Well did it?
Nope.
They did research, but it didn’t get far.
Thanks for a factual answer.
From the wiki page:
atomic energy development in Germany did not pass beyond the laboratory stage; utilization for power production rather than for an explosive was the principal consideration; and, though German science was interested in this new field, other scientific objectives received greater official attention.[98]
In terms of financial and human resources, the comparisons between the Manhattan Project and the Uranverein are stark. The Manhattan Project consumed some US$2 billion (1945, ~US$27 billion in 2023 dollars) in government funds, and employed at its peak some 120,000 people, mostly in the sectors of construction and operations. In total the Manhattan Project involved the labor of some 500,000 people, nearly 1% of the entire US civilian labor force.[99] By comparison, the Uranverein was budgeted a mere 8 million reichsmarks, equivalent to about US$2 million (1945,~US$27 million in 2023 dollars) – a thousandth of the American expenditure.
It is worth adding, I think, that Germany did produce heavy water which was necessary for the production of plutonium. It was a plant in Norway which the Germans captured when they invaded.
The allies made several attempts to destroy the plant and eventually succeeded.
The transcripts from Operation Epsilon provide some very interesting context about the German efforts:
HEISENBERG: I don’t believe a word of the whole thing. They must have spent the whole of
their ₤500,000,000 in separating isotopes; and then it’s possible.
(Got the order of magnitude right. That’s what they did.)
WEIZSÄCKER: I don’t think it has anything to do with uranium.
HARTECK: Or using mass-spectrographs in enormous quantities. It is perhaps possible for a
mass-spectrograph to make one milligram in one day – say of ‘235’. They could make quite
a cheap mass-spectrograph which, in very large quantities, might cost a hundred dollars.
You could do it with a hundred thousand mass-spectrographs.
(That too, more or less. The electromagnetic separators used coils made from silver that they borrowed from the US Treasury)
HEISENBERG: On the other hand, the whole heavy water business which I did everything I
could to further cannot produce an explosive.
HARTECK: Not until the engine is running.
HAHN: They seem to have made an explosive before making the engine and now they say:
“in future we will build engines”.
(Also true. The first working nuclear power plants didn’t arrive for about a decade. Bombs are easier than plants.)
The key point from this is they’d never worked out the key calculation that made nuclear weapons possible, namely that you could use enriched uranium to produce a bomb from grams of nuclear material not tons (there was also a passage where they postulated the Americans must have brought the bomb to the target by ship as it must have been so large IIRC).
This calculation was first made in the UK by two German Jewish scientists who’d fled the Nazis, and that’s what triggered the British and then American atomic bomb projects.
Kilograms, not grams. Little Boy used 64 kg of enriched uranium. I’m not sure if Heisenberg, etc. had realized by the time of Operation Epsilon that they didn’t need so much.
There were even several films (of greater or lesser historical veracity)and one miniseries about it:
The Heroes of Telemark (with Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris!)
Kampen om tungtvannet (The Heavy Water War: Stopping Hitler’s Atomic Bomb)
Stranger
Worth noting. All of the discussion by the German scientists was about uranium bombs. On that they were dead right. This was essentially a dead end. What wasn’t appreciated was that plutonium bombs were the answer and the US had pivoted to them reasonably early in the project. Fissile plutonium can be created at scale, whereas enrichment of uranium to bomb levels is slow and expensive. Still works if all a rogue nation wants is a few simple nukes to scare the neighbours, but never viable beyond that.
The US only made 5 Little Boy uranium based weapons, and used one. As opposed to say 60,000 plutonium bombs.
Plutonium is extraction is a (horrid) chemical process. Vastly easier than the exacting mass separation techniques for uranium enrichment. Especially when you need very high concentrations of the fissile isotope. Hanford produced the plutonium for pretty much the entire US arsenal. If the arsenal’s weapons were based on uranium the arsenal would have, at best, reached about one hundredth the size by now, assuming continuous production for the last 70+ years.
Whilst plutonium weapons are significantly more difficult to design and make work, there are good reasons that there is significant worldwide resistance to any idea of using plutonium for reactors for power production. Diverting fuel to nefarious uses is just too easy.
Also Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen
To answer the OP: of course not. If they had them, they would have used them.
No, but they were working on it and would have been successful at some point. I must actually thank Hitler - yes, you heard that right! - for being the horrible military leader that he was. The two horrible mistakes he made in not finishing off England and in starting the second front against the USSR ensured defeat in a timely manner. Had they gotten jet fighters into the air and developed nuclear weapons before us, the results could have been catastrophic.
He had a knack that was almost instinctual for tearing down Democracy and replacing it with a fascist dictatorship. He was good at stirring up the worst dregs of hateful, bigoted populism to his advantage. Despite the fact that he had previously failed at just about every one of his endeavors, somehow he even convinced some of the more moderate members of the populace that he was the answer to their problems, and to support him as well. But he was a terrible politician and military decision-maker, and started buying his own snake-oil salesmanship. He eventually began to succumb to the trappings of dictatorship and became trapped in an echo-chamber bubble of obsequious toadies who only told him what he wanted to hear. So as a result, he would eventually fail at his most terrible ambitions.
Oh wait, this is the Nazi-Nuke thread. Yeah, Hitler was a bad guy, too.
nevermind
Worth noting that some of the scientists who might have been able to help the Nazis develop nuclear technology had fled or forced to leave.
Leo Szilard was a Hungarian Jew. Lucky for all of us that Hitler had no use for him or his ilk.
Well they managed one of those at least.
One story I’ve heard is that Americans questioned the captured German scientists about the nuclear research they had done but then the questioning tapered off. The scientists assumed this meant that their work was so advanced the Americans didn’t understand how important it was.
Then the scientists heard the news about Hiroshima and retroactively realized that the reason the Americans had stopped questioning them was because they were so far ahead of the Germans that they didn’t see them as a source of useful information.
In hindsight, I’m guessing the Nazis simply didn’t realize how utterly important nukes are. This was a regime that was perfectly happy to splurge big money on all kinds of experimental weapons, after all. If they’d truly grasped the ramifications of what it meant to have nukes, they’d have made it the No. 1 priority of the regime, bar none. Imagine if they’d taken all that money/resources spent on Holocaust-ing and Messerchmitt-ing and put it into a Manhattan-Projekt, perhaps even before invading Poland.
I think that original missed calculation, that Frisch and Peierls made in the UK and was never repeated in Germany had a lot to do with that. If you think an atomic bomb is not possible without tons of fissile material then you aren’t going to consider atomic weapons as a feasible war winning weapon.
It also says a lot about how dysfunctional the upper echelons of the Nazi regime were. There was no one in charge with the knowledge to make these calls, just Hitler with his fantasies about “vengeance weapons” whichever toady he spoke to last. The rockets won, and got funded, as they sounded and looked cool, and could be demonstrated (even though everyone who knew about such things knew they were never going to be accurate enough to actual make a strategic difference to the war beyond blowing up random buildings in the south of England)