It's not quite a rehabilitation. But a new study clears Dutch physics Nobel laureate Petrus “Peter” Debye of the most serious accusations that arose last year after publications about his past in Nazi Germany. Debye, who succeeded Albert Einstein at the helm of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin in 1934, was not an anti-Semite or a Nazi, the study concludes--but it knocks him for opportunism.
Debye came under attack in 2006 from physicist and journalist Sybe Rispens. In a book and in a magazine article titled "Nobel Laureate With Dirty Hands," Rispens showed that as chair of the German Physical Society, Debye had asked Jewish members to resign in a letter in 1938--Debye had ended the letter with a "Heil Hitler!" The book also claimed that after he left Germany in 1939 to join Cornell University, Debye kept in touch with the Nazi regime and even suggested returning to his Berlin job as late as June 1941.
Rispens's publications triggered a furious debate in the Netherlands, and the University of Utrecht soon dropped the name "Debye" from its nanophysics institute; Maastricht University--in Debye's hometown--halted its involvement in the Debye Prize for the natural sciences, awarded by a Dutch foundation. Several physicists and historians objected, however, arguing that Debye had just tried to make the best of a bad situation. They pointed out, for example, that signing official letters with "Heil Hitler!" was standard practice even among those opposed to the regime (Science, 30 June 2006, p. 858). And Debye's offer to return to Germany may have been an attempt to protect his daughter, who still lived in his official residence in Berlin. Cornell University--where Debye remained until his death in 1966--said last year that it saw no reason to drop his name from a professorship.
The 200-page study by historian Martijn Eickhoff of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, commissioned by the Dutch science ministry and published yesterday, concludes that Rispens's picture of Debye was a "caricature" that contains multiple errors. Eickhoff points out that Debye seemed to think that he had to do what he could to keep German physics afloat. Although he didn't actively resist the Nazi regime, there were "moments of opposition," the study notes, such as his helping two Jewish colleagues escape from Germany. To retain his position, he developed a "survival mechanism of ambiguity."
"It's a good study," says Rispens, who concedes that his own work may have come off as slanted because he primarily looked at Debye through the eyes of Albert Einstein, who did not hold the Dutchman in high esteem.
But Debye's descendants are less pleased. "I was happy to see" that a six-page summary in English "does not support previous innuendoes of anti-Semitism and charges about Debye having been a [Nazi] collaborator," Norwig Debye-Saxinger, a grandson living in Kinderhook, New York, wrote in an e-mail to ScienceNOW. But descriptions such as "opportunistic," and the study's claim that Debye "kept an escape hatch ready in every situation," are untrue, he adds.
The two Dutch universities declined to comment; they are awaiting the report of a panel chaired by physicist and former vice prime minister Jan Terlouw that will advise them on whether to restore the Debye name.
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