CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

HUNTING HEISENBERG II

1945-03-08 BBC FREDDY GRISEWOOD

The Allies are across the Rhine. Troops under General Hodges established a beachhead on the east bank south of Bonn on yesterday afternoon. A Reuter report from the First American Army says that the crossing was made at Remagen, which is about 25 miles south of Cologne.

IN LATE APRIL 1945 the German armies were in full retreat. Soviet forces were advancing on Berlin. French forces were already in southern Germany and fast approaching the towns of Haigerloch and Hechingen where Heisenberg’s laboratory was located. After all the effort they had put in, Pash and Goudsmit were determined not to lose their number one target to the French.

With an assist from borrowed U.S. Army troops, Colonel Pash and an Alsos caravan of two armored cars, jeeps and assorted vehicles set off to collect their prize. As was now standard practice, Goudsmit and his scientists followed a few days later. Goudsmit thought the procedure was adopted to protect the scientists’ lives. He was mistaken. It was adopted by order of General Groves to assure that none of the scientists were captured and forced to reveal atomic secrets. 190

As Pash and his troops rolled into the small town of Haigerloch, white sheets and pillowcases hung from its windows signaling surrender. Alsos agents immediately set about interrogating the residents, who claimed to know nothing about any scientific experiments. They did, however, point out a cliff overlooking the town where they had witnessed some unusual activity. Just below the top, carved into the face of the cliff 80 feet above the ground, was a concrete entrance to a cave. The entrance would have been invisible to aerial reconnaissance and virtually impossible to target with a bomb.

His curiosity piqued, Pash “persuaded” a local resident granted special access to unlock the cave door and there, inside a ten-foot-wide concrete hole in the floor, was what he had come halfway across Europe to find: a metal cylinder, Heisenberg’s nuclear reactor. The reactor’s lid hung from the cave ceiling with some 600 uranium cubes dangling like Christmas ornaments on chains from its underside. Once the lid was lowered, the reactor could be sealed and heavy water pumped in. A primitive prototype of a nuclear reactor, it was all Heisenberg had to show for six years of work. 191 He had hoped to use it as a bargaining chip to win favorable treatment from the Allies after Germany’s defeat. But, as Alsos soon learned, the reactor had never sustained a nuclear chain reaction. It had never gone critical.

America’s scientists had entered the race convinced that German science was the best in the world. The Germans believed it. The President of the United States believed it. Fear of German scientific superiority had driven President Roosevelt to authorize building the atom bomb. It kept General Groves, Oppenheimer, Fermi and Goudsmit awake at night as they raced to catch up to Heisenberg. Now, it seemed, it was all a myth. Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s most brilliant physicist, the man Allied intelligence called “the brain,” had not come close to building an atom bomb. He hadn’t even built a working nuclear reactor.

Wasting no time, Pash left Goudsmit with the reactor and drove ten miles to Hechingen where Heisenberg and his group of 50 scientists had their offices inside an old textile mill. Heisenberg wasn’t there when Pash arrived, but he’d left behind on his desk a framed photo of himself. He had carried it with him in August 1939, when he sailed from New York back to Germany, his memento of happier times. Taken at the University of Michigan, it showed him and the man he had once considered a close friend, Samuel Goudsmit, staring into the camera and smiling. Goudsmit’s fellow soldiers took advantage of the situation and ribbed him about it for months. 192