| Description | Letter sent to Professor Mott FRS at H H Wills Physical Laboratory, Royal Fort, Bristol 8
'Many thanks for your letter on the 15th concerning the proposed invitation to Heisenberg and Justi. You know that I am very much in favour of inviting German scientists who have behaved decently during the Nazi time. I am afraid however that Justi certainly does not belong to this category. He was one of the first Nazis and a rather vile one as I know from personal experience. He remained so to the end as I know from Bonhoeffer and also from Clusius whom I saw recently in Zurich. In addition he is, in our opinion at least, not a very good scientist - many of his experiments are sloppy and wrongly interpreted. The main point however is that as a character he is one of the most despicable people I know and I certainly would not attend any meeting to which he was invited. I know that Fraser likes him - "he is so amusing" he said to me a short time ago. But I do not think that Fraser always picks the right person!
One also has to consider very seriously the impression which it would make on the few decent German scientists if one of the first to be invited to England was well known to have been a Nazi, is probably still one at heart, and in addition has no particular scientific merit.
Heisenberg is of course another question; relations with him will certainly have to be taken up again in the near future although one could have wished that his personal attitude to the Nazis might have been a bit cooler (of course he was never on such intimate terms with them as Justi). Also, I must say that my personal esteem for him has not been increased by his recent report on the German activities on atomic energy during the war which gives a very cleverly distorted picture of the actual facts. Nevertheless everyone would be pleased to discuss scientific matters with Heisenberg. If he is brought over, however, I think there are many more important things to discuss with him than his theory of superconductivity of which, as you know people here did not form a very high opinion and I think therefore that such an invitation should be considerd on much broader lines after discussion with all scientists who are interested in seeing him. ' |