Books I'm Reading: Heisenberg's War

I've read a number books about the development of the atomic bomb and a detailed biography of Robert Oppenheimer. These books focused on bomb development efforts in the US, only touching lightly on German efforts to build an atomic bomb during WWII. Heisenberg's War (Knopf, 1993) looks at German progress toward a nuclear device in detail by examining what Werner Heisenberg was up to during the lead-up to the war and during the conflict and what the allies thought he was up to.

During the war, Heisenberg was regarded by the allies and his peers as the most important scientist in Germany. If anyone could build a bomb for Hitler, it would be Heisenberg, and fear of Hitler with an atomic bomb was the primary motivation behind the Manhattan Project, the concerted US effort to beat Hitler to the punch, at least at the outset. It was unclear, however, whether Germany was attempting to create a bomb. A great deal of intelligence gathering was aimed at trying to piece together a picture of German bomb plans. That uncertainty was a spur in the flank of the allied bomb builders. Signs coming out of Germany were ambiguous. Clearly the Germans were interested in heavy water, but, oddly, German scientific journals following the discovery of fission (not long before the start of the war) continued to publish routine articles about nuclear theory as if it was of no immediate importance except as a potential source of energy. The US enforced a moratorium on articles about nuclear research of any kind; the government did not want to arouse suspicion that it was interested in the subject, nor did it wish to give away any useful information. But routine public activity among German scientists might have been part of a deception....

As for theory, there was disagreement among scientists around the world about the nature of the nuclear chain reaction we now know is required to produce an explosion and about how much fissile material would be required to sustain such a reaction and a detonation. If tons of uranium would be required, it would be impossible to make a bomb small enough to transport by air to any target destination (early on there was talk about exploding a large bomb on a boat in an enemy port). In the early days, there was disagreement about whether such a reaction was possible at all, although scientists in the US (many who had fled Europe) were fairly quick to understand that a bomb was possible and what it would require to build a bomb--either enriched uranium or plutonium.

Natural uranium consists of two isotopes, Uranium 235 and Uranium 238. The heavier isotope, U-238, predominates. If my understanding is correct, U-238 absorbs neutrons to the extent that it hinders the chain reaction while U-235 does less so. Therefore, a bomb can be made with a much smaller amount of U-235. With an enriched mix of the two isotopes (more U-235 than in a natural sample), critical mass, it was understood, would be about the size of a pineapple and even smaller using pure U-235. The problem is that separating the two isotopes is a slow, expensive process. Many physicists at the time concluded that a bomb would take many years to develop because of the time required to separate enough U-235 to do the job. Meanwhile some physicists surmised that certain reactor designs could be used to produce plutonium, an element that had been discovered only recently. Plutonium is much easier to produce in quantity than enriched uranium. It was a U-235 bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima, but the Trinity test detonation was a plutonium bomb, as was the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. That is, ultimately the Manhattan project succeeded in enriching uranium, in producing plutonium, and in developing explosive nuclear device designs that worked both with enriched uranium and plutonium, but, as history has shown, it was a massive effort involving more than 130,000 workers, multiple production sites, and the equivalent of about US$23 billion in today's money.    

Despite worry in the US about Hitler acquiring a bomb before the allies, German scientists appear to have believed the idea was impractical (essentially that it would have required far more money than was likely to be available) and that it would be impossible to build an atomic bomb quickly enough to win the war with such a device. They also clung much longer to the idea that tons of fissile material would be required. Scientists in Germany did understand that it might have been done if there had been a will to do it (as the allies proved), yet they never asked for funding or much other support from Hitler's government. Author Thomas Powers suggests persuasively that that was a reflection of moral compunction. Few German nuclear physicists wanted a weapon of mass destruction at the disposal of a man like Hitler. More pointedly, Powers suggests Heisenberg deliberately exaggerated the difficulties of making a bomb and never let on that he understood the physics as well as he did, giving the lasting impression of relative German incompetence. When asked, Heisenberg repeatedly said critical mass would be a ton or two of fissile material long after he appears to have understood that was not true. Heisenberg attracted suspicion and mistrust in the scientific community worldwide because he decided to remain in Germany after most others had fled the country and Nazi-occupied Europe. He remained in Germany throughout the war. There was much speculation then and later about his loyalties, but he appears to have been fiercely loyal to Germany rather than to the Nazi Party.

The book does not read like an apology. It seems even-handed. It appears to be well researched and meticulously documented. Its arguments are compelling. The book is interesting for the broad sweep of history it presents as much for the intimate details it offers of allied monitoring of German bomb development, often drawn from primary sources. Recommended, although Heisenberg's War may offer a little too much detail for a reader only casually interested in its subject matter, a problem compounded by the fact that it becomes clear fairly early in the narrative that the Germans had no hope of making a bomb before the end of the war, in large part because no one in Germany was trying very hard.

Books I'm Reading: Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir

It would be hard to argue that Leni Riefenstahl didn't live a full life. Reading her memoirs is exhausting. She goes full-tilt, without a break, from her earliest days to the last covered in her memoir (published originally in 1987 in German, when she was 85, in English in 1992; I read the Picador edition pictured). She was a dancer, actress, filmmaker, and photographer. In conjunction with these activities, she became a mountain climber, a propagandist, an African adventurer, and a scuba diver. Best known for her film Triumph of the Will, a documentary about the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nürnberg, and for the two-part film Olympia, a record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, she will forever be associated with Hitler and The Third Reich--an association that overshadowed the rest of her life, and one she's at pains to play down in these pages.

The earliest sections of the book cover Riefenstahl's debut and rise as a dancer, her transition into acting, and from there into producing and directing films. Many of the pre-war films she starred in had heroic alpine settings that required arduous climbing and filming in perilous conditions, the best known of which was The Blue Light (1932). These early films gained her the reputation that drew interest from the Nazi Party, and Hitler in particular.

While admitting that Hitler was charismatic and that she was drawn to him, she claims she abhorred his racial ideas and that he shut down any conversation about them. She claims she was pressured into making the Nazi Party films—that she tried to avoid making both Triumph of the Will and the earlier Victory of the Faith (a documentary about the 1933 Nazi Party rally, also in Nürnberg, and a virtual template for the later party film). She says her film Day of Freedom: Our Army, about the Wehrmacht, was made solely to assuage the egos of the Wehrmacht leadership (she says scenes of the Wehrmacht's participation in the 1934 rally were shot during bad weather and she decided they weren't good enough to include in Triumph of the Will—and that that omission had ruffled feathers). She doesn't mention Berchtesgaden über Salzburg (1938), a film Susan Sontag ascribes to her and calls "a fifty-minute lyric portrait of the Führer against the rugged mountain scenery of his new retreat [in Berchtesgaden]" in a review in The New York Review of Books (see below)—although an exchange between David B. Hinton and Sontag regarding the above-mentioned review raises doubts about Riefenstahl's connection to that film; pinning down the facts about Riefenstahl is often challenging.

She comes across as either terribly naive or deeply disingenuous. She never confronts the issue of her complicity in the crimes of Nazi Germany. She wants us to believe she was working solely as an artist, objectively documenting the party rallies—but it's hard to believe it never occurred to her that she was also making propaganda. She was a perfectionist. She may have been incapable of doing anything but her best and it might be argued that it wasn't her fault that Hitler admired her work and saw her value. Yet, she could have left Germany if the highly nationalistic, anti-Semitic rhetoric of Hitler and his party truly disturbed her, and much evidence seems to suggest she was a willing participant. Nevertheless, she asks the reader to believe she simply was unable to resist the chance to work on a subject as dramatic as Hitler and the Nazi Party rallies and that she felt unable to refuse Hitler—not that she was a true believer.

Much of the immediate post-war period Riefenstahl spends in and out of detention by the allies, losing and attempting to regain possession of her belongings, including her films. In Riefenstahl's portrayal of things, bad luck meets her at every turn, she is dogged by lying detractors bent on keeping her from working, and it's one personal disaster after another. She is suing people for libel left and right. Some of the animosity directed at her does appear to have been simple spite, and criticism of Olympia solely as a propaganda film seems somewhat misplaced, but she never understands why so many continued to shun her; she always sounds strangely naive, self-absorbed, and intent on forgetting inconvenient parts of her past.

By the time she turns to Africa in the mid- to late 1950s, enough time has passed that she finds sufficient support to move forward with her artistic endeavors, nevertheless suffering setbacks all along the way—setbacks always cast as the result of her victimization by enemies. Eventually her attention turns specifically to the Nuba tribe, in remote areas of the Sudan. Getting to and from these rarely visited parts of Africa to film and photograph would sap the energy of most people half her age. She is nothing if not energetic, persistent, and—despite bouts of depression and physical illness exacerbated by her financial and artistic setbacks—optimistic. It's extraordinary that she succeeded in getting several books of photography about the Nuba produced in her 70s and 80s. At the age of 74, she takes up scuba diving, and, in addition to photographing the Nuba, she begins to learn underwater photography.

The end of the book is anticlimactic. As Riefenstahl brings her story to a close, the reader is left still hoping for some reflection on the meaning of her work during the Nazi era, some admission that—even if truly unintentionally—her work served Hitler's cause, but that reflection never comes. Susan Sontag, in a review of one of the Nuba books in the New York Review of Books entitled Fascinating Fascism (February 6, 1975), offers a very different view of the meaning of Riefenstahl's life work from the one Riefenstahl herself offers, arguing for the presence of a consistent vein of fascist aesthetics running from her earliest film work through the Nazi-era films and into the African photography. It's worth reading both views. Riefenstahl died in 2003, at the age of 101. Thus, her memoir deals with her first 85 years. The book is an interesting read despite the hard-to-avoid feeling that Riefenstahl's story is told in the voice of an unreliable narrator. I wonder if there is an informed, truly objective biography available?

[Update: Perhaps Steven Bach's The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl is that book? A review of Bach's biography in The Guardian.]