that Einstein and his wife were prepared to come to America.” They walked together to the bus stop.
The Einsteins left Caputh in December 1932, scheduled to divide the coming year between Princeton and Berlin. Einstein knew better. “Turn around,” he told his wife as they stepped off the porch of their house. “You will never see it again.” She thought his pessimism foolish.
In mid-March the Nazi SA searched the empty house for hidden weapons. By then Einstein had spoken out publicly against Hitler and was returning to Europe to prepare to move. He settled temporarily at a resort town on the Belgian coast, Le Coq sur Mer, with his wife, his two stepdaughters, his secretary, his assistant and two Belgian guards: assassination threatened again. In Berlin his son-in-law arranged to have his furniture packed. The French obligingly transported his personal papers to Paris by diplomatic pouch. At the end of March 1933 the most original physicist of the twentieth century once again renounced his German citizenship.
Princeton University acquired John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner in 1930, in Wigner's puckish recollection, as a package deal. The university sought advice on improving its science from Paul Ehrenfest, who “recommended to them not to invite a single person but at least two… who already knew each other, who wouldn't feel suddenly put on an island where they have no intimate contact with anybody. Johnny's name was of course well known by that time the world over, so they decided to invite Johnny von Neumann. They looked: who wrote articles with John von Neumann? They found: Mr. Wigner. So they sent a telegram to me also.” In fact, Wigner had already earned a high reputation in a recondite area of physics known as group theory, about which he published a book in 1931. He accepted the invitation to Princeton to look it over and perhaps to look America over as well. “There was no question in the mind of any person that the days of foreigners [in Germany], particularly with Jewish ancestry, were numbered… It was so obvious that you didn't have to be perceptive… It was like, ‘Well, it will be colder in December.’ Yes, it will be. We know it well.”
Leo Szilard in Berlin debated his future in a musing letter to Eugene Wigner written on October 8, 1932. He was apparently still trying to organize his Bund: the knowledge had got into his blood that he had work to accomplish at the moment more noble than science, he wrote — bad luck, it couldn't be distilled out again. He understood he wasn't allowed to complain if such work commanded no office space in the world. He was considering a professorship in experimental physics in India since it would be essentially only a teaching post and he could therefore turn his creative energies elsewhere. Only the gods knew what might be available in Europe or on the American coast between Washington and Boston, places he might prefer, so he perforce might go to India. In any case, until he found a position he would at least be free to do science without feeling guilty.
Szilard promised to write Wigner again when he had an “actual program.” He did not yet know that his actual program would be organizing the desperate rescue. He parked his bags at the Harnack House in Dahlem and sat down with Lise Meitner to talk about doing nuclear physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. She had Hahn, and Hahn was superb, but he was a chemist. She could use a jack-of-all-trades like Szilard. But the collaboration was not to be. Events moved too quickly. Szilard took his train from Berlin, the train that proved him, if not more clever than most people, at least a day earlier. That was “close to the first of April, 1933.”
If Pauli, safe behind the lines in Zurich, had misread events before, he was clear enough once the new law was announced. Walter Elsasser, among the first to leave, chose neutral Switzerland, entrained for Zurich and homed on the physics building at the Polytechnic. “On entering the main door of this building one faces a broad and straight staircase leading directly to the second floor. Before I could take my first step on it, there appeared at the top of the stairs the moon-face of Wolfgang Pauli, who shouted down: ‘Elsasser,’ he said, ‘you are the first to come up these stairs; I can see how in the months to come there will be many, many more to climb up here.’” The idea of a German dictatorship was no longer
Longstanding anti-Semitic discrimination in academic appointments weighted the civil service law dismissals in favor of the natural sciences, fields of study that had evolved more recently than the older disciplines of the liberal arts, that German scholarship had looked down upon as “materialistic” and that had therefore proved less impenetrable to Jews. Medicine incurred 423 dismissals, physics 106, mathematics 60 — in the physical and biological sciences other than medicine, an immediate total of 406 scientists. The University of Berlin and the University of Frankfurt each lost a third of its faculty.
The promising young theoretical physicist Hans Bethe, then at Tubingen, first heard of his dismissal from one of his students, who wrote him to say he read of it in the papers and wondered what he should do. Bethe thought the question impertinent — it was he who had been dismissed, not the student — and asked for a copy of the news story. Hans Geiger was professor of experimental physics at Tubingen at the time, having moved there from Berlin. When Bethe joined the faculty as a theoretician in November 1932, “Geiger explained his experiments to me, and in other ways made a lot of me, so all seemed to be well on the personal level.” Sensibly, then, Bethe wrote the vacationing Geiger for advice. “He wrote back a completely cold letter saying that with the changed situation it would be necessary to dispense with my further services — period. There was no kind word, no regret — nothing.” A few days later the official notice arrived.
Bethe at twenty-seven was sturdy, indefatigable, a skier and mountain climber, exceptionally self-confident in physics if still socially diffident. His eyes were blue, his features Germanic; his thick, dark-brown hair, cut short, stood up on his head like a brush. His custom of plowing through difficulties eventually won Bethe comparison with a battleship, except that this particularly equable vessel usually boomed with laughter. He had already published important work.
Born in Strasbourg on July 2, 1906, Bethe moved during childhood to Kiel and then to Frankfurt as his father, a university physiologist, achieved increasing academic success. He did not think of himself as a Jew: “I was not Jewish. My mother was Jewish, and until Hitler came that made no difference whatever.” His father's background was Protestant and Prussian; his mother was the daughter of a Strasbourg professor of medicine. He counted two Jewish grandparents, more than enough to trigger the Tubingen dismissal.
Bethe began university studies at Frankfurt in 1924. Two years later, recognizing his gift for theoretical work, his adviser sent him to Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich. Sommerfeld had trained nearly a third of the full professors of theoretical physics in the German-speaking world; his proteges included Max von Laue, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg. The American chemist Linus Pauling came to work with Sommerfeld while Bethe was there, as did the German Rudolf Peierls and Americans Edward U. Condon and I. I. Rabi. Edward Teller arrived from Karlsruhe in 1928, but before the relationship between the two young men could develop into friendship Teller was incapacitated in a streetcar accident, his right foot severed just above the ankle. By the time the amputation healed, Sommerfeld had gone off on a sixtieth-birthday trip around the world, leaving Bethe, who had just passed his doctoral examinations, to look for a job on his own; missing Sommerfeld, Teller chose to move on to Leipzig to study with Heisenberg. Bethe went to the Cavendish on a Rockefeller Fellowship, then to Rome, before accepting appointment at Tubingen.
Since Geiger refused to help challenge his Tubingen dismissal, Bethe appealed to Munich. “Sommerfeld immediately replied, ‘You are most welcome here. I will have your fellowship again for you. Just come back.’” 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 Gottingen 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.” 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. 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
