The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  A week later, on the afternoon of the nineteenth, Heisenberg was still coasting on a good mood. He finished up the official minutes for the meeting and dropped them off with a fellow member, then headed down to the Bahnhof to catch an overnight train south, to see his family. It must have been a pleasant journey—the lush countryside ahead of him, the stress of his research fading away behind. Arriving at his destination, he still had a two-hour walk through the mountains to the family cabin, so he grabbed his bags and set off.

  A mile down the road he overtook a young soldier pulling a cart. Heisenberg tossed his luggage on top and offered to help. They probably exchanged a few pleasantries, until the soldier relayed some stunning news: someone had tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler earlier that day.

  It later emerged that the assassination plot, code-named Valkyrie, had come achingly close to succeeding. A thirty-six-year-old German colonel had snuck a suitcase bomb into a meeting with Hitler and placed it next to him. But another officer unwittingly moved the suitcase to make room for his feet, pushing it beneath a large wooden table that absorbed most of the blast. So while the explosion knocked Hitler unconscious and shredded his trousers, he suffered no long-term injuries. Indeed, the attempt on his life invigorated him. He actually met with Mussolini later that day, and triumphantly showed Il Duce the smoldering ruins of the meeting room.

  The news staggered Heisenberg. He thought immediately of all those drunken boasts at the Wednesday Club—had his friends been serious? Was he himself now in danger? Cautiously, he asked the soldier what he thought of the news. It was a fraught moment for both of them: under the Third Reich, you never unburdened your feelings to strangers, not about politics. The soldier finally said, “It’s time something was done.” That was all they dared say, but they understood each other well enough.

  Over the next few days at the cabin Heisenberg listened to the news on the radio, and it was every bit as bad as he’d feared. Several members of the Wednesday Club—men he’d dined and caroused with, men he’d picked raspberries for a week earlier—were named as prime conspirators, and all of them were executed. A general purge of the German professional class followed, as five thousand people were eventually rounded up and shot, including a son of the famed quantum physicist Max Planck.

  Heisenberg’s emotions continued to roil over the next few days. If the Gestapo tied him to the Wednesday Club, even obliquely, he was doomed. And damn his luck, he’d just written up the minutes for the most recent meeting. Yet no midnight knock on the door ever came. No one even stopped by to ask him questions. Perhaps the conspirators had refused to name Heisenberg. Perhaps his family friend Himmler had intervened. Perhaps Heisenberg’s status in the Uranium Club protected him. (Hitler himself had awarded Heisenberg a 1st Class Cross for War Services the previous October.) Whatever the reason, Heisenberg survived the purge. And to the dismay of Allied scientists, he proceeded from the family cabin to his new lab in southwest Germany. It was located in a cave in the village of Haigerloch, and it would house his most powerful Uranium Machine yet.

  CHAPTER 45

  Escape and Resistance

  In the spring of 1944, the Gestapo in Paris arrested Frédéric Joliot again, and this time they meant business. In addition to the usual threats and roughing up, they got him fired from his teaching post, an ominous sign: dismissals like that usually foreshadowed a trip to a concentration camp. After discussing the situation with Irène, they both agreed that he needed to go into hiding, and soon. It was disappear or be disappeared.

  First, they had to get their children to safety, and they decided that Irène should be the one to smuggle them out of France. She was feeling much healthier by that point in the war, fitter and stronger, thanks to several long stints in sanatoriums. (During her recovery she’d sent Joliot a flirty photograph to prove that she was regaining the weight she’d lost due to illness. “I am going to become a little elephant,” she claimed. Joliot cheered every kilo: “I authorize you to gain some more. I love plump women.”) Irène’s recovery was also speeded by some newfangled drugs called antibiotics.

  In early May she and the children escaped Paris for a village near the Swiss border. But rather than flee to Switzerland immediately, Irène made a rash decision. Her daughter, Hélène, age seventeen, needed to take her all-important baccalaureate exam in physics so she could qualify to work as a scientist someday. (These grueling, two-day tests were mandatory for French science students, even during wartime.) So Irène delayed their flight to freedom for four full weeks until the test date, then let Hélène travel alone to a nearby village to take her exam. Irène knew how easily female scientists could get pushed aside and—war or no war—she refused to let that happen to her daughter.

  The girl aced the test, of course, finishing so quickly that she had time to go back over several problems and derive the answer a second way. And in the end, the four-week delay benefitted the family enormously. On the day they left for good, their guide into Switzerland led them to a secluded trail well shielded by pine trees. For extra safety, he also deployed several scouts—his own children—to sneak ahead and look for German patrols, signaling when the coast was clear. But they still might have been caught if not for the fact, the dumb-lucky fact, that Irène had chosen to flee on June 6, D-Day, when the German military had more important things to worry about than a few refugees. Had the family tried to escape one day earlier they might well have been arrested; one day later and they surely would have been, since the Germans clamped the border shut. As it was, Irène and the children, like scientific von Trapps, simply waltzed to freedom.

  In Porrentruy, Switzerland, they were unceremoniously deloused and shunted into a detention center in a local manor. Characteristically, Irène paid little attention to her surroundings, and plopped down on a straw mat in their room (there was no furniture) to read a book on logarithms she’d insisted on smuggling across the border. It didn’t take long for the local prefect to recognize this strange creature as a Curie, at which point he insisted that the family join him at his home until France was again free.

  The man who had married Irène, meanwhile, went underground in Paris not long after his family left, assuming the guise of an electrician named Jean-Pierre. He slept at the home of a different friend each night, and spent his days skulking along the Seine with a fishing pole, posing as a peasant and rendezvousing with other resistance fighters. They traded rumors about Allied invasions and German crackdowns, and passed around documents with designs for homemade grenades and crude antitank missiles, in preparation for the upcoming battle for Paris.

  They didn’t have to wait long. By August, with the Allied army approaching Paris, the city was simmering like Mount Etna, and it finally exploded on August 19. No longer needing to hide, Joliot ran to the local police headquarters, dragging with him two suitcases full of chemicals. He recruited three men to help, and they stripped off their shirts in the heat and got to work making Molotov cocktails. Molotovs are normally crude weapons, bottles of gasoline with lit rags for fuses. As a man of science, Joliot devised something more sophisticated. Instead of straight gasoline, he had his assistants mix in sulfuric acid and potassium chlorate for added punch; they also wrapped each bottle with a rag soaked in more potassium chlorate. Luckily, the gluttonous head of the Parisian police under the Nazis had kept a huge stock of champagne in the basement of the headquarters, which gave them access to plenty of bottles. The shirtless men began pouring it all out, filling the bottles with their own pungent liquor and hauling the bombs up to the roof.

  They finally deployed them a few days later, when shooting broke out nearby. Several thousand French policemen rushed to the headquarters, barricading themselves inside. And when three German tanks rolled up on August 23, the police let them have it, pelting the tanks with Joliot’s cocktails. Some reports claim that Joliot himself was in the thick of things, hurling bottles down; other reports have him running back and forth through the streets, pistol in hand, to grab more sup
plies from his lab. “I saw the boches [German soldiers] fall like puppets in a traveling fair!” someone heard him cry. Whatever his role, the Nobel laureate did his country proud in this guerrilla fight, and when the smoke cleared the police had held off the tanks with little more than fancy chemistry.

  Joliot’s adventures were not over, however. Because after the battle ended and he’d returned to his lab, thrilled and exhausted, he found a strange message waiting for him. Who on earth was Boris Pash? And why was he coming after Joliot?

  CHAPTER 46

  Lightning-A

  Boris Pash despised Samuel Goudsmit the first time he met him. Samuel Goudsmit was merely terrified of Boris Pash.

  In September 1943 Goudsmit was sent to England to work out some kinks with American radar equipment there. He’d just turned forty-one and was growing gray and paunchy; he had the same dopey smile as before, but was no longer the svelte, mop-topped hotshot who’d discovered quantum spin. Still, he liked hobnobbing with the young soldiers abroad, helping them fix their radar sets by day and knocking back brewskies with them by night.

  After six months in England and a brief stint back at MIT, Goudsmit was summoned to Washington in April 1944 for a new assignment—he suspected it was a top-secret radar project. The army put him up in a hotel, which impressed Goudsmit, since rooms in D.C. were scarce and expensive during the war. He waited a week or so for his briefing, and finally called to ask what the holdup was. The Pentagon blew him off. (You can’t imagine how busy it is down here.) So he waited another week, and still nothing. Then another. He called again, crankier, and was fed more lines. (We’ll be in touch at our convenience, Sam.) He found the delay humiliating—did they think he had nothing better to do? He wished he did.

  The delay was no accident, of course. Military intelligence had placed Goudsmit under surveillance, tapping his phone at the hotel and tailing him around town to see if he met with any suspicious characters. (Moe Berg had likely been under similar surveillance during his wait in Washington.) Goudsmit apparently passed the test, and General Groves’s office finally brought him to the Pentagon in May.

  Goudsmit still assumed he’d be working on radar, but Groves’s deputy quickly disabused him. His assignment was far more serious—nuclear espionage. Goudsmit first learned of the Alsos mission at the same time he found out he’d be running it. The deputy then made him swear an oath of allegiance to the United States.

  Goudsmit later claimed to have no idea why Alsos chose him as scientific chief. This was a bit disingenuous, given his research background and familiarity with Europe, but he certainly wasn’t the mission’s first choice. Due to a clerical mix-up, Goudsmit accidentally saw a copy of his personnel file, which contained a blunt assessment of his pros and cons. Pro: he knew nuclear physics. Con: “his name adds nothing to the prestige of the mission.” Pro: his friendship with German scientists might help solicit information. Con: he was grouchy and “tactless,” both liabilities in intelligence work. The other pros were either borderline insulting (“Dr. Goudsmit has been recommended principally because he is available”) or downright alarming (because he knew nothing of the Manhattan Project, no one could torture any secrets out of him). Such revelations didn’t exactly swell his confidence.

  Nor did meeting Boris Pash. Pash flew from Europe to Washington specifically to meet Goudsmit, but he didn’t hide his skepticism about adding academic scientists to his mission. Pash called them “longhairs,” radicals, and expressed doubt that they’d hold up at the front. Goudsmit agreed wholeheartedly: he didn’t think he’d hold up, either. As Pash remembered it, Goudsmit confessed a preference “for the comforts of the civilized world and the quiet of a peaceful laboratory. Braving enemy fire or parachuting behind enemy lines was not his idea of recreation.” Pash just laughed: “I promised that if any jumping were involved, I would go first and prepare a soft landing.”

  Goudsmit nevertheless swallowed his qualms and shipped out for London on D-Day, joining a small Alsos support office there. He spent the next few months gathering dossiers on French and German physicists—scientific rap sheets, essentially—and imbibing the latest intelligence reports. He also packed for his upcoming transfer to the front, using that ominous checklist—the helmet and woolen underdrawers, the gas mask and extra life insurance. Most memorably, British agents showed him photographs of the giant concrete bunkers in northern France, assuring him that the Nazis wouldn’t go to so much trouble just to launch conventional warheads; this had to be for something special, possibly nuclear. Goudsmit got to test this theory when the V-1 barrage began a few days after his arrival. He spent many a harrowing hour crawling down into craters with a Geiger counter, ready to scramble back out if it started chattering. Welcome to the war, longhair.

  Boris Pash, meanwhile, was preparing to invade France. General Patton’s recent breakthrough there had knocked the German army back and opened up the French coast near L’Arcouest/Port Science, where Frédéric Joliot was rumored to be hiding. In early August the Pentagon sent Pash an urgent pink radiogram with orders to get there on the double and hunt down the scientist. “Still ringing in my ears,” Pash recalled as he landed on Omaha Beach, “were the words I had heard [back] in Washington: ‘Any slight delay in reaching your targets might cost us tremendous losses, or even the war.’” Pash and a sidekick rustled up a jeep, tied an army bedroll across the hood to protect their engine from snipers, and took off. They traveled day and night, snatching sleep in orchards or fields and weaving around the smoldering husks of tanks on the roadways.

  L’Arcouest turned out to be little more than a single street, with a stone church and cemetery on one side and shops and a wine cellar on the other. The Nazis, however, hadn’t quite abandoned the place; they were still fighting in the woods near Joliot’s cottage. Pash decided to risk a visit anyway and commandeered a local man with a scruffy beard—a relative of Joliot’s, it turned out—to show them the way. The man led them to the edge of town, to a trail overgrown with weeds. “Voilà,” he said, but refused to go a step farther. The Nazis had mined the woods, and seven French resistance fighters had already died there. Still, the man did offer to do his part. “I shall return to the village,” he vowed, “and drink to your health and safety.” Ta-ta.

  Alone now, Pash and his sidekick began creeping through the underbrush, checking every centimeter for mines and booby traps. Halfway there, someone started shooting—they couldn’t tell who—and they dove for cover, scarcely daring to breathe. But they started moving again before the gunfire died down completely, not wanting to delay their mission by even a minute.

  The Curie family “cottage” was a handsome two-story stone house whose façade was dominated by tall windows. But when Pash reached the clearing around Maison Curie that day, his rifle at the ready, he could see the front door ajar. And when he nudged it open and peeked inside, his heart sank. The place was bare: “There was not a stick of furniture or anything else to be found.” His lieutenant searched the rooms anyway, but there was no point. Joliot was gone.

  At least the gunfire outside had died down, so Pash motioned for them to leave. As soon as he appeared in the doorway, however, several bullets smashed into the frame near his skull. They both flung themselves to the dirt and began crawling on their bellies. Unlike the house, the woods were far from empty, and machine guns and rifles traded retorts in the air above them. The duo made it back to the village unharmed, but this was scant consolation. For all the fuss Alsos had caused in Italy, the gains had been paltry, just a few second-rate nuclear scientists. And Pash hadn’t even gotten much information out of them—Moe Berg had. On his recent trips to Washington, Pash had sensed forces aligning against Alsos, with some people pushing to eighty-six it altogether. And however unfair, he knew the failure to capture Joliot would only increase the clamor.

  A few days later Pash received orders to resume the hunt for Joliot as soon as Paris fell. He got no other encouragement, and while no one spelled anything out, he sensed that t
his was Alsos’s last shot. “If we miss the boat again in Paris, I’ll shoot myself or go over to the Germans,” he wrote a colleague. “Or what is worse, I’ll join the Russians.” For a proud veteran of the White Russian army, there was no keener cry of despair than that.

  The Allies expected to conquer Paris in early September, and Pash planned his mission accordingly. So when the city actually started falling on August 23, he had to scramble. He cadged two jeeps for himself and three companions from the army headquarters in Rennes, then took off with little more than a map and a canteen. One of the quartet wasn’t even part of Alsos; he’d simply been bored with his desk job and was looking for adventure. Pash liked the cut of his jib and recruited him on a whim. The man had recently adopted a stray puppy, a munchkin with a white body and a black head, so they named him Alsos and took him along as a mascot.

  The quartet approached Paris from the south. They tried being discreet, but the delirious ovations they received made that impossible. At every farmhouse they passed, French peasants hung out of windows and waved red, white, and blue bunting. In every village, crowds squeezed in so close that their jeeps could barely pass. Men tossed bottles of wine to them and women leapt onto the running boards to kiss their cheeks. Still, the trip was not without hazard. Two thousand Nazi troops were roaming the roads leading into Paris, and thousands more were battling partisans within the city. The biggest threat to the mission, however, was the French military. France had had a humiliating war so far—Maginot, Vichy, Nazis goose-stepping down the Champs-Élysées. French troops desperately wanted to redeem themselves, and in meetings with Allied commanders their generals insisted that the French army enter Paris first, as its liberators. Unfortunately, constant defeat had made the French army skittish about confronting the Germans. Even while brave civilians were fighting the Wehrmacht inside Paris, the troops dithered in the countryside, wasting day after day.