1. R. Rhodes,The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1986, pp. 370–371. As Rhodes reports, Houtermans, who was half-Jewish and also a Communist, had been emprisoned in the Soviet Untion after his emigration from Germany and later extradited to Germany he was released from the Gestapo prison due to the intervention of v. Laue and worked with v. Ardenne whowas interested in building the atomic bomb. Houtermans wrote a 39 pages long report on his ideas of using fission on the basis of Plutonium breeding but kept this knowledge secret.
2. H. Rechenberg, Transurane, Uransplatung und das deutsche Uranprojekt. Chronologie einer Entdeckung. In: MPG-Spiegel 1/89, p. 55–65. But following Rhodes (Ref. 1), Houtermans, being Dutch and half-Jewish, can hardly be considered a German physicist, though after being handed over to the Gestapo by the Soviet KGB he was forced to work in Germany after 1941 with v. Ardenne. After all his bad experiences with the Gestapo, he was not interested in providing a weapon like the atomic bomb. Actually, he kept his knowledge of the use of Plutonium secret and thus contributed to the lack of success in the attempts to construct the Uranium bomb. It is not known if in conversation with other scientists he informed them about his findings. Those scientists may have been v. Laue, who was a strong enemy of the Nazis, and v. Weizsäcker. It seems that Houtermans did even not inform his science director v. Ardenne whom he knew of being a proponent of the construction of an atomic weapon or bomb. In this light Rechenberg's argument, which is rather polemic, seems to be very weak.
3. E. Ströker, Die Atomkernspaltung. Ein Rückblick auf ihre Vorgeschichte und Entdeckung. In: Proceedings of an International Workshop on the Discovery of Nuclear Fission, held at the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin (Germany), March 1989.
4. E. Amaldi, Prehistory and History of the Discovery of Nuclear Fission. Ibid.
5. E. Segrè, Physics Today42, (No. 7, July 1989), 39 (1989). This paper of the late Segrè, like Amaldi a participant in the early and misinterpreted experiments of the Fermi group in Rome, summarizes the history of nuclear fission from a more emotional point of view, even climaxing in the statement that Fermi has been awarded the Nobel prize for the wrong reason. Certainly, as interesting as Segrè's attitude is, he is much less neutral than Amaldi (Ref. 4) and more preoccupied. There is no doubt that Fermi deserved the Nobel prize for any of his former contributions to physics; he did not deserve it for the discovery of fission, however, though he had produced it in his experiments without recognizing it. That he was given the prize for the discovery of transuraniae was absolutely correct and justifiable on the basis of theconcepts of knowledge of his time.