Nazi Atomic weapons?

[Kiwikid]

When Rainer Karlsch published his book Hitler's Bombe, I found his reference to nuclear test blasts at Rugen in October 1944 and again at Ohrdruf twice in March 1945 fascinating but I was also dismissive of a diagram widely published online for a Plutonium weapon. It ran contrary to everything I knew or understood to accept that Germany acquired Plutonium so I dismissed Karlsch's conclusions whilst accepting his claims about Rugen and Ohrdruf.

Part of the difficulty is that his book was written in German and a great deal of the commentary in English about his book was selective in what was disclosed.

Recently I managed to struggle through the book in German sufficiently to grasp that the commentaries in English left out important qualifications.

What became apparent to me is that German scientists Schumann and Trinks, building upon research by Otto Haxel about superheated Lithium, came up with several patent applications during WW2 for what we'd call today, tactical nukes.

These were based on two opposing conical shaped charges. The cones were fabricated from Lithium6. They blasted two molten slugs of Lithium together into a cavity containing a near vacumn. Placed at the centre of the cavity was a small quantity of fisslie material (233U or Pu239) in combination with other compounds of Lithium deuterides with Beryllium etc.

These weapons when detonated created a Deuteron beam which prompted a neutron flux in the fissile core at a level of radioactivity similar to that in the core of a critical mass warhead.

It is a contentious issue and if Germany did develop the bomb an even bigger question than how did they do it is why didn't they use it, or did they?

Sources: Karlsh, Rainer. Hitler's Bombe, pub 2005

 

[Kilo 2-3]

Having the design for a weapon, having the capability to produce it, and actually building it are three very different things. There is no question in my mind that Germany attempted to build a nuclear device during the Second World War. Their production and stockpiling of "heavy water" clearly points toward such a project.

However, it seems German efforts towards building a weapon were, for some reason, fairly half-hearted. The all-out prioritization of resources seen for the American Los Alamos Project seems never to have been paralled in Germany.

I doubt Germany even came close to having the bomb.

 

[Spetsznaz]

Having the design for a weapon, having the capability to produce it, and actually building it are three very different things. There is no question in my mind that Germany attempted to build a nuclear device during the Second World War. Their production and stockpiling of "heavy water" clearly points toward such a project.

However, it seems German efforts towards building a weapon were, for some reason, fairly half-hearted. The all-out prioritization of resources seen for the American Los Alamos Project seems never to have been paralled in Germany.

I doubt Germany even came close to having the bomb.

Exactly Germany may have been aware of the technology, but they had there funds in other toys like the V2, and ME-262's, Other Jet aircraft, helicopters and even flying saucers, here is proof: [nomedia]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWribWayTns[/nomedia]

and other wonderful weapons bought to you by the wonderwaffe. The point is these weapons were realistically to be achieved and be of use to Germany, while Nuclear weapons would require a massive amount of time and funds to build, and Germany was running short on both.

 

[Beatmaster]

Its a known fact that the germans did have a edge in several technologic aspects.
There are many books written about the research that the germans did during WOII with many facts.
Personally iam not an expert in the specific field, but from what i have been told and what i did read is the fact that the germans did have some technolgical blue prints of the A-Bomb or prints that could lead to building the bomb.
There are also rumors that the V-Rockets (V1, V2 and V3?) would be suitable to deliver a warhead or chemical agent, the same rumors tell the story about american soldiers that found secret documents during the war on various locations in the "German Reich" that helped the amerikans to build the bomb them self, its even said that it was only a matter of time before the germans would have a A-Bomb like Bomb or rocket as their proffesors and research labs did create some horrific stuff.
Wich to believe? iam not sure and i leave this open to debate, however fact remains that it has been proven that the germans where mutch further with their research levels then the allies and that it took some serious time for the west to catch up.

There are hundereds of scenatio's we can come up with but IMO lets assume that if time would permit hitler would have acces to some crazy weapons afterall it took the americans and other allies 4 years massive production and research to match hitlers levels because when the war started hitlers army did hit europa like a storm with some very hightech weapons for its time and in the beginning there where only a few that could put up a fight against his armor for example.
Also his airforces and other military stuff did have a edge towards "his victims" when it comes to technological power, at least thats what is written in the many history books.
So to me personal i would not be amazed if it turns out that given the time and given the right scenario hitler would have acces to nukes, and iam pretty sure that IF he would have 1 or 2 nukes that he probably would have used them, and who knows what would have come from it.
But rumors, fact and fact based rumors there are loads of them and for the most part we can only guess whats true and whats wrong as not all details have been released about hitlers research levels as has been shown in the past, so who knows?
But iam sure that the guys on this forum can come up with some nice info as some of them have acces to real data.

Cheers

 

[swerve]

Germany never managed to accumulate enough fissile material for a bomb.

German efforts were fragmented, with the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe & SS running competing programmes, none of them adequately resourced. The main project, the one for which Werner Heisenberg was the chief physicist, was working along the wrong track, as Heisenberg realised only in mid-August 1945, when interned in Britain, & he heard about the Hiroshima bomb. We can't say when or if he'd have realised if it hadn't been for that revelation, which depended on the prior existence of the Hiroshima bomb, & the discovery that its critical mass was orders of magnitude smaller than Heisenberg & his team had previously assumed. They'd assumed that tons of U235 were needed. The scale of that error shows how far they were from having the understanding needed to make a workable bomb.

The leading German team was less advanced in their understanding of how to make a bomb in 1945 than the British were in 1941, when they already had a good idea of the necessary critical mass, due to a superior understanding of the fast neutron chain reaction.

Note that there was no serious attempt to build up the stock of tons of U235 that Heisenbergs mistaken calculations said were needed for a bomb. Nor were experiments carried out to verify his calculations. Graphite rather than heavy water as a moderator was mistakenly dismissed for a long time, due to failure to conduct thorough experiments, & the shortage of heavy water made it impractical to build a heavy water reactor .

They had a better understanding of the critical mass of plutonium, but there was no significant progress towards making any.

Germany had the technical & scientific resources, but they were poorly applied. There was no urgency, largely because the task was seen as even more difficult than it was in reality.

None of the other projects were ever going to get anywhere. Theoretical papers by people with no resources to test their ideas do not make a bomb.

 

[defenestrator]

No.

It is a contentious issue and if Germany did develop the bomb an even bigger question than how did they do it is why didn't they use it, or did they?

I read a book earlier this year (Hitler's uranium club : the secret recordings at Farm Hall / by Jeremy Bernstein) which claimed to be based on interviews of Nazi scientists taken to England. The big clue: when they saw coverage of the bombing of Hiroshima they couldn't believe it!

According to that book, the German scientists were well behind the allied effort. While it is common knowledge that discoveries by German physicists in the 1930s first suggested the possibility of an atomic weapon, there were a couple of decisions made by the Germans that sent them down the wrong track, and they were, IIRC, still working on those dead-end areas when Berlin fell.

Of course, it didn't help matters that they were getting bombed, etc (that was a major problem for the Japanese nuclear program, apparently), and because of their lack of success funding was diverted to higher priority areas.

Without having read Karlsch's book (I took German for a year at Massey, but all I remember is that the gender for 'shotgun' is female), I would be very skeptical of the claim that Germany had successfully tested/developed/built a working nuclear weapon of any type; anything beyond a proof-of-concept demonstration does not fit with my knowledge of the facts.

 

[swerve]

It's not 'claimed'. It really is based on those recordings, as are some other books. And the most interesting parts aren't the interviews (except for the light they throw on the attitudes of the German scientists), but the secret recordings. Every room was bugged, & every word recorded, & the Germans didn't know. A great deal was learned about the Nazi atom bomb project from those recordings.

You can buy translations of the raw, unedited transcripts -

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520084993/theatomicarchive"]Amazon.com: Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts (9780520084995): Charles Frank: Books@@AMEPARAM@@http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71NS69CBPWL.@@AMEPARAM@@71NS69CBPWL[/ame]

 

[defenestrator]

It's not 'claimed'

Just being careful...with so much hyperbole and flat-out bollocks on the 'net, you should never discourage people from acknowledging the limitations of what they 'know'

 

[SABRE]

I doubt Germany even came close to having the bomb.

Academically correct. Most experts (scientists and scholars) are of this view. So am I.

One major reason could be that German generals probably failed to grasp the idea and capability of an A-Bomb. Their orientation was conventional and objective was wide area (geographic) conquest. So they might have convinced Hitler to put more resources into reach then firepower - hence the V2 missiles.

The American generals had the same issues, even after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It were the scientists who knew what it could do and convinced the FDR on it.

I think if Hitler had been convinced by his scientists we would have seen some slave labor Jewish scientists in Germany. Eisenstein amongst them.

 

[weasel1962]

Re:

It was only in 1942 that scientists enjoyed the eureka moment with fission chain reaction. There was concern over the public publication which went ahead anyway but no one in Germany picked it up.

In any case Germany was heading in the wrong direction with the focus on heavy water instead of graphite. It took Fermi to demo in US that graphite based nuclear chain reactions could be sustained on a large scale.

Nuclear Chemistry - First Chain Reaction(1942)

Germany would have to replicate too many eureka moments before a weapon could be functional. Add that to the constant aerial targeting of nuclear facilities, it thankfully never materialised.

 

[Beatmaster]

I agree with the posts above, however do not forget the germans did have Heisenberg who could be seen as one of the capable persons to comeup with a credible blueprint.
German physicists realized that if they constructed a nuclear reactor, it would make plutonium, a substitute bomb fuel for U-235, which was hellishly hard to separate from natural uranium. Yet Heisenberg downplayed hopes of making a bomb and asked Speer for a paltry few million marks for research. His bomb program coasted. Overseeing nuclear research was merely a means for Heisenberg to rehabilitate himself,
Nazi fanatics had called him a "white Jew" because of his links with Einstein's physics.

Anyway this link is a nice read: The UnMuseum - Nazi Atomic Bomb

 

[GermanHerman]

I agree with the posts above, however do not forget the germans did have Heisenberg who could be seen as one of the capable persons to comeup with a credible blueprint.

And don't forget that heisenberg was terrified by the idea or nuclear weapons and was dreaming about a world where all scientists would refuse to develop such a weapon...

There were far more people in germany who did their best to keep the nazis from winning the war than the clique around staufenberg, and although i'm not aware of any sources prooving heisenberg to be one of them, there are quite some showing that he didn't WANT to actualy build a nuclear bomb.

 

[Kiwikid]

Exactly Germany may have been aware of the technology, but they had there funds in other toys like the V2, and ME-262's, Other Jet aircraft, helicopters and even flying saucers, here is proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWribWayTns

and other wonderful weapons bought to you by the wonderwaffe. The point is these weapons were realistically to be achieved and be of use to Germany, while Nuclear weapons would require a massive amount of time and funds to build, and Germany was running short on both.

In actual fact the Nazis funded their V-2 production at Nordhausen through privatising Elektro Mechanishe Werke and selling their technology to AEG which was 80% owned by GEC. General Electric raised loans on Wall Street to fund an Osram lamp factory in Brazil but 90% of the capital was diverted to AEG via Lisbon and Switzerland.

They had more time than the Allies did. The Heereswaffenamt convened the second Uranverin in September 1939 and set it on the task of developing a German A-bomb.

The Manhattan project cost nearly $2 billion because firstly it was two projects not one. One for a Uranium Bomb and another for a Plutonium Bomb.

The second point is that the Uranium enrichment method used by Manhattan was archaic gaseous diffusion and cyclotrons. It consumed ten percent of all electricity in USA during 1944. Germany developed centrifuge technology which was thirty times more efficient than Gaseous Difusion.

According to Farm Hall transcripts, Harteck estimated had they used the Clusius Dickel process (Thermal diffusion) earlier in the war they would have been producing 3000kg of enriched Uranium annually.

Instead as Harteck, Diebner and Gerlach all pointed out in Farm Hall transcripts they opted for the more complex path of centrifuges, isotope sluices and photochemical separation.

Photochemical separation incidentally is the forerunner of laser enrichment which today makes centrifuges almost obsolete.

 

[Kiwikid]

I agree with the posts above, however do not forget the germans did have Heisenberg who could be seen as one of the capable persons to comeup with a credible blueprint.

German physicists realized that if they constructed a nuclear reactor, it would make plutonium, a substitute bomb fuel for U-235, which was hellishly hard to separate from natural uranium.

Yet Heisenberg downplayed hopes of making a bomb and asked Speer for a paltry few million marks for research. His bomb program coasted. Overseeing nuclear research was merely a means for Heisenberg to rehabilitate himself,

Nazi fanatics had called him a "white Jew" because of his links with Einstein's physics.
Anyway this link is a nice read: The UnMuseum - Nazi Atomic Bomb

Well no...

Tactical nukes invented by Schumann/Trinks used small quantities of Uranium 233 at their core (Plutonium according to another patent) Gerlach headed a project for Heereswaffenamt called Projekt Thor in which Heinz Ewald used mass spectrometers to enrich small quantities of Thorium 232 into Uranium 233.

An exiled former Nazi scientist Hans Lintner from Argentina claimed that during WW2 Germany produced 15 mini-nukes two of which he says were captured by the Soviets.

Heisenberg was actually one of the obstacles and the real drivers were Diebner, Gerlach and Harteck. Heisenberg headed the Kaiser Wilhem Institute's civil teams spread over several university campus. The HWA was a duplicated military effort later taken over by the SS in July 1944.

You refer to the meeting at Harnak Haus in July 1942 where Heisenberg was promoting an atomic weapons project and was seeking funding from the military. Heisenberg was ridiculously modest in his funding requests true, but he was ardently in favour of developing the bomb according to the unpublished memoirs of Air Marshal Erhard Milch. Heisenberg told Milch that a bomb would only be as big as a pineapple.

Perhaps the funding request was modest because he was talking about the proposed mini nuke and not a full blown project ?

The Schumann/Trinks bomb was the subject of laboratory work at Grief near Peenemunde.

 

[Kiwikid]

Germany never managed to accumulate enough fissile material for a bomb.

German efforts were fragmented, with the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe & SS running competing programmes, none of them adequately resourced. The main project, the one for which Werner Heisenberg was the chief physicist, was working along the wrong track, as Heisenberg realised only in mid-August 1945, when interned in Britain, & he heard about the Hiroshima bomb. We can't say when or if he'd have realised if it hadn't been for that revelation, which depended on the prior existence of the Hiroshima bomb, & the discovery that its critical mass was orders of magnitude smaller than Heisenberg & his team had previously assumed. They'd assumed that tons of U235 were needed. The scale of that error shows how far they were from having the understanding needed to make a workable bomb.

Incorrect ...

As mentioned previously wwhen quizzed by Erhard Milch in 1942 at Harnack Haus, Heisenberg said the bomb would only need be the size of a Pineapple. Heisenberg hammed it up post war to try an appear innocent of war crimes.

Late in 1941 Heisenberg had read a paper by Houtermanns which correctly identified critical mass for both 235U and 239Pu.*

*(Houtermanns, “Zer Frage der Auslosung” (Nov 1941) pp 31,33 (Oak Ridge G-94, pp.139)

The leading German team was less advanced in their understanding of how to make a bomb in 1945 than the British were in 1941, when they already had a good idea of the necessary critical mass, due to a superior understanding of the fast neutron chain reaction.

see Houtermanns report cited above.

[/QUOTE]
Note that there was no serious attempt to build up the stock of tons of U235 that Heisenbergs mistaken calculations said were needed for a bomb. [/QUOTE]

incorrect... serious funding was awarded to Dr Erich Bagge for mass production of his isotope sluice in April 1944 (465,000RM). Harteck built two uranium centrifuge plants, one at Celle and another underground at Kandern. The most serious plant was a photo-fission plant in Silesia under Projekt SS/1040.*

*photo-fission: B. Arakatsu, Y. Uemura, M. Sonoda, S. Shimizu, K. Kimura, and K. Muraoka: Paper "Photo-Fission of Uranium and Thorium Produced by the r-Rays of Lithium and Fluorine Bombarded with High Speed Protons," Proc.Phys.-Math. Soc.,Japan, 23, 440-445 (1941)

Nor were experiments carried out to verify his calculations. Graphite rather than heavy water as a moderator was mistakenly dismissed for a long time, due to failure to conduct thorough experiments, & the shortage of heavy water made it impractical to build a heavy water reactor .

The misconception here is that they needed Heavy water, or even nuclear reactors to manufacture Plutonium when Arakatsu had already discovered how to manufacture it by photo-fission in late 1941.

However Germany had more than one heavy water source in WW2:

1. Leuna Plant (IG Farben)
2. Kiel Plant (4km from city according to UP postwar press article 8 Aug 1945)
3. Hamburg plant (16km s/west of city according Stefan Strzelczyk Polish Kz camp survivor)
4. Merano plant (near Bolzano)

They had a better understanding of the critical mass of plutonium, but there was no significant progress towards making any.

Germany had the technical & scientific resources, but they were poorly applied. There was no urgency, largely because the task was seen as even more difficult than it was in reality.

None of the other projects were ever going to get anywhere. Theoretical papers by people with no resources to test their ideas do not make a bomb.

The Monsanto report written by Monsanto scientists Weinberg and Nordheim to A.H Compton of Manhattan project on state of Nazi nuclear science in WW2, Dated Nov 8 1945, National Archives, Records Group 371, page 2 said:

“Generally we would say their approach was in no wise inferior to ours; in some respects it was superior.”

At page three of the Monsanto report reflecting on the need to keep secret Nazi nuclear achievements:

“We must proceed therefore on the basis that anyone knowing what is in the German reports can establish a chain reaction provided he has sufficient materials... The time when others can establish a chain reaction is therefore no longer a matter of scientific research, but mostly a matter of procurement.”

 

[swerve]

Oh dear. Misrepresentation & invention.

Harteck was working on heavy water until 1943. He didn't even propose centrifuges until 1943, & was still experimenting at the end of the war.

You quote Erhard Milch, as if he was a reliable witness. Why?

Heisenberg reading a paper does not prove that he accepted its conclusions. BTW, have you read it? How's your German? The disputes over Heisenbergs calculations of critical mass are require one to believe either that he made one erroneous calculation, & never got it right until after the Hiroshima bomb, or that he made a roughly correct calculation, mentioned it to a few people then discarded it in favour of an erroneous one. We know for sure that he made the erroneous calculation: it's recorded, & he demonstrated it to his interned colleagues at Farm Hall. Why do you suggest that having got it right, he would then get it wrong? Are you suggesting that he was deliberately trying to sabotage the bomb project? If so, how is that consistent with your idea that his correct calculation (if it existed) was a positive contribution to a Nazi bomb?

BTW, consider the implications of Milch being right. Why did he not follow it up? Why did he pay no attention to such a critical project, only needing a lump of metal the size of a pineapple? Why didn't he notice that working assumptions contradicted what he had been told?

You cite a claim that the Germans actually made several tactical nuclear weapons. If so, why were they never used, nor found?

Can you explain why the project was scaled back from 1942, if it was so successful? Why was the number of scientists reduced? Why were resources diffused?

 

[boudrge]

question on Hans lintner

Hi, being very much interested by the possible german achievements during WW2 on nuclear weapons,I noticed your mentioning Hans Lintner ,an exile scientist in Argentina,about the 15 mininukes that Germany would have built. Can you give the reference or source? If that were true,it would give some weight to the rumours of such weapons being used at the Kursk battle,for example.

Then could you help me answering the following question: why did Germany send Uranium ore-by the then captured U-234 Uboot to Japan?
This brings me to my third question:
What do you think of the allégations/révélations on the socalled Japanese nuclear projects? <<<<<<of course, nothing can be dismissed,but I doubt very much that that went very far
as to your comments on Heisenberg's fervour for the bomb,I agree entirely with you.But of cours,as a pow,he played everything down


Thank you for your answers

Well no...

Tactical nukes invented by Schumann/Trinks used small quantities of Uranium 233 at their core (Plutonium according to another patent) Gerlach headed a project for Heereswaffenamt called Projekt Thor in which Heinz Ewald used mass spectrometers to enrich small quantities of Thorium 232 into Uranium 233.

An exiled former Nazi scientist Hans Lintner from Argentina claimed that during WW2 Germany produced 15 mini-nukes two of which he says were captured by the Soviets.

Heisenberg was actually one of the obstacles and the real drivers were Diebner, Gerlach and Harteck. Heisenberg headed the Kaiser Wilhem Institute's civil teams spread over several university campus. The HWA was a duplicated military effort later taken over by the SS in July 1944.

You refer to the meeting at Harnak Haus in July 1942 where Heisenberg was promoting an atomic weapons project and was seeking funding from the military. Heisenberg was ridiculously modest in his funding requests true, but he was ardently in favour of developing the bomb according to the unpublished memoirs of Air Marshal Erhard Milch. Heisenberg told Milch that a bomb would only be as big as a pineapple.

Perhaps the funding request was modest because he was talking about the proposed mini nuke and not a full blown project ?

The Schumann/Trinks bomb was the subject of laboratory work at Grief near Peenemunde.

 

[StobieWan]

I think you'll find that the OP hasn't logged in for almost three years so don't be holding your breath for a reply

Summary, as Swerve pointed out earlier was that Heisenberg and colleagues were recorded discussing the Hiroshima detonation after having been allowed to listen to the news reports. Unaware they were being recorded, Heisenberg seemed to believe that it might have been a "dirty" bomb - a sub critical release, and not a fission event - and he walked his colleagues through a very elegant calculation he'd obviously had in mind in terms of estimating the critical mass of uranium - which was wrong, and yielded a result of almost a ton. Given there was no way to get that much uranium to hand, nor any way to build a deliverable weapon from it, it's tempting to believe Heisenberg had decided early on in the project not to assign too much weight to the possibility of a workable physics package.

Tactical nukes at Kursk ? Gosh but that's an amusing concept. I suspect folk would have noticed, and I'm sure the battle would have played out a bit differently.

 

[Daryl]

Ran into posts of an apparent neo-nazi the other day who was a firm believer that Germany developed nuclear weapons and that after the war the US took over the stocks and tech. and used it to bomb Japan. I am of half a mind to believe that much of the pro data listed by some may be traceable to propaganda of this sort, created after the fact, with as many links as possible to actual events to make the fiction believable, if you don't look too closely.

The simple answer is that if Hitler, or his henchmen had a bomb, he would have used it. He had no qualms about mass death as he considered it as a testament to his power and the futility of resistance. The bombing of Rotterdam is just one example.

There is so much real documentation, (see swerve above for example), to say the German scientists had got it wrong. As a whole this argument holds together and explains the reality of events.

So what about the "sophisticated" programs? I have noticed that many of the secret weapons, (and even building projects), of the Nazis tended to be "flashy" with almost a science fiction like appeal. These were not always scientifically feasible, let alone prototype ready. The Allies used their engineering resources to make weapons using enhancements on existing technology because they wanted to win the war, (the Manhattan Project being an exception). This is not flashy engineering unless you find aircraft production figures for USA during the month of August, 1944, to be just as flashy as a Me jet fighter. I think the simple answer is that many German programs, with their "science fictionany" feel, appear to be partly, (even mostly in some cases), ego boosters, not realistic development projects. Of course, German High Command, (Hitler), was not the most realistic person so we should not be surprised. The funding for a lot of the things mentioned here is appropriate for "concept" projects.

 

[RobWilliams]

I'd lose count of all the programs that were being pumped out at the end of the war, but it's still very interesting just how advanced their thinking was in comparison to the rest of the world (in terms of concepts).

One of those things, if - perhaps - these weapons had been developed not during a time of war when things were looking very bleak and resource management had to be conducted carefully as it is and during a time of relative economic prosperity, imagine that. Course, brings rise the idea that they probably wouldn't have been developed anyway if they hadn't been in that situation.

Mostly a belief by Hitler (and that is still around today) that specific platforms can win wars rather than the bigger picture.

Some of the things though, it's a really interesting topic.