Decompositions of finitely generated nilpotent groups of class 2

In this paper we prove that rational indecomposability is a genus property for finitely generated torsion-free nilpotent groups of class 2. We use this result to determine the genus of finitely generated torsion-free nilpotent groups of class 2 which decompose as a direct product of rationally indecomposable groups. Received: 3 November 2005