The German Genius

imprisoned. 8 Released during the brief Hitler-Stalin pact, he returned to Germany where he was suspected of still having leftist leanings but was given a job by Max von Laue, helping another physicist, Manfred von Ardenne, study chain reactions. After reading the Joliot-Curie paper in Nature in 1939, Houtermans concluded that plutonium was a possibility for a chain reaction and was so disturbed when his calculations confirmed this that he smuggled a message out of the country with a refugee bound for America. Although he didn’t know how far the Allies were advanced in their bomb, his message had two elements—to “hurry” and to say that Heisenberg was trying to slow things down. 9
    Given the actions of these two men, it is perhaps not surprising that the German bomb project was not successful, though there were other reasons for the failure. After the occupation of Norway, the world’s only heavy water plant, at Vermork, became available to the Germans, but when they tried to transport a large load south, the Danish Resistance (at the request of British Intelligence) blew up and sank the ferry carrying the canisters (several Danes lost their lives in the sinking). 10 When Speer took over as armaments minister (from Fritz Todt, who had been killed in a mysterious airplane crash), he told Heisenberg he could have a cyclotron bigger than anyone else; Heisenberg replied that the Germans were so inexperienced that they would first need to learn on a smaller one. 11 Nor could they use the one in occupied Paris, he said, because the conditions of secrecy hampered their work, all of which has been used to suggest he was deliberately sabotaging Germany’s nuclear program. 12 Speer eventually decided, or said he decided (after the war) that Germany could not have a bomb before 1947. 13 Since it was consuming chromium ore at such a pace that the war could not be prosecuted beyond January 1946, and since the sums needed were also draining its rocket program (much nearer to Hitler’s heart), Germany’s attempt to construct an atom bomb was abrogated in the autumn of 1942. 14
    Not all the German innovations in the war were as fruitless as the atom bomb. They had in the Me-262 the world’s first operational jet fighter, though in too few numbers to materially affect the course of the war. The brilliant marine engineer Helmut Walther designed the technology for Germany’s diesel submarines, which could achieve speeds underwater of 28 knots when conventional submarines were capable of barely 10 knots. 15 Here too they were too late to have an effect. The Germans had their own form of radar and for a time appeared to be ahead of the Allies. And they had Enigma, their typewriter-like code machine, which, in its more developed forms, could produce 159 billion billion different ways of setting a message (159 followed by 18 zeroes). Its main effect on history is perhaps that the British device invented to cope with the codes the Germans sent led to the Colossus, in effect the world’s first computer.
    The Germans also looked at computers, or at least very advanced calculating machines. They were mainly the work of Konrad Zuse, an engineer who, as early as 1932, used a binary—on/off or 1/0—scheme, with holes punched in paper and pins that could be locked in place, to develop a machine that performed the “tremendous numbers of monotonous calculations necessary for the design of static and aerodynamic structures” in the aircraft industry. 16 His machines, which had an electrochemical memory, were used by the aircraft industry to solve simultaneous equations associated with metals stress but were never employed in cryptanalysis and never developed further because the war ended too soon.
    Then there was rocket science. Under the 1919 Versailles Treaty, Germany was forbidden from forging large guns and had been famously forced to scuttle her fleet in Scapa Flow. Her army could not exceed 100,000 men, tanks and submarines were forbidden, and guns were not to exceed 105 mm. However, she secretly began to rearm, building ships under cover in Holland and Japan, and it was in these highly clandestine circumstances that her rocket development project took shape. The leading light was Wernher von Braun, though it was Hermann Oberth, a German-speaking Romanian, who in his 1923 book, published in Germany, first outlined how the problems of space flight might be solved by the use of alcohol and liquid oxygen, and liquid hydrogen and