The Man Who Stalked Einstein (19 page)

It would be inconsistent with the aim of the [Nazi-led] national uprising, and it
would fail to suffice for the intended goal if the Government were to negotiate with
and request the approval of the Reichstag for its measures in each given case.

The Reich Government views a further session of the Reichstag as an impossibility
under the present condition of a far-reaching state of excitation in the nation.

The outcome was never in doubt. The Reichstag, in essence, voted to relinquish authority
and disband itself by the count of 491 to 94 in favor of the Enabling Act. The act,
followed by the death of Hindenberg the next year, left Hitler with a clear path to
cementing his victory by doing away with those he saw as his enemies, primarily Jews
and communists. By the end of 1933, thirty thousand German citizens would be in government
custody for “political crimes.”

Hitler’s ascent to Fuehrer of the Third Reich provided Philipp Lenard entrée into
the most powerful halls of government. The Nazi party recognized Lenard to be an “Old
Fighter,” among those who had joined the party prior to Hitler assuming power. Lenard’s
speeches and writings evidenced his adoption of a reactionary philosophy that drove
him toward the Nazi party as early as 1922. Beginning around that time, he’d begun
to establish friendly personal relationships with a number of party leaders, including
Hitler himself. Over the next several years, he became a familiar of Goebbels, Hess,
and others among the Nazi leadership. Hitler wrote Lenard several very deferential
personal letters, courting Lenard’s involvement in party activities. On October 23,
1926, Hitler wrote,

Highly esteemed professor!

Your amiable letter reached me late as I was away from Munich. Thank you very much
indeed. On October 2nd or 3rd I was unable to be in Karlsruhe, because the government
of Baden prevented me from participating in any form [as part of the deal that released
Hitler from serving his full sentence in prison]. I do sincerely hope that a conversation
may be possible at another opportunity.

Hitler concluded the letter “With German Greetings,” which Lenard would certainly
have recognized as a point of collegiality based on racial distinction.

After a 1927 donation of 100 marks, Lenard received a letter from Hitler, who was
“grateful [for the] donation for the family of the killed in action Hirschmann and
for the wounded. I want to thank you in their name as well as in the name of the movement.”
Hitler’s reference to Georg Hirschmann confirms Lenard’s sympathies with and perhaps,
by that time, membership in the party. Hirschmann was a shoemaker and a member of
the Munich SA. He had led a group of fellow brown shirts in attacking a small street
gathering of a rival political faction and had been clubbed in the head by a teenager
named Karl Schott. He died the following day. At Hirschmann’s funeral, Hitler martyred
the dead man as the fifth Nazi to die in action in 1927. He then employed the “us
versus them” tactic that would become a staple of his popular speeches, promising
that the political violence against the Nazi movement ensured Hirschmann’s would not
be the last death they would mourn. To be a Nazi was to be oppressed but in the right.
Despite the danger, the party would fight on.

By the time Hitler wrote Lenard in April 1929, he had become very direct in his efforts
to recruit Lenard to the cause. “Much to my regret, I have heard that you visited
the office and did not meet me,” Hitler wrote. “I would be delighted to welcome you
personally another time, soon. Maybe it would be possible for you to come to Nuremberg
for the party convention.”

What Hitler saw in Lenard were several qualities that he must have coveted. Despite
the fact that his National Socialist German Workers Party had grown enormously in
popular support since he had joined the party in 1920, it was still viewed by many
potential voters as too extreme. Hitler would have perceived Lenard’s reputation as
a Nobel Prize–winning scientist as attractive in improving the Nazis’ image and helping
to convert more moderate Germans to his cause. Moreover, Hitler recognized in Lenard’s
feud with Einstein evidence that Lenard was a true believer. They saw eye-to-eye on
the dangers of Jewish encroachment into German culture.

Finally, it wasn’t just Lenard whom Hitler was recruiting. Along with Lenard came
Einstein. Very early in his political development, Hitler hit upon the Jews as a scapegoat
for what ailed the German people. However, he recognized he had a problem. It was
hard to demonize an entire race in the abstract. He needed concrete examples. The
liberal, internationalist, and, most importantly, Jewish Einstein was exactly the
right whipping boy to further his party’s popularity among an increasingly angry and
xenophobic German electorate.

Lenard was sixty-one years old in 1933, when Hitler consolidated his power. Despite
his age, he had lost little of his passion for his concerns about the threat to German
culture posed by Einstein and the Jewish spirit. Nonetheless, he recognized that time
would eventually slow him down. He increasingly involved his younger acolyte, Johannes
Stark, in collaborations designed to achieve his ends. Lenard and Stark were well
matched. If it were possible, Stark held even more extreme reactionary scientific
and anti-Semitic views.

Born in a remote part of Bavaria to well-to-do parents, Stark was an academic
wunderkind
, achieving his doctoral degree at age twenty-three from the University of Munich.
After six years as an assistant at Goettingen and a brief stint at the University
of Hanover, he was appointed professor at the University of Aachen in 1909. At this
time, he was considered, along with Einstein, to be a leading proponent of quantum
theory. By 1912, however, his quarrelsome nature began to get him into trouble. A
former colleague at Goettingen, Nobelist James Franck, said of Stark, “He was a pain
in the neck in every aspect. However, I have to admit he had good ideas. And early
on, he had this idea that photochemistry was a quantum process. Not as clearly as
Einstein, but nevertheless, he had it.”

Beginning in 1912, Stark engaged in a series of quarrels with Einstein over his perception
that Einstein was usurping credit for discoveries that was rightfully his. Over similar
concerns, he also alienated the politically powerful Arnold Sommerfeld, who had supported
him for the Aachen position.

Stark’s dispute with Sommerfeld cost him dearly and set him on the path to radicalization.
In 1914, he had hoped to be named the professor at Goettingen. He lost that opportunity
in a humiliating battle with Sommerfeld, who arranged for a favorite student, Peter
Derbye, to be appointed to the post. Gaining nothing for his effort, Stark claimed
that the unfortunate outcome was attributable to a “Jewish and pro-Semitic circle
and its enterprising business manager [Sommerfeld].” He had to settle for a professorship
at the less well-regarded University of Greifswald in 1917.

Following the war, Stark took up conservative politics in earnest. He eventually became
the professor of physics in Wuerzburg, where one of Lenard’s lifelong adversaries,
Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, had long been the chair. Stark and the University of Wuerzburg
were a poor match nearly from the start. Unlike Greifswald, where the faculty was
quite conservative, the political atmosphere at the University of Wuerzburg was mostly
liberal. Stark’s disappointment with the views of his Wuerzburg colleagues and nationally
among the members of the German Physical Society led to him organizing the reactionary
German Professional Community of University Physicists. In doing so, he unnecessarily
alienated any number of natural scientists whose support might have stood him in good
stead during his later years of struggle.

Stark might have weathered the philosophical disputes, but the scientific differences
between Stark and the Wuerzburg faculty were considerable and, ultimately, unbridgeable.
Many of the natural scientists had fully embraced the new theoretical physics. As
such, they could be disdainful of the simplistic notions held by classical, experimental
physicists. When Stark accepted the thesis of his student Ludwig Glazer on the optical
properties of porcelain, his colleagues cried foul on several grounds. Foremost, they
questioned whether the topic really represented a sufficient advance to warrant granting
an advanced university degree. They charged the topic was too applied, too simplistically
practical. They mocked Stark for conferring a “doctorate of porcelain.”

They also had qualms about Stark’s motivations, charging that it was Glazer’s right-wing
politics, so akin to Stark’s own, that had led to Stark’s acceptance of Glazer’s work.
Lastly, it was discovered that several years earlier, Stark had invested heavily in
a porcelain-manufacturing concern. Even though the rules concerning conflicts of interest
were lax in those times, this revelation earned him considerable criticism. Something
of a hothead, and holding little sway with his faculty, Stark concluded that the University
of Wuerzburg was a nest of “Einstein-lovers” and resigned his chair.

Shortly after leaving his position in Wuerzburg in 1923 and entering the commercial
sector, Stark published a book that would dog him for its intemperance and help to
ensure that, despite applying for six different university appointments over the next
decade, he would not receive serious consideration for another academic post until
Hitler came to power in 1933.
The Current Crisis in German Physics
heavily criticized theoretical physics and its practitioners. He had earlier reversed
his support for quantum theory, and he now attacked it with a vengeance, citing it
along with relativity theory as topics that should be banned from the educational
curriculum throughout Germany.

Stark also drew unflattering parallels between the theory of relativity and certain
social, moral, and political changes occurring at the time, referred to as “relativism.”
This was a common theme among relativity naysayers. At the core of relativism is the
absence of absolutes in morality, acceptable behavior, and philosophy, a fearful thought
for many stolid German Protestants.

Stark doubtlessly understood that relativity had nothing to do with relativism, but
he exploited the homonymic similarity of the two words as one more reason to be suspicious
of Einstein’s work. He resurrected Lenard’s now familiar complaint that Einstein had
unduly promoted the theory of relativity in the “un-German” popular press. While the
text fell short of outright anti-Semitic statements, the message came through clearly:
the Jews were at the heart of what Stark considered the “crisis.”

Because of the stir it caused, many more scientists likely read Max von Laue’s review
of Stark’s book in the journal
Die Nurwissenshaften
than actually read the book itself. Von Laue, a well-respected professor of physics
at the University of Berlin, had received the 1914 Nobel Prize for demonstrating that
X-rays were diffracted by crystals. Von Laue’s assessment of the book dismissed the
attacks on his friend Einstein as unworthy of comment. However, he took Stark to task
for making unfavorable comments about physics and physicists:

But Mr. Stark should really have preserved enough respect for his own former activity
to not debase it publicly. . . . This severance [his resigning at Wuerzburg] surely
did not take place without some conflict. . . . All in all, we would have wished that
this book had remained unwritten, that is, in the interest of science, in general,
of German science, in particular, and not least of all in the interest of the author,
himself.

During the 1920s and into the next decade, as the frequency and stridency of their
attacks intensified, Lenard and Stark recruited junior scientists who were aligned
with their philosophy or whom they could bully into joining them in writing articles
reflecting their personal point of view. One example is an article by a student of
Stark’s, Willi Menzel, following the publication of Lenard’s
Deutsche Physik
. In the January 29, 1936, edition of
Volkischer Beobachter
, Menzel virtually parroted sections of Lenard’s introduction to his book, making
assertions identical to Lenard’s but framing them as his own. Ambitious and venal,
Menzel proved a willing accomplice to Lenard and Stark’s attacks:

In the wake of the revolution in physics came theoreticians like Einstein who then
strove to make physics into a purely mathematical system of concepts. They propagated
their ideas in the manner characteristic of Jews and forced them upon physicists.
They tried to ridicule men who criticized their new type of science with the argument
that their intellect just could not aspire to the lofty spheres of the Einstein-
ian intellect—an intellect which says that Lenard does not consciously seek after
the truth.

The recruitment of Lenard’s colleagues to his call to arms is most evident in Lenard’s
1929 diatribe,
One Hundred Authors against Einstein
, an omnibus of naysayers’ views of Einstein’s theories. The hundred “authors” of
the title were a mixed bag, at best. Many of the contributors had little or no experience
with high-energy physics. As noted by reviewer Albert von Braun, the inclusion of
many of the authors was absurd:

Since zero always yields zero when multiplied by any finite number, the compilers
might just as well have presented one thousand rather than one hundred of such authors
without even the quintessence of their remarks being able to yield any weight other
than zero.

Exuding the palpable disdain of a practiced wit, von Braun continued with a withering
analogy:

They should have realized that just as it is true that a majority of votes at a ladies’
tea party can scarcely confirm Einstein’s theories, in the same way, the accumulation
of verdicts by authors who command a little phraseology of Kant’s critical philosophy
but who have not felt even a whisper of his genius can hardly present a case against
relativity theory.