There were enormous debates within the nuclear physics community for decades regarding "the German bomb", which many wanted to exist because the possibility of it existing was the justification for the Ally's bomb (bombing Japan was something of an afterthought, albeit one that likely saved tens of thousands of lives on both sides, not that anyone on the Allied side cared about Japanese lives at that point in the war.)
There is a quite good play by English playwright and novelist Michael Frane called "Copenhagen" about Heisenberg's visit to Copenhagen in 1941 to see Bohr, that to my mind convincingly argues for the non-existence of any German bomb program, or at least Heisenberg's complete innocence of it.
SPOILER ALERT: don't read the rest of this comment if you want to see the play and be surprised by the revelation!
I'll bury this in other words so hopefully it'll be difficult for anyone to see if they don't want to, but the basic argument is drawn from the Farm Hall transcripts and the reaction that the German physicists had to the bombings in Japan, which was astonishment, followed fairly quickly by a calculation by Heisenberg that the mass of the bomb might be as little as a thousand kilograms or so. He quickly refined this calculation to something more reasonable, like twenty kilograms, but if he had had any knowledge of or interest in building a bomb he would have done the calculation long before, because a first-order, back-of-the-envelope approximation to the chain reaction based on known properties of uranium is exactly what any physicist would do the very first day they set out to build a bomb. If Heisenberg had been part of a programme to build a bomb he would not have already done that and he wouldn't have needed to do it again. This argument is absolutely compelling to any working physicist, because that is exactly what any of us would do under those circumstances, so there is no doubt that if there was a German bomb program that Heinsenberg was not part of it.
This play was adapted to Portuguese and was played in Lisbon around 2002.
I was working at a company that did interactive installations and I was tasked to write software that illustrated the characters physics discussions and projected these on stage under control of the actors via cameras and machine vision.
It was one of the most fun projects I worked in.
There is a quite good play by English playwright and novelist Michael Frane called "Copenhagen" about Heisenberg's visit to Copenhagen in 1941 to see Bohr, that to my mind convincingly argues for the non-existence of any German bomb program, or at least Heisenberg's complete innocence of it.
SPOILER ALERT: don't read the rest of this comment if you want to see the play and be surprised by the revelation!
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I'll bury this in other words so hopefully it'll be difficult for anyone to see if they don't want to, but the basic argument is drawn from the Farm Hall transcripts and the reaction that the German physicists had to the bombings in Japan, which was astonishment, followed fairly quickly by a calculation by Heisenberg that the mass of the bomb might be as little as a thousand kilograms or so. He quickly refined this calculation to something more reasonable, like twenty kilograms, but if he had had any knowledge of or interest in building a bomb he would have done the calculation long before, because a first-order, back-of-the-envelope approximation to the chain reaction based on known properties of uranium is exactly what any physicist would do the very first day they set out to build a bomb. If Heisenberg had been part of a programme to build a bomb he would not have already done that and he wouldn't have needed to do it again. This argument is absolutely compelling to any working physicist, because that is exactly what any of us would do under those circumstances, so there is no doubt that if there was a German bomb program that Heinsenberg was not part of it.