The Germans succeeded in getting a nuclear reactor to work

There is no evidence this is true, but it was a section of a tabloid style TV program concerning Mussolini's secret envoy to Hitler or something. This is also highly suspect, as the old gentleman who made the accusation wasn't in Germany at the time, and it is highly unlikely that the "secret wonder weapon" would be shared with a now dethroned Mussolini. The soil testing done is not verified, that was supposed to show an extremely high concentration of radiation in that area, it doesn't.

Mussolini was by then in that rump section of northern Italy, and unlikely to be given much true information in any event.

 

I was watching a documentary on german nuclear testing mussolini sent a reporter to find out about the weapones.look it up it true it was a test they set it up it was on purpose.

 

I watched it as well, hoping to see something of actual interest. It was all fiction, no matter how it was "presented" (as a documentary). Or at least so vague as to be unsupportable. The idea of a "dirty bomb" has been posited before, by many others, but what would the "dirty" isotope be? The one most commonly put forward is radium, which was known of. However clear into the thirties "radium" was still being sold on the open market (in very small quantities) as a "cure all" for everything from acne to hemeroids. It is VERY expensive in even small quantities.

Radium is very expensive to extract from uranium ores, in the mid-grade Czech ores (Nazi source), ninety tons of ore yield less than one ounce (28.43 grams) of radium and the complex job of extracting it is Very, VERY, expensive.

In nature, uranium atoms exist as U-238 (99.284%), U-235 (0.711%),and a very small amount of Ra-226, or radium (0.0058%). Radium is a rare very metal. Its compounds are found in all uranium ores; there is usually about 1 part of radium to 3 million parts of uranium in these ores. In luminous paints the ratio is about 1 part radioactive material per 40,000 parts paint.

Although some radium used today is obtained from carnotite from Colorado, the chief sources are carnotite from Congo (Kinshasa) and pitchblende from W Canada and Russia. Radium is present in all uranium minerals and is widely distributed in small amounts. Radium is usually obtained (with barium impurities) in residues from the production of uranium. It is recovered as the bromide by an involved chemical process. The small amount of the element present in any ore and the difficulty of extraction make it expensive.

In the thirties the extraction of pure radium was so expensive that one gram of pure radium was priced at between $50,000-$70,000. Radium does not occur free (ly) in nature but occurs in natural ores such as pitchblende as a disintegration product of radioactive decay of heavier elements, including uranium. (all emphasis mine)

See:

Ra-226 definition of Ra-226 in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

Now I’m pointing this out as radium (which does emit alpha, beta, and gamma rays), has been put forward as the "material" in a dirty bomb, but those persons then ignore that radium is a VERY SLOW killer, and a weapon that takes years to become a "death dealer" isn’t a good bet on which to spend Reichmarks, is it? Making an area "uninhabitable" isn’t a war winning strategy, but even though Hitler wasn’t know for his rational thought, even he wouldn’t wish to pour money into something that killed in generations or so.

I wonder if this tale of massive soil radiation might somehow be tied to the accident in which Heisenberg's group did manage to construct what they called the "Uranium Machine" at Leipzig using giant hollow half-spheres of aluminum, bolted together surrounding powdered uranium oxide pellets (?) or uranium oxide plates (not weapons grade U-235) and Deuterium. Even though this has nothing to do with "a dirty bomb", only "powdered uranium"? It certainly "turned dirty" when it failed! It likely irradiated a pretty large area when it went "blooey" from the steam pressure!

That event produced fires which were extremely difficult to extinguish, but weren’t from an "atomic explosion". But even then, unlike true radioisotopes, which are byproducts of nuclear reactors or of industrial sized separation processes (which no-one in the Axis had), naturally occurring uranium doesn't even emit penetrating gamma rays that cause radiation poisoning. Instead, it slowly radiates weak alpha particles, which can't even penetrate skin.

Since the fellow wasn't even a scientist (a reporter?), how would he know if what he was told had any basis of fact or not? I got the impression that he was taking "secrets" to Mussolini to simply bolster Benito's moral and "keep him in the game" a bit longer. Hitler was not well known for telling anyone the truth or sharing any secrets with anyone either.

 

The Germans apparently understood even less about the harmful effects of radiation than did the Americans. In their experiments with various reactor designs they consistently failed to include any shielding which would protect the operators. In one case Heisenberg did wrap the containment vessel in industrial grade graphite, but this was to see if the carbon would reflect neutrons back into the pile and thus enhance the chain reaction. At least the Americans always included shielding and other safety measures to control and contain radiation contamination

The last test Heisenberg conducted on the B-8 reactor could have cost him and his staff their lives had it gone critical, because there was no shielding against the radiation effects. Deibner also was pretty careless about radiation danger from what I have read of his experiments. I find it unlikely that the Germans would have even thought about "dirty" bombs when they didn't even know enough to about radiation to protect themselves.

The Leipzig accident involving Heisenberg's research (I think it was the L-3 experiment that went wrong) occurred because of the use of powdered uranium oxide and heavy water. The water leaked into the pile and caused a chemical reaction which set the uranium oxide on fire. The resulting steam pressure caused an explosion which scattered burning uranium oxide over a large area. It was NOT an atomic explosion, but it did result in radiation contamination over a large area.

 

Nuclear power would have been swell but AC power was the least of Germany's problems during the war. (Even General of fighters Adolph Galland wondered why the allies never made a determined effort to knock out the German power grid. The allies thought that German power generation facilities were too dispursed and interconnected to hit effectively from the air. They were wrong.) Don't you think that the bottom line is, whoever developed an A-bomb first, and used it, would probably win the war?

The Manhatten Project proceeded with great speed during the war, mostly out of fears that the Germans were working on developing an A-bomb themselves. They were, but not only did they have a completely wrong approach to the problem (the process involving "heavy water" was no way to an atomic bomb, the Germans simply did not realize it then), the atomic bomb also had a very low priority on the Fuehrer's "secret weapons" agenda. (Perhaps the former Corporal's mind was unable to grasp the idea.)

After the war, American experts were sent to find any and all German research on constructing an atomic bomb. The result of their efforts was that the Americans decided the Germans were years, perhaps decades away from developing one (due to the reasons above).

It's my opinion that had the Germans developed an A-bomb in say late 1944, and used it against the Russians, Stalin would simply have retaliated against Germany with poison and nerve gas attacks. It would most likely not have made Stalin surrender no matter how it was employed (unless Stalin was killed in the initial nuclear strike).

 

You are partially correct.

The Germans actually did not have an Atomic bomb project, per se. Both the project headed by Heiisenberg under Speer, and the project headed by Kurt Diebner under the Army Ordnance Bureau, were aimed at building working "atomic engines", the term the Germans used for reactors. The Germans did know that it was theoretically possible to create plutonium in a reactor, but there was no point in worrying about that until they figured out how to achieve a self-sustaining, "chain reaction", which they never did.

The priority the German government bureaucracies placed on the atomic projects was low. Hitler could have ordered a higher priority, but never did, relying on Speer's and Goering's evaluations of how useful, militarily, the atomic projects were likely to be. In any case, once the theoretical work was done, the atomic projects could only be advanced, as happened in the US, by throwing massive amounts of resources and manpower at them. No one in Germany, not Heisenberg, Diebner, Speer or Goering was willing to take the risk of such a gamble, for had they done so, the German war effort would have suffered severely in other areas. Germany was simply not capable of simultaneously fighting the war and developing an atomic bomb. German physicists probably realized this, and this was a contributing factor in their discouraging expectations of a war-time atomic bomb amongst the Nazi leaders.

As for the German theoretical approach to developing the atomic bomb, there was nothing wrong with it as far as it went; using heavy water as a moderator for a reactor will work, it's just not as efficient as using ultrapure carbon in the form of graphite. German industry, at that point in time, could not mass produce carbon of the purity required. It would have been possible for the Germans to eventually mass produce ultrapure carbon, but the process would have taken some time, and heavy water was already available in quantity in Norway. In the US, the same choice had to be made; but the difference was that there was already an industrial source for ultrapure carbon which could be immediately exploited. Using heavy water as a moderator for their reactors did slow the Germans a bit since it made achieving a chain reaction a bit more difficult, but it in no way made an atomic bomb impossible or impractical.

 

There's the Ordruff' incident to do a search on .. some people say that nowadays radioactivity level there is thru Russian pollution but thats a very convenient explanation

Also there's a known written eyewitness report of a high Italian naval officer who in late 1944 was brought to a small island in the Ostsee (Rügen?) and watched a test explosion of the 'wunderwaffe' firsthand describing a huge bright flash and a mushroom cloud too .
What i understood of the whole thing is that germans werent able to use a centrifuge to get the enriched uranium the later bombs used , and instead made a mix with a foamy substance and fuels thus making a foul '' bomb .
I remember i read this info somewhere in an article about a captured german U boot that was taken by the british on its way too Japan in early 1945 carrying (japanese and german) scientists and a huge amount of golden containers with uranium oxide in there ..when it was unloaded in Britain it became a quite famous incident .Shure that story will ring a bell with many more readers here too.

 

The submarine U-234 was taken by the USN (not the RN), the uranium oxide in the cargo was U-238 not U-235, and was simply incorporated into the pipeline of the US project. The Japanese onboard committed suicide with seditives before the surrender, and the German scientists weren't nuclear physicists. Many of them did come to the US to work for us later, one of them was insturmental in the Republic F-105 Thunderchief as I recall.

I'll look up the names of all of the scientists if you like, but none were involved in the Nazi atomic project, those men were all incarcerated at Farm Hall in Great Britain.

 

Radiation contamination resulting in higher levels of radiation than is normal is NOT proof of an atomic explosion (i.e. an explosion caused by either the fission or fusion of atoms). There are many places around the world where such contamination exists due to activities involving the development of nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, or simply the transport and storage of radioactive materials.

It would be nice if you could supply some documentation of this event so we could decide the authenticity for ourselves.

If the Germans had a nuclear device in late 1944, I find it very unlikely they would explode it in a demonstration for an Italian naval officer. Since the Germans never did any uranium enrichment, and couldn't have produced any plutonium because they didn't have a functioning reactor, what did they use as fissionable material? My guess is that, if the Italian naval officer saw anything like what you describe, it was produced by a large chemical explosive charge (which will produce a mushroom cloud if large enough), perhaps enhanced with something like magnesium to produce the flash.

The Germans never attempted the enrichment of uranium because the enrichment methods were all very difficult, very slow, and involved sophisticated equipment which the Germans did not have and could not have built very quickly. Heisenberg realized very early that a functioning "atomic engine" (reactor) would produce quantities of plutonium which could be used as the "explosive" element of an atomic bomb. The road to the atomic bomb for the Germans lay therefore in building reactors. They never managed to produce a reactor which generated a sustained chain reaction.

The Americans, on the other hand, were able to attempt both routes; the enrichment, through several different processes, of uranium into a fissionable material, and the production of plutonium in "breeder" reactors. This was only possible because of overwhelming US industrial superiority and massive economic resources. Germany simply could not compete in either area.

The first bomb the US exploded, "Trinity", was a plutonium bomb, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was an enriched uranium bomb, the one on Nagasaki, another plutonium bomb. The uranium bomb did not need to be tested; the American physicists were sure it would work. The plutonium bomb, however, was different and used a completely different triggering method to achieve critical mass, that is why it was tested at the Trinity site.

 

A mushroom cloud results from any very large explosion, not just a nuclear one. Aside from that, without even a working reactor and without enrichment equipment the Germans could not have built a bomb to begin with. Nuclear weapons require about 98%+ enrichment to work (eg., virtually pure U234). This is why the US built such huge facilities at Oak Ridge to enrich uranium: They realised the need for a massive production effort just to get a small amount of material.
Having slightly enriched reactor fuel (2 to 5% as used today in commercial reactors) does nothing for you in making a bomb.

 

On April 16, 1945 she (U-234) left Norway and was en-route to Japan with extremely important cargo (drawings, a Me-262 jet fighter in crates and 560kg of uranium oxide, several high ranking German experts on various technologies and 2 Japanese officers).

See:

The Type XB boat U-234 - German U-boats of WWII - uboat.net

It surrendered to the USN, not the RN, and was taken to Provincetown MA. for unloading, not Great Britain. Among the civilian scientists aboard the "unterseeboot" U-234 was Dr. Heinz Schlicke, a radar, infrared, and countermeasures specialist who was the director of the Naval Test Fields in Kiel. His task was to aid the Japanese in developing and manufacturing electronic devices and instruments. Then two "men from Messerschmitt," August Bringewalde (Willi Messerschmitt's "right-hand man"), who was in charge of ME 262 production, and Franz Ruf, an industrial machinery specialist who designed machines and appliances to manufacture aircraft components. Schlicke, had worked on sound and electrical absorption materials for submarines, and infrared detectors and homing devices. After 1946 he continued these efforts at the U.S. Office of Naval Research and later in the private sector. Bringewald and Ruf also returned from Germany to America.

I think that Ruf assisted in assembling one of the ME 262s, which flew at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio in May 1945 with Watson's Whizzers, and he then became significant to the American effort to further develop American jet-powered aircraft. Bringewald became the project manager for the American Republic F-105 Thunderchief. Likewise, the cargo contained a disassembled HS-293 glider bomb which may have been indispensable to the American effort to develop guided missiles. But there were no, repeat NO nuclear physicists.

The fate of the U-234 submarine itself was rather inglorious. After dismantling its interior, and removal of all weapons, the hull was taken to a location forty miles east of , Massachusetts where on November 19th, 1947 she was struck by two torpedoes from the USS Greenfish (SS-351), and sank to the ocean floor six miles below. The story of the fate of the uranium oxide has never been clarified to everyone’s satisfaction. One opinion holds that it was used in American atomic research at Oak Ridge (which I believe) most likely finding its way to the Manhattan Project's Oak Ridge diffusion plant where it was converted to U-235 and included into one of the gun-type bombs which were not used. I say that because Little Boy, L-11 which dropped on Hiroshima was already completed.

There were five total gun-type uranium bombs made after all, the remaining four were dismantled and their uranium cores used in the combination material (uranium/plutonium) bombs produced after 1949; "it has been calculated that it would have yielded approximately 7.7 pounds (3.5 kg) of U-235 after processing, around 20% of what would have been required to arm a contemporary fission weapon". (Wolfgang W. E. Samuel (2004). American Raiders. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p. 115.)

There is another tale which contends that the mysterious cargo was sent to a warehouse in Brooklyn, or Staten Island, or a storage facility in Kansas and hidden from view forever (one has visions of the "Ark of the Covenant" being stored at the climax of Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark).

I personally believe that that little half ton of uranium oxide was just put in the "pipeline" and used in the Allies project. It was certainly of little import even compared to the other Nazi uranium which the ALSOS mission had discovered in Stuttgart (1100 tons) before the U-boat surrendered, since this too was shipped to Oak Ridge for inclusion with the millions of pounds of Canadian and Belgian Congo uranium already being processed.

But when observing that even the primary records themselves differ as to when the containers were unloaded, where they were sent, and even whether the containers held uranium oxide ore, or a truly fissile material (highly unlikely owing to the Nazis lack of diffusion or enrichment facilities), or simply a radium compound or cadmium alloy which would have required such heavily lead lined containers. With these contradictory, and sometimes highly suspect claims (one even claimed that the containers were lined with GOLD [yeah right] instead of LEAD! This is Heinrich’s favorite I think), the fate of the "radioactive" material remains generally uncertain, although transfer to Oak Ridge seems most likely, but certainly too late to have been processed into components for the atomic weapons used against Japan in August 1945. It would make a sort of "poetic" justice, but no matter how romantically attractive, the reality of the ability to "enrich" uranium oxide, and the time it took probably makes that possibility extremely unlikely.

The fissionable U-235 only occurs at an unbelievably low ratio in U-238, and the Nazis under Heisenberg did NOT have the gaseous diffusion or centrifuge plants necessary for massive production of U-235. They never even got a sustained, controlled reactor running in all the years of WW2, whereas Fermi had his version up and running one year after Pearl Harbor was attacked and "atomic research" was fully funded by the US. The Nazis spent nearly the same amount of funding on their V-2 project as America spent on the Manhattan Project (about $ 2 billion).

The Nazis weren't working toward a "bomb" nor any uranium "explosive device". Just as likely due to the strict and inflexible infa-structure of the German scientific community at the time as anything. The Nazis believed that when Werner Heisenberg told them that "an explosive device" could not be completed inside of ten or twenty years, they never even looked at or attempted to build one. Heisenberg overestimated the amount of fissionable material needed by a factor of at least ten (he thought tons, not kilos), and assumed that the production would be too costly and time consuming for any nation to pursue. Read the Farm Hall transcripts that were secretly recorded in 1945, and only released in 1992 , they pretty much expose just how far away from even trying to build a bomb that the Nazis were.

 

I've seen extensive discussions of these over on the axis history forum. They remain very unconvining.

 

Equally unconvincing is the idea that the German conversations on the Farmhill recordings were deliberate deceptions by the prisoners. And, that Allied intellegence teams searching for German nuclear material, test & production equipment, and the physicists missed the 'secret' development facility. Perhaps thats why these stories usually place the mystery site in modern Poland, where the facts could not be checked during the Cold War.

 

I would only ask why, if some secret development facility in Poland had been successful in making significant progress towards an atomic bomb, or if it had even just managed to get a reactor working, would the Germans keep wasting precious resources and man power on the failed Heisenberg and Diebner projects? Doesn't make any sense. The biggest argument against any German atomic bomb, either existing, or close to fruition, is that there was absolutely no evidence found post war of any German preparations to make use of an A-bomb. If Hitler had had an A-bomb or even been close to having one, he certainly would have been getting ready to use it, given the military situation of the Third Reich in 1944-45.

 

Heres a WI to contemplate: Heisenberg & crew miscalculate when building the fist test device.

"Herr Heisenberg, how far away should we place the control/observation bunker?"

"Oh, I should think 800 meters suffcient. We are only using thirty kilograms of radioactive material for the detonation."

Heres another question. If a device were tested at the suposed Polish or Baltic sites, what would the EMP do to radio & telephone communications across Eastern Germany & Poland? Much of what I learned about EMP seems to still be classified secret. But, the non secured bits I've collected from Japanese accounts and the test shots by the US suggest there would be a lot of waving of arms and frightened shouting as the telephone and radio service is restored

 

These are good questions.

According to David Cassidy, Herr Heisenberg came close to turning himself and his lab crew into toast just trying to get a nuclear reactor to work. Fortunately for them, it never went critical, but if it had, it would have killed the whole lot. Heisenberg forgot to equip his reactor with any shielding to protect the operators!!!!!

Makes one wonder what the Germans would have done if they managed to get a reactor to go critical; recruit a new atomic research team and start all over?

 

Glad Fermi got it right. His first pile of 1942 was on the edge of the University campus, in Chicago. A unshielded stack of graphite blocks in the middle of he city. One story described his SCRAM system as a student standing next to a rope with a axe.

 

Nice seeing the post did trigger a lot of responses ..my problem is i read an awful lot of sites and pdf's so its hard to refind the same sources after a while ..i recalled most info from memory ,but i ll try to give some sources where i picked up the info .


concerning the rugen test I have this lead where its mentioned too : Hitler won atomic bomb race, but couldn't drop it - World - www.smh.com.au

the italian observer story is more or less told here too , (pity the greyfalcon site
is a bit 'spacey' to refer to ..but the story compares to the article as ive read it elsewhere .The article does mention a name to do some research on :
Hitler A-bomb

Funny thing is in the article you'll get some readings about ordruf too and again , again the grayfalcon was not the site ive read a similar info first .

the thread underneath also mentions some sources about Rugen and Ordruf , too

http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=3247.45


the issue about the gold lined uranium containers is also found in wikipedia articles about u234 ..that these seem to have been gold lined is not my invention guys , its often mentioned in various articles about the find.

this is a quote from wikipedia :
'However, according to author and historian Joseph M. Scalia, who discovered a formerly secret cable message at Portsmouth Navy Yard, the uranium oxide had been stored in gold-lined cylinders; this document is discussed in Hitler's Terror Weapons.

enjoy

View attachment 9568


About Emp ..think that EMP would be much less an issue with the ole radio tube equipment as with the more modern transistor or IC driven radio gear .

 

The common thread among these articles is that the Germans exploded a "dirty" bomb, not a nuclear device which relies on splitting the atoms in fissionable material and creating a chain reaction. Detonating a "dirty" bomb is NOT a nuclear explosion; it relies on chemical explosive to spread highly radioactive material. The radiation from a "dirty" bomb is what kills, but it is not nearly as effective as a nuclear explosion, does not do a great deal of damage to buildings and other equipment, and cannot compare with a nuclear explosion.

Second, a "dirty" bomb still requires enriched fissionable material. The Germans had no means of enriching their uranium; they had to rely on plutonium for their bomb, whether it was a true nuclear device or simply a crude "dirty" bomb. But plutonium can is not a naturally occurring substance; it can only be created in a working reactor. And the Germans never managed to achieve a sustained chain reaction in any of their reactor experiments. The last such experiment was in March, 1945, and it failed to go critical. Without a working reactor, nor any other means of enriching fissionable material, the Germans could not create either a true nuclear bomb, nor a dirty bomb.

The people who wrote the cited articles obviously don't understand enough about nuclear physics to make an assessment of the evidence. One talks about "splitting the atom" as though that were the key to an atomic bomb; it is not. The Germans were possibly the first to split the atom in 1937, though I have read that Fermi also did it in Italy in the early 1930's without realizing it. But that is only a first preliminary step. It is the critical mass sustained reaction that is key.

Another writer talks of Heisenberg, applying for a patent for a nuclear bomb; this is not evidence of anything. Most nuclear physicists, in 1940, understood the principles involved in creating a nuclear weapon, so a patent could have been issued, even though the holder still didn't have the ability to actually build a nuclear bomb. Supposedly, a schematic diagram of a German, gun-type nuclear bomb was drawn up by a German physicists during the war; I have looked at it and it appears to be very similar to the US gun-type bomb. But, even if authentic, it does not prove anything. The gun-type weapon was widely known and understood by nuclear physicists at an early stage in the nuclear race. The difficulty in actually building this type of bomb is that it requires enriched uranium and Germany did not possess any means of enriching uranium isotopes.

To me, the most compelling evidence is a lack of evidence. It's clear from examining the Manhattan Project that any German attempt to either enrich uranium, or to create plutonium in a reactor, would leave plenty of evidence of the processes involved just as the US attempts did. Enrichment of uranium takes huge amounts of electrical power and very sophisticated machinery; nothing even approaching what would have been necessary was ever found in Germany. The creation of plutonium requires a working reactor and lots of time. Neither was available to the Germans.

My feeling is, that all this new "evidence" and the articles and books about the German "atomic bomb" is nothing but sensationalism and attempts to cash in on gullible people who want, for whatever reasons, to believe in such nonsense.

 

There are lots of "horror" stories about research done in the early days of nuclear power. My high school physics teacher had previously worked at Oak Ridge before retiring and becoming a teacher. He told us of once having watched three researchers using two half balls of enriched uranium mounted in a set of turnscrews moving them by hand back and forth getting them to undergo fission and watching the results closely grouped around the assembly. He also said they died a few weeks later.....