conclusion as they left on the same southbound train for spring vacation in March 1933. “I really want you here,” Teller remembers Eucken equivocating, “but with this new situation, there is no point in your staying. I would like to help you, but you have no future in Germany.” The problem then was where to go. Back in Gottingen after a tense confrontation with his parents in Budapest — they wanted him to stay in Hungary — Teller sat down to apply for a Rockefeller Fellowship to Copenhagen to work with Bohr.
In Hamburg Otto Frisch decided he would have to take Hitler seriously after all. Frisch, a personable young experimentalist with a gift for ingenious invention, worked for Otto Stern, the tubby Galician who apprenticed under Einstein and who had barked at Ernest Lawrence four years previously to get busy on his notion of a cyclotron. Stern was “quite shocked,” Frisch writes, “to find that I was of Jewish origin, just as was he himself and another two of his four collaborators. He would have to leave and the three of us as well,” although “the University of Hamburg — with the traditions of a Free Hansa city — was very reluctant to put the racial laws into effect, and I wasn't sacked until several months after the other universities had toed the line.”
Before the Nazis promulgated the civil service law Frisch had applied for, and won, a Rockefeller Fellowship to work with Enrico Fermi in Rome. The program was designed to free promising young scientists from their immediate duties for a year of research abroad, after which they were expected to return to duty again. At a time of crisis the foundation unfortunately chose to enforce its rules narrowly. Frisch was soon “very disappointed and at first rather disgusted when [the foundation] told me that, the situation having changed because of the Hitler laws, they had to withdraw [their] offer of a grant because I no longer had a job to come back to.”
In the meantime Bohr turned up in Hamburg. He was traveling throughout Germany to determine who needed help. “To me it was a great experience,” Frisch writes, “to be suddenly confronted with Niels Bohr — an almost legendary name for me — and to see him smile at me like a kindly father; he took me by my waistcoat button and said: ‘I hope you will come and work with us sometime; we like people who can carry out “thought experiments”!’” (Frisch had recently verified the prediction of quantum theory that an atom recoils when it emits a photon, a movement previously considered too slight to measure.) “That night I wrote home to my mother… and told her not to worry: the Good Lord himself had taken me by my waistcoat button and smiled at me. That was exactly how I felt.”
Stern, secure personally in independent wealth and international reputation, set out to find places for his people. “Stern said he would go traveling,” continues Frisch, “and see if he could sell his Jewish collaborators — I mean find places for them. And he said he would try to sell me to Madame Curie. So I said, ‘Well, do what you can. I'll be very grateful for anything you can do. Just sell me to whoever wants to have me.’ And when he came back [from visiting laboratories abroad] he said that Madame Curie had not bought me, but Blackett had.” Patrick May- nard Stuart Blackett, London-born, tall, a Navy man, with a lean, vigorous face, was one of Rutherford's proteges and a future laureate. He had just departed the Cavendish for a workingmen's college in London, Birkbeck, after a furious argument over the extent of the Cavendish teaching load. “If physics laboratories have to be run dictatorially,” Blackett had sworn, emerging white-faced from Rutherford's office, “I would rather be my own dictator.” Birkbeck was a night school; experimenters could work at peace all day, except when Blackett's automatic cloud chamber, triggered by a passing cosmic ray, went off like a cannon in their midst. It was temporary duty. Frisch took it. When the appointment ran out the following year he crossed the North Sea to Copenhagen to work with the Good Lord.
He had the comfort of knowing that for the immediate future his aunt was safe. Lise Meitner was forbidden as of the following September to lecture at the University of Berlin, but because her citizenship was Austrian rather than German she was allowed to continue her work at the KWI. She had a subterfuge to confess, however. When Hahn, who had been lecturing on radiochemistry that spring at Cornell, returned hurriedly to salvage what he could from the wreckage of the Institutes' staff, Meitner sought him out. Her nephew explains:
Lise Meitner had always kept quiet about her Jewish connection. She had never felt that she was in any way related to Jewish tradition. Although she was, racially speaking, a complete Jew, she had been baptized in her infancy and had never considered herself as anything but a Protestant who happened to have Jewish ancestors. And when all this [anti-Semitic] trouble began she felt, perhaps partly to let sleeping dogs lie and partly not to embarrass her friends, that she would keep quiet about it. It was rather an embarrassment when Hitler forced it all out into the open, so to say, and she had to go and tell Hahn, “You know, I am really Jewish and I am apt to be an embarrassment to you.”
At Gottingen the Nobel laureate James Franck, a physical chemist, had a talk with Niels Bohr. Though Franck was Jewish, he was exempt from the civil service law because he had fought at the front in the Great War. He was no less outraged. The problem was deciding what to do. He listened to many people, but he told a friend long afterward that it was Bohr who persuaded him: Bohr insisted that individuals really were responsible for the poUtical actions of their societies. Franck was director of Gottingen's Second Physical Institute. He resigned in protest on April 17 and made sure the newspapers knew.
Max Born shared Franck's convictions and admired his courage but disliked public confrontation. Placed on indefinite “leave of absence” as of April 25, but hearing from the university curator that arrangements might eventually be made to reinstate him, Born responded brusquely that he wanted no special treatment. “We decided to leave Germany at once,” he writes. The Borns had already rented an apartment in an Alpine valley town for the summer; they slipped the possession date forward and went early. “Thus we left for the South Tyrol at the beginning of May.” He passed the news to Einstein via Leiden. “Ehrenfest sent me your letter,” Einstein responded on May 30 from Oxford, which was courting him. “I am glad that you have resigned your positions (you and Franck). Thank God there is no risk involved for either of you. But my heart aches at the thought of the young ones.”
The young ones — the scientists and scholars just beginning to establish themselves, as yet unpublished, without international reputation — needed more than informal arrangements. They needed organized support.
Leo Szilard's early train delivered him to Vienna, where he put up at the Regina Hotel. The news of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service reached him there, probably in the lobby, and he read the first list of dismissals. That outrage sent him into the street to walk. He encountered an old friend from Berlin, Jacob Marshack, an econometrician. Szilard insisted they had to do something to help. Together they went to see Gottfried Kuhnwald — “the old, hunchbacked Jewish adviser of the Christian Social party,” a Szilard admirer explains. “Kuhnwald was a mysterious and shrewd man, very Austrian, with sideburns like Franz Josef. He agreed at once that there would be a great expulsion. He said that when it happened, the French would pray for the victims, the British would organize their rescue, and the Americans would pay for it.”
Kuhnwald sent the conspirators to a German economist then visiting Vienna. He advised them in turn that Sir William Beveridge, the director of the London School of Economics, was also visiting Vienna at that time, working on the history of prices, and was registered at the Regina. Szilard bearded the Englishman in his room and found he had not yet thought further than the modest charity of appointing one dismissed economist to the school. That response was at least three orders of magnitude too timid for Szilard's taste and he prepared to assault Sir William with the truth.
Kuhnwald, Beveridge and Szilard met for tea and Szilard read out the list of academic dismissals. Beveridge then agreed, Szilard's admirer writes, “that as soon as he got back to England and got through the most important things on his agenda, he would try to form a committee to find places for the academic victims of Nazism; and he suggested that Szilard should come to London and occasionally prod him. If he prodded him long enough and frequently enough, he would probably be able to do something.”
The busy economist required very little prodding. Szilard followed him to London and on a weekend at Cambridge in May Beveridge convinced Ernest Rutherford to head an Academic Assistance Council. The council announced itself on May 22, proposing “to provide a clearing house and centre of information” and to “seek to raise a fund.” Among the distinguished academics who signed the announcement besides Beveridge and Rutherford were J. S. Haldane, Gilbert Murray, A. E. Housman, J. J. Thomson, G. M. Trevelyan and John Maynard Keynes.
At about the same time a similar response was building in the United States. John Dewey helped assemble a Faculty Fellowship Fund at Columbia University. There were other immediate private initiatives such as the hiring of Hans Bethe at Cornell. The major U.S. effort, the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, was organized under the auspices of the Institute for International Education.
Szilard beat the bushes that summer. He did not feel he could properly represent the Academic Assistance Council (though he ran its office for the month of August as an upaid volunteer), so he traveled and worked to
