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Eavesdropping on Hitler’s Reich
Diebner recommended that Professor Heisenberg escape and
appeal to his friends at Cambridge university: “That would cause a
terrific sensation. The whole thing would become known.” “They
could get the police to bring you back,” he added, “but the damage
would be done.”
“They are hiding us from their own people,” commented
Harteck, “and that is the amazing thing. If it had been the other way
round – we never hid a foreign scientist in Germany – the other
scientists all knew about it.”
Diebner lamented, “The awful thing with the English is that it
takes ages before they make up their minds to do something.”
“The empire has been built up through centuries,” Wirtz pointed
out. “They have plenty of time.”
Heisenberg grew thoughtful. “It may be,” he said, “that the
British Government are frightened of the communist professors,
[Paul] Dirac and so on. They say, If we tell Dirac or [Patrick]
Blackett where we are, they will report it immediately to their Russian
friends, [Peter] Kapitza and Comrade Stalin will come and
say: ’What about the Berlin University professors? They belong in
Berlin. ’”
They were all aware of the Big Three talks just opening at Potsdam
between Stalin, Truman, and Churchill. “It is possible,” continued
Heisenberg gloomily, “that the Big Three will decide it at
Potsdam, and that Churchill will come back and say: ’Off you go.
The whole group is to return to Berlin’ – And then we’ll be in the
soup.”
On July 16 the newspapers mentioned that Lord Cherwell (formerly
Professor Frederick Lindemann), Churchill’s scientific advisor,
was at the Potsdam conference. “If Cherwell knew we were detained
here,” mused Hahn, “Something would happen. He doesn’t
know . . .”
Unlike earlier texts, most of the dialogues in this Farm Hall section are
available only in English translation. These conversations have now been
published with a scholarly commentary by J. Bernstein in Hitler’s Uranium
Club (Copernicus, New York, 2001).
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS.