pdf - WHALE

9.
POSSENSPIEL BEI FARM HALL
AND OTHER FARCES
"Bagge in Berlin and Clusius and Dickel in Munich developed isotope
separation methods but achieved little practical success. They never obtained
enough U 235 to make the proper measurements and certainly too little for a
bomb."
David Cassidy, "Introduction," Hitler's Uranium Club 1
The transcripts of the German scientists interred at Farm Hall
seem like a microcosm of Nazi German culture itself,
simultaneously charming and paranoid, moralizing and utterly
amoral, suffused with brilliant subtlety and ham-fisted bluntness. In
view of the thesis that has been examined throughout the previous
pages, the Farm Hall transcripts also reveal an equal schizophrenic
on the part of commentators ever since their declassification in the
early 1990s by the British government. Consider for example the
following remark by Jeremy Bernstein with regard to Samuel
Goudsmit's "ALSOS" mission to Germany at the end of the was
"As the mission progressed, and the Alsos team learned more and
more about the paucity of the German program, the concern
focused on not letting the Russians get at the Germans and so glean
'any major bomb secrets.'" 2 If the German bomb program was in a
state characterized as "paucity," and if there were fundamental
"problems" in Heisenberg's understanding of nuclear fission and
bomb physics - as there indeed were - then why the concern at all
But then early on in the transcripts an exchange betwen
Heisenberg, Diebner, and Korsching occurs, in which the three
German scientists discuss the possibility that they may have been
viewed by the Allies and Soviets at Potsdam as war booty.
1
David Cassidy, "Introduction," in Jeremy Bernstein, ed., Hitler's
Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, Second Edition, (new
York: Copernicus, 2001), p. xxix.
2
Bernstein, op. cit, p. 47.
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