Bleeding Edge

Earth Day, Passover, Full Moon, they all came together this year in a rainbow of meaningful spiritual paradoxes, because when we share the Passover meal — the Seder — we are partaking in the most ancient tradition of Spring time resurrection, after the winter of discontent, as symbolized by the “Exodus.”

Exodus from the slavery of the most oppressive season of enslavement, exile, and complete lack of Growth, and that is what Exodus represents for us all, same as all previous generations have experienced, just as surely as the ones to come will live through it once again.

Of course even the word Exodus, has a different meaning for all of us, because it is such a personal experience shared by each one of us alone. And of course, it is not something for the faint of heart, since Liberation is a serious business — as was felt by the Israelites when during passover, fled slavery from Egypt under the cruel Pharaoh … utilizing the divine push channeled through the willful leadership of Moses.

Similarly, Nazi Germany’s “Great Purge” of all Jewish scientists in 1933 is considered another “Exodus” from slavery, as the Passover always has — yet it has also been described, as the best auto-goal in all the history of all self hating evil nations, and their eventual defeat, followed by debauchery and defacement.

As a matter of fact, methinks that Adolf Hitler & his good German Nazis, defenestrated themselves, while chasing away the Jews, and thus deserve to be posthumously awarded, with the “Ignoble prize” based on their stupendously stupid, hateful & evil quest, of riding Europe of Jews.

He claimed to be doing this for the Eugenics of a pure Aryan race, and yet the foolishness with which he pursued that pipe dream makes him a first rate loser, because by exterminating the Jews — he ensured Germany lost the war.

Any lesser fool could ave seen that because you remove Jews from the libraries, from Academia, and from German Life itself, ultimately choosing to even deprive them of their very Life through the mass murder of the whole grand total of them. All that because he was an idiot who couldn’t compete against the Jewish superior intelligence through his little pea-sized brain.

And if you don’t believe me that Herr Fuhrer, with the poopy pants, the extended arm in the Roman salute, and who was always seen wearing his funny face muff — was an idiot — here are his own words to prove it:

“If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!” —Adolf Hitler

The effects of that New Law in 1933, and the resulting Police Actions, were immediate, in the world of Academia, Scientific Inquiry, and Research, as well as in Society’s progress as demonstrated by the failure of Germany’s academic institutions, and its vaunted Physics universities to get up and rally in order to uphold their unusually “High Standards of Excellence” in research and success in all international competitions for top tier professors, talented graduates, brilliant PHDs, and of course Academic teaching staff recruitment.

Soon, the extent of the foolishness of the “Jewish Science Purge” masquerading as National Policy, was all too evident. Prior to the 1930s, Germany had dominated the natural sciences for more than one hundred and fifty years. Germany’s reputation for excellence in chemistry, physics, biology, medicine and mathematics was unrivaled. And if there was another claimant — was Great Britain and its incredible Commonwealth of Scientific minds and free thinking intellectuals roaming the halls of Oxbridge in flowing black robes and funny hats, like some strange Merlin men, the magicians of yore.

As a matter of fact, out of the 100 Nobel Prizes awarded between the years of 1901 and 1932, the year before Hitler came to power — 33 had been awarded to Germans and/or scientists working in Germany. By comparison, Great Britain’s scientists from British universities had won 18, and the United States a mere 6 Nobel prizes.

However, after the purge of jewish scientists from German Academia and Society — starting in 1933 with the Nazi party’s seizure of control amid Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany, and their passing of the “Berufsbeamtengesetz” the awfully racist law that was introduced by Adolf Hitler himself, and it was swiftly voted and passed in the Nazi Reichstang, for the so called “Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.”

Naturally the German machine turned into action and Jews, Progressives, and certain groups of liberal public employees were immediately dismissed, from all German universities. All the civil servants who did not fit the Nazi racial or societal ideal, where fired and had to leave their jobs, their homes, their pensions, and all of their belongings, in haste — all in the the name of “re-establishing a national and professional civil service”. In addition to bureaucrats, teachers, judges and other workers, scientists and academics were all immediately affected, including the ones at the world-leading institutions of the University of Göttingen and Humboldt Universities in Berlin, (Heims, 1980 p. 165).

As it seems, by the middle of April, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union proclaimed a nationwide “action against the un-German spirit”. Not long after, public Nazi marches on and around university campuses were taking place and “bücherverbrennung” book-burning ceremonies, were held in protest of literature found to be sympathetic with the socio-democratic, left-leaning and/or “Jewish values”. In a series of letters to a colleague in America, John von Neumann (1903-57) who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1930 wrote the following: “The news from Germany are bad: heaven knows what the summer term of 1933 will look like.”

The “term” as well as the coming years, became what has been called a “great purge” of world-renown scientists from Germany. A singular event, the likes of which the world had never seen before.

But what was the immediate outcome of this?

The most easily measurable effect was the rise of the United States as the world’s Top Center of scientific research and the “death” of the Universities of Germany as top tier research universities of any note…

Germany became overnight a parvenu, a has been, an issuer of useless diplomas based on NAZI party credentials, and not on intellectual prowess.

Earlier, and specifically on January 30th of 1933, the President of Germany Paul von Hindenburg had reluctantly appointed Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler to be the Chancellor of Germany. After two months in office, following the burning of the Reichstag building, the German parliament passed what has later been called the “Enabling Act” giving Hitler full legislative power for a period of four years. Following the death of von Hindenburg the next year — Hitler exploited the “Enabling Act” to merge the offices of Chancellor and President for himself, thus creating the new office of “Führer and Reichskanzler” in which he was the total unalloyed Dictator.

Von Neumann, then in Budapest, described these events, in a letter, to his colleague, Mr Veblen who was already teaching in Princeton on April of 1933: “It seems, that this Summer will be a endless series of sensations – and not always of the agreeable kind. Please excuse in me that I am asking such a lot of questions. But you know, how these things interest me, and how little newspapers are worth, if you want to find out anything. The news from Germany are bad: heaven knows what the summer term 1933 will look like. The next program-number of Hitler will probably be annihilation of the conservative-monarchistic-party […] I did not hear anything about changes or expulsions in Berlin, but it seems that the “purification” of universities has only reached till now Frankfurt, Göttingen, Marburg, Jena, Halle, Kiel, Köningsberg- and the other 20 will certainly follow. […] It is really a shame, that something like that could happen in the 20th century.“

–Von Neumann

Indeed, a lot more than 2,500 Jewish professors, employees, and administrators, were fired from the Universities of Berlin in 1933–34 and many more doctorates were withdrawn. In May, some 20,000 books written by “degenerates” and opponents of the Nazi regime were removed from the university library and burned in the Babelplatz . Reportedly, Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels gave a speech for the occasion, proclaiming the death of “Jewish intellectualism” (Isaacson, 2007).

Among the most prominent Jewish scholars forced to emigrate was, as von Neumann writes in his letter to Veblen, mathematician Richard Courant (1888–1972), one of Göttingen’s three institute heads. He left Germany for Cambridge in 1933, as he was dismissed from his position, not for being Jewish, since he was exempted, due to him being a veteran of the First World War, but due to his membership in the social-democratic political left (Schappacher, 1991). A former student of David Hilbert (1862-1943), Courant first accepted a position in Cambridge, but grew homesick within a year and returned to Germany, only to realize that there was no way for him to stay permanently. He thus re-emigrated, this time to New York University where he would remain for the rest of his life, building up a large and flourishing mathematics department (Medawar & Pyke, 2000) there. Other students of Hilbert at Göttingen, including Felix Bernstein (1878–1956) and Edmund Landau (1877–1938) were also forced out, as was Hilbert’s student Hermann Weyl (1885–1955), three years after being appointed his successor. Initially having been offered von Neumann’s position at the Institute for Advanced Study, Weyl changed his mind, as the political situation in Germany grew worse (Weyl was a Christian, but his wife Helene was Jewish), and joined the IAS in September of 1933 (see essay below).

–University of Gottingen.

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) who openly opposed the Nazi regime, happened to be visiting the United States when Hitler came to power. A visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology on and off starting in December 1930, Einstein and his wife Elsa last left Germany for in December 1932, prior to Hitler’s ascension. Despite holding a chair as Professor of Physics at the University of Berlin, he feared for the safety of both himself and his family. That year, a German magazine printed a list of “enemies of the German regime” with an accompanying picture of Einstein marked “not yet hanged” with a $5,000 bounty (Jerome & Taylor, 2006). 

Einstein dismissed this action as “crazy talk” of German Nazi journalists looking for a scape-goat …

–Einstein in Norfolk England.

When they closed up their summer house in Caputh in 1932, Einstein reportedly turned to his wife Elsa and said “Dreh dich um. Du siehst’s nie wieder” :

“Turn around. You will never see it again”

Einstein would after asking for rescue from England – he allowed himself to be “kidnapped” by Churchill’s agents, in order to go spend a period of time in relative safety from Hitler’s assassins, under heavy guard in an estate in Norfolk in the UK, while sharing the “Tube Alloys” theories, experiments, and expected results to Churchill’s scientists, before setting off towards America, and settling for good, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

That’s where he worked till the end of his Life, alongside von Neumann and Weyl, as one of the IAS’ six founding faculty members. Albeit from afar, Albert Einstein, a devoted Pacifist, would come to play the key & instrumental role, in the rescue operations of Jewish scientists, children, and even more importantly, in the development of atomic weapons, that would take place throughout the 1930s first in Britain and subsequently in the United States.

Albert Enstein’s letters to Professor Max Born (1882-1970) who was still in Göttingen University, at the end of May 1933, exhibit the clear evidence of his mixed emotions of loss, trauma, & measured enthusiasm — aways alternating with his full desperation for the thankless mission afoot. His doubts about any positive outcome are quite apparent:

“Dear Born,

Ehrenfest sent me your letter. I am glad that you have resigned your positions (you and Franck). Thank God there is no risk involved for either of you. But my heart aches at the thought of the young ones. Lindemann has gone to Göttingen and Berlin (for one week). Maybe you could write to him here about Teller. I heard that the establishment of a good Institute of Physics in Palestine (Jerusalem) is at present being considered.

Two years ago I tried to appeal to Rockefeller’s conscience about the absurd method of allocating grants, unfortunately without success. Bohr has now gone to see him, in an attempt to persuade him to take some action on behalf of the exiled German scientists. It is to be hoped that he’ll achieve something. Lindemann has considered London and Heitler for Oxford. He has set up an organization of his own for this purpose, taking in all the English universities. I am firmly convinced that all those who have made a name already will be taken care of. But the others, the young ones, will not have the chance to develop.“

–Albert Einstein

The professor “Lindemann” that Einstein mentions in his letter to is Frederic Lindemann (1886–1957), the most influential scientific advisor to Winston Churchill. Despite his German name, Lindemann was English, and a physicist by training, and so got along famously well, with both Churchill & Einstein, as well as with their colleagues in Academia.

After being rescued by Churchill, Albert Einstein wanted a repeat performance for all of his German Jewish scientific colleagues, and thus hoping to appeal to his sense of humanity, statesmanship and military strategy — Einstein went to visit Churchill in the summer of 1933, asking, not begging, for his assistance to bring Jewish scientists out of Germany, and onto England as Churchill had already done for Einstein himself.

Naturally, Einstein’s “sales pitch” to Churchill, was that the Scientisats would devote their full powers to creating the new devastating weapons that would eventually win the Second World War.

As it seems Einstein’s clarion call, was fully heeded by Churchill, who intimately understood the valuable Human Capital, of the Jewish Scientific diaspora, that would be necessary and influential, in order to win the war.

Furthermore all the scientific advancements of Nuclear Physics, that were discussed personally with Einstein on their many secret talks about the new metallurgical science of “Tube Alloys” the codename used for the newfangled Atomic Nuclear Weapons, would be realized with the influx of the Jewish scientists from Germany.

The subsequent “Exodus” of German scientists to England and then to the US, was a great exercise in the phlegmatic English spirit of subterfuge, spycraft, and perfidy, by the willy Winston and his junior helper, Einstein, to fool the German intelligence through blind obedience to the Fuhrer, to let all these Great Physicists to escape Germany’s clutches.

As for Churchill and Einstein — they celebrated their Victory at Churchill’s lovely estate in the Kentish valley, Chartwell where Einstein stayed over for a few days to make solid plans for the secret rescue operation that I shall name “EXODUS.”

Exodus is a good name because ever since their first cooperation in “kidnap & save” the VIPs, all persons of high knowledge, intellectual curiosity, and Theoretical Physics interests, and all of them, Jewish scientists like Albert Einstein, who was first brought to Norfolk in England, terrified and broken of spirit, from the ravages he had suffered at the hands of the Nazis… and was allowed to recover sufficiently in order to start the “Applied Physics” description of the new manufacture of Churchill’s “tube alloys.”

These “tube alloys” were the greatest and most powerful weapon that the world would ever see, as was the red hot revenge that Einstein sought against the Nazis who had even destroyed his beloved violin…

He visited terror upon the German Nazis, by instructing British Scientists on how to produce Nuclear weapons that they could throw at the enemy unhesitatingly. and with immeasurably damaging consequences as was proven in both Hiroshima & Nagasaki.

–Einstein & Churchill: In this photograph from the Chartwell days of Einstein — Churchill wore a large Stetson hat and Einstein had a wrinkled white linen suit, that looked like he had slept in it for a week, which he probably did.

The great men’s meeting between Churchill & Einstein, was held at Chartwell, where they cooperated for a fortnight, and it seems to have been characteristic of both men’s intellectual accuracy, vibrancy of action, and prophetic Visionary strategy.

Known for his decisiveness, Churchill responded immediately to Albert Einstein’s request, by sending his friend “The Professor” Lindemann to Germany on a rescue mission, to seek out and recruit Jewish scientists and offer them placements in British universities (Gilbert, 2007).

Subsequently, Professor Lindemann’s first visit to Germany, was to rescue physicist Max Born.

Born was one of six Jewish professors who in the spring of 1933 had been suspended from their positions in Göttingen University, as a result of the enactment of the Berufsbeamtengesetz law. At that time he was a vastly promising future Nobel Prize winner, because he was among the world’s foremost authorities on quantum physics, having supervised Pascual Jordan (1902-80), J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), Enrico Fermi (1901-54) and collaborated with Heisenberg, Pauli and Bohr.

In his 1971 book. “The Born-Einstein Letters,” Max Born recounted his own version of the events that had led to his rescue operation by Winston Churchill’s agents:

“One day (at the end of April 1933) I found my name in the paper amongst a list of those who were considered unsuitable to be civil servants, according to the new “laws”. After I had been given leave of absence, we decided to leave Germany at once. We had rented an apartment for the summer vacation in Wolkenstein in the Grödner valley, from a farmer by the name of Peratoner. He was willing to take us in immediately. Thus, we left for the South Tyrol at the beginning of May (1993); we took our twelve-year old son, Gustav, with us, but left our adolescent daughters behind at their German schools.”

—The Born-Einstein Letters* by Max Born (1971)

On his way to Tyrol, on May 10th Born witnessed the book burnings first-hand and despite his typical quiet and calm demeanor reacted so furiously that his wife Heidi had to restrain him from intervening (Medawar & Pyke, 2000). Shortly after arriving at their destination, Lindemann visited, attempting to entice Born to accept a position at Oxford University. Having spent time in Cambridge in the 20s, Born instead chose to accept a position as a “research student” at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Later, in 1936, he accepted a position as the Tait professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where he remained until 1952 before retiring to Göttingen.

As Einstein’s letter to Born recounts, Lindemann also considered recruiting Born’s former students Walter Heitler (1904–1981) and Fritz London (1900–1954). Heitler was a German physicist who made contributions to quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory and had worked for a time as assistant to Schrödinger. Following his “habilitation” in 1929 under Born, he remained at the University of Göttingen as a “privatdozent” until 1933, when he was finally fired. Safely in the UK, Born, later arranged for him to get a position as a research fellow at the University of Bristol, working under Nevill F. Mott. London, also a physicist, similarly lost his position at the University of Berlin following the enactment of the Berufsbeamtengesetz. A collaborator of Heitler, London had helped redefine chemical bonds in the age of quantum theory. Following his dismissal, he took visiting positions in England and France before, like many others, emigrating to the United States just before the war, in 1939.

–The other professor whom, Albert Einstein requested to be rescued in his letter to my grandfather Winston Churchill, was James Franck (1882–1964), who as it turned out was a German physicist and the 1925 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, that was won jointly with his scientific collaborator Gustav Hertz, for “their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom”.

At the time of this particular “EXODUS” of the Jews away from captivity, bondage, & real slavery in Germany, during the “Great Purge” of Jewish theoretical physicists, applied nuclear scientists, and public Jewish intellectuals and Professors, during the spring of 1933 — Franck was the head of experimental physics at the University of Göttingen in Berlin. This was a tenured teaching position he had held for over thirteen years. A full professor, he was also the Director of the Second Institute for Experimental Physics in Göttingen.

Alongside Born, Franck had built Göttingen’s physics department into one of the world’s finest (Rice & Jortner, 2010). Although exempt from the Berufsbeamtengesetz law as a veteran of the First World War, as Einstein recounts to Born, Franck nonetheless submitted his resignation at Göttingen, the first academic known to have resigned his position in protest of the NAZI anti-Jewish Science Purge law. After a brief visit to the United States, he later took up a position at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, before returning to the U.S. in 1938, accepting a job, at the University of Chicago, where as you might recall the first tests were to take place of the top secret “Manhattan Project.”

Physicist Hans Bethe (1906–2005) who was also dismissed from his job at the University of Tübingen in Germany, on account of being Jewish, left for England after receiving an offer for the position of lecturer at the University of Manchester through his doctoral advisor Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951) and his associate William Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971). After England, Bethe joined the faculty of Cornell University in 1935 and contributed to the Manhattan Project as head of the theoretical Physics division at Los Alamos. A nuclear physicist, throughout the course of his career, Hans Bethe also made important contributions to astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics and solid state physics, winning the Nobel Prize of Physics in 1967, for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis.

Einstein’s letter to Born also mentions the young aspirant Edward Teller, (1907-2003), one of four prominent Hungarian physicists who, due to their Jewish origin and Hungarian universities’ openly antisemitic policies at the time, were compelled to leave Europe for America in the 1930s. Interestingly and consequentially, all four contributed significantly to the development of the first atomic bomb, alongside Franck, Bethe and others.

–Teller, who was an original student of Born — would later be known colloquially as the “Father of the hydrogen bomb.” Initially, he was in Copenhagen studying with Niels Bohr (1885-1962), until Hitler came to power, and stayed far too late because he was in Göttingen during the spring of 1933 and had difficulty escaping, and thus was traumatized with the effect that he became an irascible foe of Germany’s Nazis, and thereafter he wanted to get his revenge. He sought that revenge, by building a more destructive, far bigger and perhaps way-better killing machine, the Hydrogen bomb. That was the source of their conflict because Teller’s bomb was a far more devastating weapon, than the one Oppenheimer building in Los Alamos at the time. Yet, to remember his difficult and hugely traumatic stay in Germany, from where he escaped to England with the help of the International Rescue Committee — he always assisted thereafter this global humanitarian aid Society that was founded in 1933 through the encouragement of Albert Einstein’s famous speech at the Royal Albert Hall, in the evening of Einstein’s final departure from England, where he had found refuge in Norfolk under Churchill’s protection, hidden in an obscure hunting lodge.

It was then that Teller was welcomed at the University College of London, before being offered a full professorship at George Washington University in Washington DC, which he accepted in 1935. His friend and later Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner (1902–1995) had by that time, been in Princeton University since 1930. Before that, he too had been at the University of Göttingen, working both as an assistant to Hilbert and alongside Weyl, on “group theory” and its applications in quantum physics. Reportedly, when he was first recruited for a one-year lectureship at Princeton, his salary increased seven-fold from what it had been in Europe (Szanton, 1992). However, following the expiration of his term in 1936, Princeton chose not to renew his position and Wigner had to move to the University of Wisconsin. There he stayed for two years before returning to Princeton in 1938, to commence his pivotal work on the Manhattan Project. 

Leo Szilard (1898–1964) who is best known as the “Discoverer of the nuclear chain reaction” had left Germany for England in 1933. Reportedly, he transferred his savings of £1,595 (about £100,000) from Zurich to London and thus was able to live in fancy hotels without gainful employment or any kind of paid work for the first year. Yet he kept up with his pivotal Atomic chain reaction Nuclear Physics Research. He eventually took up new temporary work as a physicist in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, working on radioactive isotopes for medical purposes. Then when he travelled to U.S. as a visiting researcher in 1938–39 — he eventually settled at Columbia University in New York. In Columbia university and in collaboration with Walter Zinn (1906-2000), he took up the task of experimentally verifying “The News” brought to America by Niels Bohr in January 1939.

The “The News” that Niels Bohr brought forth, were so called, because when Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and Fritz Strassmann (1902-80) were in Germany — they had observed barium, in the residue, after bombarding uranium with neutrons. This was “The News” that conclusively demonstrated the previously unknown phenomenon of Nuclear Fission.

Heady stuff of legend, because as all know, Szilard and Zinn’s initial experimental tests, proved that the fission of uranium, produced more neutrons than it consumed. This helped Szilard later convince Fermi, and Herbert L. Anderson, (1914-88), to conduct large-scale fission experiments with Uranium, in order to verify the possibility of a sustainable nuclear chain reaction. The rest is History.

–Fermi, an Italian and Roman Catholic by origin, was forced to flee, much like his German colleagues, were forced to escape Nazi Germany — Fermi had to escape Mussolini’s fascist Italy in 1938, because his wife Laura was Jewish.

He is accepted today, as “The Creator of the world’s first Nuclear Reactor” and thus Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics, for his work on induced radioactivity.

Before the war, he had spent a semester studying under Born at the University of Göttingen. There, in the middle of the 1920s he first met the “father of quantum mechanics” Werner Heisenberg (1901-76) and his collaborator Wolfgang Pauli (1900-58).

After this and several other research visits, Fermi eventually settled at the Sapienza University of Rome, after obtaining a full professorship there in 1926, but then he had to flee for his and his wife’s life. England & America beckoned. After England and after winning the Physics prize, Fermi now a newly minted Nobel laureate, immigrated to America in 1939.

The competition for his recruitment was so fierce, that Fermi was offered several positions at five different leading universities, eventually settling on Columbia university, where he had given summer lectures in 1936 and thus was a familiar figure, enjoying the Italian immigrant community’s vivid appreciation of New York City and America at large.

It was right there, in upper Manhattan inside the laboratories of Columbia University, where Fermi conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States. That was the single most notable development on the road to Nuclear weapons and the all too real Nuclear War…

It was in Manhattan where the “Manhattan Project” was conceived, run, and won, because at Columbia University in New York, Fermi and colleagues, alongside and with the crucial help and encouragement of Szilárd — the first large-scale fission experiment using 200 kilograms of uranium oxide was designed, performed, and perfected.

John von Neumann, alongside Wigner, was first recruited from Europe by Veblen to Princeton University in 1930. Him and Wigner had by that point collaborated on several papers and well before that, had attended the same Lutheran high school in Budapest, during the 1910s. According to Wigner, they were invited to Princeton together, on a recommendation from the university that they find and invite:

“..not a single person but at least two, who already knew each other, who wouldn’t suddenly feel put on an island where they had no intimate contact with anybody. Johnny’s name was of course well known by that time the world over, so they decided to invite Johnny von Neumann. They looked at who wrote articles with John von Neumann? They found: Mr. Wigner. So they sent a telegram to me also. —Excerpt, John von Neumann* by Norman Macrae (1992)

Of course Von Neumann’s considerable research output, scientific acumen, and voluminous authorship, were all taken into account, so despite his being only 30 years old, he was offered a lifetime professorship at the newly-founded Institute for Advanced Study alongside Einstein and Weyl in 1933. He would later be instrumental in helping Kurt Gödel (1906-78) escape occupied Austria. Although not Jewish, Gödel’s association with the Vienna Circle, and his doctoral advisor Hans Hahn (1879–1934) had made him a NAZI target. In a letter to the founder of the IAS Abraham Flexner (1866–1959), Von Neumann in September 1939 pleaded:

“The claim may be made with perfect justification that Gödel is irreplaceable for our education program. Indeed Gödel is absolutely irreplaceable; he is the only mathematician alive about whom I would dare to make this statement […] I am convinced that salvaging him from the wreckage of Europe, is one of the great single contributions anyone could make to science at this moment.” –Von Neumann

Immediately after Von Neumann’s letter was received — Gödel was offered a position at the IAS, which he assumed in 1940.

Many other scientists however stayed back in occupied Germany, mainly because all avenues of escape had been shit and even some friends of Freedom, such as Einstein’s friend Max Planck (1858–1947). Planck was ill at 74 years old, when the Nazis came to power. Although his friends and colleagues had fled, himself, a dour Lutheran, tried to “persevere and continue working” hoping the crisis would abate and the political situation ould somehow improve. So was the founder and first President of the Max Planck Society Otto Hahn (1879–1968), who despite having Jewish ancestry (according to Riehl & Seitz, 1996), also remained in Germany during the rise of the Nazis.

He later was credited with discovering nuclear fission in 1938, and during the end of the Second World War, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944. He was an opponent of national socialism,, up until the end and that is why Albert Einstein later wrote of Hahn that:

“Hahn was one of the very few who stood upright and did the best he could in these years of evil” —Albert Einstein

Indeed, the only known case of a German scientist refusing on moral grounds to succeed an expelled Jewish colleague was Otto Krayer (1899–1982), who in response to a job offering at the University of Düsseldorf wrote the following in protest of the purge of his colleagues (Medawar & Pyke, 2000): “I prefer to forgo this appointment, though it is suited to my inclination and capabilities, rather than having to betray my convictions, or that by remaining silent I would encourage an opinion about me that does not correspond with the facts” —Otto Krayer, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology in Berlin

In response, Otto Krayer was dismissed from his post at the University of Berlin for refusing to accept the appointment. Wolfgang Haubner later reported about a meeting with Krayer in his diary on July 4th 1935, writing: “On the way I spoke with Krayer who justified his refusal to return to Germany with the impossibility of taking the Hitler oath”.

Two years later, in 1937, Otto Krayer was appointed as an Associate Professor at Harvard University. He was to lead Harvard’s Department of Pharmacology from 1939 to 1966, and to be awarded far too numerous academic honors. The news of his actions in 1933 became public in an article written by the son of Otto Krayer’s doctoral advisor Paul Trendelenburg (1884–1931), who closed his essay with the following words: “Considering the horrors of the Third Reich, Otto Krayer’s deeds should be a comfort to us. When looking for a role model for the young generation, it is found in Otto Krayer. May the memory of this one righteous person never fade.” —Ullrich Trendelenburg

Now, let us learn the old lesson, once again, because methinks we have forgotten the fact that we need not repeat the German NAZIS’ grave error in their ill advised “Great Purge” of the Jews, from all scientific posts in Germany’s universities.

America’s universities have started maligning the Jews wholesale, sidelining all competent and above the fold scientists, and yes, denying tenured track, and removing all Jewish scientists, researchers, teachers, academics, professors, and above all, academic institutions administrators, provosts and presidents from the lists for academic growth, tenure, & career, because these “unfortunates” happen to be Jews.

This travesty of racism, constitutes the latest chapter of Anti-semitism in America, and as you are well aware — we have seen this wave of painful anti-semitism being directed against even the most minor of Jewish students who dare to study at the Ivy League schools of all of America, and not just the most waspish academic institutions…

I ask you this:

What is wrong with that?

How stupid we got to be as Americans to put up with that?

What do we expect to gain at this time through this fallacy of Policy from our current administration?

Is there anyone alive today, who does not remember what happened to Germany a few short years after they called for the “Death of the Jews?”

Seems to me that the crowds chanting “Death to Israel, Death to the Jews, and from The River to the Shore,” are the prelude to the Crystal Nacht, the pogroms, and all the associated horrors of the Holocaust to follow.

Why does anyone believe that this will turn out any different?

Even the Good Germans could see well enough that the Horror of all this will not be overpassed, same like the Good American administration knows full well that Karma is a bad bitch and she always comes looking for the wrong-headed wrong-doers, to set them straight by banging their heads together…

Because we all know well enough, how swiftly Germany’s anti-semitism turned pear-shaped for Germany and the Nazis, as they were soon to discover to their horror, when they felt Just Retribution.

No German man or woman, escaped the horrors, or the wholesale rape of Germany from the Russian armies, and from the rest of their foreign occupiers, who had a serious ax to grind, and who turned Germany into the whore of Babylon … spread out amongst the rubble of her former glory, for all comers to take advantage of…

Where the Hitlerites blind?

Could they not glimpse into the future and see what’s coming after their day in the sun?

Doesn’t anyone in Germany understand that God blinds those he is willing to lose.

No Matter.

No matter what — stupidity and the lemurs jumping off the cliff is nothing new in the Mob driven “fashions” of the Day, stirring pogroms against Jews. Its being going on for millennia after all…

Mob mentality frothing over perceived Jewish injustices, national wrongs, and differing customs, beliefs & habits, causes terribly evil crimes to be committed against all persons who happened to be adherents of the Judaic faith.

How can America be so stupid today is beyond me…

Because, the same things we recount about the Good Germans, can be said today, about the Good Americans, who are responsible for the Anti-Semitic purges of Jewish Scientists, intellectuals, Professors, Academics, Students, Researchers and Administrators, from the august halls of America’s elite universities.

Mobs rule and mobs decide who is to teach at their school, and who is not to teach.

Yet, methinks that I’be seen this “movie” before and I don’t need any more showings of humanity tearing itself apart…

Because if we don’t stop tearing the fabric of our Academic Life asunder — we will soon get to see great schools like Columbia university, going fast down the drain, much like the University of Berlin, Gottingen, the university of Heidelberg, and all the other great German scientific research institutions did during the 1930’s after the involuntary expulsion of all Jewish scientists.

THEREFORE, IT MIGHT BE SMART to let the Jewish scientists, professors, students, Docs, & post-Docs, to continue to research, teach, study, reflect, and sit quietly in their corner doing their Calculations, instead of allowing the passions of the Mob drive them out.

Apparently though our current resident of the White House is impassive too the pleas of the Jewish scientists and of the State of Israel; and that is the vast difference between a Great Statesman like my grandfather Winston Churchill, and the geriatric President we unfortunately have today in the US, who cannot, nor does want, to raise his voice from the presidential “Bully-Pulpit” to stop today’s anti-semitic “woke” Nazis taking hold of America’s universities, colleges and research institutions, now that the neo NAZI woke Mob has gripped firm control of all institutions of higher learning in the US, as its now reaching into grasping for the levers of Power throughout the United States government…

Inevitably, invariably and unsurprisingly — we have started to see Jewish scientists flying to New Shores.

Young Jewish scientists, profs, and researchers, who are flee-footed and always ready with a prepared suitcase hidden under the bed, like Albert Einstein, have started to fly away towards China and the developing world, because they do not want to wake up unprepared like their grandparents who were woken in the middle of the night when the knock on the door from the Gestapo, arrived at 3 AM and they were ushered into waiting cattle cars, to be relocated to some “Safe Place.”

Today’s Jewish scientists of America, having all lost past members of their families in the Holocaust, and quite clearly remembering the “Shoah” in their epigenetic RNA protein biological library, that carries all memories since Adam and the generalized suffering of the Jews — are quite aware of the danger, and are fleeing the murderous Mob Rule, like Einstein did … yet they are traveling towards a different shore.

Because this time around; they are fleeing to China, since the invitation has been sent and well received, along with the promises of Gold Renumeration, Freedom to Experiment, and Freedom to Express their thoughts, along with unlimited resources at their disposal for their basic scientific research.

This invitation, is far better than the Passover invitation for the Jews to flee the exile of Egypt, American Pharaoh is a limp brisket, who invites all the pestilence, the horrors, and the seven curses to befall upon his people — now that the Jewish scientists of America are looking to cross the waters of the Great Pacific pond to the shores of a rather welcoming Asiatic global power looking to transform their Scientific and Technological status quo.

Now, you are a rather intelligent reader — since you made it this far, so please do tell me what do you think could go wrong in America after the Jewish exodus of University Research Professors, and Jewish Intellectuals, when the most keen Scientists of Academia, Industry and Government all leave America?

What is it that you see happening soon thereafter?

Do you understand me?

Am I being crystal clear?

YES ?

Ok…

You grog me…

So, now, let us have a moment of reflective meditation, and perhaps for the non-meditators amongst you; a mere mental exercise, and let us all try to think this problem through, as a strong thought, remaining with the problem long enough for it to become crystal clear, and the vision to clarify itself, as it always happens when our thoughts are allowed to reach their natural conclusion, no matter where that process takes us.

And if you are a serious thinker, you could maybe even answer the following question:

“What would Winston Churchill Do?”

–Churchill’s Great Wall.

My grandfather Winston Churchill & Einstein at the back garden of ChartWell, hanging out, talking, walking about, and no doubt, Winston explaining to the great Physicist Albert, his close friend and confidant by now — how he had laid up all the bricks and mortar, for his famous brick wall, that he built as a fully paid-up member of the Bricklayers Union of England, and that his friends rebuilt each and every afternoon, while Winston went to nap, in order to make it straight…

And that is how you do it — one brick at a time, you built your Scientific Inventions, Innovations and Applications as I have done with my discovery of the Nuclear Safety Systems that has finally demonstrated how to “put the Genie back in the bottle” using the equations that were dancing around in the head of Albert at his prime…

Similarly to my talking and walking with beneficial friends at the Beijing Passover Seder today — I wish everyone liberation from the Exile of ignorance, freedom from the distasteful Slavery of hate and above all else, I wish you to be free of mental slavery, which is the most awful thing we all experience today in this God’s forgotten, yet dearly beloved earth on they annual Spring Earth Day celebration of this green-blue planet, we call home.

Our planet Earth, that we occupy as children of the Almighty, until we are finally called forth & sprung up towards Heaven … up above.

L’Chaim

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

If you are in Beijing – please reach out to me because I have a lecture at Tsinghua University, about Higher Physics and would want to invite you to attend.

The subject is pretty well summarized in my earlier article here at the Bleeding Edge Blog, titled 90 seconds to midnight…:

https://beb.mobi/2024/02/28/90-seconds-to-midnight/

L’Chaim