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Otto Hahn wanted to kill himself, because it was he who discovered fission, and he can see the blood on his hands. Gerlach, our old Nazi coordinator, also wants to die, because his hands are so shamefully clean.

Heisenberg, in Copenhagen, Act One

Werner Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1932 (received the following year). But this is certainly not adequate to explain the continuing interest in him and his work. Five years later Clinton Davisson and George Thomson won Nobel prizes, and who has heard of them? True, Heisenberg's prize was for work on the foundations of quantum mechanics, perhaps the most exciting theory in all of science, but he had collaborators in this effort who also made large contributions—Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrodinger, Niels Bohr—yet who, while far better known than Davisson and Thomson, certainly have not generated the kind of ongoing fascination that attends Heisenberg.

The first account of the Heisenberg Affair was an article written by Heisenberg himself that grew out of discussions with fellow internees at Farm Hall. Published first in German in 1946 and then in English in 1947 in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, the article argued that the German physicists knew very early on how to build an atomic bomb but, because of moral reservations about providing Hitler with such a terrible weapon, they deliberately did not work on the bomb and even interfered from time to time by falsifying results.

This account, in which Heisenberg portrayed himself in a favorable light, was quickly challenged by the first full-length treatment of the Heisenberg Affair: Alsos, by Samuel Goudsmit, published in 1947 and recently re released with a new introduction by Heisenberg's biographer, David Cassidy. "Alsos" was the code name for the Allied mission to capture the German nuclear physicists at the end of the war. Goudsmit, the discoverer of electron spin, had himself played an important role in the development of quantum mechanics and was a friend and colleague of Heisenberg before the war.

As the Allies were liberating Europe, Goudsmit was put in charge of gathering intelligence on the German bomb program. It was his job to evaluate the status of scientists and laboratories that may have been involved in the German war effort. The long-range Allied goal was to make sure that nothing of use would fall into Russian hands. If Goudsmit decided a scientist had played a meaningful role in the German bomb project then he would have him arrested. If laboratory equipment looked useful, he would have it confiscated.

Goudsmit was a Dutch Jew whose parents had been killed at Auschwitz just before the end of the war. He had tried to get Heisenberg to intervene on their behalf and never forgave him for what he thought was his rather feeble attempt to rescue his parents. Having seen the Farm Hall transcripts, which were so secret that even their existence could not be acknowledged at that time, Goudsmit was convinced that the "Heisenberg History" was self-serving propaganda and that his old friend was lying.

More than 50 years after its first publication, Goudsmit's book retains its power. In one passage he describes his arrival in the The Hague just after the liberation of Holland:

My trip gave me the chance to visit the house of my parents in The Hague, where I had been brought up . …I dreamed that I would find my aged parents at home waiting for me just as I had last seen them. Only I knew it was a dream. In March, 1943, I had received a farewell letter from my mother and father bearing the address of a Nazi concentration camp. …

Climbing into the little room where I had spent so many hours of my life, I found a few scattered papers, among them my high school report cards that my parents had saved so carefully through all these years.

The world has always admired the Germans so much for their orderliness. They are so systematic; they have such a sense of correctness. That is why they kept such precise records of their evil deeds, which we later found in their proper files in Germany. And that is why I know the precise date my father and my blind mother were put to death in the gas chamber. It was my father's seventieth birthday.

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