Talk:Rudolf Peierls

message: The statement in the current article that Rudolf Peierls' mother was a Catholic is untrue.  Peierls' autobiography "Bird of Passage: Recollections of a Physicist" (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985) makes it clear that both of his parents were assimilated Jews.  There is nothing in the book to indicate in any way that Elisabeth Peierls was a Roman Catholic (much less a Gentile, as implied by the current wording).  This erroneous claim appears to have originated with a February 1996 obituary that appeared on pages 74-75 of "Physics Today" magazine.  Its author apparently misread material on page 5 of Peierls' autobiography, where Peierls has a paragraph beginning with "My mother..." followed by a paragraph discussing his nanny, which is in turn followed by a paragraph beginning with the phrase "She was a Roman Catholic..."  This last statement, however, refers to the nanny, not to Peierls' mother.  On page 3, he writes of his father: "He came from a family of Jewish merchants in Breslau."  On page 5, he writes of his mother and father: "My mother, his cousin, née Elisabeth Weigert, was eleven years younger," i.e., his parents were, in fact, cousins.  On page 141, he writes: "My mother's sister was married to a doctor in Breslau, where they remained; they perished during the war, probably in a concentration camp.  Their two daughters did get away, one to England and the other to the United States."  He goes on to say "my mother's brother, Hermann Weigert, was a musician, and he was particularly gifted as an accompanist and repetitor.  He had travelled much and settled in New York in the thirties, where he worked at the Metropolitan Opera."  JINFO.ORG has clear, documentary evidence that the opera conductor Hermann Weigert, the brother of Elisabeth Weigert, was a Jew.  Peierls was indeed baptized as a Protestant, but he notes on page 6 of his autobiography that he left the Church as soon as he came of age.  Peierls definitely considered himself to be a Jew.  He submitted biographies to "Who's Who in World Jewry" in 1955 and 1965.  Under the circumstances, I intend to modify the current wording to better reflect the facts. Jinfo 05:40, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Peierls' Parents Were Both Jewish 

message: [1] From the article on Rudolf Peierls in the online edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, by the late Prof. Richard Dalitz, FRS of Oxford University:
"Peierls, Sir Rudolf Ernst (1907-1995), theoretical physicist, was born on 5 June 1907 in Oberschöneweide, a suburb in the south-east of Berlin, the youngest of the three children (Alfred (b. 1899); Annie (b. 1901); and Rudolf) of Heinrich Peierls (1867-1945), an electrical engineer from Breslau (Wroclaw) and managing director of a cable factory of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), and his first wife, Elisabeth (Elli; 1878-1921), daughter of Alfred Weigert (1848-1896) and his wife, Olga Hamburger, both of Breslau. Rudolf's parents were first cousins through the Weigert line. The Peierls families were assimilated Jews."  
[2] From the obituary for Peierls in the November 1995 issue of Physics World magazine, page 63, by Jack Paton of Oxford University: "Born into an assimilated Jewish family, Peierls originally wanted to become an engineer..."Jinfo 04:43, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Additional References 

message: Would an interview with Rudolf Peierls from 1986 be useful here as an external link? Focus of conversation is nuclear weapons policy. http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_28F1C920696B486F8796D1E449FF8391 (I helped with the site, so it would be conflict of interest for me to just add it.) Mccallucc (talk) 15:45, 24 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External link to interview on nuclear policy? 

message: Although there was an entry about this in the talk here, the article about Peierls does not say anything about his being Jewish. This ist most surprising, the more, as the German Wikipedia article does mention it. Wasn't there not just a disagreement with Hitlers politics but a fear (already in 1933) for his and his relatives' lives (who also left Germany in good time) that caused him not to return to Germany? --217.149.162.192 (talk) 17:27, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, I didn'd read carefully - his Jewish family   w a s   mentioned. --217.149.162.192 (talk) 17:36, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Jewish origin 

message: There are couple of documentaries that someone may find useful; here:  and here:   — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.145.115.25 (talk) 14:11, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Useful reference documentaries