From: Osher Doctorow [log in to unmask], Wed. Feb. 13, 2002 11:46PM

I am interested in the question of whether Werner Heisenberg, Nazi Chief of
Science in WWII, was actually closer than Hitler to the character type(s)
which launched Nazi Germany. Hitler was born out of wedlock, he came from
poverty, he was a failure until he joined German Army military intelligence
(from which he only emerged as a Corporal), and was relatively uneducated
either by himself or via others.

Werner Heisenberg had a Doctorate, came from a fairly wealthy family, was
relatively successful for most of his life up to WWII, and was part of the
Young People's Movement which proved to be so central in developing German
patriotism and worship of their past and in-group comraderie which later
turned to extreme nationalism (although Hitler eventually outlawed movements
not controlled by the Nazi Party, which merely shifted young people into one
organization of the Hitler Youth).

In isolating causes of what I refer to as the Nazi Indiscriminate Terrorism
(the characteristic feature of Nazi Germany more than anything else), I list
those which I consider most important here: 1. extreme anger against others,
2. extreme fear, 3. the manipulation of ignorance, 4. extreme imbalance
between abstract vs concrete/real/applied orientations rather than a balance
or approximate equality between the two, 5. prolonged economic/financial
failure(s), 6. extreme intolerance against new/different ideas.

I have discussed Heisenberg's imbalance between abstract vs
concrete/real/applied orientations previously, and I will merely add that he
obtained a *C level* (the lowest level) Ph.D. because he could not
demonstrate basic experimental knowledge in his orals. In addition, both
he and his father had an orientation to the most abstract mathematics rather
than to the combined abstract-concrete or abstract/*real* mathematics and
its applications. His father's heroes included one of the most extremely
abstact mathematicians in history who almost totally despised any *real
world* applications, Leopold Kronecker, specialist in number theory, who in
fact believed that everything reduced to whole numbers or integers and
finitely many at that (finiteness happens to be the current rage of quite a
few computer specialists who are possibly also divorced from reality). For
anyone who knows mathematics history, Kroncker is the man who prevented
Georg Cantor from publishing his theory of transfinite numbers/arithmetic
until Kroncker's death - Cantor basically invented the theory of infinite
numbers and of various types of infinity (countable, uncountable, etc.).
Notice that this also pertains to item 6, extreme intolerance to
new/different ideas.

I want to jump to the item on extreme anger. The youth movement to which
Heisenberg belonged was one of the most extremely angry movements in
history, taking in the frustration of the German economic misfortunes after
Versailles and turning it into prolonged hatred. Heisenberg was not merely
a chance member that movement - he spent much of his young life in it. He
continued the mountain climbing that he learned in it throughout his life.
The above factors of course also pertain to item 5, prolonged
economic/financial failure, not so much of Heisenberg himself or his family
but of the Germany with which he identified.

For those who are interested in more, try
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p02.htm. I will only mention in
addition that Kronecker was Jewish but converted to Christianity shortly
before death (like von Neumann), and that both Cantor and Heisenberg's
father and grandfather (the whole family essentially) were Protestants -
Lutheran in the case of Heisenberg (his mother, a Catholic, converted to
Lutheran upon marriage). German Jews tended to be the most assimilated
Jews outside Italy in the early 20th Century, so Heisenberg's family had no
known special pro-Jewish leanings - the favoritism toward Kronecker was
mathematical/academic (his father was professor of middle and modern Greek
philology at U. Munich, which in those days had contact with various fields
like mathematics or science). The tendencies toward intolerance and anger
and fear and unreality rather than any religious bigotry were what would be
decisive in Nazi persecution of the Jews combined with their economic
misfortunes as a nation, although very poor people like Hitler may have done
more on *manipulation of ignorance* than the academic types. Indications
are that the groundwork for Nazi Germany was more the work of the educated
fairly or highly wealthy people and that a second current which eventually
would capture the whole nation was the poor-ignorant-and
ignorance-manipulative faction.

Osher Doctorow