In 1905, the German scientist Philipp Lenard won the Nobel prize for physics for his work on cathode rays. Fourteen years later another German physicist, Johannes Stark, was awarded the prize for discoveries in the field of atomic science.
The two Nobel laureates became extremely famous. They also, in due course, became Nazis, raging antisemitic extremists who tried to destroy Albert Einstein and other Jewish scientists and impose their brand of “Aryan physics” on Germany and the world.
This week, in a letter to The Times, Professor Sir Michael Pepper of University College London called for the “Stark effect”, in which an electric field splits the spectral lines of atoms, to be renamed. More than that, both scientists should be stripped of their Nobel prizes, accolades which have stood unchallenged for more than a century.
There is a new vogue for trawling back through history, condemning people we now regard as evil, pulling down statues and removing portraits. Much of this is pointless, reducing history to a process of moral accountancy in which current beliefs are simplistically imposed on the past.
But the case of Lenard and Stark is different. These men were Nazi war criminals who still hold the highest honour that science can bestow. Nobel prizes are awarded to writers, scientists and peacemakers who have “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”. Instead, in a campaign of toxic racism, these two Nobelists turned physics into a battleground and did their best to demolish the truths that are the essence of science itself.
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Lenard had been a distinguished experimental scientist but when his career faltered after the First World War he first blamed British scientists for stealing his ideas and then the Jews, notably Einstein. His animosity reached a peak after Einstein won the Nobel prize for physics in 1921 for his work on the photoelectric effect.
Unable to understand relativity or quantum theory, Lenard was a militaristic antisemitic German nationalist who despised Einstein as a Jewish pacifist internationalist.
Stark shared the same outlook, dismissing the acclaim for Einstein as evidence of a worldwide conspiracy fomented by a “Jewish and pro-semitic circle”. The two physicists made common cause, and with the rise of Hitler they found an opportunity to meld their racist and scientific ideas into one and launch an all-out attack on “Jewish science”.
In May 1924 they jointly authored an article entitled “The Hitler spirit and science”. The Führer and his fellow Nazis, they wrote, “appear to us as God’s gifts from times of old when races were purer, people were greater, and minds were less deluded . . . He is here. He has revealed himself as the Führer of the sincere. We shall follow him.”
Their theory of “Aryan physics” (Deutsche physik) posited the absurd idea that there was a German way of doing physics (good) and a Jewish way (extremely bad). While the Nordic race showed “respect for facts and aptitude for exact observation”, argued Stark, Jewish scientists indulged in overly complex mathematical constructions, abstract hyper-theoretical physics without a firm empirical basis.
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This was complete tosh, of course. Science is either accurate and true or it is false. In Stark and Lenard’s warped universe, the validity of scientific inquiry depended on the race of the scientist doing the work. Two men who had made important contributions to scientific research were working to undermine science, with the active support of the Nazi regime. Anyone who supported Einstein was seen as part of the Jewish cabal: when Werner Heisenberg, who was not Jewish, defended the theory of relativity, he was attacked by Stark in the official SS newspaper as a “white Jew”.
Einstein dismissed Lenard as “a really twisted fellow” but the brutal Aryan physics campaign whipped up hatred of Jewish scientists to a lethal level. One German magazine included Einstein in a list of Germany’s enemies. with the threat “not yet hanged”. In 1933, he emigrated to the US.
That year, Stark became president of the powerful Physical and Technical Institute of the German Reich and set about removing all Jews from academic posts, insisting “the leading scientific positions in the National Socialist state are to be occupied only by nationally conscious German men”.
At the urging of the chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, Stark even framed a joint statement by all 11 German Nobel winners stating: “In Adolf Hitler we German natural researchers perceive and admire the saviour and leader of the German people.”
Lenard was 82 when the war ended in Europe, and although he was briefly arrested and stripped of his title as professor emeritus at Heidelberg University, he was never prosecuted and died two years later. Stark, the other “Führer of Physics”, was convicted of being a “major offender” by a German de-Nazification court in 1947 and sentenced to four years in a labour camp. But the sentence was suspended and Stark died unpunished in 1957.
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The Nobel Committee sometimes makes mistakes, awarding prizes to the wrong people and failing to award them to the right ones. Very occasionally the panel apologises, as it did in 2006, acknowledging that its failure to award the peace prize to Mahatma Gandhi had been “the greatest omission in our history”.
But the Nobel judges have never rescinded the honours bestowed on Stark and Lenard, or even acknowledged their scientific ideas were fundamentally wrong. Disgracefully, the citation for Stark makes no mention of his support for Hitler and his persecution of Jews. The organisation insists: “A Nobel prize cannot be revoked.”
Last year the International Astronomical Union removed the names of Stark and Lenard from craters that had been identified in their honour on the far side of the moon. At a time when every significant public institution is examining its past with fresh eyes, the Nobel Foundation should do the same: make an exception, issue an apology and kick these unrepentant Nazis out of the world’s most prestigious scientific club.