Since Einstein rarely defended himself against these attacks, this task was undertaken by other relativity theoreticians, who (according to Hentschel) formed some sort of "defensive belt" around Einstein. Some representatives were Max von Laue, Max Born, etc. and on popular-scientific and philosophical level Hans Reichenbach, André Metz etc., who led many discussions with critics in semi-popular journals and newspapers. However, most of these discussions failed from the start. Physicists like Gehrcke, some philosophers, and the "free researchers" were so obsessed with their own ideas and prejudices that they were unable to grasp the basics of relativity; consequently, the participants of the discussions were talking past each other. In fact, the theory that was criticized by them was not relativity at all, but rather a caricature of it. The "free researchers" were mostly ignored by the scientific community, but also, in time, respected physicists such as Lenard and Gehrcke found themselves in a position outside the scientific community. However, the critics didn't believe that this was due to their incorrect theories, but rather due to a conspiracy of the relativistic physicists (and in the 1920s and 1930s of the Jews as well), which allegedly tried to put down the critics, and to preserve and improve their own positions within the academic world. For example, Gehrcke (1920/24) held that the propagation of relativity is a product of some sort of mass suggestion. Therefore, he instructed a media monitoring service to collect over 5000 newspaper clippings which were related to relativity, and published his findings in a book. However, Gehrcke's claims were rejected, because the simple existence of the "relativity hype" says nothing about the validity of the theory, and thus it cannot be used for or against relativity.Hentschel (1990), pp. 163–195Wazeck (2009), pp. 113–193, 217–292Gehrcke (1924b)
