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    Default The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    The story starts when I read on line and failed to keep a record:

    Multiple sources

    1. Hitler's atom project was more progressed than commonly thought
    2. A small atom bomb or dirty bomb (or something between the two) was tested on a Baltic island in 1944/5.
    3. At least one fission device was used at the Kursk battle on Russian troops , there was a communique from the Swedish Military Attache who was there for the test, who mentioned blackened corpses with all their ammo exploded.
    4. Allegedly Stalin made it known that if another was used, Russia would use its poison gas reserve in retaliation
    5. The Germans produced a decent amount of plutonium, and allegedly this was given to the USA, dropped by a submarine to the Montauk Base. This ended up being dropped on Nagasaki

    This is a mix of unsubstantiated and partially substantiated stuff.


    Photo credit: Luigi Romersa/Corriere della Sera, 1944
    Last edited by Bill Ryan; 12th June 2020 at 13:55. Reason: enlarged the very interesting image
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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    From an acquaintance:

    Quote There is at least one (1) primary source document from the Second World War itself which describes multiple alleged German tactical nuclear attacks against Red Army troops on the Eastern Front. The year claimed for these events was in fact 1943.
    The document in question is a MAGIC intercept of an above top secret Japanese radio transmission which was sent from neutral Stockholm, Sweden, to Tokyo, Japan in the fall of 1944. Largely the work of US Navy and Army “spooks”—cryptanalysts, radio operators, translators, and spies—MAGIC was such a sensitive secret that it was almost entirely unknown outside of the highest circles of the American government and military for fifty (50) years following the end of the war. Historians and researchers are still digging through thousands upon thousands of MAGIC papers—including some Japanese, who are literally searching for evidence of their own WWII nuclear weapons projects in US archives.

    I was made aware of MAGIC when I began reading a few of the new histories that included some of the then-recently declassified signals intercepts, in 1995. Robert K. Wilcox was one writer who had seen a few MAGIC papers—in his case when he was doing archival research for what became the first edition of his book, Japan’s Secret War—but he had to use FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests just to get that far. It is much easier to view many MAGIC documents today than it was for half a century following the end of WWII, but there are still a number of them that are totally off limits to the public.


    Operation Magic | Encyclopedia.com
    So, what does the 1944 document say about supposed German use of battlefield nukes against the Red Army in 1943? It reads, in part:
    “This bomb is revolutionary in its results, and will completely upset all ordinary precepts of warfare hitherto established. I am sending you, in one group, all those reports on what is called the atom-splitting bomb. It is a fact that in June of 1943, the German Army tried out an utterly new type of weapon against the Russians at a location 150 kilometers southeast of Kursk. Although it was the entire 19th Infantry Regiment of the Russians which was thus attacked, only a few bombs (each round up to 5 kilograms) sufficed to utterly wipe them out to the last man.
    The following is according to a statement by Lieutenant-Colonel UE [ISHIWARA] KENJI, advisor to the attache in Hungary and formerly in this country, who by chance saw the actual scene immediately after the above took place:

    "All the men and the horses (from) the explosion of the shells were charred black and even their ammunition had all been detonated."”
    The complete citation which gives the precise location of this document in the US National Archives (NARA) is as follows:
    MAGIC decrypt "Stockholm to Tokyo, No. 232, 9 December 1944 (War Department), National Archives, RG 457, SRA 14628-32, declassified October 1, 1978. When I visited the main branch of the Archives in person in 2012 this was located exactly where the online citation I had originally seen said that it was. It was quite easy to find and I subsequently held it in my own hands and took photographs for good measure. These are posted in several answers I have written on similar topics here on this site.
    There are some issues with the content of this intercept, and reasonable alternative explanations for it do exist. For example, the Germans are known to have developed what they called “vacuum bombs”. ie, early thermobaric or fuel-air explosive (FAE) weapons, and used them in limited numbers against the Soviets. The gruesome effects wrought near their epicenter by the explosion of these devices could have been mistaken for some kind of atomic or thermonuclear weapon. However, there are also details which in the US were highly classified. Specifically, the weight of the warhead in the German nukes is given as “5 KG”. This is very close to the 6.2 KG fissile cores used in the “Fat Man” plutonium implosion bombs produced by the Manhattan Project. There are additional possibilities as well, some of which I considered in detail in the book I wrote on the subject, The Japanese Bomb, By Way of Germany?.
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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    OPERATION MAGIC:

    Quote Aware of British successes against the German Enigma machine, United States military intelligence asked their ally to share code-breaking information. The British sent top Bletchley Park cryptographers and engineers to the United States to help train code breakers and build decoding bombes. However, they closely guarded, and did not share, the secret of Enigma code breaking efforts (code named Operation Ultra) that involved Colossus, the Bletchley Park decoding computer.


    With the aid of the British, United States intelligence made significant progress against Purple in a short time. A replica of the Japanese Purple machine, built in 1939 by American cryptologist William Friedman, was used to adapt a German Enigma bombe to decode Japanese Purple. Although the settings for each message had to be determined by hand, United States intelligence gained the ability to read Japanese code with greater ease, in a more timely manner, by 1942, six months after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II.

    Utilizing their extensive network of listening stations in the Pacific, United States intelligence intercepted and decoded several other types of messages. Diplomatic Purple messages, paired with JN-25 intercepts, another broken Japanese Navy code, gave U.S. military command vital information about Japanese defenses at Midway. Operation Magic intercepts provided useful information during the ensuing Battle of Midway, turning the tide of the war in the Pacific in favor of the allied forces. A year later, Purple intercepts gave the U.S. information about a diplomatic flight on which Japanese General Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack, was traveling. U.S. planes shot down the Japanese aircraft.
    The Idea that there was pre-knowledge of the Pearl Harbour attacks is credible
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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    From 456.fis.org:



    Quote The history books say the United States and Britain comfortably won the race against Nazi Germany to build the world's first nuclear bomb.


    Today, that reassuring view is being nibbled away by the evidence from secret documents trickling out of private or former Soviet archives.

    Hidden for six decades, these papers confirm that Hitler's scientists indeed were way behind their Manhattan Project counterparts in building a Bomb.

    But the documents also suggest that by the end of the war in Europe, in May 1945, the Nazis had advanced farther down the nuclear road than is conventionally thought and had struck out in unexpected directions.

    As early as 1942, the Germans had already cracked some of the biggest conceptual problems behind making an atomic bomb. As the Reich's enemies closed in during the final months of the war, the scientists made some extraordinary technical strides.

    Using a prototype reactor hastily assembled in a disused beer cellar in southwestern Germany, a team nearly achieved a self-sustaining chain reaction, the key step to manufacturing nuclear explosive.

    According to two new documentary finds unveiled this year, Hitler's scientists even tested a nuclear weapon.

    The device that these days would be called a "dirty" bomb.

    The Reich scientists also sketched plans for the world's first mini-nuke missile.

    The Nazis were not at all close to having an atomic bomb like those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The German progress towards such weapons was comparable to what the Americans had achieved by the summer of 1942.

    During the last desperate year-and-a-half of war... a group of physicists who had been working on nuclear reactors, nuclear reactions and hollow-point arrangements of high explosives put them together to test a nuclear device.

    ~ Mark Walker, a professor of history at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

    Work in atomic physics before World War II led scientists in Germany, as well as in Britain and the United States, to speculate that an awesome release of energy could be obtained if the nucleus of a heavy atomic isotope was split apart, its neutrons wacking into other atoms in a chain reaction.

    Prompted by warnings from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt of the Nazis' interest in a bomb, the United States launched the Manhattan Project on Dec. 7 1941, coincidentally the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor that prompted its entry into World War II.

    The scheme would cost the equivalent of some 30 billion dollars and muster thousands of scientists and engineers, many of them Jewish scientists who had fled Nazi prosecution of their crimes.

    That same winter, the German military looked into the prospects for a Bomb and concluded the goal was so tough it was not worth the huge investment of billions.

    As a result, Germany's so-called "Uranium Project" was a diffuse affair, gathering between 50 and 100 scientists, scattered across the country and prone to disagrements.

    Many of them did not devote their efforts full-time to nuclear weapons research and their access to raw materials and brainpower was constrained by allied raids and conscription.

    After the war, American physicist Samuel Goudsmit investigated the Nazi nuclear effort.

    In his account, published in 1947, Goudsmit said the lead German physicist, the world-renowned theoretician Werner Heisenberg, had vastly overestimated the amount of uranium 235 needed for an explosion, or critical mass.

    Heisenberg also failed to understand that plutonium, a by-product of enriching uranium, could also be a fissile material and in fact was an even better fuel for a bomb than uranium 235, Goudsmit said. (Plutonium was used for the Nagasaki bomb).

    But the traditional picture of German incompetence has been proven wrong by documentary finds, says Walker.

    As early as February 1942, a German military overview of the Uranium Project concluded that critical mass could be achieved with "around 10-100 kilos" (22-220 pounds) of enriched uranium, a figure comparable to the Manhattan Project's own early estimate, of two to 100 kilos (4.4 to 220 pounds).

    And newly unearthed Russian documents show that in 1941 Heisenberg drafted a de-facto patent application for a plutonium bomb, although he referred to the substance as "element 94" in relation to its position on chemistry's periodic table, says Walker.

    What is already known is that Heisenberg's organisational rival, German army physicist Kurt Diebner, pushed ahead with a design for a reactor which was tested in February 1945 in the village of Haigerloch, near Tübingen.

    It came within a whisker of achieving a self-sustaining chain reaction, although if it had worked, the scientists would have been exposed to lethal levels of radiation, allied experts who discovered the device found.

    In a controversial book, "Hitlers Bombe," published this March 2005, independent German historian Rainer Karlsch said Diebner's team also tested a nuclear device in Thuringia, eastern Germany, on March 4, 1945, killing several hundred inmates.

    The device was not a weapon in the Hiroshima style, Karlsch says.

    Instead, it appears to have been an attempt to use high explosives to provoke fission in a hoard of enriched uranium and fusion in a batch of deuterium compounds, creating a fierce, localised, highly radioactive blast.

    Karlsch bases his claim on eyewitness accounts and a Soviet military espionage report. But the details are sparse and Karlsch has been savaged in some quarters.

    Even so, this astonishing tale is clearly not over.

    "More archival material continues to be found, and is still trickling out of Russian archives right now," says Walker. "I do not expect any more major surprises...but that is what I thought in 1989, when my first book on the Nazis' nuclear program was published."


    ¤=[Post Update]=¤

    From the Sydney Morning Herald:



    Quote Saturday, March 5, 2005

    Hitler won atomic bomb race, but couldn't drop it

    By Ernest Gill in Hamburg

    ADOLF Hitler had the atom bomb first but it was too primitive and ungainly for aerial deployment, says a new book that indicates the race to split the atom was much closer than is believed.

    Nazi scientists carried out tests of what would now be called a dirty nuclear device in the waning days of World War II, writes Rainer Karlsch, a German historian, in his book Hitler's Bomb, to be be published this month.

    Concentration camp inmates were used as human guinea pigs and "several hundred" died in the tests, conducted on the Baltic Sea island of Rügen and at an inland test in wooded hill country about 100 kilometres south of Berlin in 1944 and early 1945.

    Karlsch, 47, author of a number of books on Cold War espionage and the nuclear arms race, supports his findings on what his publishers call hitherto unpublished documents, scientific reports and blueprints.

    A US historian, Mark Walker, an expert on the Third Reich's atomic weapons program, lent his support to Karlsch's claims on Thursday. "I consider the arguments very convincing," he said.

    However, Hitler's atomic weapon did not approach the devastating potential of the US bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said Professor Walker, a history professor at Union College in Schenectady, New York state.

    He said the weapon secretly developed and tested by Nazi scientists was more comparable to a dirty bomb, nuclear material encased in explosives.

    Professor Walker praised Karlsch for writing "a whole new chapter" on Hitler's search for the "wonder weapon".

    Hitler's claims that his scientists were working on the "wonder weapon" have been dismissed as the rantings of a desperate and deranged man. But Karlsch's book lends credence to the possibility that Hitler may have been closer to getting his hands on that weapon than anyone has previously believed.

    It was known that German scientists had carried out heavy-water experiments in an attempt to split the atom, using research facilities in Norway and elsewhere. But it was widely believed that Nazi scientists had been hampered by a lack of pure-grade uranium, which was almost non-existent outside North America and Africa.

    It was also surmised that Hitler had favoured conventional weapons over nuclear arms because his limited grasp of strategic warfare prevented him from seeing the ramifications of nuclear capability. It was believed that he had discouraged development of the atom bomb.

    But Karlsch says he found documented proof of the existence of a nuclear reactor and nuclear weapons testing sites.

    His publishers, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, said his work was based on four years of painstaking research and interviews with independent historians.

    Among the most compelling pieces of evidence is a 1941 patent draft for a plutonium bomb, said Markus Desaga, a spokesman for the publisher.

    "He also based his research on contemporary research reports, construction blueprints, aerial surveillance photos, notebooks of some of the scientists involved as well as espionage reports by US and Soviet agents," Mr Desaga said.

    "He also based his findings on radiation measurements and soil analysis."


    ¤=[Post Update]=¤

    From Tony Csukza

    Quote Book: Nazis Tested Crude Nuclear Device

    By TONY CZUCZKA
    Associated Press Writer

    BERLIN - Nazi scientists trying to build an atomic bomb set off a test explosion two months before the end of World War II, killing hundreds of people in eastern Germany, a German researcher claims in a book published Monday.

    "Hitler's Bomb" theorizes that the March 1945 device didn't achieve fission, but did scatter telltale radioactive particles at the Ohrdruf test site. It also claims that Nazi Germany briefly had a working nuclear reactor, something historians generally dispute.

    Author Rainer Karlsch, an economic historian, offers no first-hand proof, saying his account is an interpretation of available evidence and he hopes it will spur more research.

    He said soil samples from the Ohrdruf site he had analyzed for his book turned up above-average levels of radioactive isotopes such as cesium 137 and cobalt 60, though he quotes the testers as saying the site poses no radiation hazard.

    However, access to what he believes was ground zero was barred because of old munitions at the site, which served as a Soviet military training area in East Germany after the war.

    A U.S. mission that arrived in Germany with American troops in 1945 to investigate the German atomic bomb program concluded that the Germans were nowhere near making a nuclear weapon.

    Karlsch doesn't claim they were near. But based on witness accounts recorded after the war, postwar Allied aerial photos and Soviet military intelligence reports, he argues that a test blast happened March 3, 1945, at Ohrdruf -- then being run as a Nazi concentration camp. He says there probably were several previous tests.

    "Hitler's bomb -- a tactical nuclear weapon with a potential for destruction far below that of the two American atomic bombs -- was tested successfully several times shortly before the end of the war," the book says.

    Gerald Holton, a professor of physics and the history of science at Harvard University, said the main scientists in the Nazi atomic bomb program never mentioned a test blast or having built a working nuclear reactor.

    British intelligence bugged the scientists -- including a key planner, Walther Gerlach -- while they were interned at Farm Hall manor in England after the war.

    Any claims of a Nazi test blast "would have to have a lot of documentary evidence behind it," Holton said.

    "It also would have to be checked against the remarks that Gerlach made during his period at Farm Hall ... where none of that sort of planning was discussed by him or anyone else."

    Karlsch says scientists around Gerlach had "a certain amount" of enriched uranium from an as yet unknown source.

    The German device probably was a 2-ton cylinder containing enriched uranium, he writes. The amount of uranium was small, meaning the conventional explosives used to trigger the device did not set off a vastly more destructive nuclear chain reaction, Karlsch said.

    That would mesh with an account Karlsch said he found in Soviet military archives, apparently based on information from a German informant, that said the blast felled trees within a radius of about 500 to 600 yards.

    Witnesses reported a bright flash of light and a column of smoke over the area that day, and residents said they had nausea and nosebleeds for days afterward, Karlsch says.

    One witness said he helped burn heaps of corpses inside the military area the next day. They were hairless and some had blisters and "raw, red flesh."

    Karlsch concludes that the blast killed several hundred prisoners of war and inmates forced to work at the site. Two months later, on May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered after the Soviets captured Berlin.

    The book also seeks to turn attention from famous physicists like Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker -- who historians believe were often ambivalent about building a nuclear bomb for Hitler -- to lesser-known but fiercely ambitious scientists and Nazi officials who Karlsch theorizes were directly involved in the testing program.

    Physicist Jeremy Bernstein, who edited the Farm Hall transcripts for the book "Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall," said a key question was where the enriched uranium could have come from.

    "To enrich uranium, you need an plant the size of Oak Ridge, and the Germans never had one," he said, referring to the sprawling U.S. facility that produced enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb.

    Russian officials were unaware of any such test by the Germans, said Nikolai Shingaryov, a spokesman for Russia's Federal Nuclear Agency. "Of course we don't know everything, but we don't have data about this," he said.
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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    From Historum.com


    Quote Jan 9, 2014

    The German nuclear program

    a)The German nuclear research (reactor and bomb) began with large advance (at least two years) compared to Project Manhattan. There wasn’t a lack of first-rate nuclear physicist and chemists like Werner Heisenberg, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, Karl Wirtz, Erich Bagge, Otto Hahn, Walter Gerlach, Paul Harteck, Kurt Diebner, Horst Korsching, Erich Schumann, Walter Trinks, Manfred von Ardenne and Fritz Houtermanns.

    There wasn’t a deficiency of ideas either, even with unconventional approaches, and neither did raw materials (Uranium Oxide at first with the largest stocks in the world).
    Already in 1941 Von Ardenne and Houtermanns had issued a secret memorandum within the Uranverein and HWA (i.e. Heereswaffenamt, German Army ordnance office from 1922 to 1945) with the description of all characteristics of the chain reaction and of the project of a bomb and it seems that Houtermanns would have determined as well, with a rather precise approximation, the critical mass of Uranium and Plutonium bombs.


    b) The program seemed to be, from the very beginning, organized into 4/5 main branches, somehow “formally coordinated” by Reichsforschungsrat-Uranverein (under the responsibility of Gerlach, in the last year and half of war):

    b1) The Heisenberg Group (KWI) and Theoretical Physicists Group, which worked to the realization of a nuclear cell (before Virushaus and then Haigerloch); Heisenberg and Von Weizsacker, despite they had already filled in very specific documents about the subject, because of a combination of “weak will”, technical errors (absolutely unbelievable, considering the rather impressive people involved) and the lack (be it relative or invented) of fundamental materials (heavy water and graphite pure enough).
    This last point does leave out many interpretations. As for heavy water (D2O) Germans could have easily develop national implants already in 1939/1940, instead of limiting themselves to import the one produced in Norway (and when they chose to follow this pattern, it was too late).
    Even more easily, graphite could be lightly produced in the quantity and quality requested for the most advanced chemical industry in the world. In both cases the problem was mainly tied with the unwillingness to cooperate and communicate among these eminent Physic leaders and the main enterprises such as I.G. Farben and Degussa.
    The latter, in particular, with the Auer-Werk implant (located at Oranienburg, which was never attacked in 1943/1944, then totally destroyed by a massive incursion of 600 B-17 on 15th March 1945, just before its fall into Soviet hands and, curiously, just a few days after the presumed Ohrdruf experiments) was on the avant-garde in the manufacture of metals and produced noticeable quantities of metal of Uranium ( necessary for Atomic cells), of beryllium etc (there are orders and documents).
    When questioned at Farm Hall, Heisenberg and Von Weizsacker repeatedly contradicted themselves, proving how they were worried not to look too involved with the regime, but contextually to defend their reputation in the field of Theoretical Nuclear Physic.


    b2) There were then several subgroups of nuclear physicists and chemists coordinate or directly dependent on the HWA (Heereswaffenamt), notably Schumann, Diebner, Harteck and Trinks, which worked of really different projects: methods and contrivances for the enrichment of Uranium, the project of Gottow Reactor and alternative bomb project.
    These teams, actually, reached important results in all abovementioned fields, even though the highest majority of documentation and proofs have been destroyed, stolen or classified.
    Yet, the same protagonists told, either directly or indirectly (with patents and activities just after the end of the war) their realizations.
    It’s undeniable that the super-centrifuges of Harteck obtained excellent results in the isotopic separation (with neatly superior performances to those obtained by Calutrons of Lawrence at Oak Ridge) and today devices of that kind are widely used all over the world, having ousted other enrichment methods form their role. Yet, while at Oak Ridge to obtain less than 1 (one) kg of U235 by month it was need the installation of thousands of calutrons (and thousands of system for the gassy spread), in enormous implants where tens of thousands of people were employed, we’ll never know how many super-centrifuges were actually built and where they were installed (not certainly thousands, probably not hundreds as well: perhaps few units or a dozen): so it will remain the mystery about how much U235 (and especially, of which “grade”) Germans managed to produce.

    Although regarding the Uranium enrichment of Uranium, P. Harteck at Farm Hall stated: “I was amazed at what I saw at I. G.”

    It’s highly likely too that the Atomic cell of Gottow (by Diebner) reached, with the last experiment in autumn 1944 (G-IV, perhaps with the use of partially enriched Uranium) the critical level, or it even went beyond, provoking thus the atomic incident of history. It was 2 years late compared to Fermi’s reactor and, in that same moment, at Hanford 3 reactors and 3 implants for the treatment of Plutonium had been installed and worked, but ascertaining and accepting this evidence would represent nonetheless a radical change in the historical tale, compared to the traditional reportage of the famous and ridiculous failure of Heisenber in the cave of Haigerloch. Here it lights up the “third element”.

    Americans decisively followed, with their immense industrial might and the strategic “calm” deriving from their superior economic power and their protected geographic position, the path of “Gigantism”, with the enrichment implant of Oak Ridge and the reactors of Hanford, aiming from the very beginning at “big” Plutonium and Uranium bombs (also because the critical mass was lengthily overestimated and especially owing to the fact that nobody thought of different systems); it’s likely, instead, that Germans, and in particular the supervisors of HWA, chose, already from 1941/1942, for a set of reasons tied with deficiencies in planning, organizations but also with the industrial and overall material situation and, finally, to the rising bombing campaign over Germany (besides particular personal experiences), alternatives routes.

    As a matter of fact, here lies one of the biggest differences, never sufficiently underlined, of the two Atomic programs: at the technical leading position of the Manhattan project there were people like Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller: all theoretical physics, which couldn’t conceive anything but “super-critical” bombs, because of their same formation and forma mentis.
    In Germany, at the practical point, the projects upheld by the HWA itself were, instead, entrusted to people like Schumann (who was also in charge of the research department of the HWA and who was a physicist specialized in explosives, not a theoretical and not a pure “nuclearist”) and to Trinks (his best student) and to Kurt Diebner (an experimental physicist) and to other experimental physicists.
    Theoretical physicists (Heisenberh, Von Weizsacker and Witz) isolated themselves from the beginning, in the Virushaus and visited the whole occupied Europe discussing and holding conferences.

    It’s quite likely that “hollow bombs” (hollow charges) of Schumann-Trinks derived from these circumstances: a particular, advanced and consolidated technology in this field and the exigence of producing non-conventional bombs, powerful enough but low-cost and small sized (because also of the problem of vectors: Germans never seriously followed the path of quadrimotor strategic bombers, thanks to the decision of the Luftwaffe and Göring, who was formally in charge of the “Economic Plan” and of the Reichsforschungsrat – Reich’s research council- as well).
    The same talk can be done for the experiments of Zippermayr with “Liquid bombs” (FAE in the modern terminology), maybe tested on the Eastern Front and perhaps confused with tactical bomb, especially considering the effects (excluding radiations obviously).





    b3)Then, we have the “Civil” group, sponsored and financed by the Reichspostministerium (Reich’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunications) with the combo Ardenne-Houtermanns. The scientific activity of Von Ardenne was so remarkable in the immediate post-war, by collaborating with Soviets in their Nuclear program, that he was awarded with the Stalin Prize!
    Yet, in the field of German nuclear program his activities have remained hidden and unknown for long; even today it’s known very little about what was conceived for almost 4 years in his laboratories and in the APS (the Nuclear research society constituted and financed by the Reichspostministerium): the work surely focused on a huge cyclotron (combined with the “Duoplasmatron”, an invention of Von Ardenne himself) and with these devices they worked to an alternative Uranium enrichment system.
    Houtermanns, being among the firsts to have guessed, in the ‘30s, the nuclear reactions inside of stars, was particularly interested in the Nuclear Fusions.
    Yet, it must not be forgotten that the incredibly powerful and rich Reichspost financed also the researches of Konrad Zuse and the building of the Z3 and Z4 (one year before ENIAC): to what end? In order to handle the postal codes of the various Gau?
    Curiously, the Z4, in February 1945, was urgently evacuated from Berlin to Low Saxony (at Göttingen), very very close to the secret underground SS secret implants.


    b4) And, in the end, from 1943 onwards, SS appeared on the stage, with the most secret and very powerful Sonderkommando Kammler, which could use immense resources and especially zero-cost manpower, and that, among other things, was responsible and author of the realisation of the gigantic underground implants in Thuringia (in AWO Area, i.e. Arnstadt, Wechmar and Ohrdruf), in Bohemia and in the Low Silesia (from the various MDW and Dora up to the “top secret” S-III and Riese Project): at the end of the war, Kammler was responsible, practically of all most important and advanced technological and industrial programs of the German Reich, from V2/A9/A10/V101, to the construction of the new jets and antiaircraft, antiship, antitank rockets, to IR (InfraRed) viewers, to radars etc.
    Furthermore, he “reserved” for him the Skoda implants of Pilsen as personal “industrial headquarter” (and curiously, the Skoda implant of Pilsen was one of the last targets assigned to Patton).


    c)There are evidences that of 3k+ tons of Uranium oxide in Germany ( counting initial stocks and the production, during the war, in the Sudeten mines), a large part of them “disappeared”( even considering the amount requisite by Allies and Soviets) from the ending war inventories.
    Certainly, dozens of Uranium’s tons were worked and metalized by the Auer Werk and other implants (there are orders and documents) and hundreds of slags’ tons of these works were recently found in the salt mines; as for the 560 kilograms of Uranium onboard of U-235, they were contained in golden laminate covered container: the use of containers with golden laminate instead of simple Uranium oxide is simply absurd: that Uranium must have been, at least, partially enriched; and strangely, these contained were present in the German itemized list but they, literally, disappeared from the English itemized list compiled by general Groves.

    No-one has ever discovered (or better, has ever officially declared) where Germans worked, kneaded, refined and enriched the Uranium: in theory, there’s the need of immense implants, with thousands of systems of gassy spread or centrifuges or with particularly powerful versions of Ciclotrons (like calutrons of Lawrence at Oak Ridge) which consume electric power in industrial terms.
    The fact that implants of this kind were never officially either realized or found by Allies is, in the “Official” History, one of the proofs that Germans didn’t undertake the path of fissionable material’s enrichment.

    Yet, Harteck, as briefly above stated, in one of the registered discussions at Farm Hall (on 6th August 1945), while he was talking with Heisenberg and Korsching about the industrial necessities of Uranium enrichment, said: “I was amazed at what I saw at I.G.”, highlighting that there could be far more efficient solutions than Oak Ridge’s implant. What had he seen and in in which I.G. Farben Implants?

    During the interrogations by the CIOS(Combined Intelligence Objectives Committee), in preparation for the Nuremberg Process ( 21st June 1945 and during the following days), Albert Speer stated: “Another interesting development was an ultra-high frequency contrivance developed by Siemens and used in the production of Buna.”
    An high-frequency device (UHF, i.e. Ultra High Frequency in what sense? Electromagnetic or electro-mechanic?), developed by Siemens (why?) for the production of synthetic rubber? What does the Siemens (Electronic) have to do with the Buna(Chemistry)?

    Hence, either:
    1) Either Speer was totally unaware of the technical content of the reports he was issued to, and therefore he just said random things to CIOS and scientific CIOS agents were funny chaps ready to accept whatever statement came out of Speer’s lips.
    2) Or Speer covertly alluded to something else. Yet, in this the reference to Buna could be not a random affirmation, considering that, in the huge Monowitz implant, the I.G. Farben spent two years, hundreds of millions of Reichsmark and the manpower of dozens of thousands of prisoners plus hundreds of specialized German technicians in order to obtain… officially nothing.
    What was the real goal of the Monowitz Implant is still a mystery considering in the process to the I.G. Farben ( a follower of the Nuremberg process) the leaders confirmed the massive investments but a null production (although the I.G. Farben was notorious for its efficiency, not certainly for its inefficiency).
    Despite this, the implant (never official became operational) absorbed, always according to the testimonies of the process, enormous quantities of electric energy. What?

    What could it be an “Ultra High Frequency Contrivance developed by Siemens”? If it had been a super-centrifuge for the isotopes separation or some sort of device similar to calutrons, realized and installed (in several samples) in a faked chemical implant for the production of synthetic rubber, then the events would be a little clearer.
    Curiously, Monowitz was under the management of SS and the project itself was supervised by the same Kammler.
    Nonetheless, the implant of Monowitz was partially dismantled before the arrival of Soviets and the most important implants (whose “identity” is unknown) were transferred (where is another mystery).
    The mystery, moreover, will persist and hardly will it be uncovered unless proofs aren’t found.


    d) Kammler’s programs were concerning, as above said, to a multitude of projects, among which there were V9/V10 (in collaboration with Dornberger and Von Braun), the V-101 (Skoda at Pilsen, likely the first rocket with solid fuel of history), the FAE of Zippermayr; but also many other things: from radio-controlled rockets to more “exotic” things.
    Von Braun tested the A4 in 1942, with the first successful launch in October; after that the task of production was left to Speer before and the SS after.
    Between 1942 and 1945, the Peenemünde Team didn’t succeed in experimenting anything else?
    That’s strange. The plan of A9/A10 began in 1940, some testimonies tell about a successful test, in March 1945, from Thuringia towards North Cape (still occupied by Germans) and about a launch site for intercontinental rockets prepared and ready in the AWO Area (“Polte-2”).

    e) The “hollow bomb” (actually it would be better “hollow and hybrid”) of Schumann and Trink was “sub-critical”, it didn’t request dozens of kilograms of U235 or Pu239 or of other fissionable material, but probably just a few hundred grams of these components, using methodologies deriving from the experience of conventional “hollow-charges” to arrive to the “boosted fission” of small sub-critical nucleuses of U233, or U235 or Pu239, using for this goal light elements such as deuterium (or similar).

    There are documents of the Warsaw Pact (recovered in the former-DDR archives) which prove the feasibility and realization of sub-critical mini-bombs with a hundred of grams of plutonium.
    Obviously the magnitude of these bombs is relatively low, between 0, 1 and 1 kT.
    Moreover, the project closely resembles the “Swan Devices” (see in the part “Other issues”).
    Yet the particularity of the Schumann-Trinks project was located in chain: “hollow-charge-->compression->”boosted-fission” of the nucleus, which might have evolved into a system “boosted fission”->Fusion, which means a thermonuclear bomb (like it’s seeable in the patents Schumann tried to register after the war, with a hollow-charge primer for a reaction D+n= T).
    After all, the American “Swan devices”(see in the part “Other issues”), based on a very similar principle, were born as “miniaturized” nuke (“Davy Crockett”) but they soon evolved in primers (“Robin Primary”) of the first H Bombs (W38 and W47).
    The dream of Schumann and Trinks was (as proved by several HWA’s documents) to arrive at the fusion (far more powerful, effective and efficient) not at the fissional of Uranium and Plutonium.


    f) Some experiments could have been carried through, notable in October 1944 (between 10th and 12th) at Rügen (and in those same days, for at least 60 hours, Berlin, the heart of the Reich, remained unexplainably and dangerously, isolated from the world) and in March 1945 at Ohrdruf.
    There are several clues, testimonies (Romersa, Affidavit Zinnser), declassified interceptions (MAGIC), but especially, regarding Ohrdruf, there’s a secret report of GRU(Главное разведывательное управление, “Main Intelligence Directorate”, i.e. Directorate of Military foreign intelligence of the USSR) directly for Stalin, in March 1945, surfaced from formerly Soviet archives, where it’s spoken about two experiments in Thuringia in few days (and maybe about two other ready bombs); we perfectly know how risky was to prepare such a report (about such vital informations!) directly for Comrade Iosif Vissarionovich Dzugasvili, without being more than sure about the contents (otherwise, Siberia is waiting for you).
    There were several affidavits of interned people in Ohrdruf and Buchenwald lagers (the few survivors).
    Plus, when Truman, at Potsdam, informed Stalin about “Trinity”, Stalin didn’t look much surprised.

    Something undeniably happened: we don’t exactly know what though. I don’t think it’s historically acceptable to deny all clues, the documents and testimonies just because tests on the ground surveys after 60 years don’t give absolute certainties, yet they leave an important shadow of doubt.
    Above all, considering that very probably these bombs were low magnitude ones and not certainly like those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and the eventual minor radioactive residuals) and that for 45 years remained under the adamant Soviet control, even more so considering they were Military interest areas.


    g) In the Nuremberg process, the judge Jackson tried to obtain informations from Speer (with which Jackson had a sort of confidential relationship) about a strange atomic experiment, which would have cause the instantaneous death of 10,000 prisoners, near Auschwitz (and Monowitz?).
    Speer denied being aware; like he denied whatever practical result of the Atomic program, ascribing the cause to the fact the best scientists had emigrated (forgetting, in this case, that there were two Nobel prizes in the German team).
    The question remained answerless but it wasn’t proposed to any of the other accused people, not even to those in charge of supervising the concentration camps (although it must be considered that both Hans Kammler and Heinrich Müller had disappeared).
    Furthermore, nobody worried about calling to the testimony bank Gerlach (responsible of the Reichsforschungrat and therefore of the whole German nuclear program), who, in theory, should have been well informed about such an experiment.
    10,000 prisoners dead, maybe with a nuclear experiment and the Tribunal which has to judge the crimes committed against humankind happily ignores the even, reckoning enough the denial of Speer…

    And obviously, the judge Jackson thought it wasn’t absolutely necessary to deepen with Speer the problem of his declaration to CIOS about the ties between the Buna’s production and strange contrivances created by Siemens.
    Yet, as remembered, in the Nuremberg process, two of the most important creators of the extermination programs, Kammler (who, in the initial phase of his career was responsible of the realization of Auschwitz) and Heinrich Müller (leader of “4th Amt of Reichssicherheitshauptamt – Reich’s Main Security Office- and of the Gestapo) weren’t even considered as accused people; there wasn’t any certain proof of their death: they had simply disappeared.
    Oswald Pohl, who in SS and lagers’ hierarchy was, more or less, on the same level of Kammler, was, instead condemned to death.
    Plus, when during the I.G. Farben process judges interrogated Otto Ambros (and other managers of the group), judges willingly accepted a huge series of incredible and incredibly false statements about Tabun and Buna’s implant in Monowitz without further examinations.
    What “process” was Nuremberg? It seems a total joke.


    h) The U-234 (the unique XB-Class survived U-Boat) carried out a most secret mission, leaving at the end of April 1945 from Kiel with a load of Uranium and much other high-tech material (including the most advanced infrared primes), besides projects and plans of construction for the Wunderwaffen, jets, rockets and radars and some important technicians.
    Yet, it didn’t head directly and immediately for Japan but it wandered in the North Sea (essentially a suicide in 1945, it risked several times to be sunk and it was damaged and forced to get back to harbour for reparations) between Germany and Norway for at least a week; then finally it reached the Atlantic with a really Northern route and it reached the North American coasts, surrendering to the US Navy, after having broadcast unencrypted messages to the Royal Navy with a deceitful position whereas the American destroyer USS Sutton was perfectly aware of its position and reached it without problems.
    All of this when there were flights on the polar route with Junker 290 and 390 which connected Germany to Japan, leaving from the bases in the Northern Norway.
    The most precious materials and above all the technicians could have easily taken that route, instead…

    i) The official reports of the Manhattan projects, until March 1945, represent an essentially desperate situation: the fissionable material (U235) produced in little more than one year wasn’t even 50% of the quantity demanded for “Little Boy”, because the immense implants of Oak Ridge were producing less than 1 (one!) kg of U235 (grade 85-90 %) by month and at least half of that production was diverted to Hanford reactors in order to produce Plutonium.
    But the prime of the Plutonium bomb seemed to be beyond the REAL American technological capabilities (they worked on it for more than two years without any result, an official report dated March 1945 stated: ”There is an high likelihood that primes could not work”).
    The system required synchronization at 1/3000 of second of dozens of primes to determine the implosion of the nucleus. No electro-mechanic technology was capable of ensuring such a result.
    Summing it up: there wasn’t enough U235 for a Uranium bomb, there was, instead, an abundant quantity of Plutonium, but there wasn’t a reliable and valid technology for the prime of the implosion.
    Groves was close to desperation; Oppenheimer was utterly exhausted (in Trinity photos he looks like a zombie).
    Then, unexplainably and miraculously, in June 1945 the stocks (or the production?) of U235 redouble and in July 1945 we have the experiment of Alamogordo with the Plutonium bomb (“implosion” plus perfectly efficient primes), an experiment which “went beyond the brightest expectations”.

    The official book of the Manhattan project, by R. Rhodes: “The making of the atomic Bomb”(almost 1,000 pages), happily ignores these fundamental problems, simply specifying that, in the end, problems were solved thanks to the increased efficiency of Oak Ridge implants (yet it’s worthy of note that no calutrons and gassy spread systems were added) and to technical solutions discovered, in the end, by the electronic American science.
    Moreover, he willingly skipped another strange coincidence for which one of the most important scientists of Manhattan Projects (responsible exactly of the “prime” component of the implosive bomb) named Luis Walter Alvarez and that the BUORD (Navy Bureau of Ordnance) ordered (official documentation), right after the capture of U-234, to a certain Mr. Alvarez to take and escort Dr. Schlicke (the expert of infrared primes found onboard of U-234) with his devices and to report as soon as possible. A strange coincidence.

    The unanswered question

    The most obvious question which comes to mind (always) and which allows (always) to dismiss whatever hypothesis of an even partial success of the German program, is: Why didn’t Hitler use the Atomic bomb, if he had one (or even more), instead of wasting them in “tests” and leaving them to the victors?
    After all, even the Hiroshima bomb was used without a test and the character Hitler himself doesn’t certainly seem entitled of particular moral values.

    I’m pretty convinced, as I tried to explain, that the solution to the enigma has much in common with the other elements of German weapon of mass destruction (WMD): the N-Stoff.
    Germans, by the I.G. Farben and the specialist Otto Ambros (inventor, handler, manager and consultant) produced between 1940 and 1944 12,000 tons of Tabun and 0,5 ton of Sarin.
    98% of which was loaded in grenades, bombs, rockets.
    It was enough a dozen of tons on one of these chemical agents (with simple vectors such as artillery or Nebelwerfer) to block/thwart/destroy whatever kind of Allied/Soviet operation on an area of dozens of km2.
    Yet, not even N-Stoff were used, not even in the final and most dramatic days, not even in order to earn the time necessary to eventually complete other, more important projects.
    Plus, the use of a dozen of tons of Tabun on a restricted area would have caused, in tactical terms, much more devastating and superiour damages than those of bomb with 0,1-1 kT magnitude.

    Otto Ambros, with his declarations to Hitler, in a specifically organized conference in May 1943, with a wanted utter distortion of reality, created the doubt in the OKW and in Hitler himself that even Allies could have at disposal nerve gases and that there were terrible risks of huge retaliations.
    Actually, Allied High Commands were terrified by the possibility of German gas’ use, in Normandy and in other circumstances, because, despite not being aware of never gases (which are from 50 up to 100 times more effective than blister agents like Yperite), they knew what terrible problems would have caused to the management of huge operations.
    Just imagine if they were aware of N-Stoff.

    The SS (Karl Wolff who had continuous connections with Kammler and therefore he was presumably aware of all secret programs of the Reich) had continuous contacts with the OSS and Allen Welsh Dulles in Switzerland (Operation Sunrise), at least from 1944.
    What they did really talk about is going to remain a mystery forever (but Kammler and Müller have disappeared and, as abovementioned, neither investigated; nevertheless, the same Wolff was the assistant of Heydrich and he had a significant role in the activity of deportation and lagers, yet he got by with just 4 years of condemnation).
    Speer was treated really “humanly” and a greatest number of important leaders of the I.G. Farben (from the president to the managing director) got by as well with few years, despite their links with Auschwitz and the exploitation of the interned manpower.


    In the final months of the war, Hitler repeated, over and over again, the tale that a miraculous weapon ( Wunderwaffen), a “weapon of victory” (Siegewaffe), was ready to be made available, that tests had already been carried out, and that it was the reason why it was essential to hold on, fight and fight again.
    The same concept had been expressed to Antonescu in August 1944 and to Mussolini, in their last meeting with a very trustful Mussolini who went on repeating similar things in his discourses (like in December 1944 at the Lyrical Theatre at Milan and in March 1945).

    Three final and general considerations:


    1) The German strategy proved to be, also in the fundamental field of nuclear research and atomic weapons’ production, disastrous, because of inefficiency, disorganization, shallowness and lack of a proper perspective; likewise it was in every other field of planning and management of the war.
    The idiotic rivalry between German physicists was just the iceberg’s top in this sense.

    2) Hitler wasn’t just surrounded by a number of idiots (from Göring to Himmler, Keitel, Jodl etc: unskilled idiots, who all killed themselves or were executed at Nuremberg) but also by a group of skilled and efficient people who are likely to have “betrayed” him in an extremely brilliant and clever way, perhaps saving Germany and Europe from a chemical/nuclear war but above all saving themselves (Speer, Kammler, Wolff, Ambros and the top leaders of I.G. Farben etc).
    A far different picture, in my opinion, from the one of Sonderweg and other commonplaces of many even famous historians, such as W. Shirer, who stated:
    “[…] The course of German history […] made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man, and put a premium on servility”
    A statement which was the guideline for German history of 20th century.

    3) Germany had at disposal weapons with which change, partially, the course of events; at least to delay the defeat and/or modify the military operations or the balance between Eastern and Western front, slowing down Allies and Soviets (the choice is up to each of us in the hypothesis).
    It wasn’t carried out.
    I don’t believe that only the likely threats of retaliation determined this result: under the flood of bombs ( the so-called “firestorms”), with the populace and cities dreadfully struck and with the Red Army and Ilya Ehrenburg’s poetries at gates, it was deemed essential to fight and the surrender was put out of discussion, yet, at the same time, was it feared other and more terrible retaliations?
    Irrationally ridiculous, especially and particularly for Hitler.
    I think that the non-use (at least for the ascertained WMD: i.e. nerve gases) it was mainly an operation of “brilliant disinformation”, from the lowest ranks to the highest, skillfully handled to manipulate the perceptions and decisions of the dictator.
    Perhaps, it is even possible to imagine that the diversion of important resources towards absurd programs, in terms of cost-effectiveness (such as V2), would derive from a manipulation of the same oversight, which probably handled important underground and secret negotiations as well.

    However, there still are some fundamental questions: what did upset Patton, after the recoveries in the underground implants in Thuringia? What was the fear of Americans, if not the one of a direct attack on big cities of the East Coast, by means of rockets and (small and they couldn’t be otherwise for reasons of load) nukes?
    What did absolutely have the 3rd Army (and the whole intelligence attached to it) to discover and to bring back in the USA being it so important to be launched at breakneck speed in already Soviet-assigned areas (Thuringia, Pilsen, Sudeten) ?
    Which was the mission of U-234 and why didn’t the commander carried it out by handing himself over the US Navy?
    What was really discovered in the huge underground implants of Central Germany?

    Other issues

    Between 8th and 10th October 1944 all telephonic services in Berlin were interrupted.
    English newspapers, using informations from Stockholm, spoke about an heavy crisis between the leaders of Nazi Germany.
    However, other testimonies, including the Italian Luigi Romersa (who was allowed to visit the German scientific locations), stated that on the island of Rügen had been conducted a nuclear test.
    Considering that there was no crisis in those days in the top brass of German III Reich, combined with the EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) does it make possible a nuclear experiment?

    It was said that to have EMP effects on vast distances it’s needed that the bomb explodes at high altitude.
    The first EMP effects were caught in the ‘60s just after experiments of bombs made explode in the high atmosphere.
    However it’s also true that whatever kind of atomic bomb does generate a minimal EMP and without knowing what Germans did test it’s hard to value an hypothesis.
    On the other hand, the null altitude of the presumed explosion, the distance between Rügen and Berlin and the fact that telephonic stations at that time were electro-mechanic and as such less sensitive to EMP than modern devices.

    It’s also possible that the blackout was intentional, perhaps to test some sort of defense
    Anyway, a USAAF document declassified few years ago dating 1945:
    “Investigations, Research, Developments and Practical Use of the German Atomic Bomb” A.P.I.U. (Ninth Air Force) 96/1945 APO 696, U.S. Army, 19 August 1945"
    Inside of it, there’s also the testimony of a German technician and an expert of rocket, name Zinnser who was flying over German during the first days of October 1944

    "47. A man named ZINSSER, a Flak rocket expert, mentioned what he noticed one day: In the beginning of Oct, 1944 I flew from Ludwigslust (south of Lubeck), about 12 to 15 km from an atomic bomb test station, when I noticed a strong, bright illumination of the whole atmosphere, lasting about 2 seconds.

    48. The clearly visible pressure wave escaped the approaching and following cloud formed by the explosion. This wave had a diameter of about 1 km when it became visible and the color of the cloud changed frequently. It became dotted after a short period of darkness with all sorts of light spots, which were, in contrast to normal explosions, of a pale blue color.

    49. After about 10 seconds the sharp outlines of the explosion cloud disappeared, then the cloud began to take on a lighter color against the sky covered with a gray overcast. The diameter of the still visible pressure wave was at least 9000 meters while remaining visible for at least 15 seconds.

    50. Personal observations of the colors of the explosion cloud found an almost blue-violet shade. During this manifestation reddish-colored rims were to be seen, changing to a dirty-like shade in very rapid succession.

    51. The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing.

    52. About one hour later I started with an He-111 from the A/D[24] at Ludwigslust and flew in an easterly direction. Shortly after the start I passed through the almost complete overcast (between 3000 and 4000 meter altitude). A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent billowing sections (at about 7,000 meter altitude) stood, without any seeming connections, over the spot where the explosion took place. Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lightning, turned up."



    Hypothesis about the German bomb therefore speaks of a bomb with relatively low potential, built using U-233 and concept very akin to the one of hollow-charges, to exploit the highest temperatures generated by two detonations “hollow-charges” so as to obtain, from a cover in lithium (with some grams of deuterium), a mini-fusion and a vast quantity of neutrons capable of triggering the fission of a sub-critical mass, according to a patent of Eric Schumann and Walter Trinks in 1942.
    The same type of technology was then adopted in the ‘50s for the tactical nukes, also called
    “Swan Device”.




    Regarding the presumed damages caused by the non-ascertained experiment; it must be remembered that the power decreases with the square of distance, i.e. at the double of distance the power is one fourth, at the quadruple of the distance the power has decreased to one sixteenth (1/16= 6,25 %) and so on.
    The damages that, for example, have occurred during the tests done by Americans, despite Fermi protections, are because of the distance: few kilometers.
    When speaking about Rügen, we are talking of hundreds of km.
    Even though the potential difference and the currents of telephonic wires of today are similar to those of 1944/1945, nowadays at the end of a twisted pair there’s an electronic board with elements in cilice: it’s most delicate at over-currents and over-tensions, back in the past they were less delicate.
    Therefore, it is even plausible that something might have broken down, but not surely the whole city, since the test should have been conducted far closer and not 200 km far.

    Another interesting point is the meeting between Hitler and Antonescu on 5th August 1944:
    “ […] Hitler confided his view that the jump from modern explosives to this one was the biggest since gunpowder” and then “[…] new explosives, whose development was already advanced to the experimental stage[…]”; Antonescu quoted Hitler then saying “These weapons for example have such colossal force that all human life is destroyed within three, or four kilometers of it's point of impact”.
    Germany and the Second World War: Organization and Mobilization of the German sphere of Power, Volume 5, Part 1, Oxford University Press, 2003

    Then, Patton in an interview to the Time Magazine on 27th August 1945:
    “Several times during the European phase of this war, victory was almost within Germany’s grasp […] Especially in the last months of the war , our margin of safety was slimmer than most of us suspected. The situation is known best to certain American military experts who have since inspected some of Germany’s underground research laboratories and war plants. Here they saw secret weapons […] Weapons which might conceivably have turned the trick for the Nazis if they could have used them boldly in a last desperate gamble. Some of these things can be revealed. Others cannot, Yet.”
    Unfortunately he died few months later.

    Similarly, nobody can confirm or deny the experiment of Kursk in 1943 (likewise for that at Rügen in 1943 and in Thuringia in 1945).
    Part 1
    “This bomb is revolutionary in its results, and will completely upset all ordinary precepts of warfare hitherto established. I am sending you, in one group, all those reports on what is called the atom-splitting bomb. It is a fact that in June of 1943, the German Army tried out an utterly new type of weapon against the Russians at a location 150 kilometers southeast of Kursk. Although it was the entire 19th Infantry Regiment of the Russians which was thus attacked, only a few bombs (each round up to 5 kilograms) sufficed to utterly wipe them out to the last man.”

    Part 2
    “The following is according to a statement by Lieutenant-Colonel UE [ISHIWARA] KENJI, advisor to the attaché in Hungary and formerly in this country, who by chance saw the actual scene immediately after the above took place: "All the men and the horses the explosion of the shells were charred black and even their ammunition had all been detonated."

    “Moreover, it is a fact that the same type of war material was tried out in the Crimea, too. At that time the Russians claimed that this was poison-gas, and protested that if Germany were ever again to use it, Russia, too, would use poison-gas.”

    Stockholm to Tokyo, Number 232,9th December 1944 for the War Department, National Archives, RG 457, declassified on the 1st October 1978

    Moreover, Rügen, which was a military area until 1991 (when the airbase of Dranske was closed) and then it became a protected area, was analyzed.
    Analysis shows some things:
    1) A crater wide 25m and deep 5m, in whose premises values of Cesium 137,5 times higher than normal and in the bottom of crater were found “vitrified and fused black particles”.
    2) Analysis were done after Chernobyl by the University of Giessen in 2003
    3) Analysis in the area of Ohrdruf by Uwe Keyser in 2005 shows an abnormal amount of fissionable material in such a wide spectrum that it can’t be attributed to any natural cause.
    In the book of R. Karlsch “Hitlers bombe”, the author states to have identified the place of the detonation and to have examined it with his colleague Petermann:
    “Physiker der Justus Liebig Universität entnahmen im Bereich einer großen Mulde Bodenproben, wo schon ziemlich schnell ein fünffach höherer Cäsium 137 Wert ermittelt wurde. Gefundene Verglasungen im Krater wurden von Wissenschaftlern der Ruprecht Karls Universität in Heidelberg analysiert. Ein Stein wurde dabei entdeckt, unter dessen verglaster Oberfläche ein vollkommen erhaltener Grashalm eingeschmolzen war. So was geschieht nur bei blitzartiker, sehr hoher Wärmewirkung.”

    “Physicists of the Justus Liebig University took samples in the area of a large dump soil where the determined value was more or less five time higher than normal with a value of 137.
    Glazing found in the crater was analyzed by the scientists at the Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg.
    A stone was found here, meanwhile, on the glazed surface, a perfectly preserved blade of grass was just melted down.
    Something which happens only at a lightning flash with a very high thermal efficiency."

    Then, a few sources state that at Harzberg, in Thuringia, there would have been a secret implant where U233 was produced from thorium with the use of an expressly planned cyclotron with absolutely innovative characteristics and very small dimensions and with Van der Graff accelerators and particular synchrotrons named Wilberohr [I[.
    Curiously all the documentation regarding the recoveries in Thuringia, the load of U-234 and what Americans found in the several I.G. Farben implants has been classified for 100 years, it won’t viewable until 2045!

    Now, Pacific 1945 : In August Japan was already defeated and destroyed. It didn’t have any residual retaliatory capacity. Japan could just hope to spill a lot of American blood in case of an invasion.
    Yet, USA could simply destroy and annihilate the entire islands of Japan sitting down thousands of miles away.
    If incendiary bombings hadn’t been enough to prove this concept, the use of nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki dramatically completed this scenario, being so devastating, also from a psychological point of view that the same Emperor was forced to take his power back and accept the unconditional surrender.

    Americans had just those two nukes ready at that time. Yet, the bluff wasn’t risky at all, because Germany had already surrendered and no other Power in the world was able, in the short term, to produce.
    Moreover, second but vital target, the message was clear and sound to Moscow.

    Different it would have whether, for absurd, in August 1945, Germans would still have been at war: would have the US risked a nuclear attack (on Germany or, even worse, “wasting” a precious nuke on Japan?) using the two available nukes and submitting the whole Western world (UK in the first place) to the risk of an eventual and possible retaliation?

    It’s a question of deterrence. Weapons are used (and the deterrence is over) only if the enemy isn’t capable to react and produce damage on a similar range at all.

    Germany, winter 1944/spring 1945: The Reich has at disposal (subject hypothesis) one or two small tactical nukes (already tested? First of a whole series? ) and maybe of a U-235 bomb (like Hiroshima’s one) in an advanced phase of realization. Allies and Soviets are at gates though.
    Can the utilization of this mini-arsenal change the tide of the war?
    NOT. One/Two tactical nukes aren’t sufficient.
    Can it force the enemy to a compromise peace?
    NOT. Neither if London was partially destroyed.
    Can it unleash a retaliation causing an even greater devastation?
    YES.

    Hence, the fact of having never been used is NOT a sufficient clue to prove that German nukes didn’t exist.
    To the utmost, it can prove a noticeable (and unexpected undeniably) awareness from a German point of view, despite the defeat.
    What are the goal, therefore, of the German nuclear program? In my opinion, only two:
    1) To succeed in producing a sort of low-potential mini-bomb, to use in a tactical way, in order to halt the advance of either Soviets or Allies.
    Yet, for that task dozens or hundreds are needed. As soon as they won’t be ready, for a devastating surprise attack on all main fronts, their single use is absolutely counter-productive and fundamentally useless.
    It would expose Germany to certain retaliations (Manhattan project was well known at Berlin) but it would prove the existence of it, which is linked to point 2.
    2) Deterrence: to succeed in testing a system (weapon + vector) of high power and range, actually able to really modify the strategic balance.
    Yet, to achieve such goal it’s needed one or more bomb/s of many kt and a medium-range rocket able to carry it.
    It’s highly likely they didn’t arrive in time to this target (perhaps they managed to test it).

    After all, Germany, supposing that it was at an advanced stage of its program, experiments all the paradoxes of nuclear deterrence and of mutual assured destruction.

    US, in 1945, without having any enemy, could avoid any strategic thought: the advantage of the monopolist position.
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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    It's all a ongoing con with us as the cannon fodder.

    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show....-.-.-hotspots
    Quote It's all the fruits of the ongoing Nazis propaganda and mind control research, ongoing from the second world war, base of operation moved to the good old US of A.

    Even the control forces, police forces follow the dress code
    The Germans lost the war (were used at great expense and loss, added to other countries common peoples) The Nazis moved on and still operate today, under different name of course. It shows who the 'Them' are, and all the time the Royal's satay clean but are all related to the 'Them'

    All gonging.
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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    Quote Posted by Sunny-side-up (here)
    It's all a ongoing con with us as the cannon fodder.

    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show....-.-.-hotspots
    Quote It's all the fruits of the ongoing Nazis propaganda and mind control research, ongoing from the second world war, base of operation moved to the good old US of A.

    Even the control forces, police forces follow the dress code
    The Germans lost the war (were used at great expense and loss, added to other countries common peoples) The Nazis moved on and still operate today, under different name of course. It shows who the 'Them' are, and all the time the Royal's satay clean but are all related to the 'Them'

    All gonging.
    Dah, they lost the war, physically. They managed to get through otherwise, it survives as ideals, and ideals are bullet proof. Too bad a lot of people in power today find those ideals very atractive, even if they use new names and the concepts have evolved since then to be more approachable and liked by current world standards

    How what that quote? "In land of the blind, one-eyed man is king" or something LOL, there are just a few one-eyed people in this world
    Tired

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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    Judging from today’s point of view the WWII was a false flag operation that misfired and went rogue.

    My mum once tried to explain to me that it really was a war of Jews against Jews and her voice trembled and I was very young so did not want to read about it.

    It always seems to be a war of mighty few who know we have the knowhow and the technology to move ahead very fast against the rest of mighty who wish that humans understand what are they doing first, from within.

    As the two things can go together beautifully but once any civilisation stereotype settles, no one can move ahead. People don’t either care to understand about each other and turn on the “promised land with privillages” button no matter what each promised land look like.

    Also Marx and Engels who wrote the communist manifesto ( or is that a manual ) were Jews in descent who started a social apocalypse of human race. What else did they do than fighting their own thousands of years of surviving religious paradigm and society run by rabbinical hierarchies ?
    So a war against religions allowing humans just to sit and think and pray and getting payed for it.
    They invented “modern society” instead that omits God from every equation.

    It’s them who inspired China, right after Russia to handle “the problem of human rights” resulting in millions of people being sent to prison camps for their faith alone.

    Again, who started it all ? The French ?


    Just joking 😷

    The world of today that has got at least 70 years to recover and rethink its operations seems to stand at brink of another war.
    No normal people wanted any war back then, no normal people want it now.

    Few madman at the top have an access to nuclear buttons and other weapons of mass destruction. Those millions living “under them” want to live in peace, travel around the globe, without prejudice and hatred.
    How paradoxical isn’t it.

    So how long does it take us to recognise those madmen with fixated ideas on human identity who need the conflict to satisfy their lower selves ?
    How long does it take us to stop them before they start a war?


    How long does it take to tame human aggression and stop feeding it, by meat, by violent movies, games and wild attractions?

    This dream of cultivated and peaceful human civilisation...can not be achieved by war.



    🙏

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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    Agape
    Quote Judging from today’s point of view the WWII was a false flag operation that misfired and went rogue.
    No, I think it all wen't as they planed it.
    Quote No normal people wanted any war back then, no normal people want it now.
    Quote This dream of cultivated and peaceful human civilisation...can not be achieved by war.
    Yes
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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    The following is from William Pellas on another forum

    Yes. In fact, there were at least two different designs that were tested. However, the documents and writing which I have seen to date seem to indicate that these were prototypes only. It appears to me that the Germans never progressed beyond this stage to actual serial manufacture of additional units.

    The more or less standard or conventional history of the war goes out of its way to denigrate German nuclear weapons research and development. Much of this perspective is rooted in the writings of a small handful of participants in the Manhattan Project and/or its attached atomic intelligence unit, known as ALSOS, men such as the physicist Samuel Goudsmit. Goudsmit’s 1947 book, Alsos, contains his written assessment of the reasons for the apparent failure of the Nazi nuclear enterprise—minus the information contained in numerous top secret and above top secret papers that were swiftly and highly classified at war’s end, as Goudsmit surely knew. The piece linked below summarizes:

    “Goudsmit concluded that the failure of the German atomic bomb project was attributable to a number of factors, including bureaucracy, Allied bombing campaigns, the persecution of Jewish scientists, and Werner Karl Heisenberg's failed leadership.”

    Upon closer examination, however, the resulting “Allied Legend”, as the writer-researcher Joseph Farrell terms it, that emerged from the mainstream history is revealed to be “a poorly written finale”. In my opinion it does not withstand careful scrutiny. There are a number of reasons why I have reached this conclusion.

    First, the sniff test. Given that the Germans possessed one of the most powerful heavy industrial sectors on the planet, and were universally acknowledged for years as the world leaders in nuclear physics, how likely is it that they would fail to produce anything whatsoever in the global, total war death struggle which swiftly ensued, particularly after the tide had turned against them on the Eastern Front? Does that seem plausible just on the surface of things?

    Second, nearly all of the most prominent naysayers point to the eminent German scientist Werner Heisenberg as some kind of “proof” that the Third Reich never came anywhere close to completing any atomic bombs—whether strictly in prototype form or not. Generally, this assertion is coupled to statements he made while under house arrest as a captive of the British for several months following the end of the war in Europe.

    Heisenberg was undeniably brilliant to be sure, but his specialty—quantum mechanics, in which he was a major figure and early pioneer—was not necessarily the most directly applicable to “bombology”, at least not at that time. The most important German nuclear weapons scientists were mostly sprinkled around between a number of “black projects”—nearly all of them under the direct control of the SS and/or various branches of the military.

    Returning to the conventional history of the conflict that gradually coalesced over the first three to four decades after WWII, another common assertion is that all or nearly all German nuclear research and development came to an end in 1942. This is usually also credited to Heisenberg (as in Thomas Powers’ well-written but simply mistaken book, Heisenberg’s War), who is said to have thrown Hitler off the scent by deliberately overstating the difficulties that would be involved in a truly national effort to build a practical bomb. But a closer look at certain earlier events, as well as primary source documents related to the 1942 German military-industrial conference usually claimed to have written “finis” to Nazi nuclear dreams, does not support this contention.

    According to a declassified US 9th Army Air Force report titled,” Investigations, Research, Developments and Practical Use of the German Atomic Bomb”, many of the most prominent nuclear physicists in the Third Reich were present at the 1942 gathering. These included Heisenberg and Otto Haxel (from the kriegsmarine) among others. After some deliberation, Reich Armaments Minister Albert Speer decided against a formal commitment of a large segment of the German wartime economy to the production of nuclear weapons. But this was NOT, in any way, the end of Nazi nuclear weapons R&D. Not even close.

    As already mentioned, several black projects continued. These included at least two SS efforts, a third which was under the control of the heereswaffenamt (German Army Weapons Bureau) that appears to have had some SS input, and still another which was hidden in the bureaucracy of the German Post Office—the reichspost—and had the personal patronage of Wilhelm Ohnesorge, one of Hitler’s closest confidantes.

    One of Ohnesorge’s personal friends was the father of Manfred von Ardenne, a brilliant and largely self-taught inventor-physicist who to my mind might have been the single most important figure in the entire Nazi German nuclear enterprise. Ohnesorge, in part because of his previous personal connection to the von Ardenne family, is known to have financed a significant portion of Manfred von Ardenne’s nuclear weapons research and development. Exactly which branch of the Wehrmacht and/or Nazi society was behind the von Ardenne - Ohnesorge effort is unclear from the sources I have read to date. Whatever else is true, it is known that von Ardenne and several of his lieutenant scientists largely built The Bomb for the USSR after they decided to surrender and go over to the Soviets en masse.

    Manfred von Ardenne - Wikipedia

    https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-...pr/72pavel.pdf

    The writer-researcher Carter Hydrick places considerable emphasis on what von Ardenne’s project was doing for Germany in WWII, and his work was good enough to win him an invite to present his findings at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2005. Hydrick included a number of provocative, formerly secret documents during this engagement, and the recently published third edition of his book, Critical Mass, is still more revealing.

    There may have been a fifth black project under the KWA (kriegsmarine waffenamt) and/or Dr. Karl Nowak. If this research and development existed as a separate center of gravity relative to the other projects, it may have been responsible for building and testing what appears to have been some kind of nuclear device in late 1944 (see below). One of the markers pointing in the direction of an organized effort that existed independent of the others is the fact that the 1944 event is the only one for which there does not appear to have been any oversight by the SS. All other late war German superbomb projects and related weapons tests were most likely either under direct SS control, or else received substantial assistance from the Nazi “state within a state”. (Reference: The Hidden Nazi: America’s Deal With the Devil, by Colm Lowery, Dean Reuter, and Keith Chester.)

    In any case, the reach of the Nazis’ last gasp underground secret weapons empire extended well beyond Europe. Subsequent 1990s era investigations by two branches of US intelligence including the CIA and DIA uncovered documents describing the presence of around 3,000 SS troops in Hungnam, Korea, from late 1944 through the end of the war in Europe and possibly even after that, therefore establishing some measure of direct German input into the Japanese project in North Korea.


    Please note that the vast majority of these documents were not available to civilian and even most military historians, researchers, and writers for 50 years after the end of WWII. It was only after a massive, wholesale declassification of US archives was done in 1995 that many of the papers which have now come to undergird the “contrarian” history of nuclear weapons came to be available in the public sphere. Along with this was the discovery of similarly sensitive records in Kremlin archives which were opened to western researchers in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War.

    There are at least four (4) test detonations of some type(s) of German superbomb that have emerged from the research I have seen, and conducted myself, to date. These are:

    First, an explosion on Rugen Island in the Baltic Sea on 12 October, 1944. This was described several times in both magazine articles and at least one book by the most prominent and credible eyewitness: the Italian journalist, Luigi Romersma. Notable to my mind was the fact that Romersma did not start to write about this event or to speak publicly until after his friend, German rocket scientist Werner von Braun, was dead.

    Present day researcher Rainer Karlsch, along with his American writing and research associate, Mark Walker, seem to believe that the Rugen Island bomb was some kind of rudimentary nuclear weapon that otherwise utilized a more or less standard detonation methodology, but I am not so sure about that. There are descriptions in German sources which call the device “a disintegration bomb”, but others term it “a molecular bomb”. If the latter is more accurate, it is possible that the 1944 test, while broadly speaking a “nuclear explosion”, nevertheless derived its blast yield from a very different approach to nuclear weapons physics. I go into more detail on this point in my book on the subject, The Japanese Bomb, By Way of Germany?.

    Note that Romermsa was not the only person to speak for the record about this event. A captured Luftwaffe bomber pilot named Hans Zinsser also gave a detailed description of it which closely matched Romersma’s recollection.

    Next were a pair of test firings of what were evidently early examples of boosted fission tactical nuclear weapons. Both of these utilized the sprawling former German Army parade ground located near Ohrdurf, Germany. The second and final detonation was on 3 March 1945, following an initial explosion a day or two earlier. The first of these may have incinerated around 700 people including a handful of SS personnel who were standing too close to the blast. It is likely that all except the SS were POWs taken from the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp and deliberately placed in harm’s way to test the effectiveness of the weapon.

    In addition to at least two eyewitnesses who were identified in later years

    The source for the fissile material for these tests was most likely a secret uranium cube lattice reactor built in a basement beneath a nondescript school building in Stadtilm, Germany, under the direction of Dr. Kurt Diebner and the German Army Weapons Bureau, the heereswaffenamt. This was similar to, but more efficient than, the much better-known Haigerloch reactor built under the auspices of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (and thus under Heisenberg’s supervision) following the relocation of some of its scientists and materiel from Berlin to the town of Haigerloch in the spring of 1945. Diebner went on to file a 1955 patent for a reactor design which appears to have been a modified and improved variant of his wartime uranmaschine.

    Atomkeller Museum—Link goes to an Atlas Obscura page which makes the patently silly claim that the Germans built the Haigerloch reactor with no thoughts of making atomic bombs, but is otherwise interesting and features several recent color photos.

    At least two nuclear weapon bomb design schematics which can be reliably documented to have been made during WWII itself have come to light in recent years. One of these, the “Schumann Trinks Device”, may have been the basis for the bomb prototypes tested at Ohrdurf.

    The fourth and final superbomb explosion was not an atomic bomb as such, but rather some kind of super FAE (Fuel Air Explosive) that was the product of one of the SS technical laboratories. Known as Operation Hexenkessel (“witches cauldron”), this weapon, according to both US and British primary source intelligence documents, was extraordinarly powerful when it was set off near the Starnberger See, a large freshwater lake in southern Germany near the Austrian border. Based on earlier Luftwaffe experiments with a wide area explosive powered by a potent mix of coal dust and liquid oxygen, it appears to have been a massive, wide area medium explosion rather than a point-specific super high explosion—as in an atomic or thermonuclear weapon—and may have been augmented by some kind of electromagnetic Tesla effects.

    Again, all four of these events were test detonations of prototypes. Although fragmentary testimony about alleged use of German battlefield nuclear weapons on the Eastern Front does exist, at this point in time I have not seen sufficient evidence to convince me that actual, functional atomic or thermonuclear bombs were completed and used by the Third Reich against the Soviets. But surprises continue to emerge from various archives and so I am keeping an open mind.

    On a final note, there is a chicken-or-the-egg element to the history of Axis nuclear weapons research and development. The conventional history was correct to conclude that the Third Reich appears to have decided against a massive commitment of resources on a truly national scale in order to pursue atomic bombs along the same general lines as the Manhattan Project. Therefore the Germans probably did not have a path open to them which would have led to a weapon that was broadly similar to the simple and practical but also incredibly expensive and wasteful Little Boy gun-type atomic fission bomb. But there are other ways to engineer a nuclear detonation, and most of them are far more efficient than the first bomb built by the Manhattan Project. German nuclear physics was far and away the best in the world in the runup to the Second World War and was already exploring a number of concepts relating to the use of fusion in nuclear weapons—including the foundation of what became hydrogen bombs in the first decade after the end of the conflict. The upshot of this is that the Germans were capable, in theory, of engineering and building weapons that required far less in the way of fissile material(s) than what the Allies were doing. Whether the bombs they ultimately tested were built with this in mind from the beginning, or turned out that way because Speer withheld the kind of enormous funding that would have been needed to construct a German equivalent of Oak Ridge, TN, is unclear at this time.
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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    Wolfgang Hirschfeld, who had been the senior radio operator aboard the German transport submarine U-234, bound for Tokyo from Kiel in late March 1945, described the circumstances in which the boat surrendered to the US Navy in May that year. His book Feindfahrten could not be published in West Germany in 1983 for political reasons and so he went through the Neff publishing house of Vienna.

    The English language translation was published by Pen & Sword Books in the UK and USNIP in the United States in 1997. In his text Hirschfeld mentioned uranium twice.

    On the quayside at Kiel he had watched two Japanese naval officers travelling as passengers wrap about eighty lead cases in brown paper then paint the inscription "U-235" on each before handing the cases down for stowage. When he asked one of the Japanese what "U-235" meant, the officer told him that the cases were originally to be carried to Japan by the U-boat U-235 "which is not going there now". Hirschfeld thought it was odd that since they knew that the cases were to be transported by U-234, the Japanese officers were continuing to paint "U-235" on the wrapping.

    The US Navy Unloading Manifest for the surrendered U-234 has only one entry for "uranium" listed amongst the 260 tonnes of material being transported. These were ten cases of "uranium oxide", harmless in a stout paper bag but now, according to an unloading instruction of 27 May 1945, loaded in gold-lined cylinders which were not to be opened "as the substance will become sensitive and dangerous". Lt.Col. John Lansdale, Chief of Security for the Manhattan Project, wrote in a 1996 article that he had personally handled the disposal of the ten cases of "uranium oxide" aboard U-234. He stated that the American military authorities "reacted with panic" when they were told about what it was. In all probability these were the additive material for ten "uranium disintegrating bombs" which did not work on the nuclear explosive principle though having a high degree of radioactivity.

    Hirschfeld had been returned to U-234 from Boston Jail to remove an item of radio gear. While he was there, he saw a party of four Americans "carrying small hand appliances" approach the forward cargo containers. Captain Hatten, USN told Hirschfeld that the appliances were "Geiger counters". They found so much radiation that it was impossible to determine in which of the tubes the "uranium oxide" had been stowed. Therefore two of the German crew were brought back to unload the material and were later granted US citizenship for their work and silence. Natural uranium oxide has only 0.75 percent U-235 and little radioactivity. Therefore whatever was contained in the ten gold-lined lead cases, it was not likely to have been natural uranium oxide.

    There was far more war material stowed aboard U-234 than the 260 tons declared in the US Navy Unloading Manifest. Therefore it should come as no surprise to learn that the American nuclear security officers were as baffled as anybody else by what came up from the innards of that submarine in due course.

    On 14 June 1945, Manhattan Project security officer Majors Smith and Traynor discussed the shipment just brought ashore from U-234 (US Nat.Archive SE Region, East Point Georgia). There were "39 drums and 70 wooden barrels of water" and they wanted a test to "find out the concentrations and recommendations for disposal". It appeared that "Vance" was just taking it off U-234 and putting it in the 73rd Street warehouse. "Vance" was also handling 80 cases of U-powder and wanted to know "the which and what". These would almost certainly have been the eighty lead cases which Hirschfeld saw the two Japanese officers handling at Kiel.

    Seventy-six years later all this material remains top secret. In his book Alsos - The Failure in German Science published in 1947, the military scientist Professor Goudsmit provided the sketch of a sphere with a chimney and declared with hilarity that here was the "German atom bomb!!!" Joking aside, he must have known what the Germans were aiming to do with them and how close the German project came to fruition.

    All that was needed was a demonstration bomb dropped by a V-2 rocket on a British town, a justified target being used for the import of war materials from the United States. One assumes Hitler would not have approved and so the project was shifted to where there was no longer any hope.
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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    (Note from Mecklenburger: I think I need this and three more postings to complete the information.)

    There was no Nazi atomic bomb project. Or at least not one for a major bomb. This was made clear by leading scientist Manfred von Ardenne in his book Ein glückliches Leben für Technik und Forschung (Verlag der Nation, Leipzig (DDR) 1972, when he recalled putting to Hitler in 1940 the idea of such a project which he already considered feasible. The Führer was against it on doctrinal grounds.

    Von Ardenne owned a villa at Berlin Lichterfeld in which he operated a physics laboratory with the cooperation of the Minister for Posts, Wilhelm Ohnesorge, a man very interested in nuclear science. This was how von Ardenne came to be in charge of the Reichspost project. The set-up was ridiculed by Professor Samuel Goudsmit probably because he realized how dangerous it had been.

    To put the matter in broad terms, von Ardenne aimed to vastly enhance the potency of ordinary explosives and fuel by means of techniques which are not properly understood even now, but whose existence can be validated by reference to the existing declassified documents.

    Therefore all the explosions from tests carried out in Germany during the latter part of the war were of "The Miracle Weapon" which did not use a nuclear principle but looked like an atomic explosion and had fallout. For political reasons modern Germany does not encourage interest in exotic bombs and fuels developed in the Third Reich but can tolerate an atomic project that never quite got under way and failed.

    After the United States entered the European War in December 1941 much thought was given on how to force the Americans out again. Thus in October 1942 Hitler cancelled the A9/10 Amerika rocket project and replaced it by:

    (1) The V-2 ramp and catapult at Artois as a stop-gap and
    (2) Commissioning von Ardenne to increase the efficiency of rocket fuels so that the V-2 would become the all-purpose missile and be able to reach New York.

    (1) In October 1944 at Artois near St.Omer the Allies discovered a concrete ramp for catapult-launching a winged A-9 rocket the 3,200 miles to New York. A sketch was provided. The ramp was situated on the crest of a hill above an immense concrete emplacement 250 feet in diameter. Thousands of workers had been engaged in the tunnelling below it, lorries and trains could enter the hill directly Source: Daily Mail, 30 October 1944, G.Ward-Price article: "Fly-bombs were meant for US - Huge Ramp Found". According to Dornberger in his book V-2 - Der Schuss ins Weltall (Bechtle 1952 p.55) the ramp provided a launch speed of 350 metres/sec, enough to get a fully-tanked A9 to New York. A researcher might have difficulty finding mention of this embarrassing ramp in modern "history books".

    (2) On 25 October 1942 the Heereswaffenamt issued a contract to the Reichspost laboratory in Berlin "to increase the efficiency of rocket fuels by the application of atomic decay". A copy of this document appears in Hitler's Nuclear Weapons by Geoffrey Brooks, Pen & Sword Books, 1991, facsimile in Appendix.

    To be continued...
    Last edited by Mecklenburger; 10th March 2021 at 02:06.

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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes

    PART TWO
    HEISENBERG'S ATOMIC BOMBS


    In early 1942 in his experiment B-III at Berlin-Dahlem, Werner Heisenberg arranged alternating layers of uranium powder and paraffin inside an aluminium sphere. He dropped a radium-beryllium preparation, the neutron source, down its chimney. The purpose of the experiment was to measure the creation of fissile plutonium Pu 239 achieved by U-238 isotopes capturing neutrons, (U-238+1 neutron=Pu 239).

    The paraffin was to prevent premature fission of the Pu 239 plutonium caused by the creation of energetic Pu 240 isotopes (U-238+2 neutrons=Pu 240). The experiment proved to Heisenberg that he needed to use heavy water as a moderator and that at that stage he was still getting together the basics.

    In the subsequent experiment L-IV at Leipzig, it is stated that he used an outer aluminium sphere filled with 70 kgs uranium metal powder. A concentric inner sphere contained 220 litres heavy water at its centre. A radium-beryllium neutron source was introduced through a central chimney to begin the reaction, the heavy water slowed the passage of neutrons sufficiently for capture by U-238 isotopes to create plutonium Pu 239 and now Heisenberg was able to measure where the transformations took place.

    These two experiments were of no interest to a scientist intent upon designing a nuclear reactor. Rather they provided vital information to a physicist planning to build small atom bombs.

    While Pu 239 for the bomb remains in the neutron flux, the undesirable Pu 240 isotopes are created in the ratio 75:5. Since it is not economical to separate the isotopes chemically, the fertile material can only spend so long in the sub-reactor, between forty and eighty days depending on the rate of neutron flux, before the Pu 240 begins to spoil the reaction.

    Heisenberg's enlarged spheres of 500 kgs of uranium powder of about 80 per cent purity left for say eighty days would have produced about 75 grams of Pu 239 for a bomb (the critical mass for a full-size plutonium bomb is about 5,000 grams.)

    On 7 July 1943 Hitler informed Major-General Dornberger and Wernher von Braun that by the beginning of 1945 he wanted the mass-produced intercontinental rocket operational to shoot the United States "ready for peace" if by then the Wehrmacht would have the warhead ready for the "small uranium bombs".

    Richard Rhodes confirmed in his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb that at least 7 per cent enrichment is needed for an explosion of sorts, i.e. "a fizzle". Such a small bomb might destroy ten city blocks leaving the area unapproachable for years by reason of the radioactivity and fallout. Hitler reckoned that one such bomb day after day might soon bring the recipients to the negotiating table and force the United States out of the war.

    A plutonium bomb cannot be detonated unless certain criteria are met. The requirements are:
    (i) a radiation absorber such as kerosene to block the Pu 240 emissions,
    (ii) the closest proximity of the Pu 239 sub-critical masses for fast assembly and
    (iii) the highest possible impact speed, Mach 3.5 in the nose of a V-2.

    Professor Samuel Goudsmit's sketches may show his concept of the layers of plutonium-enriched U-powder separated by paraffin in the top hemisphere, and the lower hemisphere filled with iron ballast, as the warhead in a V-2 rocket. The speed of impact would replace the tons of HE needed otherwise to implode the weapon. The paraffin barrier dispersed and the fissile material squashed into the ballast to form a non-symmetrical critical mass resulting in a small "fizzle" explosion with meltdown and fallout.

    On 20 October 1943 Kammler notified Himmler by telegram that agreement had been reached for the construction of an underground factory at Traunstein in the Bavarian Alps to produce the enhanced fuel for the "Amerika Rocket". The new fuel would provide the V-2 with ten times its present range, i.e. increased from 300 miles to 3,000 miles. (Bundesarchiv NS 10/old 273).

    The next stage of the planning was to start preparing the V-2 rockets which could hit New York from France. The Allied invasion came at just the wrong time in mid-1944 and the re-occupation of France extended the range which the V-2 would have to cover to at least 3,600 miles. The enhanced fuel left the V-2 still 600 miles short of the target.

    "In general it may be said that the Germans were about six months too late in the development and mass production of new weapons."
    James Forrestal, US Navy Secretary
    New York Times 28 August 1945

    "The Germans were preparing rocket surprises which would have, it is believed, changed the course of the war if the invasion had been postponed for so short a time as half a year."
    Col.Don Leander Putt
    Chief USAF Technical Services 10/1944-8/1945
    Deputy Commanding General AAF Intelligence., Air Technical Services Command.
    Quoted in Harper's Magazine, October 1946 at p.329.

    But the story is still only half told, for why did the Manhattan Project officials "react with panic" when they saw what U-234 was carrying aboard?

    To be continued....
    Last edited by Mecklenburger; 10th March 2021 at 20:42.

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    Default Re: The story of Hitler's (Possible) Nukes


    Final Part
    THE URANIUM DISINTEGRATING BOMB


    On 25 October 1942 when the Reichspost received the Heereswaffenamt's contract to "increase the efficiency of rocket fuels by the application of atomic decay", Manfred von Ardenne realized at once that since fuel is an explosive, he could kill two birds with one stone.

    This is the chronology:

    "...The whirlwind bomb", which produced an artificial whirlwind is absolutely authentic even though it seems improbable. The device was constructed and tested by a certain Dr. Zippermeyer of Lofer in the Austrian Tyrol. The tests used a large calibre mortar firing projectiles containing coal dust and a slow-acting explosive. The effect was sufficient to create an artificial whirlwind capable of bringing down an aircraft over a radius of 914 metres from the point of detonation..."
    Brian Ford, Barrie Pitt and Sir Basil Liddell Hart, Armas Secretas Alemanas,
    Libr.Editorial San Martin, Madrid, 1975, p.28.


    "Dr.Zippermayr was sent to Vienna and told to set up his own laboratory where he would receive supplementary equipment for further experiments for the Luftwaffe. The laboratory was located at Weimarer-Strasse, 87. He had a staff of thirty-five...his main project was a coal dust explosive for the Enzian and Schmetterling flak rockets strong enough that, upon exploding, the concussion would break the wings of an enemy bomber. This was ready by August 1943 when the work was then halted..."
    US Forces Austria, Counter-Intelligence Corps, Salzburg, Zell am See section, report 4 August 1945 case no. S/Z/55 Dr Mario Zippermayr; NARA/RG 319, Reports and Messages, ALSOS Mission.

    "Extremely good results were obtained from Dr Ardenne's project in 1944 from a mixture of 60% liquid air and 40% coal dust. The technical man responsible for this work was Dr.ZIPPERMAYR. The first trial was made at Döberitz near Berlin using a charge of about 8 kgs powder and coal dust mixed together. In the explosion in an area radius 500-600 metres the trees were completely destroyed...

    Trials were then transferred to the Starnberger See, Bavaria. Here some papery substance impregnated with a wax was added to the mixture. Bombs of 25 kgs and 50 kgs were dropped and photos taken. This more intense explosion covered an area of 4 to 4.5 kms radius and the explosions could still be felt at 12.5kms. Some destruction was caused 12 kms away and all trees on a hillside 6 kms away were destroyed."
    BIOS (British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee Final Report 142(g)
    Information Obtained from Targets of Opportunity in the Sonthofen Area.
    Publ. HMSO.


    "Among the agents brought out from BSC was one whose report, sealed and stamped THIS IS OF PARTICULAR SECRECY told of "LIQUID AIR BOMBS being developed in Germany...of terrific destructive power."
    Wm Stevenson (Director, British Security Coordination, New York, 1941-1945
    "A Man Called Intrepid", Sphere Books 1977 at p.414.


    At Starnberger See the 50 kg bomb with the additive described had (i) a blast and shock wave developing beyond six kilometres in all directions (ii) accompanied by an artificial whirlwind of fire similar to a lightning storm at ground level which burned up all the oxygen in the affected area. Therefore a single 50 kg bomb with the additive had far greater killing power than an atom bomb because it killed not only by blast and fire but also by suffocation.

    "Had they been given this extra period in which to perfect it, the Germans would have used "uranium disintegrating bombs" many more times more destructive than the V-2. A "uranium disintegrating bomb", the Wing Commander explained, had a destructive force one hundred times greater than the 1-tonne warhead of the V-2."
    Wing-Commander (later Air Commodore) A.G.Pither, RAAF, broadcast first from Melbourne, then quoted in Flight and Aircraft Engineer (Official organ of the Royal Aero Club), 26 July 1945 p.87.

    The ten gold-lined lead cases of "uranium oxide" unloaded from U-234 at the Portsmouth, NH quayside in May 1945 possibly each contained one uranium disintegrating bomb ready for use and being transported to Japan. They could be delivered to the target by a jet aircraft, a V-2 rocket was not necessary. This was the reason why the Manhattan Project officials "panicked" when they knew the contents of the ten cases.

    The experimental testing of one such device at Ohrdruf in March 1945 had a greater force than expected, killing concentration camp workers and SS guards standing far beyond the safety cordons. The bodies were destroyed on funeral pyres, the ashes then being scattered over the Harz mountains.

    Bearing in mind all the expense and effort required to build nuclear weapons, the "uranium disintegrating bombs" ready for use six months earlier after the problems had been ironed out would have been the better option tactically and strategically.

    END

    Footnote:

    The greatest mystery surrounding the Uranium Disintegrating Bomb is the question of how it worked. The BIOS report on the Starberger See bombs with their Additive of "paper and wax" naturally originated from the fertile imagination of the British censors. What we know for certain is that at the end of the war the Americans captured some of the material, and knew how it worked, but only the Germans knew how the Additive was made. Before the war ended that information was taken down to a safe place in South America or offshore (see "Conspiracy Research - Underground Bases, thread "Secret U-boat base 1960", posting 5 March 2021.)

    Bearing in mind the German work done on ball lightning, and later in the Bell project in Silesia from 1942 onwards, the simple theory is that an enclosed magnetic field infused with high energy, if placed alongside a conventional explosive and detonated with it simultaneously, combines with the explosive gases to vastly enhance the effect. Allegedly it is not possible scientifically to create stable plasmoids of this nature "in any laboratory on Earth"?
    Last edited by Mecklenburger; 11th March 2021 at 18:52.

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