Poor Werner Heisenberg; once the poster boy for modern physics, his reputation has taken a beating in recent years. Rose's book is only the latest, and the least, in this trend. At the heart of the Heisenberg controversy is why he stayed to "build" the A-Bomb for Hitler. Why did he visit Bohr in Copenhagen? What was he after? It would seem that, barring any heretofore undiscovered revelations, these questions will go unanswered. Thus, all we have left is speculation, uncertainty.

While most writers give Heisenberg the benefit of the doubt on his character (After all, he was not anti-Semitic, nor was he a member of the Nazi Party.), Rose sees him as a continuation of the German revolutionary spirit that dates back to Luther, and thus condemns Heisenberg as guilty, especially as Heisenberg was a German patriot, and it is extremely difficult for Rose (as with most people) to distinguish a patriot from a Nazi.

However, If Rose were a prosecutor, a jury would need only ten minutes to acquit Heisenberg on all counts. Rose simply fails to make his case. The alleged anti-Semitic remark by Heisenberg is second-hand via Max Born back in 1945. Hardly the testimony that can convict. It also comes late in the book, after we have been subjected to much screed about a German radical anti-Semetic tradition that Heisenberg wanted no part of at any time. Otherwise he would have been a good Party member, as were others in his scientific circle. Also, as the excellent earlier review asserts, this trend would have been long noticeable at Gottingen, the center of German physics and natural science. No, Rose simply has no case and spends over 300 pages making a hysterical justification for something that simply never was.

However, this does not mean I am leaning toward the portrait of Heisenberg given in Thomas Powers's book. Powers makes Heisenberg out to be a sort of James Bond character, brilliantly defying the Nazis to prevent the mad Hitler from obtaining the ultimate weapon. Nonsense. The simple truth about Heisenberg was that he was both naive and a coward. Any chance of him openly defying the Nazis was laid to rest with the attacks on his "Jewish physics" in the SS newspaper. It is interesting that he had to have his mother intervene with Himmler's mother to clear his name. It tells us much about the character of Heisenberg.

Also consider Heisenberg's theory that Hitler would lose the war and then evertything would come out all right. Heisenberg felt the scientist was above mere politics, and politics were only an unwanted intrusion into science. As the Second World War bore out, he was not the only one to have that view. Heisenberg's visit to Bohr may have been to ask for advice on how to proceed in building a bomb. It seems Heisenberg wanted some sort of absolution for remaining in Germany, and if he confessed to Bohr, that would have assauged his guilt. But because Bohr refused to speak with him in private, Heisenberg did the next best thing: he took the money for nuclear research and farted it away on baseless research. The Allies were surprised at how little the Germans accomplished in their program. But the real question is how much did the OSS know? Powers has Moe Berg walking next to Heisenberg in Switzerland with a revolver in his pocket, ready to blow Heisenberg's brains out. Yet, he doesn't pull the trigger. Could it have been that Berg discovered how little progress Heisenberg had made? If that were to be leaked out, especially to those at Los Alamos, would our scientists, many of whom were Jewish German emigres, hace continued work on America's A-Bomb?

It is most interesting that Rose never touches on this point in his screed, for it would undermine his argument. Instead he focuses on Heisenberg's lack of technical expertise in understanding how the bomb could be built. Heisenberg did indeed lack those engineering skills, but so did his counterpart in America, Robert Oppenheimer. But Oppenheimer compensated with a tremendous will to build the unthinkable, while Heisenberg was content not to ask to further funds or to even speculate that a bomb could be built. The transcripts at Farm Hall pretty much seem to bear this out, and in the process, destroy Rose's case.

Heisenberg did not build the bomb, and he was crucified for it. One only pauses to think how history would have treated him if he actually did build a bomb.

After having read this book, I am left with very mixed feelings. First the good stuff: This book gives a thorough account of the german A-bomb project during WW2. Lots of original documents are provided, so that one can form an own oppinion. Also the technical aspects are quite well captured for a non-physicist.

For the bad stuff: This book is thoroughly racist. I am flabbergasted, that a major publisher is willing to print a book that, in its foreword, already contains a statement about the deep hatred of the author not against Heissenberg or the Nazi regime, but against German culture and Germans as a whole. Also the treatment of Heissenberg as a physicist is certainly not adequate. It may very well be true, that he was morally corrupt or overly proud and arrogant, but statements like that he did not understand the concept of critical mass just because he never explicitly wrote down the exponential growth of neutrons in a bomb are at best uninformed and childish. Especially disgusting however is the authors revelation of 'the truth about the german mind', which traces a line of evil from Hitler back to Martin Luther.

For all its qualities as a source of information, this is the worst kind of a historical book: One that was written to judge. And this it does not only based on facts, but largeley on the authors all too apparent prejudices against a whole culture, which are labeled as 'the truth'.

Readers who believe the journalistic nonsense of the Powers book will certainly not like the reality presented by Dr. Rose. Having taken two courses with him some years ago, I know how brilliant, perceptive and inspiring he is in class, and these qualities carry over into his work. Dr. Rose does not pull any punches. He does not try to sugarcoat the fact that Heisenberg and other eminent German scientists did everything they could to develop a means of destruction that would supercede the rockets being used against the British and others, and yet, at the same time, maintain their distance from the more distasteful aspects of their Nazi masters. Rose demonstrates that Heisenberg made a fundamental error of calculation early on that ultimately made the German effort unsuccessful. This demonstration is a black-and-white explanation of the nuclear physics involved; Rose has written this so well that even a non-scientist like myself can understand it. The last section of the book is the most fascinating when Rose discusses the national characteristics of the Germans and ties the argument not only with Heisenberg and his failure to develop an atomic bomb (and his attempts after the war to excuse himself from responsibility), but also the reasons why the Nazi regime and the Holocaust occurred specifically in Germany. Anti-semitism was rampant in many countries; in many cases, it became murderous on an individual basis. Only in Germany were the national characteristics ripe to greet Hitler's state-sponsored plans for extermination of a people with such enthusiasm.