I was doing some reading about the manhattan project, and i am still amazed bow how VAST that project was…it employed thousands of engineers and scientists, and cost billions of dollars. Of course. the USA had enormous resources, and we could afford to fund several parallel paths to the bomb-we developed the Uranium bomb and the plutonium bomb in the same time frame. I don’t believe that the Germans had but a tiny fraction of the resources wehad…so how far did they get? As far as I know, they attemptede to build an atomic reactor (to make plutonium)…however, the reactor design was wrong, and it probably would nebver have worked. The germans had a good scientific team-Prof. Heisenburg headed the group, and he was as able as Fermi or Openheimer in the US. Germany also had plenty of uranium (in Czechoslovakia), and thousands of slave laborers. My question; we the germans on track to make a practical bomb? Or had they made so many mistakes that they would never have gotten there?
I understand that Heisenburg claimed (after the war) that he was an anti-nazi, and purposefully sabotaged the project…is this true?
Finally, would Hitler have hesitated to use an A-bomb on london or Moscow? 
Not really sure how far they got, but the allies did succeed in disrupting the German production of heavy water required for their nuclear program.
Taken fromhere.
And yes, I’m sure Hitler would have had no qualms about nuking London or Moscow.
This site states that the allies felt they started the war a long way behind the Germans when it came to developing nuclear weapons, but doesn’t say how far they really got.
He wouldn’t have seen any moral problem but keep in mind the he decided not to use his arsenal of state-of-the-art nerve gas. Reportedly he wanted to avoid an allied retaliation with similar weapons. Probably he would have used any weapon as long as the risk of a counterstrike could be managed, but certainly not automatically.
Good point Kellner. Yes, we can’t be certain. However, given that Hitler reportedly said “the German people have failed me”, and kept Germany fighting long past the point where defeat was certain, he probably would have been willing to risk obliteration to deploy a weapon which might have won the war. Whereas use of nerve gas could never have been decisive.
Also, IIRC wasn’t Hitler’s revulsion towards gas attacks a result of his experiences in the trenches of WW1? Or is that anecdotal?
Site of the “Atomic Cellar” museum in the town of Haigerloch, near Tübingen. The German nuclear research programme ended up there, in the former beer cellar of the Schwanen inn. Visiting the small museum for the first time I wondered: so that’s what the fear of drove the Manhattan Project?
They got a small subcritical reactor running by April 1945.
According to the museum’s site there was a meeting in February 1942 where Heisenberg was asked if he could produced a working weapon within 9 months. He answered in the negative (of course. That timescale was not achievable), and following that nuclear research was transferred from the military research department to the general research council.
It’s not inconceivable that the Nazi leadership thought at the time that nine months later the war against the Soviet Union would be won anyway…
There is a book called, I believe, The German Atomic Bomb.
Heisenberg was flleing the US army with his experimental material in a truck.
They were using paraffin as a moderator.
When they were captured and told that the Americans had used nuclear weapons on Japan, they did not believe it.
That’s about all I remember.
I had a textbook written by him in Graduate School. 
Here’s another couple of sites on German atomic bomb designs and programs.
Oddly enough…according to the last sites, as well as a couple of others I’ve found, one experimental reactor actually exploded in 1942. (But it wasn’t a nuclear explosion, of course.)
By any measure, the German project was nowhere near producing a bomb. Indeed the major, messy controversy in the 60 years since has been entirely about why they failed quite so badly.
One obvious bottom line is that by 1945 they weren’t even building a reactor capable of achieving criticality - by contrast, Fermi had done that by December 1942. Even then, the US reactor was understood as only one step in the process of building a weapon. It’s not even clear that the Germans understood this. (Though it can be argued that a power generating U-boat reactor may have seemed a more sensible target than a bomb in wartime Germany.) They also clearly hadn’t grasped the potential of plutonium as bomb-making material. Nothing at all in the way of actual bomb designs was ever started by them. For whatever reason, they had got nowhere.
To summarise the historiography of the subsequent debate about explaining this, the first round was prompted by Samuel Goudsmit’s memoir Alsos (1947). This was the name of the Manhatten Project’s intelligence mission following up the Allied advances into Europe in order to establish how far the Germans had got, on which he’d been the chief scientific officer. (The military leader, Boris Pash, later wrote his own, less interesting, account The Alsos Mission in 1969.) Goudsmit developed the argument that the German project had failed because totalitarianism is the enemy of good science. Aside from in this particular case, that thesis has been much argued about by historians of science in the decades since.
Goudsmit also suggested that Heisenberg had screwed up the physics. The two of them had regarded each others as peers before the war and this allegation led to a complex public and private debate between them. Eventually, they basically agreed to differ. (There’s a Physics Today article in the 90s by Mark Walker that goes through this correspondence.)
Then in 1956, the German journalist Robert Jungk published Brighter Than A Thousand Suns, a history of the development of the bomb. Jungk was openly anti-nuclear and the book is centrally concerned with the morality of what the Manhatten Project did. His neat counterpoint to Oppenheimer and the boys triumphantly succeeding is the suggestion that Heisenberg had moral qualms and so the German project failed because he didn’t want it to succeed. Jungk had had access to Heisenberg and latter certainly didn’t contradict the suggestion, but he didn’t explicitly admit to it either.
The final person to interview Heisenberg on the subject was unfortunately David Irving, for The Virus House (1967). His apologetic angle was that the project was unfeasible under the circumstances and so the Nazis were being rational in sidelining it. None of Goudsmit’s suggestion that Nazis couldn’t do good science because they’re Nazis.
Slightly earlier, the debate had taken a twist with the publication of Now It Can Be Told (1962) by General Leslie Groves. While mainly concerned with the Manhatten Project, he devotes a surprising amount of space to Alsos and the Germans. The usual suggestion is that Groves, an engineer, actually fancied himself as a field commander and so played up the one time he actually got to send a unit out. He largely follows Goudsmit, but crucially revealed that the Allies recorded the German physicists captured by Alsos. Pretty much everyone since has hoped to use these Farm Hall tapes to end the debate. The problem initially was that these weren’t available, apart from the quotations in Groves.
Various minor angles apart, this was how things remained until Mark Walker published German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939-1949 in 1989. He very nicely went back through the whole debate and came up with the “well, it was largely a bit of everything” interpretation. Then David Cassidy produced his excellent biography of Heisenberg Uncertainty (1992). What’s very good about it is that it finally provides the biographical context for assessing both Heisenberg’s actions at the time and his varying postwar explanations. One can follow how Heisenberg’s attitudes shift from year to year. By filling in Heisenberg’s other wartime research interests, it makes it clear that Heisenberg may simply often not have been interested in reactor research. In neither Walker or Cassidy does he emerge as the moral beacon that Jungk suggested.
At about this stage, Jungk let it be known that he’d changed his mind about Heisenberg’s wartime record.
Oddly then, what really grabbed media attention on the subject was Thomas Powers’ Heisenberg’s War in 1993. At heart this is just the Junck thesis resurrected, though with a mass of well-argued surrounding material. Personally, I think that while it’s a fascinating book, the central point turns on evidence that’s just too thin and arguable.
But Powers became the basis for Michael Frayn’s hit play Copenhagen. I like Frayn and it has to be said it does work as an evening in the theatre, but it’s not history. The published version of the play has a postscript with his discussion of the debate and I actually find that more persuasive that the text itself.
Powers had been able to make use of the release by the UK of the full Farm Hall reports in 1992 following pressure from an eminent array of British physicists and historians. These were then published in editions by both Charles Frank and Jeremy Bernstein. There and elsewhere, the latter has tended to go for the Heisenberg made a physics error version.
That’s also the line taken by Paul Lawrence Rose in Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project (1998), which is the most recent major book length treatment of the subject. (John Cornwall’s Hitler’s Scientists, which came out last year, devotes much space to Heisenberg, but I don’t think it’s based on new research.)
I’ve omitted plenty of writers who’ve touched on the topic and also the sub-genre of amateur researchers putting forward bonkers interpretations.
In the absence of major new archival material (which could happen) I suspect the debate has largely run its course. Personally, I find Cassidy the best account, at least on the question of what was motivating Heisenberg. And that motivation was complex, compromised and changable. He wasn’t a Nazi, but there may have been times when he strongly wanted them to win the war and he certainly didn’t want Germany to lose it.
Were the members of the German “Manhattan” project ever threatened by the Nazis? I can imagine somebody like heinrich Himmler attending a meeting and saying something like this:
“Herr Doktor Heisenberg, we have given you 50,000,000 Reichsmarks, and you HAVE NO BOMB??”
(Heisenberg) Herr General, we have no more heavy water, it is necessary to have more!
(Himmler): If you do NOT have a bomb by August, you and your friends will haff a one-way ticket to Dachau!"
I can’t imagine anything worse than to be the head of some Nazi-sponsored research program…I imagine the fate (of those whofailed) was quite unpleasant! :eek:
Remember that prior to the war, most of the world’s leading physicists worked out of offices at the Gottingen or Berlin University.
Fear of the Nazis drove literally dozens of them to the United States between 1937 and 1939; Germany could have retained a sizeable number of the scientists who made the Manhattan Project possible if it had been a little more circumspect about the Jews.
Actually, this sort of pressure never seems to have been imposed. Indeed I can’t think of any case in the Third Reich where someone in a non-combat role was punished in this way merely for failing to achieve a target. (By contrast, Stalin readily condemned aparachiks to the gulags or the firing squad for their inability to deliver. The famous story is him preparing two sets of orders for the outcome of the first Soviet nuclear test: in one set, the physicists get showered with honours, in the other they get executed.) Aside from the obvious categories, what got you sent to Dachau was expressing anti-Nazi actions or opinions.
Throughout the Nazi atomic project, it had at least the broad endorsement of the likes of Himmler, Bormann and Speer. The resources involved weren’t great and there was no real expectation that it would make any difference to the course of the war. So there was no great pressure to deliver. Also they were formally reporting to Army Ordnance, which I’d imagine was one of the less ideological organisations in the government.
There was a life-threatening pressure on the programme, but that was indirect. Unless you could convince the heirarchy that your project was important, there was always the danger that you’d be drafted and sent to the Eastern Front. This was less of a threat to the likes of Heisenberg (though he had done a stint in uniform under the Nazis), but it was a significant pressure on the younger scientists involved. It can be argued that Heisenberg and others responded to this pressure by talking up the importance of what they were doing in order to protect colleagues. There was a rather blanket ban from on-high preventing the drafting of research scientists, but there are also cases where this failed to prevent them being enlisted.
Heisenberg had had a run-in with the SS in 1938 over the issue of teaching “Jewish physics”, but, while dangerous at the time, he’d managed to secure a clean “bill-of-health” from Himmler.
Heisenberg was only part of the civilian Uranium project and was quite peripheral to the Atomic bomb project of German Army Ordnance (Heereswaffenamt). In any case the German atomic bomb project was more secretive than the Uranium project and all these were taken over in August 1944 by the SS.
The SS and Heereswaffenamt pursued a totally different line of logic from the Manhattan project, deciding on a technologically smarter approach.
First step of the Nazi approach was to obtain fissile bomb material not by enriching Uranium 235, but by transmuting Thorium 232 into Uranium 233 using artificial radiation sources (eg van der graff generators, cyclotrons and synchrotrons)
Second step was a nuclear weapon design which two scientists Schumann and Trinks developed from 1942 to 1943 using Uranium 233 for which they made 42 applications for wartime patents in Germany. These patents came to light in 2005 when published by the German author Rainer Karlsch.
The Schumann Trinks atomic weapon was a small tactical nuclear weapon with a mere 0.5 kiloton yield and a 1000 metre blast radius.
It used the concept of explosively crushing/compressing molten Lithium with a small mass of Uranium 233 coated by Lithium-6 Deuteride. That caused a flash of radiation called a Plasma pinch which saturated the Uranium with fast neutrons sufficient to replicate the effect of critical mass.
After the war a German scientist Karl Diebner went to the United States and taught US scientists how to miniaturise nuclear weapons and to increase the yield of the type IV Nagasaki bomb.
Nazi Germany did not have the financial or industrial resources of the Manhattan Project but really did not need to because they had a less expensive more technologically elegant concept.
Ironically in 1942 Enrico Fermi tried to persuade the Manhattan project to adopt the Nazi approach of an external plasma pinch but the Manhattan Committee declined because it was too challenging.
The retaliation would have been with Lewisite gas, a persistent gas similar to mustard gas, but more deadly. Nerve Gasses are pretty good for clearing a gap in the lines, but they are not that good for killing a city. The UK had huge reserves of Lewisite.
Who won the war?
I talked to physicists who reviewed the Nazi bomb plans after the war. They had worked on the Manhattan Project and had a thorough knowledge of our nuclear weapons program. They didn’t think the Germans were anywhere near producing an atomic weapon, nor that they even knew how. It took big steps between theory and application for us, and the Nazis hadn’t made anything like that kind of investment in their own program. Interestingly, they thought there were always some things never shown to them. I got the impression they thought we might be secretly harboring a Nazi physicist, or that we knew that the Soviets were. But they summed it up by saying that even though they were seriously worried during the war that the Germans might develop something, they were fully relieved at the end to find out they were no where close. Some of them were also disappointed that we dropped atomic bombs on Japan. Many of the people working on the Manhattan project thought that the only reason for the project was the threat of Germany developing a bomb before we did, and once they were defeated we never should have continued development of the weapons or used them. It was easy to point out that the Soviets would have their own nuclear weapons before long, but they had a feeling of betrayal anyway.
Has this method been successfully tried by any Nuclear Power since?
Username/post win.
I’m not sure, but I’m curious. I know the military loves their tactical options. Certainly there’s been further research, but who knows? Especially if it’s classified.
iNukes™ 20 megatons in your pocket!
Werner von Braun got hassled by the Gestapo and pt in prison for a few weeks for “defeatism”, and because they didn’t think his heart was in the rocket program (and because Himmler was playing political games), but Dornberger and Speer managed to get him out.
That is not the question -
Germany successfully test blasted the first nuclear weapon at least as early as 12 October 1944 on the Bug isthmus of Rugen. There are also declassified MAGIC decrypts of Japanese diplomatic signals from Europe talking about a German “Uranium atom smashing” bomb being used as early as June 1943.
The real question is not who won but why Germany lost, but I doubt many people are interested in the truth…
The German Atomic bomb worked by crushing together two opposed hollow charges with Lithium liner against a small mass of Uranium 233 coated in Lithium-6 Deuteride inside a vacuum cavity formed by the two Lithium cups.
In effect the German atomic bomb was sparked by a thermo nuclear ignition of a fissile mass.
The crushing of Lithium and Deuterium sparked what is called a deuteron beam (aka plasma pinch) which saturated a small mass of U233 with such a high neutron flux that it replicated the effect of a larger critical mass.
Enrico Fermi proposed the same Thermonuclear Plasma Pinch concept to the Manhattan Project in 1942 but the Compton Committee rejected this as too technologically challenging for the United States.
Germany’s nuclear weapon was technologically much smarter and cheaper than the Manhattan Project’s weapons. The Manhattan Project swallowed up 10% of USA’s entire electrical power grid and 2 billion dollars. By mid 1943 Germany had the Uranium ultracentrifuge which was 30 times more efficient than the porous barrier diffusion enrichment at Oak Ridge, so in a sense US tax payers lost because they paid for an unnecessarily expensive and inefficient bomb project
The war ended by a still secret negotiated peace deal between Washington and the SS, note… not with Hitler. Proof of this is the CSDIC evidence filed against Maj General Dornberger at Nuremberg trials which mention these secret peace negotiations in Lisbon during 1944.
Also German Armaments Minister Albert Speer was questioned by the British at Nuremberg Trials about German Atomic Bomb tests at Ohrdruf Concentration camp in March 1945.
And of further note the European Union and the single European currency (Euro), free trade and globally recognised patent rights were all things Hitler was seeking so in one sense the Nazis won because global capitalism and free trade was the Nazi objective in 1939,
History books about WW2 have been written from an American perspective concealing the true facts of how close Germany came to winning the war with nuclear weapons.
http://www.uboat.net/forums/read.php?3,33712,33784,quote=1
2.5m SW of Owl’s Head Maine there is the submerged wreckage of a six engined Junkers aircraft which came down there about 17/18 September 1944. Ten days later the US Coast Guard recovered the bodies of three Luftwaffe aviators from the estuary of Penobscot River. This crash was covered up because it was actually a failed attempt to bomb New York in 1944.
The truth about Germany’s atomic bomb can’t be found in the history books but is gradually coming to light from declassified wartime files.