Yuri showed mathematical ability at a young age. His father was a nonobservant Jew who was an engineer in the meat business. Golfand was born in 1922 in Kharkov in Ukraine. The essay on Houtermans by Viktor Frenkel, which takes up much the largest portion of the book, is particularly remarkable, but Golfand also deserves close attention. The book’s editor, Mikhail Shifman, now a professor at the University of Minnesota and a distinguished theoretical physicist, was also born in Soviet Latvia. Both of these are written by Russians who had access to police files. It consists of two long essays on the physicists Friedrich Houtermans and Yuri Golfand. Much has been written about the fate of Jewish scientists in Soviet Russia, but I have never seen anything quite like Physics in a Mad World. Late in his life he said he regretted that the Manhattan Project had not made the bomb earlier so that it could have been used against Germany. During the war he was head of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos. Bethe found a temporary job in Manchester and then got an offer from Cornell, where he spent the rest of his career. His former professor Arnold Sommerfeld-a very great teacher of physics-made strong efforts to find jobs abroad for his Jewish students. He was at the time at the University of Tübingen and was immediately dismissed. He had two Jewish grandparents, so according to the first racial laws that were promulgated in 1933 he could not hold a university position. The nuclear physicist Hans Bethe is another example. His son Hans, who was on this “ski trip,” became a physicist and served as the secretary of the US Air Force. He ended up at the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, where he assembled a noted group of chemists. He had bought some $50,000 worth of platinum wire that he fashioned into coat hangers. He then left on a “ski trip” to Switzerland with his family, in a car with skis on the roof and a Nazi flag on the hood. He was released without his passport, which he retrieved with a bribe of almost a year’s salary. But after the German annexation of Austria in 1938 he was arrested by the Gestapo. A highly decorated World War I veteran, Mark became a very distinguished polymer chemist and was at the IG Farben company in Germany until the Nazis came to power in 1933, when he returned with his family to Vienna. His father had been born Jewish but converted to Lutheranism upon marriage. Herman Mark was born in Vienna in 1895, making him an Austrian citizen. Here are two examples from German science. In both cases the amount of scientific talent destroyed was beyond calculation. After having done so they were either imprisoned or summarily executed. Many were arrested and forced to “confess” to crimes. The Russian scientists, on the other hand, were not allowed to leave. Until October 1941 Jews were encouraged to leave Germany and most of the prominent scientists did so, though not without great difficulty, since they were allowed to take very little money out of the country. The German scientists were automatically “guilty” if they had more than one eighth Jewish “blood.” In Russia they had to be guilty of doing something. In the 1930s German and Russian scientists of Jewish origin were treated quite differently. The physicist Friedrich Houtermans, Göttingen, Germany, 1937
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