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Eavesdropping on Hitler’s Reich
public access to the file until February 6, 199, when it was finally
opened.
The American Government had tried on several occasions to
have its copy of the transcripts declassified. This copy, in two binders,
was in the files of Groves’s “Manhattan Engineer District.”
A typical response by the National Archives (dated August 31,
1989) to an American professor’s request for access to the transcripts
as recently as 1989, read:
The Government of the United Kingdom has requested that these
documents be withheld in their entirety. It has been determined that
release of this information could reasonably be expected to cause
damage to the national security.
Ever since Otto Hahn’s discovery of nuclear fission in Germany
in December 1938, teams of scientists in Germany, Britain, and
America had competed to build, first an atomic pile – known in
Germany as an Atommeiler or Uranmaschine – and then an atomic
bomb; the first depended on the release of neutrons and energy in
a controlled chain reaction, the second on the same chain reaction
taking place with uncontrolled, explosive violence. Until 1942 the
German team at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut in Berlin, working under
the brilliant Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg, held the
lead; although the ambitious Heisenberg was more interested in
the theoretical aspects, his team began work on the Uranmaschine
in 1939.
Fatefully misled by an incorrect calculation of the Bremslänge
of Graphit by the mathematician Walther Bothe, the team believed
Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can be Told (New York, 1962).
The National Archives citation for their seat of the transcripts, now also
opened, is NA: RG.77, Manhattan Project, Entry 22, The Farm Hall Transcripts.
In the British Public Record Office the transcripts are available on
poorly legible microfilm, WO.208�5019.
See David Irving, The German Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, New York,
1967) – the first full-length narrative history of the German atomic research
effort in World War II. Its UK title was The Virus House.