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Reviews of Books
conferences, and a prophet of sensible theories of
science that stress community, dialogue, and negotiation. He was a product of German-speaking Europe
who grew to love England's very non-German way of
"muddling through." Neurath left unfinished his greatest project, the Encyclopedia of Unified Science. He
died suddenly amid a pleasant conversation with his
wife, while reaching for, but not quite grasping, his
copy of Goethe's lphigenie.
DAVID A. HOLLINGER
University of Caliornia,
Berkeley
PAUL LAWRENCE ROSE. Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic
Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1998.
Pp. xx, 352. $35.00.
Werner Heisenberg, the inventer of quantum mechanics and a Nobel laureate in 1933, at the age of
thirty-two, was one of the twentieth century's most
creative physicists. "The end justifies the means," he
would say, in justification of the unprincipled methods
by which he tried to crack problems that others could
not solve. His friend and sparring partner of the 1920s,
Wolfgang Pauli, complained to their mentor and conscience, Niels Bohr, that Heisenberg, though brilliant,
was "very unphilosophical." No harsher condemnation
was available in the intellectual hothouse directed by
Bohr, who had invented the quantum theory of the
atom and directed its development until Heisenberg
unphilosophically devised quantum mechanics.
In the 1930s, as professor of physics at the University of Leipzig, Heisenberg was attacked by the SS as a
"white Jew" for teaching the non-German "abstract"
physics developed by the full Jew Albert Einstein and
the half-Jew Bohr. Heisenberg deflected the attack by
appealing to Heinrich Himmler, to whom he had
access through a family connection. The Nazis came to
condone the teaching of relativity, without mention of
its inventor's name, and Heisenberg enjoyed the patronage of the leader of the SS. He moved from
Leipzig to Berlin as director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm
Institut fflr Physik. There the main German "uranium
project" had its seat.
The external development of the project is known in
detail. By mid-1942, the technical problems in the way
of making either a bomb or a reactor appeared to be
too great, and the chances of success too small, to
justify the necessary investment; or so Albert Speer,
Hitler's minister of armaments and war production,
determined when he decided not to proceed with a
crash program. Heisenberg's team remained in the
uranium business, however, working toward a selfsustaining chain reaction as a source of power in two
or perhaps three senses. For one, as a literal prime
mover; for another, as their postwar security as advisors in atomic energy; and, perhaps, as a weapon (a
reactor bomb or runaway pile) if the technical difficulties of making one could be overcome.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW The internal history of the project, the intentions of
Heisenberg and his immediate associates, has been the
subject of much contention. Heisenberg explained his
involvement in a series of apologia that increased his
virtue at every retelling. At first, he claimed only moral
neutrality: he worked to discover whether a uranium
weapon was feasible and was spared having to decide
whether to make one by Speer's curtailment of the
project. At the end, he claimed resistance: he had
falsified his calculations in order to make the authorities believe that German science and industry could
not produce the amount of explosive uranium (U-235)
required. No doubt Heisenberg told his colleagues that
a bomb required an amount of U-235 a hundred or
more times greater than the quantity the allies found
necessary, but it is more likely that he reached this
conclusion by error than by treason.
Paul Lawrence Rose does not suffer any uncertainty
in the matter. His Heisenberg would have developed a
bomb if he could. Rose shows convincingly that
Heisenberg made a serious but simple conceptual
mistake about the limiting condition of an explosive
chain reaction and that the strength of Heisenberg's
confidence in his analysis kept him from undertaking
the more detailed calculations that might have corrected it. A psychologist might see in this omission an
unconcious effort to keep closed a question that
Heisenberg did not want to open. Not Rose. He does
not like Heisenberg (he says so himself) or Germans or
what he takes to be a special German way of ignoring
facts and escaping responsibility.
Rose's frankness may put off readers who think that
historians should not approach their subjects prejudiced against them. In this case, however, both the
admission of prejudice and the resultant portrait of
Heisenberg are useful. In the last few years, Heisenberg's wartime behavior has been presented indulgently in two influential works: Thomas Powers's wellargued Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the
German Bomb (1993) and Michael Frayn's hit play,
Copenhagen. Powers accepts Heisenberg's versions of
the facts and so raises him from collaborator to
saboteur. Frayn dramatizes the famous meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941 when Heisenberg
went to occupied Denmark to lecture at a German
"cultural" institution. Whatever was said at their meeting about the German nuclear project, Bohr always
regarded Heisenberg's disclosures and overtures as
self-serving and unfriendly. In order to make the
episode good theater, Frayn introduced greater ambiguity into Bohr's behavior and more nobility into
Heisenberg's character than the facts easily allow.
Rose's return to the unfavorable judgments of
Heisenberg put forward by S. A. Goudsmit, a onetime
colleague of Heisenberg's who rounded up the German uranium scientists during the last months of the
war, thus has a timely value. It may, and should, have
a long-term importance as well, as a counter to the
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern tendency to palliate the actions of collaborators in the
Third Reich.
J. L. HEILBRON
University of Oxford
PATRICK MAJOR. The Death of the KPD: Commudism
and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956.
(Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Clarendon Press Oxford University. 1997. Pp. xiv, 335. $85.00.
For most casual observers, the history of German
Communism ends with the Nazi burning of the Reichstag only to piek up again (if at all) with the establishment of the German Democratie Republic courtesy of
the Soviet Union's occupation forces. Neither the
resistance to Adolf Hitler nor the post-1945 attempt to
rejuvenate the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in
the West have received the attention they merit—
particularly in the English-language literature.
Utilizing a wealth of original sources, this astute and
compelling study goes a long way toward correcting the
neglect which the postwar western KPD has suffered.
Patrick Major shows how the KPD was, for a time,
both numerically and strategically stronger than the
party of Weimar days. With membership at a historie
high and solid influence at the center of German
industry—among workers at Krupp steel, Ruhr mining, and the Hamburg docks, the KPD appeared posed
to join the French and Italian Communist parties as a
long-term player in postwar European politics. Yet, by
1956 the party was weakened to the point that the
West German government outlawed it without inordinate protest.
What crippled the newly reborn party was the
unlikely convergence of political repression by the
Western powers with irrational dictates emanating
from East Berlin. For different reasons, both sides of
the Cold War had reason to want to see a weakened
West German party. The United States and its capitalist allies had every reason to fear a radical party
whose membership topped 300,000 by May 1947, white
the Sovjet Union and its steadfast East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) were concerned when they
realized that West German Communist "cadres could
not be switched on and off like a tap" (p. 40).
In order to insure loyalty to East Berlin, the SED
purged the nominally independent KPD of over eighty
percent of its leaders in 1951. A successful campaign
was waged to replace the too self-reliant altkommunisten with younger cadres lacking the experience of
working-class struggle during the Weimar Republic.
One result was that local KPD leaders averaged a mere
twenty-four years of age by 1954. Moreover, emulation
of the SED saddled West German Communism with a
top-heavy Stalinist bureaucracy that provided a functionary for every seventy-five members, whereas the
Social Democrats had a mere 1:1500 ratio of functionaries to members.
But, as Major so cogently argues, the decline of the
KPD can not be fully understood without reference to
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
639
antagonistic anticommunist forces in the West. Before
World War II had even ended, the Western allies had
developed contingency plans to deal with the likelihood of a powerful KPD. By mid-1948, leftists, not
Nazis, were the prime target of U.S. intelligence
efforts, which included forging a document claiming to
be a KPD plot to sabotage Marshall Plan aid (p. 243).
Nor was the party to suffer only from covert actions;
completely legal KPD activities were impaired, at first,
by the occupation authorities restricting access to
paper and later by outright repression. For example, in
the period 1946-1955, various Communist press organs were banned no less than 141 separate times.
That many of the judges who ruled against the party
were ex-Nazis caused widespread consternation, at
least among civil libertarians, as the famous writer,
Thomas Mann was driven to describe anticommunism
as "the basic folly of our epoch" (p. 259).
Yet, Major shows that it was much more than "folly"
that motivated the United States and its allies during
the Cold War. Throughout this period, anticommunism was a reliable and widespread ideology that
served any number of purposes. It allowed a close
collaboration between former political enemies like
the bourgeois Christian Democrats and the proletarian
Social Democrats white providing an excuse to recreate a secret police system, now called Verfassungsschutz rather than Gestapo, and attack the popular
peace movement—all in the name of defending democracy. The author points out that scholarly investigations into Communism during this period are commonplace, but anticommunism has evaded the same
level of serious criticism.
This book reveals the complex interplay of factors
that led to the decline of West German Communism
white avoiding the Cold War stereotypes that have
plagued previous studies. By fairly evaluating the
influence of both sides of the Cold War, Major shows
a sophistication all too uncommon when handling such
a politically sensitive topic. This vitally important work
provides a rich, masterly appraisal that will be unsurpassed for many years to come.
WILLIAM A. PELZ
Institute of Working Class Histoty
MASSIMO FIRPO. Dal Sacco di Roma all'Inquisizione:
Studi su Juan de Valdés e la Riforma italiana. (Forme e
percorsi della storia, number 3.) Turin: Edizioni
dell'Orso. 1998. Pp. 232. L. 35,000.
Writers on early modern Italian religious history have
operated in four main modes: Catholic, Protestant, lay,
and, most recently, within the twin paradigms of social
discipline and confessionalization. In this collection of
six essays, as in his many other publications, Massimo
Firpo approaches the subject from a decidedly lay
perspective. He reiterates several major assertions
familiar to specialists who know his work and may have
seen these pieces in previous incarnations. His conten-
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