176 • EPSILON
massy. Eppler was arrested and survived the war to write his
memoirs,Operation Condor, in 1977.EPSILON.Code name for the detention in July 1945 of 10 captured
German physicists suspected of having participated in the develop-
ment of a Nazi atomic bomb. The scientists were flown to Farm Hall,
where they were interrogated for six months and their rooms were
wired for sound. Among the distinguished figures studied were Pro-
fessor Otto Hahn, Professor Werner Heisenberg, and Dr. Carl von
Weizsacker. The operation was supervised by aSecret Intelligence
Serviceofficer,Eric Welsh, and two subordinates, Captain Brodie
and Major Rittner, who monitored the conversations, translated the
transcripts, and prepared summaries for circulation. In 1992 the tran-
scripts of the recordings, thought to have been lost many years ear-
lier, were declassified and released, demonstrating that the news of
the attack on Hiroshima took the German group entirely by surprise
and that the Nazis had not been close to achieving nuclear fission.
The transcripts also proved that the common assertion that German
scientists would never have consented to work on a Nazi bomb was
entirely fallacious.
ERIKSON, VERA.A German spy before and during World War II,
Vera Erikson was arrested at Portgordon in Banffshire, Scotland, in
September 1940 withKarl Dru ̈cke, having been landed off the
beach by an amphibious aircraft. She was interrogated atCamp 020
and remained in custody at ‘‘E’’ Wing of Holloway Prison until the
end of the war, when she was released. Under interrogation Erickson
claimed to have lived in London before the war with Sonia, the
Countess of Chateau-Thierry, at Dorset House, when she was known
as Vera de Cottani-Chalbur, and to have worked as a spy for the So-
viets.
ERNST, KARL GUSTAV.When the German kaiser came to London
in May 1910 for the funeral of King Edward VII, a member of his
entourage, Captain von Rebrur-Paschwitz, was followed bySpecial
Branchdetectives late one evening to a barber’s shop in the Caledo-
nian Road where he remained for more than an hour. The German
owner, Karl Gustav Ernst, was placed under surveillance and when