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(literally, Institute for German East Studies, a “think tank” for eastern colonization).
    Frank had fallen from Nazi grace the previous year after a lecture critical of unconstitutional rule. That lecture saw him stripped of his prestigious title Reichskommissar, but left his governorship of Poland intact. In such disdain did Hitler hold Poland that he thought it punishment enough to let Frank languish there.
    Exiled he might have been. But he did not languish. He had already appropriated for his living quarters the luxuriously appointed Wawel Castle, where he entertained lavishly and famously. Known as the “butcher of Poles” (later executed at Nuremburg in 1946), he extorted from his governorship all that he could: lavish feasts for friends, furs for his wife and his lover, money in the bank. (Among the charges of corruption floated during party infighting was the charge, easily documented, that Frank and his wife “shopped” in the Jewish ghetto, where discounts naturally abounded.) Frank despised Poles, whom he saw as fodder for slavery and extermination; and he exhorted his fellow Germans to exterminate Jews in a blunt, brutal 1941 speech.
    In recollection, Heisenberg confided to the historian David Irving that he was struck by Frank's queries about a “miracle weapon, perhaps atomic bombs” in the possession of the Allies. 2 Heisenberg seems to have recalled little about his own talk at Frank's Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit. Presumably, he lectured on quantum theory. Nor did he recall seeing or hearing anything untoward. Yet he must have listened to the outspoken Frank boast of his successes in dealing with the “Jewish question.” Frank's castle was about fifty miles from Auschwitz.
    It was hardly surprising that Hans Frank might think to ask about an atomic bomb. Whether he had in mind a “miracle”weapon for the fatherland or feared that the Allies might have their own, Frank, like most laypeople, would have heard all about “splitting the atom” and the possibilities of atomic energy.
    Indeed, by the late 1930s, most physicists were at least speculating on the possibility of creating an atomic explosion. The idea was the logical outgrowth of three decades of revolutionary thoughts about the forces of nature, both large and small. Einstein's theories of relativity had recast how we see the large forces of the universe—gravity, the speed of light. The smallest forces—those within the atom—were next. By 1912, the British physicist Ernest Rutherford had suggested a model for the atom. He filled his laboratory in Manchester with eager young physicists. One, Niels Bohr, emerged as the single greatest theorist of the quantum. When he established his own laboratory in Copenhagen, he attracted a cadre of youngsters eager to take on the atom and make their own marks in history. Among Bohr's students was the young Bavarian Werner Heisenberg.
    They met at a lecture given by Bohr in 1922 (the year Bohr won the Nobel Prize). At once, the twenty-year-old Heisenberg impressed Bohr. His questions were pointed and probing, he was not afraid to argue, and he possessed great energy. In the following few years, working with fellow Germans Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan, Heisenberg developed the foundations of quantum mechanics. From the discovery of “matrix mechanics” to his famous “uncertainty principle,” he played a part second only to Bohr's in the story of the quantum.
HEISENBERG
    Born in 1901 in Würtzburg, a languid and venerable Bavarian town, Heisenberg was raised in a typical patriarchal family. His father, August, was a Greek scholar, ambitious and successful—he passed his “habilitation” and became Professor of Middle and ModernGreek in 1909, when Werner was eight. The following year, the family moved to Munich, where Werner entered the Maximilians-gymnasium, an illustrious and traditional school where