Re: Did Neil Bohrs sabotage his work during WWII???

Did Neil Bohrs sabotage his work during WWII???

I was just wondering if he had to (in his and many's minds) because he had to flee from Germany so he wouldn't be caught by the Nazis because he was Jewish (enough conjuctions??).

But on to our answer...

Yes, Niels Bohr was Jewish. He was awarded a new chair of theoretical physics at the University of Copenhagen in 1916, and was the first director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics there from its establishment in 1921 until his death in 1962. The Institute was renamed the Niels Bohr Institute in 1965.

The Institute never did any work with more than peripheral relation to the atomic bomb, before, during or after the Second World War. Instead, experimental work centered around nuclear radiation and the use of radioisotopes as biological tracers. So there really wasn't any bomb-related work there for Bohr to sabotage.

It's possible that you are thinking of Werner Heisenberg, a Gentile who remained in Germany during the entire war. There has been some speculation as to whether Heisenberg "sabotaged" the German bomb project, but the evidence is inconclusive.

Heisenberg was told early on that he should abandon his work on quantum theory because it was "Jewish physics." While he did work on the German bomb project, the atomic bomb didn't seem to be one of Hitler's highest priorities. Furthermore, the German project apparently had several conceptual flaws which quite effectively "sabotaged" it, without any purposeful assistance from anyone.

Danes did yeoman work in smuggling Jews - mostly but not entirely Danish citizens - to Sweden, only a short distance away by boat. In 1943 Bohr was persuaded to flee to Sweden with his family because of the increasing danger from the Germans. He immediately went from Stockholm to London to work on nuclear energy, and shortly thereafter migrated to Los Alamos with the rest of the British nuclear physics community to work on the Bomb.

More information about Niels Bohr may be found at the following sites:

• The history of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.
• A thumbnail biography of Bohr from an English site devoted to the history of mathematics. This site gives other links as well.