Hitler tested atomic device, German historian says

Nazi Germany was not only trying to develop nuclear weapons but actually tested atomic devices near the end of World War Two, the publisher of a yet to be released book by a German historian says.

The pre-publication claims by historian Rainer Karlsch drew headlines in German newspapers on Friday but the publisher of "Hitlers Bombe" (Hitler's Bomb) declined to give details or answer further questions until the book is launched on March 14.

Other historians played down any suggestion the Nazis were anywhere close to taking on the United States in a nuclear war.

According to the publisher, Karlsch says Nazi scientists tested "nuclear bombs" in 1944 and 1945 on the Baltic island of Ruegen and in central Germany under the supervision of the SS, but they were not ready to be deployed before the war ended.

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on actual people, don't you think?

Imagine if it failed? Or worse yet, was recovered by the Allies and dismantled. That could be disasterous, and while Hitler was an egomaniac concerning military strategy, he was not an utter fool.

Besides, the top German scientists were surprised when they heard about our use of the bomb...

Heisenberg and his colleagues had been completely surprised by the news that an atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Germany had no serious atom bomb program; the Germans never believed that it was possible. To cover their embarrassment at having missed this possibility, Heisenberg and friends invented the story that they had opposed the bomb project for moral reasons. Bohr was furious at this outright lie, and told Amos de Shalit that Heisenberg's message in 1941 was "You know that we are going to win this war and we will be building a new high-tech Europe based on the discoveries in quantum physics and nuclear energy. Why don't you join us?" One can imagine Bohr's feelings about being asked to participate in the building of Adolf Hitler's "thousand-year Reich" and Heisenberg's insensitivity to such feelings. The possibility of an atomic bomb was probably not even discussed, being considered irrelevant at the time.


http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-54/iss-4/p14.html

<snip> When Bohr came to Los Alamos at the end of 1943, he told J. Robert Oppenheimer that Heisenberg had talked to him about an atomic bomb. Bohr reproduced frommemory a rough drawing that Heisenberg had shown him. The drawing was given to Edward Teller and me, and we immediately recognized it as a nuclear reactor with many control rods. What did Heisenberg intend to say with this drawing? Perhaps, "Look, this is what we are trying to build and you will recognize that this is a reactor, not a bomb." If so, he overestimated Bohr's knowledge of atomic power. Perhaps he was trying to get Bohr to be a messenger of conscience, and wanted Bohr to persuade the allied scientists also to refrain from working on a bomb. According to journalist Thomas Powers, this message was repeated by Wolfgang Gentner, another non-Nazi German physicist, some time later.1 But Bohr didn't understand--and neither he nor the US would have trusted the message in any case. <snip>

http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-53/iss-7/p34.html

peace

I've read speculation in the past that some of the German scientists intentionally dragged their feet on such research, realizing the consequences of Hitler having the bomb. I'm sure it will be hard to answer this for sure, as any scientist doing this would try their hardest to keep this from being detected.

Hitler's atomic research was the number one target of spies and saboteurs from both sides. Their research was under the allies microscope at all times and was derailed early in the war. Germany never got close.

Just be thankful that Hitler didn't listen to his advisors. If he had waited a year or so to go on the offensive, the world might have been an even sadder place.

A delusional leader who does not listen to his advisers or public is destined to bring his country to ruin. Hmmmmm

seriously.....unless there's a danger that the GOP is going to use this as a way of showing that FDR was weak on preventing atomic proliferation in the 1940s in order to further their case for dismantling social security (a tactic I don't put past them to do mind you), what difference does it make in whether the Nazis split an atom or not?

it just adds food for thought to the theory that Heisenberg and others sabotaged this program...

And yes some think the Germans were "this close" to developing a nuclear device... and also this close to developing the means to deliver it to New York....

As a fiction writer it also raises questions of what would have happened IF the New York Bomber (A Heinkel bomber) actually made it to NY and delivered its nuclear payload... and there are two devices they are believed to have played with... your ever so popular dirty bomb. (Given the V-2 project this falls under terrarism) and an actual Hiroshima type device.

how does it fit into that catagory?

Amazon.de is taking advance orders:

http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3421058091/qid=1109977009/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_11_1/302-7854247-8830432

He wrote another book with Zbynek Zeman ... where have I heard that name before?

Emeritus, Oxford.

Books inter alia:
Heckling Hitler, Caricatures of the Third Reich
Selling The War. Art And Propaganda In World War II
The Life of Edvard Benes, 1884-1948: Czechoslovakia in Peace and War
The Masaryks: The Making of Czechoslovakia
Pursued by a Bear: The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe

That is the take home meme we are expected to pick up. A fear injection.

... to this. From prior reading, American scientists on the Manhattan Project had concluded that Germany was on the wrong track, in part because it chose to use more comlicated heavy water reactors to produce plutonium, rather than using simpler carbon-pile reactors.

A different history of the German atomic bomb effort is here:

http://www.prod.sandia.gov/cgi-bin/techlib/access-control.pl/2002/020307p.pdf

Additionally, there were prisoner-of-war camps in operation thirty miles or so from Peenemunde (on the northwestern tip of the island of Usedom, very close to Ruegen), and the flash from such a blast would have been very visible to prisoners in those camps (which were close enough for the prisoners to witness the contrails of V-2 launches from Peenemunde). I don't recall any testimony from prisoners suggesting something that looked like an atomic bomb blast.