How much did the WW2 German military know about the German atomic bomb project?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Chronos

Exapno, your link just talks about a letter from Bohr to Heisenberg, based on a single meeting he had with him, and which letter hasn’t even been seen by anyone who’s ever commented on it. That doesn’t strike me as very strong evidence.

Personally, I decidedly don’t take any stance on whether Heisenberg did or did not sabotage the program. Based on his claims, he’s either a hero, or a monster, and I wish to risk neither diminishing a hero nor praising a monster.

Can you provide a cite for Heisenberg actually stating he sabotaged the project? I couldn’t find one. All I can find are good historians saying, as I paraphrased, that it was extremely unlikely.

Allegations of Sabotage

A popular theory for the failure of the German project is that Heisenberg deliberately aborted it so that Hitler would not have the atomic bomb. But there remains little evidence of this. Heisenberg’s 1941 meeting in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr, who would later work on the Manhattan Project, was dramatized in the 1998 play Copenhagen. The play explores three scenarios where Heisenberg discusses his dilemma with Bohr, but leaves the matter for audiences to decide what Heisenberg actually believed and intended to do.

Nevertheless, different accounts of this meeting suggest otherwise. Heisenberg’s wife Elizabeth described a “vague hope” that Heisenberg had to halt bomb development in the United States by passing reassurances through Bohr. Victor Weisskopf recounted Bohr telling him, “Heisenberg wanted to know if Bohr knew anything about the nuclear program of the Allies. He wanted to propose a scientists’ decision not to work on the bomb, and he wanted to invite Bohr to come to Germany to establish better relations” (Powers 125).

Heisenberg did however tell Bohr that the German project was underway, and drew a simple sketch, which Bohr thought to be a bomb. Infuriated by Heisenberg, who he thought “is not being honest, or he is being used by the Nazi government,” Bohr refused to speak with him more and eventually turned the sketch over to Manhattan Project scientists, who identified it as the outline of a reactor (Powers 126). J. Robert Oppenheimer later recalled, “Bohr had the impression that they came less to tell what they knew than to see if Bohr knew anything that they did not; I believe it was a standoff.” As his son Aage Bohr explained, “He had the impression that Heisenberg thought that the new possibilities could decide the outcome of the war if the war dragged on” (Rhodes 385).

Despite some misgivings about building a bomb, throughout the war Heisenberg maintained a genuine loyalty to his country. Richard Rhodes recalled, “There was at least one speculation that one of the German scientists deliberately falsified the measurements in graphite, hoping to stop a German bomb program. I don’t think there’s really evidence to support that. It seems to have been a mistake in the course of developing these various components of the technology.” Historians generally agree that the problems with the German project stemmed from serious miscalculations and a lack of priority. The allegations of sabotage carry little weight.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Ah, I did find a cite in Rose, Paul Lawrence. Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. On p. 60, Rose quotes a 1970 letter to Ruth Nanda Aschen.

Dr. Hahn, Dr. van Laue, and I falsified the mathematics in order to avoid the development of the atom bomb by German scientists.

No further elaboration.

Perhaps there’s more like this, but by itself such a self-serving statement a quarter-century after the war does not change my opinion of “extremely unlikely.”

[squidfood]

@Alessan

Let’s just say that he was and he wasn’t.

If we knew where he was on the research, we wouldn’t know how fast it was progressing.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Alessan

Let’s just say that he was and he wasn’t.

As I understand it, he knew where he was, but he didn’t know where he was going.

[carnivorousplant]

I recall about a Jewish friend from college was to be whacked. He was trying to work up the courage to ask the authorities to release the guy. I don’t recall if he did or not. It’s been a long time since I read The German Atomic Bomb.

[bob_2]

@Alessan

Let’s just say that he was and he wasn’t.

Are you certain?

[carnivorousplant]

@bob_2

Are you certain?

Kinda sorta.

[bonzer]

@carnivorousplant

I recall about a Jewish friend from college was to be whacked. He was trying to work up the courage to ask the authorities to release the guy. I don’t recall if he did or not.

Possibly a garbled version of the case of Samuel Goudsmit’s parents? Heisenberg and Goudsmit were contemporaries at the forefront of quantum physics in the Twenties and were relatively close friends then and through the Thirties. The latter took up a job in the US before Hitler coming to power and the main refugee exodus.
However his parents remained in Holland (the family was Dutch) and got trapped by the Nazi occupation. As Jews, they got deported eastwards in 1943. At this point a Dutch physicist appealed to Heisenberg to try to intervene. He did reply, but - in hindsight - by that stage the parents had already been murdered (offhand, in Auschwitz). There’s no evidence that, having vacillated, Heisenberg ever actually tried to do anything.

The significance of this to the whole, endlessly unresolvable debate about Heisenberg and nuclear weapons is that Goudsmit became the chief scientist assigned to the Alsos Mission, the Manhattan Project’s front-line intelligence operation in Europe in 1944-5. He’s one of the main guys who has to hunt down Heisenberg. It’s then Goudsmit’s postwar memoir that sets off the whole debate and the sniping between the two of them then ran on for decades.
Pretty much everyone accepts that there was a degree of (perfectly understandable) personal animosity in all this on Goudsmit’s part over Heisenberg’s failure to try to save the parents. They did sort of patch up their personal relationship late in both their lives, but not perfectly.

[carnivorousplant]

Thanks, Bonzer, I vaguely remember that.
I had a textbook written by Heisenberg in graduate school. about half an inch thick, and difficult as hell to understand. This from a guy who dreamed of trigonometric substitution when I took differential equations. I would awaken and freak out. “Was that accurate? Christ, I can’t remember!”