The ‘Problem of Evil’ and Postwar Scientific Cooperation in Europe
John Krige
School of History, Technology and Society, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.
Far from reflecting upon the problem of evil in the years that followed the end of World War II, most
Europeans turned their heads resolutely away from it. […] After 1945 our parents’ generation set aside the
problem of evil because—for them—it contained too much meaning.
Tony Judt, 20081
The Germans’ crimes are really the most abhorrent that the history of so-called civilized nations can put
forward. The attitude of German intellectuals – regarded as a class – was no better than the mean public.
[…] Under these conditions I feel an irresistible aversion to participating in anything that embodies a part
of German public life simply out of a need to stay clean.
Albert Einstein, 19492
Tant qu’ils [des travaux sur les émotions en histoire] nous feront défaut, il n’y aura pas d’historie possible.
Lucien Febvre, 19383
For Corine de France and Anne Kwaschik, eds, Science, Internationalization and the Cold War (Paris: Armand Colin)
The central aim of this paper is to problematize the almost complete absence of any
reference to ‘the problem of evil’ from actor accounts (and historical analyses) of the
postwar reconstruction of technoscience in Europe. The European scientific community
rapidly rebuilt itself after the war, and embarked on new and significant modes of
interpersonal and international cooperation. To do so with any success scientists in the
allied countries needed to draw a veil over the German crimes (Einstein), and the
collusion of many of their colleagues in them, including some of the most eminent
practitioners in physics, in astronomy, in biology, in chemistry, in medicine. Things had
1 Tony Judt, “The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe,” New York Review of Books, 14 February 2008.2 Letter, Albert Einstein to Otto Hahn, 28 January 1949, cited in Klaus Hentschel, The Mental Aftermath. The Mentality of German Physicists 1945-1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 165.3Lucien Febvre (1938), “La sensibilité et l’histoire. Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefrois”, in Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’Histoire (Paris : Armand Colin, 1992), 221-238, at 236..
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not gone so smoothly after the First World War. Then a sustained effort was made to
exclude the German (and Austrian) scientific community from international intercourse,
at least at a formal level. The ensuing boycott, as Schroeder-Gudehus explains, was
initially “quite effective, excluding German and Austrian scientists from associations,
meetings, and publications and inflicting on their community the intended humiliation.” 4
It was only in 1926, and under pressure from their governments, that national Academies
backed away from their “patriotic agitation” and were persuaded to “give international
détente a chance.” Nothing comparable occurred after WWII. There were sporadic
objections to welcoming German scientists back into the international fold but there was
no organized attempt to exclude them. The past was ‘forgotten’ in the interests of moving
forward together into the future.
The pitiful state of science after the war — especially compared to that in the
United States —, the communist threat in the cold war, and the pressure for European
integration together account in part for this collective amnesia. As multiple studies have
shown there were good functional and geopolitical reasons for European scientists and
governments, including those in West Germany, to put the immediate past behind them,
and to pool people and money in costly and complex big science projects in the first
decades after WWII. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research is held to
be exemplary in this regard: collaboration was imperative to catch up with the world
leader and to avert a transatlantic ‘brain drain’.5 What this comfortable explanation
overlooks, however, is the emotional and institutional work that had to be done by key
social actors who promoted major multinational projects in the 1950s to deal with the
‘problem of evil.’ Indeed, it is sobering to reflect that the very success of the cooperative
postwar reconstruction of European science, so often lauded, relied on self-discipline and
repression about the behavior of German scientists under the Third Reich. To inject that
emotional work back into our accounts is not simply to give due weight to human
subjectivity in crafting our historical explanations. It is also to raise questions about how
4 Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, “Probing the Master Narrative of Scientific Internationalism. Nationals and Neutrals in the 1920s,” in Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen and Sven Widmalm, eds, Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2012), 19-42.5 A three-volume history was published by North Holland; for the first, Armin Hermann, John Krige, Ulrike Mersits and Dominique Pestre, A History of CERN. Vol. I. Launching the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1987).
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transnational scientific and ‘emotional communities’ were constructed immediately after
the war, about how trust between their members was acquired and performed and, more
generally, about the emotional compromises (and associated institutional arrangements)
that had to be made for ‘Europe’ to get off the ground at all.6
There is nothing new in the recognition that emotions mattered to the postwar
reconstruction Europe (though this is usually left implicit rather than analyzed). Indeed it
is a story driven by fear of a resurgence of German nationalism and militarism, as well as
by mutual distrust between Britain and France. But, as Judt and Einstein insist in the
quotes above, it is also a story of how erstwhile enemies dealt with collaboration with the
Hitler regime and, more generally, with the attempted genocide of the Jews in Europe.
Fruitful cooperation required repression, questions not asked, emotions disciplined.
This paper uses two examples of scientific cooperation in the 1950s to illustrate
how and why the ‘problem of evil’ was dealt with in the construction of European
facilities for nuclear physics and for astronomy. It is noteworthy that senior American
officials were crucial in facilitating this process, though in very different ways in CERN
and in ESO (the European Southern Observatory). The establishment of these
organizations has of course been recounted before. The geopolitical imperatives that
produced them are well known; the institutional and emotional work needed to ensure
their success in the light of the immediate past is generally ignored (and at best obliquely
refereed to in the accounts produced by the actors themselves). This paper recovers the
liminal field that lay between rejection and acceptance, as translated into institutional
arrangements to restrict German influence in cooperative scientific initiatives in physics
and in astronomy in the 1950s. These arrangements were tacit rather than explicit, not
openly negotiated but mutually agreed. The ‘problem of evil’ undoubtedly lurked in the
background of encounters with German scientists after the war. This paper will suggest
that, while it was repressed in interpersonal relationships and public statements —
whence the silences — it was expressed in quotidian institutional arrangements that, as
everyone knew, were intended to curb German power.
6 This involves thinking about emotions in history in a sense quite different to that understood by Febvre, i.e. not as irrational forces but as socially constructed and embedded in ‘emotional communities’ — see Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review, 107:3 (2002), 821-45.
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Repression and (superficial?) reconciliation
It was not historical research but a play produced about fifteen years ago that
dramatically turned the spotlight on the interpersonal relationships between allied and
German scientists during and after WWII. Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen elevated a
mostly ignored and relatively minor incident into a major lens probing the feelings of two
giants of European physics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.7
In September 1941 Heisenberg briefly visited Bohr in Copenhagen under strained
circumstances. Heisenberg was on an official visit to the newly founded Deutsches
Wissenschaftliches Institut (German Cultural Institute) that had been established to
promote German values in Nazi-occupied Denmark. He took the opportunity to visit his
mentor and friend at the famed Institute for Theoretical Physics where he had spent a
good deal of time as a young man reveling in the freewheeling atmosphere of the
‘Copenhagen spirit’.8 The meeting went badly, for reasons that are not clear, and that
were hotly contested. Robert Jungk, in his book Heller als tausend Sonnen. Das Schicksal
der Atomforscher, published in German in 1956,9 suggested that Heisenberg had gone to
Copenhagen to plea that physicists the world over renounce the development of nuclear
weapons, returning home empty handed. Frayn’s play amplified this encounter into a
subject of major public and historical interest and led the Bohr family to release about a
dozen previously unpublished documents.10 These were private notes and drafts of letters
written by Bohr to Heisenberg after Jungk’s book was published.
The first of these draft letters gives one a good idea of the intensity of Bohr’s
feelings on first seeing Jungk’s book when it came out in Danish in1957:
7 Michael Frayn, Copenhagen (London: 1998).8 Finn Aaserud, Redirecting Science. Niels Bohr, Philanthropy and the Rise of Physics (Cambridge University Press, 1990).9 Scherz & Goverts Verlag Stuttgart 1956. James Cleugh translated it into English and it was published under the title Brighter than a Thousand Suns. A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists in 1958 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, An American edition was published in 1970. The book is the first published account of the Manhattan Project by a non-scientist.10 For the documents see http://www.nba.nbi.dk/papers/docs/cover.html.
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I think that I owe it to you to tell you that I am greatly amazed to see how much
your memory has deceived you [regarding our meeting in September 1941] in
your letter to the author of the book, excerpts of which are printed in the Danish
edition. Personally, I remember every word of our conversations, which took
place on a background of extreme sorrow and tension for us here in Denmark. In
particular, it made a strong impression both on Margarethe [Bohr’s wife] and me,
and on everyone at the Institute that the two of you spoke to, that you and [Carl
Friedrich Von] Weizsäcker expressed your definite conviction that Germany
would win and that it was therefore quite foolish for us to maintain the hope of a
different outcome of the war and to be reticent as regards all German offers of
cooperation. I also remember quite clearly our conversation in my room at the
Institute, where in vague terms you spoke in a manner that could only give me the
firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in
Germany to develop atomic weapons […].11
Much has been written about this letter and the accuracy, not only of Bohr’s
memory but also of the putative commitment of Heisenberg and the German physics
community to developing a nuclear weapon for Hitler.12 What concerns me here,
however, is that Bohr never sent the letter. Cathryn Carson reminds us that Heisenberg’s
trip to Copenhagen in 1941 was an open secret in the physics community; by the 1950s it
had become a “subject for discreet commentary but not open confrontation” in the
interest of “postwar reconciliation.”13 Bohr himself went along with this even though he
was deeply hurt not to say angered: as late as March 1962, shortly before his death in
November, he drafted yet another unsent letter to Heisenberg on the lines of the above.14
‘Postwar reconciliation’ demanded repression, a repression that was surely facilitated by
Bohr’s deep commitment to scientific internationalism. Science, as the embodiment of
objective rationality, was expected to rise above emotional, subjective disagreements that
11 http://www.nba.nbi.dk/papers/docs/d01tra.htm12 For an excellent collection see Matthias Dörries, Copenhagen in Debate. Historical Essays and Documents on the Meeting Between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (Berkeley: Office for History of Science and Technology, 2005).13 Cathryn Carson, “Reflections on Copenhagen,” in Dörries, Copenhagen in Debate, 7-17, at 9.14 http://www.nba.nbi.dk/papers/docs/d11ctra.htm.
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yielded fruitless dispute and discord: Bohr would not descend into the realm of
confrontation and public rebuke, notwithstanding his grief and anger.
Heisenberg’s insensitivity regarding his crass behavior in Copenhagen was typical
of the postwar attitude of German physicists. Klaus Hentschel has analyzed their
mentalité using material drawn from 1945 to 1949. He found a remarkable professional
homogeneity among them that contrasted sharply with their internecine struggles for
power in the interwar years. They were united by a deep sense of injustice, of being
misunderstood by the rest of the world, of being unfairly blamed and punished for crimes
they did not commit.15 These self-righteous sentiments were amplified by the harsh living
conditions and meager rations they endured under the allied occupied forces. Richard
Courant, a brilliant émigré mathematician then based in New York who visited occupied
Germany in 1947 with Nathalie Artin, was appalled to hear an eminent scientist tell them
that “even the Nazis fed the inmates of concentration camps.”16 Otto Hahn, who was
incensed by the somewhat indiscriminate application of denazification policies, wrote to
Lise Meitner (who had worked with him on nuclear fission in Berlin before the war) that
“the Americans in Germany are now doing the same as the Germans used to do in
occupied countries.”17 She was aghast.
We know a little about the attitude of the astronomy community from a report
published in 1946 by Gerard Kuiper, an eminent Dutch astronomer and American émigré
who was a member of the ALSOS scientific and intelligence mission that was set up in
1943 to evaluate the state of nuclear research in Germany. ALSOS advanced behind
allied lines as WWII drew to a close and searched for personnel, records, material, and
sites to evaluate the German nuclear project.18 Kuiper noted that while the majority of the
astronomers were not “aggressive” Nazi’s, their dissatisfaction with Nazi “theories”
15 Klaus Hentschel, The Mental Aftermath. The Mentality of German Physicists, 1945 -1 1949 (Oxford University Press, 2007).16 Cited in John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 52. We can find no detailed information on Ms Artin.17 Ruth Lewin Sime, Lise Meitner. A Life in Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 344.18 Gerard Kuiper, “German Astronomy during the War,” Popular Astronomy, 54:6 (1946), 263-287. On the ALSOS mission see Samuel A. Goudsmit, L’Allemagne et le secret atomique. La mission ALSOS (Paris: Fayard, 1948). There is useful context in Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 204-21.
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remained “latent.” Otto Heckmann was an exception, Kuiper claimed, openly expressing
his disagreement (in this he was misled by Heckmann’s intellectual gymnastics, as we
shall see later). Kuiper pointed out that nearly all astronomers who were not already
members of the Nazi party before the war had joined the party after 1939. The
community as a whole not only benefited from government support: they
opportunistically took advantage of German conquest to refurbish their laboratories.
While Heckman’s observatory at Hamburg was forced to stop teaching and
research and devote its energies to the war effort, it is clear from Kuiper’s report that
some sections of German astronomy flourished during the war. Karl-Otto Kiepenhauer,
the director of the Fraunhofer Institute, for example, aimed to “coordinate and foster solar
research, not only in Germany and Austria, but in the occupied territories,” establishing a
solar observatory in Sicily that used some equipment requisitioned from an observatory
in Belgrade, and building four new Alpine observatories. Capitalizing on advances to the
east, the Germans dismantled the equipment at the Simeis Observatory on Mount Crimea
in the Ukraine. Capitalizing on advances to the west, the observatory in Leipzig was
refurbished, after being bombed in 1943, using equipment taken from the Belgian Royal
Observatory at Uccle. The Wehrmacht also took a reflector from Uccle and, with the help
of Zeiss, used it to make infrared observations of shipping in the English Channel. Kuiper
noted explicitly, and with a controlled sense of outrage, that the pillage of the equipment
from Mount Crimea and “two important telescopes from Uccle, Belgium” was believed
to be justified by the local community. These two centres had “one point in common”, he
wrote. “Both had obtained reparation equipment after the first world war”. The clear
implication was that German astronomers, still smarting from the humiliation of the
earlier defeat and the punishment meted out to them by the Treaty of Versailles, felt that
they were fully entitled to take back what was “theirs.”
One cannot overestimate the extent of the hostility provoked by the attitudes of
German scientists after the war. Courant and Artin felt they had “no clear conception of
the misery inflicted by Nazi Germany on her victims. Self-centered, they indulge in
criticism of the Allies, and are unwilling to see the present plight of Germany as a
consequence of Hitlerism rather than of Allied mistakes.” Rockefeller Foundation officer
Alan Gregg, who was obliged, against his will, to seek funding opportunities in occupied
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Germany, was so disgusted after interviewing medical researchers that, on leaving
Germany and Austria in 1949 he wrote that, “It isn’t that you can vomit what you have
already had to eat — you can’t — but at least you don’t have to sit smiling and eat more
and more.”19 In 1951 the chemist Sir Francis (formerly Franz) Simon spoke for many
when he wrote that:
In my opinion German scientists as a group lost their honour in 1933 and did
nothing to get it back. […] The least you could expect after all that happened was
that German scientists, as a group, would state publicly and clearly that they
regretted what had happened. I did not notice anything of this kind.20
Ute Deichman, in her study of the relationship between biologists and chemists
who left Germany and those stayed behind, concluded that it took quite some time for
scientific exchanges to become ‘normalized’ after the war, i.e. for “the national Socialist
past [to] become irrelevant in regard to scientific communication and cooperation.”21 This
then seems to generally true. For at least a decade after the war deep feelings divided
allied scientists and those who had fled Germany from their colleagues who had stayed in
the country. These feelings were counterbalanced by the urge to collaborate in the name
of scientific internationalism and by the need to exploit the new opportunities for
rebuilding science at the European level that were emerging at the time.
These broad ideological and functional explanations help explain what brought
the scientists together; however, they are too general to explain how mutual resentment
was dealt with at the day-to-day working level, when emotions could run high. The
postwar reconstruction of European science in the 1950s was only possible because the
anger and contempt that many felt for their German ‘colleagues’ could be submerged
beneath the urge for cooperation and managed through institutional arrangements that
defused face-to-face encounters. The successful reintegration of German scientists into
European organizations is easily celebrated. The emotional and institutional work that
had to be done to make that happen is usually glossed over now, as then.
19 Krige, Hegemony, pp. 52 and 286 for these two quotes, the latter from a text by Paul Weindling.20 Cited by Ute Deichmann, “The Expulsion of German-Jewish Chemists and Biochemists and their Correspondence with Colleagues in Germany After 1945: the Impossibility of Normalization?”, in Margit Szöllösi-Janze (ed), Science in the Third Reich (New York: Berg, 2001), 243-280.21 Deichmann, “Expulsion,” 272.
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The ‘problem of evil’ and CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research)
Physicists’ understanding of the structure of the nucleus was radically transformed after
the war using high-energy cosmic rays and giant particle accelerators. The European
community, that had played such a key role in making sense of nuclear structure in the
first decades of the 20th century, found their lead wrenched from their grasp by their
American colleagues. To re-establish themselves as internationally respectable partners
they needed to acquire powerful, costly and complex high-energy particle accelerators.
No nation, the British apart, could aspire to do this alone. The French were particularly
pro-active in drawing up plans for a joint European effort. They hoped to capitalize on
American help to reduce cost and to avoid duplicating effort — but recognized that
restrictions on the circulation of nuclear knowledge, and the presence of communists in
the French Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA) were major impediments to
cooperation. Its first scientific Director, Nobel prizewinner and militant communist,
Frédéric Joliot-Curie, was removed from office in April 1950.22 This paved the way for a
major American initiative by the physicist Isidor I. Rabi at a meeting of the UNESCO
General Assembly in Florence in June 1950.23
Rabi was a member of the official American delegation to the gathering. He had
just facilitated the establishment of a national accelerator facility at Brookhaven on Long
Island to serve the needs of nine Northeastern universities. In Florence, in consultation
with the State Department and several leading European physicists, he extended the
model from universities to individual countries. As resolution 2.21 put it, UNESCO was
invited “to assist and encourage the formation and organization of regional research
centres and laboratories in order to increase and make more fruitful the international
collaboration of scientists in the search for new knowledge in fields where the effort of
22 Michel Pinault, Frédéric Joliot-Curie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000). For the history of the CNRS see the article written by Denis Guthleben in this volume.23 Krige, American Hegemony, chapter 3 deals comprehensively with Rabi’s role in the birth of CERN, based on a previous major study (cf Note 26). Rabi’s own version is found in John S. Rigden, Rabi. Scientist and Citizen (Harvard University Press, 2000), 235-7, in his interview with Lew Kowarski on 6 November 1973, and in another with Edoardo Amaldi on 2 March 1983 (CERN Archives, Geneva).
9
any one country is insufficient for the task.”24 Rabi personally identified biology,
computing, and above all physics as possible fields for a collaborative effort. Thus was
planted the seed that was to become CERN.
Rabi liked to say that CERN was simply an extension of Brookhaven, ‘with
governments replacing universities.’ It was not. Brookhaven was equipped with a particle
accelerator and a nuclear reactor. Indeed in April/May 1950 a group of French physicists
proposed that the countries of Western Europe together build an organization for ‘atomic
research’ that, like Brookhaven in New York State and Harwell in England, included
both. Rabi limited America’s blessing to an accelerator because, as he put it in a later
interview, “nuclear energy smelled very much of the military on the one side and
commercial on the other, and it would have been full of rivalry.”25
There was more to it than that. Rabi limited CERN to an accelerator but expanded
its potential membership by including West Germany in the new venture, just nine
months after the division of the country and before it was even a member of UNESCO.26
The scientific equipment authorized was influenced by the political choice: occupation
laws did not permit German scientists to have access to nuclear reactors for research or
power that could produce fuel for weapons. In other words Rabi shaped the research
trajectory of CERN to enable Germany to become one of its Member States.27 Speaking
in 1983 he remarked that “the main reason in favour of the European laboratory was the
Unity of Europe.”28 In fact the new regional laboratory that he proposed in Florence was
not only inserted into the historical movement towards European integration; it endorsed
that process as a solution to ‘the German problem.’
Rabi, although Jewish himself, was blind to the behaviour of people like
Heisenberg during the war. He was a member of the Adams Committee that had insisted
as early as July 1945 that German scientists had a key role to play in the economic
reconstruction of the country and that controls on their research should be restricted to the
minimum. Adopting an attitude of what Mitchell Ash calls ‘technocratic innocence ‘ — a
24 Hermann et al., CERN, 83.25 Interview with Kowarski, 3.26 Rabi was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations that first met in January 1949, and was actively engaged in discussions on the postwar reconstruction of Western Europe: see Krige, Hegemony, 59.27 This is developed at greater length in Krige, American Hegemony, chapter 3.28 Interview with Amaldi, 4.
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naïve belief in the ‘neutrality’ of scientific and technological resources — the Committee
claimed that German scientists who had worked under the Third Reich had remained
outside the political fray and were in fact “an island of nonconformity in the Nazified
body politic.”29 These comfortable judgments dovetailed with Rabi’s broader ambitions
as a vector of US foreign policy in the region. He had no moral compunction in
promoting the inclusion of German physicists in CERN and every political reason to do
so: the laboratory dovetailed with the urge to integration underway on the continent (the
Schuman Plan of May 1950) and was part of Eisenhower’s grand design to build a strong
united Europe that included West Germany, independent of the U.S. while allied with it,
and capable of sharing the burden of defense against the Soviet threat.
When the official agreement establishing CERN was signed in 1952, 18 European
physicists telegrammed New York to tell Rabi of the “official birth of the project you
fathered at Florence.” He framed the letter and hung it on the wall of his office at home.30
Bohr was one of the signatories, of course, but so too was Heisenberg. This is not to say
that the integration of Germany into the laboratory went smoothly, though it is extremely
difficult to get hard and fast evidence of the tensions surrounding it. The only systematic
account we have is the analysis by Armin Hermann of the concerns in Germany over the
attribution of senior posts in CERN to German nationals when the laboratory was set up
in 1954.31
It was generally understood that countries that made major contributions to the
new laboratory (funded proportionately to GDP) were entitled to have representatives in
senior posts as along as they were qualified for the position. No German national was
among the first group of Division Leaders, however. When challenged to account for this
by Heisenberg, CERN officials insisted that political considerations were not at play:
Germany’s candidates were simply not among the best in the applicant pool. Heisenberg
did not believe this. On the contrary, as he put it at a meeting of the Kommission für
Atomphysik in December 1954, “[…]there was no mistaking the fact that in many
countries feelings towards Germany were more hostile than, for example, four years ago
29 Mitchell G. Ash, “Denazifying Scientists and Science,” in Matthias Judt and Burghard Ciesla, eds, Technology Transfer out of Germany (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), 61-79. For the final quote see Krige, American Hegemony, 47.30 Rigden, Rabi, 237. 31 Armin Hermann, “Germany’s Part in the Setting up of CERN,” in Herman et al, CERN, chapter 11.
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— something he had recently noted himself in the United States […].”32 For Heisenberg
then the war still cast a long shadow over interpersonal relations between physicists a
decade after it had ended, and was shaping the attribution of posts at CERN. The point
was confirmed by CERN’s first Director General and Swiss émigré, Felix Bloch, who
told Wolfgang Gentner that “it was extremely difficult for him to support a German
candidate” as Chief Administrative and Finance Officer, “unless he could be entirely sure
that the person in question had no compromising political past.”33
The European physics community went along with the inclusion of Germany as a
Member State of CERN — the broader political push to reintegration, along with U.S.
pressure, left them little option. But there were limits to what they could accept, limits to
their ability to work along with German colleagues, above all in senior posts. CERN’s
first organigramme embodied political choices that were driven by barely-repressed
sentiments of hostility to the behavior of the German science community during and after
the war.
The ‘problem of evil’ and the European Southern Observatory (ESO)
In the early 1950s, inspired by the CERN ‘model’, several Europeans astronomers
began to lobby for a ground-based telescope in the southern hemisphere to study the
central parts of the galaxy and the nearest extragalactic systems .34 There were a number
of reasons for this. There was important scientific work to be done that was not possible
with the powerful observatories they had in the northern hemisphere. The equipment they
wanted would be comparable to that available in the best American observatories and it
was hoped that Europeans could use American engineering designs, so leapfrogging over
their technological lag, and positioning themselves alongside their American colleagues
at the research frontier.35 Finally, senior science administrators with a commitment to
European integration were engaged from the outset. Jan Bannier, the Director of the
Dutch ‘National Science Foundation’ (ZWO) and Gosta Funke, the secretary of the
32 Hermann, “Germany’s Part,” 419.33 Ibid. 34 The ‘official’ history is Adriaan Blaauw, ESO’s Early History. The European Southern Observatory from Concept to Reality (Garching bei München: ESO, 1991). See also Frank K. Edmondson, “The Ford Foundation and the European Southern Observatory,” J. of the History of Astronomy, 29:4 (1998), 309-326.35 Blaauw, ESO, 4.
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Swedish Natural Sciences Research Council, were both actively engaged at the time in
the establishment of CERN, and firmly believed that their governments should
unhesitatingly support European projects articulated around cutting-edge scientific
equipment.
German astronomers were strong supporters of ESO from its inception. In fact the
suggestion that Europeans pool resources and build together a major facility in the
southern hemisphere was made by Walter Baade to his close colleague Johannes Oort,
director of the Leiden Observatory, in June 1953. Baade wanted Germany and Heckmann
to have key roles in the new organization.
Who were these men? Outstanding astronomers, of course, but with very different
war histories. Oort was one of the Dutch professors who had publically protested the
Nazi’s dismissal of their Jewish colleagues, and who had to go underground during the
German occupation of the Netherlands. He almost starved to death in the harsh winter of
1944-45, fortunately being rescued by Kuiper as he advanced with ALSOS behind the
allied lines in spring 1945.
Baade was “born, lived and died a German.”36 He left Germany in 1931 with the
help of the Rockefeller Foundation, and settled at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in
Pasadena, California. Baade was much sought after in the late 1930s as the Director of
the Hamburg Observatory, going so far as to say that he would accept the position if the
building was equipped with a powerful new Schmidt telescope. This would enable the
land where the Schmidt camera was born to take the lead away from the Americans
without spending millions of dollars, he said. When the official offer came from
Germany, however, Baade accepted a counteroffer from Mount Wilson “with heavy heart
[…] hoping the homeland will understand.”37 Otto Heckmann eventually filled the
position and remained there during the war and beyond. After the war Baade and his wife
regularly welcomed visitors to Pasadena where they “loved to speak their native tongue
and catch up on the news from ‘home’.” Baade was a patriotic German but not a Nazi,
though his brilliant colleague Fritz Zwicky apparently accused him of being one to his
face.38 He adopted Heckmann as his protégé and did what he could to advance his career.
36 Osterbrock, Baade, 212.37 Donald E. Osterbrock, Walter Baade. A Life in Astrophysics (Princeton University Press, 2001), 76.
13
That career began badly under National Socialism when Heckmann was accused
of being a ‘left centrist’ and a ‘Judenfreund.’ He gradually overcame this negative
evaluation by, as one 1935 report put it, making “every effort to embrace the essence of
National Socialism” and by striving “to contribute his personal service to the building of
the Third Reich.” 39 One factor still stood in his way: he was accused of being a supporter
of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. He overcame this by arguing that classical theories
were just as good for explaining the expansion of the universe, so paving the way for his
appointment as the director of the Hamburg observatory. After the war Heckmann
engaged in the usual gymnastics to explain away his behavior. He had rejected National
Socialism, had only joined party organizations to save science, and had always been a
firm supporter of the Theory of Relativity: his defense of classical models was simply a
ruse to get around the censors and to secure his appointment. To survive without
convictions one had to compromise.
One of the biggest challenges facing these advocates of ESO was financial. The
capital costs of the laboratory were estimated to be some $5 million. As only five
countries with strong traditions in astronomy were seriously interested (France and West
Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Sweden — the UK was peripherally engaged) it
was imperative for the latter three that the two larger, richer countries stayed on board
and contributed most of the money. With Germany’s commitment never in doubt, all
attention was turned on France. And here the promoters of ESO were faced with serious
obstacles arising from the growing anti-colonial struggle in Algeria,. This was draining
the Treasury. It also destabilized the government between 1954 and 1958, with senior
ministers lasting as little as a few weeks before being replaced: ESO was not one of their
priorities.
Oort turned to the Ford Foundation for support.40 A first approach early in 1954
was emphatically rejected on the grounds that Ford did not have a program in the natural
38 Osterbrock, Baade, 217. The Stiftung Fritz Zwicky in Switzerland informed me that they have no record of this.39 For this paragraph: Klaus Hentschel and Monika Rennneberg, “‘Ausschaltung’ oder ‘Verteidigung’ der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie — Interpretationen einer Kosmologen-Karrieren im Nationalsozialismus,” in Christoph Meinel and Peter Voswinckel, Medizin, Naturwissenschaft, Technik und Nationalsozialismus. Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten (Stuttgart: Springer, 1994), 201-207, translated by Theresa Gutberlet.40 For an account of the role of the Foundation that includes a useful set of documents but that sidesteps all political concerns see Edmondson, “The Ford Foundation”.
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sciences. Oort tried again in October 1956. This time he pitched the request in terms of a
European cooperative project, and directed his request to Shepard Stone, the director of
Ford’s International Affairs division. The timing was not coincidental: Stone had just
agreed to fund major fellowship programmes at CERN and at the Niels Bohr Institute to
foster international scientific exchange.41 He was rebuffed again: the Foundation did not
normally fund scientific equipment grants. A change in Ford’s policy in 1958 led the
astronomers to believe that their time had come. Carl Borgmann, the President of the
University of Vermont, and a chemical engineer who had a personal interest in
astronomy, was recruited to run a new Ford Foundation Program in Science and
Engineering, with a $100 million of funding (doubtless the Trustees’ response to the
Sputnik ‘shock’ of October 1957). A lunch was arranged in New York early in October
1958. Oort and Lindblad, the director of the Stockholm observatory made their case to
Stone, Borgmann and the president of the Ford Foundation, Henry Heald. Again the
results were not encouraging: Heald felt that the new Science and Engineering program
should first support American projects before making grants in Europe.42 Here, as in the
case of CERN, European governments were expected to take the lead in financing their
own research infrastructure
At this point the European astronomers were desperate. They were passing their
time engaged in site surveys in South Africa to establish the location with the best
viewing possibilities (it was eventually located in Chile). The British who had shown
some interest in the project had now definitely withdrawn: the Astronomer Royal decided
that it was preferable to build a Commonwealth Observatory in Australia. And now the
French astronomers informed their colleagues in the project that, for lack of funds, they
could not hope to participate in ESO in the immediate future either: indeed they decided,
until further notice, not to attend any meetings of the planning group as of November
1958. They suggested instead that the other four interested countries get started without
France’s participation, adding that once the project had taken off it would be easier for
them to join it.43
41 Krige, American Hegemony, chapter 6.42 Letter Oort to Borgmann, 15 October 1958, Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center.43 Letter Fehrenbach to Oort, 22 October 1958,Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center,.
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Faced with this bleak situation, Germany stepped in and made a definitive
commitment to ESO. Meeting early in December 1958 leading astronomers and high
officials in funding agencies confirmed that the joint European project was their priority;
they had no intention of building a strong national programme in astronomy. Germany
would increase its share of the budget from 33 1/3 % to 49% of the costs of the
observatory if the three smaller countries were prepared to pay 17% each to make up the
balance.44 In other words, to avoid further delay due to France’s difficulties, each country
was now being asked to contribute about 50% more in absolute terms than previously
anticipated. In parallel, renewed efforts were made to persuade Shepard Stone to get the
Ford Foundation to participate in the start-up costs, so drawing the French in with them.
The lobbying paid off. In October 1959 Borgmann wrote to Oort that the Trustees
of the Foundation had agreed to make a conditional award of $1million towards the main
telescope for a European optical observatory in the southern hemisphere.45 The most
important condition specified was that governments in at least four of the five original
countries seriously interested in the project agreed to participate in the venture. The hope
of course was that, with costs reduced, France would now be encouraged to participate.
Over the next twelve months Shepard Stone did all he could to bring the French
government on board. He discussed the ESO project with Jean Monnet, who was
“perhaps the closest adviser to Pinay, the French Finance Minister, and apparently after
de Gaulle, the most important man in the French Government”.46 He was also in constant
contact with Gaston Berger, the Minister of National Education. Both Monnet and Berger
had previously benefited from grants by the Ford Foundation for different projects in
France. Both were also on first-name terms with ‘Shep’. By exploiting his network of
powerful and prestigious personalities Stone was able to cajole the French into taking a
decision to join ESO. Indeed it was the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maurice
44 The Ford Foundation was told of this in Letter Hess to Stone, December 10, 1958, Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center. Although he used these archives extensively Edmondson does not mention this letter, or the German offer.45 Letter Borgmann to Oort, 2 October 1959, Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center.46 Memo Stone to the files, “European Southern Observatory”, 25 October 1959, Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center.
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Couve de Murville that took the initiative and called the meeting of the five potential
member states to sign a convention establishing ESO in Paris in October 1960.47
Stone’s commitment to this project was coherent with his strong engagement in
European affairs and European integration.48 At the end of 1957 he told the Foundation’s
Trustees that “A strong European Community, closely associated with the United States,
is of great importance to American national interest, and support for educational and
research activities related to the European community is a principal element of the
Foundation’s European program.”49 He regarded CERN, which had “proved to be a most
successful institutional symbol of European unity and of Atlantic partnership,” to be an
ideal candidate for a Foundation grant in 1959.50 It was within a context of strengthening
western science, fostering European scientific cooperation, and building an Atlantic
community — along with the opportunity provided by the Foundation’s new Science and
Engineering Programme — that Stone did so much to advance the cause of ESO in
French circles.
But there was more to it than that. Everybody was very much aware that it was
not a good idea to let Heckmann and Germany have a dominant role in ESO. As
Borgmann explained to the Trustees, there was “some unhappiness”, particularly in the
Netherlands, “over joining an organization of States in which West Germany has the
predominant position – a natural hangover from World War II.”51 Adriaan Blaauw,
Dutch, a ‘founding father’ of ESO and its second Director General felt it necessary to
remark that only (sic) “a decade” after the devastation of World War II, when the
negotiations over ESO were under way, “traditional nationalism and mutual misgiving
47 Letter Oort to Borgmann, 10 October 1960. The Germans were not quite ready for this, and the meeting was eventually held in Paris on 14 and 15 December 1960: Letter Oort to Borgmann, 24 November 1960,Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center.. 48 On Stone’s European engagement see Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe. Shepard Stone Between Philanthropy, Academy and Diplomacy (Princeton University Press, 2001).49 “Docket Excerpt, Meeting of the Executive Committee, 12/12/57,” Ford Foundation Records, Grant 58-35, Rockefeller Archive Center. Stone admired Monnet, as he did Bohr, and described him as “in some ways the greatest philosopher I have ever met” (Ford Foundation Records, Interview by Morrissey and Grele with Stone, 25). Monnet, like Bohr, counted “Shep” Stone as one of his “friends.” See Jean Monnet, Mémoires (Paris, 1976), 546.50 “Docket Excerpt, Meeting of the Executive Committee, 12/10/59, International Affairs, European Nuclear Research Center (Geneva).”51 Memo Borgmann to the files, “European Southern Observatory: Visit with Dr. Gosta W. Funke March 12, 1959”, 13 March 1959, Ford Foundation Records ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center.
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had to be replaced by joint effort.”52 Heckmann was very conscious of the emotional
work that his European partners had to do to accept Germany, and himself, into the
scheme. He commended Paul Bourgeois, the Director of the Observatoire Royal in Uccle
near Brussels for his willingness to cooperate despite the damage done by the Wehrmacht
to his instruments during the war (see above). He was full of praise for André Danjon, the
Director of the Observatoire de Paris, whom, he noted, had lost an eye in WWI and had
to escape from Strasbourg in WWII. Heckmann had noticed Danjon’s difficulty when in
the presence of German astronomers at the first postwar meeting of their International
Union in 1948, but commended him for gradually changing his attitude during the 1950s,
even managing to speak German to younger astronomers.53
Everyone involved in the establishment of ESO was sensitive to the political
problems created by having Germany play a preponderant role in the organization, and
this more than a decade after the war. Most alluded to it in their writings, if only in
passing.54 To curb its destructive potential enormous weight was placed on getting France
to join the project, to the extent of the Ford Foundation breaking all precedent and
offering $1 million towards the main telescope. This gift is usually reduced to a generous
financial contribution. In fact it was also a very political gesture, intended to help rebuild
European science while containing Germany. The birth of ESO is marked by profound
political unease among the scientific actors, an unease overcome by the determination to
do world quality science, by the recognition that only by joining together could one hope
to participate in an international conversation, and by Stone’s and the Ford Foundation’s
determination to bring France into ESO as a counterweight to Germany.
Conclusion
This paper has several linked objectives. Firstly, it seeks to remind scholars that the
process of European integration cannot be taken for granted. In line with Kiran Klaus
Patel’s call for us to ‘provincialize Europe’, it emphasizes that building Europe involves
52 Blaauw, ESO, 1.53 Otto Heckmann, Sterne, Kosmos, Weltmodelle. Erlebte Weltmodelle (Munich: Piper and Co., 1976), chapter 12.54 There is no trace to be found in Oort’s archives in Leiden.
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social work whose outcome cannot be guaranteed in advance and that is itself the product
of many improbable twists and turns. 55 It also emphasizes — and this is the second point
— that just because the process was so difficult, many actor’s accounts, and a good deal
of historiography tends to be silent or to gloss over the sources of resistance to the
integrative process. Anything else would dull its glitter and undermine its socially
crafted sense of ‘inevitability’. Thirdly, the paper throws one dimension of that resistance
into relief, — the anger among allied scientists at the behavior of their German
colleagues during and immediately after the war —, and suggests that these strong
feelings were managed at the institutional level in CERN and in ESO.
There are many reasons why scientists may have repressed their resentment at the
behavior of their senior German colleagues under the Third Reich. Some are intrinsic to
the scientific community itself: its ethos of internationalism, its realization that
collaboration was imperative to close the rapidly widening gap with the US. Others are to
be found in contextual political circumstances, notably the urge to European integration,
including West Germany. The haunting shame of collaboration may also have played a
role: as Judt puts it, “The wartime occupation—in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway,
and, after 1943, Italy—was a humiliating experience and postwar governments preferred
to forget collaboration and other indignities and emphasize instead the heroic resistance
movements, national uprisings, liberations, and martyrs.” With the onset of the cold war
and the emergence of a new enemy, he goes on, “it became inopportune to emphasize the
past crimes of present allies.56 But this does not man that they were completely ignored.
Senior posts in CERN were denied to German scientists. Every effort was made to
provide a counterweight to German domination of ESO.
“Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the
construction of Europe’s future,” Judt writes.57 Emotions were embedded in that
process. The postwar reconstruction of Europe combined fear — fear of German
resurgence, fear of communist domination —, with expectancy — the conviction that a
supranational Europe was the way to submerge the unbridled passions of nationalism.
55 Kiran Klaus Patel, “Provincializing Europe: Co-operation and Integration in Europe in a Historical Perspective,” Contemporary European History, 22:4 (2013), 649-673.56 Judt, “The ‘Problem of Evil’”. 57 Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 10.
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And although it also called for denial and repression, that submergence was never as total
as Judt implies. The cloak of official silence covered the implementation of
organizational measures that integrated Germans scientists back into the European
community on condition that their power and influence were tightly constrained. The
feelings repressed in painful interpersonal relationships were expressed in quotidian
institutional arrangements.
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