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Eavesdropping on Hitler’s Reich
project only to gain UK-Stellungen for his friends and scarce equipment
for his laboratories.
As the war ended, the German team were based at Hechingen,
in Württemberg, and their primitive Atommeiler, installed in a
cave beneath a cliff at nearby Haigerloch, had still not become critical.
All these scientists were however dangerous Wissensträger – in
Joseph Stalin’s or even General de Gaulle’s hands they might prove
dangerous for Britain and the United States. So Churchill and Truman
ordered their arrest: the men were to be held incommunicado
while the leaders decided what to do with them. They were meanwhile
to have every word of their private conversations recorded
– for hints at escape, for clues to where they had hidden their secret
papers, uranium, and radium stocks, and for interesting research
pointers to enable British and American scientists to pick the Germans’
unwitting brains, which were after all some of the most outstanding
in German physics and physical-chemistry. The Germans
were, of course, totally unaware of General Grove ’ s Manhattan
project, which made the recordings of their reactions to the news
of Hiroshima all the more poignant and piquant.
Like all such British Intelligence operations, the interning of
the German atomic scientists was given a code-name, the suitably
scientific “Operation Epsilon.” The captured German scientists
– initially Professors Otto Hahn, Max von Laue, and doctors
Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Karl Wirtz, Erich Bagge and Horst
Korsching – had been brought to Eisenhower’s headquarters city,
Rheims, in northern France. Here they were housed at No. 75, rue
Gambetta, where S.H.A.E.F arranged for two British orderlies and
an American cook to provide American “A” rations (the best) to
the prisoners. Lieutenant-Commander Eric Welsh, a British Intelligence
officer attached to the ALSOS mission, ordered Major T.
H. Rittner to fly to Rheims, collect the prisoners and take them
to a chateau at Versailles “where the original [unexplained] policy
regarding these detainees could be carried out,” as Rittner – a high
official of C.S.D.I.C. – reported. Since the British and American
staff refused to “wait on Germans,” Rittner selected a German waiter
and cook from the local Rheims stockade – thereby saving them