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david irving Secretly Overheard:
from the starvation that awaited a million of their fellow prisoners
– but warned them that they would have to remain with him for
as long as the professors were detained: There was to be no leakage
from “Epsilon” whatever.
A Dakota flew the ill-assorted party to Versailles on May 7.
Conditions at the local detention centre at the Château du Chesnay,
known as “Dustbin,” were less congenial than those at Rheims
– the professors were allowed only prisoner rations, there were only
camp beds and no other furniture. After two or three days the professors
were in a state of controlled fury at being treated as “war
criminals”, as they put it (“Professor von Laue,” reported Rittner,
referring to one of the most illustrious names in practical physics,
“was almost in tears.”) Professor Werner Heisenberg and Dr. Kurt
Diebner were now added to the party. Rittner watched over them
closely, and prevented them from speaking with anybody else at the
centre. By May 10 the professors were so restive that they begged
Rittner to contact Professor Frédéric Joliot, their eminent (and
fiercely Communist) colleague in Paris; they assured Rittner that
Joliot would help them. Rittner refused.
After a widely publicised incident involving Reichsmarschall
Göring, General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered that no preferential
treatment was to be given to German prisoners; the party was
moved on May 11 to a villa at Le Vesinet, where they were reduced
to “B” rations. Professor Paul Harteck, the young physical chemist
who had been working on centrifuges to separate the explosive
uranium-235 isotope using uranium hexafluoride, was now also
added to the group.
As local indignation and whispers began about the identity of
the mysterious nine men, Rittner put it about that his charges were
eminent anti-Nazis being held for their own protection. Their morale
declined. On May 12 the Americans accidentally let slip that
On Heisenberg, see N. P. Landsman’s essay review, Getting even with Heisenberg,
in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, vol. 33 (2002),
pages 297–325; and Jeremy Bernstein’s paper Heisenberg in Poland in the
Journal of the American Association of Physics Teachers, vol. 72, March
2004: http:��aapt.org�ajp.
this is a copyright manuscript © david irving 2007