The ‘Problem of Evil’ and Postwar Scientific Cooperation in Europe

John Krige

School of History, Technology and Society, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.

Far from reflecting upon the problem of evil in the years that followed the end of World War II, most

Europeans turned their heads resolutely away from it. […] After 1945 our parents’ generation set aside the

problem of evil because—for them—it contained too much meaning. 

Tony Judt, 20081

The Germans’ crimes are really the most abhorrent that the history of so-called civilized nations can put

forward. The attitude of German intellectuals – regarded as a class – was no better than the mean public.

[…] Under these conditions I feel an irresistible aversion to participating in anything that embodies a part

of German public life simply out of a need to stay clean.

Albert Einstein, 19492

Tant qu’ils [des travaux sur les émotions en histoire] nous feront défaut, il n’y aura pas d’historie possible.

Lucien Febvre, 19383

For Corine de France and Anne Kwaschik, eds, Science, Internationalization and the Cold War (Paris: Armand Colin) 

The central aim of this paper is to problematize the almost complete absence of any

reference to ‘the problem of evil’ from actor accounts (and historical analyses) of the

postwar reconstruction of technoscience in Europe. The European scientific community

rapidly rebuilt itself after the war, and embarked on new and significant modes of

interpersonal and international cooperation. To do so with any success scientists in the

allied countries needed to draw a veil over the German crimes (Einstein), and the

collusion of many of their colleagues in them, including some of the most eminent

practitioners in physics, in astronomy, in biology, in chemistry, in medicine. Things had

1 Tony Judt, “The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe,” New York Review of Books, 14 February 2008.2 Letter, Albert Einstein to Otto Hahn, 28 January 1949, cited in Klaus Hentschel, The Mental Aftermath. The Mentality of German Physicists 1945-1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 165.3Lucien Febvre (1938), “La sensibilité et l’histoire. Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefrois”, in Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’Histoire (Paris : Armand Colin, 1992), 221-238, at 236..

1

not gone so smoothly after the First World War. Then a sustained effort was made to

exclude the German (and Austrian) scientific community from international intercourse,

at least at a formal level. The ensuing boycott, as Schroeder-Gudehus explains, was

initially “quite effective, excluding German and Austrian scientists from associations,

meetings, and publications and inflicting on their community the intended humiliation.” 4

It was only in 1926, and under pressure from their governments, that national Academies

backed away from their “patriotic agitation” and were persuaded to “give international

détente a chance.” Nothing comparable occurred after WWII. There were sporadic

objections to welcoming German scientists back into the international fold but there was

no organized attempt to exclude them. The past was ‘forgotten’ in the interests of moving

forward together into the future.

The pitiful state of science after the war — especially compared to that in the

United States —, the communist threat in the cold war, and the pressure for European

integration together account in part for this collective amnesia. As multiple studies have

shown there were good functional and geopolitical reasons for European scientists and

governments, including those in West Germany, to put the immediate past behind them,

and to pool people and money in costly and complex big science projects in the first

decades after WWII. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research is held to

be exemplary in this regard: collaboration was imperative to catch up with the world

leader and to avert a transatlantic ‘brain drain’.5 What this comfortable explanation

overlooks, however, is the emotional and institutional work that had to be done by key

social actors who promoted major multinational projects in the 1950s to deal with the

‘problem of evil.’ Indeed, it is sobering to reflect that the very success of the cooperative

postwar reconstruction of European science, so often lauded, relied on self-discipline and

repression about the behavior of German scientists under the Third Reich. To inject that

emotional work back into our accounts is not simply to give due weight to human

subjectivity in crafting our historical explanations. It is also to raise questions about how

4 Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, “Probing the Master Narrative of Scientific Internationalism. Nationals and Neutrals in the 1920s,” in Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen and Sven Widmalm, eds, Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2012), 19-42.5 A three-volume history was published by North Holland; for the first, Armin Hermann, John Krige, Ulrike Mersits and Dominique Pestre, A History of CERN. Vol. I. Launching the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1987).

2

transnational scientific and ‘emotional communities’ were constructed immediately after

the war, about how trust between their members was acquired and performed and, more

generally, about the emotional compromises (and associated institutional arrangements)

that had to be made for ‘Europe’ to get off the ground at all.6

There is nothing new in the recognition that emotions mattered to the postwar

reconstruction Europe (though this is usually left implicit rather than analyzed). Indeed it

is a story driven by fear of a resurgence of German nationalism and militarism, as well as

by mutual distrust between Britain and France. But, as Judt and Einstein insist in the

quotes above, it is also a story of how erstwhile enemies dealt with collaboration with the

Hitler regime and, more generally, with the attempted genocide of the Jews in Europe.

Fruitful cooperation required repression, questions not asked, emotions disciplined.

This paper uses two examples of scientific cooperation in the 1950s to illustrate

how and why the ‘problem of evil’ was dealt with in the construction of European

facilities for nuclear physics and for astronomy. It is noteworthy that senior American

officials were crucial in facilitating this process, though in very different ways in CERN

and in ESO (the European Southern Observatory). The establishment of these

organizations has of course been recounted before. The geopolitical imperatives that

produced them are well known; the institutional and emotional work needed to ensure

their success in the light of the immediate past is generally ignored (and at best obliquely

refereed to in the accounts produced by the actors themselves). This paper recovers the

liminal field that lay between rejection and acceptance, as translated into institutional

arrangements to restrict German influence in cooperative scientific initiatives in physics

and in astronomy in the 1950s. These arrangements were tacit rather than explicit, not

openly negotiated but mutually agreed. The ‘problem of evil’ undoubtedly lurked in the

background of encounters with German scientists after the war. This paper will suggest

that, while it was repressed in interpersonal relationships and public statements —

whence the silences — it was expressed in quotidian institutional arrangements that, as

everyone knew, were intended to curb German power.

6 This involves thinking about emotions in history in a sense quite different to that understood by Febvre, i.e. not as irrational forces but as socially constructed and embedded in ‘emotional communities’ — see Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review, 107:3 (2002), 821-45.

3

Repression and (superficial?) reconciliation

It was not historical research but a play produced about fifteen years ago that

dramatically turned the spotlight on the interpersonal relationships between allied and

German scientists during and after WWII. Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen elevated a

mostly ignored and relatively minor incident into a major lens probing the feelings of two

giants of European physics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.7

In September 1941 Heisenberg briefly visited Bohr in Copenhagen under strained

circumstances. Heisenberg was on an official visit to the newly founded Deutsches

Wissenschaftliches Institut (German Cultural Institute) that had been established to

promote German values in Nazi-occupied Denmark. He took the opportunity to visit his

mentor and friend at the famed Institute for Theoretical Physics where he had spent a

good deal of time as a young man reveling in the freewheeling atmosphere of the

‘Copenhagen spirit’.8 The meeting went badly, for reasons that are not clear, and that

were hotly contested. Robert Jungk, in his book Heller als tausend Sonnen. Das Schicksal

der Atomforscher, published in German in 1956,9 suggested that Heisenberg had gone to

Copenhagen to plea that physicists the world over renounce the development of nuclear

weapons, returning home empty handed. Frayn’s play amplified this encounter into a

subject of major public and historical interest and led the Bohr family to release about a

dozen previously unpublished documents.10 These were private notes and drafts of letters

written by Bohr to Heisenberg after Jungk’s book was published.

The first of these draft letters gives one a good idea of the intensity of Bohr’s

feelings on first seeing Jungk’s book when it came out in Danish in1957:

7 Michael Frayn, Copenhagen (London: 1998).8 Finn Aaserud, Redirecting Science. Niels Bohr, Philanthropy and the Rise of Physics (Cambridge University Press, 1990).9 Scherz & Goverts Verlag Stuttgart 1956. James Cleugh translated it into English and it was published under the title Brighter than a Thousand Suns. A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists in 1958 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, An American edition was published in 1970. The book is the first published account of the Manhattan Project by a non-scientist.10 For the documents see http://www.nba.nbi.dk/papers/docs/cover.html.

4

I think that I owe it to you to tell you that I am greatly amazed to see how much

your memory has deceived you [regarding our meeting in September 1941] in

your letter to the author of the book, excerpts of which are printed in the Danish

edition. Personally, I remember every word of our conversations, which took

place on a background of extreme sorrow and tension for us here in Denmark. In

particular, it made a strong impression both on Margarethe [Bohr’s wife] and me,

and on everyone at the Institute that the two of you spoke to, that you and [Carl

Friedrich Von] Weizsäcker expressed your definite conviction that Germany

would win and that it was therefore quite foolish for us to maintain the hope of a

different outcome of the war and to be reticent as regards all German offers of

cooperation. I also remember quite clearly our conversation in my room at the

Institute, where in vague terms you spoke in a manner that could only give me the

firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in

Germany to develop atomic weapons […].11

Much has been written about this letter and the accuracy, not only of Bohr’s

memory but also of the putative commitment of Heisenberg and the German physics

community to developing a nuclear weapon for Hitler.12 What concerns me here,

however, is that Bohr never sent the letter. Cathryn Carson reminds us that Heisenberg’s

trip to Copenhagen in 1941 was an open secret in the physics community; by the 1950s it

had become a “subject for discreet commentary but not open confrontation” in the

interest of “postwar reconciliation.”13 Bohr himself went along with this even though he

was deeply hurt not to say angered: as late as March 1962, shortly before his death in

November, he drafted yet another unsent letter to Heisenberg on the lines of the above.14

‘Postwar reconciliation’ demanded repression, a repression that was surely facilitated by

Bohr’s deep commitment to scientific internationalism. Science, as the embodiment of

objective rationality, was expected to rise above emotional, subjective disagreements that

11 http://www.nba.nbi.dk/papers/docs/d01tra.htm12 For an excellent collection see Matthias Dörries, Copenhagen in Debate. Historical Essays and Documents on the Meeting Between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (Berkeley: Office for History of Science and Technology, 2005).13 Cathryn Carson, “Reflections on Copenhagen,” in Dörries, Copenhagen in Debate, 7-17, at 9.14 http://www.nba.nbi.dk/papers/docs/d11ctra.htm.

5

yielded fruitless dispute and discord: Bohr would not descend into the realm of

confrontation and public rebuke, notwithstanding his grief and anger.

Heisenberg’s insensitivity regarding his crass behavior in Copenhagen was typical

of the postwar attitude of German physicists. Klaus Hentschel has analyzed their

mentalité using material drawn from 1945 to 1949. He found a remarkable professional

homogeneity among them that contrasted sharply with their internecine struggles for

power in the interwar years. They were united by a deep sense of injustice, of being

misunderstood by the rest of the world, of being unfairly blamed and punished for crimes

they did not commit.15 These self-righteous sentiments were amplified by the harsh living

conditions and meager rations they endured under the allied occupied forces. Richard

Courant, a brilliant émigré mathematician then based in New York who visited occupied

Germany in 1947 with Nathalie Artin, was appalled to hear an eminent scientist tell them

that “even the Nazis fed the inmates of concentration camps.”16 Otto Hahn, who was

incensed by the somewhat indiscriminate application of denazification policies, wrote to

Lise Meitner (who had worked with him on nuclear fission in Berlin before the war) that

“the Americans in Germany are now doing the same as the Germans used to do in

occupied countries.”17 She was aghast.

We know a little about the attitude of the astronomy community from a report

published in 1946 by Gerard Kuiper, an eminent Dutch astronomer and American émigré

who was a member of the ALSOS scientific and intelligence mission that was set up in

1943 to evaluate the state of nuclear research in Germany. ALSOS advanced behind

allied lines as WWII drew to a close and searched for personnel, records, material, and

sites to evaluate the German nuclear project.18 Kuiper noted that while the majority of the

astronomers were not “aggressive” Nazi’s, their dissatisfaction with Nazi “theories”

15 Klaus Hentschel, The Mental Aftermath. The Mentality of German Physicists, 1945 -1 1949 (Oxford University Press, 2007).16 Cited in John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 52. We can find no detailed information on Ms Artin.17 Ruth Lewin Sime, Lise Meitner. A Life in Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 344.18 Gerard Kuiper, “German Astronomy during the War,” Popular Astronomy, 54:6 (1946), 263-287. On the ALSOS mission see Samuel A. Goudsmit, L’Allemagne et le secret atomique. La mission ALSOS (Paris: Fayard, 1948). There is useful context in Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 204-21.

6

remained “latent.” Otto Heckmann was an exception, Kuiper claimed, openly expressing

his disagreement (in this he was misled by Heckmann’s intellectual gymnastics, as we

shall see later). Kuiper pointed out that nearly all astronomers who were not already

members of the Nazi party before the war had joined the party after 1939. The

community as a whole not only benefited from government support: they

opportunistically took advantage of German conquest to refurbish their laboratories.

While Heckman’s observatory at Hamburg was forced to stop teaching and

research and devote its energies to the war effort, it is clear from Kuiper’s report that

some sections of German astronomy flourished during the war. Karl-Otto Kiepenhauer,

the director of the Fraunhofer Institute, for example, aimed to “coordinate and foster solar

research, not only in Germany and Austria, but in the occupied territories,” establishing a

solar observatory in Sicily that used some equipment requisitioned from an observatory

in Belgrade, and building four new Alpine observatories. Capitalizing on advances to the

east, the Germans dismantled the equipment at the Simeis Observatory on Mount Crimea

in the Ukraine. Capitalizing on advances to the west, the observatory in Leipzig was

refurbished, after being bombed in 1943, using equipment taken from the Belgian Royal

Observatory at Uccle. The Wehrmacht also took a reflector from Uccle and, with the help

of Zeiss, used it to make infrared observations of shipping in the English Channel. Kuiper

noted explicitly, and with a controlled sense of outrage, that the pillage of the equipment

from Mount Crimea and “two important telescopes from Uccle, Belgium” was believed

to be justified by the local community. These two centres had “one point in common”, he

wrote. “Both had obtained reparation equipment after the first world war”. The clear

implication was that German astronomers, still smarting from the humiliation of the

earlier defeat and the punishment meted out to them by the Treaty of Versailles, felt that

they were fully entitled to take back what was “theirs.”

One cannot overestimate the extent of the hostility provoked by the attitudes of

German scientists after the war. Courant and Artin felt they had “no clear conception of

the misery inflicted by Nazi Germany on her victims. Self-centered, they indulge in

criticism of the Allies, and are unwilling to see the present plight of Germany as a

consequence of Hitlerism rather than of Allied mistakes.” Rockefeller Foundation officer

Alan Gregg, who was obliged, against his will, to seek funding opportunities in occupied

7

Germany, was so disgusted after interviewing medical researchers that, on leaving

Germany and Austria in 1949 he wrote that, “It isn’t that you can vomit what you have

already had to eat — you can’t — but at least you don’t have to sit smiling and eat more

and more.”19 In 1951 the chemist Sir Francis (formerly Franz) Simon spoke for many

when he wrote that:

In my opinion German scientists as a group lost their honour in 1933 and did

nothing to get it back. […] The least you could expect after all that happened was

that German scientists, as a group, would state publicly and clearly that they

regretted what had happened. I did not notice anything of this kind.20

Ute Deichman, in her study of the relationship between biologists and chemists

who left Germany and those stayed behind, concluded that it took quite some time for

scientific exchanges to become ‘normalized’ after the war, i.e. for “the national Socialist

past [to] become irrelevant in regard to scientific communication and cooperation.”21 This

then seems to generally true. For at least a decade after the war deep feelings divided

allied scientists and those who had fled Germany from their colleagues who had stayed in

the country. These feelings were counterbalanced by the urge to collaborate in the name

of scientific internationalism and by the need to exploit the new opportunities for

rebuilding science at the European level that were emerging at the time.

These broad ideological and functional explanations help explain what brought

the scientists together; however, they are too general to explain how mutual resentment

was dealt with at the day-to-day working level, when emotions could run high. The

postwar reconstruction of European science in the 1950s was only possible because the

anger and contempt that many felt for their German ‘colleagues’ could be submerged

beneath the urge for cooperation and managed through institutional arrangements that

defused face-to-face encounters. The successful reintegration of German scientists into

European organizations is easily celebrated. The emotional and institutional work that

had to be done to make that happen is usually glossed over now, as then.

19 Krige, Hegemony, pp. 52 and 286 for these two quotes, the latter from a text by Paul Weindling.20 Cited by Ute Deichmann, “The Expulsion of German-Jewish Chemists and Biochemists and their Correspondence with Colleagues in Germany After 1945: the Impossibility of Normalization?”, in Margit Szöllösi-Janze (ed), Science in the Third Reich (New York: Berg, 2001), 243-280.21 Deichmann, “Expulsion,” 272.

8

The ‘problem of evil’ and CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research)

Physicists’ understanding of the structure of the nucleus was radically transformed after

the war using high-energy cosmic rays and giant particle accelerators. The European

community, that had played such a key role in making sense of nuclear structure in the

first decades of the 20th century, found their lead wrenched from their grasp by their

American colleagues. To re-establish themselves as internationally respectable partners

they needed to acquire powerful, costly and complex high-energy particle accelerators.

No nation, the British apart, could aspire to do this alone. The French were particularly

pro-active in drawing up plans for a joint European effort. They hoped to capitalize on

American help to reduce cost and to avoid duplicating effort — but recognized that

restrictions on the circulation of nuclear knowledge, and the presence of communists in

the French Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA) were major impediments to

cooperation. Its first scientific Director, Nobel prizewinner and militant communist,

Frédéric Joliot-Curie, was removed from office in April 1950.22 This paved the way for a

major American initiative by the physicist Isidor I. Rabi at a meeting of the UNESCO

General Assembly in Florence in June 1950.23

Rabi was a member of the official American delegation to the gathering. He had

just facilitated the establishment of a national accelerator facility at Brookhaven on Long

Island to serve the needs of nine Northeastern universities. In Florence, in consultation

with the State Department and several leading European physicists, he extended the

model from universities to individual countries. As resolution 2.21 put it, UNESCO was

invited “to assist and encourage the formation and organization of regional research

centres and laboratories in order to increase and make more fruitful the international

collaboration of scientists in the search for new knowledge in fields where the effort of

22 Michel Pinault, Frédéric Joliot-Curie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000). For the history of the CNRS see the article written by Denis Guthleben in this volume.23 Krige, American Hegemony, chapter 3 deals comprehensively with Rabi’s role in the birth of CERN, based on a previous major study (cf Note 26). Rabi’s own version is found in John S. Rigden, Rabi. Scientist and Citizen (Harvard University Press, 2000), 235-7, in his interview with Lew Kowarski on 6 November 1973, and in another with Edoardo Amaldi on 2 March 1983 (CERN Archives, Geneva).

9

any one country is insufficient for the task.”24 Rabi personally identified biology,

computing, and above all physics as possible fields for a collaborative effort. Thus was

planted the seed that was to become CERN.

Rabi liked to say that CERN was simply an extension of Brookhaven, ‘with

governments replacing universities.’ It was not. Brookhaven was equipped with a particle

accelerator and a nuclear reactor. Indeed in April/May 1950 a group of French physicists

proposed that the countries of Western Europe together build an organization for ‘atomic

research’ that, like Brookhaven in New York State and Harwell in England, included

both. Rabi limited America’s blessing to an accelerator because, as he put it in a later

interview, “nuclear energy smelled very much of the military on the one side and

commercial on the other, and it would have been full of rivalry.”25

There was more to it than that. Rabi limited CERN to an accelerator but expanded

its potential membership by including West Germany in the new venture, just nine

months after the division of the country and before it was even a member of UNESCO.26

The scientific equipment authorized was influenced by the political choice: occupation

laws did not permit German scientists to have access to nuclear reactors for research or

power that could produce fuel for weapons. In other words Rabi shaped the research

trajectory of CERN to enable Germany to become one of its Member States.27 Speaking

in 1983 he remarked that “the main reason in favour of the European laboratory was the

Unity of Europe.”28 In fact the new regional laboratory that he proposed in Florence was

not only inserted into the historical movement towards European integration; it endorsed

that process as a solution to ‘the German problem.’

Rabi, although Jewish himself, was blind to the behaviour of people like

Heisenberg during the war. He was a member of the Adams Committee that had insisted

as early as July 1945 that German scientists had a key role to play in the economic

reconstruction of the country and that controls on their research should be restricted to the

minimum. Adopting an attitude of what Mitchell Ash calls ‘technocratic innocence ‘ — a

24 Hermann et al., CERN, 83.25 Interview with Kowarski, 3.26 Rabi was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations that first met in January 1949, and was actively engaged in discussions on the postwar reconstruction of Western Europe: see Krige, Hegemony, 59.27 This is developed at greater length in Krige, American Hegemony, chapter 3.28 Interview with Amaldi, 4.

10

naïve belief in the ‘neutrality’ of scientific and technological resources — the Committee

claimed that German scientists who had worked under the Third Reich had remained

outside the political fray and were in fact “an island of nonconformity in the Nazified

body politic.”29 These comfortable judgments dovetailed with Rabi’s broader ambitions

as a vector of US foreign policy in the region. He had no moral compunction in

promoting the inclusion of German physicists in CERN and every political reason to do

so: the laboratory dovetailed with the urge to integration underway on the continent (the

Schuman Plan of May 1950) and was part of Eisenhower’s grand design to build a strong

united Europe that included West Germany, independent of the U.S. while allied with it,

and capable of sharing the burden of defense against the Soviet threat.

When the official agreement establishing CERN was signed in 1952, 18 European

physicists telegrammed New York to tell Rabi of the “official birth of the project you

fathered at Florence.” He framed the letter and hung it on the wall of his office at home.30

Bohr was one of the signatories, of course, but so too was Heisenberg. This is not to say

that the integration of Germany into the laboratory went smoothly, though it is extremely

difficult to get hard and fast evidence of the tensions surrounding it. The only systematic

account we have is the analysis by Armin Hermann of the concerns in Germany over the

attribution of senior posts in CERN to German nationals when the laboratory was set up

in 1954.31

It was generally understood that countries that made major contributions to the

new laboratory (funded proportionately to GDP) were entitled to have representatives in

senior posts as along as they were qualified for the position. No German national was

among the first group of Division Leaders, however. When challenged to account for this

by Heisenberg, CERN officials insisted that political considerations were not at play:

Germany’s candidates were simply not among the best in the applicant pool. Heisenberg

did not believe this. On the contrary, as he put it at a meeting of the Kommission für

Atomphysik in December 1954, “[…]there was no mistaking the fact that in many

countries feelings towards Germany were more hostile than, for example, four years ago

29 Mitchell G. Ash, “Denazifying Scientists and Science,” in Matthias Judt and Burghard Ciesla, eds, Technology Transfer out of Germany (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), 61-79. For the final quote see Krige, American Hegemony, 47.30 Rigden, Rabi, 237. 31 Armin Hermann, “Germany’s Part in the Setting up of CERN,” in Herman et al, CERN, chapter 11.

11

— something he had recently noted himself in the United States […].”32 For Heisenberg

then the war still cast a long shadow over interpersonal relations between physicists a

decade after it had ended, and was shaping the attribution of posts at CERN. The point

was confirmed by CERN’s first Director General and Swiss émigré, Felix Bloch, who

told Wolfgang Gentner that “it was extremely difficult for him to support a German

candidate” as Chief Administrative and Finance Officer, “unless he could be entirely sure

that the person in question had no compromising political past.”33

The European physics community went along with the inclusion of Germany as a

Member State of CERN — the broader political push to reintegration, along with U.S.

pressure, left them little option. But there were limits to what they could accept, limits to

their ability to work along with German colleagues, above all in senior posts. CERN’s

first organigramme embodied political choices that were driven by barely-repressed

sentiments of hostility to the behavior of the German science community during and after

the war.

The ‘problem of evil’ and the European Southern Observatory (ESO)

In the early 1950s, inspired by the CERN ‘model’, several Europeans astronomers

began to lobby for a ground-based telescope in the southern hemisphere to study the

central parts of the galaxy and the nearest extragalactic systems .34 There were a number

of reasons for this. There was important scientific work to be done that was not possible

with the powerful observatories they had in the northern hemisphere. The equipment they

wanted would be comparable to that available in the best American observatories and it

was hoped that Europeans could use American engineering designs, so leapfrogging over

their technological lag, and positioning themselves alongside their American colleagues

at the research frontier.35 Finally, senior science administrators with a commitment to

European integration were engaged from the outset. Jan Bannier, the Director of the

Dutch ‘National Science Foundation’ (ZWO) and Gosta Funke, the secretary of the

32 Hermann, “Germany’s Part,” 419.33 Ibid. 34 The ‘official’ history is Adriaan Blaauw, ESO’s Early History. The European Southern Observatory from Concept to Reality (Garching bei München: ESO, 1991). See also Frank K. Edmondson, “The Ford Foundation and the European Southern Observatory,” J. of the History of Astronomy, 29:4 (1998), 309-326.35 Blaauw, ESO, 4.

12

Swedish Natural Sciences Research Council, were both actively engaged at the time in

the establishment of CERN, and firmly believed that their governments should

unhesitatingly support European projects articulated around cutting-edge scientific

equipment.

German astronomers were strong supporters of ESO from its inception. In fact the

suggestion that Europeans pool resources and build together a major facility in the

southern hemisphere was made by Walter Baade to his close colleague Johannes Oort,

director of the Leiden Observatory, in June 1953. Baade wanted Germany and Heckmann

to have key roles in the new organization.

Who were these men? Outstanding astronomers, of course, but with very different

war histories. Oort was one of the Dutch professors who had publically protested the

Nazi’s dismissal of their Jewish colleagues, and who had to go underground during the

German occupation of the Netherlands. He almost starved to death in the harsh winter of

1944-45, fortunately being rescued by Kuiper as he advanced with ALSOS behind the

allied lines in spring 1945.

Baade was “born, lived and died a German.”36 He left Germany in 1931 with the

help of the Rockefeller Foundation, and settled at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in

Pasadena, California. Baade was much sought after in the late 1930s as the Director of

the Hamburg Observatory, going so far as to say that he would accept the position if the

building was equipped with a powerful new Schmidt telescope. This would enable the

land where the Schmidt camera was born to take the lead away from the Americans

without spending millions of dollars, he said. When the official offer came from

Germany, however, Baade accepted a counteroffer from Mount Wilson “with heavy heart

[…] hoping the homeland will understand.”37 Otto Heckmann eventually filled the

position and remained there during the war and beyond. After the war Baade and his wife

regularly welcomed visitors to Pasadena where they “loved to speak their native tongue

and catch up on the news from ‘home’.” Baade was a patriotic German but not a Nazi,

though his brilliant colleague Fritz Zwicky apparently accused him of being one to his

face.38 He adopted Heckmann as his protégé and did what he could to advance his career.

36 Osterbrock, Baade, 212.37 Donald E. Osterbrock, Walter Baade. A Life in Astrophysics (Princeton University Press, 2001), 76.

13

That career began badly under National Socialism when Heckmann was accused

of being a ‘left centrist’ and a ‘Judenfreund.’ He gradually overcame this negative

evaluation by, as one 1935 report put it, making “every effort to embrace the essence of

National Socialism” and by striving “to contribute his personal service to the building of

the Third Reich.” 39 One factor still stood in his way: he was accused of being a supporter

of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. He overcame this by arguing that classical theories

were just as good for explaining the expansion of the universe, so paving the way for his

appointment as the director of the Hamburg observatory. After the war Heckmann

engaged in the usual gymnastics to explain away his behavior. He had rejected National

Socialism, had only joined party organizations to save science, and had always been a

firm supporter of the Theory of Relativity: his defense of classical models was simply a

ruse to get around the censors and to secure his appointment. To survive without

convictions one had to compromise.

One of the biggest challenges facing these advocates of ESO was financial. The

capital costs of the laboratory were estimated to be some $5 million. As only five

countries with strong traditions in astronomy were seriously interested (France and West

Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Sweden — the UK was peripherally engaged) it

was imperative for the latter three that the two larger, richer countries stayed on board

and contributed most of the money. With Germany’s commitment never in doubt, all

attention was turned on France. And here the promoters of ESO were faced with serious

obstacles arising from the growing anti-colonial struggle in Algeria,. This was draining

the Treasury. It also destabilized the government between 1954 and 1958, with senior

ministers lasting as little as a few weeks before being replaced: ESO was not one of their

priorities.

Oort turned to the Ford Foundation for support.40 A first approach early in 1954

was emphatically rejected on the grounds that Ford did not have a program in the natural

38 Osterbrock, Baade, 217. The Stiftung Fritz Zwicky in Switzerland informed me that they have no record of this.39 For this paragraph: Klaus Hentschel and Monika Rennneberg, “‘Ausschaltung’ oder ‘Verteidigung’ der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie — Interpretationen einer Kosmologen-Karrieren im Nationalsozialismus,” in Christoph Meinel and Peter Voswinckel, Medizin, Naturwissenschaft, Technik und Nationalsozialismus. Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten (Stuttgart: Springer, 1994), 201-207, translated by Theresa Gutberlet.40 For an account of the role of the Foundation that includes a useful set of documents but that sidesteps all political concerns see Edmondson, “The Ford Foundation”.

14

sciences. Oort tried again in October 1956. This time he pitched the request in terms of a

European cooperative project, and directed his request to Shepard Stone, the director of

Ford’s International Affairs division. The timing was not coincidental: Stone had just

agreed to fund major fellowship programmes at CERN and at the Niels Bohr Institute to

foster international scientific exchange.41 He was rebuffed again: the Foundation did not

normally fund scientific equipment grants. A change in Ford’s policy in 1958 led the

astronomers to believe that their time had come. Carl Borgmann, the President of the

University of Vermont, and a chemical engineer who had a personal interest in

astronomy, was recruited to run a new Ford Foundation Program in Science and

Engineering, with a $100 million of funding (doubtless the Trustees’ response to the

Sputnik ‘shock’ of October 1957). A lunch was arranged in New York early in October

1958. Oort and Lindblad, the director of the Stockholm observatory made their case to

Stone, Borgmann and the president of the Ford Foundation, Henry Heald. Again the

results were not encouraging: Heald felt that the new Science and Engineering program

should first support American projects before making grants in Europe.42 Here, as in the

case of CERN, European governments were expected to take the lead in financing their

own research infrastructure

At this point the European astronomers were desperate. They were passing their

time engaged in site surveys in South Africa to establish the location with the best

viewing possibilities (it was eventually located in Chile). The British who had shown

some interest in the project had now definitely withdrawn: the Astronomer Royal decided

that it was preferable to build a Commonwealth Observatory in Australia. And now the

French astronomers informed their colleagues in the project that, for lack of funds, they

could not hope to participate in ESO in the immediate future either: indeed they decided,

until further notice, not to attend any meetings of the planning group as of November

1958. They suggested instead that the other four interested countries get started without

France’s participation, adding that once the project had taken off it would be easier for

them to join it.43

41 Krige, American Hegemony, chapter 6.42 Letter Oort to Borgmann, 15 October 1958, Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center.43 Letter Fehrenbach to Oort, 22 October 1958,Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center,.

15

Faced with this bleak situation, Germany stepped in and made a definitive

commitment to ESO. Meeting early in December 1958 leading astronomers and high

officials in funding agencies confirmed that the joint European project was their priority;

they had no intention of building a strong national programme in astronomy. Germany

would increase its share of the budget from 33 1/3 % to 49% of the costs of the

observatory if the three smaller countries were prepared to pay 17% each to make up the

balance.44 In other words, to avoid further delay due to France’s difficulties, each country

was now being asked to contribute about 50% more in absolute terms than previously

anticipated. In parallel, renewed efforts were made to persuade Shepard Stone to get the

Ford Foundation to participate in the start-up costs, so drawing the French in with them.

The lobbying paid off. In October 1959 Borgmann wrote to Oort that the Trustees

of the Foundation had agreed to make a conditional award of $1million towards the main

telescope for a European optical observatory in the southern hemisphere.45 The most

important condition specified was that governments in at least four of the five original

countries seriously interested in the project agreed to participate in the venture. The hope

of course was that, with costs reduced, France would now be encouraged to participate.

Over the next twelve months Shepard Stone did all he could to bring the French

government on board. He discussed the ESO project with Jean Monnet, who was

“perhaps the closest adviser to Pinay, the French Finance Minister, and apparently after

de Gaulle, the most important man in the French Government”.46 He was also in constant

contact with Gaston Berger, the Minister of National Education. Both Monnet and Berger

had previously benefited from grants by the Ford Foundation for different projects in

France. Both were also on first-name terms with ‘Shep’. By exploiting his network of

powerful and prestigious personalities Stone was able to cajole the French into taking a

decision to join ESO. Indeed it was the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maurice

44 The Ford Foundation was told of this in Letter Hess to Stone, December 10, 1958, Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center. Although he used these archives extensively Edmondson does not mention this letter, or the German offer.45 Letter Borgmann to Oort, 2 October 1959, Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center.46 Memo Stone to the files, “European Southern Observatory”, 25 October 1959, Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center.

16

Couve de Murville that took the initiative and called the meeting of the five potential

member states to sign a convention establishing ESO in Paris in October 1960.47

Stone’s commitment to this project was coherent with his strong engagement in

European affairs and European integration.48 At the end of 1957 he told the Foundation’s

Trustees that “A strong European Community, closely associated with the United States,

is of great importance to American national interest, and support for educational and

research activities related to the European community is a principal element of the

Foundation’s European program.”49 He regarded CERN, which had “proved to be a most

successful institutional symbol of European unity and of Atlantic partnership,” to be an

ideal candidate for a Foundation grant in 1959.50 It was within a context of strengthening

western science, fostering European scientific cooperation, and building an Atlantic

community — along with the opportunity provided by the Foundation’s new Science and

Engineering Programme — that Stone did so much to advance the cause of ESO in

French circles.

But there was more to it than that. Everybody was very much aware that it was

not a good idea to let Heckmann and Germany have a dominant role in ESO. As

Borgmann explained to the Trustees, there was “some unhappiness”, particularly in the

Netherlands, “over joining an organization of States in which West Germany has the

predominant position – a natural hangover from World War II.”51 Adriaan Blaauw,

Dutch, a ‘founding father’ of ESO and its second Director General felt it necessary to

remark that only (sic) “a decade” after the devastation of World War II, when the

negotiations over ESO were under way, “traditional nationalism and mutual misgiving

47 Letter Oort to Borgmann, 10 October 1960. The Germans were not quite ready for this, and the meeting was eventually held in Paris on 14 and 15 December 1960: Letter Oort to Borgmann, 24 November 1960,Ford Foundation Records, Folder ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center.. 48 On Stone’s European engagement see Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe. Shepard Stone Between Philanthropy, Academy and Diplomacy (Princeton University Press, 2001).49 “Docket Excerpt, Meeting of the Executive Committee, 12/12/57,” Ford Foundation Records, Grant 58-35, Rockefeller Archive Center. Stone admired Monnet, as he did Bohr, and described him as “in some ways the greatest philosopher I have ever met” (Ford Foundation Records, Interview by Morrissey and Grele with Stone, 25). Monnet, like Bohr, counted “Shep” Stone as one of his “friends.” See Jean Monnet, Mémoires (Paris, 1976), 546.50 “Docket Excerpt, Meeting of the Executive Committee, 12/10/59, International Affairs, European Nuclear Research Center (Geneva).”51 Memo Borgmann to the files, “European Southern Observatory: Visit with Dr. Gosta W. Funke March 12, 1959”, 13 March 1959, Ford Foundation Records ESO, Rockefeller Archive Center.

17

had to be replaced by joint effort.”52 Heckmann was very conscious of the emotional

work that his European partners had to do to accept Germany, and himself, into the

scheme. He commended Paul Bourgeois, the Director of the Observatoire Royal in Uccle

near Brussels for his willingness to cooperate despite the damage done by the Wehrmacht

to his instruments during the war (see above). He was full of praise for André Danjon, the

Director of the Observatoire de Paris, whom, he noted, had lost an eye in WWI and had

to escape from Strasbourg in WWII. Heckmann had noticed Danjon’s difficulty when in

the presence of German astronomers at the first postwar meeting of their International

Union in 1948, but commended him for gradually changing his attitude during the 1950s,

even managing to speak German to younger astronomers.53

Everyone involved in the establishment of ESO was sensitive to the political

problems created by having Germany play a preponderant role in the organization, and

this more than a decade after the war. Most alluded to it in their writings, if only in

passing.54 To curb its destructive potential enormous weight was placed on getting France

to join the project, to the extent of the Ford Foundation breaking all precedent and

offering $1 million towards the main telescope. This gift is usually reduced to a generous

financial contribution. In fact it was also a very political gesture, intended to help rebuild

European science while containing Germany. The birth of ESO is marked by profound

political unease among the scientific actors, an unease overcome by the determination to

do world quality science, by the recognition that only by joining together could one hope

to participate in an international conversation, and by Stone’s and the Ford Foundation’s

determination to bring France into ESO as a counterweight to Germany.

Conclusion

This paper has several linked objectives. Firstly, it seeks to remind scholars that the

process of European integration cannot be taken for granted. In line with Kiran Klaus

Patel’s call for us to ‘provincialize Europe’, it emphasizes that building Europe involves

52 Blaauw, ESO, 1.53 Otto Heckmann, Sterne, Kosmos, Weltmodelle. Erlebte Weltmodelle (Munich: Piper and Co., 1976), chapter 12.54 There is no trace to be found in Oort’s archives in Leiden.

18

social work whose outcome cannot be guaranteed in advance and that is itself the product

of many improbable twists and turns. 55 It also emphasizes — and this is the second point

— that just because the process was so difficult, many actor’s accounts, and a good deal

of historiography tends to be silent or to gloss over the sources of resistance to the

integrative process. Anything else would dull its glitter and undermine its socially

crafted sense of ‘inevitability’. Thirdly, the paper throws one dimension of that resistance

into relief, — the anger among allied scientists at the behavior of their German

colleagues during and immediately after the war —, and suggests that these strong

feelings were managed at the institutional level in CERN and in ESO.

There are many reasons why scientists may have repressed their resentment at the

behavior of their senior German colleagues under the Third Reich. Some are intrinsic to

the scientific community itself: its ethos of internationalism, its realization that

collaboration was imperative to close the rapidly widening gap with the US. Others are to

be found in contextual political circumstances, notably the urge to European integration,

including West Germany. The haunting shame of collaboration may also have played a

role: as Judt puts it, “The wartime occupation—in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway,

and, after 1943, Italy—was a humiliating experience and postwar governments preferred

to forget collaboration and other indignities and emphasize instead the heroic resistance

movements, national uprisings, liberations, and martyrs.” With the onset of the cold war

and the emergence of a new enemy, he goes on, “it became inopportune to emphasize the

past crimes of present allies.56 But this does not man that they were completely ignored.

Senior posts in CERN were denied to German scientists. Every effort was made to

provide a counterweight to German domination of ESO.

“Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the

construction of Europe’s future,” Judt writes.57 Emotions were embedded in that

process. The postwar reconstruction of Europe combined fear — fear of German

resurgence, fear of communist domination —, with expectancy — the conviction that a

supranational Europe was the way to submerge the unbridled passions of nationalism.

55 Kiran Klaus Patel, “Provincializing Europe: Co-operation and Integration in Europe in a Historical Perspective,” Contemporary European History, 22:4 (2013), 649-673.56 Judt, “The ‘Problem of Evil’”. 57 Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 10.

19

And although it also called for denial and repression, that submergence was never as total

as Judt implies. The cloak of official silence covered the implementation of

organizational measures that integrated Germans scientists back into the European

community on condition that their power and influence were tightly constrained. The

feelings repressed in painful interpersonal relationships were expressed in quotidian

institutional arrangements.

20