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Tag Archives: Final Solution

Hitler Kicks out Einstein

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Science

≈ Comments Off on Hitler Kicks out Einstein

Tags

A.N. Wilson, Academia, Academics, Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, Anti-Semitism, Atom Bomb, Biography, Eduard Fraenkel, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Ernst Gombrich, Eugene Wigner, Final Solution, Germany, Hans Bethe, Jews, Joseph Goebbels, Judaism, Leó Szilárd, Lise Meitner, Max Born, Max Planck, Nazism, Niels Bohr, Otto Stern, Philipp Lenard, Psychics, science, Third Reich, Victor Weisskopf, Walter Isaacson, World War Two

Adolf Hitler in Color

“Early in April 1933, the German government passed a law declaring that Jews (defined as anyone with a Jewish grandparent) could not hold an official position, including at the Academy or at the universities. Among those forced to flee were fourteen Nobel laureates and twenty-six of the sixty professors of theoretical physics in the country. Fittingly, such refugees from fascism who left Germany or the other countries it came to dominate — Einstein, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Hans Bethe, Lise Meitner, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Otto Stern, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, and others — helped to assure that the Allies rather than the Nazis first developed the atom bomb.

Planck tried to temper the anti-Jewish policies, even to the extent of appealing to Hitler personally. ‘Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists,’ Hitler thundered back. ‘If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!’

Among those fleeing the Nazi purge was Max Born, who with his tart-tongued wife, Hedwig, ended up in England. ‘I have never had a particularly favorable opinion of the Germans,’ Einstein wrote when he received the news. ‘But I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise.’ Born took it all rather well, and he developed, like Einstein, a deeper appreciation for his heritage.

The Germans were all a bad breed, Einstein insisted, ‘except a few fine personalities (Planck 60% noble, and Laue 100%).’ Now, in this time of adversity, they could at least take comfort that they were thrown together with their true kinsmen. ‘For me the most beautiful thing is to be in contact with a few fine Jews — a few millennia of a civilized past do mean something after all.’

Having found himself deposited in Belgium… [Einstein] rented a house on the dunes of Le Coq sur Mer, a resort near Ostend, where he could contemplate, and Mayer could calculate, the universe and its waves in peace…

Peace, however, was elusive. Even by the sea he could not completely escape the threats of the Nazis. The newspapers reported that his name was on a list of assassination targets, and one rumor had it that there was a $5,000 bounty on his head. Upon hearing this, Einstein touched that head and cheerfully proclaimed, ‘I didn’t know it was worth that much!'”

Albert Einstein at Princeton

__________

From Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

Today marks the 69th anniversary of Hitler’s suicide and the Allies’ final push on Berlin. In his short biography of the Führer, A.N. Wilson establishes the bogus philosophical underpinnings of the Final Solution, reflecting on the ways in which these deranged justifications wound up backfiring in unexpected ways:

[Hitler] often discoursed upon… the fact that ‘the Jew’ was always on the look-out to destroy ‘the natural order’ by ‘sleight of hand’: ‘The Jew introduced Christianity into the ancient world — in order to ruin it — re-opened the same breach in modern times — this time taking as his pretext the social question. It’s the same sleight of hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mordechai became Karl Marx…’ He had decided that ‘the people that is rid of the Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order.’

Already, by the middle of the war, Germans were beginning to recognize what it felt like to be on the way towards achieving natural order. For one thing, they had toothache, since most of the dentists in Germany had been deported or gone into exile. For another, they had very few nuclear physicists left, and those who had gone were helping the Americans pioneer nuclear weaponry. The fortunate universities of Britain and America now had their Albert Einstein, their Ernst Gombrich, their Eduard Fraenkel to adorn their faculties, thanks to the German Leader’s belief that such individuals were undermining the natural order.

More on Einstein:

  • Young Albert breaks up with his first girlfriend
  • Einstein expounds his theory that God doesn’t play dice
  • Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck denounce the evils of militarism

(Below: Einstein with some other unnaturals)

Albert Einstein and Scientists

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Survival In Auschwitz

08 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Auschwitz, concentration camps, death camps, Elie Weisel, Final Solution, free will, God, history, Hitler, Holocaust, Jews, Judaism, Kristallnacht, memoir, Nazis, Nazism, Primo Levi, Rabbi Akiva, religion, Shoah, Survival in Auschwitz, Writing

Holocaust Survivor Tattoos

“Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?

If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”

__________

From Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.

I tried but failed to find a full text of the book to post here. So pick up a copy for yourself. Just don’t start it late at night, because you won’t get to sleep.

While I believe Levi’s unflinching moral outrage and existential cynicism are legitimate, even admirable, I think they should be counterbalanced by Elie Weisel’s somber reflection that, “after Auschwitz, I did not lose faith in God. I lost faith in mankind.” These takes on the Holocaust are divergent ways of grappling with Rabbi Akiva’s paradoxical epigram that “all is foreseen by God, yet free will is given.”

Kristallnacht, the attacks which intensified the rabid persecutions leading to the Final Solution, broke out 75 years ago tomorrow. Something on which we should all spare at least a moment’s reflection in the next few days. The German novelist W. G. Sebald remarked, in a hyperbolic but effective line, that, “no serious person ever thinks about anything else but the Holocaust.”

The above shot is one of my favorite photos, now hanging in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, “Diaspora” by Frederic Brenner.

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