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  • Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler by Philip Ball
  • Jon Agar
Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler, by Philip Ball. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013. ix, 303 pp. $30.00 US (cloth).

The question of how did scientists respond to Nazism very quickly slides into the more fraught, but valid, moral question of how should scientists have behaved. Historians have documented the spectrum of physicists’ responses, from revulsion to enthusiastic collaboration. Albert Einstein, for example, was in the United States when the Nazi Party took power, and chose not only not to return but also to continue his trenchant criticism of militarism and fascism. Paul Rosbaud, an x-ray metallurgist turned scientific journal consultant, stayed on to spy for the British on the German [End Page 341] nuclear research programme. The great theoretician of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, on the other hand, joined the atomic project, alongside others. By then many physicists, nearly one in five of the profession, had left as anti-Semitic laws were enforced and violence increased.

History-telling has been a potent resource for participants and commentators seeking to manage the past. The extraordinary Farm Hall tapes, recordings of conversations of captured German nuclear physicists who had been detained in a British farmhouse riddled with surveillance bugs, revealed that physicists had concocted self-serving historical myths to justify actions right from 1945, when the physicists first heard of Hiroshima. One of the first historian’s accounts of the atomic bomb, Robert Jungk’s Brighter than a Thousand Suns (1956), repeated these myths. Since then historians have tried variously to adjudicate between accounts, seek to blame or exonerate scientists as individuals or as a group, or debate differences between more nuanced, contextual interpretations.

In Serving the Reich, the science journalist and writer Philip Ball draws on this body of literature to offer a short, synthetic, highly readable account of what we know about what the physicists did, and how far we can judge what the physicists should have done, under Nazism. There’s not much original research here, but his assessments are sound.

Ball focusses on three physicists in particular: Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Paul Debye. The stories of the first two are well known to historians. Planck, the “upright man” of John Heilbron’s biography, was the reluctant instigator of revolutionary quantum theory, a deeply traditional conservative, a pillar of the German physics community, who valued propriety above all else. Here was a man, a German establishment type in fact, who could not break a law, however bad. Ball cites historian Alan Beyerchen’s account of an agonized conversation with Lise Meitner over the first wave of anti-Semitic dismissals: “‘What should I do?’ he asked… when she protested the injustice. ‘It’s the law’. Planck knew that the legality of the dismissals did not make them right — but in his view it made them incontestable” (p. 67).

Planck was left in paralyzed inaction. Heisenberg, in contrast, showed no concern. He was, perhaps again typically, unable to see someone else’s problem as his own. Ball steers a path here between the divergent, but substantial, historical accounts written by Paul Lawrence Rose, David Cassidy, and Mark Walker.

Ball’s lengthier and subtle analysis of Paul Debye, however, is the highlight of the book. Debye, a Dutchman, was extraordinarily able to take complicated, messy research topics from the borders of chemistry and physics, such as the behaviour of crystals and colloids, and, through a telling combination of theory and experiment, deduce startlingly simple and [End Page 342] powerful results. Debye took over directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in 1935. He won a Nobel Prize the year after. But in 1939 Debye left Berlin and went to the United States. The New York Times in 1951 wrote: “Abruptly he was informed that his laboratory was needed ‘for other purposes.’ He made a few discreet inquiries and learned that a large part of the institute was turned over to uranium research. He fled Germany and came to the United States. Upon his arrival he notified his fellow scientists about the...

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