Hitler's Terror Weapons by Geoffrey Brooks Read Free Book Online Page A

Heisenberg himself. His role as the leading atom physicist in the Third Reich was an equivocal one and this book will not do much to resolve the controversy. Born in Würzburg on 5 December 1901, he was the second son of a University lecturer. During the First World War he volunteered for land service. When a soviet republic was imposed on Bavaria in April 1919 Heisenberg joined many fellow students in supporting the moderate socialists. He served with a cavalry brigade as despatch carrier and lookout.
    At Munich in 1923 he obtained a doctorate cum laude in theoretical physics, his aversion to the experimental side of the discipline having let him down. He was still aged 22 when he qualified as a university lecturer. From May 1926 he lectured in the Danish language at Niels Bohr’s Institute in Copenhagen and was called to the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Leipzig in October 1927. He transformed Leipzig into a leading research centre. One of his pupils there was Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker who would later assist him in his campaign to deflect attention away from a major atom bomb project.
    When Einstein’s theories were attacked in an article published by the Völkischer Beobachter in its edition of 26 February 1936, Heisenberg prepared a paper signed by seventy-seven professors of physics, including a number of Party members, expressing his concern to the Reichsminister for Education, Bernhard Rust, at the official policy of discrediting theoretical physics.
    The nomination of Heisenberg as the leading candidate to succeed to the vacant Chair at the Faculty of the University of Munich the following year brought the matter to a head and the vehemence of the opposition to him from supporters of Aryan Physics rallying around its founders, Lenard and Stark, became almost hysterical. The swell of protest culminated in an anonymous article entitled White Jews in Science attributed to Johannes Stark which appeared in the SS-journal Das Schwarze Korps in its edition of 15 July 1937.
    â€œJust how secure the White Jews feel themselves to be is demonstrated by the behaviour of the Professor of Theoretical Physics at Leipzig, Professor Werner Heisenberg, who in 1936 managed to smuggle an article into an official party newspaper describing Einstein’s relativity theory as ‘the obvious basis for further research’.”
    After a catalogue of complaints alleging a pro-Jewish bias in making appointments the article continued:
    â€œIn 1933 Heisenberg received the Nobel Prize at the same time as the Einstein boys, Schroedinger and Dirac – proof of the ways Jews influence the Nobel Committee against National Socialist Germany. Heisenberg paid his own tribute in August 1934 by refusing to sign the Declaration of German Nobel Prize Winners For the Führer and Reichskanzler. His answer was: ‘Although I am personally in favour, political affirmations by scientists seem wrong, since it was never the practice in the past. Therefore I won’t sign.’ This answer identifies the Jewish spirit of its author, who considers the unity of the people and national responsibility of scientists to be improper. Heisenberg is only one example of many. They are all vessels of Jewishness in German intellectual life and must disappear as must the Jews themselves.”
    Johannes Stark contributed his opinion in a footnote to the article warning that:
    â€œwhilst the influence of the Jewish spirit has been removed from the German Press, literature and art as well as from German jurisprudence, it still has its defenders and protagonists among Aryan associates of Jews and those who have been pupils of Jews. In this situation, the Schwarze Korps renders great service if by virtue of its courageous and important utterances it directs public awareness to the amage to which German intellectual life and the education of its academic youth is being exposed by White Jews.”
    Realizing now that he