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While this is an argument worth having, at least fora while, certain judgments seem finally irresistible. First, the divisions in the German scientific community, even within the Uranverein, made success in building a bomb problematical. If the most bilious attacks by the advocates for deutsche physics had faded by the early 1940s, the various sites of reactor building in particular frustrated any coordination of effort. Scientists competed for limited resources, especially uranium oxide and heavy water. What is lauded as academic freedom and scientific independence in peacetime comes to resemble an unaffordable luxury of disorganization in times of all-out war, as the Americans would discover. To an extent, Heisenberg’s appointment to the KWI in mid-1942 focused the effort to build a uranium reactor, and the center of nuclear research overall was the Virus House, built on the grounds of the KWI Institute of Biology and Virus Research. Still, scientific jealousy prevented any synchronization of the investigation. The ousted Kurt Diebner retained funding from the Army and resumed his reactor work in the Berlin suburb of Gottow. Experiments to separate isotopes and create chain reactions also continued in Berlin itself and in Munich.25

The lack of coordination among laboratories was never remedied by the German government, which had its own disjointed relationship with nuclear science, and here is a second reason why the German program failed. Some in the regime were suspicious of nuclear physics because of its association with Einstein and other prominent Jews. Hitler wanted weapons, certainly, but he never understood the science and technology that produced them. When the distinguished Max Planck, president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, approached the Fuhrer in May 1933 to argue that Jewish scientists could contribute to the state and should not be driven off, Hitler became so apoplectic that Planck simply got up and left. (Einstein reported that Hitler had threatened during his tirade to throw Planck, who was 75, into a concentration camp.) Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, head of the Reich Research Council, ridiculed the hypothetical scientist who felt he must proclaim ‘his discoveries to the world, as though they are too much to hold in his bladder one moment longer’. He complained that ‘we can’t read the papers that these scientists publish—or at any rate I’m too feeble to’. (Goring soon thereafter relinquished management of the Research Council.) Bernhard Rust, the Minister of Education involved in the quest for fission since the first meeting of scientists in April 1939, was uninterested in nuclear research, preferring instead to rewrite history textbooks and purge Jews from universities.26

Albert Speer, who had once considered mathematics as a career, became the chief architect of the Third Reich and, in 1942, the Minister of Armaments. Only after this second appointment did he learn of the prospect of an atomic bomb. In June 1942 Speer and a trio of military representatives were briefed by Heisenberg, Hahn, and several others on the progress in nuclear research. Heisenberg talked about the ‘uranium machine’, his favorite nuclear subject, and could not help complaining about the lack of support for nuclear research by Rust’s ministry and the probability that the American scientists were by now ahead of the Germans as a result. Speer asked Heisenberg about atomic bombs. ‘His answer was by no means encouraging,’ Speer remembered. ‘He declared, to be sure, that the scientific solution had already been found’—indeed, Heisenberg had believed this as early as September 1941—‘and that theoretically nothing stood in the way of building such a bomb’. But the technology was lacking and would remain so for at least years, even if the project suddenly received full government support; Speer subsequently heard a timetable of three to four years. The session left Speer doubtful that a bomb could be built in time to win the war. He was additionally