by Sam Kean
Now, a course catalogue might seem mundane, but it did list the professors teaching each class at Nazi U, and a few names jumped out immediately—including that of Carl von Weizsäcker. Given that he belonged to the Uranium Club, Alsos probably should have dropped everything else to pursue him when the city fell in mid-November 1944. But at that point Goudsmit and Pash were distracted with the thorium-toothpaste scare, and by the time Lightning-A reached Strasbourg—on November 25, ten days after Patton’s armies had rolled through—the diplomat’s son had fled.
All wasn’t lost, though. Through various ruses, Pash tracked down several other nuclear physicists in the city. (In one case, when a woman claimed that the scientist who lived next door to her had fled weeks before, Pash tripped her up by pointing out the fresh eggs and soft, fresh bread in the man’s kitchen.) Pash also ransacked Weizsäcker’s apartment and his office at the university. The apartment proved a disappointment. It was as bare as Joliot’s cottage had been, containing nothing but a potbelly stove and some ashes—the remnants of all the papers he’d burned. Moving on to his office, they found the door locked, so several stout fellows lowered their shoulders and slammed into it. It didn’t budge, so they started kicking. When that failed, they grabbed an axe. Only after smashing through the wood did they realize that the door opened outward and hadn’t been locked at all. Luckily, Weizsäcker hadn’t had time to clean out his office, and piles of documents remained. Pash sent word to Goudsmit to hurry to Strasbourg.
Goudsmit did so, albeit reluctantly. He took an open-top jeep there, and the weather on the two-day, three-hundred-mile journey was so bone-chilling that he resorted to wearing his pajamas beneath his uniform in an effort to keep warm. It didn’t help, and the trip put him in a foul mood. “A jeep is not a proper method of travel for… over-draft-age, desk-type, and blackboard scientists,” he griped. But honestly, cold weather wasn’t the real problem. The disappearance of his parents was still festering in his mind. He’d also grown acutely homesick. Amid the jubilation in Paris he couldn’t help but notice, with a pang, all the families sharing meals and laughing together in the cafés, while he ate alone. In letters home he began begging his wife and daughter to write more often: “Mail,” he told them, “is more important than sleep and food.” (His daughter complied; his wife did not.) Going to Strasbourg only dragged him deeper into the war and farther away from his family. He nevertheless sucked it up and went, and when he arrived at Nazi U, he began going through the documents from Weizsäcker’s office.
Because the electricity in Strasbourg was out, everyone in Alsos huddled together in the same room around a few candles that night. While the scientists read, the soldiers played one of their endless games of what Pash called “applied mathematics”—poker. (They preferred playing with inflation-prone French money because the piles of cash looked more impressive.) It was a sleepy evening overall, although shells continued to fall and dogfights occasionally erupted overhead. Halfway through the stack of papers, however, Goudsmit and a colleague both yelped and jumped to their feet. This startled the soldiers, who dropped their cards and whipped their rifles around. A little sheepishly, Goudsmit told them to stand down, but he was overjoyed. He’d discovered a cache of letters between Weizsäcker and Heisenberg on nuclear fission—their first real lead on that front.
In a huge security lapse, the letterhead on one page provided not only Heisenberg’s new address in southern Germany, Weiherstrasse 1, #405, but his telephone exchange. (Goudsmit suggested, only half facetiously, sneaking into Switzerland and calling up ol’ Werner.) More importantly, the letters included several pages of reactor calculations and references to a “spezialmetall,” obviously uranium. One especially valuable letter had been discovered in Weizsäcker’s trash can, torn into little pieces. Weizsäcker had taken a harsh tone in it, and had apparently thought better of sending it. When reconstructed, the scraps contained valuable clues about the state of German research and how the Uranium Club was proceeding.
Goudsmit studied these letters by candlelight until his eyes ached, and continued studying them for the next three days. At the end of which he jumped to a dramatic conclusion. The Nazi atomic bomb project, he announced, was a sham—a crude, poorly funded effort that would never produce a nuclear weapon. You could see it in the calculations, he said: the Nazis were years behind the Manhattan Project. Feeling triumphant, he summarized his conclusions in a memo to General Groves, then rewarded himself with a little cognac.
If Goudsmit was expecting praise, he obviously didn’t know Leslie Groves. In fact, Groves didn’t believe Goudsmit, and picked apart every one of his conclusions. The torn-up letter in the trash can, for instance, seemed like an obvious plant. Why would someone who’d scrupulously burned every document at home leave behind that one vital piece of evidence, unless he wanted it discovered? In fact, how did Goudsmit know that any of the documents were genuine? Perhaps they were part of a misinformation campaign designed to lull them into complacency.
Goudsmit didn’t have a good answer, and it soon became clear that he’d been sloppy and hasty, glossing over several bits of evidence that might argue for a Nazi nuclear threat. One document spoke of “large scale” fission experiments being conducted just fifteen miles from Berlin. Another revealed that German officials had already briefed Hitler about atomic weapons. Perhaps not coincidentally, reports began trickling in to intelligence officials that very week about something Hitler had said at a military conference: “Up to this day I can answer for all the acts I’ve committed before God and my compatriots. But for what I’m going to order in the near future, I will no longer be able to justify before God.” What else could he be referring to?
Groves also had access to reports that Goudsmit didn’t—including one report he called “the biggest scare to date” in the war. A few days after Alsos arrived in Strasbourg, reconnaissance planes had snapped photos of several mysterious buildings in a valley not far from the Black Forest. They were clearly industrial sites—they had huge chimneys and grids of pipes, with railroad spurs and slave quarters. What most alarmed Groves was the speed of their construction. The first recon sorties spotted three buildings; a few weeks later there were fourteen, spread over twenty miles. Was this a uranium enrichment facility, the German Oak Ridge? Even the unflappable British began trembling.
Ten days of crisis followed in Washington and London before the truth emerged. Someone realized that all the plants lay on the same geological contour, and a trip to the library revealed that this contour was mostly shale. Shale often contains uranium, but in this case it contained oil as well. The Allies knew that Germany was running low on petroleum, and more likely than not, the site in the valley was a new refinery.
Groves bombed the hell out of the place anyway, just to be safe. And even after he destroyed it, the specter of it continued to haunt him. However bruised and battered, Germany could still throw together huge industrial projects with terrifying speed. The Allies had been lucky to spot the buildings—Germany was shifting most manufacturing underground at that point. So who knew what else they’d missed? Robert Oppenheimer had once warned Groves that the Manhattan Project’s facilities for enriching uranium, including the sprawling Oak Ridge site, might be anomalies. Nuclear science was still in its infancy, and Oppenheimer had enough humility to admit that some clever German “might come up with a way to [enrich uranium] in his kitchen sink.” In which case the Allies would never notice a thing, until it was too late.
Rather bravely, Goudsmit continued to defy Groves on this matter, insisting that the Nazis would never succeed in making an atomic bomb. But he was destined to lose this power struggle with the general. With hundreds of tons of uranium still missing, and Heisenberg and Weizsäcker still at large, Groves simply couldn’t take a chance otherwise.
Aside from losing this fight with Groves, Goudsmit found Strasbourg demoralizing for another, darker reason. As noted, Alsos scientists were gathering intelligence in fields beyond nuclear physics. In
particular, they’d been tracking rumors about Nazi doctors experimenting on prisoners, and what they found in Strasbourg confirmed those tales in the most awful way.
It started with a vaccine biologist named Eugen von Haagen, who ran the “Hygiene Institute” at Nazi U. Some of the labs there seemed innocent enough: bays of rats, mice, goats, and other livestock on which to test serums. But Alsos soon discovered a second facility at an isolated fort outside of town. According to his records, von Haagen had been infecting prisoners there with spotted fever and other diseases, then sacrificing them at fixed intervals to monitor the decay of their organs. He’d even had the audacity to complain to prison officials that they were sending him weak, inferior “material” (i.e., human beings) to study. To understand the true effects of these diseases, he argued, he needed to kill healthy men and women. How else could he save people’s lives?
Strasbourg was also home to Heinrich Himmler’s personal anthropology institute, Das Ahnenerbe (The Legacy of the Ancestors), dedicated to proving the racial superiority of Aryans. Much of the “research” there focused on anatomy, and the staff kept an extensive reliquary of human skulls to study. Himmler had in fact supported Germany’s disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 in part to gain access to the skulls of “Jewish-Bolsheviks” and other degenerate types. While virtually every other Nazi prosecuting the war on the Eastern Front was focused on, say, defeating the Russians, Himmler and his minions were dispatching high-priority messages about where to find new “specimens,” along with detailed instructions for preserving their bodies in “specially constructed airtight tin containers filled with preservative.” The Alsos team saw the strange fruits of this labor in Strasbourg: half-dissected limbs lying about, and giant tanks full of alcohol with human corpses floating inside. These turned out to be prisoners from Auschwitz. Many were sickeningly emaciated and had numerical IDs tattooed on their arms. Most had been gassed and had arrived in Strasbourg with their bloodshot eyes wide open.
News of other sadistic experiments would emerge over the next several months as Allied troops liberated concentration camps throughout the Reich. But even this glimpse of the atrocities proved too much for Goudsmit. By awful coincidence, he was billeted in Eugen von Haagen’s lavish house in Strasbourg, an unnerving experience. Worse still, he had to sleep in the bedroom of von Haagen’s son. “All his toys were still there,” Goudsmit remembered. “An electric train, a movie projector, an old microscope of his father’s, an aquarium with snails, books, tools. But also a lot of Hitler Jugend [Hitler Youth] insignia.… I was thinking whether he missed his toys now.”
Had Goudsmit hardened his heart and thought only of von Haagen and his crimes, he might have gotten through the weeks there. But he was pining for his own daughter, and as soon as he allowed himself a little sympathy for the von Haagen child, he broke down and began sobbing. The images he’d seen over the past few days—tanks of bodies, shelves of skulls—flashed through his mind and snapped the last frayed strands of emotional restraint he had left. This most timid of physicists stormed out of the child’s room and began rampaging around the house, stomping his feet and screaming. The soldiers staying with him were stunned. “He just went off his rocker,” recalled one. “He was furious at the Germans, weeping and thrashing around.” It was a full-fledged mental crack-up, and it took a full half hour to calm him down.
Goudsmit never mentioned the incident in letters home. But shortly afterward, while writing yet another unanswered missive to his wife, he lamented, “I fear I am too soft for this [espionage] game.” The army was inclined to agree. After his breakdown Alsos put him on rest leave, and officials quietly arranged for him to return to the States to see his family. According to some accounts, he visited a psychiatrist there—a drastic act back then, something only desperate people did.
During his absence the army debated cutting him out of Alsos altogether. The Pentagon eventually allowed him to remain on duty, but it did veto his participation in another mission. Throughout his time in Strasbourg, Goudsmit had been fielding cables from OSS about his trip to Zurich to seize Werner Heisenberg. His nervous breakdown eliminated him from that operation. Someone liable to crack-ups clearly couldn’t be sent undercover to a foreign country.
Several other members of the Zurich kidnapping team had to drop out as well, due to travel delays and other foul-ups. And given the timing here—Goudsmit fell apart in early December, just two weeks shy of Heisenberg’s lecture—intelligence officials didn’t have time to find substitutes. Moe Berg would have to stalk Werner Heisenberg alone.
CHAPTER 54
Uncertainty, Principles
Paradoxically, going after Heisenberg with the gentle Moe Berg rather than the brutal Carl Eifler all but ensured that the mission would turn violent. To be sure, ever since OSS first enlisted Eifler, the plot had had an undertone of violence. Eifler, though, simply had permission to kill Heisenberg if things went south; his death had never been the point of the mission. But with Berg going solo, OSS had to abandon all hopes of a kidnapping: Berg would never be able to manhandle the physicist alone, and Samuel Goudsmit wouldn’t be there to interrogate him anyway. As a result, assassinating the physicist seemed the only viable option. Moe Berg would have to become a deadly hombre.
Although too unstable to accompany Berg, Goudsmit did help brief him in Paris on December 13, passing along final instructions from Groves. Berg was to take his pistol to Heisenberg’s lecture and listen closely to determine how much progress the Reich had made toward a nuclear bomb. It seemed unlikely that Heisenberg would blatantly threaten the allies, of course, but he might drop clues here and there, hints. If nothing else, the laddish Heisenberg might well brag in front of his peers. And if he did so, Berg had to render him “hors de combat,” as Goudsmit put it. That was more than a flourish of French between two polyglots. Literally, the phrase means “outside the fight,” or more colloquially, “out of action.” It usually refers to battlefield casualties, and as one historian noted, “There is a very narrow range of ways in which a gun may be used to take an opponent out of battle.” Five years earlier Goudsmit had welcomed Heisenberg into his home in Michigan. Three years after that he’d proposed kidnapping him. Now he was telling another friend to shoot the man, for trying to build something he didn’t believe the Germans even could. Perhaps Goudsmit wasn’t as “soft” as he claimed.
Heisenberg arrived in Zurich by train on December 16. Riding alongside him was Carl von Weizsäcker, who served as his official escort. Beyond that, Heisenberg had no security with him. What had he to fear in Switzerland?
In fact, news from the front lines soon put Heisenberg in fine fettle. The day he arrived in Zurich, the Third Reich launched its last major offensive of the war, now known as the Battle of the Bulge, in the dense forests of Belgium. To everyone’s surprise the Wehrmacht still had plenty of fight left, and the Germans knocked the Allies in the teeth and sent them staggering backward. (The Alsos crew at Nazi U had to abandon their headquarters and flee thirty miles west.) The German press was ecstatic, and a few delirious reporters hinted that the Nazis might deploy atomic weapons soon, driving the Allies off the continent forever.
Heisenberg finally gave his lecture on the eighteenth, a week before Christmas. Despite the abundance of consumer goods there, Switzerland did ration fuel during the war, and the first-floor lecture hall at ETH was chattering cold. Weizsäcker had no doubt warned Heisenberg about the near riot during his talk three weeks earlier, but thanks to Heisenberg’s insistence that the talk not be publicized, only twenty physicists showed up.
Them, and a pair of spies. Berg entered the freezing lecture hall with a fully loaded Beretta—the one he’d fumbled on the plane—concealed beneath his suit coat. Although just three months younger than Heisenberg, he was posing as a Swiss graduate student learning the intricacies of quantum mechanics. At Berg’s side was an OSS agent named Leo, sent to escort Berg and presumably help him escape after the deed. And if Leo failed, the cat
cher had his lethal cyanide L-pill in his jacket pocket. One sharp bite down, and he’d render himself hors de combat, too.
Berg took a seat in the second row and produced a small notebook and pencil, as if to take notes on the lecture. In fact he drew a map of the room and began taking notes on the other attendees. At one point he also tried out his German and offered his coat to a man seated in front of him who seemed chilly. Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker turned his deep-set eyes on the stranger and curtly told him no. Berg jotted “Nazi” in his notebook and fingered him as Heisenberg’s minder.
At 4:15 p.m. Berg finally laid eyes on the man he’d spent months obsessing over. Heisenberg emerged onstage in a dark suit, and after having some trouble cranking the blackboard into place, he wrote out several equations. While he did so, Berg took notes on his manner and appearance. It was a superfluous act—it’s hard to imagine Carl Eifler bothering—but Berg wanted to size up the man he’d emotionally prepared himself to kill. He described Heisenberg as looking “Irish,” with an oversized head, ruddy hair, and a bald spot on the crown. He wore a wedding band on his ring finger, and his furry eyebrows couldn’t quite conceal two “sinister eyes.”
His equations ready, Heisenberg began speaking, blithely unaware that his survival depended on what he’d say over the next few hours. He’d decided to lecture on developments in S-matrix theory, the scattering theory he’d first outlined at ETH two years earlier. Berg could not have been pleased with this choice of topic. Again, he didn’t expect Heisenberg to sketch a bomb on the blackboard and start cackling, but he must have hoped for something at least related to fission—a lecture on reactors, perhaps. Instead Heisenberg wanted to talk pure theory, especially his hope that S-matrix theory could reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity.
