Theodore von Kármán

Biographical key data and university beginnings

Theodore von Kármán was born in Budapest in 1881 and grew up there. Around the turn of the century, he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Polytechnics and Economics in Budapest. He then worked as an assistant at the university and as an engineer at Ganz & Co, an electric motor and generator company.

In 1906, thanks to a scholarship, he was able to move to the University of Göttingen to work with Ludwig Prandtl (professor at the University of Göttingen). There he obtained his doctorate with his thesis on buckling strength. Two years later he completed his habilitation in mechanics and thermodynamics. In 1911 he published his best-known work on the Kármán vortex street named after him. In 1913, he then accepted a call to the TH Aachen to head the Institute of Mechanics and Aeronautical Aerodynamics there. He also took over the management of the newly established Aerodynamic Institute.

During the First World War

With the beginning of World War I, von Kármán was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. He was put in charge of a research laboratory near Budapest. Here he was involved, among other things, in the construction of so-called tethered helicopters, which were to be used for enemy observation. This succeeded in test flights, but not in demonstration. Through his time in the Austro-Hungarian army, von Kármán came into contact with military research and promotion for the first time.

After the end of World War I, von Kármán returned to Aachen in 1919 and continued to devote himself to his research. In the following years, he wrote papers on strength, fluid mechanics, aeronautical engineering and gliding. This was at least not expressly forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.

Denunciation, dismissal and emigration

In 1926, he was invited by Robert A. Millikan to Pasadena, California, to advise engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) on the construction of a wind tunnel. After this wind tunnel was completed in 1928, von Kármán stayed and joined the newly formed Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) at Caltech. In 1929, he became director of GALCIT. The department gained reputation when numerous airlines used the wind tunnel to test models. In the following years, he spent summer terms in Aachen and winter terms in Pasadena.

During these years, the political and also the higher education political climate in Aachen changed increasingly. One of the most important higher education policy goals of the National Socialists was the “political Gleichschaltung and Aryanization of the teaching staff.” By the mid-1930s, more than 1600 scientists had been expelled in Germany. At the RWTH, students were instrumental in these developments.

In Aachen, it was not the National Socialist students who initiated the denunciations of professors and assistants at the university, but the AStA, which at that time was still led by the Waffenring and the Catholic fraternities. On April 6, 1933, the leadership of the German Student Union called for several weeks of antisemitic action in a letter to all student bodies. But the Aachen AStA had already sent a letter of denunciation to Rust, the minister of education, on March 18. In it, they threatened to abandon cooperation with the faculty if the individuals named in the letter did not disappear. The motivation for this letter was not only ideological reasons, but also competition with the NSDStB. The AStA wanted to use such radical actions to show that they too were capable of mobilizing students for the new government.

The Aachen district group of the NS-Lehrerbund reacted to the denunciation letter and criticized it as too “moderate”, since the Jewish members of the teaching staff were not mentioned. The AStA then denounced the Marxist and Jewish professors, including von Kármán, in a supplementary letter to Rust on April 10. This was again on the Aachen AStA’s own initiative, since the German Student Body did not demand this until a few days later.

Von Kármán’s reaction

On April 4, the university received a telegram from Kármán, who was in Pasadena at the time. In it, he requested his leave of absence for the summer semester of 1933, since his mother was not yet fit to travel. His request was granted by the Prussian Minister for Science, Art and National Education, with the condition that he would resume teaching in the winter semester of 1933/34 and continue in the summer semester of 1934.

In September 1933, another letter from Kármán reached the rector. In it he explains that he will not be able to resume his lectures in the winter semester either. Von Kármán requests an extension of his leave of absence, and in case this should not be possible, his dismissal from the German civil service. The rector of the TH Aachen, Paul Röntgen, and the German authorities did not know that von Kármán had already applied for American citizenship on May 23, 1933.

Von Kármán’s faculty, the Faculty of General Sciences, endorsed von Kármán’s remaining at the TH in a letter to the rector, and suggested that it would be useful to obtain the assessment of the Ministry of Aviation regarding von Kármán’s importance to German aviation. Egon Krause, professor emeritus of fluid mechanics at the RWTH, (and Ulrich Kalkmann, author of “Die Technische Hochschule Aachen im Dritten Reich,” among other works) see in this not only an extraordinary esteem for von Kármán, but “also a protest – albeit cautious – against Nazi-Socialist university policies.”
Despite the reference to von Kármán’s success and importance in the field of aviation expressed by his faculty in Aachen, Kármán was dismissed from the Prussian civil service during the summer semester of 1934.

However, according to von Kármán’s own account, the then head of aeronautical research, Adolf Baeumker, offered him a position as an advisor in the German Aviation Ministry in the same year, but von Kármán turned it down. This shows how decisive the rearmament-related importance of a scientist was for the way National Socialist policy dealt with him.

The final departure of von Kármán was the reason for a considerable loss of importance of Aachen aviation. The mathematician Otto Blumenthal and the mechanic Ludwig Hopf, who had taken over parts of the teaching in aviation science during Kármán’s absence, were also denounced and dismissed. The vacant positions were not really filled for years. Thus, Aachen aerodynamics increasingly lost its importance. Also, Aachen’s geographic location made it less suitable as a site for German aeronautical research than the other sites under consideration in the event of war.

Von Kármán’s fate in the context of expulsion

Also worth mentioning is the different treatment of Jewish and anti-regime professors on the part of the ministries. Von Kármán was of great value to the Aviation Ministry, especially with regard to armaments research. He was also in a stronger negotiating position than other university professors, since he already had a foothold and offers in the United States. The situation was different for some of his colleagues, who did not have such opportunities available to them.

Life in the USA

In the following years, von Kármán devoted himself entirely to aeronautical research in the USA. He remained director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratories (until 1949), which under his leadership became one of the most important teaching & research institutions in the USA. During this time he also worked with the aeronautical industry and participated in the creation of the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. Von Kármán spent much time in Washington, where he was active in an advisory capacity. In 1944, he was commissioned to establish a board of advisors for the U.S. Air Force. These advisors reviewed the state of the U.S. Air Force, made recommendations, and initiated many changes in the Air Force.
Because of reports of German scientists in 1944 developing rockets for military purposes, Caltech was given the task of producing long-range rockets as well. Thus was born the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose first director was von Kármán. This laboratory became increasingly involved in extraterrestrial research in the 1950s and was taken over by NASA in 1959.

Von Kármán saw no problem in his research results being used for military purposes. He believed that research and the military could work together and saw military funding as a great opportunity for research. Certainly, these statements must be seen in the context of his expulsion from Germany, since he was motivated, on the one hand, to provide the best possible support to the American military in World War II and, on the other hand, was able to realize much of his research in the United States because of extensive funding and unrestricted contracts.

Aachen 29.04.2022 (al)