Volume 49, Number 5 · March 28, 2002
What Bohr Remembered
By Thomas Powers
Military victory for Hitler's Germany probably never appeared more certain than it did in the early fall of 1941, when Werner Heisenberg, on a Sunday evening in mid-September, boarded the night train from Berlin to Copenhagen. Forward elements of the German army were pressing on Moscow, the Americans had not yet entered the war, German armies occupied most of the rest of Europe, and Britain was trapped on its island. 'News from the Russian front has been pretty bad,' wrote one of Winston Churchill's advisers, Alexander Cadogan, in his diary later that week, while Heisenberg was visiting the institute of his old friend and mentor, the physicist Niels Bohr. 'Everything is pretty murky, and how exactly we are going to win this war, I should like someone to explain.'
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