Hitler’s Atomic Bomb: History, Legend and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima
By Mark Walker
Cambridge University Press,
380 pp.
Deep in historian Mark Walker’s important and highly detailed history of Nazi Germany’s wartime nuclear research, I found myself engrossed in a chapter about Albert Einstein and the conflict over his ideas in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. The case of Einstein provides a glimpse into how scientific discovery, fascist ideology and war interacted in Nazi Germany—part of the larger story the book is telling about the German atomic research program during World War II and particularly the career of the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg.
Einstein was a German citizen living outside Germany who had opposed World War I. He was a pacifist, an internationalist and a Jew who faulted imperial Germany for starting the war. At that time, Germans treasured the “stab-in-the-back myth,” the notion that they would have won the war but for the treachery of bankers, Bolsheviks and Jews. Einstein’s criticism was a case in point, and it infuriated right-wing Germans, especially ethnic German nationalists, the self-described Völkisch, who joined forces under the Nazi banner.
In 1934, Heisenberg, in his early 30s but already a professor in Leipzig and a Nobel laureate, was being considered for a more prestigious professorship in Munich. The promotion was opposed and viciously attacked by far-right nationalists. His critics included two older Nobel laureates in physics. Their opposition was not on account of Heisenberg’s bloodlines or his politics—he was conservative and, in the vocabulary of Nazism, “Aryan”—but rather because of his embrace of Einstein’s theory of relativity and his development of the related field of quantum mechanics. The 1905 laureate in physics, Philipp Lenard, branded Einstein’s work Jüdische Physik, or “Jewish physics” (although many gentile German physicists acknowledged its importance). Johannes Stark, the 1919 laureate, vowed, as Walker quotes him, to “do everything that I can do in order to break the domination of the Jews over my science.”
Walker describes how in 1935, with the Nazis already in power, Stark wrote: “Today, Einstein has vanished from Germany…but unfortunately his German friends and supporters are still able to continue working in his spirit…the theoretical formalist Heisenberg, spirit of Einstein’s spirit, is even supposed to be honored by a call to a professorship.” Despite Heisenberg’s stature, advocates of “Aryan physics” dismissed modern physics as conflicting with nature and common sense, and as a quintessentially Jewish flight of imagination. Evidently, the simpler verities of a Newtonian universe fit the Nazi worldview better.
Werner Heisenberg (left) and Niels Bohr (right) in Copenhagen, 1932. (Photo credit: Caltech Images Collection, Images. California Institute of Technology Archives and Special Collections)
For several years, advocates of “Aryan physics” vied with advocates of relativity in articles and conferences, though Heisenberg ultimately prevailed on behalf of modern physics. Walker’s telling of how he did this, through a mix of compromise and ambiguity, connects to how he went on to lead Germany’s wartime nuclear program, the larger subject of Walker’s work. Heisenberg—while not a Nazi—was not averse to dealing with them. His mother happened to know the mother of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and Heisenberg had her pass a letter to Himmler using that channel.
In it, the young physicist demanded to know, as his university post in Leipzig made him a civil servant, whether the government shared Lenard and Stark’s view of him. If so, he would resign.
Heisenberg must have known that his resignation would be seen around the world as a setback to German science. Himmler had the SS investigate complaints against Heisenberg, and they ultimately cleared him—although, to satisfy the Nazi hierarchy, Himmler promoted Heisenberg not to the prestigious and disputed Munich post but to important positions in Berlin.
“Aryan physics” and its champions were ultimately undone by a successful line of argument developed by their physicist adversaries: One could appreciate Einstein’s physics while deploring his politics, they argued, and furthermore, if Einstein had not derived the theory of relativity when he did, some other physicist ultimately would have done so. In other words, use the physics, forget the physicist. If that was disrespectful to the world’s most famous scientist, it was the sort of compromise that survival required in the circles where Heisenberg traveled. His bureaucratic defenders’ arguments on his behalf were littered with antisemitic remarks; he signed off his first letter to Himmler (in which he noted that he belonged to no party) with the politically correct “Heil Hitler.”
The history of the atomic bomb’s development and the failure of German science to match the Manhattan Project’s success remain fertile ground for both historical and moral/philosophical dispute. In the years after World War II, when Heisenberg defended his role directing Germany’s wartime atomic energy project, he implausibly described his own behavior as a form of resistance that, being carried out in the belly of the beast, required the occasional tactical compromise. His claim was elevated by the playwright Michael Frayn in his play Copenhagen to what Walker dismisses as a legend, a story “too good to be true.” The play depicts a never-fully-explained meeting in September 1941 when Heisenberg and his close collaborator Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker traveled to Copenhagen, where Heisenberg met with his former mentor Niels Bohr. The two men spoke about nuclear physics and politics, and, according to postwar accounts, Heisenberg told Bohr that an atomic bomb was a possibility and that the Germans were working on potential military progress in that direction. Heisenberg also suggested that Bohr convey an appeal to physicists the world over to refrain from developing such a weapon.
In Frayn’s play, which won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2000 and was made into a TV movie in 2002, the strong implication is that Heisenberg was thwarting the scientific work being done under his command, purposely slowing German progress, throwing the game while playing the part of team captain. This is an appealing thought to those who hope that scientific brilliance yields some redeeming moral insight. But Walker is having none of it. By the time of the Copenhagen meeting, he points out, Germany had attacked the Soviet Union and was encountering very stiff resistance. The Germans had no New Mexico with vast spaces beyond the war’s reach to use as a testing ground. A year or two later, the factories that would be needed to make the components of a bomb were subject to constant Allied air attacks, and the country’s atomic ambitions had been scaled back to simply trying to build a nuclear reactor (which they called a “uranium machine”).
Walker figures Heisenberg’s real mission to Copenhagen was to convey an inflated picture of German progress and to urge physicists in the United States and Britain to abandon their better-funded and more successful nuclear programs.
What makes any of this compelling, 80 years after the United States did precisely what it had once feared Nazi Germany would do, drop atomic bombs on enemy cities? Walker does not quite pay off on his book’s subtitle about Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Yes, German physicists, especially having had so many Jewish colleagues before their ouster by the Nazis, could not plausibly have been oblivious to the mass murder of Jews from Germany and elsewhere. But those wanton mass murders do not seem particularly dependent on or related to German physics. Hiroshima is the key.
The assumption that Germany would make a bomb drove émigré scientists like Einstein and Leo Szilard to urge President Franklin D. Roosevelt to beat the Germans to it. The use of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also a signal to Moscow of the postwar Anglo-American primacy to come and, to Stalin, of the need for a Soviet bomb. The spiraling arms race of the Cold War was thus set off by the bomb that German physicists recognized was beyond their reach.
Walker’s detailed analysis of the characters of Heisenberg, Weizsäcker and their colleagues—highly accomplished men, some gifted beyond brilliance yet capable of deception and self-deception to protect their projects, families and lives—also remains compelling reading. They witnessed the purging and demonization of their Jewish colleagues, and if they regretted that policy, it seems to have been more for the injury done to German physics than to the human beings whose lives were uprooted. In choosing to stay, they rationalized their roles as protecting the superiority of German science from party hacks or moderating the schemes of the most extreme Nazi leaders. Talking up the prospects of a possible atomic weapon when the entire German nuclear program was a fraction of the Manhattan Project kept budgets for nuclear research replenished and young scientists safe from conscription, even as Allied armies converged on Germany. Flattering those in power helped, too.
Heisenberg was rehabilitated after World War II, and in West Germany he stuck to nuclear energy, not weapons. Weizsäcker became one of the country’s best-known public intellectuals. It is hard to fault them for what they did, since, failing to achieve a bomb at the war’s end, they contributed less to the German war effort than any random company of infantrymen on the Eastern front. As their one-time colleague Lise Meitner, an expatriate German Jewish scientist who was done out of her rightful share of credit for the discovery of nuclear fission, wrote, it wasn’t what her former coworkers had done, it was for whom they had done it. As unusual a group as they were, their wrongdoing was of the most commonplace sort: They stayed when history said “Leave.”
Robert Siegel is Moment’s special literary correspondent.
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