OTTO WARBURG WAS no longer legally defined as a half-Jew after the war, but he could not be made whole again. Warburg had always been divided in a psychological sense, a nineteenth-century aristocrat at the frontiers of twentieth-century science, a man of extraordinary self-belief who, at any given moment, might unravel in a fit of doubt-fueled fury. Warburg had now been divided by history as well. The Germany of his youth, the Germany of scientific dominance and Jewish Nobel laureates that had existed before 1933, was gone forever.
Warburg was even split along geographical lines after the Allies carved Germany into four occupation zones. His summer house on the island of Rügen was in the Russian sector. So, too, was Liebenberg, the estate to which his lab had moved near the end of the war. His primary home and former institute, meanwhile, were in Dahlem, and so within the American sector.
Because Warburg was at Rügen at the war’s end, he spent the summer of 1945 under Soviet rule. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the plundering of German science, including German scientists, was among Stalin’s highest priorities. That made Warburg a valuable asset, and various Soviet military and intelligence officials worked to recruit him. While some high-ranking officers tried to entice Warburg with flattery and kindness, others, according to an American military report, “were of the less agreeable character.”1
In June 1945, dozens of Soviet soldiers arrived at Warburg’s lab at Liebenberg. They worked quickly, packing up the equipment and tossing Warburg’s books down the stairs. The disassembled centrifuges were put into straw-lined crates. Warburg’s treasured manometers went into boxes. All of it, along with the mattresses and virtually everything else that could be removed, was carried into waiting vans.
If the Russians intended to hold Warburg captive, they did not do a particularly good job of it. In September 1945, Warburg made his way back to Dahlem. Eric Warburg, who was working with an American intelligence unit to prevent the Soviet Union from recruiting or kidnapping German scientists, set out in search of his cousin. He learned that Warburg was hiding from the Soviets in the home of another professor in Dahlem. When Eric arrived at the house, he waited for his cousin by the front door. When he looked up, he saw Warburg approaching, ghost-like, through a long dark hallway. Warburg had virtually disappeared to the outside world at the start of the war in 1939. As he made his way forward through that dark hallway, he was also remerging into a new life.
“He was about the most unsentimental person I have ever known,” Eric Warburg wrote, “but there was a fraction of a tear in one of his blue eyes as he said to me in his Berlin accent, ‘I always knew the war would really be over only when you stood before me.’ ”
Warburg’s sentimental moment was short-lived. He “immediately got down to brass tacks,” telling his cousin he needed 40 liters of gasoline as soon as possible so that he could collect the books and scientific instruments he had left behind in the Russian sector. Eric Warburg responded that the trip was “absolutely forbidden” according to the new fuel regulations the Allies had introduced. “I couldn’t care less,” Warburg said. As usual, Warburg got what he wanted. His cousin authorized the gasoline, and Warburg went to recover his goods.2
That the Soviet military allowed Warburg to pass in and out of the territory it controlled might have been part of the effort to recruit Warburg, which continued after his return to Dahlem. In Warburg’s telling of the story, Georgy Zhukov, the famed Red Army general who had taken Berlin, personally intervened to have Warburg’s horses returned from Rügen, where they had been confiscated. Warburg also claimed, later on, that the Soviets had offered him an institute in Moscow with 100 employees. Warburg declined and thereafter liked to boast that neither Hitler nor Stalin had managed to move him. Though Warburg was not the most reliable narrator of his own life at any point, especially in his last decades, the stories about the Soviet Union’s efforts to recruit him appear to be accurate. While there is no direct evidence that supports Warburg’s claim that Zhukov took him to dinner and asked him how he could help, in January 1946 the Soviets did give Warburg a BMW automobile as a gift.3
Warburg refused all invitations to visit Moscow—he feared, with good reason, that he might never return—but the Red Army did get something in exchange for its generosity. In 1946, Warburg published an article in Russian in the Soviet journal Biokhimiya. According to Roger Adams, a chemist serving as an adviser to the American military who prepared a five-page report on Warburg in early 1946, Warburg also kept the Russians at bay by offering them new cancer drugs, along with specific instructions on how to use them. Adams’s report does not specify the nature of the drugs. Warburg probably gave the Red Army B vitamins, which he believed could help maintain respiration and prevent cells from shifting to fermentation, thus preventing cancer.4
The Americans, who had turned Warburg’s institute into the offices of their local military government, were interested in Warburg as well, or at least they were interested in keeping Warburg out of Stalin’s reach. Adams hoped to fend off Soviet advances by giving Warburg a position as a scientific consultant to the US Military Government’s Field Information Agency, Technical (FIAT), which had an office in Berlin. The opportunity required Warburg to sit for an interview with a public safety official, who also produced a report on Warburg:
Subject further stated that the German people are too stupid politically to achieve self-government on a democratic basis. It will take a very long time to change this situation, at least twenty years, and in the meantime Germany must have a government imposed by the Allies. Subject stated that he had never voted or belonged to any party because he considered all such activity a stupidity. Subject further stated that militarism is most natural for the Germans and admitted that he considered his own military service as a very pleasant time and a life of the soldier worthy and honourable, “provided the army in question was used in the interest of humanity and civilization.”5
The public safety official concluded that Warburg was “completely unsuited for the position” on the grounds that he lacked “known liberal, statesmanlike qualities and views etc.”
Adams ended his own report on Warburg on a more sympathetic note: “Throughout last fall, despite his considerable fear and dread, Dr. Warburg retained always his dignity and wry sense of humor.” Adams added that Warburg was “a very tired man primarily concerned with seeking some possibility of peace” and also that he was “in grave danger of being kidnapped” by the Soviets.
In a letter to Lotte sent in January 1946, Warburg said that he had received offers from abroad, but was still hesitant to leave Germany: “[A]s you know from 1933, I am no fan of immigration.” He also said that he was considering the life of a wandering scientist who moved from one lab to the next. Because he would contribute wherever he went, Warburg explained, he would never wear out his welcome in any one location.6
While making this rather transparent attempt to save face, Warburg was, in fact, anxious to find a new home and a new place to work. It is not clear if he understood how the global scientific community felt about him. According to one account, Britain’s scientists were “so fed up with Warburg’s conduct during the war and especially with the indecent aspersions he has cast on English scientists in his field that” they “would not knowingly permit him to land on English soil.”
Warburg reached out to the Rockefeller Foundation, but the officials who had once championed his science now wanted nothing to do with him. In retrospect, the foundation’s decision to support German science in the 1930s appeared foolish, if not traitorous. Warburg’s institute now stood as a testament to the foundation’s shortsightedness. After surveying his colleagues, one Rockefeller official summarized the general sentiment within the organization about Warburg after the war: “All give ‘several reasons’—not identical, but similar—for being cool to the suggestion of bringing Warburg to the U. S.” The list of reasons included “prima donna-ness,” “Europe needs its scientist,” “career about finished,” and “collaboration.”
The nature of the suspected “collaboration” was not specified. It was likely a reference to Warburg’s Aryanization, but there was also a rumor circulating that Warburg had volunteered his services to the German military at the start of World War II. If Warburg had done so, it might reasonably be understood as an attempt to secure his own safety in a dangerous situation. The worst of the Nazi atrocities had not yet begun, and many Mischlinge were volunteering at the time in an effort to solidify their place in German society.7
Even as his own actions during the National Socialist period were being questioned, Warburg was making accusations against others. He told a Rockefeller Foundation official that Ernst Telschow, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society official he blamed for nearly causing him to lose his institute in 1941, was “the worst Nazi.” Warburg also told the American Military Government that Wilhelm Eitel, an influential Kaiser Wilhelm Society member, had been a “staunch National Socialist” who conspired against professors who spoke out against the Nazis. (Though Warburg’s assessment of Eitel was entirely accurate, Eitel was nevertheless brought to the United States, where he continued his successful career.)
In August 1946, Warburg and three other Kaiser Wilhelm Society scientists gathered to review the case of Otmar von Verschuer, the biologist who led the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics during the war. Verschuer was under investigation by the Americans, and his guilt wasn’t difficult to discern. He had mentored Joseph Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor of Auschwitz. (During the war, Mengele had sent Verschuer the eyeballs from his corpses for further study.) Three of the four committee members, including Warburg, concluded that Verschuer was a “racial fanatic” and linked to the crimes of Auschwitz.8
That Warburg could correctly assess the guilt of others did not mean that he had suddenly gained perspective. When the biophysicist Max Delbrück visited Warburg in Berlin in 1947, he found him still indignant that the Soviets had confiscated his equipment and papers. It was a “scandal,” Warburg said. He was particularly upset that they had taken his father’s scientific papers. “[T]his was at the time when Berlin was in ruin and still practically smoking,” Delbruck later said. “But that the Russians had taken his father’s scientific papers, that was really a scandal!”9
Warburg did show glimpses of true humanity after the war. He made efforts to help find a new position for Carl Neuberg, the Jewish pioneer of fermentation research who had been the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry before the Nazis took over. In a letter, Warburg told Neuberg that he had called on German officials to return Neuberg’s institute to him. Doing so, Warburg wrote, would be the first time Germany addressed “the injustice done to scientists” with “deeds rather than phrases.” Warburg added that he “could think of nothing which could do more to restore the prestige of Dahlem” than Neuberg’s return.
But Warburg’s periodic acts of kindness were overshadowed by his obtuseness. At the same time he was singling out the Nazi criminals he hoped to see punished, he agreed to provide an affidavit on behalf of Viktor Brack, who was then being tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. The affidavit, requested by Brack’s attorney and presented during his trial, recounted how Brack had intervened to save Warburg’s life. Warburg’s brief statement ends on a nauseating note: “Considering that Brack did this at a time when racial hatred and war psychosis had reached their climax in Germany, one has to admire the courage with which Brack advanced the cause of tolerance and the peaceful work of science against the basic principles of National Socialism.”
According to the German historian and Otto Warburg authority Petra Gentz-Werner, it is highly unlikely that Warburg knew anything about Brack’s horrific crimes when he put his name to the affidavit. But at the very least, he knew that Brack was a high-ranking Nazi official. The affidavit was perfectly in keeping with Warburg’s narcissism. In Warburg’s moral framework, good and evil could only be measured based on how one had treated him.10
WARBURG CLAIMED THAT he was prepared to become a wandering scientist, yet for a time he had nowhere to wander. That changed in November 1947, when Robert Emerson, a prominent American botanist, invited Warburg to spend six months in Urbana at the University of Illinois. Though Emerson had studied photosynthesis under Warburg in the 1920s, he had later committed a cardinal sin: he had concluded that Warburg was wrong about the number of photons needed to power a photosynthetic reaction.
Afterward, Warburg dismissed Emerson’s work at every opportunity. But Emerson, a descendant of the transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, was Warburg’s opposite, an unusually kind man who believed that the greatest contribution science could make was to inspire scientists themselves to lead ethical lives. After the war, he put his career on hold to help resettle the Japanese Americans who had been interned in camps by the US government. He even brought a Japanese American scientist who had been imprisoned to Illinois to work as his assistant. (This man, Shimpe Nishimura, would also conclude that Warburg was dead wrong about photosynthesis.)11
Emerson appears to have genuinely believed that once Warburg arrived in Urbana, the two of them could work together to resolve the photosynthesis controversy once and for all. He did not know Warburg nearly as well as he thought. Emerson would regret the decision even before Warburg arrived, in the summer of 1948. Warburg insisted that he needed to bring both a scientific assistant as well as Heiss—who had “a clean political record as determined by American authorities,” Warburg noted. The request itself was reasonable enough, but in the months following his acceptance of Emerson’s offer, Warburg repeatedly changed his mind about the details of his travel arrangements. Emerson, who had to negotiate Warburg’s every request with university officials, did his best to accommodate the Nobel laureate. But by May of 1948, with Warburg’s arrival still a month away, Emerson was reaching the limits of his extraordinary generosity:
[J]ust trying to arrange for the visit has kept me busy for a large part of the winter. . . . Last report I had was that he [Warburg] and Heiss might leave by June 1st. I hear they have 400 kilos of baggage and a poodle, on all of which they expect the Univ. of Illinois to pay transportation. It will turn out that the reason Warburg wants to leave Germany is because the American administration has been unable to get any more of that good German dog-food, made of pure beef-steak, the only thing the poodle will eat. There will be Hell to pay when he finds that in America they feed horse-meat to dogs! And imagine the problem of finding housing for Warburg, Heiss, and a poodle!12
Warburg and Heiss—it was only to be the two of them in the end—arrived by plane on June 26, 1948, with six enormous crates. The flight was 12 hours late, and Warburg was “visibly annoyed,” according to a witness at the scene, that no airport officials were available to help with his cargo. Then it began to rain. “Warburg arrived in the midst of the heaviest thunderstorms I have experienced in my fifteen years in Urbana,” the biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch wrote. “[T]his proved to be an augury.”
For the American scientific community, Warburg’s arrival was a major happening. In September, the New York Times ran an article about Warburg’s efforts to cure cancer by blocking the enzymes of fermentation. In November, a photo of Warburg seated at his laboratory bench at the University of Illinois appeared on the cover of the journal Science. To the outsider, it looked like a happy story: the famed German biochemist coming to America after the war to help resolve a great scientific debate. But despite the positive press, the visit itself was going even worse than Robert Emerson could have imagined.
Unaccustomed to working in a lab that he could not control like a Prussian military officer, Warburg complained about everything. And though fairly fluent in English, he refused to speak anything but German, leaving Emerson scurrying to find a German-speaking lab assistant. Warburg had agreed to give lectures while in Urbana but was now refusing to do so, likely because he was embarrassed about his English. He said he would only comment on the lectures of other professors.13
Warburg was given quarters in a faculty center, yet Heiss was assigned to a room in a University of Illinois fraternity house. Warburg visited the house one day—a moment rife with comic potential—and was predictably repulsed. He insisted that Heiss be moved. Heiss was set up with a cot in Warburg’s room, but as soon as Emerson put out one fire, another would start. “I can never foresee what his next impossible demand is going to be,” an exasperated Emerson wrote to a colleague. In another letter, he said that he had fallen behind in his work “because of the pressure we are under to provide for Warburg, who has a way of setting the entire laboratory on its head almost every day.”14
Things were already going poorly, and then they got worse. As winter arrived, the heat was turned on in the laboratories. Warburg said it was far too hot and demanded that it be turned off. The other researchers were forced to carry out their experiments in their overcoats. Warburg, meanwhile, continued to come up with new explanations for why Emerson and his colleagues were arriving at results that contradicted his own measurements. One day their algae had not been grown in the proper light; the next day they had chosen the wrong chemical for their buffer solution. With each new complaint, Emerson inched closer to his limit. Though he never took the local public transportation, after one of Warburg’s outbursts Emerson reportedly got on a bus and rode it around campus in an effort to calm himself.
James Franck, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who had trained under Emil Warburg, was among the researchers involved in the photosynthesis debate. “Everyone knows the man is a genius, but he also has the misfortune of being crazy,” Franck wrote to a colleague, adding that “the craziness is only clear to those who really have to deal with him.”
Given that he knew Warburg’s father, Franck likely grasped the deeper roots of his refusal to budge on the photon debate. Warburg had always believed that biology could achieve the mathematical elegance of physics. “In a perfect world,” Warburg once said, “photosynthesis must be perfect.” Based on the understanding of photosynthesis at the time, a total of 4 electrons needed to be passed to 2 atoms of oxygen to complete the cycle of reactions. And because Einstein, with the help of Warburg’s father, had discovered that each photon set only 1 electron free, any number of photons higher than 4 was more than refutation of Warburg’s measurements. It was a violation of the known laws of the universe.
Warburg once even turned to Einstein himself for guidance, asking him why he assumed that the energy of only 1 photon was needed to set an electron free. Einstein, it seems, did not take the question very seriously. “Well, that’s a lot,” Einstein said.15
In spite of everything he had endured, Emerson made a concerted effort to help Warburg find a permanent position at another American institution. The search did not go smoothly. When the biochemist Martin Kaman came to meet Warburg, Emerson introduced him as a “physicist.” Kaman was mystified. Emerson later explained that he had no choice but to lie because Warburg didn’t respect other biochemists and would have quickly dismissed him if he had known the truth.
Warburg was entirely incapable of recognizing the efforts Emerson was making on his behalf. Instead, he grew paranoid that Emerson was going to “denounce” him as a “dangerous Communist” to the US State Department and thereby prevent him from having his visa renewed. In a letter to Walter Kempner, the researcher he had fired after the Nazis came to power, Warburg wrote that Emerson was known to be “a psychopath.” Warburg asked Kempner, who was then at Duke, if he might be willing to warn the State Department about Emerson so that the denouncement wouldn’t be believed.
That Warburg was genuinely fearful of a denouncement was perhaps a sign of the psychological scar left by his life under the Nazis. It had only been five years since Warburg had been denounced to Nazi authorities by one of his employees. In the same letter to Kempner in which he shared his paranoia, Warburg himself drew a connection to his past. “As you can see,” Warburg wrote, “I’m still fighting for a place to belong, even if only a little bit.”
Otto Warburg at the University of Illinois, 1949. Dean Burk points at the manometer Warburg holds. Robert Emerson looks over Warburg’s left shoulder.
If Emerson could not find a new lab for Warburg, he remained hopeful that he and Warburg could at least resolve their photosynthesis debate. After six months, Warburg’s visit ended with a bizarre competition that today would seem like a reality TV event: Warburg and Emerson each carried out their own photosynthesis experiments, with the results presented to two impartial judges. Though most other scientists who had bothered to run their own experiments believed that Emerson was correct about the number of photons, one of the two judges, Dean Burk, of the National Cancer Institute, was Warburg’s former student and a tireless champion of his science.
The competition ended in a stalemate. Warburg departed Urbana in January 1949, claiming he had completely triumphed in a drama “watched by all America.” He did not bother to say goodbye to a thoroughly dismayed Emerson.16
WARBURG’S VISA WAS renewed at the end of his stay in Urbana, and he moved on to the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, to work with Burk. With a loyal supporter by his side, Warburg was far more content. It’s easy to see why Warburg took to Burk. Warburg had many admirers throughout his life, but no one had shown him as much love or devotion or had embraced Heiss so openly. Burk, an amateur artist, painted portraits of both Warburg and Heiss, and he maintained an independent correspondence with Heiss for decades.
Perhaps best of all, from Warburg’s perspective, Burk went to war against Warburg’s opponents with as much ferocity as Warburg himself. If anything, Burk was the more dedicated warrior. In his last decades, Warburg would sometimes consider backing away from scientific battles. He once told Burk there was no use in publishing yet another polemic that would “lead nowhere.” Whenever Warburg expressed these uncharacteristic sentiments, Burk would urge his mentor to fight on for the “cause,” often inciting Warburg with updates on how his enemies were maneuvering against him.
After six months with Burk, Warburg moved again, this time to the Marine Biological Station in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He brought along the German-speaking assistant Emerson had found for him and put his services to good use. Still uncomfortable lecturing in English, Warburg had his assistant deliver his photosynthesis lecture. Warburg sat in the audience and listened. When the assistant said that Warburg “believed” that only 4 photons were needed, Warburg leapt up from his seat: “Vot do you mean, ‘I believe’? I know.”17
Warburg spoke English on at least one other occasion at Woods Hole. During a discussion with a group of American scientists, Warburg and fellow German James Franck got into a sparring match over photosynthesis. “Warburg was shouting at Franck, ‘You are wronk,’ ” a witness recalled, “and Franck was responding ‘You are wronk.’ ” Another scientist had to step in to settle them down. But there were at least some less acrimonious moments during Warburg’s stay at Woods Hole. One day, Warburg attended a picnic on a nearby island with a group of physiology students. In a photo taken at the picnic, Warburg sits at the beach in long sleeves and pants, surrounded by shirtless young scientists in their swimming trunks. He appears remarkably relaxed. One member of the group recalled Warburg sitting by a tree eating lobster as Heiss tended to his every need.18
Warburg did not want to spend the rest of his life moving from lab to lab, but he was still having no luck finding a more permanent position in America. It didn’t help that he was 65 and considered by some to be too old to hire. But given Warburg’s fame and accomplishments, his age could have been overlooked. The more serious obstacle to finding a position in America might have finally dawned on Warburg during a dinner party held at Woods Hole, shortly before he returned to Germany. An unidentified woman at the party, a wife of a Caltech professor, turned to Warburg and asked him why he had remained in Germany “when the Nazis were doing such bad things.”
“I wanted to protect my co-workers,” Warburg lied. “What could I have done?”
The woman had an idea: “You could have committed suicide!”19
Warburg and the other dinner guests sat stunned. Someone had finally informed the Emperor of Dahlem of his missing clothes.