Ousters and Reorganizations

This law, promulgated on 7 April 1933, served to enforce the political conformity of civil servants and formed an early peak in the persecution and disenfranchisement of citizens of Jewish descent in Germany. As there were no strict regulatory statutes attached, the law was also used as a basis for the dismissal of privately employed as well as self-employed professionals such as physicians and lawyers. The so-called Paragraph on Aryans allowed -until the Nurnberg Laws of 1935 - the exemption of civil servants who entered service before WWI, WWI frontline soldiers and civil servants whose fathers or sons fell in WWI. 

Since the KWG was a private organization, the law applied orrly to those of its institutes that received more than half of their funding from the state. Such institutes were then treated like universities or state research institutions, and this was in fact the case for Haber s institute. On 27 April 1933, the General Administration of the KWG sent out directives to the institutes requesting that their members fill out questionnaires about their descent and political allegiance. Dismissals were issued based on the evaluation of these questionnaires. In the KWG, there were 126 dismissals, or about 11% the KWl for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry was affected more adversely than any other KWG institute. 

Physik movement, this entirely Jewish affair simply needs to be gotten rid of. His colleague, Johannes Stark, wanted a new spirit to be imposed upon the Society at the very least The Prussian Minister of Culture expressed a similar sentiment, which had more serious bureaucratic implications. It was hardly a coincidence, given the grounds for their criticism of the KWG, that they came to focus much of their attention on Haber s institute. As a result, in the following years, the Institute would become a textbook example of National Socialist science policy.  

detailed accounts in SzoUosi-Janze, Haber and Schmaltz, Kampfstoff-Porschung. 

Fritz Haber, however, was not quite so ready simply to obey the expectations, or rather orders, of the General Administration and the Ministiy. He wanted to remain in command for the time being because, as he expressed to Schmidt-Ott on 21 April 1933, 

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