I just read in Roosevelt’s Centurions that when Szilard presented Einstein’s letter to FDR to built the atomic bomb, he mentioned that Germany had acquired Czechoslovakia’s uranium mines and had ceased exporting uranium.
So then why did Heisenberg have to fight tooth and nail with the Luftwaffe to acquire radioactive material for his experiments? The Luftwaffe wanted radium for glow in the dark aircraft instrumentation. There should have been plenty of radioactive material.
Because that was Germany’s only source of uranium, because it was mined by slave labor, which is horribly inefficient, and because Nazi Germany’s resource distribution and supply system was byzantine, irrational, and counterproductive. You had three major groups who needed the uranium; the bomb project, which hoped they could weaponize it, the Luftwaffe,who,like you said, needed it for plane dials, and the medical community, who needed it for nuclear imaging and radiation therapy.
Basically, supplies went to those organizations who could yell the loudest or who was in favor at the time.
I’d like to know more about this. Its probably buried in every thread about “Why Nazi Germany failed” – the war, this or that battle, etc. But I’d like to know who set up an archaic system, and why they didn’t improve it. Maybe I give the Nazis too much credit, but I feel like they were re-writing their society and culture, so I figured they could have fixed distribution problems.
I’d say its not so much giving the Nazis too much credit as it is not understanding what they were about. The Nazis caused these distribution problems and archaic system. Hitler was perfectly happy with, and encouraged, multiple organizations performing the same function and the creation of what was in effect fiefdoms of power at odds with each other. For example, the SA and the SS, eventually leading to the Night of the Long Knives which purged the SA of its leadership, though the organization itself continued to exist until the final fall of the Nazis in 1945.
To give another example, by the end of 1942 the German Army was increasingly desperate for manpower. Its division were chronically understrength as a result of the lack of replacements for casualties. This led eventually to a revision of the organization of Infantry Divisions to the 1943 pattern, which had 3 regiments each of 2 battalions rather than the older pattern of 3 regiments each of 3 battalions. In effect, divisions ‘lost’ 1/3 of their strength, but this was mostly an acceptance on paper of the facts already on the ground. At the same time that this was happening, the Luftwaffe was finding itself with an excess of manpower to the tune of 200-250,000 men. The logical thing to do would have been to transfer them to the Army, put them through basic infantry training and assign them as replacements to existing Army divisions. Being Nazi Germany this of course did not happen. Herman Goering wasn’t about to lose 250,000 men from his fiefdom, and instead, with Hitler’s blessing, proceeded to create 22 Luftwaffe Field Divisions from these men. Their performance in action was unsurprisingly horrible. The problem wasn’t the men, it was that they were trained and led by Luftwaffe officers who had no experience at all with infantry combat.
Oh, here’s another example, again a military one. In 1938, the Germans created the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), which was supposed to be the umbrella military agency that coordinated the armed forces, especially the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), the Army High Command.
Originally, the OKH had control over day to day war planning, but after the Battle of Moscow, Hitler put command over troops everywhere but the Russian front in the hands of the OKW, while the OKH kept command of the troops in Russia.
That meant that, for a unit to be sent from the Western Front to the Eastern Front or vice versa, it needed the signoff of both the OKW and OKH. And, since their was bad blood between the OKW and OKH, that led to delays. Plus, above that, each of the generals on the front had a direct line to Hitler, which meant that if they thought the OKW or OKH wasn’t listening to them, they’d go over their heads.
On top of that, the OKW had, on paper, oversight and supervisory control over both the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, but neither Goering or Doenitz had any interest in listening to army generals, so they didn’t.
Add to this the Waffen-SS, which was organized by the Nazi party. Waffen-SS units were equipped, trained, and led by a parallel organization in the SS, and while the Heer tended to have tactical command of most of them, there was also the Kommandostab Reichsfuehrer-SS, under Himmler, which exercised tactical control over most of them. And, of course, even the Waffen-SS units that were under operational control by the Heer could always go over the Heer’s head to Himmler and his staff.
Speer addressed the general issue of distribution of materials in his memoirs, “Inside the Third Reich.”
Basic point: a dictatorship is inherently inefficient. One person cannot run a country. That means the dictator has to delegate. That creates a second or even third level of decision-makers. (Goering, Himmler, etc).
But, since all power flows from the dictator, those second and third level don’t have any real power if their own. So if Goering wants radioactive materials for his Luftwaffe, and Himmler wants to develop a bomb, the only way to resolve the dispute is to have inter-bureaucratic squabbles, and may ultimately have Goering and Himmler go to the Fuehrer to resolve the dispute.
But they may not go together. Himmler might go by himself and accuse Goering of subverting Himmeler’s plans to build the master weapon that will win the war added with suggestions that Hitler can’t trust Goering and only Himmler is trustworthy.
Then Goering goes to Hitler and accuses Himmler of subverting the war effort with his cockamamie bomb plan, when the Luftwaffe has proved its worth and needs the radium. And why isn’t Himmler gung ho on keeping the planes flying? What’s his real goal here?
So then the question of efficient allocation of a limited resource gets lost in a vicious turf war between Himmler and Goering, which only Hitler can resolve, and he is more likely to do so for political reasons to keep Goering and Himmler balanced, than actually decide based on the efficient allocation of the resource.
Speer’s thesis was that a democracy under the rule of law was more efficient than a totalitarian dictatorship. The political actors in a democracy have defined roles, through democratic elections. Their authority is defined by law rather than the whims of one individual, and there is independent dispute resolution through the courts. It’s messy and complicated, but ultimately more efficient than a system of bureaucratic fiefdoms whose authority all comes from only one person.
Was Speer sucking up to democratic government in hopes of an early release?
People have a mental image of dictatorships as efficient, but the reality is that they tend to promote inefficiency. A leader like FDR or Churchill has an outside source of legitimacy due to being elected, while monarchs have a long tradition of legitimacy. Hitler didn’t have anything like that, he simply became the one in charge and continued to be in charge because people did what he said - technically there was a democratic process at the start, but it wasn’t considered legitimate by the people or by Hitler and company, and rapidly became a historical footnote.
Because he didn’t have an election or tradition to point to to say “this is why I’m the legitimate ruler”, he feared that some underling or power block would seize an opportunity to depose him. So he set things up so that everyone under him would be in conflict with each other and not have a chance to try to knock him out. Everyone needed to fight for their pet projects, and lines of authority were not often clear, and even when they were a higher-up could override them, priorities shifted based on who’s personal feifdom was in favor, and so on. This didn’t work very well at winning the war, making the economy really good, organizing society, or organizing a successor, but it worked extremely well at keeping Hitler in power until the war was completely lost and he killed himself.
Anyone who has worked for a mid-sized private company, especially in middle management, will be familiar with this scenario. With the traditional pyramid management structure, no manager wants an assistant capable of replacing [him] but they all measure each other’s worth by the size of their budget and the number of people under their control.
I am also reminded of the counter-productive conflicts between intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nope. Released from Spandau in 1966 after serving his full 20 year sentence. The Soviets opposed all applications for clemency.
“Inside the Third Reich” was published after his release, in 1969.
To a certain degree, yes, he was writing to his audiences expectations. You have to remember that almost all post-war German history books and memoirs went straight to the “It was all Hitlers fault” explanation.
Previous posters have given good answers to the inefficiencies in a government formed of fiefdoms. One thing that exacerbated a lot of these issues was the Nazi habit of placing political favorites in charge of technical institutions. The men in charge may have been competent, but there was a good chance that any particular man was not the best for the position or had even replaced the man who was best for the position. These jobs had been given out as rewards to party loyalists throughout the Reich era.
Can anyone verify if this vague memory is correct?
I seem to recall that the Germans miscalculated how much uranium they would need for a bomb (either by accident or a scientist intentionally trying to screw things up). As a result they thought they needed a lot more than they actually did suggesting they’d be even more keen to hoard all they could.
I don’t think so. Heisenberg managed to build a nuclear pile at a college, as was done at a university in Chicago, so I believe he would have had at least a ball park answer.
My digression for this post: Heisenberg and a student thought the pile was going to become critical, and ran out of the building. They stopped on the stairs because they realized they could not outrun the radiation, even if it didn’t explode. There was only a fire, and he lived to be uncertain about things.
As discussed in this paper (a pdf), the interwar period had seen a substantial downturn in production from the Czech uranium mines, as they were undercut by new sources of supply elsewhere, most famously in the Congo. Those that were still operating were doing so at a loss and were often still open only as an adjunct to supplying spa water.
The result was that, by 1940 at least, these were not the obvious source of uranium ore for the Germans. Because by that stage they’d seized Belgium and thus the Union Minière stockpiles there, most notably at Olen. It was far more practical to utilise that under the circumstances than to bother ramping up Czech production.
It’s worth noting that German wartime demand for uranium went far beyond their nuclear projects and instrument dials. Not only were people already beginning to experiment with the metal in armour piercing shells, the ore had become a commonplace industrial commodity with multiple applications.
Postwar, the Soviets do immediately expand the Czech supply. But that’s because they were cut off from the Congolese supplies and this was the obvious known source within their sphere of influence. They were also giving the matter a much higher priority than the Germans had.
They did however fairly quickly then find sources within the USSR itself, solving the problem for them.
I found this (bolding mine):
I have read that he didn’t believe the Americans could build it.
He had his equipment in a truck fleeing the front lines. He was using paraffin as a moderator.
That and the lab fire is about all I know.