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david irving Secretly Overheard:
wife and son were at Stadtilm and several times he threatened suicide,
until Rittner was able to inform him his family had been safely
evacuated.
On June 14 Walther Gerlach was added to the group. “[He] has
a very cheerful disposition, “ summarised Rittner, “and is easy to
handle.” But the other professors were now “very, very restive, “ and
there were hints at desperate actions to “let the world know of their
situation.”
They tried many different ploys. Heisenberg, whom Rittner adjudged
the most sensible, told him not to let British Intelligence be
fooled by the mere documents found at their institutes:
“He said that [in fact] their experiments had advanced much
further than would appear from these documents, “ reported the
British officer, “ and [he] maintained that they had advanced still
further as a result of pooling of information since their detention.”
Heisenberg and Harteck suggested adding Professor Dietrich(?)
Bonhöffer of Leipzig to their party – “He was an active anti-Nazi
who had worked with them . . . it would be unwise to let him fall
into Russian hands.”
WHAT MAKES THESE PARLEYS interesting for history are the
personalities and politics involved. For example, Carl-Friedrich von
Weizsäcker – whose brother Richard would later become Bundespräsident
of Germany – was a clever young theoretical physicist and
son of the Staatssekretär im Auswärtigen Amt, Ernst von Weizsäkker,
whom the Allies had arrested as a Kriegsverbrecher; in July 1940
the physicist Weizsäcker had described in einer Aufzeichnung for
the Heereswaffenamt how a new atomic explosive, atomic-element
No.94 (plutonium), could be extracted from an Atommeiler. In later
years however he would become famous as a Kernwaffengegner
und Friedensforscher – was this volte-face hypocrisy, opportunism,
or a natural development in a Germany where a crushing defeat
had stood everything on its head and where the former Obrigkeit,
the Nazis like Kurt Diebner, were about to become the persecuted
and the oppressed?
Sketching the characters of his ten illustrious prisoners, Rittner
this is a copyright manuscript © david irving 2007