Werner Heisenberg led the Nazi effort to develop the atomic bomb. If they’d obtained it, this would have been a Bad Thing. Fortunately, the Nazis had a flawed theoretical approach, and were nowhere near building a weapon by the end of the war. Heisenberg claimed that this was, at least in part, intentional; he was a man of conscience, selflessly working to sabotage the project from the inside.
Personally, I’m skeptical. It seems unlikely that any harm would have come to Heisenberg if he’d declined to join the project - even fantastically evil regimes know better than to draft entirely unwilling physicists. (After all, they could easily do exactly what Heisenberg claims he did, and sabotage the work with no one being the wiser.) And without many other folks of Heisenberg’s caliber, his simple non-participation would have dealt a serious blow to the effort.
My guess? Heisenberg had no great love for the Nazi regime, and felt conflicted about the work, but was doing a more-or-less honest job, to the very best of his ability. Which would make him something of a bastard.
ETA: Damnit, why can’t I fix spelling errors in the title? Lousy vbulletin.
A collaborator is someone who cooperates with an enemy occupying ones country. A traitor. Heisenberg was a German citizen and could not be called a collaborator for working for the German government. In addition many good men worked for the Nazi government, without this makes them bastards.
“Collaborator” was possibly a poor choice of words. “Bastard,” however, would be pretty much fair if Heisenberg was honestly trying to help the Nazis build an atomic bomb. I agree with you that there were reasonably non-evil-men working for the German government during WW2 - while I’m sure the civil service became politicized, there were plenty of not-evil jobs even in that nightmare regime. (I’m inclined to more-or-less give a pass to postal service workers, for example.)
But even if we accept that one could work for the German government of that time in some capacity without being a bastard, working to build an atomic bomb is rather a special case, isn’t it? I mean, we’re talking about a device that would have incinerated cities at a single go, and would have been handed over to a genocidal state. So far as bastardy goes, that ranks pretty darned high.
He slipped Bohr some of the plans for the Nazi reactor during their famous meeting in Copenhagen, something that I assume would have caused him to be shot had the Nazi’s found out. So at least by that point in the war, he was at least testing the waters regarding betraying the Nazi’s and willing to take risks for the same.
I think he was conflicted. On the one hand, he was a fairly enthusiastic German nationalist, at least during the early 30’s, and also liked some of the Nazi ideology regarding physical fitness and the like. On the other-hand, many of his co-workers were Jews, and he himself was obviously against their being run out of Germany or put in camps, the Nazi’s were anti-modern physics and he himself had been prosecuted during the late 30’s (and was saved by the odd coincidence that his mom was friends Himmler’s mom, and the latter told her son to knock it off).
So I think Heisneberg was a German Nationalist who convinced himself that the more extreme tenants of Nazism were just talk, and when it became obvious that wasn’t true, he at least started down the path of active resistance before the war ended.
Heisenburg was an excellent theoretical physicist, but a lousy experimentalist. He made major mistakes in researching atomic fission. The test reactor he built (blocks of uranium suspended by chains in heavy water) would have blown up and killed everybody around it, had it gone critical (it never would). Plus, the Germans never understood the phenomenon of “poisoning” (the damping of a fission reaction by neutron absorption). The metallic uranium produced by the germans was heavily contaminated with other elements that would have prevented fissioning.
Finally (as was mentioned in another thread) the calculations he made for critical mas (for a uranim bomb) were totally wrong (he though a workable bomb would weigh hundreds of tons).
I do recall his reaction to the United States atomic bomb. He was being “held” somewhere with the other German scientists when they heard about it. He didn’t believe it was possible from the work he had done.
This is my argument against the “deliberate sabotage” argument.
As I pointed out in the other thread. Heisenberg and his colleagues were being held by the allies when they news of Hiroshima broke. The location they were held (Farm Hall in Godmanchester) was secretly bugged in an effort to reveal any secrets they were concealing about the Nazi A-Bomb effort as part of “Operation Epsilon” (and there is no evidence any of them had any inclining of this fact).
In the recordings Heisenberg is heard talking about his disbelief over how the allies could have transported tons of fissionable material to the target city. This clearly shows he simply had never repeated the calculations made by German-Jewish scientists Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls in Britain during the 1930s, that showed only a pound of uranium-235 was required for critical mass (this turned out to be slight under-estimate).
Is that known to be the case?I was under the impression (so may quite possibly be wrong), that the contents of the WWII Bohr-Heisenberg conversations in Copenhagen are lost to history.
Indeed, not only do we not know what they said to each other, we don’t even know which direction Heisenberg was coming from, i.e. did he go there to try to recruit Bohr? Or did he go there to reassure Bohr? Or, perhaps he went there to pump Bohr about the allied effort (or even atomic physics questions he was “stumped” by)?
Me too. Some people have speculated that Heisenberg was attempting to organize a “strike” of physicists on all sides during the war, to prevent anyone from making an atomic bomb, but Bohr misunderstood his intentions and rebuffed him (not that such an effort would have ever worked IMO).
Except he was doing it for a vicious mass murdering dictatorship. The full of extent of the Nazi’s crimes may not have been evident at the time, but there was enough information out there for anyone to seriously question working for the Nazi regime.
And, earlier on the war at least, it would have career suicide to go against the regime wishes, not actual suicide.
