Werner Weber (3 January 1906 – 2 February 1975) was a Germanmathematician.^[1] He was one of theNoether boys, the doctoral students ofEmmy Noether. Considered scientifically gifted but a modest mathematician, he was also an ardent Nazi, who would later take part in driving Jewish mathematicians out of theUniversity of Göttingen.^[2]

He later started work as part of a group of five mathematicians, recruited byWilhelm Fenner, and which includedErnst Witt,Georg Aumann,Alexander Aigner,Oswald Teichmueller and Johann Friedrich Schultze, and led byWolfgang Franz, to form the backbone of the new mathematical research department in the late 1930s, which would eventually be called: Section IVc ofCipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (abbr. OKW/Chi).^[3][4]

Weber was born in 1906 in Oberstein (nearHamburg,Germany), the son of a merchant. In 1924, he graduated from theAbitur. He studied mathematics in Hamburg and at theUniversity of Göttingen and in 1928 he handed over the Lehramtstaatsexamen (state examination) in Mathematics, Physics, Biology. Weber took his examination for promotion ofDr. phil. in Göttingen withEmmy Noether, (who was described byPavel Alexandrov,Albert Einstein,Jean Dieudonné,Hermann Weyl, andNorbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics), with a dissertation titled: Ideal theoretical interpretation of the representability of any natural numbers by square forms, (German: Idealtheoretische Deutung der Darstellbarkeit beliebiger natürlicher Zahlen durch quadratische Formen)^[5] Noether had not been authorized to supervisedissertations on her own.^[6]

In Göttingen, his postdoctoral scholarship was co-sponsored byEdmund Landau in 1931, with whom he had been an assistant since 1928 and whom he represented in 1933 after his leave of absence. Landau and Noether had judged his dissertation to be excellent, but Weber was only a mediocre mathematician, and his usefulness for Landau consisted chiefly of his abilities in accurateproofreading, to which Landau devoted much attention (according to an anecdote which was then prevalent, he was able to distinguish between an Italic point and a Roman point).^[7] In 1933,Oswald Teichmüller convinced Weber to convert to Nazism.^[8]

He was involved in the publication of theDeutsche Mathematik and published a book on thePell equation.^[9]

From 1946, Weber worked as a publishing director inHamburg and from 1951 at the private school "Institut Dr. Brechtefeld" in Hamburg as a teacher. He left a detailed manuscript (written down before 1940) about his discussion with Hasse,^[10] which serves as an important source for the events at that time in Göttingen.

Weber was a member of theSA, 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 theVow 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 mathematicianEdmund Landau on 2 November 1933 from the mathematics faculty at theUniversity 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 mathematicianOswald Teichmüller, along with theSS, organized a group that commanded a boycott of Edmund Landau's lectures. In a letter thatRichard Courant wrote toAbraham 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]

Landau received a delegate from the students, who informed him that "Aryan students want Aryan mathematics...and requested that he refrain from giving [any more] lectures."^[14] The speaker for the students was a very young, scientifically gifted man, but completely muddled and notorious. That person was Oswald Teichmüller. Landau would leave the university soon after.

On 13 February 1934 the university Dekan (Deacon) asked Weber, who was acting director of the mathematical institute at Göttingen, for recommendations on who should replaceHermann Weyl as new operational director. Several days later Weber recommended, as the best mathematician, thealgebraistHelmut Hasse, then working at theUniversity of Marburg, andUdo 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 ofFelix 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 NaziTheodor 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 theprobability theoristErhard 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 theNazis, to question him about his ancestry, where Weber and his cronies did not consider him reliable for party politics, due to him having aJewish 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 atHeidelberg 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 andTheodor 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 theCipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht in section IVc underWolfgang Franz which was scientific decoding of enemy crypts, the development of code-breaking methods and working onre-cyphering systems not solved by practicaldecoding. The agency was managed byErich 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.

• 1906 births
• 1975 deaths
• German cryptographers
• 20th-century German mathematicians
• Nazi Party members

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