Early on, the Nazis advocated "Deutsche Physik" as an alternative to the physics mainstream. Led by advocates like Philipp Lenard, Rudolf Tomaschek, and Johannes Stark, it was popular among those who felt physics to be too dominated by Jews like
Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and briefly attracted a number of "old guard" physicists who rejected the paradigm shift presented by the theory of relativity. It fell out of favor in the late '30s once the sturdiness of the "Jewish physics" became apparent even to many Nazis, though they only acknowledged this through clenched teeth and refused to give any credit to Jews, instead favoring "Aryan" physicists like Werner Heisenberg (who they had ironically harassed and bashed as a "White Jew" for supporting relativity just a few years prior). Deutsche Physik, as short-lived and often overblown by modern observers as it was, still had a disastrous effect on scientific research in Germany, and the Jewish scientists who found themselves driven out of German universities under the Nuremberg Laws would
go on to contribute massively to the
Nuclear Weapons programs of Germany's enemies.
