Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb

by Thomas Powers

Book Overview

"Full of fascinating characters, deeds of heroic daring . . . [a] powerful book." -- New York Times One of the last secrets of World War II is why the Germans failed to build an atomic bomb. Germany... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394514114
• ISBN13: 9780394514116
• Release Date: February 1993
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 607 Pages
• Weight: 2.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 6.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

One of the best written books I have ever read!

This book is amazing on so many different levels I am not really sure where to begin. It is an amazingly well written, compelling, insightful, and utterly fascinating book on it's own. Fortunately, it is so much more than just a really well written book, it is TRUE story that everyone needs to read. It is book about a true hero, a courageous man who risked his life and his reputation to save tens of millions of lives. I don't really want to give too much away, but it answers a question that many World War 2 historians want to know: WHY didn't the Germans create the Atomic Bomb? Well, there is one word for why, Heisenberg. This man stayed in Germany and deliberately sabotaged the Nazi's attempts to make the bomb. In a world where people struggle to find heroes and gather up courage it is a shame not many people know this story. I think many people would be amazed at the sacrafices one very proud man would endure to save the world. Please read this book, you will not be disappointed.

History Done Right

Here we see why Thomas Powers is a Pulitzer class writer. This is an excellent investigation of a very charged, complex but immensly interesting topic and the tragic life of maybe one of the brightest men in history of science. Powers takes us through the golden years of physics, birth of quantum mechanics, key figures surrounding this unique period, the international brotherhood and the total darkness and bitterness that shattered it in the wake of WWII. Having grown up in the aftermath of the Great War, Heisenberg, the smartest pupil of the "Great Dane", Niels Bohr, finds himself suddenly on the "other" side again in 1939. In spite of the fact that he never joins the Nazi party, an arrogance that he can afford due to his immmense popularity and fame, he was still considered to be a very dangerous tool of Hitler's ambitions by almost all of his old freinds. There was good reason to fear, for he had the means and the knowledge to put fission into the service of his country for peaceful and non-peaceful purposes. Worst of all, he had refused to jump ship and leave Germany, his country, at the beginning of hostilities. Powers goes into great detail of so called the German Atomic Bomb project, which turns out to be non-existent. Heisenberg cleverly plays the establishment to put war in the service of physics not the other way around as he puts it. Incredibly detailed and solid research Powers has done supports this view of Heisenberg's war activities. His detractors, old friends, many of them jews who have lost family in concentration camps, hold the view that Heisenberg was asked by Hitler to build a bomb but he simply did not know how to do it. The subject is very rich, full of giants of science and world history, characters small and large who cross from physics, math, chemistry, to military to politics and sometimes to very personal levels but all played out in a global theater. Thomas Powers shows that it is possible to write decent history even from a victor's point of view. It is worth noting the recent Broadway play by Michael Frayn, Copenhagen, which was motivated by this very book. The play is daring but still captures only a fraction of the real drama chronicled in the book. "Heisenberg's War" is well written. One gets a good feel of the time period. Very important Farm Hall records have been finally included which was missing from Cassidy's biography. It may have too much detail for casual reader but a gold mine for the interested. The irony of the men, who actually built the bombs and dropped them on non-combatant populations, refusing to shake hands with Heisenberg, who contributed absolutley nothing to the Nazi war effort, is just overwhelming. It is even more ironic that Heisenberg himself witnessed the total destruction of his homeland by the indiscriminant and incessant Allied carpet bombings. Imagine the fear his intelligence and understanding of nuclear physics caused on the Allied side at the time, when a q

Solid and timely historical research

The title Hesienberg's war is slightly misleading, since the book not only covers the German bomb effort but also the climate that lead to and the ensuing effort in the allied bomb effort. I have read books about the allied effort, and it seems this book has much of factual information they contained, as well as the German effort, which they do not discuss. But most importantly, I think the pre-war chapters about the history of Quantum Mechanics and the friendships that blossomed between the founders during this revolution, then followed by chapters on how politics, anti-Semitism (Jewish physics, verses Duetche physics) and the NAZI atrocities that forever tarnished these friendships forged in during the most creative period in modern physics. The meeting of Bohr and Heseinberg in Copenhagen is presented in a fair mater, and even though the author offers an opinion on the role of Hesienberg the German effort, I believe he presents the material in a fair manner leaving it up to the reader to decide for themselves.

engrossing history

Powers makes a compelling argument that one of the main reasons Germany failed to develop the atom bomb was because many German scientists --- especially the best ones --- just weren't very keen about the idea of Hitler having such a weapon. The account is painful, complex, and heavily documented. (By the way, it's hard to imagine how a feminist perspective would be relevant to this topic.)

Compelling

The story of the German atomic bomb project has inspired controversy and invited investigation for over half a century. In his book, Thomas Powers has combined his experience as a writer with years of exhaustive research to form a fresh and in-depth interpretation of these events. Powers' focus is Werner Heisenberg, one of the world's foremost physicists in the 1920s and `30s, who elected to remain in Nazi Germany even after most of his colleagues had fled.Heisenberg, the most famous physicist in wartime Germany, was chosen to head Germany's nuclear research program. Yet, in his own version of events after the war, Heisenberg stated that there was never a danger of a German atomic bomb, despite fear in the U.S. at the time, because the German nuclear research program never focused on weapons and most of the project's scientists had no interest in making such a weapon for the National Socialists. Heisenberg's story, however, was treated with intense skepticism after the war by his friends and colleagues outside Germany, who forever saw Heisenberg as guilty by association. Powers, however, has challenged this accepted belief through intensive research into both new and old documents, and through a number of interviews with those who were in some way involved with the events. Powers conducts a thorough investigation and uses his expertise in writing about secret activities to expose the prejudices that have condemned Heisenberg. Powers addresses the issue from a different starting point and relies on the evidence to generate a new conclusion which ultimately exonerates Heisenberg from the guilt by association judgment.Powers' conclusions about Heisenberg and the German bomb may not satisfy everyone, especially since the subject has always been emotionally and politically charged, and the record incomplete. However, his book is intellectually stimulating because it addresses so many gray areas, not only in this particular subject but also in what constitutes accurate history. On the first note, Powers' reinterpretation of the events is compelling because he also simultaneously addresses how the condemnation of Heisenberg was created and perpetuated: by people who were most immediately traumatized by the Nazis, or somehow connected to the American bomb program. Secondly, Powers has treated the subject with about as much energy and time as any one person can, approaching the truth of the matter more closely than any other work to date. Yet, despite such considerable effort, the history is still incomplete and will likely remain so, which gives credence to the idea that history is only a representation of truth, and that hopefully all historians will approach history with as much hard work, honesty and objectivity as possible, setting aside their purposeful judgments in the pursuit of more accurate conclusions.