by Sam Kean
That winter Groves sent Berg to interview Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. He also visited Lise Meitner in Stockholm, a second and far less pleasant call. A few months earlier, miffed that Otto Hahn hadn’t answered her first letter, Meitner had written him another note to ask why. Hahn, confused, replied that he’d never received any letter from her. Meitner quickly deduced that the “extremely friendly” Dr. Berg had double-crossed her. So when he showed up at her home again, all smiles, she gave him the worst tongue-lashing he’d endured since Boris Pash laid into him in Rome.
Berg calmed her down the fastest way he knew how, by spinning more lies. He claimed that no one had read the first letter; authorities simply hadn’t delivered it to Hahn because he was in custody. Berg then had the chutzpah to invite himself into her home, where they spent the next few hours chatting things over. At the end of which—the man had a way—Meitner entrusted him with another letter, for physicist Max Planck. Berg immediately opened this letter, too.
Berg and Meitner never met again. Incredibly, though, absorbing the brunt of her wrath stirred up some real emotions in Berg, a rare thing for him. She continued to haunt his thoughts for years, in fact, and he talked about her regularly; friends wondered whether he hadn’t fallen a little in love with her, perhaps even tried to seduce her. In sum, the hulking big league catcher from Newark seemingly had a thing for a prim Austrian physicist who half hated his guts, and whose trust and confidence he repeatedly betrayed. If you ever needed further proof that Cupid is a perverse little imp, there you go.
Eventually Groves ran out of missions for Berg and cut him loose. More humiliating still, Berg discovered the hard way that OSS hadn’t quite disbanded, not entirely. The agency no longer ran missions abroad, but it still had a stable of accountants in Washington tying up loose ends, and they had a few questions for Mr. Berg about the money that OSS had advanced him over the years: a total of $21,439.14 ($300,000 today). Mind you, no one ever accused Berg of theft or misappropriation (at least not publicly); the bean counters simply needed some sort of justification for the money in their ledgers. But Berg smelled a conspiracy afoot, or perhaps he decided to mask his guilt with bluster. Either way, he refused to account for a single dime, setting off a brawl that lasted for years.
Even if OSS accountants thought him a bounder, Berg still had champions in other areas of government, and in December 1946 the White House awarded the catcher the Medal for Merit, at that time the nation’s highest civilian honor for wartime service. The nomination letter specifically cited his parachuting into Norway to investigate the heavy-water plant, his intelligence gathering in Italy, and his stalking of Werner Heisenberg in Zurich.
Berg rejected the award. When asked why, he stayed true to character and refused to explain himself. “It embarrasses me,” was all he’d say. He’d already resigned from the State Department by then, and after refusing the medal he deflected all inquiries about what he’d do next. When he turned in his gear, he kept just two mementos from his days as an atomic spy: the pistol he’d carried to Heisenberg’s lecture, which he’d still never fired, and the cyanide-filled rubber L-pill.
CHAPTER 59
The Bomb Drops
Alsos arrested dozens of German nuclear physicists throughout the spring of 1945 but ultimately kept just ten in custody, including Heisenberg, Hahn, Weizsäcker, and Diebner. All ten assumed, of course, that the Americans wanted to milk them for atomic secrets, based on the incredible Uranium Machines they’d built. (Did we mention the 670 percent increase in neutrons?) But the plain truth was that American scientists would learn almost nothing from their German counterparts. Alsos detained them in large part to keep them away from the Russians.
While debating where to intern this new Uranium Club, Alsos put them under the guard of some U.S. troops in Heidelberg who happened to be black—an act the Germans protested as insulting. (Apparently the attitudes of the Third Reich had rubbed off on them more than they realized.) There was talk of sending them to rural Montana to keep them isolated, until an American general proposed saving fuel and shooting them instead. Aghast, the British stepped in at this point and assumed control. They shifted the scientists to Versailles and then Belgium before finally flying them to England on July 3. It was a routine flight, but the Germans immediately grew suspicious. If the Allies wanted to wipe out the entire German nuclear physics program, they had a grand opportunity here: one plane crash would do it. All ten were no doubt white-knuckled the whole flight, flinching at every shudder of turbulence until they landed.
The British transferred them to Farm Hall, an estate north of London that was every bit as cushy as the one the German generals had enjoyed. The scientists dined on rich food and had full access to newspapers and radios. Heisenberg played Beethoven sonatas on the piano, and Hahn weeded the rose garden. A British soldier read passages from Dickens to them to improve their English. They played volleyball. The only complaints were a lack of contact with their families and boredom. One physicist read Lewis Carroll’s Alice books several times through and couldn’t stomach another journey into Wonderland.
Most of the ten got on well, enjoying the solidarity of prisoners, but Heisenberg and his clique continued to freeze out Diebner, snubbing him during activities and speaking to him as little as possible. The one time Diebner opened up to Heisenberg, the latter practically laughed in his face. Diebner had just confessed his fear that the British were monitoring their conversations, perhaps through microphones hidden around the estate. Heisenberg rolled his eyes: “They’re not as cute as all that. I don’t think they know the real Gestapo methods. They’re a bit old-fashioned.” Same old Diebner, pathetic as ever.
Turns out Diebner was right. In direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, the British had wired the whole house and were taping every conversation.
Political considerations kept the Alsos crew out of Berlin until late July 1945, a full three months after the Soviet army marched in. The clean, efficient German capital that Samuel Goudsmit remembered from before the war was gone. Mobs of grubby Russian soldiers roamed about, spreading typhoid fever and lice. Food and clothing were scarce, and a ruthless black market had popped up: everywhere American soldiers went, people swarmed their jeeps, offering chocolate bars for 50 Reichsmarks ($70 today) or cigarettes for 100. Bombed-out cars clogged the streets, and Alsos sometimes showed up at scientific institutes to find little more than an address plate atop a pile of rubble. (In future years many university students had to help clear debris or do construction work as a condition of admission.)
While digging through one rubble pile, Goudsmit found the skull of an infant buried in ash. He also visited the old Egyptian museum in Berlin, once a favorite haunt of his, and found it still standing, albeit barely. Sadly, the old museum security guard, not knowing what else to do with himself, still reported to work each day and stood there all alone. Goudsmit shared his memories of the collection, and the guard was so moved that he offered Goudsmit a mummy to take home. Although tempted—Goudsmit could ship anything he wanted to the United States, by claiming he needed to test it for radioactivity—the souvenir was too unwieldy to fit in his jeep; he settled for some painted scraps of mummy wrappings instead.
One day during the first week of August, while Goudsmit was excavating the ruins of Himmler’s “race academy,” a jeep screeched up beside him and an officer jumped out. You have fifteen minutes to catch a plane, he told Goudsmit. Goudsmit asked what the fuss was. The officer replied that he’d been scouring Berlin for him, and had finally seen the Alsos lightning logo on his jeep. Now he had to rush him to the airport for an emergency flight to Frankfurt, where Boris Pash was waiting. He couldn’t reveal why.
After digging through debris all day, Goudsmit was tired and dirty, and asked to grab his toothbrush and pajamas first. No time, the officer said, and dragged him off. Goudsmit arrived at the airstrip to find the plane’s propellers already spinning, “just like in the movies,” and they started down the runway the moment he
slammed the door shut. He arrived in Frankfurt to find two weeks’ worth of fresh laundry waiting; clearly he wasn’t going anywhere soon. But when he asked why he’d been summoned, no one would say. Even Pash mumbled excuses. Annoyed, Goudsmit wandered off to have dinner with some old Alsos colleagues stationed nearby.
That evening everything became clear. After dinner Goudsmit chaperoned an Alsos secretary back to her hotel. In the lobby sat a drowsy sergeant listening to big-band music on the radio. Suddenly the broadcast cut out for a news flash—the United States had dropped a devastating new bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The report riveted Goudsmit: he couldn’t believe how much technical detail the announcer was revealing. After years of intense secrecy, the public now knew almost as much about nuclear weapons as he did.
As the broadcast wound down, Goudsmit felt a wave of foreboding. One day a few months earlier, after realizing how far behind the German bomb project was lagging, he’d turned to one of Groves’s deputies and said, “Isn’t it wonderful that the Germans have no atom bomb? Now we won’t have to use ours.” The deputy just looked at him: “You understand, Sam, that if we have such a weapon we’re going to use it.” The prophecy had now come true. Atomic bombs had originated in fear, as defensive weapons to counteract the threat of a nuclear Reich. But as the German threat receded, so too had the notion of merely playing defense. Imperceptibly but inevitably, the Bomb had been transmuted into something else—the most blatantly offensive weapon in history. And the world, Goudsmit sensed, would never again be the same.
Unlike Goudsmit, Otto Hahn received a courtesy warning about Hiroshima. A British officer at Farm Hall pulled the chemist aside before dinner on August 6 and broke the news. Hahn was devastated. As codiscoverer of fission, he felt morally responsible for the destruction, and all the old horrors clutched at his heart. When the soldier offered him gin to steady his nerves, he took several gulps.
Hahn told the other nine German scientists at dinner around 7:45 p.m. that evening. There was an immediate uproar: none of them believed him. If Germany hadn’t succeeded in building a nuclear bomb, then no other country could have, either. Heisenberg was especially adamant. This was a trick, he insisted, propaganda. The Allies had just slapped the name “nuclear” on some large conventional explosive. Besides, he’d already asked his friend Samuel Goudsmit about an American bomb, and Goudsmit would have told him if they had one.
Their protests continued right up until the BBC broadcast at 9 p.m.—which hushed every mouth in the room. The announcer went into a convincing amount of technical detail, and even mentioned uranium fission. Each physicist there suddenly felt as devastated as Hahn. As Goudsmit later commented, “That was the first time they really felt that Germany had lost the war. Up to that time, they had believed that Germany at least had won the war of the laboratory.” No more.
Each scientist dealt with his grief differently. Diebner sat silent. Heisenberg kept asking how on earth the Americans, of all people, had beaten them. Hahn, perhaps tipsy, loosed his wicked tongue and began taunting people: “If the Americans have a uranium bomb, then you’re all second-raters. Poor old Heisenberg.” Weizsäcker, naturally, started making political calculations. “If the Americans and the British were good imperialists,” he declared, “they would attack Stalin with the thing tomorrow, but they won’t do that.”
Weizsäcker also began rallying his comrades and—in a move that’s still causing acrimony today—laying out ways for German nuclear scientists to save face. He emphasized two stratagems. First, they should blame their failure on a lack of resources and the stringent German wartime economy. Clearly they could have succeeded, if only they’d had the manpower and materials. At the same time, they should emphasize that they hadn’t wanted to build a nuclear bomb—that they’d taken a moral stand to keep it out of Hitler’s hands. As if trying the line out that evening, Weizsäcker said at one point, “The physicists didn’t want to do it, on principle. If we had all wanted Germany to win the war, we would have succeeded.” Hahn immediately objected to this (“I don’t believe that”), as did another scientist. But you have to hand it to Weizsäcker: the strategy was clever. It would convince the Allies that they’d opposed Hitler, since they supposedly hadn’t wanted to build it; convince their fellow Germans that they hadn’t traitorously sabotaged the war effort, since building a bomb was economically impossible; and perhaps most importantly, convince the scientific world that they could have built a bomb if they’d been as rich and well supported as the Americans.
After the discussion broke up that night, well past 1 a.m., the hidden microphones at Farm Hall captured some poignant scenes. The administrative head of the German bomb project locked himself in his room and wept. When Hahn retired, two other scientists rendezvoused in the hallway and began whispering. Would Hahn kill himself that night? They feared so, and cracked open his bedroom door to peek. They waited and waited, and were immensely relieved to see him drift off at last.
Heisenberg, too, likely slept very little that night. His thoughts churning, he began working out a complete theory of bomb design the next morning. He did so all by himself, without access to any books or technical data—and in less than a week, he managed to reproduce most aspects of the top-secret American bombs. Why Heisenberg hadn’t done these calculations in, say, 1939 remains unknown. But this wizardry showed exactly why the Allies considered him the most dangerous scientist in the world.
Weizsäcker, meanwhile, kept crafting the German political response, and he pushed his fellow captives to release a statement to exonerate them in the eyes of the world. Heisenberg duly wrote something up, and all ten Farm Hall scientists signed it, albeit some reluctantly.
Hahn was one of the reluctants, and over the next few months he continued to agonize. How had his simple chemistry experiments—a purely scientific venture—mutated into something so monstrous? Things got even more complicated when he learned, after reading a story about himself in the newspaper, that he’d won the 1945 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering fission—surely the only scientific laureate to receive the news while incarcerated. It later emerged that one of the first scientists to nominate him for the fission work, way back in 1941, had been Samuel Goudsmit.
Fearing that Russian agents in Berlin would snatch him up and drag him to Moscow, the American army tried to detain Goudsmit in Frankfurt for most of August. Goudsmit refused, returning to the German capital as soon as he could—he was tired of the army jerking him around. And while a Russian agent did approach him there a few days later, it was only to buy his watch. With the flourishing black market, Goudsmit stood to make a fortune on it, $250 ($3,500 today). Except it had stopped ticking that very morning, and he got nothing.
In late August he had his final Alsos adventure. Unlike Goudsmit, the Russians really did want to kidnap the publisher-spy Paul Rosbaud (the Griffin), who knew the inside scoop on everything from the Peenemünde rockets to the Black Forest Uranium Machines. So when the Soviets lured the Griffin to a hotel one day, supposedly to meet with a famous Russian physicist, he and Goudsmit smelled a trap, and Goudsmit ordered two armored jeeps to follow Rosbaud. Sure enough, Soviet soldiers seized him and tried to drag him off. American troops had to wrestle him free in the street. Goudsmit then helped smuggle Rosbaud out of Berlin in an army uniform, taking the autobahn west to the American quadrant of Germany.
After Rosbaud’s rescue, Goudsmit’s work for Alsos effectively came to an end. He could now return to the United States and pick up the life he’d left behind. But before leaving Europe, he had one last mission, a personal one, to attend to.
His hometown of The Hague had been liberated in May 1945, and he finally found time to visit one windy day in September. He was surprised at how cramped and narrow the streets in his old neighborhood felt, and was saddened to see that his mother’s hat shop had been gutted. Otherwise, things looked fairly normal. The familiar smell of the sea filled his nostrils, and as he approached his boyhood home, “I dreamed that
I would find my aged parents… waiting for me,” he said, “just as I had last seen them.” For one fleeting moment he could even believe this—the house with its high front porch was still standing. But as he parked his jeep, he saw that all the windows had been smashed out; curtains on the third floor were flapping naked in the breeze. He climbed inside through a broken window and found the house empty, more than empty. The previous winter had been brutal in Holland, and every burnable item inside—doors, ceiling panels, stairs, all his father’s handcrafted furniture—had been scavenged for fuel.
“Climbing into the little [bed]room where I had spent so many hours of my life,” he later wrote, “I found a few scattered papers, among them my high-school report cards that my parents had saved.” He wandered back downstairs and peeked outside. “The little garden in the back of the house looked sadly neglected. Only the lilac tree was still standing.” His mother’s breakfast nook was vacant, as was the corner where they’d kept the piano; the bookcase was bereft of books.
Until then, he’d merely felt furious with the Nazis for murdering his parents. But as he wandered the vacant house that day, a sense of guilt washed over him. Why hadn’t he acted sooner to get Isaac and Marianne to safety? “If I had hurried a little more,” he remembered thinking, “if I had written those necessary letters a little faster, surely I could have rescued them.” It was the Nazis’ final cruelty: to make the victims punish themselves. Alone in the empty house, he began weeping.