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Heisenberg was a fool.

A fool and a liar. He was begged by his colleagues during his American tour in 1939 to not remain in Nazi Germany, but immigrate to the U.S. or any other Western democracy, just don't work for Hitler because it was discovered that year that atoms could split and a terrible bomb could theoretically be possible. But Heisenberg was another patriotic German still traumatized after WWI, and he stayed in his Fatherland while all his Jewish friends and colleagues were fired from German universities and had to seek employment -and safety - in other countries.

He and his team of German physicists attempted to make an atomic pile, but really got no where. Enrico Fermi, whose wife was Jewish and their two children were therefore half Jewish immigrated to the U.S. and Fermi created the first fission reactor underneath Stagg Stadium in Chicago in 1942. Heisenberg's team never got anywhere close to what Fermi's team accomplished that day in Chicago, but their arrogance was such that they never dreamed that atomic bombs could be created in the U.S.

After Germany surrendered in May, 1945, Heisenberg and the other leading German physicists were rounded up and sent to England to a very well bugged residence, and their conversations were all recorded. It was Heisenberg's opinion that Americans were very good at making things like cars, but they weren't up to making such as advanced things like A bombs. In fact, the German physicists were confident that they had a lot to teach the Allies about their research, and that could be a sort of a bargaining chip for them.

Their world crashed in around them when the news came that the U.S. had A bombed Japan twice. The German scientists tried to believe those weren't A bombs because it made them look so inferior. Finally Carl Friedrich von Weizecker (a German diplomat's son) began suggesting that they could have made A bombs for Germany but they were too moral to do so. Any transcript of the tape recordings made of the German physicists held in England show that the Germans - led by Heisenberg - just weren't up to it. But they had their alibi and they all stuck with it trying to cling to the moral high ground until their deaths.