CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CAPTURE

DURING THE WANING DAYS of the war in Europe, Colonel Pash rounded up nine of the German scientists on his most wanted list. Only Heisenberg remained free. With the German army in disarray and offering only sporadic resistance, Pash and his men tracked Heisenberg to his family’s cabin in the mountain town of Urfeld 150 miles from Hechingen. Heisenberg had ridden there by bicycle, traveling only at night to elude SS troops executing suspected deserters and Allied fighter planes strafing vehicles on the road.

Heisenberg was sitting calmly on the veranda, looking out at the lake, when Pash and his men, out of breath from the steep climb, trudged up the road to his cabin. 193 On seeing the American uniforms, he said simply, “I’ve been expecting you,” and invited them in to meet his stunned wife and children. 194

In the cabin, Pash’s soldiers found another photo of Heisenberg and Goudsmit, this one from the 1920s when Goudsmit was a student in Göttingen. “Sam Goudsmit is waiting for you at headquarters in Heidelberg,” they told him. 195 Heisenberg seemed pleased, but concerned about his family’s welfare. Not wanting to appear to be collaborating with the enemy, he asked Pash to treat him roughly, and Pash played his part. In the nearby village, his men handcuffed Heisenberg and forced him into an Army jeep. 196

Twenty-seven years after losing World War I, Germany had lost another. Millions of Germans had been killed. Much of the country had been turned to rubble. Yet at the moment of capture Heisenberg felt only relief, “like an utterly exhausted swimmer setting foot on firm land.” 197

Heisenberg didn’t know it, but that swimmer had come within a hair’s breadth of not making it. In November 1944, after inviting Heisenberg to lecture in Zurich, Paul Scherrer cabled Goudsmit who notified the OSS. The OSS assigned one of its top agents, Moe Berg, to attend the lecture. A man with a colorful history, Berg had studied seven languages at Princeton and played fifteen years of professional baseball, ending his career as catcher with the Boston Red Sox. Often described as “the brainiest player in major league baseball,” 198 he had passed the bar exam in the off-season and years later been recruited by the OSS.

Berg arrived in Paris just before the Battle of the Bulge for a week of OSS briefings by Sam Goudsmit and others. It’s not known exactly what was said during Berg’s briefings, but Berg, an inveterate note taker, left a fragmentary scrap of paper reading— “gun in my pocket” and on the next line “nothing spelled out but—Heisenberg must be rendered hors de combat ,” a French phrase meaning “out of the battle.” 199

On December 18, 1944 Berg and another OSS officer arrived early for a 4:15 seminar at the University of Zurich lecture hall on Ramstrasse. Encountering no security, they left their hats and coats at the door and took seats in the second row. Only about twenty people were in the audience. Heisenberg stood at the blackboard in front of the room and began to speak. Berg had been briefed on nuclear fission, but this speech on something called S-matrix theory seemed to have little to do with fission.

Berg listened intently trying to decide if Heisenberg should live or die. Well into the lecture, Berg began taking notes: “thinish” . . . “Irish look” . . . “Heavy eyebrows, emphasize movement of that part of bony structure over the eyes” . . . “Sinister eyes” . . . “Continuous seeming quizzical smile as he talks.” 200

After the war, Berg told a friend he would have shot Heisenberg there and then had he believed he was building a bomb. But S-matrix theory, “sinister eyes” and “quizzical smile” were not sufficient evidence for a death sentence. Berg issued Heisenberg a reprieve. The “exhausted swimmer” was allowed to reach “firm land,” unaware how close he had come to drowning. 201

It was Heisenberg’s second Allied reprieve. After the Strasbourg documents confirmed the location of his laboratory in Hechingen, General Groves set in motion plans to have the lab bombed. Goudsmit convinced the General that Heisenberg was not a threat, and the mission was scrubbed.