At the end of the war ten German scientists were interned in a country house named Farm Hall in Britain. With one exception, all had worked on the wartime research project on the economic and military applications of nuclear fission. There were microphones hidden in the walls and the Germans’ conversations were recorded, excerpted, translated, and transcribed, including in particular their reactions to the surprising and shocking news of Hiroshima. The Germans discussed four basic questions among themselves: Did they know how to build an atomic bomb? Could the Germans have built these weapons? Did the Germans try to make atomic bombs? Had they been Nazis?

The American Alsos Mission, a scientific intelligence-gathering task force, followed behind the advancing Allied armies in the west, looking for evidence of a German atomic bomb. Its scientific leader, the physicist Samuel Goudmit, quickly determined that the Germans were far removed from building nuclear weapons but also was misled by some documents and his own prejudices, convincing himself that the Germans, including his colleague Werner Heisenberg, had not understood how an atomic bomb would work. When Goudsmit returned to the United States, he began publishing books and articles using the German uranium work as an example of how the Nazis had ruined science through political and ideological control, mistakes that America must not repeat. Heisenberg responded by defending both his scientific work and conduct under Hitler. Goudsmit criticized both Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker for compromising with the Nazis. While Goudsmit eventually reconciled with Heisenberg, he never forgave Weizsäcker. Goudsmit had lost his parents in Auschwitz, and Weizsäcker’s father, a high-ranking official in the Foreign Ministry, had been convicted of war crimes.