Jewish Refugee Scientists

The expulsion of mainly Jewish scientists from Nazi Germany and Austria and the immigration of many of these refugees to the United States had a strong impact on American science.

Dismissals and Forced Emigrations of Jewish Scientists Germany is widely acknowledged to have been the international center of many areas of science in the nineteenth century and first third of the twentieth. This is indi­cated by the high percentage of German scientists among the Nobel laureates: Of all 100 Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and physiology/medicine awarded between 1901 and 1932, 33 were awarded to scien­tists in Germany and Austria, and only 6 went to Americans. Around a third of the German or Austrian Nobel laureates were Jewish or of Jewish origin.

In part as a consequence of the expul­sion of Jews, Germany lost its international preeminence in the sciences soon after the Nazis came to power in 1933. Nazi policy from the very beginning had as one of its main goals the purging of the entire civil service and public sector of Jews, people of Jewish origin, and those with leftist sympa­thies. The first and most important of these laws was the Gesetz fur die Wiederherstel- lung des Berufsbeamtentums (Law for the Restoration of the German Civil Service), passed on April 7, 1933. As a consequence, all Jewish (non-Aryan) and the very few outspoken liberal or left-wing university teachers and researchers from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes were dismissed.

German laws were applied to Austrian universities immediately after the Anschluss on March 13, 1938. “Non-Aryans” were in most cases dismissed in April 1938, along with politically undesirable individuals— among them supporters of the former Dollfuss-Schuschnigg government as well as those with obvious Christian-Socialist attitudes. The dismissals at the German University of Prague had already started at the end of 1938 and were completed after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

Of the academic scientific disciplines, physical chemistry and biochemistry were affected the most by these expulsions. Around a third of the scientists working in these fields were expelled from their posi­tions as university teachers or researchers at a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and most of them emigrated. In organic and inorganic chemistry around 20 percent lost their po­sitions; in zoology and botany around 10 percent. Figures in physics differ between 15 and 25 percent. Around 90 percent of the scientists who lost their positions were Jewish or of Jewish origin. The high per­centage of dismissals in chemistry and bio­chemistry are related to the comparatively strong participation of Jews in these fields, as opposed to biology.

More than 50 percent of the emigres left at first for various countries in western Europe, particularly the United Kingdom. At the end of the 1930s, many of them had to emigrate a second time: they had been given only temporary positions in the United Kingdom, and many Euro­pean countries had become targets of German aggression. With more than 30 percent of the emigre scientists, the United States became the country with the most emigres in the chemical and bio­medical sciences, followed by the United Kingdom (around 20 percent).

The influence and quality of scientists’ research was estimated by reviewing Nobel Prizes, determining the number of cita­tions in the Science Citation Index for the years 1945—1954, and relying on assess­ments from other scientists in the field. Based on these criteria, the following twenty-five emigre scientists from Nazi Germany were the most successful and in­fluential ones before and/or after their em­igration in chemistry, biochemistry, and bi­ology. (For physicists see below. It has not been reviewed in detail). Except for Max Delbruck and Johannes Holtfreter, all sci­entists were Jewish or of Jewish or partly Jewish origin. Individuals who had to emi­grate when they were still children are not included.

As this list can only partly indicate, emigres in the United States became most successful in biochemistry, the physical chemistry of polymers, and experimental embryology. They were also very successful in physics ( in the list represented only by Otto Stern, who started as a chemist and later became the pioneer of the molecular beam method in atomic physics). Some physicists, in particular Max Delbruck, and several biochemists, in particular Erwin Chargaff and Fritz Lipmann, later became pioneers in molecular biology. Other emigre physicists who were already successful or became so in the United States include Hans Bethe (Nobel Prize 1967) and James Franck (Nobel Prize 1925). Bethe also played an active role in the Manhattan Project, as did Viktor Weisskopf and three Hungarian Jewish sci­entists who had worked in Germany be­fore they emigrated to the United States: John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner (Nobel Prize 1963). The Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel Prize 1945), who in 1937 moved from Zurich to the United States, went back to Switzerland in 1945. The chemical physicist Maria Goppert-Mayer (Nobel Prize 1963) was not Jewish; she emigrated to the United States in 1930.

In the classical fields of biology, Viktor Hamburger at Washington University in St. Louis and Johannes Holtreter at the University of Rochester contributed greatly to neuroembryology and the properties of interacting cells in development, respec­tively. Both scientists were students of No- belist Hans Spemann at the University of Freiburg. Curt Stern was a renowned Drosophila geneticist when in 1933 he re­ceived a position at the University of Rochester and, in 1947, at the University of California, Berkeley. Salome Glueck- sohn-Waelsch, another student of Spe- mann, became a pioneer in mouse genetics after her emigration. First receiving a post at Columbia University, she moved to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York a few years later. There she be­came a full professor in 1958, a great achievement for a woman at the time.

Influence of Emigre Scientists in Biochemistry

The reception of emigre scientists in the United States strongly depended on their discipline. With the exception of Max

The twenty-five dismissed and/or emigre chemists, biochemists, and biologists who received the most citations in the Science Citation Index 1945-1954 and/or a Nobel Prize or distinguished themselves by individual major scientific contributions

Medical Res.

(director), U. Berlin (prof.)

Note: U. = University;TH= Technical University; KWI = Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; Med. Res. = Medical Research; ass. = assistant; res. fel. = research fellow. * Max Delbruck and Johannes Holtfreter were not Jewish.

Bergmann, an eminent protein chemist, Jewish organic and inorganic chemists did not receive academic positions. However, biochemists and a few physical chemists became university professors. As a group, German Jewish emigre scientists in the United States became most influential in biochemistry. It was a comparatively un­derdeveloped field in the United States, in which Germans at the time were more ad­vanced. Biochemistry became a niche for emigres, among them the most talented biochemists of the twentieth century. It is an example of a whole discipline that was changed dramatically by refugees. The German Jewish biochemists Gustav Emb­den, Hans Krebs, Otto Meyerhof, and Carl Neuberg had contributed decisively to the elucidation of the first cycles of intermedi­ary metabolism of the cell, research that began in 1910 with studies on the reac­tions of glycolysis (degradation of glucose) and fermentation. After 1933 important contributions to the field of biochemical reactions and mechanisms of intermediary metabolism came from German Jewish emigres, most noticeably Fritz Lipmann, Rudolf Schoenheimer, and his student Konrad Bloch in the United States, and Hans Krebs in England.

As was the case with many other Ger­man refugees, most of the older and al­ready accomplished biochemists, such as the Nobel laureates Otto Loewi and Otto Meyerhof, as well as Carl Neuberg, had problems adjusting themselves to their new situation—that is, lower salaries, smaller laboratory space, fewer coworkers and as­sistants (if at all), etc. Otto Loewi did not flee immediately when Germany annexed Austria because he was completing an im­portant experiment. He was imprisoned for two months, made his way to England, and in 1940 to the United States, where he joined the faculty of New York University College of Medicine as a research professor of pharmacology, an unsalaried post. Be­cause the Germans had compelled him to sign over his Nobel Prize money, he was supported by the Emergency Relief Com­mittee, and his research was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation for several years.

Otto Meyerhof, director of the divi­sion of physiology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidel­berg, was one of the last Jewish researchers dismissed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. In 1938 he emigrated to France, in 1940 he fled to the United States via Portugal. He became a research professor at the Uni­versity of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Meyerhof, one of the founders of the ener­getics of the cell, had contributed decisively to the elucidation of the metabolic cycle of glycolysis; that is, degradation of sugar in the cell. Despite increasing health prob­lems, he continued research in his field until his death in 1951.

Most of those who transformed the discipline of biochemistry in the United States belonged to a younger generation of extraordinarily gifted scientists. Eminent examples are Rudolf Schonheimer (later Schoenheimer) and Fritz Lipmann, the lat­ter ranking among the most important biochemists of the twentieth century.

Lipmann first went to the United States in 1931; he had received a fellowship to work at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Fearing the increasing power of the Nazi Party, he did not return to Germany the next year but went to Copenhagen to work with Albert Fischer. In 1939, shortly before the German occupation of Den­mark, he received a position at Cornell Medical School and in 1941 set up a bio­chemistry laboratory at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Lipmann at first continued the work in intermediary metabolism he had begun under Otto Meyerhof in Heidelberg. His demonstra­tion of the activation of intermediates in these cycles by the energy-rich “Coenzyme A” earned him the Nobel Prize in 1953 (together with Hans Krebs). In his later work he elucidated the chemical bonds of activated amino acids to t-RNA and the biosynthesis of antibiotics consisting of amino acids. His work was of major im­portance for the newly developing field of molecular biology. Lipmann was able suc­cessfully to transfer basic concepts that he had developed in one scientific field to a new field, thus contributing to the ad­vancement of both biochemistry and mo­lecular biology.

Schoenheimer was an assistant profes­sor at the University of Freiburg until his dismissal as a Jew. After his emigration in 1933, he became head of a research group at Columbia University. He successfully used the heavy isotope of hydrogen, deu­terium, discovered by Urey in 1932, as a tracer for studying pathways of intermedi­ary metabolism. His success convinced the head of the department, Hans T. Clarke, to develop a serious program in the medical and biological application of various isotopes. Though Schoenheimer did not receive a high position—at the time of his untimely death in 1942 he was still an associate professor—he was given the opportunity to found a center of re­search into the biochemistry of metabo­lism at Columbia Medical School, finan­cially supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. In part due to the influence of emigres from Germany and Austria, the biochemistry department at the Columbia School of Physicians and Surgeons, founded by Clarke, became one of the leading international centers of biochemi­cal research in the United States.

Among Schoenheimer’s students was Konrad Bloch, who, after studying chem­istry at the Technical University in Munich, was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and received his PhD in 1938 under Schoen- heimer. Bloch successfully discerned the in­termediate reactions in the synthesis of cho­lesterol by using deuterium-marked acetic acid, an achievement for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1964 (together with Feodor Lynen of Munich).

Protein chemistry was another field in which German Jewish immigrants exerted a great direct or indirect influence. The most prominent example is the protein chemist Max Bergmann, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Leather Re­search in Dresden and professor at the city’s Technical University. In contrast to other already prominent emigres of his age, he managed to adjust quickly. Bergmann left Germany immediately after his dismissal in summer 1933 and two years later received a position at the Rock­efeller Institute of Medicine in New York, where he founded an influential school of protein chemistry. Among his coworkers were Joseph Fruton and Heinz Fraenkel- Conrat, who was an emigre, too, and, some years later, William H. Stein and Stanford Moore. A major area of research was the development of analytical meth­ods to determine the amino acid composi­tion of peptides and proteins. A break­through was achieved after Bergmann’s death (in 1944) by Moore and Stein, who developed a new chromatography method to this aim. They received the Nobel Prize in 1972.

Influence of Emigre Scientists in Molecular Biology

Early studies on the scientific impact of the forced emigrations emphasize the role of emigre physicists in creating molecular bi­ology during the 1940s and 1950s. Donald Fleming, for example, considers the “pro­found stimulus given by refugee physicists to the revolution of biology” to be “one of the most remarkable by-products of the European diaspora of the 1930s” (Fleming 1969, 152). It is true that some physicists also played important roles in shaping the new research field of molecular biology, but most of the pioneering work was car­ried out by microbiologists and bio­chemists. There, too, emigres from Nazi Germany in the United States played a major role.

The theoretical physicist Max Del- bruck, assistant to Lise Meitner at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, went to the United States in 1937 on his own initiative, supported by a Rockefeller scholarship. Delbruck was not Jewish, but a university career in Germany seemed unlikely for him. In 1939 he initi­ated genetic phage research. The so-called phage group, founded by him and Salvador Luria, an emigre medical scientist from Italy, in 1941, developed techniques that turned out to be very successful in tackling fundamental questions in molecular biol­ogy. Gunther Stent, a younger member of the phage group, is an example of an emi­gre who left Germany when he was still a student and later became a well-known molecular biologist.

The chemist Erwin Chargaff devoted his entire work to the chemistry of DNA when he heard of the work by Oswald T. Avery and his collaborators on the trans­formation of pneumococci by DNA (1944). Chargaff, a Jewish Austrian by birth who had received his education in Vi­enna and in 1930 came to Berlin, went to the Institut Pasteur in 1933, and in 1935 emigrated to the United States, where he joined Columbia University. Chargaff demonstrated that DNA was not a monot­onous molecule, in which four nucleotides repeated themselves, as was believed at the time, but a molecule capable of determin­ing biological specificity. He became best known for having shown (1949—1952) that the molar ratio of particular bases of DNA (adenine and thymine, on the one hand, and guanine and cytosine, on the other), is close to one. His results were de­cisive for the subsequent elucidation of the double helix structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick.

Fritz Lipmann’s unusually broad in­sight into the biochemical processes in cells helped him successfully extend his bio­chemical work on questions of molecular biology, in particular the elucidation of the mechanism of the biosynthesis of proteins from amino acids. Lipmann applied his concept of a universal chemical energy source in the form of ATP on the forma­tion of a peptide bond between two amino acids, predicting that one had to be acti­vated by ATP beforehand.

Impact of Emigres in Polymer Chemistry

The pioneer of polymer, or macromolecu­lar, chemistry was Hermann Staudinger, professor at the University of Freiburg, who in the mid-1920s demonstrated the existence of macromolecules by organic chemical methods. He sustained this con­cept against the almost total rejection by his colleagues in organic chemistry during the 1920s and early 1930s. One of the first scientists to show that the concept of macromolecules was compatible with the results of X-ray crystallography was the chemist Hermann Mark. In contrast to Staudinger, who considered polymer chemistry to be entirely a branch of organic chemistry, Mark focused on the develop­ment of physical chemical methods for the study of polymers. He set up an interdisci­plinary working group at IG Farben in Ludwigshafen in 1927 and then estab­lished a teaching and research program in polymer chemistry at the University of Vi­enna, where he became a professor of phys­ical chemistry in 1932. After the Anschluss in 1938, Mark, whose father was Jewish, was dismissed. Following a short imprison­ment because of his friendship with the former chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1934, Mark fled to Canada via Switzerland and En­gland. Many of his students and coworkers were dismissed, too, and left Austria, among them the following individuals who later set up institutes of their own or headed industrial laboratories in the United States: Frederick Eirich, Herbert Margaretha, E. Suess, Robert Simha, Eugen Guth, and Hans Motz. Mark be­came head of research at the Canadian In­ternational Paper Company in Hawkes- bury, Ontario.

After two years, Mark decided that it was impossible to pursue his broad scien­tific interests in Hawkesbury. The du Pont Company, with which Mark had worked on developing viscose fibers to be used in tire cords, offered him a du Pont consul­tancy with an academic position at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Thus, in 1940 he moved to Brooklyn, where he be­came adjunct professor and was assigned to the Shellac Bureau, a small laboratory sup­ported by industry, whose task was to char­acterize shellac chemically.

Thanks to the support of the dean of Brooklyn Polytechnic, Raymond Kirk, Mark was given the opportunity to develop a teaching program and to establish a re­search center in polymer chemistry. In ad­dition to Peter Hohenstein, an organic chemist and former student of Mark in Vi­enna who was already at the Shellac Bu­reau, Mark employed Robert Simha, an­other former student, and Turner Alfrey, to establish a teaching program, which began in September 1940. Because the literature in polymer chemistry was almost totally in German at the time, it was important that all these people could understand German.

Research until 1945 was largely de­voted to wartime projects. Mark received large grants from the military and the gov­ernment. With the substantial funding he could hire many people. Among the re­searchers who joined Mark during the early 1940s were Isidor Fankuchen and Kurt G. Stern (another German refugee), who set up the ultracentrifuge at the institute; Paul M. Doty; A. V. Tobolsky; and B. H. Zimm. They investigated synthetic rubber and its properties and the mechanical properties of polymers. Other work was done on the permeability of membranes with the help of osmotic measurements, work that was related to the improvement of gas masks. After the war, Mark’s former coworker from Vienna, Frederick Eirich, and Her­bert Morawetz joined Mark at Brooklyn Polytechnic.

The polymer activities at Brooklyn Polytechnic led in 1947 to the foundation of the Institute of Polymer Research, the first such graduate program at an American university. In contrast to other depart­ments of polymer chemistry, as for example the one at the University of Illinois under Carl S. Marvel, that focused on either syn­thesis, characterization, or properties of polymers, Mark pursued the idea of creat­ing a new discipline that covered all the aspects of polymer research. Bringing to­gether physicists, chemists, and techni­cians, he succeeded in founding modern polymer science as a multidisciplinary aca­demic discipline. The Polymer Research Institute soon became the international leader in this field and remained so for decades after World War II. Together with Eric Proskauer, Mark founded the Journal of Polymer Science in 1946, three years after Hermann Staudinger had transformed the Journal fur Praktische Chemie (Journal of Practical Chemistry) into the Journal fur Makromolekulare Chemie (Journal for Macromolecular Chemistry).

Mark’s contribution to polymer science in the United States was less in the scientific field than in organizing research and teach­ing. His major scientific achievements took place while he was still in Germany and Austria. After the war, he extended his or­ganizational talents to projects outside the United States; for example, as chairman of the founding committee of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

Emigre Influence in Physical Chemistry

Physical chemistry had become a strong discipline in the United States in the 1920s. Whereas at the beginning of the century, American students and postdocs went to Germany, in particular to Wilhelm Ostwald, to study physical chemistry, by 1933, the year in which the first issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics appeared, leadership of the new chemical physics had passed to the United States, as names like Henry Eyring, G. N. Lewis, Robert S. Mulliken (Nobel Prize 1966), and Linus Pauling (Nobel Prize 1954) indicate.

As a consequence, emigre physical chemists as a group were less well received in the United States than theoretical physi­cists. Many ended up without permanent positions, such as Hans Beutler, formerly head of the department at the Kaiser Wil­helm Institute for Physical Chemistry; Otto Redlich, associate professor at the University of Vienna; and Alfred Reis, as­sociate professor at the Technical Univer­sity of Berlin. Others took up employment in industry, as for example Jacob Biker­man, assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Insti­tute for Physical Chemistry; Hans Cassel, lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin; and Gertrud Kornfeld, lecturer at the University of Berlin. Some received permanent positions at American universi­ties, such as Herbert Freundlich, Kasimir Fajans, Immanuel Estermann, Karl Sollner, Otto Stern, and Kurt Wohl.

Otto Stern was the most eminent physical chemist from Germany. His case illustrates the problems that even some very renowned scientists of the older gener­ation had to face after their emigration. Starting as a chemist and holding a profes­sorship of physical chemistry at the Uni­versity of Hamburg, his later experiments were in the forefront of physics, related to the quantum theory of the atom, where he developed the molecular beam method in the 1920s. In 1920 and 1921 he conducted the famous experiment with Walther Ger­lach in which they provided evidence for the magnetic properties of the electron (spin). In the early 1930s, Stern deter­mined the magnetic moment of the pro­ton. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1943 for the development of the molecular beam method and the determination of the magnetic properties of the proton. After he and his coworker Immanuel Estermann were dismissed and emigrated, this research was not continued in Germany. The center of nuclear magnetic moments research moved to Columbia University. Here Isidor Rabi, who had become acquainted with this research during a postdoctoral year with Stern in Hamburg in 1929, in­troduced new and powerful molecular beam methods and founded a school that later achieved spectacular results. He re­ceived a Nobel Prize in 1944.

Due to the intervention of the presi­dent of the university, Thomas Baker, Stern and Estermann were given positions at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. Baker vis­ited Germany in July 1933 and engaged the three Jewish scientists Stern, Estermann, and Ernst Berl, formerly professor of chem­ical technology at the Technical University in Darmstadt. Together with Estermann, Stern established a molecular beam labora­tory at the Carnegie Institute and contin­ued to work in this field, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1943. However, Stern never regained the reputation he had enjoyed in Hamburg, largely due to the fact that there was little interest from the faculty and no support from the top after the first year. Stern left Pittsburgh after his retire­ment in 1945 and settled in Berkeley. The University of California completely ignored the fact that he was in Berkeley and never asked him to join the faculty. Estermann had fewer problems than Stern, but finally decided to leave Pittsburgh as well. During the war he became a consultant on the Manhattan Project.

Emigre Influence in Industry Many emigres became successful industrial chemists. Among them were Gertrud Kornfeld and Arnold Weissberger. Korn- feld, Privatdozent (lecturer) for physical chemistry and assistant to Max Bodenstein at the Institute for Physical Chemistry of the University of Berlin, had focused on photochemistry and reaction kinetics. After she was dismissed because she was Jewish, she first attempted to find a post in England. After this attempt failed, she went to Vienna, supported by a fellowship from the American Association of Univer­sity Women in 1935. In 1937 she emi­grated to the United States, accepting a post at the research laboratory of Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York.

As Privatdozent (lecturer) for organic chemistry at the University of Leipzig, Arnold Weissberger, being Jewish, was dismissed in October 1933. He received a three-year fellowship from the Academic Assistance Council in London to work with N. V. Sidgwick in Oxford. Interest­ingly, according to a certain Professor Gibson, an expert referee for this council, Weissberger was not suitable for industry. However, in 1936 Weissberger accepted a position at Kodak in Rochester, where he joined the research laboratories in their synthetic chemicals department. With more than 100 patents, mostly dealing with the manufacturing of color film and methods for developing film, he helped Kodak become competitive in areas of or­ganic chemistry in which the Germans (Agfa) were leaders. One notable result achieved by Weissberger and his chemist colleagues during World War II was the development of nondiffusing couplers by a technique different from the one the

Germans had invented shortly before. Couplers are chemical compounds that form dyes when combined with photo­graphic developing agents. Nondiffusing couplers greatly simplify the production of dyes. Weissberger’s inventions thus helped greatly to improve the colors in the dyes used in Kodak film.

Ute Deichmann

See also Einstein, Albert; German Jewish Migration to the United States; Intellectual Exile; Wigner, Eugen(e) Paul

References and Further Reading

Deichmann, Ute. Biologists under Hitler.

Cambridge: Harvard University, 1996.

------. “The Expulsion of Jewish Chemists and Biochemists from Academia in Nazi Germany.” Perspectives on Science 7 (1999): 1-86.

Fleming, Donald. “Emigre Physicists and the Biological Revolution.” In The Intellectual Migration. Eds. Donald Fleming and B. Bailyn. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1969.

Kleinkauf, Horst, Hans von Dohren, and Lothar Jaenicke. The Roots of Modern Biochemistry. Fritz Lipmanns Squiggle and Its Consequences. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1988.

Kohler, Robert E. “Rudolf Schoenheimer, Isotopic Tracers, and Biochemistry in the 1930s.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 8 (1977): 257-298.

Krohn, Claus Dieter, Patrik zur Muhlen, Gerhard Paul, and Lutz Winkler, eds. Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933—1945. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998.

Lipmann, Fritz. Wanderings of a Biochemist. New York: Wiley, 1971.

Mark, Herman. From Small Organic Molecules to Large: A Century of Progress. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1993.

Morawetz, Herbert. “Herman Mark, Life and Accomplishments.” Macromol. Symp. 98 (1995): 1173-1184.

Nachmansohn, David. German-Jewish Pioneers in Science 1900—1933. New York: Springer, 1979.