Johannes Juilfs - Career - Afterwards

Afterwards

It was in the summer of 1940 that Wolfgang Finkelnburg became an acting director of the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Dozentenbund (NSDDB, National Socialist German University Lecturers League) at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt (today, the Technische Universität Darmstadt). As such, he organized the Münchner Religionsgespräche (“Munich Synod”), which took place on November 15, 1940. The event was an offensive against the deutsche Physik movement. Finkelnburg invited five representatives to make arguments for theoretical physics and academic decisions based on ability, rather than politics: Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Otto Scherzer, Georg Joos, Otto Heckmann, and Hans Kopfermann. Alfons Bühl, a supporter of deutsche Physik, invited Harald Volkmann, Bruno Thüring, Wilhelm Müller, Rudolf Tomaschek, and Ludwig Wesch. The discussion was led by Gustav Borer, with Herbert Stuart and Johannes Malsch as observers. While the technical outcome of the event may have been thin, it was a political victory against deutsche Physik and signaled the decline of the influence of the movement within the German Reich.

In November 1942, as a follow-on to the 1940 Münchner Religionsgespräche, 30 scientists met at Seefeld in the Austrian Tyrol to establish guidelines for the teaching of physics. Among those in attendance were Werner Heisenberg, Carl Ramsauer, Wolfgang Finkelnburg, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Juilfs, as well as supporters of the declining deutsche Physik movement. Juilfs clearly expressed the side the SS had taken against the movement. The deutsche Physik supporters were sufficiently cowed and the program of the 1940 Münchner Religionsgespräche was adopted, i.e., quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity were accepted as essential parts of German physics. This was a considerable victory by the physics establishment in Germany, as the state was forced to back down on ideological purity in the teaching of physics in order to get the physics community’s support.