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Eavesdropping on Hitler’s Reich
Heisenberg suggested that Blackett might get help to his wife
through her brother, a Mr. Schumacher, who was in fact now an
American citizen, Ernst Friedrich Schumacher.
“I know him well,” said Blackett. “He stayed with us a few days
ago. . . He tried to get in touch with you, but he was not allowed to.”
He added: “There is absolutely no conceivable reason, in my view,
for this complete black-out on information about your being here,
and the fact that you have been kept incommunicado from everybody
is just silly now.” Schumacher, explained Blackett, had visited
him after inspecting bomb damage in Germany: “He is in American
uniform on the Bombing Research Mission.” Blackett assured
Heisenberg that his junior colleagues could return to Germany
without problem; but his “key people” might be asked to work in
Britain instead.
On Sunday morning, September 6, 1945 Otto Hahn assured Professor
Blackett in halting English that he had held out hopes to
the Reich authorities that something useful might yet come of his
“harmless” research, but only to save his laboratory staff from being
sent to the front. “Of course, we knew that it was of no importance
at all,” he assured Blackett. “We were really cheating our government.
The same as my friend [Joseph] Mattauch – he was just as
much a fanatical anti-National Socialist as I was.”
Blackett reassured Hahn a few moments later, “Your reputation
is very well known over here because of your fine record as anti-
Nazi. . . So don’t you worry.”
Later that Sunday morning, Blackett asked Heisenberg to pass
judgement on his colleagues. All the old resentments and jealousies,
the rivalries between class and class, between non-Party and Party,
and between theoretical and experimental physics, briefly surfaced
as Heisenberg in a few deft words settled old scores.
HEISENBERG: Weizsäcker is not interested much in going back to
the uranium business, he is more interested in astrophysics at present.
. . He is a very good man.
Diebner later settled at Stadtilm in the Soviet Zone of Germany, the DDR.
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