Early Life in Germany

Hyland, G. J.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-14851-9_2

G. J. Hyland²

Part of the book series: Springer Biographies ((SPRINGERBIOGS))

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Abstract

Herbert Fröhlich was born at 11.30 am on Saturday 9 December 1905 in the home of his paternal grand-parents, Abraham Jakob and Dorken (née Landauer) at Im Brühl, 186 (now Freudenstädter Straβe 31), in Rexingen (Württemberg), a village in the Neckar valley, on the edge of the Black Forest, where an unusually high proportion of the inhabitants were Jewish. Rexingen is near Horb am Neckar, approximately midway between Freudenstadt and Tübingen.

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Notes

1.
There are 36 Fröhlich entries in the archives of the old Jewish Cemetery in Rexingen, and 62 relating to his mother’s family (Schwarz); the Fröhlich line can be traced back to at least 1744 (In Stein gehauen 1997, 2003, pp. 122–123).
2.
At school Betty (b.1904) excelled in mathematics, but having, in those days, no possibility of pursuing it professionally, became, instead, an accomplished pianist. In 1926, as an ardent Zionist, she was the first member of the family to leave Germany for Palestine, at first living on a collective farm with her husband Fritz Lichtenstein. They separated in 1938, and she later married Martin Lustig. She had a daughter and 4 sons, one of whom was killed in the Yom Kippur war of 1973.
3.
Albrecht (1916–2001) later became a distinguished pure mathematician, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Great Britain in 1976. He married in the same year as his brother (1950), and died at the same age of 85 years, leaving a widow (Dr. Ruth Brooks), 2 adopted children and several grandchildren. Herbert and Albrecht were not the only siblings to be elected F.R.S. in the 20th century; others include Christopher and Michael Longuet-Higgins, Maurice and David Hill, Nathaniel and Miriam Rothschild, and Sidnie and Irene Manton.
4.
From September 1917 until 1933, when they left Germany, they lived at Seidlstraβe, 22.
5.
At first, they had premises at Hauptstraβe 1, moving a few years later to Schöngeisingerstraβe 6, and finally in 1930, to Bullachstraβe 3, near the centre of the town.
6.
This denotes reference (188) in the Complete Bibliography of H. Fröhlich, at the end of this book; similarly [Fx] denotes reference (x).
7.
The quantum mechanical form of this equation permits the work function, W, of a metal to be determined from measurement of the thermionic current, which is proportional to T ² exp(−W/kT); classically, the pre-exponential factor becomes T ^½, whilst the meaning of W is somewhat different.
8.
‘Second quantization’ is a technique whereby a many-body system of identical particles is described by a quantum field in three-dimensional space and time, rather than by appropriately symmetrised many-particle Schrödinger wave-functions in multi-dimensional configuration space. The individual particles are the quanta of this field (just as photons are quanta of the electromagnetic radiation field) whose quantization rules dictate the particle statistics, bosons (fermions) being described by commutating (anti-commuting) fields. Many years later, as a spin-off of his work on the connection between micro and macrophysics, Fröhlich demonstrated the equivalence of the two approaches in a way that is very much simpler than that which is usually presented [F155].
9.
This was an activity in which even Pauli participated (Pauli 1926), although he later came to despise it: ‘I don’t like this solid-state physics……though I initiated it (with his application of Fermi-Dirac statistics to calculate of the spin paramagnetism [Pauli paramagnetism] of the electron gas in a metal); one shouldn’t wallow in dirt’ (Hoddeson et al. 1992, p. 159).
10.
A fraudulent document that first appeared in Russia in 1905, in which was discussed a supposed Jewish plan for world domination; it was widely cited during the 1920s and 30s in defence of anti-semitism.
11.
Strasbourg is the capital of the Alsace region of eastern France, which borders Germany, and is only 25 km west of Rexingen where Herbert had been born.
12.
The original para-military wing of the Nazi Party, which played a key role in Hitler’s rise to power during the 1920s and early 1930s. It became disempowered after Hitler’s blood-purge in 1934 (Night of the Long Knives), being effectively then superseded by the SS.
13.
Schutzhaft was a kind of protective custody under the guise of which political opponents of the Nazi regime, and especially Jews, were rounded up so that they could be officially ‘protected’ from the wrath of the German population.
14.
Josef Meisinger (1899–1947) was born in Munich, and joined the SS is March 1933. In 1934 he moved to Berlin with Heydrich to the office of the Gestapo. In 1940 he was appointed Commander of State Police in Warsaw, where his atrocities appalled even his superiors. He was removed to Tokyo in 1941 where he acted as Gestapo Liason Officer until September 1945 when he surrendered himself to two American war correspondents. He was handed over to the Polish authorities in Warsaw, and executed in 1947 as a war criminal for atrocities in Poland, having become known as the ‘Butcher of Warsaw’. Walter Schellenberg described Meisinger as ‘one of the most evil creatures among Heydrich’s bunch of thugs who carried out the vilest of his orders… He was a frightening individual, a large, coarse-faced man with a bald head and an incredibly ugly face. However, like many men of his type, he had drive and energy and an unscrupulous sort of cleverness’ (Schellenberg 1956, pp. 160–161).
15.
An historic building on Place Kléber, built by Jacques-Françoise Blondel, 1765–1772, which still exists. Between 1926 and 1928 it was redecorated by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Arp and the De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg.
16.
The family home at Seidlstraβe 22 contained some fine items of art nouveau furniture.
17.
With Herbert’s financial assistance (made possible by encashing an insurance policy on his father’s life and from the proceeds of the sale the family property (in both Munich and Fürstenfeldbruck), his parents and brother moved to Palestine in 1934; his father died there in 1952, and his mother in 1959.

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