Pandora's Keepers Read Online Free

at bay.
    The university community was changing, too.
Studenten Verbindungen
(fraternities) were increasingly nationalistic and anti-Semitic—foreshadowing the growing Nazi movement that would come to
     power in a few years. Members of these fraternities spent their free time roaming the streets, where they could be heard howling
     anti-Jewish slogans late into the night. They regularly searched out and beat up Jewish students or those who looked Jewish.
     Before long, Jewish physicists became one of their favorite targets because physics was so dominated by Jews. Such insults
     and coercion were part of the Nazis’ plan to “free” German education from the Jews’ “destructive yoke.” The Nazi Party took
     control of universities and appointed
dozentenschaftsfuerhers
(faculty leaders) who would assemble physics professors and lecture them that there was no such thing as “objective” science,
     that science was an outcome of “national feeling.” A vise was slowly closing.
    The vituperation of Nazi academics toward Jewish physicists became increasingly aggressive and outlandish. “German physics?”
     asked Herr Lenard of Heidelberg University. “‘But,’ it will be replied, ‘science is and remains international.’ It is false.
     In reality, science, like every other human product, is racial and conditioned by blood.” Herr Tomaschek of Dresden’s Physics
     Institute went further. “Modern physics,” he wrote, “is an instrument of [world] Jewry for the destruction of Nordic science….
     True physics is the creation of the German spirit…. In fact, all European science is the fruit of Aryan, or, better, German
     thought.” And then there was Herr Mueller of Aachen’s Technical College, who in a book titled
Jewry and Science
described a worldwide Jewish plot to pollute science and thereby destroy civilization. 4
    American physicists had an inside view of the tragedy befalling Jewish physicists in Germany. The physics grapevine carried
     vivid accounts of Nazi persecution, dramatic stories of hasty departures, and desperate inquiries about faculty positions
     outside of Germany. “We have been three days in Göttingen and the rest in Berlin, and had time to see and appreciate the effects
     of the present German madness,” wrote one American physicist to a colleague back home. “It is simply horrible. In Göttingen,
     it is quite obvious that if these [Nazis] continue for only two more years (which is unfortunately very probable), they will
     ruin German science for a generation—at least.” Hitler didn’t care. He reportedly said: “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists
     means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years.” 5 (The irony of fate is that Hitler’s actions removed the one group of people who would have been able to provide him with
     the instrument for the world dominance he so eagerly sought.)
    One result of all this was the exodus of the cream of European physicists, the prominent and the promising alike. Eleven Nobel
     laureates in physics left Germany in 1933 alone; one was Albert Einstein. They could not yet imagine the evil of the Holocaust
     and it was not German anti-Semitism per se that drove most of them away; they had long been used to subtle prejudice in Germany
     and elsewhere. Instead, it was more the fear, the expectation—almost the certainty—that the Nazis would get into a war and
     that the physicists caught in Germany would have to work for Hitler.
That
idea was too much.
    These years and exile did not destroy the physicists’ intellectual and emotional bonds to the best of German culture, which
     was deeply ingrained in their thinking and feeling, but did profoundly, personally demonstrate to them that unfathomable evil
     could take hold of a civilized society. They had gone into physics to escape, and now they had to escape to do physics. And
     it was still not clear whether they had escaped the