JEWISH GENIUS and the ATOMIC BOMB

by Jim Melnick

  What if Planck had succeeded in changing Hitler's mind?...

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE

Hitler hated the Jewish people with every fiber of his being. He did everything he could first to humiliate them and then to destroy them, ultimately resulting in the the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children - the Holocaust. This was die Endlosung der Judenfrage - the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question."¹ In the last sentence of his political 'testament' before his suicide in April 1945, Hitler proclaimed his undying "merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry."²

Hitler was certainly not alone: as Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi wrote in The Black Hole of Auschwitz in a 1965 essay, "The hatred for the Jews that had lain dormant for centuries in Germany and in the whole of Eastern Europe found in Hitler its prophet and town crier, and Hitler had found, in millions of Germans, an army of obedient and willing collaborators."³

But besides destroying the Jewish people, Hitler also wanted to take over the world. Couldn't his destruction of the Jews - what became known as 'The Final Solution' - wait until after he conquered all of his enemies? The answer to that question is clearly No - the destruction of the Jews did not take a second seat to the goal of world domination as far as Hitler was concerned.

The German railway system, known as the Reichsbahn, was devoted to what one Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg, once termed "The Bureaucracy of Annihilation." He noted that, while "[s]ometimes space was preempted by the army or some other claimant... Jewish transports were put together whenever and wherever there was a possibility of forming a train."⁴

However, when it came to the Jewish people, if Hitler had been a pragmatist instead of a demonically-inspired ideologue, world history might have been very different...This is the much larger reality of understanding what might have happened under slightly different circumstances.

In April 1933, the Nazis passed the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service. This law was aimed at purging Jews from government positions in Germany, but it was later expanded to private institutions as well.⁵ This academic purge eventually impacted even the world-renowned Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science, led by Max Planck.

More than a decade before this, Hitler had already expressed his views on the role of Jewish scientists in Germany. In a 1921 article he asserted: "Science, once the great pride of our people, today is taught by Hebrews, whose science is nothing but a means by which our national soul is being systematically poisoned and thereby bringing about the collapse of the core of our culture."⁶


MAX PLANCK

Planck was a world-famous German physicist. Even today he remains one of the most revered physicists in history. "Planck’s constant" is foundational to quantum mechanics, and the “Planck length” is defined as the smallest unit in nature that can be measured.

Planck was deeply disturbed by what he saw Hitler doing to Germany and to its Jewish scientists in particular. His authority in Germany was so great at the time that he was able to obtain a meeting with Hitler in May 1933. Planck sought to appeal to Hitler on pragmatic grounds on behalf of Jewish scientists who were being kicked out of German institutions. He especially tried to intercede on behalf of German Jewish physicists who were among the cream of the crop in world physics. He even tried to appeal to Hitler from the standpoint of German pride – these scientists were “valuable for mankind,” Planck said, and dismissing them would set German science back tremendously.

If accounts of the meeting are accurate, Hitler responded by saying: “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years.” ⁷  (emphasis added)

(As some background to this, readers must realize that Plank had known Albert Einstein, for example, decades prior to his meeting with Hitler. Outside of physics, he and Einstein shared a love of music - he had even played music with Einstein in the Planck living room in Berlin, years before! Planck had been corresponding with Einstein as early as 1907. Einstein had written to Planck in 1922 after one of Einstein's friends had been gunned down and when he thought he himself was under threat of possible assassination by German anti-Semites.⁸  So Planck was someone whom Einstein could confide in).

Planck later made a transcript of his meeting with Hitler. He particularly wanted to single out Fritz Haber in Hitler's eyes, dean of the German science community and head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin. He also tried to say that there were "different sorts of Jews, some valuable and some valueless for mankind...that one had to make distinctions in such matters." Hitler vehemently disagreed: "A Jew is a Jew," he told Planck. "Wherever one Jew is, other Jews of all types immediately gather." Planck countered that it would be an act of self-mutilation for Germany to do this, but Hitler would have none of it: "He was adamant." When Planck tried to press his point, Hitler flew into a rage. Finally, "Planck fell silent and took his leave."⁹

There were at least two reasons why Hitler was so enraged at Planck's request: the first reason is what the Nazis referred to as 'the good Jew' problem. Hitler was upset that so many Germans had Jewish friends or colleagues whom they vouched for. Planck was one of many Germans who took this attitude, although he was more prominent than most. To Hitler and leading Nazis, people like Planck posed an ongoing problem. As author Peter Hayes has noted, Hitler "frequently complained that the problem with most Germans is that each of them had a 'good Jew,' a friend or acquaintance who did not conform to antisemitic stereotypes and who therefore [in their eyes] should be treated as an exception to the general condemnation."¹⁰

Secondly, what Planck was inferring about Jewish contributions went completely against one of Hitler's core beliefs: Hitler actually viewed any reliance on Jews for anything - in this case German Jewish scientists and the future of German science - as a great weakness for Germany. He saw it as his 'destiny' to free the Third Reich from any such reliance. According to one account, he told a compatriot: "I discovered the Jews as the bacillus and ferment of all social decomposition... And I have proved one thing: that a state can live without Jews."¹¹

Understanding this is vital for understanding the Nazi mentality.

Later, during the war, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo and SS, was even more blunt. At a 1943 meeting of SS generals held in Posen in occupied Poland, Himmler spoke mockingly of the fact that every Nazi Party member understood that it was their policy to exterminate the Jews. He complained that, although this was their policy, who was going to actually do it?: "It is one of those things that is easily said. 'The Jewish people is being exterminated,' every Party member will tell you, 'perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter.' And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew."¹²


HITLER'S CHIEF IDEOLOGIST, ALFRED ROSENBERG, DENIED THERE WAS SUCH A THING AS 'JEWISH GENIUS'

Alfred Rosenberg was Hitler's and Nazism's primary ideologist. They were very close in the years leading up to WW II.


Adolf Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg

In his antisemitic book, The Track of the Jew through the Ages (1920, 1937), Rosenberg - whose views represented official Nazi policy - proclaimed that "It is now not hard to outline the sphere of the Jewish mind with total strictness...The lack of imagination and inner quest, which damned the Jew to sterility in religion and philosophy, emerges also in science. Not a single creative scientific idea sprang from a Jewish mind, nowhere has it pointed out new paths."¹³

Besides being totally false, this view cost the Nazis the war. Why? Because otherwise they might have succeeded in building The Bomb.


'WORLD CONSPIRACY'

Instead of seeing Jewish genius when it manifested itself, the Nazis saw a Jewish 'world conspiracy', such as concocted and virulently antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which was probably originally produced by a member or members of the Russian czarist secret police). Hitler himself credited the Protocols in Mein Kampf. For the Nazis the concept was simple - the Jews, in their view, were trying to take over the world, with their purported 'tentacles' were everywhere. As Richard Rhodes noted, "This fiction of a Jewish world conspiracy had practical value for the Nazi Party..." It could confirm and reassure the German people that "if the Jews could dominate the world, then so could the Aryans."¹⁴

According to this logic, there could not be two peoples vying for world domination. Therefore, as soon as the Nazis gained total power over any particular region, they would move very quickly to isolate, humiliate, and eventually seek to destroy the subjugated Jewish populations.


WHAT IF HITLER HAD BEEN MORE PRAGMATIC?

If Hitler had taken a more pragmatic view, he might have: (a) forced the building of the Bomb with the help of leading Jewish scientists, and (b) then launched the Holocaust and his plans for world domination. But this approach would have gone completely against the grain of his core beliefs. In 1931, before he achieved ultimate power, a brave German journalist asked Hitler about perhaps asking talented Jews, "war heroes among them," even Einstein, for help in running the country. In response, Hitler replied: "Everything they have created has been stolen from us," that is, from ethnic, Aryan Germans, and then he added, ominously, "Everything that they [the Jews] know will be used against us..." Then he said: "They should just go out and foment their unrest among other peoples. We do not need them."¹⁵

Thus, Hitler lay the groundwork for refusing to rely on the help of any Jewish specialists; it didn't matter to him what sacrifices Germany might have to make or its impact on science - for Hitler, to rely on "talented" Jews for anything was completely contrary to his core pathological beliefs.

Many of the same Jewish scientists whom Hitler hounded out of Germany and elsewhere in Europe later became the key scientists who later developed the atomic bomb for the Allies....

While not all were from Germany, Jewish scientists and theorists whose work and insights were critical in developing the atomic bomb included (besides the well-known support of Albert Einstein): Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Stanislav Ulam, Isidor Rabi, Niels Bohr, Sir Rudolf Peierls, Sir Francis Simon, Victor Weisskopf, Hans Bethe, Philip Morrison, and, of course, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who organized the entire effort and brought it to fruition. In addition, Otto Frisch, who was also Jewish, and his famous aunt, Lise Meitner, came up with the idea of nuclear fission in the first place! That was in 1938 when they were out hiking together and Lise had a sudden insight...¹⁶

Hitler might have been a pragmatist and told Planck, ‘Yes, you’re right, but we will make these Jewish scientists work for us'. Later, they might have been forced to work on nuclear research in support of the Nazis under threat of torture or death or that of their loved ones - something like that eventually happened to some prisoners in the Soviet Gulag in the USSR in support of certain scientific projects, as characterized in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous novel, The First Circle.¹⁷

Such a plan may have led to the Nazis succeeding in developing atomic weapons before the Allies - through which they would have taken over the whole world. Thankfully, we will never know - other than through fictional accounts like "The Man in the High Castle."¹⁸

Interestingly, Harvard professor and well-known Jewish polymath Steven Pinker argues in his 2018 book, Enlightenment Now that, had it not been for the threat to the world posed by the Nazis, the atomic bomb might never have been invented: "Quite possibly, had there been no Nazis, there would be no nukes."¹⁹

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT; EINSTEIN'S LETTER

Many have heard of the famous Einstein letter warning President Franklin Roosevelt about the potential threat from atomic bombs. Einstein's letter to Roosevelt (which was actually drafted by Hungarian Jewish refugee Leo Szilard) was dated August 2, 1939.²⁰   It was personally hand-carried and brought to Roosevelt's attention by a Jewish advisor to Roosevelt, Alexander Sachs, an economist with Lehman Brothers. Sachs carried the letter around for some ten weeks before he had an opportunity to present it to Roosevelt - to actually read it to him personally (along with other supportive material). As Robert Jungk tells the story in Brighter than a Thousand Suns: The Story of the Men Who Made The Bomb, the President listened but was too tired or impatient; he told Sachs that he didn't see that the government should get involved. Sachs realized that he had failed to convince Roosevelt of how important this was. He left the meeting with nothing but Roosevelt's agreement to meet again. Sachs had a rather sleepless night as he thought of what he should say to try to get Roosevelt to see what was at stake. Finally he hit upon an idea. The next morning he went back to the White House and, with the President sitting at the breakfast table, told him a story about how Napoleon once ignored the advice of Robert Fulton. Fulton had told Napoleon how he could use steamships to defeat England, but Napoleon thought it was a foolish idea. Finally, the light came on for Roosevelt. He said to Sachs, "Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up?" "Precisely!" was Sachs' reply. Following this discussion, the Manhattan Project was later launched.²¹


ALEXANDER SACHS



The Einstein-Szilard letter to President Roosevelt (August 1939)

Meanwhile, in Britain, two Jewish refugee scientists, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, who had escaped Europe ahead of the Nazis, began working quietly at the University of Birmingham in Britain on the idea of nuclear fission. They had no outside support or interest - they were just two Jewish refugee scientists working out of an obscure building, "scratching out their formulae on the backs of envelopes." It was in March 1940 that the two men first realized "that nuclear bombs could, in principle, be built." When they were eventually able to do the final calculations, they just "stared at each other in silence. Could it be that Hitler's scientists were already making the weapon? The risk was too great to ignore..." Out of this emerged the "Frisch-Peierls Memo" to the British government.²²  In fact, their initial calculation was in error - the possibility for fission was actually three times less than they thought possible. The net result of that error was, however, that they believed that "construction of a bomb was less daunting than in fact it [was]," and this "further increased the urgency of American and British scientists to explore the feasibility of a bomb."²³



          Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls                             Blue plaque commemorating Frisch and Peierls at Birmingham*


JOHN VON NEUMANN
By lanl.gov - Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3429594

John von Neumann

John von Neumann was an Hungarian Jewish mathematician and Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was a polymath and a child prodigy. At age six, he reportedly could joke with his father in classical Greek as well as recite entire chapters of a book that he had read.²⁴

After fleeing Europe and arriving in the United States, von Neumann is credited with "working on the immense number of calculations needed to build the atomic bomb." His "principal contribution to the [Manhattan] Project was the concept and design of the explosive lenses used in the implosion bombs" needed for the weapon. Von Neumann also helped develop "the first electronic general-purpose computer," the ENIAC. He was the youngest as well as one of the original members of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein also was based.²⁵ A video documentary on his vast number of scientific and mathematical contributions can be found here.²⁶

'MEN FROM MARS'

As an Hungarian Jewish refugee to the U.S., von Neumann was one of a number of Hungarian Jews who made enormous contributions to physics and/or the later development of the atomic bomb. Others included: Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Theodor von Karman, Michael Polyani and George de Hevesy. Theoretical physicist Fritz Houtermans once quipped that this group of men was so extraordinary and unusual in its brilliance that perhaps "these people were really visitors from Mars" who only pretended to all be from Hungary! Joking aside, it was a group that had experienced violent anti-Semitism there.²⁷

Stanislav Ulam once said that it would "be left to historians of science to discover and explain the conditions which catalyzed the emergence of so many brilliant individuals from that area..." Von Neumann thought that "it was a coincidence of some cultural factors he could not make precise: an external pressure on the whole society on this part of Central Europe..."²⁸

However it originated, it resulted in bringing about the greatest concentration of genius around a particular goal that the world has ever seen...


Emilio Segrè and Enrico Fermi


EMILIO SEGRE                                  ENRICO FERMI

Emilio Segrè was an Italian Jewish American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959. He was "an integral member of the Manhattan Project," with his primary discovery being "the high rate of spontaneous fission in plutonium" - a discovery "that forced the Project to abandon a plutonium-fueled, gun-type bomb."²⁹

Segrè was a "close friend and colleague" of Italian-American physicist genius, Enrico Fermi, who is often referred to as being "the architect of the atomic bomb." Their friendship began at the University of Rome,30 where Fermi turned the physics institute there "into a leading center for the study of the nucleus.” Fermi's wife Laura was Jewish. As Segrè has related the story, Fermi was attacked by the antisemitic fascist press in Italy (this was even before World War II) for, according to the fascists, having allegedly "transformed the physics institute into a synagogue.” Later, when the Fermis needed to escape Italy, they did so by going to the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, and from there, they fled to New York. Not long after this, “Laura Fermi’s Jewish father, who had been an admiral in the Italian navy, disappeared into a concentration camp and was never heard from again.”³¹

So, even though Enrico Fermi himself was not Jewish, his story was deeply connected to the greater story of the Jewish people at this critical time in world history.


Stanley P. Frankel


STANLEY P. FRANKEL (at Los Alamos)

Stanley P. Frankel "made the first calculations to determine the amount of uranium needed for a fission bomb."³²


CONCLUSIONS

Had Hitler not persecuted the Jews, then those Jewish scientists who were the driving force in creating The Bomb might never have invented nuclear weapons in the first place. Sir James Chadwick, who discovered the neutron and who played an important role in the atomic bomb story, was quite wrong when - looking back after more than 25 years - he said in a 1969 interview that he realized by the spring of 1941 "that a nuclear bomb was not only possible - it was inevitable." Was that really the case - especially if Hitler had never risen to power? The idea of constructing an atomic bomb only emerged after an enormous amount of planning, theorizing, and experimentation had gone into it, to say nothing of the massive investment necessary to launch the Manhattan Project in the first place - again, only because of the exigencies of the war effort and the do-or-die race with the Nazis. Earlier, Chadwick had a different tune and said that building a nuclear bomb might not be viable. He certainly did not think then that it was "inevitable." In a 1941 official report, he opined that "...we entered this project with more skepticism than belief..." And, in the case of Frisch and Peierls, although they eventually worked out that a bomb might theoretically be possible, Peierls was still grappling at the time "with dozens of thorny calculations" to try to solve.³³

In 2009, one scholar in an essay titled, "Jewish Scientists, Jewish Ethics and the Making of the Atomic Bomb," concluded that, "Therefore, it may have been an historical accident that so many prominent scientists who fled from Germany, Hungary and Austria because of anti-Semitism and who were involved in the initiation and later in the research and construction of the bomb, were of Jewish origins."³⁴

No. It was no "historical accident." It was the direct result of Hitler's attempt to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth. The making of the Bomb was the effort of primarily Jewish minds working at breakneck speed - for their own preservation! It is also one of the most extraordinary and far-reaching stories in the history of mankind, without parallel.

It is a stunning thought to consider that we may have nuclear bombs today only because of Hitler's persecution of the Jews. Yes, it is possible that The Bomb might still eventually have been invented, but it certainly would NOT have been invented during World War Two without: (a) the concentration of Jewish genius brought to bear on the problem specifically because of the threat from Hitler, and (b) the massive investment and experimentation of the U.S. industrial base to actually construct a working prototype. Who is to say that, in the absence of these two unique factors, work would have been carried on elsewhere after the war? Perhaps it might have been built in the Soviet Union under Stalin? Yes, perhaps, but the USSR was devastated after World War Two. It is doubtful that the Soviets would have been willing or able to devote massive resources to an unproven bomb project 'from scratch' if it had never been shown to be viable to begin with. Could the Nazis have done it?

The infamous "evening walk" in October 1941 in Copenhagen, Denmark, between famed Jewish Nobel laureate Niels Bohr and his former young protege, German scientist Werner Heisenberg (who led the Nazi nuclear research program), certainly accelerated Allied concern that the Nazis might be trying to produce an atomic bomb. It is not known what exactly was said that night between the two men. However, the impact of that "evening walk" changed the course of world history. Bohr's son Aage later claimed that Bohr believed at the time that "great technical difficulties" remained on "the question of the military application of atomic energy." Heisenberg's widow Elisabeth later asserted that Bohr that night "essentially heard only one sentence" as he and Heisenberg spoke, that is, that "[t]he Germans knew that atomic bombs could be built" and that Bohr "was deeply shaken by this..." Meanwhile, Heisenberg passed on "to Bohr a drawing of the experimental heavy water reactor he was working to build." What exactly was Heisenberg's motivation for doing this - to pass on intelligence or to see Bohr's reaction? We do not know. Ultimately, though, Bohr understood that it was time for him to leave Denmark, which he did by fleeing to Sweden and then to England. Bohr later assisted in the Allied effort to create an atomic bomb at Los Alamos.³⁵

Heisenberg's ultimate purpose and motivation in leading the Nazi nuclear program is also shrouded in mystery. The Germans had set up what the so-called Uranverein ("Uranium Club" or "Uranium Society") under the German Army Ordnance Research Department.³⁶  Did he purposely 'drag his feet' to keep Hitler from acquiring The Bomb? We do not know.³⁷  The truth may have been complex: Heisenberg was a German patriot, but he was no Nazi.

Would the United States have potentially expended enormous sums and manpower after the war in order to build an atomic bomb, or if Hitler had never come to power? Possibly, but that is highly doubtful. The only incentive would have been if there had been an arms race with the Soviet Union concerning the feasibility of developing a nuclear weapon.

Ralph A. de Toledano, author of The Greatest Plot in History: How the Reds Stole the Atomic Bomb (1963), assessed the situation this way: he noted then that "Soviet science...moved timidly," taking "the safe course. Soviet technology...'made do' with what what it had at hand, never striking out boldly but relying on the pioneering of the West."³⁸  Of course, there were exceptions to that - the later Soviet space program for one, but the general view still holds - that the Soviet Union at the time would have been unlikely on its own to expend the enormous amounts of capital and brainpower necessary on a project that - to many - had every prospect of being a dead end.

Jewish scientist Isidor I. Rabi, who worked on the Bomb during those historic days in New Mexico, has remarked that it was fear that made the U.S. "lavish such huge sums of money on the rapid development of the bomb." There was enormous concern "lest the enemy get it first." He remembers being in the room at the time with other scientists - so many of whom were Jewish - and thinking, "What did the Nazis have? Who were the Nazi scientists? We knew them all..."³⁹  The group assembled in Los Alamos was also "the most intense concentration of top-class physicists the world had ever seen."⁴⁰  And there were unique interactions between them. Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, for example, had a special connection at Los Alamos. Both later went on to win Nobel Prizes, with Feynman emerging as one of the most influential physicists in world history. As one observer has stated, "Bethe's solid technical prowess and Feynman's brilliant insights combined well when they both worked at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb."⁴¹

German Nobel laureate physicist Max von Laue, who was anti-Nazi but was nevertheless detained by the British at Farm Hall after the war, ultimately acknowledged "that it was fear and loathing of the Hitler regime that led to the bomb: ‘The….. [Jewish] emigrés’ passionate hatred of Hitler was the thing that set it all in motion.’”⁴² But while they certainly hated the Hitler regime, it would be more accurate to say that it was passionate fear for their own lives and the lives of their relatives, of Jews everywhere, and of all free people that drove them on. All were potential future victims of the Nazi war machine of death and destruction - if Hitler got The Bomb first, he would rule the world....

As I state in Jewish Giftedness and World Redemption: The Calling of Israel: "For better or worse, the nuclear age that finally came to be was largely made possible by Jewish geniuses at a time when the world faced a time of utmost peril."⁴³

But the hatred is rising again, especially in light of the Hamas surprise attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, and the demonic barbarity that accompanied it.

For those today who hate Israel and the Jewish people, especially in light of October 7th, the lesson still has not been learned - do not touch the 'apple of God's eye!'

May this realization grant us wisdom as we face the challenges and crises of our own day...

Copyright 2017-2024 by Jim Melnick. All rights reserved. Please contact info@portableexpert.com for more information or copyright permissions or redistribution.

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ENDNOTES

1. Peter Hayes, Why? Explaining the Holocaust (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017), 123.↩

2. Hitler's political testament (Berlin: 29 April 1945) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Political_Testament; Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 8 volumes and 2 supplementary volumes (Government Printing Office, Washington, 1946-1948), VI, 259-263, Doc. No. 3569-PS; see also Primo Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), 118.↩

3. Primo Levi, "La Tregua" (in the series 'Letture per la scuola media," Einaudi, Turn, 1965), The Black Hole of Auschwitz (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), 14.↩

4. See Christopher R. Browning, Peter Hayes and Raul Hilberg, German Railroads, Jewish Souls (New York: Berghahn, 2020), 32. ↩

5. Jim Melnick, Jewish Giftedness and World Redemption: The Calling of Israel (Messianic Jewish Publishers, 2017), 118-119.↩

6. Adolf Hitler quote, cited in Steven Gimbel, Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 149, from an article in Volkischen Beobachter, January 3, 1921.↩

7. This story appears in numerous books about the Third Reich, such as, for example, Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 43; Edward Y. Hartshorne, Jr., The German Universities and National Socialism (Allen & Unwin, 1937), 112. John Cornwell wrote: "The exodus of Jewish scientists was devastating in its consequences for Germany...Most of the lost physicists were scientists of high originality and unique experience; they were irreplaceable. Almost half of Germany's theoretical physicists went, and many of its top experts in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics." (John Cornwell, Hitler's Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil's Pact, New York: Viking, 2003), 139-140.

A similar attitude was expressed with respect to the Holocaust itself. A key Nazi administrator in Nazi-occupied Soviet Union, Hinrich Lohse, was upset that Jews were being killed by the SS without regard for their economic benefit: While"Lohse had no particular qualms about killing Jews," according to authors Robert K. Wittman and David Kinney, "he needed these particular Jews. ‘Of course the cleansing of the East of Jews is a necessary task; its solution, however, must be harmonized with the necessities of war production.’ The Reichskommisar did not want to lose a valuable source of labor until replacements could be trained." Lohse's strong concerns led to a struggle between SS chief Himmler and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, whose ministry ostensibly oversaw Lohse's region. Economic pragmatism - just as in the case with Planck and physics - lost out when it came to "the Jewish question." The official decision was as follows: "‘Clarification of the Jewish question has most likely been achieved by now through verbal discussions,’ the letter read. ‘Economic considerations should fundamentally remain unconsidered in the settlement of the problem.’" (Robert K. Wittman and David Kinney, The Devil’s Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016), 322. (Sources: “Tell Lohse it is my order”: Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (NY: Knopf, 1991): 208, 217; “Clarification of the Jewish question”: Letter dated December 18, 1941, from Alfred Rosenberg’s ministry to Hinrich Lohse, reproduced as 3666-PS in Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy, vol. 6: 402-403; Arad, Yitzhak. “Alfred Rosenberg and the ‘Final Solution’ in the Occupied Soviet Territories,” Yad Vashem Studies 13 (1979): 279-280. ↩

8. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1986; 2012 ed.), 172, 174; Norman Lebrecht, Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947 (New York: Scribner, 2019), 187.↩

9. John Cornwell, Hitler's Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil's Pact (New York: Viking, 2003), 34, 130, 137-8. Haber died in 1934. In defiance of the Nazis, Planck "organized a memorial service to celebrate Haber's life a year later." (p. 139) He also later nominated Lise Meitner, who was Jewish, for the Nobel Prize: "It was Planck's last gesture of support" before stepping down." (p. 213) Planck had given Meitner his strong support for many years (as a woman facing discrimination in the field of physics), long before the rise of Hitler. (Richard Rhodes, op. cit., 80) ↩

10. Peter Hayes, Why? Explaining the Holocaust (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2017) p. 71.↩

11. Robert K. Wittman and David Kinney, The Devil’s Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016), 331, citing Ian Kerhsaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemisis, New York: Norton, 2000. ↩

12. Heinrich Himmler comments, U.S. National Archives, in German: 15 min. 242-229. https://www.archives.gov/research/military/ww2/sound-recordings.html#43 and Jewish Virtual Library (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/himmler-s-posen-speech-quot-extermination-quot). ↩

13. Alfred Rosenberg, The Track of the Jew through the Ages (1920, 1937 - Alexander Jacob translation), 162. ↩

14. Richard Rhodes, οp. cit., 181-184. ↩

15. Richard Rhodes, οp. cit., 184. ↩

16. Amir Aczel, Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Created the Nuclear Age(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 104-110.↩

17. Soviet Communist dictator Josef Stalin, for example, set up a program in the Soviet Gulag [prison labor camp system], where he forced some of his most talented victims to work in special prison technological institutes called sharashki on behalf of the Soviet regime. These are described in Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s famous novel, The First Circle. The Nazis sometimes made exceptions for some Jewish forced labor as a prelude to final liquidation - as in the 'selections' at Auschwitz, but that was the extent of 'pragmatism' when it came to the so-called 'Jewish question.' Even the infamous Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz chose a talented Jewish pathologist, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, to assist him but had nearly all the other Jewish doctors and specialists who arrived with him around the same time killed almost immediately. Earlier, Mengele forced another specialist, Dr. Epstein, to serve as the director of his research laboratory. Epstein had been a professor at the University of Prague and was a pediatrician of world renown (see Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1960, 2011: 30). But these kinds of exceptions were largely unique. In any event, nearly all Jews under Hitler's control were marked for eventual death - sooner or later.↩

18. For more on "The Man in the High Castle" television series, click here. ↩

19. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Viking, 2018), 314.↩

20. Leo Szilard drafted the famous letter for Einstein to sign. While dated August 2, 1939, Einstein did not actually sign it until August 19, 1939, "when fellow Hungarian [Jewish] refugees Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner [joined Leo] Szilard [and] visited Einstein...at his vacation home on Long Island to explain to him that it might be possible to build nuclear weapons, and to press him to alert Roosevelt." (Graham Farmelo, Churchill's Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race, Basic Books, Perseus Group, 2013), 129. The combined group of Szilard, Teller and Wigner has sometimes been referred to as the so-called "Hungarian conspiracy." They persuaded Einstein that constructing an atomic weapon might be possible. Einstein replied: "I never thought of that!" They also knew that having Einstein sign the letter would carry more weight with President Roosevelt than if they attempted this themselves. See J. Melnick, Jewish Giftedness and World Redemption: The Calling of Israel (Messianic Jewish Publishers, 2017) 19 and 54-55 & footnote #71, p. 202, citing James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, 136, further citing Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987), 305, 308.

Szilard himself has been described as "a man of remarkable genius and political astuteness... He immediately set about helping Jewish emigres... In the autumn of 1933, standing at a road intersection near the British Museum, Szilard had an extraordinary scientific epiphany in which he understood the potential for releasing energy from the atom." (John Cornwell, op. cit., 208) ↩

21. Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns: The Story of the Men Who Made The Bomb, translated [from the German] by James Cleugh, New York, Grove Press, 1958, pp. 109–11. In terms of the timing, according to H.A. Feiveson, it was not until October 1941, when Vannevar Bush, the "director of the newly formed Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) carried the MAUD report to the president" did the Manhattan Project really get underway (H.A. Feiveson, Scientists Against Time: The Role of Scientists in World War II (Bloomington, Indiana: Archway Books, 2018), 158. ↩

22. Graham Farmelo, op. cit., 136, 141.↩

23. H.A. Feiveson, Scientists Against Time: The Role of Scientists in World War II (Bloomington, Indiana: Archway Books, 2018), 154. Ralph de Toledano, author of The Greatest Plot in History: How the Reds Stole the A-Bomb (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce), has noted that Peierls "desperately needed someone who could do the elaborate calculations needed in nuclear research..." He brought in a man named Klaus Fuchs, whose scientific papers he had read, and Fuchs, who turned out to be a Soviet spy, became fully integrated into the atomic bomb project. (p. 165) ↩

24. Richard Rhodes, op. cit., 107. ↩

25. "John von Neumann," Atomic Heritage Foundation, https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/john-von-neumann (Accessed 10 July 2020); Rhodes, op. cit., 108. ↩

26. "John von Neumann" documentary, The Mathematical Association of America (1966). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2jiQXI6nrE&t=157s ↩

27. Richard Rhodes, op. cit., 106-7. ↩

28. Richard Rhodes, op. cit., 112-3. ↩

29. "Emilio Segrè's Interview" with Richard Rhodes (June 29, 1983). Manhattan Project Voices. https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/emilio-segr%C3%A8s-interview ↩

30. "To Fermi - with Love - Part 1," Voices of the Manhattan Project
https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/fermi-love-part-1 ↩

31. Brian VanDeMark, Pandora’s Secrets: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb (2003), pp. 22, 24, citing Emilio Segrè, Enrico Fermi, Physicist, p. 98. ↩

32. Arnold Cusmariu, "Stanley P. Frankel" entry, "Jewish Scientists Helped America Build the Atom Bomb," American Thinker (February 8, 2015) https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/02/jewish_scientists_helped_america_build_the_atom_bomb_comments.html ↩

33. Farmelo, op. cit., 179-180, 119. ↩

34. Meron Medzini, "Jewish Scientists, Jewish Ethics and the Making of the Atomic Bomb," Chapter 8, War and Militarism in Modern Japan: Issues of History and Identity (Guy Podoler, Editor. Folkestone, Kent, UK: Global Oriental Ltd., 2009), 128. ↩

35. R. Rhodes, op. cit., 383-386; Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 93, 322-325; J. Melnick, Jewish Giftedness, op. cit., 56. ↩

36. J. Melnick, Jewish Giftedness, op. cit., 56. ↩

37. See Amir D. Aczel, Chapter 11, "The Nazi Nuclear Machine," Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Created the Nuclear Age (2009), 131-37. ↩

38. Ralph A. de Toledano, The Greatest Plot in History: How the Reds Stole the A-Bomb (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1963), 21. ↩

39. Isidor I. Rabi, Science: The Center of Culture, (New York and Cleveland: The New American Library, 1970), 140-141.↩

40. Farmelo, op. cit., 254. ↩

41. See Lawrence M. Krauss, The Greatest Story Ever Told - So Far (2017), 134. ↩

42. 42. John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil’s Pact (NY: Viking, 2003), 405.↩

43. Jim Melnick, Jewish Giftedness and World Redemption: The Calling of Israel (Messianic Jewish Publishers, 2017), 57..↩

Updated FEBRUARY 2024