Rescuing German Scientists from the Reich

In a phrase attributed to Sir Ian Jacob, Churchill’s military secretary, the Allies won the war ‘because our German scientists were better than their German scientists’. It is true that refugee scientists were prominent in the Manhattan Project and other military research, but the story of this exodus is far more complex, and tragic, than is often believed. Sir David Clary, a professor of chemistry at Oxford University, has mined the records of the two British agencies that helped refugee scientists in the 1930s to produce this book, a series of short biographies of the men and women caught up in deadly turmoil created by Hitler and Stalin. Both the Academic Assistance Council—AAC—and its successor, the Society for Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), preserved their massive files of correspondence among desperate scientists, their friends and supporters, and British institutions willing—or unwilling, or unable—to help them.

Clary begins with a short Introduction, leading with the promulgation, on April 7, 1933, of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. One of the first Nazi edicts as Hitler worked to create his new order, the law banned “non-Aryans” and the “politically unreliable” from public office, which in Germany included every university and research institute. Some of the thousands of Jews and leftists who lost their jobs moved quickly to leave Germany, but given conditions around the world during the Depression, and general aversion to both Jews and leftists in most of the developed world, these suddenly unemployed scientists faced an uphill battle.

Lost Scientists continues with eight chapters devoted to the fates of scientists in various disciplines as they sought to escape Germany, Austria or the Soviet Union. They, or family members, wrote letters to the AAC, enclosing their CVs, lists of publications or patents, and letters of reference from senior people in their profession. Each such application was then vetted by top British scientists, who could either recommend that the agency help, or, with regrets, turn the applicant down. Some applicants were too young; they had yet to make a name in their field. Some were too old; why would a British university or institute want a chemist in his 60s? Some had made a lot of friends in their disciplines, others had made enemies. Many of these vignettes end at Theresienstadt or Auschwitz.

But not all. There is also the “happy” story of Friedrich Houtermans. As Clary writes: “Houtermans (1903-1966) was unique—a physicist who survived World War II despite being imprisoned and tortured by both the Nazis and the Soviets.” Houtermans, as a Jew and Communist, lost his position in Germany in 1933, but thanks to the AAC, he moved to a lab in England almost immediately. He hated, however, both British cooking and the lack of culture in the small town where he lived. So—although none other than Wolfgang Pauli warned him not to do it—he took a position at the Ukraine Physical Technical Institute in Kharkov in December 1934. Unfortunately, the Stalinist purges decimated the ranks of researchers there in 1937, and Houtermans ended up in a Moscow prison. Under duress, he confessed to being a German spy. Then came the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in 1939, and the USSR and the Nazis exchanged some prisoners. Houtermans was now in the hands of the Gestapo. Two prominent German physicists came to his rescue though, and managed to convince the Gestapo to not only free him, but set him up in a lab to continue his scientific research. So Houtermans spent the war in Göttingen, working on, among other things, the potential for using uranium-238 to produce a nuclear chain reaction. Nothing came of that, but he survived the war, and eventually moved to Switzerland, where he died of lung cancer. He was a heavy smoker.

Clary covers all the various disciplines that the AAC and SPSL worked in, including medicine, mathematics, biology and the social sciences. One striking feature of his book is the level of his expertise, and the amount of homework he has done, in evaluating each of these men and women and their scientific output. Clary’s own work is at the intersection of chemistry and quantum physics, so he is surely qualified to judge both the papers such scientists published and the potential work those who died might have done. But he devotes equal time to Robert Eisler, a polymath whose interests ranged from the historical Jesus to renaissance astrology. This book is well written and includes excellent notes, along with a bibliography and index. The Lost Scientists of World War II is a much-needed addition to Holocaust studies, a field that has produced so many books on the camps, the killing fields, and the perpetrators, but not many on scientists, victims or survivors.

---///---

Note: The Lost Scientists of World War II is also available in paperback & e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium

www.nymas.org