AP News, November 27th, 2007
Historians investigating the life of a Dutch Nobel chemistry laureate who worked in Germany during Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime found the scientist complied with anti-Jewish dictates while sometimes helping Jewish colleagues.
Peter Debye, who won the Nobel in 1936, was posthumously stripped of honors by two Dutch universities last year after new evidence emerged that he collaborated in the expulsion of Jews from scientific institutions.
Asked for a deeper study, the Netherlands War Documentation Institute published a report Tuesday that cast light on the quandaries faced by scientists when working under the racist laws of the time, saying "situations are often not so clearly definable as they seem to have been in retrospect."
The report said Debye accepted working with the Nazis and felt obliged to defend German science, the pre-eminent network of its day, even when it involved anti-Jewish measures.
"As a scientist, Debye did not distinguish between Jews and non-Jews," the report said, but "as a scientific organizer he accepted the separation of Jewish and non-Jewish circles without public protest."
Debye never resisted the Germans, "but there were moments of opposition," such as when he helped two Jewish scientists who were forced to emigrate, it said. This was "connected with a survival mechanism of ambiguity," which secured his own position in German institutions, where he had worked since 1927, the report said.
The study was commission after last year's publication of the book "Albert Einstein in the Netherlands," which documented Einstein's suspicions of the Dutchman.
The book, by Berlin-based author Sybe I. Rispens, reproduced a 1938 note by Debye, then director of the prestigious Max Planck Institute in Berlin, instructing Jewish members of the institute to quit.
"In light of the current situation, membership by German Jews as stipulated by the Nuremberg laws, of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft cannot be continued. According to the wishes of the board, I ask of all members to whom these definitions apply to report to me their resignation. Heil Hitler," Debye's note said.
The institute said its study was the first to review Debye's life through Dutch, German and U.S. sources. It concluded the physicist's actions after 1939 could be deemed "opportunistic with reason. He kept an escape hatch ready in every situation."
Debye moved to the United States in 1940, five months after receiving notice that he was required to accept German citizenship and relinquish his Dutch nationality. He died in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1966 after an illustrious career with more than 200 publications.
He won the Nobel prize for his studies on the structure of molecules. His name has been adopted as a unit of measurement for an interaction of electrons called a dipole moment.
