The Use and Abuse of Nuclear History: Farm Hall in Historical Memory

75 years later, the Farm Hall transcripts remain a singular source from the dawn of the atomic age, one which resembles a morality play: 10 prominent nuclear physicists, including Max von Laue, Werner Heisenberg, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and Otto Hahn, contemplating the German defeat, their complicity in the Nazi war machine, and, after the news of the Hiroshima bomb arrived, whether they truly intended to build a nuclear weapon for Hitler. Sprinkled in amid all the moral ruminations are speculations on how to build an atomic bomb.

As a rare primary document that quite literally reproduces real-time conversations, one might expect the transcripts to be the definitive source on wartime German nuclear intentions. Yet since 1945, the Farm Hall recordings have been used to make radically different arguments about the abortive program. Allied scientists like Samuel Goudsmit used them in an attempt to prove that Heisenberg and the Germans got their physics wrong when trying to construct a bomb—but that the Germans would have willingly provided Hitler with a nuke if only they could. Others, like journalist Thomas Powers, have used them to spin a fanciful narrative of scientific resistance inside the Nazi regime. The former internees themselves, particularly Heisenberg and von Weizsäcker, used them to demonstrate their apparent innocence on all counts.

This talk explores how a seemingly authoritative text has been used to support such differing perspectives, investigating a phenomenon all too familiar in 2020: how apparently incontrovertible evidence can be spun to support a variety of viewpoints. It argues that the meaning and interpretation of the Farm Hall recordings have been contested since their creation in 1945.