“Heisenberg is an intelligent man, but a typical German (that is to say a Tacitus).” So wrote Albert Einstein to his Swiss confidant Carl Seelig, in January 1953. Although the quotation does not appear in this book by the American historian Paul Rose, everything else that one could possibly say against Werner Heisenberg and his behaviour during the Third Reich can be found here.
Few books have such a strong teleological character as this one by Rose. His goal is, from start to finish, to devalue Heisenberg as a person and a scientist, and to make him appear a “devil” and a “fool”. That aim is pursued for more than 300 pages, with such an aggressive single-mindedness and with such a self-righteous, cutting tone that one is reminded of Kenneth Starr or the historian Daniel Goldhagen. It is hard to accept that this book has been written by a professor of history at a well known US university and that it claims to be a historical study.
Rose’s general approach is also mixed with a good deal of Germanophobia. As he states in the preface: “I have tried to penetrate into how Germans think – or rather, perhaps, used to think – and to show how radically different are German and what I have termed ‘Western’ mentalities and sensibilities.” This approach reaches its climax at the start of the third section of the book, in which Luther and other central figures of German intellectual history are used to bolster the author’s claim that anti-semitism and other negative features are characteristic of the German mentality and that therefore the “ugly Germans” had a specific predisposition to Nazism and its atrocities.
Such a linear understanding of history, formed from an undifferentiated and predetermined viewpoint, conflicts with the standards and methods of modern historiography. In addition, it does no justice to the complexity of Heisenberg’s personality or to his behaviour during the Nazi period. Without doubt, Heisenberg was no hero and certainly was not a resistance fighter. There is much evidence for his opportunistic manoeuvring and for his occasionally awkward behaviour during that time – reflected, for instance, by Einstein’s critical remark. But it is tendentious and historically unjustified to use this evidence to say that Heisenberg had close relationships with the SS and Heinrich Himmler in particular (p262), or to accuse Heisenberg of “a strong implicit anti-semitism” (p242).
The author uses these statements to turn Heisenberg into a “devil”, which he undoubtedly was not, although this role was certainly played by others in Nazi Germany, including some scientists. But such a blanket condemnation of Heisenberg eliminates the wide range of behaviour that scientists showed during the Nazi period, and ignores the difference between the criminals and activists of the regime on the one hand and those who merely followed the regime on the other. Of course, this has nothing to do with an en bloc apology for the latter or with any desire to liberate those involved from their responsibility for the things that did happen.
It is clear and well known that Heisenberg made some awkward compromises, and that he actively collaborated with the Nazis on occasion. He also utterly failed to appreciate what the Third Reich was all about or to understand his own involvement in the regime. For example, he made very few self-critical remarks in his writings after the war – indeed, he appears to have been an example of the so-called “inability to mourn” that Alexander Mitscherlich attributed to post-war Germans in general.
However, all of these details do not create a true picture of Heisenberg’s personality. To achieve this, one should compare his behaviour with that of other scientists of his time. One should also place more emphasis on the fact that Heisenberg’s opposition to the idea of “Deutsche physik” (i.e. anti-semitic and racially founded physics, as opposed to Einstein’s modern “Jewish physics”) and his desire for high standards and international cooperation in physics did not just come from his specific or even egotistic professional interests. These activities were seen by the Nazi regime, his students and even in the circles of the German resistance as a kind of non-conformism and opposition to Nazi rule. In other words, Heisenberg managed to communicate hope and invigorate resisting and non-conformist behaviour, and thereby helped to undermine the Nazi dictatorship’s claim to totalitarian domination.
Rose’s presentation of the German uranium project is also based on a predetermined point of view. He reproduces the opinion of Samuel Goudsmit, who argued in Alsos: The History of Modern Physics (American Institute of Physics, 1983) that Heisenberg and the other German atomic physicists made significant mistakes in their efforts to harness nuclear fission. Rose argues that Heisenberg only developed a clear idea of the critical mass of an atomic bomb once he and other German physicists were taken to Farm Hall in the UK at the end of the Second World War, where they were interrogated about their role in Germany’s bomb project. Rose also emphasizes that Heisenberg pursued the idea of a reactor bomb more or less up to the end of the war, and concludes that he must therefore have failed to understand how a bomb would work with a uranium-235 isotope.
But if you read Heisenberg’s Collected Papers (Springer, 1989), especially his talks from 1942 and 1943, you come to a quite different conclusion. This would more or less tie in with the assessments made by Mark Walker in German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and by David Cassidy in Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (WH Freeman, 1992) – neither of whom are burning admirers of Heisenberg! Although their opinions cannot, of course, be taken as proof of authority, they should allow readers to judge the facts for themselves.
It is therefore somewhat surprising that Rose uses Cassidy’s biography as a kind of “chief witness”, even though it gives a very different and above all well balanced view of Heisenberg’s personality and work. But this only goes to show Rose’s approach and the way in which he very often reaches his conclusions: namely by ignoring or reinterpreting those facts that contradict his thesis. One therefore finds in this book some tendentious and indeed wrong views of physicists: for example that Hans Jensen was a “communist” (p227), that Friedrich Hund “serv[ed] Stalin after the war” (p260) or that Manfred von Ardenne headed the German Post Office’s atomic project and collaborated with Gustav Herz (p199).
Of course, such incorrect details could be forgiven, were it not for the fact that Rose himself clearly shares Einstein’s view that “whoever fails to take the truth seriously in small things, cannot be trusted in large ones”.
