A thousand suns

With little warning it finally hit Hauser that somewhere in this maze of rooms was their leader, mere yards away from him, perhaps separated only by one wall, or a door. Spatially, he was closer now to Adolf Hitler than he had ever been, despite having been a supporter for nearly seventeen years. He had only ever dreamed of being this close.

Hauser imagined he could sense the magnetic power of the man, the aura, drawing him in, bidding him to step forward into his inner sanctum. Hauser momentarily resisted the urge, desperate to make this moment of delicious anticipation last as long as possible. To be shortly in the company of the Great Man, to have the Great Man, attentive, listening to him… to him! Hauser felt a tremulous shudder of excitement ripple down through his body. This was the reward for so many tireless years of devotion to the great cause.

Dr Hauser had been an active card-carrying member of the party since first he’d heard the Great Man speak. In his opinion, that made him part of the ‘old guard’. He had even volunteered to join the SS at the outbreak of war, but his ‘special skills’ had proven an obstacle to joining. He had been refused on the grounds that his academic and research work could benefit the Reich far more than his physical contribution as a soldier could.

So Hauser, reluctantly and with some bitterness, had served his country living and working alone. He had worked in isolation on a chalkboard, in a ten foot by ten foot office in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, an annexe of the University of Berlin. He could talk to no one about his work and was given the task of checking and duplicating the notes and calculations of Professor Werner Heisenberg. Every day of the war he had spent a little time at a cafe nearby, reading about the spectacular victories of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, and cursing his role in the war as little more than a clerk double-checking the simple arithmetic of another mathematician. Hauser had grown to hate the slanted and florid writing of Heisenberg, the flamboyant tails on his Ys and Gs; the elaborate depiction of mathematic symbols suggested a man who was easy in the company of others, a man who could effortlessly climb the hierarchical ladder and speak with ease to those at the very top.

He resented the man.

Heisenberg was good, but not brilliant. His work was reliable and consistent, Hauser rarely found any mistakes in his calculations. But he was definitely not the genius he thought he was.

At the heart of Heisenberg’s work was the task of determining the minimum mass of U-235 required to produce the chain reaction of fission. The man had produced this lengthy calculation several dozen times, and each time the answer had pointed to unfeasible masses of this substance, tons. And yet the fool Heisenberg had persisted, securing additional funding for his work, attempting to construct a small reactor in Straussburg.

Hauser hadn’t been able to believe the utter stupidity of the man: the futility of the process was staring him in the face with every iteration of this same calculation.

Tons.

To produce a ton of U-235 one would need to extract a hundred tons, refined from 10,000 tons of enriched ore. Hauser wasn’t even sure that the whole planet contained that much of it. By March 1944 Hauser had convinced himself that the process of nuclear fission having a practical use either as a weapon or a power source was a stillborn science, and he was beginning to suspect that Heisenberg was merely extorting funds for his own private use.

It was during 1944, one wet and overcast afternoon in March, that he uncovered the pre-war research notes in the archives of the University of Leipzig of a Jew called Joseph Schenkelmann. He had been a student of Heisenberg’s while he had been a Professor of Theoretical Physics there in the 1920s. Reading the man’s notes and carefully following the path of his calculative trail, Hauser had been able to understand that something amazing was possible. The stupid and arrogant Heisenberg had made the same mistake over and over.

The arithmetic was correct, but he had made several erroneous assumptions in his work.

If he’d had the humility to double-check his own work he might have seen that it wasn’t tons of U-235 they needed, but only a few ounces. If the chain reaction could be accelerated enough at the beginning, that is. There was the trick, and this Jew Schenkelmann, this clever little Jew, had spotted that.

On that cold and wet afternoon everything had changed.

‘You should go in now, this door needs to be sealed,’ said the Feldwebel.

Hauser looked at the man in uniform; he had a soldier’s face, bereft of intelligence or emotion.

Little more than a shaved monkey dressed in a black uniform.