Hitler's Gift
The True Story of the Scientists Expelled by the Nazi Regime
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Between 1901 and 1932, Germany won a third of all the Nobel Prizes for science. With Hitler's rise to power and the introduction of racial laws, starting with the exclusion of all Jews from state institutions, Jewish professors were forced to leave their jobs, which closed the door on Germany’s fifty-year record of world supremacy in science. Of these more than 1,500 refugees, fifteen went on to win Nobel Prizes, several co-discovered penicillin—and more of them became the driving force behind the atomic bomb project.
In this revelatory book, Jean Medawar and David Pyke tell countless gripping individual stories of emigration, rescue, and escape, including those of Albert Einstein, Fritz Haber, Leo Szilard, and many others. Much of this material was collected through interviews with more than twenty of the surviving refugee scholars, so as to document for history the steps taken after Hitler’s policy was enacted. As one refugee scholar wrote, “Far from destroying the spirit of German scholarship, the Nazis had spread it all over the world. Only Germany was to be the loser.”
Hitler’s Gift is the story of the men who were forced from their homeland and went on to revolutionize many of the scientific practices that we rely on today. Experience firsthand the stories of these geniuses, and learn not only how their deportation affected them, but how it bettered the world that we live in today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Before Hitler's rise to power, Germany outstripped the rest of the world in its scientific achievements. Between 1901 and 1932, German scientists won one-third of all Nobel science prizes; from 1933 to 1960, however, Germany won only eight of these prizes. Medawar, the widow of renowned immunologist Peter Medawar, and British physician Pyke collaborate to narrate an engrossing story of how England and the United States benefited from Hitler's expulsion of Germany's leading scientists. The authors observe that at least 20% of these biologists, physicists and chemists were dismissed from their university posts because they were Jews. Others left the country because of their opposition to Hitler and his regime. In Britain, scholars such as historian G.M. Trevelyan, biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins, and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane formed the Academic Assistance Council to help relocate and support displaced German scientists, among them physicist Erwin Schr dinger, who originated the theory of wave mechanics; and biologist Hans Krebs, the father of the famous Krebs Cycle, which describes the oxidation of carbohydrates into energy. German refugee scientists who won acclaim in the United States include Einstein; Edward Teller, the "father of the H-bomb"; and Enrico Fermi, who split the atom. Medawar and Pyke point out that several scientists remained in Germany, most notably Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg, in an attempt to preserve German science in its pre-Hitler expressions. Yet the authors refrain from casting moral aspersions on those who stayed or on those German academics who apparently did not help their Jewish colleagues. This engaging story of the demise of science in Hitler's Germany and the subsequent rise of science in England and the United States compellingly chronicles a little-considered aspect of WWII history.
