It is known that the Nazis were close to creating the atomic bomb. However, there is an opinion among historians that scientists who worked during the Third Reich within the framework of the German atomic program not only failed to create a bomb, but also with all their might hampered "uranium" research.
German version
For the first time this version sounded on August 6, 1945 from the lips of a direct participant in the German atomic program, the famous physicist Karl Friedrich von Weizsacker. On the day when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a discussion took place between the German physicists arrested by that time, recorded by listening equipment, during which Weizsacker literally stated the following: “I think the main reason for our failures is that most of the physicists are considerations did not want this. If we all wanted Germany to win, we would surely be successful."
In 1947, the famous German scientific journal Die Naturwissenschaften (Natural Sciences) published an article by another famous participant in the German atomic program, an outstanding physicist, Nobel Prize laureate 1932 Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg argued that "a group of academic scientists monitored nuclear research and, guided by their high moral principles, diverted work away from the creation of nuclear weapons."
Obvious contradictions
The final cross on the "apologetic" version so attractive to German physicists was raised only in February 2002, when the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen published 11 hitherto unknown letters from a Danish physicist addressed to his student Werner Heisenberg. Until that moment, the letters were kept in the Bohr family and, according to a certain "family moratorium", had to be made public 50 years after the death of the scientist, along with other documents from the personal archive. However, in 2002 this moratorium was revised, and the letters were published 10 years earlier than the target date!
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The unfinished and unsent letters were written by Bohr between 1957 and 1961. They shed light on the true content of Werner Heisenberg's trip to occupied Copenhagen, which he undertook with his friend physicist Karl Weizsacker in September 1941 to meet with his teacher. The official reason for the trip was the astrophysical conference held at the German Scientific Institute and designed to strengthen cultural cooperation with the Institute for Theoretical Physics, headed by Niels Bohr.
Until now, the content of a private conversation between two prominent physicists was known only in the presentation of one of the interlocutors - Werner Heisenberg. According to him, he wanted to get "moral advice" from Bohr, and in addition, to agree through him with colleagues on the other side of the front on a mutual moratorium on the creation of the atomic bomb. However, the information presented in Bohr's first and most important letter is fundamentally contrary to the interpretation proposed by Heisenberg. We add that the letter was written by Bohr under the impression of Robert Jung's book "Brighter than a Thousand Suns" published in 1957 in Denmark, which, among other things, contained an apology for German physicists who allegedly sabotaged the German atomic program.
Bohr's message
Bohr writes: “Dear Heisenberg, I have read Robert Jung's book Brighter than a Thousand Suns, which was recently published in Danish. And I have to tell you that I am deeply surprised at how much memory refuses you in a letter to the author of the book. I remember every word of our conversations. In particular, I and Margrethe, as well as everyone at the institute with whom you and Weizsäcker spoke, were impressed by your absolute conviction that Germany will win and that it is therefore foolish of us to show restraint on German proposals for cooperation. I also clearly remember our conversation in my office at the institute, during which you said in vague terms: under your leadership, everything is being done in Germany to create an atomic bomb. I listened to you in silence, because it was about an important problem for all mankind. But the fact that my silence and heavy eyes, as you write in your letter, could be perceived as a shock caused by your message that an atomic bomb can be made is a very strange delusion of yours. Three years before I realized that slow neutrons could cause fission in uranium-235 and not in uranium-238, it became obvious to me that a bomb could be created based on the effect of uranium fission. In June 1939, I even gave a lecture in Birmingham on fission of uranium, in which I spoke about the effects of such a bomb, observing, however, that the technical problems of actually creating it are so complex that it is not known how long it will take to overcome them. And if anything in my behavior could be interpreted as a shock, it was a reaction to the news thatthat Germany was the first to participate vigorously in the race to acquire nuclear weapons …"
Unscientific mission
The testimony of Heisenberg's wife Elizabeth, who recalled that her husband constantly tormented himself with the thought that the allies with the best resources could create a bomb and use it against Germany, deserves close attention.
The historian of the German atomic project, University of Pennsylvania professor Paul Laurence Rose, points out that in July 1941, Weizsacker was also concerned about the report of a Swedish newspaper about an American experiment to create an atomic bomb. Rose believes that the trip to Copenhagen had a very specific goal - to find out what the Allies are doing and whether Bohr has come up with a way to create an atomic bomb that Heisenberg does not know about. Moreover, Rose learned that at the end of this trip, Heisenberg had reported it to the Gestapo. Unfortunately, this report disappeared, like many other Heisenberg documents.
However, Rose got hold of an equally interesting document containing 135 pages describing the process of working on the atomic bomb in 1942. It is noteworthy that this report is not in the open archives, it was given to Rose by one of the former Nazi scientists. Thanks to the publication of Bora's letters, Rose once again confirmed the credibility of his own reconstruction of the Copenhagen meeting: "The letters confirm what many of us said and what I myself wrote in a book about Heisenberg: it was a visit from enemies, in fact it was a reconnaissance mission."
Bohr writes that during his visit to Copenhagen, Heisenberg told him that if the war lasts longer, nuclear weapons will decide its outcome. Bohr told American scientists about this phrase of Heisenberg back in 1943, when he came to America after his forced flight from Denmark.
Under the pretext of a conference
In several drafts of his unsent letter, Bohr stubbornly insists on the question to Heisenberg: who invented and authorized "this dangerous trip with secret documents"? A new circumstance arises before us - it turns out that there are some "secret documents" that Bora Heisenberg brought and about which absolutely nothing is known!
Rose suggests that Heisenberg was trying to get Bohr into the German nuclear program as part of a very specific assignment. In this light, it seems plausible that the German academic exchange service hastily organized a conference in Copenhagen as a pretext for Heisenberg's visit. Rose points out that Heisenberg had connections with SS security and its science department, which was linked to the Gestapo. So both the Gestapo and the SS security department knew about this trip.
In fairness, it should be noted that Niels Bohr, in turn, maintained contacts with the special services of the allies, although he wrote about the absence of such contacts during that period. As proof, one can cite his letters to the Nobel laureate and close friend, the Englishman James Chadwick, who was working at that time in the framework of the British atomic program. It is known that British intelligence repeatedly came into contact with Bohr and offered him to go over to the side of the Allies. Bohr, in turn, invariably refused to leave Denmark, arguing that he had to save the institution he headed and set an example of moral resistance to Nazism for his compatriots. It is unlikely that Bohr could simply forget these circumstances, it is more appropriate to assumethat such forgetfulness was dictated by the presence of certain obligations to the relevant services of the allies …
Intelligence information
From this follows a natural and extremely important conclusion: the special services of the allies were already in 1941 fully aware of the real position of Heisenberg. This, in particular, is evidenced by the following lines from Bohr's unsent letter: “I had the opportunity to discuss this issue (how far the German atomic program has advanced) with both the British intelligence service and members of the British government, and I, naturally, reported on all our events and, in particular, shared his impressions of visiting Copenhagen by you and Weizsäcker."
However, the most interesting thing is that, in addition to the Western special services, similar information was "proactively" brought by Bohr to the attention of the Soviet side. Let us turn to the testimony of Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov, the former head of the NKVD group "C", whose task was to coordinate the activities of the Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army and the NKVD on the atomic problem. Concurrently, Sudoplatov was the head of the counterintelligence service for the Soviet nuclear industry. In his memoirs, Pavel Anatolyevich says that in 1943 Bor, who had already fled from Denmark occupied by the Germans to Sweden by that time, asked the prominent scientists Lisa Meitner and Hannes Alfven who were there to inform Soviet representatives and scientists, in particular Kapitsa, that his visited by the German physicist Heisenberg. He also said that the issue of creating atomic weapons is being discussed in Germany. Meitner or Alfven, in turn, met in Gothenburg with a TASS correspondent and a Soviet intelligence officer and informed him that Bohr was concerned about the possible creation of atomic weapons in Hitler's Germany. Similar information from Bohr. even before his escape from Denmark, received British intelligence.
In conclusion, we note that the publication of Bohr's letters significantly influenced the position of one of the German "fathers" of the American hydrogen bomb, Hans Albrecht Bethe. Long believed that Heisenberg intended to build only a "civilian" nuclear reactor, Bethe had to admit that. "Apparently in 1941 Heisenberg wanted to make a bomb."
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №21. Author: Alexey Komogortsev