As Germany, what would you have done in 1943?

I don't think you can trade with the western allies at this point they had the no less than unconditional surrender policy.Your best bet is annihilating the allied beach heads at Sicily which Hitler failed to do. Postponing Operation Citadel until panther,tiger,and elephant ready and even then remain on the defensive on eastern front until the western allies suffer a sever defeat and transfer 2-3 Luftwaffe air fleets to combat the allies in Sicily to push of the allies.Transfer troops from Scandinavia the eastern front and launch a offensive with complete air superiority to counter the soviet numbers on Kursk with the new battle tanks ready for combat.

 

Mark4,

if you will use the real facts of this time the only way would be to surrender to the West allies with one requirement: Let the allies marching in in Germany til they had reached the German eastern Borders and withdrawal the Armies from Russia and be safe from beeing conquered by the Russians and surrender completely if all German troops were back in Germany. Otherwise it made no difference for the fighting men in Russia to fight til the End or to surrender to the Red Army. So my thoughts based on not extremely real facts.

Regards

Ulrich

 

I'm not saying to surrender the Germans had a slight chance of success against the western allies in 1943.

 

If the allies had a guess of what will happen in the future, i think they had accept this way of surrender.

Regards

Ulrich

 

Yea Sicily by 1943 North Africa was lost but a defeat at Sicily (very possable) plus the heavy losing the americans were suffering in thier bombing campaign they had to surrender and give up D-Day plans.

 

I believe it should be remembered that until 1943 (Feb.) it would have been possible for Germany to surrender without the "unconditional" part. That was only adopted post-Casablanca Conferrence. When they started loosing and falling back toward their original borders in the east by late 1942, it isn't outside the realm of possibility that a "negotiated" surrender might have been managed.

By mid-1943 they had lost any chance of either developing an atomic device, or doing other than they did with Hitler at the helm.

 

I didn´t wrote it good enough, sorry! I would say that the allies would accept the German surrender if they had known what would happen with the Russians after WWII!!!

Regards

Ulrich

 

Correct! After WWII the US Secret-Service found an hidden Bunker at Lake Constance where the Nazi´s tried to built a Atomic bomb. After their researches the Nazis neede only 7.000 litres more of the heavy water from Norway to complete a small one. Not much!

But i am lucky that they didn´t manage to get the stuff!

Regards

Ulrich

 

You do understand that deuterium (heavy water) isn't a needed component in the production of an atomic device do you not? The problem the Heisenberg team had was that they were wedded to the idea of deuterium as a moderator for the construction of a controlled reaction system, which could (if completed) been able to produce plutonium.

They (the Nazi team) went down the wrong road as to a moderator, and didn't have enough U-238 for separation to a fissionable isotope. While it is possible to produce plutonium from the raw uranium oxide ore, without a controllable reaction unit, it isn't.

They couldn't produce the plutonium, and had no way of producing a fissionable isotope of uranium (U-235) other than the lab. level cyclotron magnetic separation method. Atomics were a non-starter for the Germans in this time frame.

 

Sorry Clint,

but this was said in that TV Documentation. I am not a in the guess with the Atomic stuff, so dont take my post wrong. And thanks for your explanation!
But if you know more of this project (i am sure you do that) and if you want to share, i am curios to learn more.

Regards

Ulrich

 

I watched a documentary on this and the Germans never got far all they managed is what we today call a "Dirty bomb" and they tested it on POWS and civilians.

 

Here is a portion of an old post of mine on this subject. Having deuterium isn't a requirement of atomic bomb production. The American process didn't use it until post war for plutonium. They always used graphite in Fermi reactors, and didn't use "heavy water" from the Canadian plant until long after the war was over.

To get a chain reaction in natural uranium you need a moderator to slow down the neutrons that are generated from fission. This was widely known inside the world of nuclear physics by the late 1930s. Two moderators were believed to be possible: i.e. either carbon or "heavy water" (D2O, deuterium). Walter Bothe, the leading experimental nuclear physicist in Germany, did the crucial experiment and concluded that carbon in the form of graphite would not work.

In America however, Enrico Fermi did a similar experiment and concluded that graphite was marginally acceptable. He suspected that an impurity in the graphite was responsible for the problem. Leo Szilard, who was working alongside Fermi, and had actually "patented" the concept of a fission bomb in the mid-thirties, had studied chemical engineering before going into physics. He remembered that electrodes of boron carbide were commonly used in the manufacture of commercial graphite. It was known that one atom of boron absorbs about as many slow neutrons as 100,000 atoms of carbon. Very small boron impurities would "poison" the graphite for use as a nuclear reaction moderator, which Walter Bothe had factored into his calculations. Szilard therefore went around to the American graphite manufacturers and convinced one of them to make a boron-free graphite at higher cost. Using this pure graphite as the moderator, the American group achieved a chain reaction on December 2nd, 1942.

The German team, however, felt they needed to use heavy water (deuterium). Ordinary water contains heavy water at a rate of about 1 part in 5,000 to 10,000. The two can be separated by repeated electrolysis, which requires large amounts of electric power in close proximity to a water source. The Germans only had this at the Hydro Norsk hydroelectric plant in occupied Norway, since that plant had been the first (and only at the time) commercial producer of the deuterium in Europe. The British alerted the Norwegian underground that heavy water was useful for the war, without telling them why. The Norwegians had already suspected as much, and had smuggled their "stockpile" of deuterium to France when the German orders multiplied exponentially. When the British SOE altered the underground, courageous Norwegians sabotaged production as best they could, by such diverse methods as adding cod liver oil to the process which cause excessive "foaming" in the plant and delayed the production. As a result the Germans had only about half the heavy water they needed as a moderator for a reactor by the end of the war.

Despite the shortage of heavy water, Heisenberg continued to work toward a controlled chain reaction to the very end of the war. What else could he have done? Graphite was not an alternative; he had no reason to doubt Bothe's measurement. Bothe was the recognized authority in the field and Germans believed strongly in authority. Even if another German had repeated the experiment, the result would have been unchanged. No German physicist would have consulted a chemical engineer! The barrier between the two disciplines was too large and respect for "authorities" in any given field too great. It would have been equally impossible to accelerate heavy water production. To do so would have required additional electric power sources in an already power-constrained economy. Germany's final attempt to build a nuclear reactor failed to go critical for lack of enough materials and time.

This may be why Heisenberg could, with a straight face tell Hitler; "For the present I believe that the war will be over long before the first atom bomb is built." (Heisenberg, statement to Hitler in 1939). Then as the head of German research (Heisenberg) could again honestly report to Hitler, in July of 1943 that; "though our work will not lead in a short time towards the production of practical useful engines or explosives, it gives on the other hand the certainty that in this field the enemy powers cannot have any surprise in store for us." He of course had no clue that the Fermi team had succeeded a full seven months before his conference with Hitler, and the Fermi team had created the world’s first controlled nuclear reactor in Chicago.

Nor could Heisenberg know that three months after his "prediction" to Hitler, the DuPont company would begin construction of the Fermi (graphite) pile "plutonium" production facility at Hanford WA. It began full operation in late 1944, and begin delivering its first weapons grade plutonium before mid-‘45.

Then, the other problem is the engineering problem of how to put the "pressure" onto the critical masses of fissonable isotopes to make them "explode" rather tha fissle out as a nothing. The "gun-type" used at Hiroshima in the U-235 type was pretty sure to work, and never tested before use. The "implosion type" using plutonium was new and very difficult to produce. The German teams never got either the fissionable material, with which to work, nor did they develop a way to make the material they didn't have explode.

As to a "dirty" bomb, the nastiest stuff around was radium, and it was more than 20 times more precious than gold as a dangerous radiation producing material, and the global supply at the time was less than 1,000 grams.

Does this help?

 

Thank you Clint!

Regards

Ulrich

 

there was nothing the Germans could do:the Russian superiority was that big that there was no alternative:
shortening the frontline would result in a shorter frontline for the Russians
evacuating NA was impossible due to the Allied naval and air superiority

 

You´re right! But as i said it was not based up on the real facts!
Best way were been to surrender and save the lives of thousands of men.

Regards

Ulrich

 

By Kursk in July 1943, even Hitler admitted to many people "the war is lost militarily". He also was well aware of the Western allies' demand for unconditional surrender. Since he was facing the fog of war like everyone else, his only real long-term strategy was to delay the enemy long enough and hope for some discord to rupture the Western allies, and enable Germany to negotiate a peace (just as they had in world war 1). A faint hope, as Hitler surely realized, but it was all the Germans had.

 

Hello Urlich,

Unfortnately this was an impossibility. The Red Army and the Western allies were just that "allies". Such a decision could not be undertaken without a unanomous vote by all allies. Even had the Germans surrendered to the allies not only would this not stop the Russian advance but would also be considered a stab in the back by Stalin and the Russian people. Nothing good would have come out of such a move.

 

By my understanding of the progress of German Nuke fission, their experiments had not even gained the foothold of achieving a sustainable chain reaction.

The experiment that was uncovered showed clearly that their research was at a dead end. No bomb meant no way out, and when your leader has spent the formative years of his reign before the war backstabbing agreements and pushing everybody to the limit, is it any wonder that a negotiated peace was out of the question.

Their best hope was to stick to the Munich agreement in 1938. This might well have seen Adolf Hitler as leader until he died. But he was particularly concerned that his political goals were achieved whilst he was still alive, so they cashed in their limited superiority in military terms and gambled for control of continental Europe.

If Goering had his way, Germany would not have gone to war with any other nation except Poland, and eventually, the Soviets. but when you bully others in the diplomatic sense, you lose the mutual trust that these agreements are founded on.

In 1943, there was only one option...."Make peace, you fools!"...or get rid of Hitler and put Goering in charge.

 

Well said.

I would speculate the demand for unconditional surrender was the result of Allied leaders' desire to prevent another "stabbed in the back" myth. If Germany was defeated under the harshest term possible, the German people whould understand they had lost the war because they were militarily inferior instead of internal sabotage. Also, unless the post-war German government was under the complete control of the Allies for awhile, Germany might re-militarize and become a threat to the balance of power once more.

 

In my opinion, there was no other alternative besides an "unconditional surrender" following mid 1942. The millions of Russian military and civilian deaths up to that point made it unconditional surrender or the destruction of Germany by military means in the eyes of Stalin. The sheer and utter tragedy that was Leningrad alone meant Germany had a one way ticket to destruction.