September 2024

11 Buckden Roundabout September 2024 Farm Hall Farm Hall In July the Huntingdon Drama Club put on an excellent produc- tion of Farm Hall, written by Katherine Moar. Farm Hall is a large mid 18th century house on West Street, Godmanchester and was used by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) during the Second World War. Between July 1945 and January 1946, ten of Germany ’ s top nuclear scientists were held in the Hall. Most of the scientists were part of Hitler ’ s notorious Uranium Club and were nuclear physicists working towards the German atomic bomb. Unaware that the SIS had placed listening devic- es in all the rooms, the scientists talked openly and candidly to their colleagues. The play is a dramatisation of recorded tran- scripts from the bugged walls. Given the codename Operation Epsilon, the aim of their detainment was to determine how close Nazi Germany had been to constructing an atomic bomb by listening to their “ private ” conversations. The transcripts, which remained Top Secret for 47 years and were not made public till 1993. The original transcripts were sent from the administrator of the operation, British military officer Major T.H. Rittner, to Lieutenant Commander Eric Welsh, a naval intelligence officer and then to Sir Michael Will- cox Perrin. Perrin, a scientist who directed the first British atomic bomb programme, was charged with understanding the status of the German atomic programme. The transcripts of the recordings reveal both the primitive na- ture of Nazi Germany ’ s nuclear programme and the personali- ties of those who worked on it. Moreover, the commonly held view by some that German scientists refrained from develop- ing the atomic bomb for Nazi Germany for moral reasons was proved to be unfounded. Germany would have developed, given its level of scientific knowledge, and most likely used a nuclear bomb had it not been held back by inferior engineering and logistics. Although there were 10 scientists in total detained, the play featured only 6, as follows: Professor Max Von Laue. Von Laue was an open objector to Nazism and played no role in Hitler ’ s Uranium Club. He won the Nobel prize for Physics in 1914 for the discovery of the diffraction of X - rays by crystals. After the war he returned to Germany and continued his academic work. He made a signifi- cant contribution to re - establishing and organising German scientific endeavours. He died on 24 April 1960, aged 80, fol- lowing a collision with a motorcyclist while he was driving to his laboratory. Professor Otto Hahn. Hahn discovered nuclear fission, the pro- cess that makes an atomic bomb possible. For this he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944. Although Hahn was another anti Nazi he worked on the German nuclear weapons programme, cataloguing the fission products of uranium. However, with the news of the first dropping of the American nuclear bomb we see him grappling with guilt for his role in the discovery of nuclear fission. After the war he returned to his academic work and helped to rebuild German science, be- coming one of the most influential and respected citizens of postwar West Germany. He died on 28 July 1968, aged 89. Dr Kurt Diebner. Diebner was an experimental physicist and head of Hitler ’ s Uranium Club and nuclear fission research, when it was under the control of the Army Ordnance Office. He was a committed Nazi Party member. After the war Dieb- ner did mainly commercial work and at one point worked for a company for the Commercial Exploitation of Nuclear Energy in Ship Building and Shipping. He died on 13 June 1954, aged 59. Professor Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg replaced Diebner as the symbolic leader of Hitler ’ s Uranium Club when the army ceded control to the Reich Research Council. Heisenberg con- sistently told Hitler ’ s government that the creation of an atom- ic bomb was not possible. The transcripts revealed that Heisen- berg, along with Otto Hahn and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, were glad the Allies had won World War 2. Heisenberg wrote the paper that established modern quantum mechanics and in 1932 won the Nobel Prize for its creation. After the War, Hei- senberg was Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astro- physics and in 1951 became the scientific representative of the Federal Republic of Germany at the UNESCO conference, with the aim of establishing a European laboratory for nuclear phys- ics and building a large particle accelerator. Heisenberg died of kidney cancer at his home, on 1 February 1976, aged 74. Dr Carl Friedrich Von Weizsaker. Weizsaker was a close friend and colleague of Heisenberg. As a protégé of Heisenberg, he was present at a crucial meeting at the Army Ordnance head- quarters in Berlin on 17 September 1939, at which the German atomic weapons programme was launched. He subsequently joined the programme and participated in developing an atom- ic bomb. Weizsaker made numerous claims that he didn't want Nazi Germany to get the bomb. After the war he contin- ued with his academic work, becoming a Christian pacifist on his retirement in 1980. He died in 2007 aged 94. His brother was the former German President Richard von Weizsäcker. Dr Erich Bagge. Bagge, a former student of Heisenberg for his doctorate, developed a uranium enrichment device later built by Dieber. Although Bagge was a committed Nazi Party mem- ber he argued that he only joined because otherwise the au- thorities would not allow him to do his research. After the war Bagge continued with his academic career and died on 5 June 1996 aged 84. Local writer and historian, Roger Leivers, has done much re- search on Farm Hall and features it in his new book Godman- chester at War. Roger returns to the Buckden Local History Society on 4 September and will be providing a new insight into the role of the SIS ’ s operation at Farm Hall—please come along. Details of the talk are given in the BLHS advert in this Roundabout. - Richard Storey, Chairman of Buckden Local History Society Photo of Farm Hall with thanks to Roger Leivers.