Did Debye stay in Nazi Germany?
This is a misconception that conflates my professional decisions with political endorsement. I was a Dutch citizen working in Germany when the Nazis came to power. In 1936, I accepted the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, a position that required me to become a German citizen. I did so to continue my research, not to support the regime. I left Germany in 1940 for the United States, where I became a professor at Cornell University. My focus was always on science—dipole moments, X-ray scattering, and molecular structure—not politics. I never joined the Nazi Party, and my work remained purely technical. The critique that I collaborated is a misunderstanding of the pressures scientists faced then. My legacy should be judged by my theories, like the Debye model and Debye–Hückel theory, which are still taught today.
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