Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall

by Jeremy Bernstein

"The transcripts provide a unique insight into the characters, relationships and thoughts of a remarkable group of individuals." Nature In 1992 the transcripts of the secretly recorded conversation among ten key German nuclear scientists, including Hahn and Heisenberg, were made public. These important documents not only reveal what the German scientists knew and didn't know about building the atomic bomb in 1945, they also tell us what it was like to be a scientist in Germany during the Second World War. In this insightful book, the author annotates the transcripts in detail and presents a well-documented case to back his conclusion that German scientists knew very little about nuclear weapon technology before the Allies' bombing of Hiroshima.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, War, Physics, History Of Science

427 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are few, if any, other instances in recorded history where we have the conversations of leading figures as they complete one era, come to terms with it, and prepare their strategy for the next. It is as though these men were lifted out of history at a crucial turning point—from the age of conventional weapons to the nuclear era — placed within a timeless container and told to discuss their past and future as the recorders roll.

- Jeremy Bernstein


Astonishingly dramatic; also as pure as primary sources get. These reports were the result of months of secret eavesdropping on the German nuclear scientists, including after they hear of Hiroshima. Innocent of the microphones, the men concede their ignorance without ego, their character without any obfuscating propriety. (There are still two impurities: their words are both transcribed and translated by strangers. The physicists speak to us here in full sentences, with little of the fragmentariness and repetition of real speech. And it takes someone as highly trained as Bernstein to get us over the technical barrier.) Even so, this is as plain and self-interpreting as history gets. For six months they play madlibs, argue, and run around the garden, while the English and we listen in.

Hahn is a sweetheart and von Laue a droopy hero. The Party functionary Diebner is comic, even though he has most responsibility for the Nazi weapons project. Harteck is the most technically astute by far: he guesses a huge amount correctly, all in the teeth of loud ignorance by his more prestigious peers. von Weizsacker is the slimiest. Heisenberg is just weird: he has a very faint echo of the strange clear-sight-and-moral-vacuum of Eichmann. Enormous intelligence and no sense.

The morality of their wartime actions does not come up very much (except when raised by sweetheart Hahn or von Laue). They are mostly glad of the destruction of the Nazis, and Wirtz is horrified by the scale and singularity of SS murder. But the rest are more self-regarding than pro or anti Nazi. (Again, it is wonderful to read these and actually know they meant it.)

(What about the morality of our reading the reports? I don't have a clear opinion, but doing so after their deaths seems mostly fair.)

They very often speak about money, Heisenberg in particular. (Not just research funding or aid for their families in Occupied Germany, but dolla dolla bills.) On hearing that Hahn had won a Nobel:

"it says that you are supposed to receive the Nobel Prize for 1944." The excitement that struck the ten detainees at this moment is hard to describe in a few words. Hahn did not believe it at first. In the beginning he turned away all the offers of congratulations. But gradually we broke through, with Heisenberg in the lead, who congratulated him heartily on the 6200 pounds.

As you can see, Bernstein's editorial voice is a bit strong. But his other qualities are huge and unique: he knew some of the protagonists personally, and worked on nuclear weaponry himself. He is out to get Heisenberg, and overreads a few times. But this is because people (Powers, Frayn to a degree) persist in rose-tinting him: there's this idea that Heisenberg feigned incompetence at reactor-making as anti-Nazi activism. The transcripts make clear that he'd have made a bomb if he could, not because he is a Nazi or a German but because he was amorally curious, and hungry for primacy. Heisenberg does object to Nazism. But not very strongly.

Bernstein's conclusion is that the project was pretty much a shambles. They had a two-year head start on the Allies, but failed for several reasons: they had < 1% of the funding of the Manhattan Project, an unbelievably bad administration and communication of data and ideas, and key resources like deuterium kept getting bombed. But Bernstein feels able to go for the jugular:

reading this lecture, I am once again struck by the intellectual thinness of this group. Here are ten German nuclear scientists — nine if one does not count von Laue — who are supposed to be the cream of the crop, the intellectual elite, of German nuclear physics, men who had been working on these questions for several years. And look at the discussion it produced.

To see what I have in mind, let us entertain the following fantasy. Suppose the tables had been turned and ten of the best Allied scientists had been interned in Göttingen when a hypothetical German atomic bomb went off. Whom shall we include? Fermi, Bethe, Feynman, Serber, Wigner, von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Peierls, Ulam, Teller, Bohr, Frisch, Weisskopf... What would the technical conversation have been like? No doubt there would have been disagreements and some fumbling. But like this? The question answers itself.

Yet even with these handicaps, it looks like Harteck could have built a basic pile in 1940, if the project was headed by someone less arrogant than Heisenberg. And that pile would have brought all the funding, and maybe sorted out their many collective muddles and lack of engineering care.

5/5 for Bernstein's commentary and the hair-raising fact of their existence.

[Matt]

Hitler’s atom bomb and why it didn’t exist

A long and fascinating article (in German) by physicist Manfred Popp sheds new light on the topic.

Up until now historians thought that the Nazis knew how to build nuclear weapons, but didn’t because the nessecary resources were missing. Manfred Popp interprets the original sources (including the Farm Hall protocols from this book) quite differently and comes to the conclusion that German scientists from the so-called “Uranium Club” had no idea how to construct an atomic bomb. The scientists, including Werner Heisenberg, had not even worked on the physics of the bomb and not taken any steps to build it. It was not economic boundaries that prevented Hitler from possessing nuclear weapons. The most important reason was the fear of the Nazi regime on part of the scientists involved.

[Kaylee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read! Throughout school, I was taught the myth of the German scientists being the "morally noble" ones who didn't make the bomb because they didn't want to help Hitler. I can't understand why that perspective is still being taught so many years after this book was published. The transcripts of the scientists' conversations make it clear that Heisenberg and Co. painted themselves in a falsely flattering light.

Not only is this book great for the historical value, but Bernstein interjects amazing commentary throughout, as well as provides a layman's version of bomb physics. Well done.

[Ross Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The math is a bit rough sledding, but you can skip it and not lose anything. These are the verbatim transcripts of ten of Germany's top physicists while being held and recorded (without their knowledge) right before the end of WWII.

Basically, Germany was never working on The Bomb because they believed they needed an order of magnitude more uranium than was actually required. Instead, they put their energy into a reactor, which they knew would eventually produce Plutonium, but the complexity of the project meant it wasn't a war priority.

Most of the group were German nationalists, but few liked Hitler. Had they gotten their math right, who knows what they would have chosen to do.

[Luca malagoli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Assieme alla parte di storia della scienza, il testo permette di veder "da dentro" quel che accadde agli scienziati tedeschi alla notizia della prima esplosione atomica. E soprattutto permette di chiarire, pur senza dirimere in modo decisivo, il ruolo di questi scienziati rimasti in Germania durante il tragico periodo nazista, spesso con differenti motivazioni

[John Hayward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Explains what the play "Farm Hall" failed to convey: why the scientists were kept under secret guard: namely, to keep them out of Russian hands. Even the preface and prologue tell a fascinating history.

[Mo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers some fascinating insight into the minds of the scientists who worked on the German nuclear research project. It's problematic as a source, as the conversations are translated from their original German and the transcripts are fragmentary. Still, the personalities (especially Heisenberg, von Weizsäcker, Gerlach, and Hahn) and the issues they were grappling with shine through. The contemporary commentary by the British officers running Farm Hall and the modern notes by Bernstein are also very interesting.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

A seriously remarkable bit of history. The transcripts are probably interesting enough to stand on their own, but Bernstein's obviously deep grasp of the physics provides invaluable context. Hands down one of the most fascinating books I've ever read.

[Nick Black · Rating 1 out of 5]

Amazon third-party, 2009-11-16.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this out of Copenhagen's bibliography to read more of the history behind the Nazi atomic research program. Fascinating.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

The war would have ended sooooo differently - this is an amazing account of what did happen and how close it really was to being a fact that Hitler was the first to create the A-bomb