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Notes
- 1.
Inner Exile, by Elisabeth Heisenberg, Birkhäuser, Boston, 1984.
- 2.
Heisenberg, op. cit., p. 96.
- 3.
This visit has been discussed in various degrees of completeness by David Cassidy, Uncertainty, W. H. Freeman, New York, 1992, Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1993, Mark Walker, Nazi Science, Plenum, New York, 1995, and German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939–1949, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989. I am very grateful to these authors for many helpful communications.
- 4.
David Cassidy has studied the records of the Max Gymnasium. He informs me that in the years 1911–1914 Erwin Heisenberg and Hans Frank were in the same class but different sections. However, in 1914 there was only one section in which Frank and Erwin Heisenberg were both enrolled.
- 5.
I am grateful to Helmut Rechenberg of the Heisenberg Archive in Munich for pointing this out and also for supplying an account of the correspondence that led to Heisenberg's visit.
- 6.
A scathing portrait of his mother and father is given by Niklas Frank in his book In the Shadow of the Reich, with Arthur S. Wensinger, Carol Clew Hoey (Translator), Jonathan B. Segal (Editor). Knopf, New York, 1991. Frank, who collaborated in a play about this material, was born in 1939, but his memory of both wartime and the immediate post-war experiences is very vivid. There is as yet no biography of Frank. The following websites with their links may be useful. http://www.dhm.de/ lemo/htm/biografen/Frank Hans/ and http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Frank.
- 7.
This quotation and the one that follows can be found in a fascinating essay called “The University of Cracow Library under Nazi Occupation: 1939–1945” by Mark Sroka, Libraries and Culture. Vol. 34, Winter 1999. Sroka is primarily concerned with the fate of the Polish libraries, but he also discusses the general cultural life.
- 8.
For information on this event and many other aspects of this history, I am greatly indebted to Kryzstof Fialkowski, who is a theoretical physicist on the faculty of Jagellonian University in Cracow. He discussed Heisenberg's visit with colleagues who have recollections and he also searched newspaper archives and other historical sources.
- 9.
For a discussion of this see, for example, Germany Turns Eastward by Michael Burleigh, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 253–254. When a letter was circulated in Germany protesting, the only physicist to sign it was Max von Laue.
- 10.
I know a Polish physicist, Jacques Prentki, who received his education this way. Prenkti was himself arrested in a random operation in Warsaw but managed to escape the box car in which he had been placed in which he was being shipped to an extermination camp. He is not Jewish. Professor Fialkowski informs me that on the day of Sonderaktion his mother, who was a law student, was in the library across the street. She was with a friend who went to see what was happening and did not return for six months. He was later killed in the 1944 Warsaw uprising.
- 11.
There is some disagreement about the number of volumes. At Nuremberg Frank said 43, but only 38 were actually found. The National Archives and Records Administration has these on microfilm. Part of the copy I studied was very dark and not easy to read.
- 12.
This quote can be found on the website http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/document/ DocFrank.htm. It is translated from the German, and I have quoted this translation.
- 13.
This recently came to light in a letter that Heisenberg wrote to his wife from Copenhagen. The letter in English and German can be found at http://werner-heisenberg.unh.edu
- 14.
The letter is quoted in Powers, op. cit., p. 121.
- 15.
Elisabeth Heisenberg, op. cit., p. 49.
- 16.
Rechenberg believes that it was the physicist Karl Wirtz and that the report was in 1942. Wirtz was one of the ten German scientists detained at Farm Hall near Cambridge. These conversations were recorded —see my Hitler's Uranium Club, Copernicus, New York, 2001. In one of them Wirtz says, “We have done things which are unique in the world. We went to Poland and not only murdered Jews, but for instance, the SS drove up to a girls′ school, fetched out the top class, and shot them simply because the girls were high school girls, and the intelligentsia were to be wiped out.” p. 98, Bernstein, op. cit. This does not appear to be the incident described by Elisabeth Heisenberg. There is no reason to assume that these girls were Jewish.
- 17.
Mark Walker's book Nazi Science, op. cit., has been very helpful to me with these details.
- 18.
For a full discussion of this see Burleigh, op. cit.
- 19.
I am grateful to Mark Walker for a file of these letters and to Helmut Rechenberg for permission to quote from them.
- 20.
The quotation was supplied by Rechenberg.
- 21.
For an account of this plunder see Art as Politics in the Third Reich by Jonathan Petropoulos, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1996, and The Rape of Europa, by Lynn H. Nicholas, Vintage, New York, 1995.
- 22.
Niklas Frank, op. cit., p. 309.
- 23.
By Professor Fialkowski, who asked those of his colleagues who knew physicists who were in Cracow at the time. There were a few who had actually been there and had tried to attend the lecture.
- 24.
I am very grateful to Professor Fialkowski for finding this article in the library. The reference is Krakauer Zeitung, 1943, nr, 302, December 18. He also sent me the German original, from which this is a translation.
- 25.
Niels Bohr Library, AIP, M140, 31526–31567. In the translation above I have left out the allusions to nuclear weapons. My problem with them is, considering the unbelievability of the rest of the letter, what are we to believe about this?
- 26.
In his testimony at Nuremberg, Frank stated that he did not arrive in Cracow until a few days after the Sonderaktion. He then tells us he devoted himself to getting the imprisoned faculty released. However, it was pointed out to him that in his journal he said that these professors should be returned to Poland either for liquidation or imprisonment. To this he responded that he had written that “to hoodwink my enemies.” Frank also claimed that he encouraged higher education in Poland under the occupation, something which certainly would come as a surprise to the people who lived under it. This testimony can be found on the site http://www.law.umke.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/ franktest.html. In his diary Frank records his comment on the Sonderaktion: “We cannot burden the Reich concentration camps with our affairs. The trouble we had with the Cracow professors was awful. Had we dealt with the matter here it would have taken a different course. I should therefore like to request you urgently not to deport any more people to the concentration camps in the Reich, but to carry out the liquidation here or to impose a regular sentence. Anything else is a burden of the Reich and continually leads to difficulties. Here we have an entirely different form of treatment and this form must be maintained.” Hans Frank's Diary edited by Stanislaw Piotrowski, Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warsaw, Poland, 1961, p. 61.
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(2008). Heisenberg in Poland. In: Physicists on Wall Street and Other Essays on Science and Society. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-76506-8_4
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