Gordon Fraser - The Quantum Exodus: Jewish Fugitives, the Atomic Bomb, and the Holocaust

THE QUANTUM EXODUS

Jewish Fugitives, the Atomic Bomb, and the Holocaust

by

Gordon Fraser

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Gordon Fraser 2012

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First published 2012

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This book is dedicated to my father, Jack Fasht, 1912

Albert Einsteins departure from Germany.

Reichstag fire, 1933.

Winners of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Kristallnacht 1938.

Lise Meitner.

Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls.

Leo Szilard.

Stanislaw Ulam, Richard Feynman, and John von Neumann.

The first Atomic Bomb explosion.

Victor Weisskopf.

Edward Teller.

Eugene Wigner.

Jack Steinberger.

It had become dark in physics, from the top downwards. With the massive infiltration of the Jews into important posts in universities and academies, the observation of Naturethe basis for all natural sciencehad been forgotten. Instead, knowledge was supposed to be based on human imagination. The most obvious example of this damaging influence of the Jews on science was provided by Herr Einstein.

Philipp Lenard, winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize for Physics,
writing in the Vlkischer Beobachter, 15 May 1933.

After such prejudice, it was no accident that the Atomic Bomb and the Holocaust emerged simultaneously from the turmoil of the twentieth century. In its first thirty tumultuous years, many political and demographic threads had become tightly knotted. Like a puppet whose strings have become entangled, an ill-timed jerk brought unexpected results.

In 1911, as a belligerent world lurched towards war, these various threads were still largely separate. Nations vied with each other in a hectic arms race, each boasting of a perceived superiority. In all this swashbuckling defiance, Great Britain still considered itself the worlds leading sea power. To maintain this claim, plans had been drawn for a new breed of battleship, the super-dreadnought, bigger and superior in firepower, armour, and speed to anything then afloat. Super-dreadnoughts also brought other innovations. Instead of the traditional coal, of which Britain then had an enormous supply, new battleships would instead be fuelled by imported oil, presaging a new era in geopolitics. They were also to be armed with 15-inch calibre guns, capable of hurling a one-tonne shell over a distance of 30 kilometres.

That year a 40-year-old New Zealand scientist working at the University of Manchester made a startling discovery and struggled to find an apt analogy: It was as though you had fired a 15-inch naval shell at a sheet of tissue paper and it had come back and hit you. Ernest Rutherford was speaking figuratively, of course. Had he really been hit by a shell from a super-dreadnought, he would not have had much time to be surprised. But Rutherford had just discovered the atomic nucleus, hidden deep in the heart of the already infinitesimal atom. It was a new milestone in the quest to understand the innermost structure of matter, and was even more significant than the work for which Rutherford had already won a Nobel Prize several years earlier. His nuclear revelation would be more consequential than any battleship.

Nevertheless, in 1911 other people were more concerned about politics and the imminence of war rather than the science of invisible atoms and their even more invisible nuclei. Rutherfords quote reflects as much the aggressive belligerence of the time as it does about the workings of the atom. In the lead-up to the conflict that would become the First World War, the super-dreadnoughts with their 15-inch guns were still the ultimate in naval firepower.

Across the North Sea, Germany was also building battleships. After the outbreak of war in 1914, German and British ships skirmished sporadically until 1916, when the German High Seas Fleet boldly steamed out to challenge the super-dreadnoughts and other ships of the British Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland. One of the biggest naval battles in history, it was nevertheless inconclusive. The confused and disorganized British lost more ships, but the German fleet remained bottled-up in port for the remainder of the war, its frustrated commanders seething to underline their new claim to naval superiority. After the sudden 1918 armistice, the German fleet ignominiously crossed the North Sea to be interned at the British naval base at Scapa Flow.

When the First World War began, three years after Rutherfords nuclear realization, science and scientists on both sides were mobilized for the war effort. Talented German chemists (several went on to earn Nobel prizes) developed new weapons of mass destruction using poison gas. On the Allied side, Rutherford had been given other responsibilities. In 1912, the focus of world attention had been temporarily diverted from the inevitability of war by the sinking of the Titanic after it struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage. The Titanic had been equipped with radio, but this could not in itself detect icebergs. Could sound waves be used to detect such underwater obstacles and avert future disasters? After the outbreak of the war and the emergence of submarines as a threat to shipping, the goal of this sonic effort shifted. As well as sinking

With world attention focused on the carnage of that war, atomic science was an obscure corner of academia. But Rutherfords discovery of the atomic nucleus had nevertheless been a huge stimulus: when they found time, researchers turned their attention from the atom as a whole to what went on deep in its centre. Continually in the forefront of the effort was Rutherford. When not developing underwater sonics, he persevered dutifully with his nuclear investigations, firing the atomic equivalent of 15-inch shells at unsuspecting nuclear targets. Nuclei are extremely small, and the chance of hitting one was like target practice in thick fog: most shots missed their targets entirely. But among all the subatomic artillery shells emerging intact, Rutherford spotted a few lighter fragments. A few of Rutherfords fat projectiles had broken up after slamming into nuclear targets. The ancient alchemists had dreamed of transforming base metals into gold; Rutherfords artillery had instead transmuted nitrogen nuclei into those of oxygen. While he was making this discovery, in October 1918 a German submarine attempting to enter the British Scapa Flow naval base was detected by the new anti-submarine equipment and promptly destroyed by mines triggered from the shore. After arriving late when unexpectedly summoned to another meeting on anti-submarine measures, Rutherford excused himself: If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war.