WI: Less Jewish scientists escape the clutches of Nazism

OTL, many scientists fled nazi Germany before their lives could be ended by the death machine. They were important in many projects during the war. What if the Nazis were effective in hunting them down, thus leaving the West with less potential in the science department?
 
You would have to have a different German policy then trying to pressure Jews to leave in the 30s.
 

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OTL, many scientists fled nazi Germany before their lives could be ended by the death machine. They were important in many projects during the war. What if the Nazis were effective in hunting them down, thus leaving the West with less potential in the science department?
It wasn't so much that they failed to hunt them down as much as they were happy to see them leave. Nazi policy was to push out the Jews and take their property as a tax as they left. So you'd need first to get the Nazis to recognize that Jewish scientists (and those of the liberal or communist bent) were a potential threat to have going abroad in the first place. Stopping them is easy in most cases, simply deny them a visa and arrest them for trying to leave.

But that said, let's say that is the case. Its not necessarily that big of a deal. Yes it was two German-Jewish expats in Britain that proved to the British government that weaponizable nuclear fission was possible, but even if no one else thought it was possible in the end nukes really didn't end the war. That would free up significant resources for other projects and Hiroshima and Nagasaki are just firebombed instead. I cannot think of a single project that Jewish expat/exiles really made a difference on. Sure they helped here and there, but really its more a myth of the FU variety to the Nazis that Jewish Germans made a big difference to the Allied scientific projects. They certainly made the nuclear project possible (assuming no one else anyone does anything similar later), but then the nukes weren't vital to the war. On no other project of consequence did they make a significant difference. So no change really unless the Nazis find a way to use their theoretical physicists for their own nuclear bomb project and get one before the end of the war. Really it was just American and British scientists and engineers that did the vast majority of the R&D work and beat the Germans, not German exiles.

The big difference that German expats (both Jews and non-Jews) made to the US and Britain was in university life that transformed them into world class institutions post-war that beat what was then the world-beating German institutions. The big effect was post-war, but that also then included the Germans scooped up by Operation Paperclip and the guys that just left Germany due to the economic situation post-war. Plus of course the higher salaries in the US and Britain relative to Germany.
 
The Nazis were happy to have high profile Jews leave - it allowed them to put a somewhat better face internationally on their internal policies. As long as the Jews left the bulk of their property behind, getting Germany to issue an exit visa was not an issue. The problem was getting ANYONE to give them an entry visa (cf: SS St Louis). Once the Germans had decided on extermination as a policy, building on the Einsatzgruppen, random atrocities, and culling by disease and starvation, they made very little use of the talents of their Jewish prisoners. The currency forgery operation was an exception to this and involved very few individuals. Given Hitler's rants about atomic physics being a "Jewish Science", I can't see any of those who left Germany after 1933 convincing the Nazis to put more effort in to the atomic program, or convincing Heisenberg that the amount of fissile material needed for an explosion was in the range of 10s of kilograms, not hundreds or more. Even with the fate of their families being held over their heads, I can't see Jewish scientists forced to work for the Nazis pushing advances that their Aryan fellow scientists have overlooked - why push to convince Heisenberg that atomic weapons are practical, just go along and agree with his estimates.

I can't be sure without a lot of checking, but it is my impression that the leading Jewish scientists from Europe including Germany left fairly early on, and by the late 1930s most had left, most even before the Nuremburg laws. In the first few years of the Nazi regime Jews were pushed out of university positions and government funded institutes rather rapidly, and these folks left for greener (and safer) pastures as soon as possible. Don't forget that other Jewish scientists and highly educated folks left other continental countries where anti-Semitic laws and restrictions on employment were passed during the late 20s and 30s.
 
Science generally isn't the result of a few individual geniuses; even without the various refugees, the Manhattan Project (which was a giant industrial-scale research project) would work out. It might be delayed slightly, but not by that much. Someone else will make the key breakthroughs eventually.

Did refugees help? Absolutely! Were they vital? Not really; the level of investment the Allies made in R&D was enough to swamp the effects of essentially any individual, no matter how brilliant.
 
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