The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

The Third Reich promulgated its first anti-Jewish ordinance on April 7. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, the harbinger of some four hundred anti-Semitic laws and decrees the Nazis would issue, changed Teller’s life, Pauli’s, Frisch’s, the lives of their colleagues decisively, forever. It announced bluntly that “civil servants of non-Aryan descent must retire.”674 A decree defining “non-Aryan” followed on April 11: anyone “descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents.”675 Universities were state institutions. Members of their faculties were therefore civil servants. The new law abruptly stripped a quarter of the physicists of Germany, including eleven who had earned or would earn Nobel Prizes, of their positions and their livelihood.676 It immediately affected some 1,600 scholars in all.