Hitler's Uranium Club. - The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, 2nd edition

Near the end of World War II, ten of Germany's foremost nuclear physicists, including Werner Heisenberg, were captured by American and British forces, then spirited out of Germany and detained for six months at Farm Hall, an English country house outside Cambridge. The physicians knew that Germany, in spite of its early lead in nuclear research, had failed to develop an atomic bomb or even a self-sustaining reactor. And during their imprisonment they learned - from a BBC radio report on August 6, 1945 - that an Allied atomic bomb project had succeeded where the German effort had failed. What the scientists did not know was that during their detention they were being secretly monitored and recorded by British agents. Farm Hall was a comfortable, even civilized, prison, but it was bugged. This book contains the complete collection of transcripts that were made from the secret 1945 recordings, expertly annotated by Jeremy Bernstein. A startling and sobering set of documents, it provides an unprecedented view into the thoughts and feelings of these scientists as they contemplated the destruction of the Third Reich, the failure of "German Physics," and the roles they had played in the Nazi war effort.