Nobelist Stripped of Dutch Institutes due to Nazi Colaboration

Documentary evidence that chemistry Nobel Laureate Peter J. W. Debye may have been a Nazi collaborator in Berlin in the 1930s has led a university in the Netherlands to remove his name from its Debye Institute of Physics & Chemistry of Nanomaterials & Interfaces. Another university in Maastricht, the Netherlands, has reportedly dropped the name of Debye from a scientific award.

Utrecht University spokesman Ludo Koks says a book about physics Nobel Laureate Albert Einstein, published in January, led to the university’s decision to “abandon” the Debye name from its physics and chemistry institute. Evidence in the book, he says, includes a letter that Debye signed in 1938 in which he orders, in the name of the German authorities, Jewish coworkers of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft in Berlin to leave the organization.

“The University Board contacted the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) to verify this,” Koks says. “NIOD found it reliable.”

Debye, who died in 1966, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1936 for his contributions to the study of molecular structure, primarily his work on dipole moments and X-ray diffraction. According to several biographies, Debye left Nazi Germany for the U.S. in 1939 after he refused to become a German citizen. In 1940, he became head of the chemistry department at Cornell University, which became a leader in solid-state research largely due to his influence.

The book, available only in Dutch, is “Einstein in the Netherlands” by Berlin-based science writer Sybe I. Rispens. Rispens tells C&EN that his archival research on Einstein and his relationship with Debye reveals that “Debye showed himself to be an extreme opportunist during the Nazi period.” As in the letter expelling Jews from the physics institute that Debye directed, Rispens says, Debye, in most of his correspondence, “shows himself as a willing helper of the regime, signing dozens of letters with ‘heil Hitler.’ There are no signs that he acted involuntarily or was threatened by the Nazis.”

Rispens says his discoveries about Debye were the result of trying to find out why Einstein—who had held Debye in high scientific esteem—changed his mind so much about the chemist. “In 1940, Einstein did something he never did before or after: He tried to ban Debye from an academic position in the U.S. The letter in which Einstein tried to appeal to his fellow U.S. colleagues to ‘do whatever they find is their duty,’ was found by me in the Einstein archives in summer 2005 and has been, as far as I know, never published before.”

Of the recent actions regarding Debye in the Netherlands, Rispens says, “they made their decision to drop the name from the institute of physics in Utrecht and a prize named after Debye in his hometown, Maastricht, within three weeks after publication of the book. This has stunned me quite a bit and, as a matter of fact, gives me mixed feelings.”

The American Chemical Society presents a Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry sponsored by DuPont. ACS Grants & Awards Chair C. Gordon McCarty says, “The ACS Board Committee on Grants & Awards is aware of the situation and the developing story and is considering what the impact will be on the ACS national award named for Peter Debye.”

“The University of Utrecht is fully aware of the eminent scientific work of Peter Debye,” Koks says. “Moreover, historical research is needed to fully understand Debye’s role before and during the Second World War. Still, the University Board thinks, with due observance of recent knowledge, the name of Debye is no longer compatible with the image of one of our leading research institutes.”
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/