Nazi Germany’s seizure of power in 1933 transformed politics from a distant abstraction into a force shaping the lives and choices of J. Robert Oppenheimer and those around him. The dismissal of Jewish academics, the flight of physicists from Germany, and the later disputes over European war made the event a continuing pressure on their professional, political, and personal worlds.

From political detachment to urgent concern

At Berkeley, Oppenheimer’s friends and colleagues were interested in social and political questions, but the account initially portrays him as detached from overt political activity. Melba Phillips recalled that the group was “not political at all in any overt way.” Oppenheimer once asked Leo Nedelsky, “what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?” After Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, that separation became harder to sustain. By April, Jewish professors in Germany were being summarily dismissed from their positions.

The change became concrete for Oppenheimer in 1934, when he received a circular soliciting money to help German physicists emigrate. He agreed to set aside three percent of his salary—about $100 a year—for two years. The episode connected political persecution to a specific act of professional solidarity: support for scholars forced from their work and country. James Franck, Oppenheimer’s former professor at Göttingen, may have benefited from the fund. Though initially allowed to retain his post, Franck went into exile after refusing to dismiss other Jewish colleagues; by 1935 he was teaching at Johns Hopkins University. Max Born had already fled Göttingen in 1933 and went on to teach in England.

Antifascism in Oppenheimer’s circle

The rise of Hitler also belongs to the political formation of Jean Tatlock, who opposed both Hitler and Benito Mussolini. While studying premedical subjects at Berkeley in 1933–34, she wrote for the Western Worker, the Pacific Coast newspaper of the Communist Party USA. She was a dues-paying member and attended two Party meetings a week. Her reporting on cases involving workers and children arrested in California gave her political commitments a practical focus on injustice. Her activities show how opposition to fascism existed alongside other political convictions, rather than as an isolated response to events in Europe.

The event’s significance in the book is therefore not limited to Oppenheimer’s financial contribution. It marks the point at which his earlier claim that politics had little to do with truth, goodness, or beauty met the consequences of state power: scholars lost their posts, colleagues became refugees, and political choices entered ordinary professional and social life. The responses differed, but the distance between intellectual work and political responsibility narrowed.

The European crisis and domestic politics

The effects of Hitler’s rise continued to shape political debate years later, though later developments should not be mistaken for the seizure itself. On August 24, 1939, the Soviet Union announced its nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany; a week later, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and war began in Europe. The pact unsettled left-wing intellectual circles. Haakon Chevalier defended it as a necessary strategic decision, while Oppenheimer argued that it should be understood in light of Western appeasement of Hitler at Munich. These disagreements show how the crisis that began with Nazi power continued to reorder political loyalties and arguments.

In 1940, pamphlets issued under the name of the College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California, defended the New Deal and criticized the changing domestic political climate. Chevalier said Oppenheimer drafted the reports and paid for their printing and distribution; Gordon Griffiths corroborated his involvement, while the evidence leaves Oppenheimer’s precise authorship uncertain. One report described liberals’ discouragement, red-baiting, and the mobilization of reaction. Oppenheimer may have helped edit it, but the book cautions against treating the pamphlets as definitive proof of his authorship or Party membership. His correspondence suggests disappointment with Franklin D. Roosevelt, not the pamphlets’ denunciation of him as a warmonger. What the material does support is a continuing concern that war abroad and reaction at home could damage domestic social programs and political freedoms.

Significance

Nazi Germany’s seizure of power functions in this account as a turning point in political attention, not as a single episode with a single response. The persecution of Jewish academics elicited material assistance; opposition to fascism contributed to Tatlock’s activism; and the later war and Soviet-German pact forced renewed argument over political allegiance and domestic policy. The book preserves uncertainty about some of Oppenheimer’s political work while making the initial change clear: events in Germany made political consequences impossible for him to keep outside the boundaries of scientific and personal life.