Back in the United States

               At the end of the National Research Council Fellowship, J. Robert Oppenheimer accepted assistant professorships at Caltech and the University of Caifornia at Berkeley.  In 1929 he accepted a professorship of physics at Cal Berkeley.  As a professor of physics at Berkeley, J Robert Oppenheimer influenced many young minds.  He was teaching some of the men and women that would later work on the Manhattan Project.  His students enjoyed working under his charismatic leadership.  Hans Bethe later said about him: 

            “Probably the most important ingredient Oppenheimer brought to his teaching was his exquisite taste. He always knew what were the important problems, as shown by his choice of subjects. He truly lived with those problems, struggling for a solution, and he communicated his concern to the group.” 

            By 1938, Adolf Hitler had risen to power in Germany and taken over Austria.  Several Jewish scientists left the country because of Hitler’s treatment of Jews.  Many of those scientists came to the United States bringing with them a fear that Hitler might build an atomic bomb.

            In 1940 Oppenheimer married Katherine “Kitty” Puening. Dr. Oppenheimer’s wife had been married to a communist, Joe Dallet, and was a communist herself.  During this time Dr. Oppenheimer contributed monthly to the Communist Party to aid in the Spanish Civil War which continued until 1942.  He also maintained a close friendship with Jean Tatlock, a communist, for many years.  These affiliations would later cause him trouble.

http://ohst.berkeley.edu/oppenheimer/exhibit/chapter2.html

 The staff of Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory in 1939, inside the yoke of the magnet of the 60" cyclotron. Among the young faces were some who would belong to the most distinguished physicists of their generation, including J. Robert Oppenheimer at center-top.

Front row, left to right: John H. Lawrence, Robert Serber, Franz N.D. Kurie, Raymond T. Birge, Ernest O. Lawrence, Donald Cooksey, Arthur H. Snell, Luis W. Alvarez, Philip H. Abelson. Second row: John Backus, Wilfred B. Mann, Paul C. Aebersold, Edwin M. McMillan, Ernest Lyman, Martin D. Kamen, D.C. Kalbfell, W.W. Salisbury. Last row: Alex S. Langsdorf, Jr., Sam Simmons, Joseph G. Hamilton, David H. Sloan, J. Robert Oppenheimer, William Brobeck, Robert Cornog, Robert R. Wilson, Eugene Viez, J.J. Livingood.

Photo courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.