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...the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1936. His name, Debye, is still used as the unit of measurement of a dipole moment.
Born in Maastricht in 1884, Debye was educated at the Aachen Institute of Technology and Munich University, where he received his Ph.D. in physics in 1908. Following appointments at Zurich University, Utrecht University, the University of Gottingen, and the University of Leipzig, Debye (in effect) replaced Albert Einstein as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institute for Physics in Berlin in 1934, serving until 1939. From 1937-1939, he was also president of the German Physical Society.
In 1939, he left his German positions and shortly afterwards emigrated to the United States, to join the faculty of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he taught until 1952. By the time he retired, he had become a colleague respected by many on the Cornell campus, and a mentor to a number of young chemists, many of them now prominent in their fields. He was also a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, elected in 1927.
Given Debye's reputation, the publication in January 2006 of Einstein in Nederland, by science writer Sybe Izaak Rispens, came as a shock to academic communities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
In Chapter Five of the book--and in newspaper articles he wrote to promote it--Rispens charged that Peter Debye, "one of the greatest Dutch scientists of the twentieth century," had contributed to "Hitler's most important military research program." Acknowledging that Debye was not a member of the Nazi Party, Rispens branded him an "extreme opportunist" and "willing helper of the regime" whose "hands are dirtier than is commonly assumed." (1)
Rispens focused much of his attention on Debye's activities in Berlin. Supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation (made before the Nazis came to power), the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute boasted state-of-the-art research facilities and a staff of first-rate scientists. According to Rispens, Hermann Goering, the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, made sure Debye got all the resources he needed, especially after physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman discovered that a 'fission' bomb could release virtually unlimited energy. Debye received a large salary, which reached 40,000 marks in 1939, and a house in Berlin-Dahlem, where he lived with his German-born wife, Mathilde Alberer, and their two children. (2)
Debye retained his Dutch passport throughout the 1930s, Rispens asserts, because he believed that with the Nazis in power a German citizen was less likely to become a Nobel Laureate. Although he declined to formalize his German citizenship, he told physicist Max Planck that he was nonetheless a sturdy German nationalist. Debye made repeated inquiries, Rispens emphasizes, "about what people in power expected of him." (3) Following the Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jews on November 9 and 10, 1938, he came under pressure to make the German Physical Society conform to Nazi ideology and practices by excluding all non-Aryan members. Debye might have resigned from the organization in protest, as the Dutch-born physicist Samuel Goudsmit had in 1937. Or protested to the Ministry of Education and Culture. Instead, in December, he wrote to members of the society: "Under the compelling overarching circumstances the abiding of Reich-German Jews in the German Physical Society can no longer be maintained in the sense of the Nuremberg Laws. In agreement with the Executive Committee I request all members who fall under this regulation to communicate to me their withdrawal from the Society. Heil Hitler!" Debye's letter may well have been "half-hearted," Rispens writes, but it was "nonetheless effective Aryan cleansing," with about 10 percent of the society's members excluded. And...
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