Abstract
This chapter presents for the first time in its entirety Heisenberg’s paper “On Active and Passive Opposition in the Third Reich”, its analysis, and a discussion of the German physicists’ secretly recorded conversations during their 1945 detention in England.
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Notes
- 1.
Private Papers of Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem. I thank Prof. Walker for sharing with me this document, and Dr. Helmut Rechenberg and the Werner Heisenberg Archive he used to direct, for the permission to reproduce it here.
- 2.
Throughout this letter, the emphasis in bold is added by me for better clarity.
- 3.
In the next sentence Heisenberg repeats himself, but I am not here to copy edit his text, and thus am keeping his repetition.
- 4.
Quoted from [Wal1, p. 340].
- 5.
Rebuttal, which was not published in Germany [Wal1, p. 360].
- 6.
Abbreviation for “Very Important Person.”
- 7.
[Ber, p. 123].
- 8.
[Ber, p. 129].
- 9.
[Ber, p. 145].
- 10.
[Ber, p. 150].
- 11.
[Ber, p. 131].
- 12.
[Cas, p. 314].
References
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Heisenberg, W., Die aktive und die passive Opposition im Dritten Reich, unpublished 4-page manuscript with the cover letter, dated November 12, 1947.
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© 2015 Alexander Soifer
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Soifer, A. (2015). On Active and Passive Opposition in the Third Reich. In: The Scholar and the State: In Search of Van der Waerden. Birkhäuser, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0712-8_33
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