How did the atomic bomb get created?
Hitler created a powerful, psychopathic, virulently contagious form of hatred and assault of the Jews.
Which drove all the creative Jewish physicists out of Germany, Austria, Italy, and other Nazi-influenced European states.
These creative Jewish physicists eventually ended up in the Manhattan Project.
The urgency of the evacuation from German university employment, and the energy and passion with which colleagues arranged working positions [and livelihoods] for the outcast Jewish physicists is a small but poignant part of the preface to WWII.
In “The Making of the Atomic bomb”, Richard Rhodes devotes an entire chapter to the Exodus, to the deeply affecting history of anti-Semitism. To Hitler, Mein Kampf, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and to families of Jewish physicists leaving Germany during the early days of crisis, finding, with the help of colleagues, academic and research positions in England and America. Rhodes tells one small story of Leopold Infeld arriving in Princeton.
Leopold Infeld, riding the train through New Jersey from New York to Princeton, “was astonished at so many wooden houses; in Europe they are looked down upon as cheap substitutes which do not, like brick, resist the attack of passing time.” Inevitably on that passage he noticed “old junked cars, piles of scrap iron.” At Princeton the campus was deserted. He found a hotel and asked where all the students had gone. Perhaps to see Notre Dame, the clerk said. “Was I crazy?” Infeld asked himself. “Notre Dame is in Paris. Here is Princeton with empty streets. What does it all mean?” He soon found out. “Suddenly the whole atmosphere changed. It happened in a discontinuous way, in a split second. Cars began to run, crowds of people streamed through the streets, noisy students shouted and sang.” Infeld arrived on a Saturday; in those days Princeton played Notre Dame at football.
Rhodes concludes the chapter on the exodus of Jewish physicists with this observation.
A chemist, Kurt Mendelssohn, vividly recalled the morning after his escape: “When I woke up, the sun was shining in my face. I had slept deeply, soundly, and long — for the first time in many weeks.”
Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before it is even family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of the morning sun.