Esau hurried out of the room as the Gestapo major began his questions….
He found it difficult to concentrate on Heisenberg’s tight, narrow handwriting. Half of Major Stadt’s interrogation was discernible through the walls and through the half-open door of the adjacent office. Esau imagined Reichminister Speer sitting in silence, watching the Gestapo officer ask his questions.
“We have on record your attempts, time and again, to defer scientists from active service in the military. For the betterment of the Reich, you say! To keep technicians working rather than shooting the enemy, you say! And who are you to decide how best we can implement our armed forces?”
Esau took out sheets of clean paper and used a fountain pen to check calculations, trying to unravel Heisenberg’s chain of reasoning. Several times Esau lost the thread of what the physicist meant, what he was trying to show. He paused between written lines, puzzling over how Heisenberg had made an intuitive leap. Back in Cambridge, in the coffee shops, Esau and Graham Fox had played similar games, trying to out calculate each other. It had been so long since he had seen Fox….
Stadt raised his voice in the next room. “But he is a Jew! I don’t care if he is one of your colleagues—we aren’t interested in Jewish physics here! You were ordered to ignore Jewish physics.”
Heisenberg began to answer, but Major Stadt interrupted him. “We have your attempt on record. Look, here are your own letters, signed by your own hand, requesting that the parents of one Samuel Goudsmidt be released from a concentration camp. Who are you to decide these things? We decide! Himmler decides! You have only one task—to develop a new weapon. And you cannot even manage that!”
Heisenberg mumbled something Esau couldn’t hear. Esau tried to maintain his concentration as he tallied a column of figures. Heisenberg himself had scratched out one answer and written another on top. An attempt to camouflage results? Or a simple mistake?
Reichminister Speer said one word, clearly heard: “Bohr.”
Major Stadt immediately spoke up. “Yes, that brings us to an interesting situation, one of the most damning we have about you. Witnesses say that you left Germany, went to Copenhagen, and met with Niels Bohr, a half-Jew with known Allied sympathies. In fact he is even now believed to be in hiding in America, working on their atomic bomb project. Yet you had a private conversation with him, you were seen together, talking. We have everything on record. Now tell us—what were you doing there?”
“I had a troubled conscience.” Heisenberg’s voice sounded shallow and defeated. “I wanted to ask—”
“Ask? No doubt you wanted to tell him everything about our program, so he could share it with the Americans! We know you are falsifying your own experiments, disrupting progress on our nuclear program, trying to make us lose the war.”
“That is not—”
Major Stadt cracked something hard against the desktop, then lowered his voice below hearing again.
The interrogation went on. Distracted, Esau continued his inspection. He stared at the numbers, at the comments jotted down in the laboratory. He tried to find flaws in Heisenberg’s work. He was too afraid even to get up and find a cup of tea for himself. None of Heisenberg’s fellow scientists were likely to be in a helpful mood at the moment.
Hours later he felt hunger biting at his stomach. The other scientists paced the halls in silence, unwilling to talk to each other. They did no work the entire day, and it had passed the time when they usually went home to their families. Some had trains to catch, but they could not depart until Reichminister Speer allowed them to leave.
Otto Hahn appeared at the door, scowling but looking dapper with his intense and bright eyes set under bushy eyebrows. His graying moustache was clipped so close as to seem a mere smear of stubble on his lip. “Excuse me, Dr. Esau. We were wondering if some sort of dinner might be provided? My technicians have not eaten all day.”
Esau looked up at him, amazed—Otto Hahn had discovered nuclear fission in the uranium atom, and now he stood timid, asking a simple favor of Esau.
“You have no food here in the laboratories?” He had wanted something to eat as well.
“Not with all the uranium we keep, Herr Professor. Many of the things here are highly poisonous. We thought it best to prohibit eating in the area.”
Reichminister Speer and Major Stadt had closed the door to maintain privacy in their endless interrogation. Esau did not dare interrupt them to ask for permission. Then he realized his own foolishness. After all, wasn’t he the Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics? Didn’t he have the authority to make certain decisions? Hadn’t he been the one to point out Heisenberg’s intentions?
“Gather some of the workers in the hall,” he said. “I will select one at random and he will go to the commissary of the institute to get enough food for all of us.” Otto Hahn looked relieved and nodded as he backed out the door. Esau had just proved he could be reasonable. That was good, since he would have to make these people work with him.
Later, as he worked red-eyed and far into the night, sipping on the cold dregs of a cup of tea, Esau sat up as Heisenberg’s door snapped open. One stack of laboratory records sat to Esau’s right; a few more, scattered in front of him, still needed to be checked. In front, on a sheet of his personal stationery, Esau had written a list of errors he found. The fountain pen left blobs toward the bottom of the page, when he had been too tired to worry much about penmanship.
Major Stadt stepped out. His black SS uniform looked no worse after his hours of interrogation. “Professor Esau,” he said, “have you finished? What do you have to report? You have found a substantial number of errors?”
Esau stood up and peeled the scratch paper from the desk blotter. “Yes, Herr Major. Here is a list of inconsistencies I have found. I cannot tell if these are malicious mistakes or simple sloppiness.”
Or because my own eyes are so bleary from staring at them so long, Esau thought. He couldn’t tell if he’d made the mistakes or if Heisenberg had.
But that was enough for Major Stadt. His lips made a tight smile. Reichminister Speer came out of the office beside Heisenberg. The great physicist looked defeated, confused. When he stumbled, Speer made no move to touch him.
Heisenberg splayed his fingers on the desk in front of Esau, brushing his own damning lab records aside. Esau could smell the sweat on the man, could see how rumpled his clothes had become.
Major Stadt found a ruler from the desk and smacked it against the wood, then against the doorjamb. He raised his voice to be heard throughout the halls. Speer flinched from the racket.
“Attention! Attention!” Major Stadt called. The two motorcycle guards reappeared, blinking and bleary-eyed, anxious to see what was wrong. The other scientists, no doubt unable to sleep, emerged from their rooms, Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker beside Otto Hahn and Karl Wirtz. They continued to stare at the floor; the other lab assistants studiously avoided drawing attention to themselves.
“We will assemble in the courtyard. We have important business to conclude this evening, and I am certain you will all be anxious to return to your research immediately. You have been idle all day!”