Debye Was Not An Anti-Semite Or A Nazi

This is rather interesting, mainly because I missed the whole controversy in the first place. A news report in Science's daily news update based on a thorough investigation historian Martijn Eickhoff of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation appears to have exonerated Peter Debye of being a Nazi and an anti-Semite. The allegations were made by physicist and journalist Sybe Rispens in a book and in a magazine article titled "Nobel Laureate With Dirty Hands".

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."

The full report in English can be found here.

Zz.