Paul Davies

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Title: An Ethical Stand for Copenhagen and Bohr: Lise Meitner's Views on Heisenberg's Nazi Collaboration

I am writing in rebuttal of the playwright Mr. Frayn's naïve view of the "political responsibilities" of physicists in his play "Copenhagen".

The hard work of historical interpretation is often not acknowledged by the general public. Yet in my doctoral research, long lonely hours in archives, countless interviews with elderly scientists and interesting discoveries of unpublished notebooks, letters, and memories, I have found satisfaction in my profession -
and more so, come to teach basic values to my own students on the ethical responsibilities of scientists most pertinent to every generation - but sorely lacking in the core curriculum of scientists today.

I will refer directly to the letters written by Niels Bohr in 1946 published by his family concerning Heisenberg. Bohr was very upset over Heisenberg's years of research with other nuclear physicists in Nazi Germany to develop an atomic bomb under the auspices of Heinrich Himmler, and Bohr's angry retort to his formerly beloved protégé' will cast light on what has been only speculation until now about "conversations" held between these two in 1941. Recall that Niels Bohr did leave Copenhagen secretly when the Nazis invaded Denmark in 1943 (I interviewed many who knew him during this time) and spent most of the war years immediately after securing his family's safety in Sweden working in Los Alamos in the top-secret Manhattan Project.

Let me first summarize my own exposure to these rare letters by Niels Bohr and then trace the famous physicist Lise Meitner's strong views supporting Bohr after her own secret emigration from Nazi Germany to the Bohr Institute. Meitner's angry views about Heisenberg and many of her letters were unpublished until I published them in my biography Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Cambridge, MA: Birkhauser 1999) and I wish to thank my editor Ann Kostant for her untiring support in the publication of this book when German-owned Springer Verlag became the parent company of Birkhauser Press and nearly blocked the book's release.

If you would read my chapter "Secrecy and Code Names: War Research Concerning Nuclear Fission 1939-1942" carefully, you will find many original documents I unearthed in archives throughout Sweden and Germany written by the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner to von Laue, Hahn and others about Heisenberg and his "shameful performance" in Denmark. Lise Meitner was one of the senior physicists in Bohr's circle, and had worked closely with Max Planck for over 15 years before the rise of Hitler. Sitting in the front row with Max Born, Heisenberg, Stern and others in a casual photograph taken at the Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in the early 1930's, the 60 year old Meitner looks concerned. She had reason to be: many of her own colleagues, including Einstein, were banned from Germany - or worse. Meitner remained, assured by older colleagues that her Austrian citizenship would protect her. However, after Hitler's cruel Anschluss into Austria, Meitner secretly escaped Berlin in 1938 through the last-minute aid of Niels Bohr. She just barely got across the border into Holland (with the assistance of physicist Dirk Coster) and arrived exhausted at Bohr's Institute in July 1938. She lived with his family in the Carlsberg mansion until a position was created for her at the Nobel Institute for Physics in Stockholm during the fall of 1939. Betrayed years later by her own 30-year research partner Otto Hahn after the war with revisionist remarks like Heisenberg's own systematic "rewriting" of history, the 65 year old Meitner felt responsible to put down her views in strong language to Hahn.

His chemical research and her interpretation of nuclear fission had changed the war - and led to the creation of Los Alamos and the world first atomic weapons. Bohr's ceaseless efforts to have Lise Meitner's contributions recognized brought the attention of nuclear fission to the scientific community in 1939. John Archibald Wheeler, who wrote the Foreword to my book, told me many times that Bohr had gone to Princeton to discuss other physics questions with Einstein that winter and never dreamed he would be co-authoring a paper with Wheeler on "The Mechanics of Fission" based on Meitner's work, which was soon demonstrated by Fermi and countless others by 1940. While the story of Los Alamos has been told and dramatized in many forms, the top-secret atomic bomb project of the Third Reich, nicknamed the "Uranium Club", which I carefully researched and wrote about, remains to be debated. The playwright Frayn's glib remark quoted by the NY Times that historians must work harder to come up with "explanations that somebody else is certain of" plays off Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle but has nothing to do with the moral relativism and collaboration with the Nazis that Otto Hahn, Heisenberg, Carl Fredrick von Weizsaecker and other physicists were involved in for over six years. Did they think their work would lead to the 'super weapon' Heisenberg excitedly described in reports to Heinrich Himmler and other Nazi officers? Heisenberg "bragged" to Bohr that the Nazis would win the war quickly. Let us carefully examine the facts of this group of physicists once so close to Meitner, Einstein and Bohr.

Lise Meitner stated in a letter to Hahn from Stockholm, June 27, 1945 after witnessing Count Bernadotte's work to bring concentration camp victims to Sweden:

When I heard a very objective report prepared by the British and Americans for British radio about Bergen- Belsen and Buchenwald, I began to wail aloud and couldn't sleep all night. If you only had seen the people who came here from the camps. They should force a man like Heisenberg, and millions of others with him, to see these camps and the tortured people. His performance in Denmark in 1941 cannot be forgotten. Perhaps you remember when I was still in Germany (and I know today that it was not only stupid, but a great injustice that I didn't leave immediately), I often said to you, 'As long as just we and not you have sleepless nights, it won't get any better in Germany.' But you never had any sleepless nights: you didn't want to see -
it was too disturbing.

The German Army had been occupying Denmark for over a year when the meeting between Bohr and his protégé'
Heisenberg took place in mid-September 1941. A so- called "German Cultural Institute", which most Danes detested, had been established in Copenhagen to generate propaganda on the Third Reich, and Heisenberg and von Weizsaecker were often funded by this organization to travel to scientific congresses in Copenhagen, where they met several times with Bohr. Recall that the German "Uranium Project", supported by the former head of the largest steel company in Germany (a highly influential Nazi Party member, Albert Voegler), brought to Speer's attention the 'neglected' field of Germany nuclear and uranium research based on research and reports by Heisenberg, Stern, and others. By May 6, 1942, Speer discussed the situation with Hitler and it was proposed that Goering become the new head of the Third Reich's "Research Council". The Allies, including Soviet spies, had been observing this reorganization of the uranium research program and feared - correctly -
that the German nuclear project was picking up steam. This career-minded group of young and older scientists never thought of challenging the moral stand of the Third Reich -- and you find in most historical documents that Einstein, Meitner, James Franck in Chicago, Schroedinger in Dublin, Bohr in Copenhagen, Chadwick in London and others looked on with horror at these colleagues' eager embrace of "forwarding the progress of the German Fatherland." Meitner wrote to many colleagues of their "shameless nationalism" and took to task post-war historians such as Robert Jungk for misinterpreting and playing down Heisenberg's active role not only in developing a German atomic bomb research team but promoting the Third Reich.

In fact, Eric Bohr and I discussed this at his home in Copenhagen, and he showed me the angry letter his father wrote to Heisenberg, which was neatly stuck in the tattered volume of Jungk. When I, as a conscientious historian, brought this to historian Abraham Pais' attention, I was summarily dismissed as 'knowing too much'. Yet why did Dietrich Hahn, Otto Hahn's grandson, threaten me with a lawsuit when my first book publishing Meitner's vociferous views on the collaborationists in the German scientific community, including her long-term research partner Hahn, who received the Nobel Prize in 1945 for 'his' discovery of fission, was published in Germany in 1991? Hahn was embarrassed that yes, his grandfather did collaborate with the Third Reich. Obviously, many primary documents and letters from witnesses who were there and knew well the physicists in question now shed light on the dark side of scientists working under Himmler and others. Finn Aaserud, Director of the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen, might be preserving Bohr's memory when he states "The Bohr family has come to regard speculation about the content of this materials more harmful than its release" but the circle of historians who have worked with this material well know that many physicists whose reputations were almost untarnished after World War II suffered from little more than embarrassment after their confinement in Farm Hall, England. Speculation does not harm, it clouds the issue at hand -
that Heisenberg, von Weizsaecker, Otto Stern, Otto Hahn and many others worked directly in a top secret weapons project approved by Hitler: to research and build an atomic weapon. I, for one, look forward to hearing Bohr's anger and his refreshingly clear voice. He had a right to be angry at Heisenberg, who was said to have boasted to his former mentor that the Nazis were "going to win the war quickly and build a high-tech Europe based on the discoveries of quantum physics and nuclear energy". (See 'Letters to the Editor', Physics Today, April 2001). Denying that history - and Bohr's resistance to its lies -- through dramatization which leads most of audiences further astray -- may be the greatest sin of "revisionism" the public has swallowed in our lifetime, and shouldn't be applauded in any circles.

Patricia Rife, Ph.D. Dept. of Literature, Culture and Communication Georgia Institute for Technology Atlanta, GAPrife@att.net

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Published   2002.03.05