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connection, he enlisted the help of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Himmler demanded that Heisenberg make his case, and Heisenberg did so, in writing and in several harrowing sessions with Gestapo interrogators in Berlin. In the end, a full year after the publication of Stark’s ‘white Jews’ article, Himmler exonerated Heisenberg ‘precisely because you were recommended to me by my family’, and because, as Himmler wrote to Gestapo head Reinhard Heydrich, Heisenberg seemed a ‘decent person’ whom they ‘could not afford to lose or to silence decisively’. Heisenberg had to agree not to mention in his classes the names of Jewish scientists, and he gave up the effort to move to Munich, remaining at the University of Leipzig until called to the KWI in 1942.19

Thus, along with his dedication to his country and its science, his identification in good part of German science with himself, and his belief that Nazism might not be so terrible in the long run or at least susceptible to his influence, Heisenberg might have felt in a perverse way grateful to Himmler for having exonerated him, or at least for having protected him from the poisons of Lenard and Stark. As David Cassidy has written, for Heisenberg ‘remaining in Germany was apparently worth almost any price, as long as he could continue to work and teach’. The pleas of his colleagues in America during the summer of 1939 only made him more determined to return home. While he abhorred the racist parochialism of the deutsche physics advocates, their rhapsodizing concerning the uniquely glorious properties of German culture was not entirely without attraction for him. Werner Heisenberg was no Nazi. But in the name of Germany, and for physics itself, he was more than willing to continue his work, even to the benefit of the Third Reich.20

His remaining assured that German science would make a serious exploration of the uses of nuclear power. The Germans were quick off the mark. Fission was discovered by Hahn and Strassmann, then confirmed by Meitner and Frisch, in December 1938; Bohr reported on it in Washington in late January. Hahn and Strassmann then further clarified the process leading to a chain reaction (‘There could then simultaneously be a number of neutrons emitted,’ they wrote in January), and three French physicists, led by Frederic Joliot, confirmed the news of a chain reaction in uranium in a letter to the journal Nature on 7 April. Two weeks later, and two days after the Joliot letter had been published, Harteck and Groth wrote to the Reich War Office about the possibility of a nuclear explosive. And on 29 April, the Reich Education Ministry (REM) convened a meeting of experts at its headquarters in Berlin to discuss the findings to that point. Scientists here spoke mainly of constructing a nuclear reactor, a ‘uranium burner’ as the Germans liked to call it, out of which discussion came the decision to end the export of uranium, most of it available from the mines at Joachimsthal. (This step, along with an alarming report of the 29 April meeting given to a British scientist by the German chemist Paul Rosbaud, got the attention of British scientists, and ultimately several in the United States.)21

For all the loyalty German scientists like Heisenberg felt for the German state, and for all the apparent totality of the Nazi regime, physicists resisted a centralized nuclear project. Or perhaps it simply did not occur to them at first to combine efforts. Though out of the REM meeting there came the Uranium Club, or Uranverein, a group of scientists united in the cause of making fissions, as in the United States the scientific habit of independent research persisted, and as in Japan there was more than one government agency interested in directing the work. The REM, which had called the 29 April meeting, proceeded under the leadership (it will be recalled) of the physicist Abraham Esau to capture as much uranium as it could with an eye toward building a reactor. Meanwhile, Harteck and Groth’s provocative letter to the Army Weapons Bureau prompted the bureau’s explosives