Kensington Gardens. Einstein was the featured speaker and therefore all the hall’s ten thousand seats were filled and the aisles crowded. Ernest Rutherford came down from Cambridge to chair t
he event. Afterward Einstein packed his bags and left for America, joining his wife on the Westernland when it stopped at Southampton on its way from Antwerp to New York, on October 7.
The mass meeting had been meant to raise money. It raised very little. Cambridge physicist P. B. Moon remembers Rutherford’s frustration:
He did a very great deal for the refugees from Hitler’s Germany, finding places for some of them in his laboratory and scraping together what money he could to keep them and their families going until they could find established posts. He told me that one of them had come to him and said he had discovered something or other. “I stopped him short and said ‘plenty of people know that,’ but you know, Moon, these chaps are living on the smell of an oil rag. They’ve got to push themselves forward.”723
With the possible exception of French prayer, in fact, Gottfried Kuhnwald’s shrewd prediction held true for the first two years of the rescue effort: the British alone nearly equaled the rest of the world in temporary appointments, and American contributions, largely from foundations like the Rockefeller, matched the rest dollar for dollar.724, 725 Then, as the Depression began to ease and the English academic system pinched, emigration increased to the United States. Under official Emergency Committee auspices thirty scientists and scholars arrived in 1933, thirty-two in 1934, only fifteen in 1935; but forty-three came in 1938, ninety-seven in 1939, fiftynine in 1940, fifty in 1941.726 Nor were many of these physicists: with their international network of friendships and acquaintances the physicists were better able than most to provide for each other. About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.727