How Nazi laws stymied German nuclear dreams

Richard Webb, features editor

FOR legislative acts of national intellectual suicide, the "Law for the restoration of the professional civil service", passed by the Nazis shortly after their accession to power in Germany in 1933, stands without comparison. German science, then the envy of the world, was decapitated as those of non-Aryan descent or suspect political views were forced from the nation's universities. Many sought refuge in friendlier - though not always friendly - countries such as the UK and US.

It is a dispiriting narrative of exile and personal and professional loss, but one that science writer Gordon Fraser recounts with little cohesion. He flits dizzyingly from one "quantum exile" to the next between paragraphs and sometimes even sentences. Orientation is not helped by his penchant for overwrought simile and a smattering of confounding protagonists, such as Sigmund Freud, who lie outside the book's stated physics remit.

The ultimate destination is clear, however. Many of those expelled from Nazi Germany went on to develop the atomic bomb that might, had history not determined otherwise, have been used against their birth land. Whether Germany's attempt to build its own bomb came to naught because its remaining intellectual elites were too busy planning the Holocaust, as Fraser suggests, or simply because the success of their earlier "cleansing" had robbed them of the necessary expertise, remains a question for debate.

Book Information
The Quantum Exodus
by Gordon Fraser
Published by: Oxford University Press
?25/$45

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