Nazi Nobel Laureates

Johannes Stark won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919 for his discovery of the Doppler Effect in electron wavelengths. This discovery led to understanding the structure of the atom. While he gained academic prestige, his colleague Albert Einstein was gaining worldwide fame. Stark became extremely jealous, causing him to vocally oppose Einstein's relativity theories and label it "Jewish Physics."

With the rise of Hitler, Johannes Stark became an early Nazi Party supporter and gave rise to "Aryan Physics" with the intent of removing Einstein and other Jewish science academics from German universities.

Philipp Lenard won the 1905 Nobel Prize for his cathode ray experiments that laid the path for Einstein's photon theory of light. For this reason, Lenard also harbored a bitter jealousy toward Albert Einstein. He became the co-founder of the Aryan Physics movement with Johannes Stark, authoring a four-volume physics textbook labeled "Deutsche Physik" or "German Physics."

Lenard and Stark even went so far as to label non-Jewish supporters of Einstein's work as "White Jews", particularly Werner Heisenberg, who was later exempted from the academic purges by SS-leader Heinrich Himmler. After all, Heisenberg was needed to help develop the Nazi Atomic Bomb.

While this so-called school of "Deutsche Physik" helped the Nazis succeed in Aryanizing scientific academia, physics theories in general were never taken seriously by the bureaucrats of the Third Reich, who only validated the physical sciences.

In 1947, Johannes Stark was tried by a German court as a "leading Nazi" was sentenced to four years in a labor camp. Lenard was expelled from his emeritus post at Heidelberg in 1945. He died in 1947.

Wagner-Jauregg

Austrian Julius Wagner-Jauregg won the 1927 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his treatments of dementia paralytica with febrile disease inoculations. Only in 2004 was it revealed that Wagner-Jauregg became a Nazi Party member in 1939, and was a leading Reich advocate of enforced sterilization of those with mental illness and "people with criminal genes."

Knut Hamsun

The 1920 Nobel laureate for Literature was Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, best known for his novel "Hunger." After the Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940, Hamsun wholeheartedly supported the collaborationist occupation government of Vidkun Quisling. In 1943, Hamsun sent his Nobel Prize medal as a gift to Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. He also met Hitler.

Like fellow Nazi sympathizer and collaborator Ezra Pound, their works devoid of personal politics have been judged favorably by literary critics, Aryan and non-Aryan alike. Also like Pound, Hamsun was confined to a mental institution after the war. He died in 1952 at age 92.

Gunter Grass

In 2006, there was a stunning revelation that German political liberal and peace activist Gunter Grass, the 1999 Nobel laureate for Literature, had been a teenaged panzer tank gunner in the Waffen-SS. Grass is best known for his "Danzig Trilogy" of novels, most notably "The Tin Drum." All are critical explorations of the rise of Nazism and the cruelties of war. Grass has publicly apologized for his hypocrisy, particularly his criticism of President Ronald Reagan's controversial visit to the graves of Waffen-SS soldiers at Bitburg.