A World Full of Prejudice

Abstract

Alswede is a village of scarcely fifteen hundred inhabitants in the neigh-bourhood of the Westphalian town of Minden. The ten scientists were taken there, and should therefore have been pleased to have been within the ‘hospitality’ of the British occupying power. The news of the return of Otto Hahn spread like wildfire. Once again on native ground, he and his colleagues were confronted with ridiculous reports about German atomic research. How childish the rumours seem to one, that we made atom bombs for the Americans, and nonsense like that, wrote Hahn, annoyed, in his first uncensored letter to his wife, Edith, on 6 January 1946.