I came upon this website, and I was blown away…I knew that Germany was developing high powered rockets (aside from the existing V2), but had no idea that they planned ahead this far.
Is there a chance that the site is bogus perhaps?
In any case I’d be interested to know what kinds of predictions/information people have about Nazi satellites/space stations - allowing more time for Germany in WW2, perhaps an armstice in '41 or an outright win (at least for the purposes of this speculation)?
Interestingly the space station does in fact involve a death ray…
The plans were real enough, but they were also pie in the sky. The most advanced plan was probably the Amerika Bomber which got as far a wind tunnel test. There is no way this could have been used as a weapon, it’s just too expensive for much in the way of delivery. There is a notion that Hitler planned to drop a “dirty” radioactive bomb on New York, but this is rubbish. No-one understood the concept of radiation sickness until after Hiroshima.
If you want some really whacky space science, then look up the work of Viktor Schauberger, the father of Nazi UFO program.
As a quick reading of the linked site shows, even that author calls several of the plans “patently ridiculous”, “delusional”, “self-indulgent” and points out the major flaws in it. In any case, straight-science considerations would have pointed to the programme getting off the ground… oh, c. 1958. After all, that’s when the guy actually in charge of Germany’s rockets DID get to launch his satellites.
The lilelier possible technological way to alter the course of the war would have been to hold out starting it 'til '43, when the military services and armaments industry had expected to be introducing mundane but then-cutting-edge conventional-war technology (e.g. jet planes, guided missiles, superheavy tanks, assault rifles) in force. As it was, having to develop them with your resources otherwise tied up, factories getting bombed and lunatics in charge of the strategic decisions resulted in “too little, too late”.
For that matter, he would have liked to drop a bang-bang nuke on New York, too. But as we found out after the war, Germany’s nuclear program was so far behind ours that the bomb would have been even longer in coming than the bomber.
Not true. Scientsits understood radiation sickness a lot better after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it was certainly a known factor many years before then.
OK, I was wrong on scientists not understanding radiation sickness prior to WWII, but I stand by my basic point which is that no-one considered using a radiological bomb until long after the war. The only known(?) test was in 1987, by Iraq for use against Iran.
Of course the people working on the projects could not but know that their products could not be deployed before the end of the war (what they reported to the government was another matter…).
But the projects were obviously useful to the research teams:
a) to get the research funding while it was still to be had
b) to keep their draft deferments.
Maybe no one in the mainstream media, but the concept was well understood in the scientific community, and even in the science-fiction community. Check out Robert Heinlein’s Solution Unsatisfactory for an example.
(This story, written in the late 1930’s, described the use of radioactive dust as an “ultimate” weapon. While Heinlein may have gotten the technology of the ultimate weapon wrong, he accurately predicted the nuclear standoff that was the basis of the Cold War.)
Robert Heinlein wrote a science fiction short story, “Solution Unsatisfactory”, about radiological weapons (a radioisotope “dust”) that was published in Astounding magazine in May 1941.
I was just at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS on Saturday. They have a huge exhibit on Nazi advances in rocketry.
The crux of it was that Nazi’s were friggin’ geniuses when it came to the field and god knows what would have happened if they hadn’t been stopped in time. America’s space program was built on their defecting scientists and enginers.
BTW, if you ever get stuck in the middle of Nowhere, KS (i.e. Hutchinson), GO GO GO to the Cosmosphere. Its a great museum, and I still can’t figure out what its doing out there, miles away from civilization as I know it.
With all due deference, MEBuckner and BrotherCadfael, a story is just a story. It’s doubtful that even the über-nuttiest Nazi used Heinlein stories as the basis for a WMD program.
With all due respect, I seriously doubt that either MEBuckner or I were suggesting anything of the sort. We were disputing the claim in the OP which suggested that “No-one understood the concept of radiation sickness until after Hiroshima.”, which our citation of the Heinlein story definitively refutes.
So the general gist of what people are saying is that because of the Germans lack of understanding of some of the technology issues, this would have prevented them from getting a man into space much before 1958? Remember, I’m assuming here that the Nazi’s either win WW2 or get an ‘out’ in such a way to allow reasonable progress in their space efforts post 1941/42…
I had always assumed that they would have a man in space by '49 or '50, if they were allowed to, and even onto the moon by the late 50’s…
Check out Stephen Baxter’s fun short story on the subject here.
Everyone knows that the basic “Death Ray” research was done long before the Nazis’ era, and that twenty years prior numerous functional models had been developed and marketed. None of them coal-powered, granted, but only because coal is not the correct fuel source for something so energy-intensive.
The Nazis may have claimed the original science as their own, but those claims are absurd on their face.
