The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Ernst David Bergmann.md

aliases	created	updated	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations
Ernst David Bergmann Ernst Bergmann David Bergmann David Ernst Bergmann David Ernest Bergmann Ernst D. Bergmann E. D. Bergmann Professor Bergmann Bergmann	2025-01-09	2026-10-05	Scientists & Researchers	Person KeyFigure Israel Nuclear Dimona Chemist AtomsForPeace WeizmannInstitute Rafi	German-born organic chemist, founding director of the Sieff Institute at Rehovot and chairman of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission from 1952 to 1966, called the scientific father of the Israeli bomb in the American record.	1903-10-18	1975-04-06	Karlsruhe, Germany	type with start end role fn employed_by Weizmann Institute of Science 1934-01-01 1951 founding director of the Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Rehovot; scientific director of the Weizmann Institute from 1949 1 type with start end role fn head_of Israel Atomic Energy Commission 1952 1966 chairman, sole remaining member by the late 1950s 2 type with start end role fn employed_by Israel Ministry of Defense 1948 1966 head of the first defense research institute; scientific adviser to the minister and director of research and planning 2 type with start role fn employed_by Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1952 professor of organic chemistry 1 type with start end role fn reported_to Shimon Peres 1953 1966 the Atomic Energy Commission stood under the jurisdiction of the director general of the Defense Ministry 2 type with start role fn member_of Rafi 1965 founding member 8

Ernst David Bergmann (born October 18, 1903 in Karlsruhe; died April 6, 1975 in Jerusalem) was an organic chemist who directed the Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Rehovot, chaired the Israel Atomic Energy Commission from its creation in 1952 until 1966, and held two defense posts under David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres. Seymour Hersh called him "the scientific father of the Israeli bomb, its J. Robert Oppenheimer"; the American documents published by Avner Cohen and William Burr record that Peres kept Bergmann and his commission largely outside the negotiations for Dimona.¹²³

Berlin, Rehovot and the war years

Bergmann began doctoral research in chemistry at the University of Berlin in 1924 under Wilhelm Schlenk, took the doctorate in 1927 and became a Privatdozent in 1928; the Nazi civil service law of April 7, 1933 ended his teaching rights.¹ Hersh wrote that he had been introduced to nuclear research as a student at the Emil Fischer Institute, that Herman F. Mark was a colleague with whom he published joint papers on the chemical structure of rubber, paint and adhesives, and that his father, a rabbi in Berlin, was a close friend of Chaim Weizmann, who arranged a place for him at Manchester University in England.² He reached Palestine on January 1, 1934 as founding director of the Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Rehovot, the body that became the Weizmann Institute of Science.¹ Hersh, citing a Weizmann biography, wrote that in 1936 the Haganah asked Weizmann for a chemist to develop a high explosive, that Weizmann assigned Bergmann, who then joined the Haganah's technical committee, and that in 1939 Bergmann carried his findings to Paris for the French.²

Two accounts exist of the war years. The Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography places him in London from 1939 on war work for the Ministry of Supply, studying Weizmann's "catarole process" for aromatic compounds at the Manchester Oil Refinery, then in the United States from 1942 with Commercial Solvents at Terre Haute, Indiana, on fermentation isoprene for synthetic rubber, returning to the Sieff Institute in 1946.¹ Hersh wrote that Bergmann left England shortly after the invasion of Poland for a chemistry laboratory in Philadelphia that "didn't work out," and that Herman Mark took him to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where Weizmann also stayed.²

The Dictionary records his appointment as scientific director of the new Weizmann Institute in 1949, his departure in 1951, a professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1952, and his marriage that year to Hani Itin.¹ Hersh wrote that Weizmann's wife Vera objected to Bergmann as institute director because of his long relationship with her husband's private secretary Hani, whom he eventually married, and that he was made head of the organic chemistry division; that Bergmann moved at Ben-Gurion's request after 1948 to the Israel Ministry of Defense to establish the first defense research institute; and that more than forty years later Peres told an Israeli reporter that Bergmann was speaking of a missile capability in 1948: "I might be ready to tell the full truth about him in one hundred years, maybe."² The Dictionary adds that from 1952 Bergmann also contributed to chemical and biological research under the Institute for Biological Research.¹

The Atomic Energy Commission

According to the Dictionary, Ben-Gurion founded the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission in 1952 "on Bergmann's recommendation," with Bergmann as first director; Bergmann wanted a French-style, state-sponsored, project-oriented program.¹ Hersh wrote that Bergmann told friends by 1947 that the Negev phosphate fields held recoverable traces of uranium, that a department of isotope research was set up at the Weizmann Institute within two years, that Weizmann researchers had devised a heavy water process by 1953, and that he announced the commission in a radio address in November 1954, two years after its creation, without saying that it stood under the jurisdiction of Peres and the defense ministry.² According to the businessman Abraham Feinberg, in New York in the fall of 1947 Bergmann said over dinner "There's uranium in the desert"; Feinberg told Hersh he "shushed him up."² Hersh also reported that J. Robert Oppenheimer's papers show a visit to Israel in May 1958 for the opening of the Institute of Nuclear Science at Rehovot and a military flight with Bergmann and Peres to Eilat, while Israeli officials who worked at Dimona in 1958 recalled no visit by him.²

The American record of Bergmann's own requests is documentary. Cohen and Burr wrote that after the July 12, 1955 "Atoms for Peace" agreement Bergmann tried in 1955 and 1956 to obtain from the United States a ten-megawatt natural uranium and heavy water reactor and ten tons of heavy water; that his formal request was a letter of July 1956 to the Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis L. Strauss; that in September the Commission replied that it could be done only under a new power agreement with stricter safeguards because of "plutonium production capabilities"; and that Israel dropped the probe. They wrote that Bergmann pressed the Israeli government from 1955 for twenty tons of heavy water, wrote in August 1956 to his friend Gunnar Randers, director of the Norwegian Institute for Atomic Energy, asking for ten tons, and that Israel and Norway exchanged documents on the sale on February 25, 1959.³ Hersh wrote that in mid-September 1956 Peres and Bergmann went to Paris to ask for a reactor, and that on September 17 they dined with Francis Perrin and Pierre Guillaumat at the home of the Israeli ambassador Jacob Tzur; Bertrand Goldschmidt told Hersh that the decision to help was taken in those mid-September meetings.⁴

Peres, the commission and the bypass

Cohen and Burr wrote that Peres "decided to compartmentalize and bypass Bergmann and the IAEC almost entirely" in the Dimona negotiations with France; that in February 1958 all seven members of the commission except Bergmann resigned, in an episode "obscure" but possibly a protest against the exclusion; that there was a time when Bergmann was not allowed to visit the site; and that Bergmann was "known among Israelis as being loose on secrecy."³ Hersh wrote that the six other members had left by the mid-1950s, that scholars and American files had cited the departures as evidence of disagreement over Bergmann's plans "for the most part" wrongly, and that the members moved to the Weizmann Institute's physics department because ministers hostile to nuclear development, Levi Eshkol and Pinhas Lavon, refused to allocate research funds, leaving Bergmann "chairman and sole member" of a commission with no commissioners.⁵ Hersh cited the diary of Moshe Sharett, which records Sharett writing Bergmann off as "a chemist sunk in research and teaching with no ability to oversee the 'problem,'" whose lack of administrative skills would "limit and disrupt the horizons of the 'Enterprise.'"⁶

On April 15, 1958 Bergmann met the American embassy's second secretary Lewis Townsend in Tel Aviv. He said that the French foreign minister "did not know what he was talking about" in saying that France supplied Israel's uranium, acknowledged an exchange agreement with France limited to unpublished reports and students, and said that a decision to build a power reactor "had already been taken" and that an "experimental nuclear reactor" was contemplated within two or two and a half years. The post-mortem on the National Intelligence Estimate of December 1960 listed that remark among the hints the American intelligence community had missed; Cohen and Burr wrote that Bergmann made no mention of the secret French agreement signed in Paris in October 1957 and that it was unclear how much he knew.³ In November 1960 the University of Michigan nuclear engineer Henry Gomberg, a guest of the commission, reported that in his last meeting with Bergmann, pressed about unnamed activities, Bergmann acknowledged that the Beersheba facility was to have been announced later in 1961 but that Ben-Gurion would make an announcement in about three weeks; the debriefing memorandum notes that a "personal friend of Ben-Gurion" who told Gomberg of the coming announcement "probably" meant Bergmann.³

A memorandum of February 13, 1963 by the embassy's science attache Robert Webber, based on conversations between the Atomic Energy Commission official Abraham Friedman and members and staff of the Israeli commission including Bergmann, was summarized by the National Security Archive editors with the observation that the commission was "largely excluded from the Dimona project," so that much of the report concerned the commission's own plans for power reactors.⁷

Rafi, resignation and Princeton

Hersh wrote that Bergmann was a founding member of Rafi in 1965 and that "Ben-Gurion was quoting Bergmann all the time," according to an Israeli, about the dangers of not producing a nuclear arsenal.⁸ By the spring of 1966, he wrote, Bergmann resigned under pressure from the commission and his two defense science posts; a Defense Ministry official came to his apartment within the hour to retrieve his government car; Eshkol moved responsibility for the commission to the prime minister's staff and became its chairman; and Bergmann gave an interview to the newspaper Maariv, of which the New York Times reported that he spoke of the Eshkol government's lack of funds for research and "the risk of dependence on foreign sources." In that interview Bergmann said: "It's very important to understand that by developing atomic energy for peaceful uses, you reach the nuclear option. There are no two atomic energies."⁸⁹

Hersh wrote that in the fall of 1966 Strauss used his influence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey to obtain for Bergmann a two-month visiting fellowship, although the institute rarely took chemists; that the institute's new director Carl Kaysen recalled that Strauss "had nudged me about Bergmann" and that Bergmann "was working on [the Israeli nuclear] weapons program. He was very relaxed about it"; and that neither Strauss's biographer nor his son knew the two had met.¹⁰ In 1968, Hersh wrote, Bergmann spoke at the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg on "the move toward international collaboration," saying of Israel and South Africa that "neither of us has neighbors to whom we can speak."¹¹

After his death

Hersh wrote that Peres eulogized Bergmann in a 1979 book as one of the seven founders of the State of Israel, reporting that Weizmann saw in him "a future candidate for the presidency," without mentioning nuclear weapons; that Matti Golan's 1982 biography of Peres does not cite him and Michael Bar-Zohar's biography of Ben-Gurion does not mention him in its English edition; and that Mark said without Bergmann "there would have been no Israeli bomb": "He was in charge of every kind of nuclear activity in Israel."¹² Mark, the "sole known survivor" of the Berlin and Brooklyn circle, told Hersh that Bergmann "was anxious, rightly so, that there shouldn't be too much talk. It was super-secret, just like the Manhattan Project."¹²

Footnotes

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1. "Bergmann, Ernst David," Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008 (Encyclopedia.com). http://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/bergmann-ernst-david ↩︎

2. Hersh, Seymour M., The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, chapter 2, "The Scientist," pp. 19-27. Full text read at https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option ↩︎

3. Cohen, Avner, and William Burr, "The Eisenhower Administration and the Discovery of Dimona: March 1958-January 1961," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 510, April 15, 2015, introduction and notes 9 to 11, documents 1A-B (embassy despatch 652, April 16, 1958), 6A-C (Gomberg). https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb510/ ↩︎

4. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 3, "The French Connection," pp. 38-40. ↩︎

5. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 6, "Going Public," p. 78. ↩︎

6. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 3, pp. 33-34, citing Sharett's personal diaries, then unpublished in full in English. ↩︎

7. Burr, William, and Avner Cohen, eds., "The Battle of the Letters, 1963: John F. Kennedy, David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, and the U.S. Inspections of Dimona," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 671, May 2, 2019, document 07 (U.S. Embassy Israel Airgram A-517, February 13, 1963). https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2019-05-02/battle-letters-1963-john-f-kennedy-david-ben-gurion-levi-eshkol-us-inspections-dimona ↩︎

8. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 10, "The Samson Option," pp. 139-142. ↩︎

9. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 2, p. 26 (the 1966 interview). ↩︎

10. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 7, "Dual Loyalty," pp. 85-86 (the Princeton appointment and Kaysen's account). ↩︎

11. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 19, "The Carter Malaise," p. 264 (the Johannesburg speech of 1968). ↩︎

12. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 2, pp. 26-27; chapter 3, pp. 44-45. ↩︎