Gerard Kuiper saves Max Planck
A rescue mission doesn’t necessarily require car chases, parachutes or shoot-outs to be an act of supreme courage and daring. Sometimes quiet, understated missions are just as impressive, as the rescue of Max Planck showed. The legendary German scientist was stranded in the east of his native country when the Second World War finally came to an end. With the Red Army advancing – and killing, looting and raping with impunity as it did – the future of Planck and his wife looked grim indeed. But the American astronomer Gerard Kuiper had other ideas. Though they were not friends, Kuiper became determined to get Planck out, however risky that might be.
In the closing months of the war, the Americans worked tirelessly to get Germany’s top scientists out of the country and back to the US. By May 1945, this mission was almost completed. Above all, the Americans had Werner Heisenberg and his team in custody. Getting Planck too was seen as a bonus but not essential. And so, when General Eisenhower ruled that the River Elbe would serve as the limit of America’s advance into Germany, it looked like the famous physicist and his wife would be lost to the Soviets. Kuiper, with no official backing, needed to act swiftly. Luckily, he was not only fluent in German but was also a man of action as well as an intellectual.
Commandeering a US Army jeep and convincing two GIs to join him, Kuiper set off into war-torn Germany. Away from the American zone, the country was in chaos. Though the war was over, the Red Army was on the rampage and Germany’s demobbed soldiers were desperate. Against the odds, Kuiper made it to the farm by the River Elbe where intelligence reports had concluded the 87-year-old Planck and his wife were hiding. Sure enough, the old couple were there – and they didn’t need much persuading to jump in the jeep and head west.
On the way back, Kuiper narrowly avoided several Soviet patrols. But still, the rescuers and the rescued all made it back into the American zone. From there, the Plancks chose to remain in west Germany, and Max even got back to work for two more years. Kuiper, meanwhile, retuned to America and played down his role in rescuing Max Planck, ‘the father of quantum theory’. Kuiper, who made a name for himself as a pioneer of astronomy, died in 1973.