a time of increasing danger, publicly opposed that drive with the individualistic and enriching discretions of complementarity.
It was also entirely in character, when Fermi came to Copenhagen, that Bohr should lead him aside, take hold of his waistcoat button and whisper the message that his name had been mentioned for the Nobel Prize, a secret traditionally never foretold. Did Fermi wish his name withdrawn temporarily, given the political situation in Italy and the monetary restrictions, or would he like the selection process to go forward? Which was the same as telling Fermi he could have the Prize that year, 1938, if he wanted it and was welcome to use it to escape a homeland that threatened now despite the distinction he brought it to tear his wife from citizenship.
Leo Szilard's Cambridge collaborator Maurice Goldhaber emigrated to the United States in the late summer of 1938 and took up residence as an assistant professor of physics at the University of Illinois. Szilard appeared at Goldhaber's new apartment in Champaign in September to finish work they had begun together in England and stayed to follow the Munich crisis, for which purpose his host went out and bought a radio. Szilard understood, as Winston Churchill also understood and told his consituents at the end of August, that “the whole state of Europe and of the world is moving steadily towards a climax which cannot long be delayed.” Before deciding between residency in England or the United States, Szilard said later, “I just thought I would wait and see.”
The Sudetes, the border region of mountainous uplift that continues across Czechoslovakia from the Carpathians to the Erzgebirge, sustained at that time a German-speaking urban and industrialized population of some 2.3 million, about one-third of the population of western Czechoslovakia, formerly Bohemia. Nazi agitation began early in the Sudetenland; by 1935 a surrogate Nazi organization had become the largest political party in the Czechoslovakian republic. Hitler wanted Czechoslovakia next after Austria to facilitate his dream of German expansion,
By the time Szilard began listening to Maurice Goldhaber's new radio the Czech government had established full martial law in the Sudetenland but also offered autonomy to the region in excess of what the Sudeten German Party had demanded. These developments prompted the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, to propose a meeting with Hitler. Hitler was delighted. He invited the Prime Minister to Berchtesgaden. The last outcome he wanted was a Czechoslovakian settlement. He signaled the Sudeten Nazis to increase their demands. Chamberlain heard the extremist proclamation on the radio on September 16 as he rode out by train from Munich: a call for immediate annexation to the German Reich. Back in London on September 17 he recommended the annexation. Hitler, he said, “was in a fighting mood.”
“The British and French cabinets at this time,” writes Churchill, “presented a front of two overripe melons crushed together; whereas what was needed was a gleam of steel. On one thing they were all agreed: there should be no consultation with the Czechs. These should be confronted with the decision of their guardians. The Babes in the Wood had no worse treatment.” The two governments, citing “conditions essential to security,” decided that Czechoslovakia should cede to Germany all areas of the country where the population was more than 50 percent German. France had treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia but chose not to honor them. Facing such isolation, the small republic capitulated on September 21.
The Anglo-French proposals invoked self-determination for the German-speaking areas they defined. Hitler had agreed to such self-determination when he saw Chamberlain on September 16. Now the Prime Minister met with the Chancellor again, this time at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine outside Bonn, near Remagen. Hitler escalated his demands. “He told me,” Chamberlain reported immediately afterward to the House of Commons, “that he never for one moment supposed that I should be able to come back and say that the principle [of self-determination] was accepted.” Hitler wanted Czech acquiescence without self-determination by September 28 or he would invade. Chamberlain did not believe, however, he informed the Commons, that Hitler was deliberately deceiving him. The Nazi leader also told the Prime Minister “that this was the last of his territorial ambitions in Europe and that he had no wish to include in the Reich people of other races than Germans.”
The Czechs mobilized a million and a half men. The French partly mobilized their army. The British fleet went active. At the same time a secret struggle may have been taking place between Hitler and the German general staff, which resisted any further plunge toward war. The result should have been stalemate, but Chamberlain moved again to concession. “Appeasement” was at that time a popular and not a pejorative word.
“How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is,” the Prime Minister admonished the British people by radio on September 27, the night before Hitler's deadline, “that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing!” He volunteered “to pay even a third visit to Germany.” He was, he said, “a man of peace to the depths of my soul.” He made the offer of a visit to Hitler at the same time directly by letter, and the Fiihrer took him up on it the following afternoon. Chamberlain, French Premier Edouard Daladier, Mussolini and Hitler met at Munich on the evening of September 29. By 2 a.m. the following morning the four leaders had agreed to Czech evacuation of the Sudetenland without self-determination within ten days beginning October 1. At Chamberlain's suggestion he and Hitler then met privately and agreed further to “regard the Agreement signed last night… as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.” Before he left Munich, closeted with Mussolini, the Fuhrer discussed Italian participation in the eventual invasion of the British Isles.
Chamberlain flew home. He read the joint declaration to the crowd gathered at the airport in welcome. Back in London he waved the declaration from an upper window of the Prime Minister's residence. “This is the second time there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour,” he told the multitude below. “I believe it is peace in our time.”
A group of refugee scientists was gathered outside the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford the next morning discussing the Munich agreement when Frederick Lindemann drove up. Churchill had described the Czechoslova-kian partition as amounting to “the complete surrender of the Western Democracies to the Nazi threat of force.” Lindemann, Churchill's intimate adviser, was equally disgusted. One of the refugees asked him if he thought Chamberlain had something up his sleeve. “No,” the Prof snapped, “something down his pants.”
A cable came along to Lindemann then:
HAVE ON ACCOUNT OF INTERNATIONAL SITUATION WITH GREAT REGRET POSTPONED MY SAILING FOR AN INDEFINITE PERIOD STOP WOULD BE VERY GRATEFUL IF YOU COULD CONSIDER ABSENCE AS LEAVE WITHOUT PAY STOP WRITING STOP PLEASE COMMUNICATE MY SINCERELY FELT GOOD WISHES TO ALL IN THESE DAYS OF GRAVE DECISIONS
SZILARD
Szilard and Goldhaber found time during the crisis to write up a series of experiments with indium that they had started in England in 1937 and that Goldhaber and an Australian student, R. D. Hill, had completed before leaving for the United States. Szilard had thought indium might be a candidate for chain reaction but the results indicated that the radioactivity in indium of which Szilard had been suspicious was caused by a new type of reaction process, inelastic neutron scattering without neutron capture or loss. Szilard was discouraged. “As my knowledge of nuclear physics increased,” he said later, “my faith in the possibility of a chain reaction gradually decreased.” If other kinds of radiation also induced radioactivity in indium without producing neutrons, then he would have no more candidates for neutron multiplication and he would have to give up his belief in the process he still nicknamed “moonshine.” That final experiment would be worked by friends at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, where he would travel in early December.
Otto Hahn opened the September 1938 issue of the
Curie and Savitch believed that their R3.5h activity could be at least partly separated from
