Werner Weber (mathematician)

Weber was a member of the SA, but only became a Nazi on 1 May 1933 when he was given the Nazi party number 3,118,177.^[11][12] In November 1933, he signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State.

Weber was involved in the removal of the Jewish mathematician Edmund Landau on 2 November 1933 from the mathematics faculty at the University of Göttingen. Richard Courant was also forced out of Göttingen in May 1933. As the leader of a group of pro-Nazi students Weber, along with the Nazi mathematician Oswald Teichmüller, along with the SS, organized a group that commanded a boycott of Edmund Landau's lectures. In a letter that Richard Courant wrote to Abraham Flexner, he stated:

[There] were some seventy students, partly in SS uniforms, but inside [the lecture theatre] not a soul. Every student who wanted to enter was prevented from entering by Weber.^[13]

Teichmüller told Landau that "Aryan students want Aryan mathematics...and requested that he refrain from giving [any more] lectures."^[14] Landau left the university soon after.

On 13 February 1934 the university dean asked Weber, who was acting director of the mathematical institute at Göttingen, for recommendations on who should replace Hermann Weyl as new operational director. Several days later Weber recommended, as the best mathematician, the algebraist Helmut Hasse, then working at the University of Marburg, and Udo Wegner as his second choice.^[6] In 1940, Weber would write:

On the morning of 25 April 1933, I sank into gloomy brooding over how to save German mathematics. According to Weber: The tradition of Felix Klein that had been destroyed by the Jews, could only be awakened to a new life by one man: Wegner^[15]

The decision was made by the Nazi Theodor Vahlen, who appointed Helmut Hasse in April 1934. The Nazi were unsure if Hasse was fully committed to National Socialist policies, and tried to appoint someone to a second chair at Göttingen who was a firm Nazi supporter. Udo Wegner was a strong candidate, but the probability theorist Erhard Tornier and ardent Nazi, eventually gained the second chair.^[16]

Later Weber and other convinced national socialists, met in Göttingen with the designated new head of the Göttingen mathematical institute Helmut Hasse, who also sympathized with the Nazis, to question him about his ancestry, where Weber and his cronies did not consider him reliable for party politics, due to him having a Jewish grandmother. Although Hasse was acceptable to the Nazis, he was not acceptable to Weber, who refused to hand over the keys to the institute.^[17] Hasse eventually assumed directorship in July 1934 and Weber was forced to leave Göttingen.^[12] Weber found a position as an associate professor at Heidelberg University where he would remain until the end of the war.^[18]

In 1940, Weber sent a document of over 400 pages to Rudolf Mentzel of the Reich Ministry for Science Education and Adult Education and Theodor Vahlen on the events. Mentzel told Weber he should have waited until after the war before bringing this matter up and considered the matter temporarily closed. ^[12][19]

In 1945, Weber was dismissed due to his Nazi involvement. He struggled to find work, but eventually found a job working for a publisher in Hamburg.^[18]

During World War II, he worked with Oswald Teichmüller in the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht in section IVc under Wolfgang Franz which was scientific decoding of enemy crypts, the development of code-breaking methods and working on re-cyphering systems not solved by practical decoding. The agency was managed by Erich Hüttenhain. He successfully deciphered a cypher of the Japanese diplomatic service. He also worked on cryptanalytic theory.

• Menzler-Trott, Eckart (1 January 2007). Logic's Lost Genius: The Life of Gerhard Gentzen. American Mathematical Soc. ISBN 978-0-8218-9129-2.
• Segal, Sanford L. (2003). Mathematicians Under the Nazis. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00451-X.
• Segal, Sanford L. (23 November 2014). Mathematicians under the Nazis. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-6538-3.