FOR OLDER RESEARCHERS who still remembered Warburg as one of the great minds of his generation, his death landed as a blow. “Scientists all over the world felt that a king—their king—had died,” wrote Ernst Jokl, the German American pioneer of sports medicine.1
In the immediate aftermath of Warburg’s death, work at the institute came to a standstill. The 71-year-old Heiss took it upon himself to make sure that nothing would change until an appropriate new director could be identified.
“It was horrible,” Peter Ostendorf, Warburg’s glassblower, recalled. Ostendorf considered moving to the nearby Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, but Heiss refused to let him go. For the next year, Ostendorf spent most of his time at the institute playing darts.
On one occasion, two architects arrived to discuss the future of the building. When one of them suggested it might be best to tear it down, Heiss grew enraged and chased them out. Heiss was known among the employees of the institute for his short temper, but Ostendorf had never seen him so animated.2
Eighteen months after Warburg’s death, the Max Planck Society chose Oxford physiologist Henry Harris as Warburg’s replacement and invited him to Berlin to make the offer in person. Heiss and Norman, the Great Dane, were waiting to greet Harris at the institute when he arrived. Little had changed since Warburg’s death. Those technicians who were still working at all were working on experiments Warburg had outlined. “Berlin was then a city where it was easy to talk to ghosts: they called out to you as you walked the streets,” Harris wrote. “But I don’t think I ever had a more intimate conversation with a ghost than when I visited Warburg’s Institute.”3
Harris turned down the job offer. The Institute for Cell Physiology was finally closed in March 1972. It has been renamed the Otto Warburg House, and it is now home to the Archives of the Max Planck Society. In that capacity, it serves a function Warburg would have applauded: providing a new generation of scholars with evidence of the crimes committed by German scientists, including some of Warburg’s antagonists, under the Nazis.
Although the archives hold many of Warburg’s letters and papers, his scientific notebooks went missing. At one time, it was thought that Heiss had burned them, but the materials can now be found in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, which is located in the former East Berlin.
What happened to the notebooks in the interim was revealed when documents from the Stasi, the East German secret police, surfaced in 2008. Heiss, it turned out, had been smuggling Warburg’s belongings across the Berlin Wall. It was an outrageous thumbing of the nose at the entire scientific establishment of the West, and, as such, a fitting tribute to Warburg’s memory.
Jacob Heiss died in October 1984. He was buried where he belonged, next to Otto Warburg.