Carl Ramsauer: Refuting Allegations that Modern Theoretical Physics is a Product of the Jewish Spirit [January 20, 1942]

Abstract

Germany’s prospects are good, considering its people’s talent for theoretical physics, and it should therefore do its best within its ability to promote this potential. Instead of this, Germany has allowed a numerically small group of extreme-minded physicists, astronomers, and philosophers to harshly attack German theoretical physics and its most notable representatives, as the publications listed in Attachment II show.[²] No objection is made to impartial criticism nor to the fight directed against Einstein’s presumptuous Jewish speculations. [³] But beyond this, as a cursory perusal of the list shows, Germany’s entire modern theoretical physics is portrayed as contaminated by the Jewish spirit; and in this connection deserving German theorists like Sommerfeld, Planck, and Heisenberg are severely attacked. Thus in article No. 3 Sommerfeld and Planck are characterized as mind-mates [Gesinnungsgenossen] of the Jews, while a bit further on following lengthy remarks about Heisenberg that can be proven contradictory to the truth there appears verbatim: “Heisenberg is only one example among several others. All of them are puppets of Jewry in German intellectual life and must disappear just as the Jews themselves.”[⁴]