The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  Adding to Heisenberg’s frustration was the fact that Nazi leaders wouldn’t leave him alone to work. As an elite scientist he often had to attend silly state functions, and on March 1, 1943, he and Otto Hahn and other scientists were summoned to a particularly asinine lecture in Berlin on the health effects of bombing raids.

  Now, a naïve person might think that bombing raids had only negative health effects, but according to the lecturer that night, one Dr. Schardin, there was a definite silver lining to the billowing clouds of burning smoke. Sure, you might be crushed under twenty tons of rubble during a raid or torn to bits by shrapnel, but if you put those complications aside and focused only on concussive forces, then bombs were actually a pleasant way to die, he said. They caused such a spike in air pressure that your brain essentially liquefied: all the blood vessels burst and a massive stroke ensued, killing you before you realized it—all in all, a painless, almost serene death. The takeaway was that there’s really nothing to fear from a bombing raid.

  Excitingly, just as Schardin was wrapping up, the Berlin air-raid sirens began to wail. Here was a chance to put theory into practice! Heisenberg, Hahn, and the rest of the audience herded into the basement to wait the attack out. Few of them had experienced a raid before, and this was one hell of a baptism. Bombs poured down for what seemed like hours, each one detonating with a tectonic boom. The walls around them heaved and quaked, and every so often they heard a building collapse aboveground. Soon the power went out, and medics barged in with a bloodied woman moaning in pain. During the heaviest blitz, two bombs went off nearly simultaneously above them, and the double whammy of pressure left the audience dazed. Hahn and his wicked tongue piped up: “I bet Schardin doesn’t believe in his own theories right now.” For one moment they all laughed.

  After the all-clear sounded, the scientists clambered out of the shelter and confronted the scene around them. The neighborhood had been gutted, a mess of twisted steel and shattered walls. Because Allied bombs often included incendiaries like phosphorus, pools of eerily flaming liquid had collected in the streets. Everyone present scattered, rushing off to see if their homes or labs were still standing.

  Heisenberg had more reason than most to worry. He’d brought his twins, Wolfgang and Maria, now five years old, from Leipzig to Berlin that week to celebrate their maternal grandfather’s birthday; he never imagined he’d be exposing them to bombs and incendiaries. And his initial hope upon leaving the shelter—that the destruction was confined to central Berlin—proved false: he could see fires lighting the streets for miles in every direction, burning deep into the suburbs. The city had suspended all buses and trains that night, so he and a colleague immediately took off walking.

  Despite—or perhaps because of—his anxiety, Heisenberg spent most of the ninety-minute walk chattering about abstract topics. Like a modern Marcus Aurelius, he’d taken consolation in philosophy during the tumult of the war. Whenever he and his family could escape to their mountain cabin in southern Germany, the Eagle’s Nest, he would pull out a treatise he’d been working on and add his latest revelations. He called it The Order of Reality. In the grand tradition of Teutonic philosophy, there was plenty of metaphysical bloviating about the nature of the cosmos, but it also included sections about ethics, especially the responsibility of intellectuals in unjust societies. He concluded that individuals are essentially pawns, buffeted by grand historical forces, and that beyond being decent to friends and loved ones, they can’t affect society much. These unnamed individuals should therefore retreat into the higher realms of art and science, and should moreover be absolved of all moral responsibility for their intellectual work, even if that work ends up being exploited by unjust rulers. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in psychology to see that Heisenberg was wrestling with his own conscience here, most probably his research into uranium fission. Conveniently, he absolved himself of wrongdoing, and he considered the 161-page treatise such a profound contribution to human thought that he modestly gave copies to friends as Christmas gifts.

  That night in Berlin, walking with his colleague, Heisenberg expanded on another favorite theme of his, the state of German science and its role in Germany’s future. Today the conversation reads like a surreal Platonic dialogue, pitting the pessimistic colleague, who believed Germany doomed, against the chipper Heisenberg, who stressed his optimism about a scientifically inspired future. All the while they were weaving around bomb craters and piles of flaming rubble—the direct result of recent scientific and technological advances. At one point Heisenberg got so caught up in his rhapsody that he stepped into a pool of flaming phosphorus and had to hotfoot over to a puddle to douse his shoes.

  Heisenberg also offered his thoughts on the character of the German race, whom he described as dreamers, people too inclined to believe in old myths about heroes (or Führers) rising up and leading them to greatness. But, he assured his colleague, such illusions have finally been shattered. Never again will the German volk indulge in silly fantasizing, never again will they neglect or ignore truth. They will learn to think scientifically, he insisted, and ground themselves in the reality confronting them.

  Just as he was saying this Heisenberg splashed into another puddle of phosphorus, and his shoe caught fire a second time. This intrusion of reality didn’t stop the discussion, though, as Heisenberg cheerfully doused his foot again. The colleague finally suggested, with some hesitation, that perhaps “it wouldn’t be a bad thing if we simply bothered about the facts that stare us in the face.” Heisenberg, his shoes no longer smoldering, couldn’t have agreed more.

  Shortly after this the two men wished each other luck and parted ways for separate suburbs. At which point reality once again intruded on Heisenberg’s night. For as he approached the home of his wife’s parents, where he and his children were staying, he realized that it was on fire. He ran up and found all the doors and shutters blown in—a bad sign. He kicked his way inside and sprinted up to the attic. There, he found his aged mother-in-law gamely trying to put out the fire; like a World War I trench gunner she was wearing a steel helmet to protect her noggin from falling debris. Heisenberg persuaded her to give up and hurried her outside. She assured him that his wife and children had escaped unharmed, albeit barely; they were staying at a neighbor’s house near the local botanical gardens.

  With his family safe, Heisenberg ran to the house next door, also on fire. The roof had caved in and the staircase inside had collapsed, so he began scaling the exterior walls like Spider-Mensch, working his way up to the attic. He found an old man there absentmindedly tossing handfuls of water onto the inferno. The water did no good, of course—it hissed and evaporated instantly—but the man was numb with shock and not in his right mind. He was likely to die, in fact; he kept backing into what Heisenberg called “an ever-diminishing circle” amid the flames. Only the appearance of a soot-smeared Heisenberg—who leapt through a “wall of flame” to reach him—startled the man back to reality. In a touchingly formal gesture, he bowed to his savior. Heisenberg then saved his life by helping him down the outside walls.

  Overall, that night showed Heisenberg at his best and worst: obtuse and brave, a hero and a fool. He was so troubled by the moral implications of uranium research that he constructed a wholly new (and wholly bogus) philosophical system simply to absolve himself. And yet he never hesitated when confronted with one of the toughest moral dilemmas a human being can face, barging into a fire and risking his life to save a stranger. That night revealed why so many people admired Heisenberg, and why they found him so, so frustrating.

  In the months that followed, the Allied bombing raids over Germany intensified, often lasting hours without relief. Berlin, Leipzig—nowhere seemed safe, especially in the north of the country. Fearing for their lives, Heisenberg permanently moved his family to the Eagle’s Nest cabin in southern Germany in the spring of 1943, and good thing, too. The family protested the move—the cabin was cold and remote and uncomfortable—but by year’s end their home in
Leipzig had been leveled by bombs. Had Heisenberg not insisted, they probably all would have perished there.

  Meanwhile, German scientific officials were also looking to evacuate. A few months after the Berlin raid, all Reich scientists received orders to begin scouting new locations for their labs. Heisenberg and the Uranium Club focused on a few sleepy villages in the Swabian Alps near the Black Forest in southern Germany. One town in particular, Haigerloch, seemed ideal for fission research. It was obscure and remote, and was situated near a cliff, which made it hard for bombers to attack. As a bonus, the cliff had a sturdy cave carved into its base. It was the perfect place for Heisenberg to fire up a new and much more powerful Uranium Machine—and show Kurt Diebner once and for all who the real genius was.

  CHAPTER 28

  “The Fun Will Start”

  In March 1943, one of the most fateful conversations of the war took place between two imprisoned German generals, one a congenial cynic and the other a bitter optimist. The congenial cynic was Wilhelm von Thoma, who looked more like a prisoner of war than a general: gaunt and hungry-eyed, with ears sticking out from his head. In the fall of 1942 he’d been commanding a tank division in Egypt, and after a sound defeat at the hands of the British, he prepared to retreat. But his commanding officer, Erwin Rommel, received a telegram from Hitler ordering the tank corps to stay put. Either win an incredible victory, the Führer demanded, or die in glory. From a military perspective this was lunacy, and Rommel knew it. He nevertheless obeyed the order out of loyalty to the regime. In contrast von Thoma denounced the order as “unparalleled madness,” and two days later, on November 4, he put on a clean uniform, climbed into his tank, and rolled toward enemy fire. After deliberately taking two hits, he crawled out the top and stood calmly amid the flaming husks of Panzers on the battlefield, waiting to be taken prisoner.

  He ended up at Trent Park, a luxurious manor a few dozen miles north of London; it dated to the days of Henry IV. When the owner died on the eve of World War II, the British government converted it into a cushy POW camp for senior Nazi officers, which was probably better than they deserved. The estate featured marble statues, huge cedars and oaks, and ponds with wild ducks, and although the lawns and courtyards were ringed with barbed wire, the prisoners had leave to stroll around them. Inside, the house had hot and cold running water and walls decorated with prints of German art. The common area included a radio console and a painting studio; one prisoner made such a nice copy of the famous Rembrandt-school painting Man in the Golden Helmet that the British hung it in the dining room. There was even a film room and a tobacco and beer shop. In short, these Nazi warmongers lived vastly more comfortable lives than most British folk at the time. The main complaint among the Germans, poor fellows, was that the food was “too abundant.”

  By war’s end sixty-three generals were ensconced at Trent Park, but von Thoma was just the second to arrive. He therefore made friendly with the first general there—the bitter optimist, Ludwig Crüwell—even though the two men normally would have had nothing to do with each other. Crüwell looked like a stereotypical Prussian general: hard eyes, hard mouth, cruel stare, but he had a complicated relationship with the Nazis. During a military purge in June 1934 party goons had tried to murder him, and he’d despised the regime ever since. As a loyal soldier, however, he always did his duty, and he prosecuted Hitler’s war without hesitation. (If nothing else, Crüwell had several young children, and feared that a German defeat would ruin their future prospects.) Despite his reservations, the war began brilliantly for him, as troops under his command captured Belgrade in 1941; observers compared him to Hannibal for his tactical brilliance. After a quick promotion, he was transferred to North Africa in August of that year.

  His meteoric rise ended abruptly the following May. One afternoon he flew what should have been a routine reconnaissance mission to inspect the position of some Italian troops. Italian officers on the ground were supposed to light flares to indicate the location of the front line, so Crüwell’s plane didn’t overshoot it. In a typical Italian blunder—the Germans were constantly cursing their incompetence—the officer in charge started yakking on the telephone just before Crüwell arrived and forgot the flares. Crüwell’s plane sailed right past him and was shot down a few minutes later. He was taken prisoner and ended up in Trent Park.

  Crüwell did not adjust well to life there, losing twenty-five pounds in three months. He also abused himself in the hope of securing a medical discharge to Germany, taking cold showers to induce chills and clawing his legs with his fingernails until he had open sores. The British saw through these tricks and refused to release him. Crüwell sank into a sullen depression, and only the arrival of von Thoma, a fellow general, loosened him up.

  The two spent many hours chatting together, despite markedly different temperaments. Crüwell was terse and unsmiling, and always maintained strict discipline; von Thoma rambled for hours and disregarded military regulations as frivolous in prison. The two men did share a contempt for Nazi leaders: Goebbels’s “beer-house tirades” disgusted them, and they deplored Hermann Göring—with his palaces full of looted art and his gold belt buckles “as big as an octavo volume”—as a greedy fop. They also swapped rumors about Hitler’s fits of madness (he supposedly fell to the ground sometimes and snapped like a dog) and mocked his conduct of the war. But while both agreed that things were dire at the moment, they differed in their long-term forecasts. Before his capture Crüwell had experienced only German victories, and he remained optimistic. Indeed, he refused to even entertain the thought of defeat, lest he go mad with anguish. Von Thoma, meanwhile, cheerily declared the war lost already and delighted in tormenting Crüwell about it.

  Hearing top German officers disparage Hitler was certainly heartening for the British. But the fifty-one-year-old generals also provided vital military intelligence in a conversation on March 22, 1943. During a drawn-out debate about the future of Germany, von Thoma mentioned his surprise that London was still standing; bombs should have flattened it by now. Crüwell asked what he meant, and von Thoma relayed some gossip he’d heard before his capture about revolutionary new rockets being tested at Peenemünde, on the Baltic coast—the V-weapons. “They’ve got huge things which they’ve brought up there,” he explained. “They go fifteen kilometers [nine miles] into the stratosphere” and rain down “frightful” terror. Something had obviously delayed their deployment, but London no doubt had a nasty surprise in store. He then quoted a senior official at Peenemünde: “Wait until next year and the fun will start!”

  Unbeknownst to von Thoma and Crüwell, the British were recording this conversation. As soon as the government took over Trent Park in 1939, intelligence agents had walled off a secret room in the house—dubbed the “M room,” for mic’d—and outfitted it with recording equipment that captured conversations in seven-minute stretches on gramophone discs. They then snaked microphones into the light fixtures in the common area and other places where the Germans would likely gather. Recording conversations between prisoners without their consent violated the Geneva conventions, but the British brushed aside such concerns.

  Ironically, most German officers at Trent Park realized that the British were probably trying to eavesdrop on them: in private they admonished each other over and over about the danger of loose lips and careless chatter. You never know what the enemy is up to. But in the very next breath they’d start bragging about all the things they’d withheld from the British during official interrogations, as well as a dozen other things the Limeys would probably love to know. Indeed, to help new prisoners adjust, von Thoma often held group therapy sessions in which he encouraged them to open up about their war experience; as one historian commented, “No stool pigeon could have done it better.” British agents had a riot listening to all this, and sometimes provided newspapers with fake stories to goad the prisoners into speaking more.

  Trent Park was ruinously expensive to run, but when the generals were fat and happy, they let
their guard down, and the information the British gleaned was invaluable. An impromptu discussion between Crüwell and another officer on submarine tactics, for instance, provided a vital edge for the Allies on D-Day and ultimately consigned hundreds of U-boats to Davy Jones’s locker. But the most important intelligence concerned V-weapons.

  British officials had been debating for months about how seriously to take Peenemünde. Some declared the threat overblown—a farrago of rumor and circumstantial evidence. Yet a few lucky breaks argued otherwise. In late 1942 a Danish chemist dining at a restaurant in Berlin happened to be seated next to two engineers from Peenemünde, who got roaring drunk and began blabbing about the latest rocket tests; the Dane swiftly reported this to Allied intelligence. Then, a photographer on a reconnaissance mission found himself with a half-used roll of film as his plane passed over the screaming head of Peenemünde. He started snapping, and happened to capture a cloud of exhaust at the moment of launch. Follow-up work revealed a power station nearby, as well as railroad spurs. All this was still ambiguous, but von Thoma’s chilling report about the imminent “fun” clinched the case.