
Conversations among German Nuclear Physicists at Farm Hall (1945) [pdf] - trymas
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf
======
mikeash
> WEIZSÄCKER: I think it's dreadful of the Americans to have done it. I think
> it is madness on their part.

> HEISENBERG: One can't say that. One could equally well say "That's the
> quickest way of ending the war.”

And there’s seven decades’ worth of debate summed up in an instant on the day
of the first bombing.

Something to keep in mind next time I feel tempted to argue about it.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Capitulation could have ended the war even quicker, at the speed of a
telegram. Clearly, that cannot be the only criterion.

(not seeking to argue with you, I'm replying to Heisenberg so to speak)

~~~
mikeash
I imagine there’s an implied “with them as the winners” on the end.

------
remon
Such an amazing read. What positively surprised me, but perhaps shouldn't
have, is that they seem almost relieved they didn't get there first. It's
reassuring in a way I have trouble verbalising.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Some of them were relieved but some of them weren't. There was Gerlach's
reaction described later in the document.

" _7\. HAHN and HEISENBERG discussed the matter alone together. HAHN explained
to HEISENBERG that he was himself very upset about the whole thing. He said he
could not really understand why GERLACH had taken it so badly. HEISENBERG said
he could understand it because GERLACH was the only one of them who had really
wanted a German victory, because although he realized the crimes of the Nazis
and disapproved of them, he could not get away from the fact that he was
working for GERMANY. HAHN replied that he too loved his country and that,
strange as it might appear, it was for this reason that he had hoped for her
defeat. ..._ "

Then there was also this bit:

" _... BAGGE: That 's not true. You were there yourself at that conference in
Berlin. I think it was on 8 September that everyone was asked – GEIGER, BOTHE
and you, HARTECK, were there too– and everyone said that it must be done at
once. Someone said 'Of course it is an open question whether one ought to do a
thing like that.' Thereupon BOTHE got up and said 'Gentlemen, it must be
done.' Then GEIGER got up and said 'If there is the slightest chance that it
is possible – it must be done.' That was on 8 September '39.

WEIZSÄCKER: I don't know how you can say that. 50% of the people were against
it.

HARTECK: All the scientists who understood nothing about it, all spoke against
it, and of those who did understand it, one third spoke against it. ..._"

~~~
Balgair
What an interesting exchange here! This really highlights an issue that we
have been dealing with for these last 80 years: What to do when the leader is
known to be unjust/evil?

Here we see that these very intelligent men all were patriots to their own
people, despite their evil leader. But they all _knew_ that this patriotism
was misplaced and would make the world worse. They all knew that they should
loose, despite their loyalty to their own people.

In the 8 decades since, have we come to a conclusion on how to deal with this?
What is a person to do when the nation goes towards evil? Must we all go Capt.
America on our own[0]?

The decisions of these cowards and their internal conflicts echo to this day.

[0][https://external-
preview.redd.it/sORWym5kfi2NIanLWbz_0nWtqPP...](https://external-
preview.redd.it/sORWym5kfi2NIanLWbz_0nWtqPPZQTjbn3jCDm8rUIg.jpg?auto=webp&s=b807fcf22438b259c4a42760984b65948322516d)

------
sanqui
Highlight for me:

> _WEIZSÄCKER: I don 't think we ought to make excuses now because we did not
> succeed, but we must admit that we didn't want to succeed. If we had put the
> same energy into it as the Americans and had wanted it as they did, it is
> quite certain that we would not have succeeded as they would have smashed up
> the factories._

> _WEIZSÄCKER: One can say it might have been a much greater tragedy for the
> world if Germany had had the uranium bomb. Just imagine, if we had destroyed
> LONDON with uranium bombs it would not have ended the war, and when the war
> did end, it is still doubtful whether it would have been a good thing._

~~~
matt4077
Von Weizsäcker, and his family, are extremely interesting. The father was a
somewhat reluctant ambassador to Britain. The four brothers all were highly
successful, as a physicist, a politician (President of Germany in the 90s), an
economist, and a political scientist.

I had the honor to study with the economist. I rarely get the explicit idea
that someone is smarter or dumber than me. But with him, it was so obvious I
skipped right over jealousy straight to awe and enjoyment.

There is also a play, “Copenhagen”, featuring three or four possible versions
of a meeting of WeizsÄcker. Heisenberg, and Bohr.

~~~
mgoetzke
Richard von Weizsäcker (President of Germany) was fabulous. Every interview
worth reading, every word well chosen. Nobody since has lived up to that high
standard yet in my opinion.

~~~
olaf
No coin without flipside: "... Er war - für die Bundesrepublik in dieser Form
bis heute einmalig - der intellektuelle Gegenentwurf zum Kanzler, und er hat
diese Rolle auch gerne angenommen. Im privaten Leben war er zwar oft
unbeherrscht, hochfahrend und anmaßend. Untergebene schurigelte er zuweilen
aus nichtigem Anlass. Doch seine öffentlichen Auftritte inszenierte Weizsäcker
untadelig. ..." Source [german]:
[http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/richard-von-
weizsa...](http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/richard-von-weizsaecker-
im-alter-von-94-jahren-gestorben-a-1016056.html)

~~~
dash2
Translation: "He was - uniquely to this day for the Federal Republic - the
intellectual counterbalance to the Chancellor [Kohl?], and happily played this
role. In private life, he was often uncontrolled, arrogant and overbearing. He
sometimes bullied his staff for trivial reasons. But Weizsäcker played his
public appearances flawlessly."

------
newsgremlin
>HEISENBERG: I am still convinced that our objective was really the right one
and that the fact that we concentrated on uranium may give us the chance of
collaboration. I believe this uranium business will give the Anglo–Saxons such
tremendous power that EUROPE will become a bloc under Anglo–Saxon domination.
If that is the case it will be a very good thing. I wonder whether STALIN will
be able to stand up to the others as he has done in the past.

Another timeline that most can be glad we didn't go down. America would be
even more dominant over the western world. Russia even more on edge.

~~~
lqet
Not sure if you are being sarcastic - but isn't he in 1945 correctly
predicting the development of the western world over the next 30-40 years, in
which the US were clearly the dominating NATO power? I don't think Heisenberg
meant that the US will threaten European nations with annihilation.

~~~
dekhn
I'm having trouble parsing the quote, I think by 'Anglo-Saxon' he really means
'England and the US', and it's not really clear that England the US have true
"power and control" over Europe. Instead what we see is a Europe dominated by
England and Germany with large military influence by US.

~~~
biesnecker
If you look at the period from 1945 to, say, 1975, though, which is the
speaker's perspective, American political and economic influence were both
extremely strong compared to today, in addition to the obvious military
influence.

~~~
bilbo0s
The thing is, from the 60's through the fall of the wall, you can say what you
want, but I distinctly remember everyone _MUCH_ preferring German Marks to any
other European currency. (Probably the Swiss Franc was on par with it, you get
the idea. No one wanted Lira, and, at times, even Pounds and French Francs
were out of favor.) Germany, or Germany and France, were usually the driving
force behind most European initiatives during that time.

Not only then, but still today. (If not even more today.) I remember the late
unpleasantness with the PIIGs, and believe it or not, there was a little while
there where people would try to determine where a Euro note came from...

and they wouldn't take it unless it was from Germany.

The Germans may not be vocal about dominating Europe, but they definitely
dominate Europe. And they have in many ways for a long time. At least since
the 60's.

------
martin_a
As a German I would love to have read it in German or hear the audio files.
Nevertheless an interesting piece of history.

~~~
jkovacs
Same here. I tracked down the German version on their website here:
[http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-
dc.org/pdf/deu/German101ed.pdf](http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-
dc.org/pdf/deu/German101ed.pdf) (PDF)

~~~
SiempreViernes
These are possibly a re-translation, supposedly the german originals were
lost, at least that was the situation in 2013:
[http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/09/13/what-did-the-
nazis...](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/09/13/what-did-the-nazis-know-
about-the-manhattan-project/) (third paragraph)

------
dash2
Dürrenmatt's famous play The Physicists has a very similar setting, I wonder
if he was inspired by this at all.

------
fefe23
Note how quickly they feel the need to defend themselves, why they couldn't
get the bomb done in time. Considering their situation (prisoners of war in
the UK), I find that instinct patently absurd.

Over half of the transcript is them coming up with excuses why the Americans
succeeded where they did not. Let it be a lesson about the human condition
that the excuses all but eclipse the guilt over having attempted to build such
a bomb themselves. Both the guild and envy are powerful emotions. Envy wins.

~~~
macintux
I think the defensiveness only looks absurd in hindsight.

They were wondering whether they’d go back, and how they’d be
perceived/treated by their fellow Germans. Would they be perceived as traitors
for failing to create the bomb?

------
tachang
How did we end up purifying the amount of U235 needed?

I saw on another page "General Leslie Groves consulted with lead scientists of
the project and agreed to investigate simultaneously four separate methods of
separating and purifying the uranium-235: gaseous diffusion, centrifuge,
electromagnetic separation and liquid thermal diffusion."

Seems like a ton of work.

------
andrew_
Fascinating stuff, really interesting characters. I for one never knew the
Germans were pursuing fission for the production of "engines". Do yourselves a
favor and read the entire transcript.

The comments about how they see history being written, specifically about the
German contributions, comes across as particularly naive but evident of men
who were clearly distraught and disoriented.

And their predictions about Stalin and Russia were ominous but nearly correct
several times over.

~~~
marksweston
> Fascinating stuff, really interesting characters. I for one never knew the
> Germans were pursuing fission for the production of "engines". Do yourselves
> a favor and read the entire transcript.

I'm fairly sure that by "engines" they meant reactors.

~~~
mgoetzke
They talk about a 'Maschine' in the German version 'a machine' and clearly
mean a machine to produce energy i.e a reactor.

------
Animats
Previously on HN.[1]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568250)

------
ghaff
Operation Epsilon is a pretty good (if probably overly literal) play about
Farm Hall. Worth going to see if you get a chance.

------
qqn
Overall a neat piece of history to read, to sit in that disbelief as fragments
of the world start being lifted back up from the ground where they've
shattered. Neat quotes:

Heisenberg: I believe this uranium business will give the Anglo–Saxons such
tremendous power that EUROPE will become a bloc under Anglo–Saxon domination.
If that is the case it will be a very good thing.

Heisenberg: [T]he days of small countries are over.

Weizsäcker: Our strength is now the fact that we are 'un–Nazi'.

Heisenberg: I believe that we are now far more bound up with the Anglo–Saxons
than we were before as we have no possibility of switching over to the
Russians even if we wanted to. On the other hand we can do it with a good
conscience because we can see that in the immediate future Germany will be
under Anglo–Saxon influence.

Weizsäcker: If I ask myself for which side I would prefer to work of course I
would say for neither of them.

Weizsäcker: History will record that the Americans and the English made a
bomb, and that at the same time the Germans, under the HITLER regime, produced
a workable engine. In other words, the peaceful development of the uranium
engine was made in Germany under the Hitler regime, whereas the Americans and
the English developed this ghastly weapon of war.

------
porpoisely
What an interesting read. Also, is it just me or are there a surprising number
of german related topics on the frontpage right now?

"We only had one man working on it and they may have had ten thousand"

This is why I always chuckle at the ww2 "documentaries" positing the
possibility of german or japanese bomb. Nevermind that both parties were
preoccupied fighting far stronger and larger opponents ( US, British Empire,
Soviet Union, China ), they lacked the resources, economic power and
infrastructure to construct one before the US. We had a much larger economy
and resource potential than germany and japan. Just like we do today. It was a
race neither had a chance of winning.

Another interesting read is the military's view on hiroshima and nagasaki.
Most military leaders saw it as serving no military purpose. So ultimately,
hiroshima and nagasaki were the largest human experimentation in ww2. It was a
predominately a radiation test on civilian populations and cities. Something
we'd continue doing on unsuspecting pacific islanders decades after ww2.

~~~
skh
After the Germans surrendered my dad's division was scheduled to be
transferred to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. At least that is what
they were told. He was happy to hear of the bombings on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
since from his perspective it caused the Japanese to surrender.

Of course it's debatable on whether or not those bombings did indeed cause the
surrender of Japan. Politically the U.S. has not been a nation to stomach
large numbers of its soldiers being killed. The actions on Iwo Jima and
Okinawa were far more bloody than the public cared for. How many more such
battles would a war weary public have endured? Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not
military targets but they were political targets.

I don't know if the bombings were morally right or wrong and can see the
argument both ways. But from at least one drafted soldier's perspective they
were a good thing.

~~~
porpoisely
It isn't debatable because we know hiroshima and nagasaki had no bearing on
the japanese decision to surrender. If the nukes were the cause of japan's
surrender, hiroshima would have been enough and nagasaki wouldn't have
happened.

Also, there is no ambiguity to the morality of hiroshima or nagasaki. No more
than there is any ambiguity to the morality of nazi death camps. They were
both racially driven war crimes and crimes against humanity. And as mcnamara
said, if we had lost the war, our leaders would have been executed for war
crimes and crimes against humanity.

~~~
skadamou
>...we know hiroshima and nagasaki had no bearing on the japanese decision to
surrender.

I think this is an interesting idea but I would love to see a source on this.

When I took a Japan at War class in college our professor seemed to be of the
opinion that using the atom bomb was what finally convinced the Japanese to
surrender unconditionally but that they would have agreed to a conditional
surrender as long as their emperor was guaranteed some form of independence.
What are your thoughts on this?

~~~
jpfr
That is the justification for the bomb for the American public.

Many Japanese cities (sixty-ish) were destroyed by traditional firebombing.
For the Japanese, Hiroshima and Nagasaki simply meant "two more cities".

Two days after Hiroshima, Russia declared war against Japan. So their
strategic position in the war became hopeless. Historians believe Russia
entering the war shaped the surrender much more than the atomic bomb.

[https://nationalpost.com/news/did-the-atomic-bombings-of-
hir...](https://nationalpost.com/news/did-the-atomic-bombings-of-hiroshima-
and-nagasaki-really-end-the-war)

------
erentz
Plugged it in a previous thread but will plug it as relevant again, since I
see debate in this thread about Japanese surrender and wheather the Germans
were really developing the bomb.

Have a read of Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg, he was involved and saw a
lot of the nuclear planning during the Cold War. It’s pretty clear from his
retelling that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were not essential to end the
war. Japan was days away from surrender, and we killed more people in a
firebomb raid than with the A-Bomb anyway, so it’s not like they weren’t
already suffering citywide destructions. In fact Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
two cities kept off of the firebombing list simply to still have test targets
for the A-Bomb.

On the German front Hitler apparently discontinued the nazi program when he
found out it was going to take too long for his timeline to win the war.

In Cold War terms there’s almost too much disturbing in the book to list. But
one thing it brought home to me was that we should have a “no first use”
policy like other countries, but we don’t because we like to threaten their
use. And we have absolutely no need for land based ICBMs anymore given we have
SLBMs more than capable of destroying the world, the ICBMs are a strategic
liability (targets) and yet instead of getting rid of them we are planning to
spend over $100b to replace them.

~~~
iguy
An under-emphasised point: If defeating Japanese fascism was a valid war aim,
then the bomb was a really efficient weapon. Even if mining the harbors was
much cheaper & had more military effect. The lesson from Versailles is that
surrender wasn't enough to defeat German militarism, just a few years later
they could spin stories about the army being stabbed in the back... but such
stories didn't sell so well in 1950, 1960, with Soviet & US tanks facing each
other in Berlin. The US ability to fly over in 1 plane, 1 bomb, 1 city was
another really hard-to-deny reality.

And: It's not clear that "no first use" policies are anything more than PR
tools. IIRC it emerged that not one of the USSR war plans for Germany was
nuclear-free.

