The Alienation of an Old Fighter

Abstract

The “White Jew” Stark’s situation in the summer of 1937 was grim. He had been forced to resign from the DFG after years of struggle with party comrades in REM. Since Stark refused to humiliate himself by apologizing to Wagner, his case before the highest party court threatened to throw him out of the NSDAP. After having lost so much already in the Third Reich, Stark decided to fight for what he had left—the purity of Deutsche Physik. Once again, Stark adopted a strategy of character defamation in order to deny the Munich professorship to Werner Heisenberg, but this time Stark took the consequential step of allying himself with forces within the SS.