Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall [Hardcover]

Jeremy Bernstein (Author), David Cassidy (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1995

"The transcripts provide a unique insight into the characters, relationships and thoughts of a remarkable group of individuals." Nature In 1992 the transcripts of the secretly recorded conversation among ten key German nuclear scientists, including Hahn and Heisenberg, were made public. These important documents not only reveal what the German scientists knew and didn't know about building the atomic bomb in 1945, they also tell us what it was like to be a scientist in Germany during the Second World War. In this insightful book, the author annotates the transcripts in detail and presents a well-documented case to back his conclusion that German scientists knew very little about nuclear weapon technology before the Allies' bombing of Hiroshima.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Upon hearing about the Hiroshima bomb, the German nuclear physicists were astounded, and voluble about figuring out how the weapon worked. Their reactions were secretly taped, and after 50 years, their conversations about nuclear physics and Nazi politics were released. This, their first book-form appearance, broadly consists of Bernstein's summary of prewar physics and the German nuclear research program (including a turning-point, 1942 Heisenberg lecture to Nazi officials), and at the core are 25 transcripts drafted by the monitors. The most dramatic are those of August 6 and 7, 1945, into which Bernstein (a qualified scientist) inserts his commentary on the accuracy of the Germans' remarks, as well as his indignation at the rationalization by some of them that they purposely failed in order to prevent a Hitler victory. Bernstein's obiter dicta make clear his disbelief in ethical compunctions, but readers can at last reach their own conclusion. Heavily technical in patches, yet this one-of-a-kind document earns large libraries' consideration with its human-interest aspects. Gilbert Taylor

Review

Captured and detained by the Allies, ten German atomic scientists joined the rest of the world in astonishment as they learned that a U. S. Air Force bomber had just dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima, Japan. Many of these men had worked on a Nazi nuclear reactor project, but they were now being held at Farm Hall, an English country manor used by British intelligence. Eavesdropping on these men and recording their conversations, the Allies learned how close the Nazis came in their failed attempt to build an atomic bomb and how much the Germans knew about the Allies' research efforts. Kept under wraps until 1992, records of these top-secret conversations are fully explored for the first time in Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings At Farm Hall. Providing the first expertly annotated transcripts of the Farm Hall conversations, Hitler's Uranium Club brings fresh insights into the progress of the German bomb project during World War II, the thoughts of German scientists during that time, and their attempts to grapple with the postwar era. -- Midwest Book Review

Product Details

• Hardcover: 457 pages
• Publisher: American Institute of Physics; annotated edition edition (November 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1563962586
• ISBN-13: 978-1563962585
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,244,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Get it from the horse's mouth, Werner Heisenberg himself., September 4, 2002

By 

Tony (Moorpark, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Paperback)

This book consists of expertly annotated transcripts of conversations of German scientists taken at Farm Hall after the end of the WWII in Europe. The book is based on the recently de-classified "Farm Hall Transcripts", a revealing set of informative statements which demonstrates the low level of understanding that the German Scientists had of how to build Atomic Bombs. It is written and annotated by an American physicist, so you get some insights as to Heisenberg's mistakes. The book is a refutation of the book "Heisenberg's War" by Thomas Powers, a revisionist history that claims that Heisenberg, Germany's top scientist, really knew how an Atomic Bomb worked, but withheld this information from his colleagues and the German Government.

Heisenberg remains a mystery. He won a Nobel Prize in Physics in the early 1930s for his "Uncertainty Principle" which deals with Quantum Mechanics. Yet despite his brilliance, he sounds pretty ignorant at Farm Hall. Was he faking? I think not. To paraphrase Watergate: the question still is "What did Werner Heisenberg know and when did he know it? At Farm Hall, when he found out about Hiroshima, his ego deflated like an untied balloon. His comments were made at a vulnerable and candid moment. They reveal a knowledge one would expect from someone you picked at random at a shopping mall.

The Manhattan Project was at least as much engineering as science, and Heisenberg was more of a theologian than a nuts 'n bolts guy.

But hey, don't take my word for it. If you are really interested, I recommend this book along with "Heisenberg's War" so you get both sides. Then read "Alsos" by Samuel Goudschmidt, the scientific leader of the famous Alsos Mission, who along with Col. Boris T. Pash ("The Alsos Mission"), followed the allied armies into France and captured Heisenberg and the others. Goudschmidt was a physicist who offered the earliest (1947) and perhaps the most philosophical postmortem on the German A-bomb "program".

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A startling and sobering set of documents, March 19, 2001

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Paperback)

Toward the end of World War II, ten German nuclear physicists were captured by American and British forces and sent to Farm Hall, An English country house near Cambridge for six months. While there they were interrogated about Germany's nuclear research. Farm Hall was a comfortable prison, but it was bugged and their every word was secretly monitored by British agents. Now in a revised and updated second edition, Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings At Farm Hall is a complete collection of transcripts made from those secret recordings in 1945. Expertly annotated by Jeremy Bernstein and put in context by Bernstein (and with an informative introduction by David Cassidy). This startling and sobering set of documents provide an insight into the thoughts and feelings of these ten scientists as they considered the destruction of the Third Reich, the failure of their beloved "German Physics", and the roles they played in the Nazi war effort. Hitler's Uranium Club is a unique, informative, invaluable, and at times unsettling contribution to World War II studies.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Kindle edition misses essential notes and comments, August 27, 2009

By 

William Evenson (Provo, UT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Kindle Edition)

Unfortunately, the Kindle edition of this important and interesting book does not link correctly to the editor's notes and comments. These are absolutely essential -- this is a transcript, and the notes and comments clarify both historical and technical context. I finally had to get a printed copy of the book -- my Kindle edition was a waste of money!

Having read the printed copy, I give that edition very high marks. But don't buy the Kindle edition unless they fix the editorial notes and comments.