The best-known physicist in Austria, Erwin Schrödinger, wasn’t Jewish, but his wife was. Schrödinger had been at the University of Berlin in 1933 but had quit in protest when Hitler came to power. After Hitler invaded Austria, Schrödinger publicly recanted his anti-Nazi views, but this wasn’t enough for the new regime. Dismissed from his university post for “political unreliability,” Schrödinger fled to Ireland with his wife. Once there, he wrote a letter to Einstein, apologizing profusely for his “great duplicity.”
