Pauli had written that their former German colleague, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, had just been appointed director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, a nuclear research facility in Berlin. Moreover, Pauli had learned that Heisenberg was scheduled to give a lecture in Switzerland. Weisskopf reported further that he had discussed this news with Hans Bethe, and the two men had agreed that something should be done immediately: “I believe,” Weisskopf wrote Oppenheimer, “that by far the best thing to do in this situation would be to organize a kidnapping of Heisenberg in
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