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david irving Secretly Overheard:
will take us.”
“It is quite obvious that Heisenberg was not the right man for
it,” remarked Bagge. “The tragedy is that Korsching is right in the
remarks he made to Gerlach. I think it is absurd for Weizsäcker to
say he did not want the thing to succeed. That may be so in his case,
but not for all of us. . . Heisenberg could not convince anyone that
the whole thing depended on the separation of isotopes. The whole
separation of isotopes was looked upon as a secondary thing. When
I think of my own apparatus – it was done against Heisenberg’s
wishes. . . Do you remember how Von Weizsäcker said in Belgium,
’When they come to us we will just say that the only man in the
world who can do it is Heisenberg’? Von Weizsäcker is very upset
about the whole thing.”
THEY ALL RETIRED to bed about 1: 30 a.m., but it was a disturbed
night for most of them. The hidden microphones picked up deep
sighs and even occasional shouts during the night. It would not
be long, predicted Von Weizsäcker uneasily next morning, before
their names appeared in the newspapers: how could they then clear
themselves in German eyes? “History will record,” he pronounced,
“that the Americans and the English made a bomb, and that at
the same time the Germans, under the Hitler regime, produced a
workable Maschine. In other words, the peaceful development of
the Uranmaschine was made in Germany under the Hitler regime,
whereas the Americans and English developed this ghastly weapon
of war.”
When, later that again day, he expressed horror at the weapon,
Professor Heisenberg remarked that had they, the Germans, produced
and dropped such a bomb they would certainly have been
executed as War Criminals for having made the “most devilish
thing imaginable.”
At Major Rittner’s casual suggestion, the scientists drafted a memorandum
dissociating German scientists from any atom bomb
research:
this is a copyright manuscript © david irving 2007