Lenard
[10] and Stark enjoyed the Nazi support because it allowed them to undertake a professional coup for their preferred scientific theory. Under the rallying cry that physics should be more "German" and "
Aryan," Lenard and Stark, with backing from the Nazi leadership, entered on a plan to pressure and replace physics positions at German universities with people teaching their preferred theories. By the late 1930s, there were no longer any Jewish physics professors in Germany, since under the
Nuremberg Laws of 1935 Jews were not allowed to work in universities. Stark in particular was also trying to get himself installed as the authority of "German" physics—not an entirely fanciful goal, given the
Gleichschaltung (literally, "coordination") principle applied to other professional disciplines, such as
medicine, under the Nazi regime, whereby a strict linear
hierarchy was created along ideological lines.
They met with moderate success, but the support from the Nazi party was not as great as Lenard and Stark would have preferred. After a long period of harassment of the
quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, including getting him labeled a "White Jew" in the July 15, 1937, issue of
SS's weekly,
Das Schwarze Korps (
The Black Corps), they began to fall from influence. Heisenberg was not only a pre-eminent physicist whom the Nazis realised they were better off with than without, however "Jewish" his theory might be in the eyes of Stark and Lenard, but Heisenberg had, as a young boy, attended school with SS chief
Heinrich Himmler. In a historic moment, Heisenberg's mother rang Himmler's mother and asked her if she would please tell the SS to give "Werner" a break. After beginning a full character evaluation, which Heisenberg both instigated and passed, Himmler forbade further attack on the physicist. Heisenberg would later employ his "Jewish physics," in the
German project to develop nuclear fission for the purposes of
nuclear weapons or
nuclear energy use. Himmler promised Heisenberg that after Germany won the war, the SS would finance a physics institute to be directed by Heisenberg.
[11]
Lenard began to play less and less of a role, and soon Stark ran into even more difficulty, as other scientists and industrialists known for being exceptionally "Aryan" came to the defense of Relativity and quantum mechanics. As historian Mark Walker puts it, "despite his best efforts, in the end his science was not accepted, supported, or used by the Third Reich. Stark spent a great deal of his time during the Third Reich fighting with bureaucrats within the National Socialist state. Most of the National Socialist leadership either never supported Lenard and Stark, or abandoned them in the course of the Third Reich."