Pedro Lilienfeld

Deutsche Physik? A new branch of science? Physics in German? Well, let me explain. It was a pseudo-scientific concoction that sprouted together with the rise of nazism in Germany. It was supported, principally but not exclusively, by two German Nobel Prize winner physicists: Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard. They attempted to “arianize” physics in order to exclude or, at least, question the contributions of Jewish scientists such as Albert Einstein which they derided as “Jewish Physics”.

Lenard and Stark had the support of the Nazi government but eventually they were discredited by their attacks on Werner Heisenberg, the foremost German physicist, who endorsed Einstein’s theories.

It is worth citing here the following description from the Wikipedia entry for “Deutsche Physik”:

“…the support from the Nazi Party was not as great as Lenard and Stark would have preferred. They began to fall from influence after a long period of harassment of quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, which included getting him labeled a “White Jew” in Das Schwarze Korps. Heisenberg was an extremely eminent physicist, and the Nazis realized that they were better off with him rather than without, however “Jewish” his theory might be in the eyes of Stark and Lenard. In an historic moment, Heisenberg’s mother rang Heinrich Himmler‘s mother and asked her whether she would please tell the SS to give “Werner” a break. After beginning a full character evaluation, which Heisenberg both instigated and passed, Himmler forbade further attack on the physicist. Heisenberg would later employ his “Jewish physics” in the German project to develop nuclear fission for the purposes of nuclear weapons or nuclear energy use. Himmler promised Heisenberg that after Germany won the war, the SS would finance a physics institute to be directed by Heisenberg”.

It is worth considering the overall dystopian mentality permeating the academic establishment in Germany during the 1930s after Hitler’s takeover. Symptomatic of this Nazi infused hysteria was the treatment

afforded to Einstein. Here, I will cite some of the exchanges between Einstein and the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1933, shortly after

Hitler’s takeover and Einstein’s withdrawal from that institution (from “The World as I See it” by Albert Einstein, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949). This was, in part, his justification for that action:

“As long as I have any choice, I will stay in a country where political liberty, toleration and equality for all citizens before the law are the rule. Political liberty implies liberty to express one’s political views orally and in writing, toleration, respect for any and every individual opinion. These conditions not obtain in Germany at the present time…I hope that healthy conditions will soon supervene in Germany, and that in future her great men like Kant and Goethe will not merely be commemorated from time to time, but that the principles which they inculcated will also prevailing public life and in the general consciousness”.

The Academy’s subsequent declaration, against Einstein, of April 1, 1933 reads:

“The Prussian Academy of Sciences heard with indignation from the newspapers of Albert Einstein’s participation in in atrocity-mongering in France and America. In the meantime Einstein has announced his withdrawal from the Academy giving as his reason that he cannot continue to serviette Prussian State under its present government… The Prussian Academy of Sciences is particularly distressed by Einstein’s activities as an agitator in foreign countries…It has therefore, no reason to regret Einstein’s withdrawal. Signed: Prof. Dr. Ernst Heymann, Perpetual Secretary”.

Further acrimonious exchanges between the Prussian Academy and Einstein ensued. Shortly after, Einstein also withdrew his membership of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences for similar reasons to those addressed at the Prussian one.

Returning to the above cited Wikipedia entry:

“It is occasionally put forth that there is a great irony in the Nazis’ labeling modern physics as “Jewish science”, since it was exactly modern physics—and the work of many European exiles—which was used to create the atomic bomb. Even if the German government had not embraced Lenard and Stark’s ideas, the German antisemitic agenda was enough by itself to destroy the Jewish scientific community in Germany. Furthermore, the German nuclear weapons program was never pursued with anywhere near the vigor of the Manhattan Project in the United States, and for that reason would likely not have succeeded in any case. The movement did not actually go as far as preventing the nuclear energy scientists from using quantum mechanics and relativity, but the education of young scientists and engineers suffered, not only from the loss of the Jewish scientists but also from political appointments and other interference”.

I have in my possession the most important German physics textbook published under the Nazi regime that reflects the ambivalence, if not actual rejection of Einstein’s Special and Generalized Theories of Relativity. It is Grimsehls Lehrbuch der Physik (Grimsehl’s Handbook of Physics) authored by Prof. Dr. R. Tomaschek. I inherited that book from Erich Lilienfeld, my father, who had acquired two of its volumes (II and III) in Madrid, the latter tome on April 9, 1942, shortly before our departure to Ecuador (see above photo of its cover). He had acquired those volumes because they were the best physics handbooks available in Madrid at that moment without any regard to their implied anti-Jewish slant. Here is the pertinent Wikipedia entry mention:

“The leading theoretician of the Deutsche Physik type of movement was Rudolf Tomaschek, who had re-edited the famous physics textbook Grimsehls Lehrbuch der Physik. In that book, which consists of several volumes, the Lorentz transformation was accepted, as well as the old quantum theory. However, Einstein’s interpretation of the Lorentz transformation was not mentioned, and Einstein’s name was completely ignored”. The latter statement is not entirely correct. I will endeavor to review in what follows the actual pertinent mentions and omissions as they appear in the 3rd volume of that German physics handbook.

These are my free and partial translations of specific statements in that handbook in reference to Einstein’s work.

On page 101, under the section entitled “Energy and Light-quanta”: “The energetic behavior of light within the photoelectric effect …was confirmed in 1905 by Einstein”. On page 153, under section “Emission of Light and the Atom Model”: “…the relationship hυ = mv²/2 + p (Hallwachs, Lenard, Einstein) is confirmed”. On page 205, under the title “Velocity of Light as Limiting Velocity”, on the other hand, there is no mention at all of Einstein as its originator. Equally, any reference to Einstein is omitted on page 206 when discussing the deflection of light by a gravitational field.

Perhaps the most egregious disregard for appropriate attribution in this handbook is in the subsection unprepossessingly entitled “Mass of the Kinetic Energy” (page 201) wherein the equation m = E_kin /c² appears buried in the text without any acknowledgment of its origin. Here we have Einstein’s most famous equation of the 20th century without naming him.

Finally, on page 433, under the section title “The Relativity Principle”, I will attempt to provide a literal translation of intellectual obfuscation: “Einstein has, in the hypothesis of his various relativity theories, attempted to provide a formal relationship from which certain conclusions could be reached. No attempt of further consideration of this dogmatic-dialectic method will be made”.

It is obvious that even this Nazi-approved treatise could not avoid, even though reluctantly, mentioning Einstein in various contexts. However, the omissions of his name in the contexts of the fundamental limiting property of light’s velocity, the gravitationally induced deflection of light and, most incredibly, the intrinsic energy equivalence of matter, attest to the absurd “arianized” approach to physics of the Nazi scientific community.

Unfortunately, these attempts at the distortion and suppression of scientific facts seems to be reenacted by the present (2025) U.S. administration and its congressional sycophants, with all the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes. They remind me of the German Physics inanity as well as the nefarious role played, within Soviet biology, by Trofim Lysenko who rejected  Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics.