Werner Heisenberg is known as the father of quantum physicsWerner Heisenberg is known as the father of quantum physics
On witnessing the first test of the atomic bomb, which he had helped to develop during his work with the Manhattan Project, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer later remorsefully said:
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
The Manhattan Project was started in response to fears that German scientists had been working on a weapon using nuclear technology since the 1930s and it was Werner Heisenberg they were most afraid of.
Werner Heisenberg is known as the father of quantum physics
While still officially Sommerfeld’s student, in 1922 Heisenberg became an assistant and student of Max Born at the University of Göttingen, where Heisenberg also first met Bohr.
In 1924 Heisenberg completed his qualification to teach at the university level in Germany.
The same year that Heisenberg was awarded a Nobel Prize, 1933, also saw the rise to power of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi Party).
Nazi policies excluding “non-Aryans” or the politically “unreliable” from the civil service meant the dismissal or resignation of many professors and academics—including, for example, Max Born, Einstein, and Schrödinger and several of Heisenberg’s students and colleagues in Leipzig.
Johannes Stark, a leader of this movement, used his Nazi Party connections to assert influence over science funding and personnel decisions.
Heisenberg’s response was mostly quiet interventions within the bureaucracy rather than overt public protest, guided by a hope that the Nazi regime or its most extreme manifestations would not last long.
Heisenberg’s mentor ArnoldSommerfeld had long regarded Heisenberg as his eventual successor, and in 1937 Heisenberg received a call to join the University of Munich.
Thereupon the official SS journal published an article signed by Stark that called Heisenberg a “white Jew” and the “Ossietzky of physics.”
(German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize for Peace, had been imprisoned in 1931 for treason for his reporting of Germany’s secret rearmament efforts, given amnesty in 1932, and then rearrested and interned in a concentration camp by the Nazis in 1933.)
Heisenberg, relying on the acquaintance of his mother’s family with Heinrich Himmler’s family, sent a request to the SS chief to intervene on his behalf in acquiring the professorship in Munich. Himmler, after an investigation, decreed a compromise:
Heisenberg would not succeed Sommerfeld in Munich, but he would be spared further personal attacks and (essentially) promised another prominent post in the future.
Meanwhile, Stark and the Aryan physicists were for other reasons losing influence in the bureaucratic jungle of the Nazi state, particularly in the context of militarization.
Amid this political turbulence, Heisenberg apparently never seriously contemplated leaving Germany, though he certainly received several offers of university appointments in the United States and elsewhere.
Apparently, he was guided by a strong sense of personal duty to the profession and a national loyalty that (in his mind) transcended the particular politics of the regime.
Heisenberg’s main focus of work in the late 1930s was high-energy cosmic rays, for which he proposed a theory of “explosion showers,” in which multiple particles were produced in a single process, in contrast to the “cascade” theory principally favored by British and American physicists.
Heisenberg also saw in cosmic-ray phenomena possible evidence for his idea of a minimum length marking a lower boundary of the domain of quantum mechanics.
The discovery of nuclear fission pushed the atomic nucleus into the centre of attention.
After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Heisenberg was drafted to work for the Army Weapons Bureau on the problem of nuclear energy.
At first commuting between Leipzig and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Physics in Berlin and, after 1942, as director at the latter, Heisenberg took on a leading role in Germany’s nuclear research.
Following 2 years as a Boston Red Sox coach, Morris ” Moe” Berg left baseball on Jan. 14, 1942, the same day his father, Bernard Berg died. He always regarded his son’s choice of a career as a waste of a fine intellect and it was a matter of contention between them to the end.
On December 28, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the formation of the Manhattan Project to bring together various scientists and military officials working on nuclear research.
It is at this point, just after the start of the United States’ entry into World War II, that Berg’s life became the subject of much speculation.
Moe Berg became an excellent linguist while an undergraduate student at Princeton University, where he studied Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Sanskrit.
After graduating from high school at the top of his class, Moe went to Princeton, an unusual accomplishment for a poor Jewish boy in the 1920s.
He became the star shortstop of the college baseball team, graduated magna cum laude and was offered a teaching post in Princeton’s Department of Romance Languages.
Wanting to study experimental phonetics at the Sorbonne but unable to afford graduate study overseas,
Berg accepted a contract to play shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Moe’s hitting was below par and he was sent to the minors after the 1924 season.
It was Moe who inspired a professional scout to coin the immortal baseball phrase, “Good field, no hit.” One teammate said, “Moe, I don’t care how many of them college degrees you got, they ain’t learned you to hit that curve ball no better than the rest of us.”
Berg returned to the majors in 1926 with the Chicago White Sox.
At the same time, he attended Columbia Law School.
Despite his hectic schedule, the brilliant Berg managed to finish second in his class at Columbia.
He eventually did also study at the Sorbonne.
That year, the White Sox asked him to play catcher, a position that took advantage of his strong arm and intelligence.
Moe hit .287 in 1929 and received votes for Most Valuable Player but in 1930 he seriously injured his knee, ending his career as a full-time player.
He played as a reserve for three more teams until he retired in 1939.
Galvanized by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Berg left baseball in January 1942 for a post under Nelson A. Rockefeller.
Rockefeller gave Berg a job of Office of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, an agency set up to counter German, Italian and Japanese propaganda in Latin America.
His natural ability in languages helped Moe to meet government officials, journalists, and businessmen.
On August 2, 1943, Berg was offered a position with the Office of Strategic Services Special Operations Branch (SO) for a salary of $3,800 ($55,000 today) a year, which he accepted. His code name was Remus.
His first assignment was a secret mission to Yugoslavia to assess the strength of the two rival leaders there — Draza Mihajlovic and Joseph Broz Tito. He correctly reported that Tito was stronger.
In late 1943, Berg was assigned to PROJECT LARSON, an OSS operation set up by OSS Chief of Special Projects John Shaheen.
The stated purpose of the project was to kidnap Italian rocket and missile specialists in Italy and bring them to the U.S.
However, there was another project hidden within Larson, called Project AZUSA, with the goal of interviewing Italian physicists to see what they knew about Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.
From May to mid-December 1944, Berg hopped around Europe interviewing physicists and trying to convince several to leave Europe and work in America.
He interviewed scientists in Rome two days after the city was liberated by US troops to see how far the Italians had progressed in their research. Berg also entered German-occupied Norway as part of an Allied effort to find and destroy a heavy-water plant.
During his time in Switzerland, Berg became close friends with physicist Paul Scherrer who was also a friend of Heisenberg.
Berg, according to one biography, was prone to blunders: getting caught trying to infiltrate an aircraft factory during his training, dropping his gun into a fellow passenger’s lap, and being recognized by wearing his O.S.S.-issue watch.
Despite these mistakes, Berg was well-regarded enough to have been chosen to carry out one of the O.S.S.’ more ambitious endeavors – a plot to possibly assassinate Werner Heisenberg, the head of Nazi Germany’s atom-bomb project.
Heisenberg’s real talents emerged in his work on the anomalous Zeeman effect, in which atomic spectral lines are split into multiple components under the influence of a magnetic field.
Heisenberg developed a model that accounted for this phenomenon, though at the cost of introducing half-integer quantum numbers, a notion at odds with Bohr’s theory as understood to date.
Given the Nazi context, this role had been enormously controversial. Heisenberg’s research group was unsuccessful, of course, in producing a reactor or an atomic bomb.
In explanation, some accounts have presented Heisenberg as simply incompetent; others, conversely, have suggested that he deliberately delayed or sabotaged the effort.
It is clear in retrospect that there were indeed critical mistakes at several points in the research.
Likewise, it is apparent that the German nuclear weapons project as a whole was not possessed of the same degree of enthusiasm that pervaded the Manhattan Project in the United States.
However, factors outside Heisenberg’s direct control had a more substantive role in the outcome.
In contrast to the unified Anglo-American effort, the German project was bureaucratically fractured and cut off from international collaboration.
Key materials were in short supply in Germany, to say nothing of the widespread dislocations caused by Allied bombing of the country’s transportation network.
Moreover, the overall strategic perspective critically affected the prioritization or de-prioritization of nuclear bomb research.
After a 1942 conference with Axis scientists, German minister for armaments and war production Albert Speer concluded that reactor research should proceed but that any bomb was unlikely to be developed in time for use in the war.
By way of confirmation, the official start of the Manhattan Project in the United States also occurred in 1942, and, even with its massive effort, it could not produce an atomic bomb before Germany’s surrender.
Controversy has also swirled around Heisenberg’s lectures in countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands during the war years.
These trips outside of Germany were necessarily taken with the approval of German authorities and hence were perceived by colleagues in the occupied countries as indicating Nazi leaders’ endorsement of Heisenberg and vice versa.
Most notorious in this regard was a trip to Copenhagen in September 1941, during which Heisenberg raised the subject of nuclear weapons research in a conversation with Bohr, offending and alarming the latter, though Heisenberg later claimed that Bohr’s reaction rested on some misunderstanding.
Heisenberg & Bohr postwar meeting
The exact content of the conversation has never been clarified.
Their conversations after news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, initially suggested that Heisenberg had no clear sense of some basic principles of bomb design—e.g., the approximate critical mass—but within a few days he had solved many of these problems.
Berg went to Switzerland to watch Heisenberg give a colloquium at the University of Zurich on Dec. 18, 1944. Paul Scherrer, the mutual friend of Heisenberg and Berg lured Heisenberg there .
Among the 20 or so int he room was a man with a concealed pistol. This would-be assassin was an agent of america’s Office of Strategic Services, which had contrived to place within a few feet of Nazi Germany’s greatest physicist.
Berg supposedly knew enough physics and enough German, the O.S.S. hoped, to figure out whether Heisenberg was building an atomic bomb for Hitler.
For 2 years American military intelligence officers, inspired in part by scientists who had fled Hitler’s regime, had worked on plans to kidnap or even to kill Heisenberg in an effort to halt or delay work on a German atomic bomb.
Morris (Moe) Berg decided not to shoot. Heisenberg had spoken on the safely esoteric topic “S-matrix theory.”
Presented are historic diagrams, mathematical equations, and notes describing an atomic chain reaction, which would occur less than eight months later in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Notes by Berg in red pencil, and by physicist Paul Scherrer in regular pencil.
But Berg garnered an invitation to a small dinner party being given for Heisenberg by a Swiss physicist who was in league with Allen Dulles, then the O.S.S. man in Zurich (and later Director of Central Intelligence).
After dinner, the ingenious Berg managed to claim the honor of walking the discoverer of the uncertainty principle, who had to his hotel. Heisenberg was a bit suspicious. But he seems not even to have realized that Berg was Jewish; he later speculated that this enigmatic dinner guest had been an agent of the Nazi SS sent to monitor his table talk.
The Berg-Heisenberg encounter is the most astonishing of many engaging episodes in Thomas Powers’s “Heinsenberg’s War. The Secret History of the German Bomb.”
The book, manages to weave together two distinct narratives that culminate at the end of World War II in the private, but secretly recorded, conversations of Heisenberg and other captured German scientists reacting to news of the american bombing of Hiroshima with a nuclear weapon.
The first of Mr. Powers’s narratives is about Heisenberg, who, Mr. Powers believes, tried to slow Germany’s progress toward nuclear weapons.
The second is about American and British efforts to determine the character and pace of the Germans’ efforts to build an atomic bomb, and to diminish their chances for success.
During the war Allied intelligence enlisted the aid of many scientists in the United States and Britain in what became known as the Alsos Mission, to track down German scientists who, after being debriefed, were incarcerated for six months at Farm Hall, near Cambridge, England.
Alsos members Goudsmit, Wardenburg, Welsh and Cecil
An English translation of transcripts of conversations among the Germans recorded there was finally made public last year. The significance of the comments the German scientists made about their work is now the basis for an animated scholarly and popular debate, to which “Heinsenberg’s War” is an important contribution.
Mr. Powers is a Pulitzer Prize-winning freelance writer who has concentrated on the history of Amercian intelligence agencies for many years. Int his book his account of Allied intelligence is the more thoroughly convincing of his two stories; it contains a greater welath of fresh material.
Especially valuable is his reconstruction of the activities of Samuel Goudsmit, the Dutch-born physicist who became the chief scientist involved in the Alsos Mission.
Mr. Powers shows that Goudsmit, a scientific rival of Heisenberg during the 1920’s, had become aware through intelligence sources not only that Heisenberg had been reported as saying in 1944 that it was a pity Germany was losing the war, but also that the German physicist had apparently delivered too little too late when one of Goudsmit’s friends appealed to him ot intercede with the Nazis to prevent the internment of Goudsmit’s parents in the Netherlands.
He concludes that Goudsmit’s anger at Heisenberg led Goudsmit to underestimate the scientific competence of the work carried out by Heisenberg and some other German scientists during the war.
BUT it is his other story – that of Heisenberg himself – that will bring the most readers to the book. He makes a case that Heisenberg tried to retard Germany’s progress toward an atomic bomb, and his book is the most carefully documented and sensitively developed version of this argument.
It is more nuanced and detailed than Robert Jungk’s “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns” (1958), which told the story of the atomic bomb from a perspective sympathetic to Heisenberg.
But recent scholarship by historians of science – especially Mark Walker of Union College and David C. Cassidy of Hofstra University – discredits Heisenberg’s claim that he held back work on nuclear weapons because of conscience, and denies that Germany’s failure to develop the bomb owed much to anyone’s reluctance to serve the Nazi cause. Mr. Cassidy published a massive biography of Heisenberg last year.
This scholarship, which Mr. Powers engages critically and collegially, explains the failure of the Germans to mount a more ambitious bomb program in terms of two other considerations:
First, in the early years of the war the German Government expected too swift a victory to enable its scientists to develop nuclear weapons in time to be of military use.
Hence it made little sense to commit to such a project resources that could be put to more efficient use elsewhere.
Second, by the time Berlin recognized that the war would last well beyond 1942, the enormous resources required were more difficult to obtain.
Mr. Powers stops short of insisting that the Germans would have succeeded in building an atomic bomb during the war, had not Heisenberg mounted a campaign of passive resistance.
He claims that the German bomb program “was fatally crippled by lack of scientific zeal.”
In his view, Heinsenberg and his colleagues had a number of opportunities to urge their Government to authorize a crash program to exploit Otto Hahn’s discovery of nuclear fission in 1938.
Even when offered an opportunity to sell a program to the theatrically minded Albert Speer – who, even before he became Germany’s Munitions Minister, had the ear of a Fuhrer to whom a prodigious bomb would surely have had extraordinary psychological appeal – Heisenberg spoke blandly and cautiously.
Scientists in the United States and Britain were energetic in calling to the attention of their Governments the military implicatons of Hahn’s discovery, and in volunteering their own services.
Why were the leading German scientists, Hahn as well as Heisenberg among them, less zealous than their Allied counterparts?
I believe the greater zeal shown by the Allied scientists can be explained largely by the assumption on the part of the Allies that the war would be long, rendering a time-consuming and expensive weapons project more viable.
But Mr. Powers is surely correct to suggest that the commitment of Allied scientists – cinluding, of course, many refugees from Hitler’s Europe – to Allied arms was deeper than was the commitment of at least some of the leading German scientists to the military cause of the Nazis.
MUCH of “Heisenberg’s War” recounts a series of very strange, faint signals sent to the Allies from the German scientific community, especially from Heisenberg’s inner circle.
Prominent among them were leaks about the status of research and development on nuclear energy in Germany. “There is not even one case of similar indiscretion among the Allied scientists who built the American bomb,” Mr. Powers observes.
He also makes much of a handful of explicit messages reporting intentional slowdowns. In March 1941, for example, a physicist close to Heisenberg, Fritz Houtermans, instructed a friend leaving for the West to tell American scientists that “Heinsenberg himself tries to delay…as much as possible” work on German bomb.
Houtermans echoed this message in his first personal encounter with Allied scientists at the war’s end, when he was debriefed in April 1945 by Goudsmit.
When Goudsmit reached Heinsenberg’s office in Germanyu at the end of the war, he found on Heisenberg’s desk a picture of the two of them together at the university of Michigan in 1939.
But when Goudsmit encountered Heisenberg himself he refrained from asking his longtime acquaintance for an accounting of his wartime activities, the subject of endless speculation in Goudsmit’s circles throughout the war.
At that moment Goudsmit had many things on his mind. He had recently learned – from Otto Hahn, as it happened – of the death of his parents at Auschwitz.
It was Goudsmit who finally selected Heisenberg, Hahn and eight other German scientists for captivity. And once they were interned at Farm Hall, where Allied electronic ears could eavesdrop on them, they gave unwitting testimony that is relevant to Mr. Powers’s argument.
Heisenberg’s young protege Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker (the son of Baron Ernst von Weiszsacker, the second in command at Hitler’s foreign office, and the brother of the current President of Germany, Richard von Weizsacker) proclaimed that the Germans hadn’t won the race to the atomic bomb because they had not really wanted to.
Heisenberg spoke to the same effect, and Hahn expressed gratitude that they had failed.
The confused speculations about technical issues prove that most of the German scientists, includign Walter Gerlach, the project director, were far from understnading how an atomic bomb would work.
But Heisenberg was exceedingly quick to figure it out on the basis of fragmentary news reports about the Hiroshima bomb, and he explained it to the others in remarkably accurate terms.
“What the Farm Hall transcripts show unmistakably,” Mr. Powers asserts, “Is that Heisenberg did not explain basic bomb physics to the man in charge of the German bomb program until the war was over.”
But the Farm Hall transcripts create more problems for Mr. Powers than he fully acknowledges. Heisenberg was manifestly shocked by the news of the American bomb, and was at first adamant that it could not possibly be a uranium-based weapon.
Had he been withholding the anaylsis he set forth int he days that followed, and had he believed that a significant difference might have been made by ideas he had kept to himself, he surely would not have been so flummoxed to hear that the deed was actually possible.
Moreover, the transcripts show the Germans to have seen themselves in a real race, and to have lost it.
Heisenberg
Even Hahn, whose professions of discomfort at the thought of Hilter with an atomic bomb are the most credible, immediately addressed Heisenberg as the leader of a beaten team:
“At any rate, Heisenberg, you’re just second-raters and you may as well pack up.” Further, Hahn rejected outright Mr. von Weizsacker’s claim that they lost because they hadn’t really tried to win; and others, out of earshot of Mr. von Weizsacker, declared that he certainly did not speak for them.
Some believe Mr. Powers exaggerates the depth and consistency of Heisenberg’s reluctance to see Nazi Germany equipped with an atomic bomb. The evidence he presents can support, instead, the thesis that from Farm Hall onward Heisenberg and Mr. von Weizsacker inflated what had been a mild and episodic ambivalence into a principled stand calculated to enhance their position in Germany’s postwar scientific establishment and in the international scientific community.
Walker may not be quite as sensitive as he should be to the possibility that lack of evidence for Heisenberg’s passive resistance might derive from Heisenberg’s need to cover his tracks during the war. But Mr. Walker’s 1989 book, “German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939-1949,” and his subsequent papers remain the most discerning treatments of the activities of Heisenberg and the German scientific community.
Mr. Powers characterizes as “very close to the truth” the most extreme claim ever attributed to Heisenberg: that he “falsified the mathematics in order to avoid development of the atomic bomb by German science.”
Heisenberg is aid by Ruth Nanda Anshen, an editor in an American publishing house that issued one of his books, to have written this to her in 1970 in a letter describing not only his own conduct but also that of his fellow Nobel Laureates Hahn and Max von Laue.
In coming so close to identifying himself with this claim, Mr. Powers falls victim to the mystique of the individual scientist-hero on whose thoughts and deeds the world’s destiny depends.
What “Heisenberg’s War” actually shows about its central character is something more prosaic, yet more true. Heisenberg was less an agent of fate than a vehicle for forces in the Third Reich to which he, like so many others, was blinded by what Mr. Powers calls his “love of country.”
The Rest Was Silence
Heisenberg did science and was active in German public life for 30 years after the war….But the task Heisenberg had set himself of rebuilding German science exacted a price:
reticence about the past….He claimed he had been sensitive to the moral issues involved in building a bomb, but was spared the agony and danger of a moral decision.
Perhaps the closest he came to explaining this reticence was in a speech delivered to students at Gottingen University on July 13, 1946, on “Science as a Means of International Understanding.”
His own personal history, he said, had shown him that knowledge is indifferent to race and nation. But science brings power – “a frightening aspect of our present-day existence.”
Common efforts to confront the dangers posed by atomic, chemical and biological easpons are of course necessary, but these cannot free “the individual scientist (from) the nessecity of deciding according to his own conscience…whether a cause is good.” …
No state was comfortable with this view….But the state’s claim cannot override “the duty owed by the scientists to his work which links him to people of other nations.” …Scientists cannot escape their obligation to the world community – “but care will have to be taken that it does not become the origin of a dangerous wave of mistrust and enmity of large masses of people against the profession of science itself.” …
Heinsenberg wasn’t the only one with a secret. Old friends like Victor Weisskopf and Hans Bethe might have told Heisenberg frankly that int he heat of the war, frightened by the awful prospect of Hitler with a bomb, they ah urged the authorities to kidnap him….
None of Heisenberg’s old friends could have told him more about this episode than Sam Goudsmit… (Niels) Bohr and Goudsmit must have grasped the terrible irony – the man they feared posed no danger.
But if that irony ever prompted them to question their own war, they certainly never confessed as much to Heisenberg. Truth-telling ended soon after 1945. Heinsenberg and his onetime friends, after a few bruisiing encounters, elected silence.
By January 1945 the KWI for Physics was evacuated to the towns of Hechingen and Haigerloch in the province of Hohenzollern (then a Prussian enclave, now part of the state of Baden-Württemberg).
In the closing days of the war, Heisenberg bicycled from there to his family’s vacation house in Bavaria. There he was captured by an American military intelligence team, and eventually he was interned with several other German physicists in England.
In 1951, Berg begged the CIA to send him to Israel. “A Jew must do this”, he wrote in his notebook. The CIA rejected Berg’s request.
Still, in 1952 Berg was hired by the CIA to use his old contacts from World War II to gather information about the Soviet atomic bomb project. For the $10,000 plus expenses that Berg received, the CIA received nothing.
The CIA officer who spoke with Berg when he returned from Europe said that he was “flaky”.
Berg’s spying career came at the end of the war, when, while traveling through Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia with some other agents, he produced a letter with a big red star on it when asked for credentials.
The Americans lacked any authorization, and supposedly what Berg showed the Soviet soldiers was a copy of the Texaco Oil Co. letterhead.
After being forced out of the spy business in the late forties, Berg didn’t hold a regular job.
A bachelor, he often freeloaded off friends and relatives, especially his brother Sam, who once sent Moe two eviction notices to get him out of his house. After living with Sam for 17 years, he moved in with his sister Ethel for the final eight years of his life.
In 1960, out of financial necessity, he was prepared to break his lifelong silence about his supposed exploits and agreed to write a book.
However, the project collapsed when the editor glowingly praised the prospective author’s movies on the mistaken assumption that he was about to sign a contract with Moe of The Three Stooges.
Berg died at 70 on May 29, 1972 in Belleville, N.J., of an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Ethel took his ashes to Israel. To this day, no one knows where his remains are buried.
In death, as in life, Moe Berg was a mystery.
Sources:
Moe Berg: catcher, lawyer, spy
Moe Berg, Class of 1923: Baseball Player, World War II Spy
War & Espionage – Morris Moe Berg