The world would have been a far darker place had Nazi Germany beaten the US to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Mercifully, the self-defeating hatred of Adolf Hitler’s regime sabotaged its own efforts. A 1933 law sacking “civil servants of non-Aryan descent” stripped one quarter of Germany’s physicists of their university posts. As the historian Richard Rhodes noted, 11 of those 1,600 scholars had already earned, or would go on to earn, the Nobel Prize. Scientific refugees from Nazi Europe were later central to the Manhattan atomic bomb project in the US.
如果纳粹德国击败美国制造出世界上第一颗原子弹，世界将变得更加黑暗。幸运的是，阿道夫·希特勒政权的自暴自弃的仇恨破坏了自己的努力。1933年一项解雇“非雅利安裔公务员”的法律剥夺了德国四分之一的物理学家在大学的职位。正如历史学家理查德·罗兹(Richard Rhodes)所指出的，这1600名学者中有11人已经获得，或今后将获得诺贝尔奖。来自纳粹欧洲的科学难民后来成为美国曼哈顿原子弹计划的核心。