The impact of WWI and WWII on Max Planck

World War I had an immense effect on Planck. For one, professionally it drove him away from a direct involvement with politics. He lost in the span of 1914 to 1919. His eldest son was killed in Verdun as a German soldier. He lost his two twin daughters. Each of them died in childbirth. And his youngest son, and arguably his favorite child, was injured in World War I and held as a prisoner of war for several years. So by the end of 1919 he was incredibly devastated as a human being and he rallied back with his characteristic optimism. He moved away from his physics work after World War I largely. He started writing essays and speaking philosophically, doing more public outreach and actually fundraising for German science, which was in big trouble. In World War II then when the Nazis came to power, well the Nazis came to power long before World War II, but they started ushering him out of his last positions of scientific leadership and he wasn't scientifically active or that active during World War II at all. He was just trying to survive. But his son, his last remaining son by his first wife, Erwin, who had been injured in World War I, was eventually captured by the Gestapo, interrogated and tortured and finally executed in the closing months of World War II for an alleged association in the German resistance. He actually did know people in the German resistance. After Erwin was arrested by the Gestapo and accused of treason, Planck started negotiating the Nazi bureaucracy as best he could and his son Erwin's wife Nellie as well, they're writing letters. He did write a letter directly to Hitler and this is where we start the book in chapter one actually. So Planck says basically in essence, if I'm the national treasure, you say I am, have mercy on an old man and spare my son. That's all that's left of me and my best friend.