Influence of European immigrants on science during World War II

Significance: Scientists who escaped to the United States from dictatorships in Hungary, Germany, Italy, and other European countries during the 1930s played a major role in the successful development of the atomic bomb and other projects during World War II.

European immigrants who came to the United States during the nineteenth century were mostly farmers, construction workers, domestic servants, or day laborers. Only very few scientists with professional training came over, usually to take advantage of broader opportunities than were available in their homelands. The Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell came from London, England, to an innovative school in Boston, where he worked with deaf children to teach them the rudiments of speech. His research on using vibrating reeds to duplicate the sounds of words made by the human voice led to his invention of the telephone in 1876. Nikola Tesla, an electrical engineer from Serbia, was inspired to come to the United States after reading about Thomas Alva Edison’s ingenious inventions of electrical apparatuses. Tesla’s specialty became the development of alternating current (AC); he designed the electric motor and generator that was later used in the first large-scale hydroelectric power plant, built at Niagara Falls, New York, in 1895, making the United States the world leader in electricity production and use. However, Bell and Tesla should be viewed as rare exceptions among the multitude of blue-collar workers who immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century.

Persecution of European Scholars During the 1930s

Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 as a fascist dictator. It is noteworthy that prior to this, in the chaos following World War I, a substantial number of other European countries had already become dictatorships, among them Hungary, under Admiral Miklós Horthy; Italy, under Benito Mussolini; Spain, under General Miguel Primo de Rivera and, later, Generalissimo Francisco Franco; Poland, under Marshall Józef Piłsudski; Russia, under Joseph Stalin; and Portugal, under António de Oliveira Salazar. In order to gain control over their people, these dictators appealed to nationalistic pride and made scapegoats out of foreigners and Jews.

In Hungary, the Horthy regime made anti-Semitism a legal doctrine, dismissing Jews from employment in public schools and universities. In Italy, Mussolini demanded that all university faculty members sign a loyalty oath that was designed to stifle criticism of the government. During the mid-1930s, Stalin and Hitler both instituted reigns of terror to enforce obedience. Jews and other people who were considered "undesirables" could be arrested and deported to labor camps without warning. Although many Jews had separated themselves from the religious tradition of their parents or grandparents and in some cases had been baptized as Roman Catholics or Protestants, these governments classified all people of Jewish heritage into the same category.

University scholars who had lost their livelihood in Europe anxiously looked to the United States for employment, but the Great Depression meant that funding for new positions in American universities was scarce. The Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, organized by the Institute of International Education and led by Edward R. Murrow, provided notable help to refugees, finding employment for some three hundred scholars out of more than six thousand applicants. The Institute for Advanced Study, which opened in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1933 with a large private endowment, was able to recruit the world-renowned physicist Albert Einstein from Berlin during its first year of operation. The National Refugee Service was the largest American organization that provided financial aid to Europeans in many occupations.

Another renowned scientist who was displaced by anti-Semitic policies was the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who had been selected to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938. Mussolini boasted publicly about the excellence of scientific research under his Fascist rule. However, Fermi’s wife was of Jewish heritage, which meant that the Fermis’ children were not permitted to attend public school, so they quietly planned to immigrate to the United States. When the Fermi family went to Sweden to accept the Nobel award, they did not return to Italy but instead used the prize money to pay for their boat trip to the United States and to get settled in their new home.

Discovery of Nuclear Fission

In January 1939, a dramatic discovery was announced by two scientists in Germany: the fission of a uranium nucleus into two pieces, accompanied by a large release of energy. The amount of nuclear energy emitted per atom is a million times greater than the chemical energy that is released by traditional explosives. This meant that if uranium could be purified sufficiently, it might be possible to build a weapon of terrifying power. Two Hungarian-born physicists who had previously immigrated to the United States, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, realized the danger the world would face if Hitler’s scientists were able to develop an atomic bomb. They wrote a letter addressed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to warn him and to urge him to establish a scientific team to investigate the feasibility of such a weapon. They took the letter to Einstein for his signature, thinking that only Einstein’s prestige would carry enough weight to get the message through to the president.

The subsequent development of the atomic bomb during World War II, an enterprise code-named the Manhattan Project, has been well documented. As in any research project, there was uncertainty at many points about the eventual outcome. The large reactor that was built for plutonium production at Hanford, Washington, almost failed because of an unanticipated problem with a previously unknown neutron absorber. At Oak Ridge, Tennessee, three different technologies for uranium isotope separation were attempted with no guarantee that any of them could be made to work. The test explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in June 1945 could have been a dud if the unusual detonation mechanism of an implosion had fizzled. A spirit of cooperation developed among the scientists, the US Army, and the private contractors, without which the project could not have been completed within four years.

Contributions by European Scientists

European scientists were few in number in comparison to the many Americans who worked on the atomic bomb and other war research projects. However, the Europeans made major contributions, often in leadership roles. The magnitude of the immigrants’ contributions can be appreciated by listing the accomplishments of some of the most prominent individuals.

Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Italy, was the world’s foremost expert on nuclear reactions by neutron bombardment. He was the first person to create a controlled nuclear fission chain reaction and the chief designer of the first nuclear reactor using natural uranium fuel. The successful operation of the reactor in 1942 was an essential step toward the crash program to develop an atomic bomb.

Leo Szilard was a physicist who left Hungary during the 1920s to escape the government's open anti-Semitism. After a period in Berlin, he immigrated to the United States in 1937. He was one of the first scientists to envision the possibility of an atomic bomb and wrote the letter that alerted President Roosevelt to the potential danger of a nuclear Germany. He worked closely with Fermi on the construction of the first nuclear reactor and other projects.

Eugene Wigner also was a physicist and a refugee from Hungary. His major contribution to the atomic bomb project was to design the large nuclear reactor at Hanford, Washington, which produced plutonium. He was a cowinner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.

Hans Bethe was a theoretical physicist who fled Germany in 1933, went to England, and then joined the faculty at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1935. He developed a theoretical model for energy production in stars, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967. At the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer chose him to head the theoretical physics division. During the 1950s, he served on the President’s Science Advisory Committee.

Felix Bloch was a Swiss physicist who came to Cornell University in 1934. During World War II, he contributed to the development of radar. In 1952, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on nuclear magnetic resonance, which is the basis for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), now widely used by the medical profession.

James Franck was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1925. In 1935, he resigned from his university position at Göttingen in protest over the dismissal of Jewish faculty and came to the University of Chicago. He headed the chemistry division that prepared the materials for Fermi’s reactor. In 1945, he was a leading voice among scientists who recommended a demonstration of an atomic explosion as a warning to Japan before military use.

George Gamow was a physicist who fled from Russia during the 1920s. He established his reputation in physics by providing an explanation of the mechanism of radioactive decay. After coming to the United States in 1933, he developed a theory of energy production in stars by nuclear fusion, which later became important in the design of the hydrogen bomb.

Edward Teller, a Hungarian physicist, immigrated to the United States in 1935. While working at Los Alamos, he conceived the idea of a superbomb using hydrogen fusion (the so-called H-bomb) that would be detonated by an atomic bomb. In 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission set up a new laboratory at Livermore, California, specifically to pursue H-bomb research, with Teller as its head. Another Hungarian immigrant, John von Neumann, was a talented mathematician. At the age of thirty, he came to the United States at the invitation of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He designed the first electronic computer at Los Alamos to replace the slow mechanical calculators. As a respected technical adviser, he contributed his expertise to the H-bomb and long-range missile programs.

Hungarian-born Theodore von Kármán was an outstanding aeronautical engineer. After immigrating to the United States in 1930, he improved the performance of high-speed military aircraft and designed rocket engines for spaceflight. For ten years, he served as director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Samuel Goudsmit was a Dutch physicist who was chosen to head the Alsos mission, which followed Allied forces in Europe in 1944 to determine just how far Germany had come toward building an atomic bomb.

Emilio Segrè was a colleague of Fermi at Rome who found the rise of Fascism in Italy intolerable. He joined the cyclotron group at the University of California, Berkeley, which produced the first tiny samples of plutonium in 1942, and later worked at Los Alamos. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959 for the discovery of the antiproton.

Bibliography

Compton, Arthur H. Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative. Oxford UP, 1956.

Fermi, Laura. Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi. U of Chicago P, 1954.

Fermi, Laura. Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930–41. 2nd ed., U of Chicago P, 1971.

Groves, Leslie R. Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. 1962. Da Capo Press, 1983.

Hargittai, István. The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century. Oxford UP, 2006.

Sayen, Jamie. Einstein in America: The Scientist’s Conscience in the Age of Hitler and Hiroshima. Crown, 1985.