Hitler's Terror Weapons by Geoffrey Brooks Read Free Book Online Page B

was in serious danger, on 21 July 1937 Heisenberg responded with a letter to SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler requesting a decision on the principle and offering to resign if the view of Herr Stark corresponded with that of the Government,
    â€œBut if that is not the case, as I have already been expressly assured by Reich Education Minister Rust, then I request you as SS-Reichsführer to defend me effectively against such attacks in this newspaper.”
    During the next twelve months Heisenberg was frequently summoned to hearings in Berlin. These were under the personal direction of Gestapo Chief Reinhard Heydrich. Many interrogations were conducted in the notorious Gestapo prison on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, from where Heisenberg would return exhausted and distressed. One of the problems confronting the SS inquisition was their uncertainty of the political implications of a science they did not understand. The frightening interviews were attended by an SS physicist, Johannes Juilfs, a former student of Heisenberg, who saw to it that he was not brutally treated.
    On 21 July 1938, exactly a year since his letter, Himmler exonerated Heisenberg:
    â€œI do not approve of the attacks made against you in the Das Schwarze Korps article and I have therefore ensured that there will be no further outbursts against you. However, I consider it right to mention that in future before an audience, you should clearly distance yourself from the human and political identity of the researcher when recognizing scientific research results.”
    A scientific nonentity, Müller, acceded to the Munich Chair of Physics, while Heisenberg resumed academic life at the University of Leipzig. The degree of ferocity with which the proponents of Aryan Physics championed their view of science is difficult to comprehend. Not even Ministers were exempted from attack. Soon after taking over the Armaments Ministry in February 1942, Albert Speer found his attempts to promote atomic physics research, by which he presumably meant the development of the atom bomb, met by a “rubber wall”. 30 On one such occasion he was astonished to encounter strident opposition in the Party daily Völkischer Beobachter, the newspaper of which Adolf Hitler himself was the owner. The editorial railed against him in an article entitled Jewish Physics Stirs Again! Speer also found it easy to incur the Führer’s wrath in even mentioning the atom bomb, which Hitler privately described to him as “the spawn of Jewish pseudo-science”.
    The Discovery of Neutrons and Nuclear Fission in Uranium
    Many scientists assert that the age of nuclear physics began in 1932. On 17 February that year the scientific periodical Nature published an article by the British researcher James Chadwick in which he announced the discovery of the neutron. It was released when alpha-radiation from a radium source penetrated a beryllium atom. The neutrons ejected from the beryllium had no electrical charge and this enabled them to penetrate close to the nucleus of the atom of many other substances tested. This was a new means of splitting the atom, but for the time being at least there was no prospect that the neutron might be used for the production of energy. Nevertheless the discovery was the foundation for the new science of nuclear chemistry and every atom from hydrogen to uranium now came in for experiment in laboratories worldwide.
    Since 1934 Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Straßmann had been subjecting uranium to neutron bombardment in experiments at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. In an article appearing in the scientific journal Die Wissenschaften of 6 January 1939, 31 Hahn and Straßmann announced that they had demonstrated nuclear fission in uranium. When a U 235 isotope of uranium was struck by a neutron, U 235 +1n = U 236 , a new unstable compound, was formed and split up almost instantaneously. As this occurred, the highly