The German Genius

was shallow and hypocritical, that the English national character knew no calling higher than exploitative profit making. Another theme was Alsace which, it was claimed, was a much more successful culture when it was German than when it was French.
    There was not much resistance inside the universities, save for the Weisse Rose (White Rose) group in Munich. This very small group—its core consisted of five students and a philosophy professor, who distributed six different leaflets in 1942 and 1943 calling for the overthrow of Hitler—was eventually found out, and all were beheaded by the Gestapo. The text of their sixth leaflet was smuggled out of Germany, and copies dropped by Allied aircraft later in 1943. At Heidelberg there was a group of between thirty and seventy professors (membership varied), led by Alfred Weber and his sister-in-law Marianne Weber, many of whom had been dismissed but kept working and met to exchange ideas. 3 Some were conservative rather than radical, but they formed what was later called “ Resistenz ,” a somewhat elusive term that involved refusing to accept Nazi ideology without publicly criticizing the regime’s policies and could hardly be said to involve any kind of bravery. Many were reduced to what Leo Strauss later called “writing between the lines.” 4
     
     
    Despite Leo Szilard’s warnings, on March 18, 1939, the French scientists, the Joliot-Curies, insisted on publication in Nature of their observation that nuclear fission emitted on average 2.42 neutrons for every neutron absorbed, meaning that energy was released in sufficient quantities to maintain a chain reaction. In Germany, the article was read by Paul Harteck, a thirty-seven-year-old chemist at the University of Hamburg and an expert on neutrons. Harteck immediately recognized the implications of the paper, and he approached the weapons research office of the German Army Ordnance, to say that a weapon of mass destruction, derived from uranium fission, was a distinct possibility. After the war, as John Cornwell tells the story, Harteck said it was only the “opportunistic quest for scarce funding” for research that caused him to set the ball rolling, rather than belligerence. 5 Whatever the truth of that, the effect was the same.
    In any case, by then Werner Heisenberg had already discussed the possibilities of an atomic bomb, and Abram Esau, a physicist in Bernhard Rust’s Department of Education, had called a meeting to set up a “Uranium Club,” prompted by physicists at Göttingen who also saw the potential of nuclear power in uranium. 6 A second, more important meeting was held at the office of Army Ordnance in Berlin in September 1939, the month the war began, at which Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Hans Geiger, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and Paul Harteck were all in attendance. 7 The “club” discussed nuclear power in general, in addition to its use as a weapon, and as a result the KWI for Physics, in Berlin, was requisitioned for war work.
    This sounds decisive, but the uranium team in Germany was never to exceed a hundred members, compared with tens of thousands in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in the United States. Whereas Germany had the largest supply of uranium reserves—at the Joachimsthal mines in now-occupied Czechoslovakia—it had no cyclotron for the study of the properties of nuclear reactions.
    The development of the German bomb—or rather the pace at which its research developed—has been the subject of much controversy (not least in Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen ). The Germans concentrated in the beginning on isotope separation though later they explored plutonium. These approaches involved the participation of two equally controversial and even mysterious characters, Werner Heisenberg and Fritz Houtermans. Heisenberg would become notorious for his meetings with Niels Bohr in 1940, in which the two men fenced over how far each side had gone in the race to produce a bomb, and for whether or not Heisenberg was letting Bohr know that Germany was exploring nuclear power and whether he, Heisenberg, was trying to slow down developments. Houtermans was a brilliant physicist who in 1941 confirmed that a chain reaction was possible using plutonium, element 94. Houtermans had trained at Göttingen but, having socialist sympathies, had gone to work in the Ukraine, despite Stalin’s purges. There he had been arrested as a German spy, had given a false confession and been