Unless you're a World War II history buff or an expert on the lineage of modern logic and philosophy, you might not have even noticed that Kurt Gödel appears briefly in "Oppenheimer." A famous logician, Gödel (James Urbaniak) features in the scene where Oppenheimer consults Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) in the woods about the dangers of an atomic detonation.
Einstein remarks that his friend Gödel, who was forced to flee Nazi occupation in Austria, is still terrified that German spies will try to poison or assassinate him in America. This was true of the real Gödel as well. To try to assuage his fear and paranoia, and because of a series of digestive problems, he had his wife Adele prepare or taste most of his meals. After she was hospitalized from a stroke in the late 1970s, however, she was unable to fulfill these duties. As a result, Gödel effectively starved himself, still terrified of being poisoned and dealing with a number of mental and physical health problems. He died from this self-starvation and malnutrition in 1978, with his wife ultimately outliving him.
While Gödel's grim story would have been a bit of a tangent in "Oppenheimer," it shows just how powerful the Nazi machine of fear and violence was. Even when he was safe on the other side of the world and decades after the death of Adolf Hitler, the esteemed logician couldn't escape the scars that the Nazi regime had inflicted on him.
