How German Anti-Semitism Spurred US Science

Before and during World War II, Germany rid itself of many of its top scientists. But Germany’s loss was the US’s gain.

NYU Stern’s Petra Moser, University of Chicago’s Alessandra Voena, and Fabian Waldinger of the University of Warwick find that US patents in the research areas of émigré chemists rose 31 percent between 1933 and 1970.

“While many of the most prestigious and famous scientists went to the UK, which was closer, we ended up with some very remarkable scientists,” Voena says.

Scientists who left Germany were responsible for many groundbreaking achievements. Moser, Voena, and Waldinger looked specifically at chemistry, a field in which innovations are routinely patented. They find that many of the chemists who moved to the US in this period entered new fields of investigation, boosting the output of American chemists working in those fields.

Émigré scientists attracted young scientists to their new fields, often areas in which American scientists had not previously done much work. And when the émigré scientists themselves began filing patents, so did their new co-inventors, many of whom had never before registered a patent. The young scientists trained another generation of scientists, and the level of productivity in these areas remained high for several decades.

Scientists forced out by the Nazi regime included the physicists who developed the atomic bomb. Among them was Louis (Léo) Szilárd, who was born in Hungary and left Germany in 1933, and worked with Fermi to conduct the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Niels Bohr, whose mother was a Jew, left Denmark in 1943 as the Germans pursued him, and arrived in the US to work on the Manhattan Project with his son. Likewise, Edward Teller, who was also forced out of the University of Göttingen in 1933, is considered the father of the hydrogen bomb.