[pyuser583]

That was not my takeaway from the Oppenheimer movie.

Or from … history.

The Germans chose to extremely underinvest in their nuclear program to maintain financial and political support for their rocket program.

The rocket program was so fundamentally different from the Manhattan Project it’s hard to see the Germans doing anything like it.

[maplethorpe]

I mean, they definitely expelled Jewish scientists, people like Einstein and Bohr and other prominent physicists, who would have ultimately been very useful to them. Maybe their funding choices would have been different if they hadn't ousted so many researchers.

[pyuser583]

I read the Oppenheimer biography, so maybe that’s distorting things.

Oppenheimer was Jewish, but very Americanized.

Bohr was working on radar for the Nazis. Einstein had surprisingly little knowledge of nuclear physics, and famously rejected key parts of quantum physics.

The Germans had great nuclear scientists. They simply weren’t willing to spend the money it took to cold the bomb.

[maplethorpe]

I mentioned two as an example, but they expelled significantly more. In 1933 they brought in laws that immediately ousted many Jews from public positions, which caused a mass exodus of intellectuals from the country. James Franck was another prominent physicist who left in protest, and he went on to work directly for the Manhattan Project.

The Nazis drawing a distinction between "Jewish mathematics" and "German mathematics" was also very real.

It's hard to imagine these policies had no effect on their ability to do research, and that it was purely a matter of funding.

"Boris Stoicheff, wrote how the mathematician Edmund Landau was 'physically prevented from entering his classroom by about seventy of his students, some wearing SS uniforms.' They demanded 'German mathematics' instead of 'Jewish mathematics.' One estimate is that the 15% of scientists in Germany who had been fired accounted for about 60% of the country’s physics-based publications."

https://research.usask.ca/herzberg/resources/the-person/phys...