Farm Hall

  • David Cassidy
Staged reading in Santa Fe, New Mexico: May 2014.

By July 1945, the Allies and Germans had spent years racing each other to build an atomic bomb. The German physicists were certain of their technological superiority, but had not even taken the first step — building a working reactor. The Manhattan Project scientists, who had panicked that the Germans would build this evil thing first, had made four bombs. But that July, neither side knew for certain how close the other had come. So, just after the Nazi surrender, the Allies captured ten German nuclear scientists — including Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Max von Laue, Kurt Diebner and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker — sequestered them in Farm Hall, a country house in deepest Cambridgeshire, UK, and bugged their rooms.

Left to right: Werner Heisenberg, Max von Laue and Otto Hahn in Göttingen, Germany, in 1946. Credit: INTERFOTO/AKG-IMAGES

Transcripts of the taped conversations were declassified and published almost 50 years later in Operation Epsilon (University of California Press, 1993) and annotated in physicist Jeremy Bernstein's Hitler's Uranium Club (AIP Press, 1995). But they begged to be a play. Now David Cassidy, historian of physics at Hofstra University in New York, has written a one-act script called Farm Hall. Whereas a recent produced play by Alan Brody (also called Operation Epsilon) focused on the scientists' morals in trying to build a bomb for Hitler, Cassidy looks at the scientists' accounts of their failure to do so.

Both playwrights had to choose, from the mess of reality, one central tension. I thought that the tension might be how close the Germans came to building the bomb. Bernstein thought the tension was the German scientists' construction of a version of reality in which they had refused to build the bomb for Hitler on principle. Cassidy, however, focuses on their realization of their technological inferiority — on how they rationalized what he calls their own “fall into failure”.

Cassidy quotes verbatim from the transcript, putting the stiffly translated German into American English. He narrows the cast down to five scientists, including Heisenberg, who led the German nuclear programme and won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics; Hahn, who co-discovered fission; and Diebner, an engineer. Their military minder at Farm Hall, Theodore Rittner, has arranged for the secret taping, translation and transcription of their conversations for British and US intelligence.

The scientists settle in and get comfortable. They talk.

They try to figure out why they're being held. To keep them out of the hands of the Russians? Because the Allies want to know what they know? They compliment themselves on being ahead of the Allies, who — they think — cannot build a reactor in which uranium can be collected into a near-critical mass and begin fission. They argue about why they never actually built the reactor: because Heisenberg insisted on using his design rather than Diebner's more effectual one?

The scientists skirt around the moral issue of building an atomic bomb for the Reich. Heisenberg and the others agree that they did what was necessary to protect the future of German science. Hahn, who never worked on the bomb, says that he loves Germany but is glad that her criminal leaders lost the war. Diebner says that he joined the Nazi party because he needed work.

On the night of 6 August, they listen to the BBC's announcement that the United States has dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Stunned, they try to figure out how the Allies managed it. Heisenberg calculates that by using 100,000 mass spectrometers, one could separate out enough of the fissile but rare isotope of uranium for a bomb — about a tonne. Hahn is confused: aren't Heisenberg's calculations out by a factor of ten? (They are.)

The next day, they read the British newspapers, which brag that the Allies won the atomic race. They are outraged, having thought they were so far ahead that racing was irrelevant. They disagree about whether they were even trying to build a bomb or, as Heisenberg begins to insist, just a reactor. Everybody agrees that the German government kept them too short of funds for success. They write an official memorandum explaining that their efforts were directed towards building a power-producing reactor and that working on a bomb had not been feasible. About five months later, they go home — Heisenberg to the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, and the others also to worthy and interesting jobs. As Cassidy says, they fall from the heights of their arrogance, but not far.

Cassidy's script has had two readings; others are planned, and a Spanish production in Santiago, Chile, is in preparation. Cassidy is expanding his play to two acts. “I don't think I could have picked a more difficult subject for my first play,” he says. The difficulty lies in the multiplicity of historical realities that he must cram into one plot that is driven, in effect, by one tension.

The transcript itself holds many tensions: between aristocratic theorists and lower-caste engineers; between those who joined the Nazis and those who just worked for them; between arrogance and wilful blindness; between Heisenberg's great scientific stature and his failure to help a Jewish colleague's family, or indeed his own. Cassidy has Rittner, at the play's end, collapse all the tensions: people who are great in one area, Rittner says, are expected to be — and expect themselves to be — great in all. But in both art and life, they fall.