German Nuclear Bomb

Were you around when one of the authors joined the forum to hawk his "historical" book? That was a fun thread...

EDIT: For those interested: http://www.ww2f.com/topic/41770-grey-wolf-the-escape-of-adolf-hitler/?hl=%2Bgrey+%2Bwolf

 

There is hard evidence for Martin Bormann escaping and surviving. His remains weren't discovered until 30 years later, and they went several times where Axman described where his remains were and never found them. His skull had new dental work from his German records, post 1940s dental technology, and red clay in his remains local to South America, not Europe.

 

Telegram from Fuehrerbunker at 15:15 on May 1, 1945:

GRAND ADMIRAL DOENITZ --
Most secret -- urgent -- officer only
The Fuehrer died yesterday at 15:30 hours. Testament of April 29th appoints you as Reich President, Reich Minister Dr. Goebbels as Reich Chancellor, Reichsleiter Bormann as Party Minister, Reich Minister Seyss-Inquart as Foreign Minister. By order of the Fuehrer, the Testament has been sent out of Berlin to you, to Field-Marshal Schoerner, and for preservation and publication. Reichsleiter Bormann intends to go to you today and to inform you of the situation. Time and form of announcement to the Press and to the troops is left to you. Confirm receipt.
-- GOEBBELS.

A few hours after sending this telegram, Goebbels poisoned his six children with cyanide capsules. At 20:30 he and his wife emerged from the Fuehrerbunker into the chancellery garden where they were shot, at their own request, by an SS orderly.

At the same time, in the bunker of the New Chancellery, a miscellaneous group of women, soldiers, party officials, and hangers-on gathered in preparation for a mass escape. Nominally under the command of Martin Bormann, they planned to follow tunnels from the chancellery to the subway line, and then follow the subway line north, under the Friedrichstrasse, to the Friedrichstrasse station a few hundred yards south of the river Spree. At that point they would surface, link up with what was left of Brigadefuehrer Mohnke's battle group, and attempt to force their way across the Weidendammer Bridge. Then they would proceed north-west, through the Russian lines, and save themselves as best they could.

At 23:00 hours the mass escape began. Moving in small groups, they proceeded underground, as planned, to the Friedrichstrasse station. Here they emerged to find the ruins of Berlin in flames, and Russian shells bursting everywhere around them. The first group managed to cross the river Spree by an iron footbridge that ran parallel to the Weidendammer Bridge. The remaining groups likewise emerged at the Friedrichstrasse Station, but there became confused and disoriented. They made their way north along the Friedrichstrasse to the Weidendammer Bridge, where they found their way blocked, at the bridge's north end, by an anti-tank barrier and heavy Russian fire.

They next withdrew to the south end of the bridge, where they were soon joined by a few German tanks. Gathering about the tanks, they again pressed forward. Bormann, Artur Axmann (head of the Hitler Youth), Ludwig Stumpfegger (Hitler's surgeon), and others followed the lead tanks as far as the Ziegelstrasse. There a panzerfaust struck the lead tank. The violent explosion stunned Bormann and Stumpfegger, and wounded Axmann. All retreated to the Weidendammer Bridge.

On this all witnesses involved in the escape agree.

Now it was every man for himself. Bormann, Stumpfegger, Axmann, and others followed the tracks of the surface railway to the Lehrter station. There Bormann and Stumpfegger decided to follow the Invalidienstrasse east. Axmann elected to go west, but encountered a Russian patrol and returned on the path Bormann and Stumpfegger had taken. He soon found them. Behind the bridge, where the Invalidienstrasse crosses the railroad tracks, they lay on their backs, the moonlight on their faces. Both were dead. Axmann could see no signs of an explosion, and assumed that they had been shot in the back. He continued on his way, escaping from Berlin and spending the next six months hiding out with the Hitler Youth in the Bavarian Alps, where he was eventually captured.

The above paragraph is a summary of what was stated by Axmann.

In the early days of May 1945 Berlin Postal Employees were forced to bury two bodies by the Soviets. In 1963, a retired postal worker named Albert Krumnow told police Krumnow's colleague Wagenpfohl found an SS doctor's paybook on the second body identifying him as Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger. They also found Bormann's pocket diary in the leather SS overcoat of one of the bodies "the small stocky" one. The spot (pointed out by one of the Postal employees) where the bodies had lain, before being moved to the burial site, was the spot where Axmann had testified to having last seen them (independent corroboration). He gave the paybook to his boss, postal chief Berndt, who turned it over to the Soviets. They in turn destroyed it. He wrote to Stumpfegger's wife on 14 August 1945 and told her that her husband's body was "... interred with the bodies of several other dead soldiers in the grounds of the Alpendorf in Berlin NW 40, Invalidenstrasse 63."

Excavations on 20–21 July 1965 at the site specified by Axmann and Krumnow failed to locate the bodies. However, on 7 December 1972, construction workers uncovered human remains near Lehrter station in West Berlin just 12 m (39 ft) from the spot where Krumnow claimed he had buried them. Upon autopsy, fragments of glass found in the jawbones of both skeletons led to the conclusion that they had committed suicide by biting cyanide capsules to avoid capture.

After extensive forensic examination (including facial reconstruction was undertaken in early 1973 on both skulls to confirm the identities of the bodies of Stumpfegger and Bormann), using the dental records of Bormann's dentist (Prof. Hugo Blaschke, who was also Hitler's dentist) the shorter of the two skeletons was identified as that of Martin Bormann, and West German authorities officially declared him dead. The forensic identification was validated by Dr. Reidar F. Sognnaes, a celebrated U.S. expert in such matters. (Reidar F. Sognnaes, "Dental Evidence in the Postmortem Identification of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and Martin Bormann", in Legal Medicine Annual, 1976.) This new evidence caused Hugh Trveor-Roper to write in the 1978 edition of The Last Days of Hitler that "...in view of new evidence which has recently been found, I believe that it [the question of Bormann's death] can now be closed."

In 1998 a DNA examination was conducted by Professor Wolfgang Eisenmenger, using blood from Bormann’s children Eisenmenger was able to conclude that the skeleton was Martin Bormann. He also determined the cause of death to be self inflicted cyanide poisoning.





It is hard to understand why it would be necessary to disinter Borrman's body from Paraguay, ship it surreptitiously into the British sector of Cold War West Berlin, in the Shadow of the Soviet sector, bury it, and then allow it to be "discovered". In the exact spot next to Ludwig Stumpfegger. Why this facade is necessary is beyond me.

Or, you know, just maybe it was there buried in the detritus of the War all along. Occam's razor...

I don't find claims of "post-1940's dental technology" and "red clay from South America" particularly convincing. It may be just me, but I don't find claims of rural Paraguayan dentistry of early 1950 exceeding German dentistry of mid 40's. Nor do I see first-hand references to the skull being "encased" in red clay (as purported in various internet sites) dating from the discovery; rather from the DNA tests, made in 1998.... Given the body was retrieved in 1972, that's 16 years to explain where the skull has been.

But let's re-examine what happened in 1973;

Facial reconstruction, as it is done.
The skull was not dug up "encased" in red clay; it had flecks of red clay after the facial reconstruction clay.


The body found in Berlin that was convincingly, and unequivocally, DNA:ed as Bormann and was that of a man in his mid 40's!! Bormann was 45 in 1945 !! So if he did make it out of Berlin and died -- then he died real soon thereafter, or was kidnapped by time-travelling aliens, and forced to suicide by cyanide pill. Or kidnapped, cloned, and the clone killed by cyanide, by time travelling aliens....

 

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...and on ww2talk, AND on AHF...

I/We gave him an easier ride than I could have, given some of the stuff I found out about in the course of that episode.

 

Here's a photo...



Must be true...

 

To be fair - although the one German attempt to start a controlled atomic reactor was less than "controlled"...heavy water on its own did not make the effective moderator they thought...and ther Allies didn't go down that path at all...

A year after the end of the war, the Canadians started and successfully ran a heavy water-moderated reactor at Chalk River, and this "third way" of building/starting/moderating a nuclear reaction was at the heart of the Canadian nuclear industry in form of the Zeep reactor for several decades.

But it was NEVER going to work the way the Germans wanted it to work; lumps of uranium on chains lowered into a hole in the ground filled with heavy water and absolutely NO other form of moderation/emergency cooling was an accident waiting to happen. And it did.

However - the Germans DID managed to enrich a few kilos of uranium in laboratory conditions, where it could be enriched and separated a few atoms at a time.


LWD...yep, flour WILL explode - but only under pressure. Even talcum powder will. As long as the top is on said can

 

Indeed. I've read that Speer statement before.

Oh, now that's interesting. I'm familiar with the principle of explosive suspensions, but never heard of it being used as a weapon. I think that very well may have been what was detonated at Ohrdruf.

Yes, there's no way they could have done it, just on organizational principles. The drive simply wasn't there. People often don't realize the scale of the Manhattan Project. It employed over 130,000 people and cost $2B ($27B in today's dollars), When Niels Bohr visited Los Alamos, he said, "I told you it couldn't be done without turning the whole country into a factory. I see you have done just that."

 

It was a study led by a college doctor about the clay in the remains and the dental work.

 

Indeed. That has been the problem, separating the signal from all the noise. People are either quick to assure me that the Nazis didn't develop a nuclear weapon, which I know, or to proclaim that they did, but my interest is what the latter group base those claims on. I have gotten some good information here and from leads developed from here, so thank you all who replied. I believe my character is ready to proceed to Berlin. Now to see if I can scrounge up some WW2 street maps of the city....

 

My impression was that it could explode even without being confined the confinement just makes it more likely. That was the issue with developing hyperbaric or fuel air explosives from what I've read. Getting them to explode reliably without confinement. Grain elevators and coal mines certainly demonstrated the potential but as you point out are confined environments.

I have heard some suggest that the Germans were considering building a "dirty bomb", i.e. an conventional bomb with a radioactive component. I haven't seen enough sources to find it convincing but it's more likely that they could have got that to work than a real atomic device.

 

Which study, by whom, dated when?

 

That sir, is misleading; for dust-explosions, a near-empty container is actually more dangerous, than a full one; you need the particles suspended in air..

 

No, your bloody OpanaPoint.

 

Indeed one of the big reasons FAE/hyperbarics are so powerful is that they don't need to include their own oxygen. A substantial portion of the weight of conventional explosives is in chemicals that provide oxygen for the reaction. If you don't need to supply the oxygen you have more volume/weight for the rest.

 

Here's a thing though - did the Germans even know about the issue??? Yes, I'm quite sure Heisenberg et al knew about the fate of Marie Curie etc...but the actual threat from enriched material? Beyond prolonged exposure in the lab, that is. The Manhattan scientists knew of SOME of the risks, but didn't realise about the full threat from directly-propagated gamma rays, and fallout, until TRINITY. I'm not sure a "dirty bomb" on the 1940s sense would have made much sense except as some form of wide-area denial weapon..as long as those it was used ON realised what had happened, or were told and believed it