Comment by eesmith

1 year ago

> How could we possibly know the such things as 'Nazi snatch squads' even existed

Even setting aside the description "Danish woman working for the Gestapo saw an order for Bohr’s arrest and tipped off Bohr’s brother" from this account, we can look at other accounts, like the chapter "Escape" from his biography at https://archive.org/details/nielsbohrmanhis00moor/page/300/m...

"Many years later at the Nuremberg trials it was revealed that the Nazis had intended to arrest Bohr on the day martial law was declared. There was, however, a dispute about it, and the decision was made to put off his arrest and deportation to Germany until the Nazis began their roundup of the Jews. In the general excitement, they thought the arrest of Bohr would attract less attention and the furor would be less."

The contents of the chapter are mostly aligned with the linked-to account, though the chapter says the beer bottle of heavy water was not true:

"The prosaic truth was quite different. Heavy water was used in the institute's accelerator. When the supply had to be replenished, someone remembered that Bohr had once had a bottle the Norwegian manufacturer had presented to him. The institute men were unable to find it and sent an underground query to Rozental in Stockholm. Rozental sent back full instructions about where to find it and pointed out that the bottle was unlabeled." - https://archive.org/details/nielsbohrmanhis00moor/page/308/m...

> Basically every paragraph is like this.

That is not lost on anyone. From the second page of the book chapter I linked to, "Bohr and Margrethe, feeling like the principals in a spy melodrama, as indeed they were".