CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE HUNT IS OVER

1945-05-01 BBC RADIO

This is London calling. Here is a news flash. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead. I repeat that. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.

SAM GOUDSMIT’S SEARCH FOR WERNER HEISENBERG ended in Heidelberg, Germany on May 6, 1945, a week after German dictator Adolf Hitler committed suicide. In the preceding months Goudsmit had met with a dozen or more German scientists, helping to decide whether they would be interned or freed. As he waited for Heisenberg to be ushered into his office, he knew that the fate of his nemesis had already been decided. Heisenberg was simply too valuable an asset to risk his being kidnapped and forced to work for the Soviets. Goudsmit would have to take him into custody.

It had been almost six years since the two had last seen each other. There was so much to say that the two ended up saying very little. Goudsmit asked Heisenberg, as he had in 1939, if he wanted to come to the United States. And once again he answered no. He would be needed in Germany after the war. And then Heisenberg proudly asked Goudsmit if he wanted to see his prototype nuclear reactor.

“He was still too impressed by his own importance,” Goudsmit later wrote. Goudsmit didn’t even bother to ask Germany’s chief atomic theoretician about his work. “I merely thanked him for his offer and left him secure in the belief that his work was ahead of ours.” 202 In his brief report on the interrogation Goudsmit said simply, “Heisenberg is actively anti-Nazi, but strongly nationalistic.” 203

In his account of the meeting Heisenberg completely misinterpreted Goudsmit’s comments. “The conversations with Goudsmit . . . were as amicable as though the last six years had never taken place, and I myself haven’t felt this well for years, both emotionally and physically,” he wrote his wife. 204 It’s hard to imagine how he could have been so far off the mark. The letter was never mailed. She discovered it after his death among his papers.

The day after the meeting, Germany surrendered, and the full horror of Nazi atrocities finally became public—atrocities that certainly would have been much worse had Germany developed an atom bomb.

Newsreels from the period showed ditches filled with rotting bodies piled one on top of another and prisoners not yet dead, waiting to die.

WORLD WAR II NEWSREEL

NARRATOR: For the first time America can believe what they thought was impossible propaganda. Here is documentary evidence of sheer mass murder. 205

Among the dead were Enrico Fermi’s father-in-law, an admiral in the Italian navy . . . and Goudsmit’s parents. With typical German efficiency, the Nazis had recorded the date of their murder. It was February 11, 1943, Isaac Goudsmit’s seventieth birthday. 206

Werner Heisenberg knew Goudsmit’s parents. He had met them in 1925 at Goudsmit’s home in the Netherlands. When the Gestapo arrested them, a friend alerted Heisenberg, hoping he would intercede. Heisenberg responded by sending a letter to Nazi authorities in Holland saying that Goudsmit had always been a friend of the German people and “He would be very sorry if . . . [Goudsmit’s] parents would experience any difficulties in Holland.” 207

Goudsmit considered the letter woefully inadequate and could not forgive Heisenberg. Nor would he forgive himself. He wrote very movingly about his own failure to save his parents in his memoir on the Alsos mission: “Maybe I could have saved them . . . If I had hurried a little more, if I had not put off one visit to the immigration office for one week, if I had written those necessary letters a little faster, surely I could have rescued them from the Nazis in time. Now I wept with a heavy feeling of guilt in me.” 208