Harnack House

Three days later, under a cold gray winter sky, a crowd gathered in Dahlem. They stepped across cobblestones dusted with wet snow toward the Harnack House, clubhouse and meeting hall for the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. 

On any normal day, the Harnack House was filled with men. This crowd, however, was oddly dominated by women. 

In Willstatter s mind, the many missing faces stood out more vividly than the ones before him. Albert Einstein and James Franck were in exile in the United States. Max von Laue was practically within earshot, ensconced unhappily in his office at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, just a short walk from the Harnack House. Willstatter recognized no one from Haber s own institute. 

Straight ahead, after leaving the station, lies the Harnack House, where Fritz Haber once presided over his famous Monday Colloquium and where Max Planck led a memorial service in Haber s honor in 1935. Not far away, to the left, are the former villas of Richard Willstatter and Fritz Haber, and just beyond them lies Fritz Haber s beloved institute. 

Such must have been Szilard s conclusion that year he moved to the Harnack House of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes— a residence for visiting scientists sponsored by German industry, a faculty club of sorts—and approached Lise Meitner about the possibility of doing experimental work with her in nuclear physics. Thus to save mankind. 

Szilard promised to write Wigner again when he had an actual program. He did not yet know that his actual program would be organizing the desperate rescue. He parked his bags at the Harnack House in Dahlem and sat down with Lise Meitner to talk about doing nuclear physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. She had Hahn, and Hahn was superb, but he was a chemist. She could use a jack-of-all-trades tike Szilard. But the collaboration was not to be. Events moved too quickly. Szilard took his train from Berlin, the train that proved him, if not more clever than most people, at least a day earlier. That was close to the first of April, 1933. ... 

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