David Irving The Virus House - F FOCAL POINT Copyright © by David Irving Electronic version copyright © by Parforce UK Ltd. All rights reserved No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. Copies may be downloaded from our website for research purposes only. No part of this publication may be commercially reproduced, copied, or transmitted save with written permission in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. To Pilar is the son of a Royal Navy commander. Imper- fectly educated at London’s Imperial College of Science & Tech- nology and at University College, he subsequently spent a year in Germany working in a steel mill and perfecting his fluency in the language. In he published The Destruction of Dresden. This became a best-seller in many countries. Among his thirty books (including three in German), the best-known include Hitler’s War; The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field Marshal Rommel; Accident, the Death of General Sikorski; The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe; Göring: a Biography; and Nuremberg, the Last Battle. The second volume of Churchill's War appeared in and he is now completing the third. His works are available as free downloads at www.fpp.co.uk/books. Contents Author’s Introduction ............................. Solstice.......................................................... A Letter to the War Office ........................ The Plutonium Alternative....................... An Error of Consequence ......................... Item Sixteen on a Long Agenda............... Freshman................................................... Vemork Attacked...................................... An Unexpected Result ............................. The Cynic in Command ......................... The Alsos Mission Strikes........................ To the Brink of Criticality....................... The German Achievement...................... Notes and Sources ................................... Index........................................................ Illustrations Professor Otto Hahn page Professor Abraham Esau page Professor Paul Harteck page Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker page Article in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung by Dr. Siegfried Flügge page Dr. Kurt Diebner page Dr. Erich Bagge page Professor Werner Heisenberg page The reactor pit and alloy vessel at the Virus House page Diagram of the Leipzig Pile - page Secret conference at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, Berlin- Dahlem page The first ultracentrifuge used to enrich uranium- page Dr. Samuel Goudsmit page Professor Walther Gerlach page The ferry Hydro on Lake Tinnsjö page Entrance to the cave at Haigerloch, in southern Germany page Advertisement for Doramad “radioactive” toothpaste page Diagram of the B- assembly used in the Germans’ final criticality project page The Haigerloch pile showing its cubes of uranium page Allied officers dismantling the Haigerloch pile in April page Author’s Introduction German atomic research program? It seems hard to believe, for twenty years have passed and there is little reference to it in the established chronicles of the Second World War. In fact, there has up to now been no history of the German atomic research effort between and , simply because of the thoroughness with which the Allied Intelligence mission under Dr. Samuel A. Goudsmit divested liberated Europe of almost every vestige of evidence that such a program had ever existed. For a historian it would have been and ini- tially it was something of a nightmare to piece the story to- gether from such scraps as remained. I can now understand the French Professor Joliot’s feelings when, having insisted that the German nuclear physicists at Hechingen should produce for him every remnant of the uranium metal that they must surely have concealed, he was solemnly handed a lump of uranium the size of a sugar cube that had been used for laboratory tests. (The British and American officers had removed all the documents and uranium from the French zone of Germany even before the war ended.) In the end, I went to the United States and searched for the missing documents there; and I ran them to earth in abundance, lying unused and neglected in a warehouse of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I am grateful to Mr. Robert L. Shannon and Mr. James M. Jacobs for their assis- tance to me there. The most important German files, particu- larly on the political history, were provided to me by Dr. Goudsmit, to whom I am indebted for his hospitality at Brook- haven National Laboratory, New York; I must also thank his as- sistant, Mrs. Peggy Homan, who took care of many arrange- ments for me during my American investigations. Too many participants in these events have assisted me in conversations, correspondence, and commenting upon various sections of the draft manuscript for me to be able to thank them all here. I have named all of them in my Notes on Sources. But three I must particularly thank: Lieutenant-Colonel Knut Haukelid, DSO, MC, who aided me during my researches in Norway into the SOE operations against heavy-water produc- tion; Professor Werner Heisenberg, who made time for several very lengthy conversations with me, and who has read the whole manuscript in draft; and Sir Patrick Linstead, FRS, who kindly permitted me to make use of the extensive facilities of the Impe- rial College physics library in South Kensington. Without their help it would have been exceedingly difficult to present in detail the story that follows. London, August Solstice of the German nuclear research program during the war can best be begun at the end, for it was a program which lacking strong military direction like that in America was beset by the personalities of its main scientists and nowhere do the characters of the ten leading German atomic scientists come more closely to the surface than in the records relating to the events of August , . During the evening the BBC Home Service broadcast the first news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima some hours before. The : .. bulletin announced that the bomb had contained as much explosive power as two thousand of the RAF’s ten-ton bombs, and that President Truman had disclosed that the Germans had worked feverishly to “find a way to use atomic energy,” but had failed. In Farm Hall, a country house near Huntingdon, languished the man who had made the atomic bomb possible, with nine of his fellow countrymen: he was the German chemist Professor Otto Hahn, the man who had discovered the fission of the uranium nucleus. Some minutes after the first news was broadcast, Major T. H. Rittner, the British officer in charge, asked for Hahn to be brought to his office and broke the news to him. The elderly German was horrified: he felt personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. He told Rittner that he had had the worst forebodings when he had first seen the potentialities of his discovery, six years before; but he had never thought it would come to this. Rittner fortified him with a strong drink and tried to calm him. Together they waited for the bulletin to be repeated at seven o’clock. The other captives all of whom had worked on Ger- many’s nuclear project during the war* had already sat down to supper when Hahn’s absence was noted. Dr. Karl Wirtz went to Rittner’s office to fetch him. Wirtz came in just as the : .. was beginning; he listened with Hahn and Rittner, then returned to the dining room and shocked the others into silence with the announcement. Uproar broke out. British Intelligence officers listening through concealed microphones heard with satisfaction that even the most eminent of the Germans were sure that such a bomb had not been made. Professor Werner Heisenberg one of the most famous names in theoretical physics and a Nobel Prize winner of long standing suggested that it was a bluff. Professor Gerlach, Göring’s last Plenipotentiary for Nuclear * The ten German scientists detained at Farm Hall were: Dr. Erich Bagge, Dr. Kurt Diebner, Prof. Walther Gerlach, Prof. Otto Hahn, Prof. Paul Harteck, Prof. Werner Heisenberg, Dr. Horst Korsching, Prof. Max von Laue, Prof. Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Dr. Karl Wirtz. Physics, wrote in his diary afterward: “Heisenberg energetically disputes the possibility that the Americans have this bomb.” The Americans were no better than the Nazis, said Heisen- berg; they had just developed some new explosive and had given it this fancy name. The possibility that the Americans had even had a uranium project seemed remote. Heisenberg had himself asked Dr. Goudsmit, the head of the American Intelligence mission which had taken him prisoner in May, whether the Americans had been working on the same lines as he had in Germany, and Goudsmit, a fellow physicist who was not likely to mislead a col- league, had assured him that they had not. Professor Heisenberg had begun to drop hints about being ready to advise the Ameri- cans should they wish to start a uranium project of their own and Goudsmit had not ridiculed him. Nor was that all: it seems that when the Germans’ last uranium pile laboratory was cap- tured in April by the American mission, the German scientists there and von Weizsäcker and Wirtz in particular had been tricked into revealing the location of their uranium and heavy- water stocks, with a promise that these would be needed when the Germans resumed their research elsewhere; so how could the Americans have an atomic bomb? In fact, the Americans’ object was to insure that the materials did not fall into the hands of Professor Joliot and the French, in whose zone the pile labo- ratory lay. Heisenberg still could not believe that a fellow scientist like Goudsmit with whom he had stayed in America in would have misled him. So this talk of “atomic bombs” must be bluff.