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Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project, 1939-1945: A Study in German Culture

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Poor Werner Heisenberg; once the poster boy for modern physics, his reputation has taken a beating in recent years. Rose's book is only the latest, and the least, in this trend. At the heart of the Heisenberg controversy is why he stayed to "build" the A-Bomb for Hitler. Why did he visit Bohr in Copenhagen? What was he after? It would seem that, barring any heretofore undiscovered revelations, these questions will go unanswered. Thus, all we have left is speculation, uncertainty.

While most writers give Heisenberg the benefit of the doubt on his character (After all, he was not anti-Semitic, nor was he a member of the Nazi Party.), Rose sees him as a continuation of the German revolutionary spirit that dates back to Luther, and thus condemns Heisenberg as guilty, especially as Heisenberg was a German patriot, and it is extremely difficult for Rose (as with most people) to distinguish a patriot from a Nazi.

However, If Rose were a prosecutor, a jury would need only ten minutes to acquit Heisenberg on all counts. Rose simply fails to make his case. The alleged anti-Semitic remark by Heisenberg is second-hand via Max Born back in 1945. Hardly the testimony that can convict. It also comes late in the book, after we have been subjected to much screed about a German radical anti-Semetic tradition that Heisenberg wanted no part of at any time. Otherwise he would have been a good Party member, as were others in his scientific circle. Also, as the excellent earlier review asserts, this trend would have been long noticeable at Gottingen, the center of German physics and natural science. No, Rose simply has no case and spends over 300 pages making a hysterical justification for something that simply never was.

However, this does not mean I am leaning toward the portrait of Heisenberg given in Thomas Powers's book. Powers makes Heisenberg out to be a sort of James Bond character, brilliantly defying the Nazis to prevent the mad Hitler from obtaining the ultimate weapon. Nonsense. The simple truth about Heisenberg was that he was both naive and a coward. Any chance of him openly defying the Nazis was laid to rest with the attacks on his "Jewish physics" in the SS newspaper. It is interesting that he had to have his mother intervene with Himmler's mother to clear his name. It tells us much about the character of Heisenberg.

Also consider Heisenberg's theory that Hitler would lose the war and then evertything would come out all right. Heisenberg felt the scientist was above mere politics, and politics were only an unwanted intrusion into science. As the Second World War bore out, he was not the only one to have that view. Heisenberg's visit to Bohr may have been to ask for advice on how to proceed in building a bomb. It seems Heisenberg wanted some sort of absolution for remaining in Germany, and if he confessed to Bohr, that would have assauged his guilt. But because Bohr refused to speak with him in private, Heisenberg did the next best thing: he took the money for nuclear research and farted it away on baseless research. The Allies were surprised at how little the Germans accomplished in their program. But the real question is how much did the OSS know? Powers has Moe Berg walking next to Heisenberg in Switzerland with a revolver in his pocket, ready to blow Heisenberg's brains out. Yet, he doesn't pull the trigger. Could it have been that Berg discovered how little progress Heisenberg had made? If that were to be leaked out, especially to those at Los Alamos, would our scientists, many of whom were Jewish German emigres, hace continued work on America's A-Bomb?

It is most interesting that Rose never touches on this point in his screed, for it would undermine his argument. Instead he focuses on Heisenberg's lack of technical expertise in understanding how the bomb could be built. Heisenberg did indeed lack those engineering skills, but so did his counterpart in America, Robert Oppenheimer. But Oppenheimer compensated with a tremendous will to build the unthinkable, while Heisenberg was content not to ask to further funds or to even speculate that a bomb could be built. The transcripts at Farm Hall pretty much seem to bear this out, and in the process, destroy Rose's case.

Heisenberg did not build the bomb, and he was crucified for it. One only pauses to think how history would have treated him if he actually did build a bomb.

The author has done an excellent job of historical research, but this material and the whole book is flawed for three main reasons:

1) If Heisenberg is the representative of some supposed cultural influence on the way German scientists morally behaved, the same pattern should have been observed in Göttingen, for instance, which was the center of German Science then (Quantum Mechanics and Abstract Algebra were born there). But with the sole exceptions of Teichmüller (a mathematical genius and fanatic Nazi) and Hilbert (who was already very old and sick), all the leading mathematicians and physicists of Göttingen fled the country because of their opposition to the Nazi regime. This simple historical counterfactual renders the main "culturalist" thesis of the book untenable.

2) The author clearly lacks proper training in physics, and the technical details he describes is intended mainly to impress the non-scientific reader - the pitfall is that for a trained physicist it is almost nonsensical to imagine that someone of Heisenberg's stature would make the silly mistakes ascribed to him by the author. The point is that he draws too much on information given by Hans Bethe, a less than reliable source on Heisenberg as anyone who knew both men were aware (but not the author, it seems).

3) Heisenberg read ancient Greek fluently and in fact he read the Greek philosophers in order to reflect upon his scientific activity. It was this broad and humanistic vision of physics that attracted Ettore Majorana to Heisenberg at Leipzig and estranged him from Fermi and his group in Rome (it should be remembered that for Majorana a proper ethical stance was always more important than scientific achievements). It seems to defy our common sense to mantain that a man with this backgroud would be the morally silly character portrayed in the book. In fact, impartial accounts given by other scientists who knew Heisenberg (Weisskopf, for example) shows a different picture.

The mixture of void grand metaphysical speculation and scientific and historical ignorance is a common feature of much that today is published in France as "cultural" studies of science. If it were not for the interesting historical material dug by the author, his book would neatly fall into this category - cheap French journalism.

After having read this book, I am left with very mixed feelings. First the good stuff: This book gives a thorough account of the german A-bomb project during WW2. Lots of original documents are provided, so that one can form an own oppinion. Also the technical aspects are quite well captured for a non-physicist.

For the bad stuff: This book is thoroughly racist. I am flabbergasted, that a major publisher is willing to print a book that, in its foreword, already contains a statement about the deep hatred of the author not against Heissenberg or the Nazi regime, but against German culture and Germans as a whole. Also the treatment of Heissenberg as a physicist is certainly not adequate. It may very well be true, that he was morally corrupt or overly proud and arrogant, but statements like that he did not understand the concept of critical mass just because he never explicitly wrote down the exponential growth of neutrons in a bomb are at best uninformed and childish. Especially disgusting however is the authors revelation of 'the truth about the german mind', which traces a line of evil from Hitler back to Martin Luther.

For all its qualities as a source of information, this is the worst kind of a historical book: One that was written to judge. And this it does not only based on facts, but largeley on the authors all too apparent prejudices against a whole culture, which are labeled as 'the truth'.

this book is so deeply biased and prejudiced against its main subject (Werner Heisenberg) that it cannot be taken seriously even for the few relevant things it has to say. Moreover the author is so aggressive (almost violent)against what he calls "german culture" (this label already suggests a lot) that his criticism borders on cultural racism. I deeply regret the time and money I spent in reading and buying this book.

Supposedly the author is a historian, however, nothing in terms of research method has been applied; this is a work of journalism, and very much on the simplistic side.

The book contains some very selective use of sources, to prove the objective stated at the onset (in preface): That Heisenberg was morally corrupt, and at that a representative for German culture.

It does not get more advanced than that in the rest of the book, so one can basically stop reading after the preface.

R. Rose has a personal axe to grind and it distorts this entire book. His attempt to be a "historian" is undermined by any serious attempt to look at the evidence and to use objective facts to guide his interpretation. No serious historian would ever endorse this book and it is fatally flawed by Rose's bias.

Whether or not you agree with the author's conclusions, Rose's book provides a response to Powers's"Heisenberg's War," and provides material which was not available to Cassidy in "Uncertainty..." Some of the material, such as the supposed antisemitic rant by Heisenberg in the presence of Max Born, I found barely credible, due to a reliance on second hand sources.

Nevertheless, Bohr's post war coolness toward Heisenberg as well as Heisenberg's failure to honestly confront the evil of the Nazi regime after the war are evidence that Rose's negative view of Heisenberg is closer to the truth than Powers's mostly positive one. I would strongly urge those interested in Heisenberg and the other German physicists of that era to purchase both the Rose book and the Powers book, and then to decide for themselves.

In the immortal words of Gene Autry: How can anyone be right, when everybody's wrong? Mr. Garea's (Amazon's Spotlight review) thoughtful, well written critique on the Heisenberg portrayed in Mr. Rose's book is "compleat" (yuck yuck), and there is nothing I need to add. Mr. Rose's slashing attack on Mr. Heisenberg is too simplistic, fails to take into account the impact of the political, economic and moral collapse of Weimar Germany on the German people, and plays too heavily on what Mr. Rose sees as 400 unchanging years of Germanic totalitatian culture. Heisenberg's harshest critics, the Nobel Laureates Lenard and Stark with their Newtonian cause & effect "German Physics" (as opposed to "Jewish Physics" ie relativity & disputes about quantum mechanics a la Einstein and Niels Bohr), they were the ones falsely tied to a vision of Germanic Culture. Not Heisenberg.

Where I part ways with Mr. Garea is in Mr. Garea's tounge in cheek portrayal of a Werner Heisenberg qua James Bond (maybe not Sean Connery or Roger Moore--more like a Timothy Dalton or George Lazenby) from Thomas Powers "Heisenberg's War: the Secret History of the German Bomb." Whatever else he was, Mr. Heisenberg was no smoothie--a common denominator for Bondness. However, I am convinced by Mr. Powers's thesis that Mr. Heisenberg did retard Germany's development of the atomic bomb. No, Heisenberg did not "fake" math calculations or create false evidence, but as Mr. Powers carefully documents, Heisenberg did work hard to create a false impression of the feasibility of creating an atom bomb. Of the different opportunities that Heisenberg had for pushing development of a German A-bomb, none could have been as fortuitous as the June 1942 meeting with Albert Speer. Speer had just been appointed Hitler's honcho to get the economy on a war footing, and develop some answer to the allies increasingly relentless and unanswerable bombing missions. Additionally, the Nazi regime needed to do something about the military reverses at Moscow. If Heisenberg wanted to build an atom bomb, Speer was ready to fund one. Instead, Heisenberg gave a deliberately obtuse presentation about the atom bomb. Heisenberg was well aware that a reactor would create the fissonable element 94 (plutonium), but instead spoke generally of "transuranics." This conscious fogging of the science intentionally left a false impression on Speer's science advisor, a physical chemist named Lieb. After the meeting, Lieb (incorrectly) believed that only U-235 could be used for a bomb, and that there was no viable way to separate U-235 from U-238. Heisenberg knew better--plutonium could replace U-235--and how much fissonable material was needed for a critical mass: about the size of a pineapple. Finally, Heisenberg told Speer that perhaps a working reactor could be built in 1942, but a bomb could not be built before 1945. These dates are key for two reasons. First, the dates are outside the parameters that Speer needed, and second: they were also damn good guesses. Mr. Fermi created the world's first sustained chain reactor in Chicago in December, 1942 and the US blew up the first bomb in July 1945. Finally, if Heisenberg really wanted to go all out on a German bomb, there was Speer ready to write the big checks. Instead, Heisenberg & his people asked for piddling amounts of funding to continue basic research--so small that Speer promptly lost interest in atom bombs. The importance of this June 1942 Meeting, and the difference between what Heisenberg knew and what he told Speer is lost on Mr. Rose.

Heisenberg did consciously retard German developments of an A-bomb, if only by deliberately creating several key false impressions--not exactly the stuff that wins hearts of Ursula Andress, Jill St. John or even Sophie Marceau, but it still counts.

Nevertheless, how should we account for Heisenberg's inconsistent actions both during and especially after the war? Mr. Powers suggests several reasons, but I do not believe he gives enough creedence to Heisenberg's (and most Germans) fear & distrust of Soviet Russia. Many individuals in the West initially excused Nazi excesses in the name of restoration of the economy (if only taming rampent inflation), and creating a bulwark against Stalinism. One of Heisenberg's key co-workers was a (now former) communist sympathizer who returned to Nazi Germany after two & a half years in a Soviet prison, with a forced bogus confession of being a Gestapo-Trotsky-Bukharin spy. Something needed to be done about Stalin. Moreover, post WWI Germany featured seemingly endless rises and collapses of Governments. At the time, it was not unreasonable to believe that Hitler's thousand year reich would be replaced in next year's coup by the Christian Democrats, or the Weirmarcht would throw out the Nazis, and continue a secular (as opposed to Nazi racist paganism) military dictatorship. The post WWII alibi of the "good germans" was not only that they "didn't know," but that "someone" needed to stop Stalin (not to mention the crap about building the autobahn, but we digress).

Finally, Heisenberg's seemingly inconsistent statements after the war are probably a combination of his foolish pride (OF COURSE he could have built a bomb--if he REALLY wanted to), and his awkward speaking style. This last point is more of an impression--but Heisenberg was a physicist, not a politician or a public speaker. He could talk about science with exactness--but outside of that realm, he left much to be desired.

In short, I am convinced by Mr. Powers's arguments and the breath of his documentation. Mr. Rose needed to pay closer attention to Powers's book, and the documentation used by Powers.

As a final note on both this book and Mr. Powers's book--indeed, since Heisenberg's death in 1976, any book about Heisenberg--an important source as to Heisenberg's postwar views is the 1967 book "The German Atomic Bomb," and a battery of extensive personal interviews, all by David Irving. Mr. Powers merely cites this source--an undisputedly important source--without comment. Still, as a historian, there is no question that Mr. Irving's reputation has taken a beating. See, for example, "Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial" by Richard J. Evans. Mr. Irving has recently been sentenced to three years imprisonment in Austria as a "holocaust denier." What all Mr. Irving's personal beliefs, credentials, and current legal woes add to the discussion of Heisenberg's activities from 1939 to 1945, I do not know. I have no idea what Mr. Irving's views were in 1965-1967, when Mr. Irving extensively interviewed Heisenberg and wrote his book--and if Heisenberg was aware of those views in giving such time and access to Mr. Irving. I only mention this as an additional piece of the Heisenberg puzzle that may (or may not) mean anything.

Be that as it may, the bottom line is: Read Powers's book, and not this one. And Amazon is damn lucky to have thorough reviewers like Mr. Garea.

cannot say i wasn't warned--rose admits this is not a graceful book and he is not kidding. falls in to the all too frequent trap of viewing with hindsight events that were cumulative and indulging in speculation as to what the subject's mind set must have/could have/should have been in Rose's theory. first time i have ever seen a supposedly scholarly approach that cites "private information" without any clarification as a source.

in the last analysis, fails to deliver on the promise set out in the title. a hatchet job.

I remember learning about Hiesenberg's Uncertainty Principle in college chemistry; a simple but elegant fact of nature. Behind the brilliance of the concept lies a most complicated, complex and nebulous personality.

What kind of person of such intelligence would actively participate in Nazi science, let alone the possible development of the most destructive weapon known to mankind for Nationalist Germany during World War II? I had always accepted the notions that Dr. Heisenberg was just trying to protect German science or German Scientists; that he was really trying to assist German Jews; that he was trying to protect "Jewish Physics;" that he felt an unusual loyalty to the German state, but not its leaders; or that he really tried to preempt the German atomic bomb with false information or an inflated degree of difficulty in developing the bomb. Somehow none of it quite seemed to fit. What of the meeting with Neils Bohr in Copenhagen? It is a shame that Dr. Bohr did not leave a record of the meeting!

In any event, Professor Rose has provided an outstanding work placing Dr. Heisenberg in the setting, culture, and mind set of Germany and her people just before and during World War II. This book is a significant historical work and provides historical insight and historical fact in the context of World War II Germany and its culture.

After reading this book, I am convinced that Dr. Heisenberg was less than honest with himself. He clearly aided Nazi Germany and expected Germany to dominate Europe, as would German science. I think that it is also evident that Dr. Heisenberg had deceived himself as to his knowledge of the atomic bomb.

When I finished this book, my uncertainty about Dr. Heisenberg's role in Nazi science was put to rest. He was an active participant, something that he could never acknowledge.