Werner Heisenberg and “collective guilt” of Germans under Nazi

I’ll write a series of articles using “Heisenberg” as the category.  One of the topics of my reading WWII is the “collective guilt” of the German people.  How could such a highly educated, civilized and hard-working people be led by a monstrous evil into an unprecedented tragedy?

As Churchill said, “Even in Germany itself there are millions who stand aloof from the seething mass of criminality and corruption constituted by the Nazi party machine” that was responsible for the power of its fuhrer, who was a “a haunted, morbid being, who, to their eternal shame, the German people in their bewilderment have worshiped as a god.”

Sommerfeld & Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1930 Nobel laureate)

In telling the tale of Werner Heisenberg’s role in Nazi’s effort in making atomic bomb, I’ll also survey the attitude and mood of the German general population in war time and the periods leading to the war.

Arnold Sommerfeld (a giant in developing quantum physics, the mentor for Werner Heisenberg), who, in October 1946 invited Einstein to rejoin the Bavarian Academy, to which Einstein replied,

Planck & Einstein

“It was a real joy for me to receive your letter after all these dark years.  None of us would have dreamed of all the horror we have been through.  The Germans slaughtered my Jewish brethren; I’ll have nothing further to do with them, not even with a relatively harmless academy.  I feel differently about the few people who, insofar as it was possible remained steadfast against Nazism.  I am happy to learn that you were one of them.”

Otto Hahn (who discovered the nuclear fission; you may read the post of “Nuclear fission—a woman slighted by Nobel Prize committee” for further details) also asked Einstein to become a foreign member of Planck Institute (former Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics), Einstein emphatically said “No”; in the response Einstein said, “the conduct of the German intellectuals—seen as a group—was no better than that of a mob.”

http://doctorjytsai.blogspot.com/2013/12/nuclear-fissiona-woman-slighted-by.html

Einstein obviously had an unforgiving heart, I wouldn’t blame him.  Almost all the prominent German physicists in that era were all very decent intellectuals and, with very few exceptions, never joined Nazi Party.  But, “as a group”, as Einstein said, their conducts were tantamount to the accomplices to an evil regime. This may be unavoidable in a tightly controlled, brutal and oppressive political apparatus.  I would touch these issues as I go along.

After reading two books about Heisenberg the past week or two, I still cannot draw a conclusion whether he was a true hero who skillfully deprived Hitler of an atomic bomb or an accomplice.  His wife, Elizabeth Heisenberg, wrote a book in 1980 (English translation in 1984), after Heisenberg passed away in 1976.  “Inner Exile: Recollection of a Life with Werner Heisenberg” is a genuine attempt to defend her husband’s reputation.

The second book, “My Dear Li” was published by their daughter in 2016 after Elizabeth passed away in 1998.  These are their correspondence between 1937 and 1946.  These letters shed no further light in search of the truth about atomic bomb, but one can have a better grasp about the life under Hitler Germany.