'Hitler's A-Bomb' ?

News agency Reuters is reporting the imminent publication of 'Hitler's Bomb' by Rainer Karlsch, due from German publisher DVA on March 14th.

Advance publicity has caused controversy in the German Press. According to the book, German scientists tested 'nuclear bombs' in 1944/45 on a remote Baltic island and in Central Germany under the supervision of the SS. It further claims that an operational reactor was situated close to Berlin and that 'the Third Reich was on the verge of winning the race to deploy the first nuclear weapon'.

Although other historians have been quick to cast doubt on the story, DVA claims that the book is based on reports, diaries, construction plans, aerial photos, personal testimonies and radiation measurements.

We shall see......

 

I doubt its authenticity because everything i have read on the subject makes out that Heisenberg, the german scientist in charge and a theoritical physicists, had all his calculations wrong and predicted that more uranium-235 would be needed than could be found. When in actual fact it was also a few kilos. When captured he was taken to Farm Hall near cambridge and he and his fellow scietist de-briefed and left to discuss what they knew. These tapes revealed a lot to the allies about the extent of german research and failure to develop the bomb. The transcript for the tapes can be seen here:

http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p11a.htm

 

It does rather smack of yet another revisionist author/publisher trying to drum up sales....

 

Probably martin. Revisionism is all well and good if based in fact. I consider myself a revisionist but to juct ignore certain facts to me is just stupid.

 

Saw a document on this some 6 months ago on this and we discussed the matter here as well.

At least Speer was given the answer ca 1943 that the atomic weapon would not be ready within a year and projects that could be ready within that time period were given first priority , so the atomic bomb project did not get money ( the V weapon did get) then.

It seems that the creation of the A weapon was not possible simply because it did not get resources and was not financed.

 

I thought that the German heavy water plant in Vemork that the Norwegian commandos destroyed set the Germans plan for an atomic bomb program long enough for no reactor to be online.

 

There's a nice article at luft '46 on German atomic weapon design ... German Atomic Bomb

 

Interesting article Drache. At one point it states that the German bomb needed 551kg of Uranium for its design and was wondering how that would compare to the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A book I had read some time ago, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes has it listed as needing 42kg of U-235 in order to make the Hiroshima bomb work.

 

I read the same book Bill, very good it was too. The argument goes that Heisenberg (head pysicist of German A-bomb research)possibly sabotaged the attempts for the making of the bomb. Possibly under the guidance of Niels Bohr. The commando raid on the Norwegion 'heavy water' plant didn't help thier cause either. But Hitler finaly pulled the plug on the project for economic reasons more than anything.

 

As I read a review of this book in one of the US papers today I got the impression that the author is trying to make a case that the bomb that Germany tested late in the war was more akin to what we today would call a "dirty bomb" and not a full blown atomic weapon along the lines of the Hiroshima or Nagasaki weapons. Given my interest in this subject this book will definatley have to be acquired and bumped up to the top of the stack if for any reason to see what the author is really attempting to claim. Also, Stevie, if you do not already have the book in your library you may want to take a look at Rhodes follow up book entitled "Dark Sun, The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb". It not only details the creation of the Hydrogen bombs but it also delves deeply into the Soviet atomic bomb project and its corresponding foreign intelligence gathering effort around the atomic bomb projects.

 

I think this whole subject is rather sensationalist. In the 1940s there was only one nation in the whole world that could develop, build and use an atomic weapon: the United States of America.

Germany did not have the indstrial infraestructure, nor the economic power neither the most important factor of all: the brains, to develop an atomic weapon.

The world can thank the idiocy of Nazi ideology and its insistance on the cultural suicide of Germany: all the country's best physicists were in exhile, only Heisenberg remained. Fermi (who fled from Italy because his wife was Jewish), Oppenheimer, Einstein, Szilárd, Teller and Wigner, all in and working for the US.

10 Jewish-German scientistists were awarded the Nobel Price from 1905 to 1933. All their knowledge and capacity was deprived from Germany thanks to the nazis, as well as the talent of many, many others.

Without the factories, the money and the knowledge there was not a single posibility of the Germans developing an A-bomb… their project was still in nappies, compared to the US' one.

 

With everything that I have read so far, the only logical conclusion I can arrive at is to agree with you Fried. That being said however, I will still be reading this book in order to learn the arguments it will try to make. This way I can better prepare myself to refute the arguements based on fact. For as Sun-Tzu said "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

 

Before we give all the A-Bomb credit to America, perhaps someone more familar than I with the 'Tube Alloys' project would comment.

Quoting from Roy Jenkins' "Churchill: A Biography", p. 691 in my edition:
"... After lunch [at Hyde Park NY] on the second day [probably 20 June 1942] they [Churchill and Roosevelt] settled the broad lines of the arrangements for Tube Alloys, as the atomic bomb project was then codenamed in Britain. On the basis of pooling all information, working together on equal terms and sharing the results, it was decided that, for reasons of convenience and security, future developments (rechristened the Manhattan Project) should be in the United States, although up to that point at least as much progress had been made in Britain as in America. At the making of this momentous but sensible arrangement - there was, it should not be forgotten, the fear that the Germans might get there [Britain] first ..."

 

Yea I agree, lately there has been a lot of these books that are trying to make the Nazis seem more like they are in 'return to castle wolfenschtein' than in real life

 

the A-bomb Tests took place in Turingian forest
Mussolini was one of the men that witnessed it.
he was interrogated by Italian partizans
sobe geiger test were taken after the war and it was confirmed

 

In a way interesting article....

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Drawing uncovered of 'Nazi nuke'

But since the core of the bomb is called Plutonium....

94 Plutonium

Name Plutonium was first revealed in 1948 so the pic is a fake. The Germans could not have used the term during WW2 or any plan describing a nazi A bomb, I think.

 

One would suspect that given the type of society the Third Reich was, that scientists who had worked in the Third Reich might suspect other countries of using some of the tricks employed by the Third Reich too, thus if people suspected they were being bugged they might tell lies to mislead.

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

 

What would be the point in lying ?
The war for Germany was over, lying about the state of German research into atom bombs would gain them nothing.

 

Thanks. I was going to mention that. And most German scientists were singing like birds and trying to cut themselves some deals. But felt like it would not fit his veiw LOL

 

If one reads the 200-odd pages of the 1992 declassified Farm Hall transcripts, there is the moment when Werner Heisenberg and the nine other German nuclear scientists being held at a country house in England hear that an Allied Atomic bomb has devastated the city of Hiroshima.

The Allies' atomic weapon, according to the BBC Home Service announcer; has delivered "as much explosive power as 2,000 of our great ten-toners." Hidden microphones were clandestinely transmitting the voices of the German "guests" to a nearby listening room at Farm Hall, and so we have in the reports a record of their astonished reaction. Heisenberg is heard to "snort" and then responds by flatly rejecting the possibility that the bomb could have been a fission weapon. "Some dilettante in America who knows very little about it has bluffed them," he says. "I don't believe that it has anything to do with uranium."

Even more informative, from any historian’s point of view, are the intense technical discussions that consumed the subsequent hours and days as the captive scientists tried to puzzle out how their Allied counterparts could have managed to do what they had concluded was beyond reach. Of particular interest, is Heisenberg's informal estimate of the amount of uranium required for a bomb, the critical mass. Throughout the war Heisenberg continued to believe that many tons of the rare isotope uranium-235, or of plutonium (an impossible quantity for any country to obtain in his estimate) would be needed for a bomb, rather than the tens of kilograms actually required.

"I consider it perfectly possible that they [the Allies] have about ten tons of enriched uranium," Heisenberg says, "but not that they can have ten tons of pure U-235." (the separated isotope) This faulty estimate, apparently made early in the war and reiterated at Farm Hall, was an error of far-reaching consequence. With an exaggerated notion of the task, the Germans ruled out the possibility that a bomb could be built during the war and instead focused on reactors, which could also be used to generate plutonium for an eventual bomb. A further effect of the mistake was to encourage a false sense of security, which deprived the German project of the kind of urgency that drove the Allies.

What makes the transcripts of the Farm Hall tape recordings so interesting is that the scientists clearly had no idea they were being recorded.

In fact, about a week after they arrived, one of the number, Kurt Diebner, said to Heisenberg: "I wonder whether there are microphones installed here?"

Heisenberg is heard to laugh: "Microphones? Oh no, they're not as cute as all that. I don't think they know the real Gestapo methods; they're a bit old-fashioned in that respect."

BBC NEWS | UK | England | Cambridgeshire | Hitler's scientists and the atom bomb

And here is some more fascinating data:

John Amacher

And here is an interesting letter written to Heisenberg by Bohr, but never sent perhaps to keep Heisenberg from embarrassment.

Dear Heisenberg;

"I have seen a book, "Stærkere end tusind sole" ["Brighter than a thousand suns"] by Robert Jungk, recently published in Danish, and I think that I owe it to you to tell you that I am greatly amazed to see how much your memory has deceived you in your letter to the author of the book, excerpts of which are printed in the Danish edition.

"Personally, I remember every word of our conversations, which took place on a background of extreme sorrow and tension for us here in Denmark. In particular, it made a strong impression both on Margrethe and me, and on everyone at the Institute that the two of you spoke to, that you and Weizsäcker expressed your definite conviction that Germany would win and that it was therefore quite foolish for us to maintain the hope of a different outcome of the war and to be reticent as regards all German offers of cooperation. I also remember quite clearly our conversation in my room at the Institute, where in vague terms you spoke in a manner that could only give me the firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons and that you said that there was no need to talk about details since you were completely familiar with them and had spent the past two years working more or less exclusively on such preparations. I listened to this without speaking since [a] great matter for mankind was at issue in which, despite our personal friendship, we had to be regarded as representatives of two sides engaged in mortal combat. That my silence and gravity, as you write in the letter, could be taken as an expression of shock at your reports that it was possible to make an atomic bomb is a quite peculiar misunderstanding, which must be due to the great tension in your own mind. From the day three years earlier when I realized that slow neutrons could only cause fission in Uranium 235 and not 238, it was of course obvious to me that a bomb with certain effect could be produced by separating the uraniums. In June 1939 I had even given a public lecture in Birmingham about uranium fission, where I talked about the effects of such a bomb but of course added that the technical preparations would be so large that one did not know how soon they could be overcome.

"If anything in my behaviour could be interpreted as shock, it did not derive from such reports but rather from the news, as I had to understand it, that Germany was participating vigorously in a race to be the first with atomic weapons.

"Besides, at the time I knew nothing about how far one had already come in England and America, which I learned only the following year when I was able to go to England after being informed that the German occupation force in Denmark had made preparations for my arrest. All this is of course just a rendition of what I remember clearly from our conversations, which subsequently were naturally the subject of thorough discussions at the Institute and with other trusted friends in Denmark. It is quite another matter that, at that time and ever since, I have always had the definite impression that you and Weizsäcker had arranged the symposium at the German Institute, in which I did not take part myself as a matter of principle, and the visit to us in order to assure yourselves that we suffered no harm and to try in every way to help us in our dangerous situation.

"This letter is essentially just between the two of us, but because of the stir the book has already caused in Danish newspapers, I have thought it appropriate to relate the contents of the letter in confidence to the head of the Danish Foreign Office and to Ambassador Duckwitz.

(me again) As to Heisenberg, why hadn't pure intellectual curiosity led him to investigate the properties of uranium-235 with fast neutrons? He could have made a small amount using the cyclotrons available in both Paris and Copenhagen. But he never asked that these properties be measured. The best proof of his lack of interest came at the end of the war.
When the news of the Hiroshima atomic bomb was broadcast, these scientists could not believe it. When they finally recognized that it was real, they asked Heisenberg how it could have been done. His first attempt at explanation was totally wrong!

He hypothesized something like a nuclear reactor, with the neutrons slowed by many collisions with a moderator.That he was capable of doing the work was shown a week later when, in another discussion with his colleagues, he corrected himself and presented a theory similar to that worked out by Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch in 1940. He estimated the necessary amount of uranium-235 at about 20 kg, which is nearly exact. These recorded discussions prove that Heisenberg, the scientific leader of the German effort, did not work on a bomb, but not for ethical or moral reasons.

He simply considered it too difficult and expensive. Farm Hall transcript is the real proof that the Heisenberg group had not worked on an atomic bomb. Around 1990/91 several fellows of the Royal Society urged publication. They convinced the Lord Chancellor, and so the transcripts are now in the public domain. (See the article, "Bomb Apologetics: Farm Hall, August 1945," by Jeremy Bernstein and David Cassidy in Physics Today, August 1995, page 32.)

When Bohr came to Los Alamos at the end of 1943, he told Oppenheimer that Heisenberg had talked to him about an atomic bomb. Bohr reproduced from memory a rough drawing that Heisenberg had shown him. The drawing was given to Edward Teller, and it was immediately recognized it as a nuclear reactor with many control rods.

Heisenberg himself wrote in 1965; "It was from September 1941 that we saw an open road ahead of us, leading to the atomic bomb." How is this to be reconciled with Heisenberg's statement at Farm Hall that he did not work on the bomb, but only on the "engine"--that is, a reactor?

The explanation is that the Germans rejected the separation of uranium isotopes as too difficult. They saw the fissionability of plutonium as the key to the entire project. Once you had a chain reaction you could make plutonium, and once you had plutonium, you could make a bomb. However, if they had achieved the reactor, they would have found that the road from there to a bomb was still full of obstacles.

And the expenditures in neither finances nor manpower was ever devoted toward an atomic bomb research. (Physics Today Online - July 2000 Volume 53, No. 7)