Did the "Manhattan Project" succeed thanks to Nazi enriched uranium
A fascinating possibility and an even more fascinating quid pro quo if true...
The following is extracted from Farrell's online book "Reich of the Black Sun"
Chapter 3: U-234, U235, AND THE STRANGE CASE OF THE MISSING URANIUM 53
"The traditional history denies, however, that the uranium on board U-234 was enriched and therefore easily usable in an atomic bomb. The accepted theory asserts there is no evidence that the uranium stocks of U-234 were transferred into the Manhattan Project... And the traditional history asserts that the bomb components on board (the) U-234 arrived too late to be included in the atomic bombs that were dropped on Jepan.
"The documentation indicates quite differently on all accounts. "
Carter P. Hydrick, Critical Mass: The Real Story of the Atomic Bomb and the Birth of the Nuclear Age.'
In December of 1944, an unhappy report is made to some unhappy people: "A study of the shipment of (bomb grade uranium) for the past three months shows the following....: At present rate we will have 10 kilos about February 7 and 15 kilos about May 1."2 This was bad news indeed, for a uranium based atom bomb required between 10-100 kilograms by the earliest estimates (ca. 1942), and, by the time this memo was written, about 50 kilos, the more accurate calculation of critical mass needed to make an atom bomb from uranium.
One may imagine the consternation this memo must have caused at headquarters. The was, perhaps, a considerable degree of yelling and screaming and finger pointing and other histrionics, interlarded with desperate orders to re-double efforts amid the fire- tinged skies of the war's Wagnerian Gotterdammerung.
1 Carter Hydrick, Critical Mass: the Real Story of the Atomic Bomb and the Birth of the Nuclear Age, Internet published manuscript, www.3dshort.com/nazibomb2/CRITICALMASS.txt, 1998, p. 6.
2 Ibid., p. 11.
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The problem, however, is that the memo is not German at all. It originates within the Manhattan Project on December 28, 1944, from Eric Jette, the chief metallurgist at Los Alamos. One may imagine the desperation it must have triggered, however, since the Manhattan Project had consumed two billion dollars all in the pursuit of plutonium and uranium atom bombs. By this time it was of course apparent that there were significant and seemingly insurmountable problems in designing a plutonium bomb, for the fuses available to the Allies were simply far too slow to achieve the uniform compression of a plutonium core within the very short span of time needed to initiate uncontrolled nuclear fission.
That left the uranium bomb as the more immediately feasible alternative - as the Germans had discovered years earlier - to the acquisition of a functioning weapon within the projected span of the war. Yet, after a veritable hemorrhage of dollars in pursuit of the latter objective, the Manhattan Project was far short of the necessary critical mass for a uranium bomb. And with the inevitability of an invasion of Japan looming, the pressure on General Leslie Groves to produce results was immense.
The lack of a sufficient stockpile, after years of concerntrated all-out effort, was in part explainable, for two years earlier Fermi had been successful in construction of the first functioning atomic reactor. That success had spurred the American project to commit more seriously to the pursuit of a plutonium bomb. Accordingly, some of the precious and scarce refined and enriched uranium 235 coming out of Oak Ridge and Lawrence's beta calutrons was being siphoned off as feedstock for enrichment and transmutation into plutonium in the breeder reactors constructed at Handford, Washington for the purpose. Thus, some of the fissionable uranium stockpile had been deliberately diverted for plutonium production.3 The decision was a logical one and the Manhattan Project decision- makers cannot be faulted to taking it. The reason is simple. Pound for weapons grade pound, a pound of plutonium will produce more bombs than a pound of uranium. It thus made economic sense to convert enriched uranium to plutonium, for more bombs would be possible with the same amount of material.
3 Hydrick, op. cit, p. 12.
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But in December of 1944, having pursued both options, General Leslie Groves now stood on the verge of losing both gambles. And let us not forget what had just happened in I urope to sour the mood of "those in the know" in the United States even further. There, six months after the Allied landings in Normandy and the headlong dash across France, Allied armies had stalled on the borders of the Reich. Allied intelligence analysts confidently reassured the generals that no further significant German military offensive was possible, and their optimism was reflected in the general mood of the citizenry in France, Britain, and the United States. The mood was brutally shattered when, on December 16, 1944, the German Army and Luftwaffe mounted one last, desperate offensive with secretly husbanded reserves in the Ardennes forest, scene of their 1940 triumph against France. Within a matter of hours, the offensive had broken through American lines, surrounded, captured, or otherwise decimated the entire 116th American infantry division, and days later, surrounded the 101st Airborne division at Bastogne, and appeared well on the way to crossing the Meuse River at Namur. On December 28, 1944, when the memo was written, the German offensive had been stalled, but not stopped.
For the Allied officers privy to intelligence reports and "in the loop" on the Manhattan Project, the offensive was possibly seen as confirmation of their worst fears: the Germans were close to a bomb, and were trying to buy time. The horrible thought in the back of every Allied scientist's and engineer's head must have been that after all the Allied military successes of the previous years, the race for the bomb could still be won by the Germans. And if they were able to produce enough of them to put unbearable pressure on any one of the Western Allies, the outcome of the war itself was still in doubt. If, for example, the Germans had a-bombed British and French cities, it is unlikely that a continuance of the would have been politically feasible for Churchill's wartime coalition government. In all likelihood it would have collapsed. A similar result would have likely occurred in France. And without British and French bases available for supply and forward deployment, the
55
American military situation on the continent would have become untenable, if not disastrous.
In any case, word of the Manhattan Project's difficulties apparently leaked in the Washington DC political community, for United States Senator James F. Byrnes got in on the act, writing a memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and confirming that the Manhattan Project was perceived - at least by some in the know - as being in danger of failure:
SECRET March 3, 1945
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT
FROM: JAMES F. BYRNES
I understand that the expenditures for the Manhattan project are
approaching 2 billion dollars with no definite assurance yet of
production.
We have succeeded to date in obtaining the cooperation of
Congressional Committees in secret meetings. Perhaps we can
continue to do so while the war lasts.
However, if the project proves a failure, it will be subjected to
relentless criticism.4
Senator Brynes' memorandum highlights the real problem in the Manhattan Project, and the real, though certainly not publicly known, military situation of the Allies ca. late 1944 and early 1945: that in spite of tremendous conventional military success against the Third Reich, the Western Allies and Soviet Russia could conceivably still be forced to a "draw" if Germany deployed and used atom bombs in sufficient numbers to affect the political situation of the Western Allies. With its stockpile of enriched uranium already depleted by the decision to develop more plutonium for a bomb (which as it turned out was undetonatable 4
Memorandum of US Senator James F. Byrnes to President Frankliin D. Roosevelt, March 3, 1945, cited in Harald Fath, Geheime Kommandosache -S III Jonastal und die Siegeswaffenproduktion: Weitere spurensuche nach Thuringens Manhattan Project (Schleusingen: Amun Verlag, 2000), p. 41.
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with existing British and American fuse technology anyway) and far below that needed for a uranium-based atom bomb, "the entire enterprise
Senator Byrnes' March 1945 Memorandum to President Roosevelt
57
appeared destined for defeat."5 Not only defeat, but for "those in the know" in late 1944 and early 1945, the possibility was one of ignominious defeat and horrible carnage.
If the stocks of weapons grade uranium ca. late 1944 - early 1945 were about half of what they needed to be after two years of research and production, and if this in turn was the cause of Senator Byrnes' concern, how then did the Manhattan Project acquire the large remaining amount or uranium 235 needed in the few months from March to the dropping of the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima in August, only five months away? How did it accomplish this feat, if in feet after some three years of production it had only produced less than half of the needed supply of critical mass weapons grade uranium? Where did its missing uranium 235 come from? And how did it solve the pressing problem of the fuses for a plutonium bomb?
Of course the answer if that if the Manhattan Project was incapable of producing enough enriched uranium in that short amount of time - months rather than years - then its stocks had to have been supplemented from external sources, and there is only one viable place with the necessary technology to enrich uranium on that scale, as seen in the previous chapter. That source was Nazi Germany. But the Manhattan Project is not the only atom bomb project with some missing uranium.
Germany too appears to have suffered the "missing uranium syndrome" in the final days prior to and immediately after the end of the war. But the problem in Germany's case is that the missing uranium it not a few tens of kilos, but several hundred tons. At this juncture, it is worth citing Carter Hydrick's excellent research at length, in order to exhibit the full ramifications of this problem:
From June of 1940 to the end of the war, Germany seized 3,500 tons of uranium compounds from Belgium - almost three times the amount Groves had purchased.... and stored it in salt mines in Strassfurt, Germany. Groves brags that on 17 April, 1945, as the war was winding down, Alsos recovered some 1,100 tons of uranium ore from Strassfurt and an additional 31 tons in Toulouse, France ..... And he claims that the amount recovered was all that Germany had ever held, asserting, therefore, that Germany had never had enough raw material
5 Hydrick, op. cit, p. 13.
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to process the uranium either for a plutonium reactor pile or through magnetic separation techniques.
Obviously, if Strassfurt once held 3,500 tons and only 1,130 were recovered, some 2,370 tons of uranium ore was unaccounted for - still twice the amount the Manhattan Project possessed and is assumed to have used throughout its entire wartime effort.... The material has not been accounted for to this day....
As early as the summer of 1941, according to historian Margaret Gowing, Germany had already refined 600 tons of uranium to its oxide form, the form required for ionizing the material into a gas, in which form the uranium isotopes could then be magnetically or thermally separated or the oxide could be reduced to a metal for a reactor pile. In fact, Professor Dr. Riehl, who was responsible for all uranium throughout Germany during the course of the war, says the figure was actually much higher....
To create either a uranium or plutonium bomb, at some point uranium must be reduced to metal. In the case of plutonium, U238is metalicized; for a uranium bomb, U235 is metalicized. Because of uranium's difficult characteristics, however, this metallurgical process is a tricky one. The United States struggled with the problem early and still was not successful reducing uranium to its metallic form in large production wuantities until late in 1942. The German technicians, however,... by the end of 1940, had already processed 280.6 kilograms into metal, over a quarter of a ton.6
These observations require some additional commentary.
First, it is to be noted that Nazi Germany, by the best available evidence, was missing approximately two thousand tons of unrefined uranium ore by the war's end. Where did this ore go?
Second, it is clear that Nazi Germany was enriching uranium on a massive scale, having refined 600 tons to oxide form for potential metalicization as early as 1940. This would require a large and dedicated effort, with thousands of technicians, and a commensurately large facility or facilties to accomplish the enrichment. The figures, in other words, tend to corroborate the hypothesis outlined in the previous chapter that the I.G. Farben "Buna" factory at Auschwitz was not a Buna factory at all, but a huge uranium enrichment facility. However, the date would imply
6 Hydrick, op. cit., p. 23, emphasis added.
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another such facility, located elsewhere, since the Auschwitz facility did not really begin production until sometime in 1942.
Finally, it also seems clear that the Germans possessed an enormous stock of metallic uranium. But what was the isotope? Was it U238 for further enrichment and separation into U235, was it intended perhaps as feedstock for a reactor to be transmuted into plutonium, or was it already U235, the necessary material for a uranium atom bomb? Given the statements of the Japanese military attache in Stockholm cited at the end of the previous chapter - that the Germans may have used an atomic or some other weapon of mass destruction on the Eastern Front ca. 1942-43, and given Zinsser's affidavit cited in the first chapter of an atom bomb test in October of 1944, it cannot be conclusively denied that some of this enormous stockpile may also have been U235, the essential component for a bomb.
In any case, these figures strongly suggest that the Germans, ca. 1940-1942 were significantly ahead of the Allies in one very important aspect of atom bomb production: the enrichment of uranium, and therefore, this suggests also that they were demonstrably ahead in the race for an actual functioning atom bomb during this period. But the figures also raise another disturbing question: where did this uranium go?
One answer lies in the mysterious case of a U-boat, the U-234, captured by the Americans in 1945.
***
The case of the U-234 is well-known in literature about the Nazi atom bomb, and of course the Allied Legend is that none of the material on board the U-boat found its way into the American atom bomb project.
None of this could be further from the truth.
The U-234 was a very large mine-laying U-boat that had been adapted as an undersea freighter to carry large cargoes. Consider then the following "cargo manifest" of the U-234's very odd cargo:
60
(1)
Two Japanese officers;7
(2)
80 gold-lined cylinders containing 560 kilograms of uranium
oxide;8
(3)
Several wooden cases or barrels full of "water";
( 4 ) I nfrared proximity fuses;
(5) Dr. Heinz Schlicke, inventor of the fuses.
When the U-234 was being loaded with its cargo in Germany for the outward voyage, its radio operator, Wolfgang Hirschfeld, observed the two Japanese officers writing "U235" on the paper wrapping of the cylinders prior to their being loaded into the submarine.9 Needless to say, this observation has called forth the full range of debunking techniques normally applied by skeptics to UFO sightings: low sun angles, poor lighting, distance was to great to see clearly, etc. etc. This is no surprise, for if Hirschfeld saw what he saw, then the enormous implications were obvious.
The use of gold lined cylinders is explainable by the fact that uranium, a highly corrosive metal, is easily contaminated if it comes into contact with other unstable elements. Gold, whose radioactive shielding properties are as great as lead, is also, unlike lead, a highly pure and stable element, and is therefore the element of choicewhen storing or shipping highly enriched and pure uranium for long periods of time, such as a voyage.10 Thus, the uranium oxide on board the U-234 was highly enriched uranium, and most likely, highly enriched U235, the last stage, perhaps, before being reduced to weapons grade or to metalicization for a bomb (if it was already in weapons grade purity). Indeed, if the Japanese officers' labels on 7
The two officers were Air Force Colonel Genzo Shosi, an engineer, and Navy Captain Hideo Tomonaga. When the captain of the U-234 made known his intentions to surrender the submarine, which was then en route to Japan after the German surrender, the two Japanese officers committed hari-kiri, and were buried at sea with full military honors by the Germans.
8 Hydrick's comment on the U-234's cargo manifest explains why the U- 234 was off limits to the American press following its surrender: "Whoever first read the entry and understood the frightening capabilities and potential purpose of uranium must have been stunned by the entry." (op. cit, p. 7)
9 Hydrick, op. cit., p. 5.
10 Ibid., p. 8.
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the cylinders were accurate, it is likely that it was at the final stage of purity before metallicization.
The cargo of the U-234 was so sensitive, in fact, that when the U.S. Navy prepared its own cargo manifest for the German submarine on June 16, 1945, the uranium oxide had entirely disappeared from the list.11 Significantly, within a week of the appearance of the U.S. Navy's version of the U-234's cargo manifest, Oak Ridge's output of enriched uranium very nearly doubled.12 This in itself is highly suspect, since as late as March of 1945, as we have already seen, a U.S. Senator is worried about the failure of the Manhattan Project, so much so that he writes President Roosevelt a memorandum on the subject, and of course, we have also already seen that the chief metallurgist of Los Alamos laboratory indicates the stock of fissile U235 is far short of the needed critical mass, and would remain so for several months.
The conclusion is therefore simple, but frightening: the missing uranium used in the Manhattan Project was German, and that means that Nazi Germany's atom bomb project was much further along that the post-war Allied Legen would have us believe.
But what of the other two items in the U-234's strange cargo manifest, the fuses and their inventor, Dr. Heinz Schilcke? We have already noted that by late 1944 and early 1945, the American plutonium bomb project had run afoul of some nasty mathematics: the critical mass of a plutonium bomb, "imploded" or compressed by surrounding conventional explosives, would have to be assembled within 1/3000th of a second, otherwise the bomb would fail, and only produce a kind of "atomic fizzling firecracker", a "radiological" bomb producing very little explosion but a great deal of deadly radiation. This was a speed far in excess of the capabilities of conventional wire cabling and the ordinary fuses available to the Allied engineers.
It is known that late in the timetable of events leading to the Trinity test of the plutonium bomb in New Mexico that a design modification was introduced to the implosion device that incorporated "radiation venting channels", allowing radiation from
11 Hydride, op. cit., p. 9.
12 Ibid., p. 11
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the plutonium core to escape and reflect off the surrounding reflectors as the detonator was fired, within billionths of a second after the beginning of compression. There is no possible way to
explain this modification other than by the incorporation of Dr. Schlicke's infrared proximity fuses into the final design of the American bomb, since they enabled the fuses to react and fire are the speed of light.13
In support of this historical reconstruction, there is a communication from May 25, 1945 from the chief of Naval Operations, to Portsmouth where the U-234 was brought after its surrender, indicating that Dr. Schlicke, now a prisoner of war, would be accompanied by three naval officers, to secure the fuses and bring them to Washington.14 There Dr. Schlicke was apparently to give a lecture on the fuses under the auspices of a "Mr. Alvarez,"15 who would appear to be none other than well- known Manhattan Project scientist Dr. Luis Alvarez, the very manwho, according to the Allied Legend, "solved" the fusing problemfor the plutonium bomb!16So it would appear that the surrender of the U-234 to the Americans in 1945 solved the Manhattan Project's two biggest outstanding problems: lack of sufficient supplies of weapons grade uranium, and lack of adequate fusing technology to make a plutonium bomb work. And thhis means that in the final analysis the Allied Legend about the Germans having been "far behind" the Allies in the race for the atom bomb is simply a incorrect in the extreme in the best case, or a deliberate lie in the worst. But the fuses raise another frightening specter: What were the Germansdeveloping such highly sophisticated fuses for? Infrared heat-seeking rockets, which they had developed, would be one answer,
13 Q.v. Hydrick, op. cit, pp. 46-51, for a detailed discussion of this issue and the historical problems it poses for the Allied Legend.
14 Ibid., p. 46.
15 Ibid.
16 As I observed in my previous book, The Giza Death Star Deployed, Dr.Luis Alvarez also had some other strange distinctions to his credit, being one of the scientists allegedly involved with the alleged Roswell "UFO" crash, theCIA's subsequent "Robertson Panel" in the 1950s on UFOs and governmentpolicy, and subsequent cosmic ray experiments inside the 2nd Pyramid at Giza.
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and of course an implosion device to compress critical mass would be another.
But what about the other missing German uranium mentioned previously? The mission of the U-234 and its precious cargo thus raises certain other questions, and highlights other possibilities in this regard. It is a fact that throughout the war Germany and Japan both conducted long-range exchanges of officers and technology via aircraft and submarine - the exchange of technology being mostly a one-sided affair from Germany to Japan. It is conceivable that many of these voyages - just as with the U-234 - would have included similar transfers of uranium stocks and high technology to Japan. Some of the missing uranium must therefore surely be looked for in the Far East, in the Japanese atom bomb program.17
Similarly, during the war both Germany and Italy undertook long-range flights to Japan, the Germans using their special long- range heavy lift transport aircraft such as the Ju-290 for polar flights. It is conceivable that these flights and their Italian counterparts also involved the exchange of officers and technology, if not a small amount of raw material as well. Some of the missing uranium probably also fell into the hands of the Soviets as the Russian armies steamrollered into Eastern Europe and finally into what would become the Soviet "eastern" zone of occupation in Germany.
But why, after traveelling under radio silence from Germany, did the U-234 finally surrender its precious uranium, fuses, and "water", when its obvious destination was Japan? This is an intriguing question, and one taht unfortunately cannot be answered here except briefly. Again, Carteer Hydrick's superb research elaborates one highly probable hypothesis: U-234 was handed over to the US authorities on the orders of none other than Martin Bormann, in a maneuver designed to secure his and others' freedom after the war, and as part of a deliberate plan to continue Nazism and its agendas and research underground.18 It is thus, on this view,
17Q.v. chapter 7.
18 Q.v. part two. The allegation that Bormann's action was a component of this plan is my own, and not Hydrick's although Hydrick also clearly suggests a connection. This "Bormann hypothesis" of the events leading up to the U-234's
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the first visible, and crucial, element of the emerging Operation Paperclip, the transfer of technology ami scientists from the collapsing Third Reich to the United States. There, the German scientists and engineers could, would, and did continue their lines of esoter i c research and development of high technology and sophisticated weaponry, with a similar moral and ideological effect on the culture at large as occurred in Nazi Germany.
And finally, of course, as we have already seen, some of the missing uranium ended up in the German atom bomb program itself, enriched, and refined, and probably assembled and tested - if not used - in actual bombs themselves.
surrender is a major component of Hydrick's work, spanning several pages of meticulous research.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2013 11:20 pm Post subject:
I'd only once, through the Carter Hydrick book, come across this Nazi atom bomb stuff before now several reminders in the same week!
Perhaps it was not rocket scientists the US wanted in 1945 that made them want to do a deal with Reinhard Gehlen, Martin Bormann etc... but nukes?
With some of the more interesting looking comments
Doug Deitrich is the guy I referred to who came across US Archives of Nazi A-bomb use against the Soviets in Pomerania late in the War. Goggle for him and you should find it.
Tazjet100 3 months ago
According to a US man named Deitrich who publishes on some website somewhere he was formerly a US archivist and had to destroy archived records of Nazi nuclear weapons used against the Soviets in Pomerania so perhaps they actually did do so? Stalin however frequently threatened retaliation with poison gas and the Germans had too little rubber for gas masks.
Tazjet100 3 months ago
There were two different German A-bombs, first the Schumann Trinks tactical nuke using Li-6 Deuteride to create a plasma pinch to explode a small Uranium 233 target. The second was an SS project with Dr Ing Zippermayer & Dr Alfred Klemm (Operation Hexenkessel) adapting a coal dust Fuel Air Explosive with Lithium 6 and Trittium to cause a small thermonuclear blast. Production of the SS weapon commenced 8 March 1945 following a meeting near Ohrdruf, Thuringia (CIOS report 207/7//23/45)
Tazjet100 3 months ago
Yes German Army Ordnance tested at least two tactical nuclear warheads weight 5 kilograms intended according to Dornberger (in CSDIC evidence given at Nuremberg) as warheads for the V-2. However Churchill warned Hitler through channels in May and August1944 that UK would retaliate with Anthrax if a single nuke was used against England. USA warned Hitler through Lisbon in July 44 that Dresden would suffer A-bomb attack unless he negotiated peace secret talks (via Lisbon)
And one for luck
Hitler's Bomb (1992 Documentary)
Published on 18 Jan 2013
In December 1938, in Berlin, a simple chemical experiment showed for the first time that the atom can be split, releasing immense power. Within months, the Wehrmacht had started research into nuclear weapons. The Germns were the first to start work on the atom bomb. The programme investigates the reasons why Hitler was not the first leader to use it, drawing on new evidence gathered by historian Mark Walker. Dramatised scenes, eyewitness accounts from Allied and German scientists, interviews and archive footage are all employed.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2013 6:27 pm Post subject:
The realo reasons for the post WW2 Nazi US pact
More interesting info
What Carter Hydrick discovered and has written in Critical Mass provides compelling proof, according to powerful documentary evidence housed in the United States National Archives, of the Nazi surrender of enriched uranium and other atomic bomb components to the United States, which were then used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is evidence that profoundly changes the traditional history claiming the United States alone created the first atomic bombs. Read and discover...
Why…a quarter of the present and former employees of Oak Ridge National Laboratory who viewed Carter Hydrick’s presentation of Critical Mass purchased the book.
Why… retired director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Weapons Program Office, Dr. Delmar Bergen, endorses Critical Mass, saying it "certainly leads the experienced physicist to believe."
Why… Texas A&M University professor of World War Two science Dr. Anthony Stranges, who had defended the traditional history of the atomic bomb against Critical Mass in two television news broadcasts, after reviewing Carter Hydrick’s documentation and reading the book, reversed his position and now endorses Critical Mass.
Why… distinguished professor emeritus of history Dr. Douglas Tobler recommends that scholars and laymen interested in modern history read Critical Mass, calling it, "well-researched, well-reasoned, well-written."
Why...quasi-experts of the traditional history of the Manhattan Project are using poor scholarship and mischaracterization of the evidence presented in Critical Mass, in an effort to conserve the entrenched but incorrect history of the making of the first atomic bombs--and how these events profoundly changed the world in which we live. Read Critical Mass for yourself and decide where the truth lies!
http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Mass-Germany-Surrendered-Enriched/dp/09 75985302/ _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
German nuclear experts believe they have found nuclear waste from Hitler’s secret atom bomb programme in a crumbling mine near Hanover.
More than 126,000 barrels of nuclear material lie rotting over 2,000 feet below ground in an old salt mine.
Rumour has it that the remains of nuclear scientists who worked on the Nazi programme are also there, their irradiated bodies burned in secret by S.S. men sworn to secrecy.
A statement by a boss of the Asse II nuclear fuel dump, just discovered in an archive, said how in 1967 'our association sank radioactive wastes from the last war, uranium waste, from the preparation of the German atom bomb.'
This has sent shock waves through historians who thought that the German atomic programme was nowhere near advanced enough in WW2 to have produced nuclear waste in any quantities.
It has also triggered a firestorm of uncertainty among locals, especially given Germany’s paranoia post-Fukushima.
Germany was the first western nation to announce the closure of all its atomic power plants following the disaster at the Japanese facility following the catastrophic earthquake and Tsunami in March.
There are calls to remove all the nuclear material stored within the sealed site but this would cost billions of pounds.
Yet the thought of Nazi atomic bomb material stored underground has made headlines across Germany - and the country’s Greenpeace movement has backed a call for secret documents relating to the dump to be released to the state parliament from sealed archives in Berlin.
It was in January of 1939, nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War, that German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published the results of an historic experiment about nuclear fission.
The German 'uranium project' began in earnest shortly after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September.
Army physicist Kurt Diebner led a team tasked to investigate the military applications of fission. By the end of the year the physicist Werner Heisenberg had calculated that nuclear fission chain reactions might be possible.
Although the war hampered their work, by the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 Nazi scientists had achieved a significant enrichment in samples of uranium.
Mark Walker, a US expert on the Nazi programme said: 'Because we still don’t know about these projects, which remain cloaked in WW2 secrecy, it isn’t safe to say the Nazis fell short of enriching enough uranium for a bomb. Some documents remain top secret to this day.
'Claims that a nuclear weapon was tested at Ruegen in October 1944 and again at Ohrdruf in March 1945 leave open a question, did they or didn’t they?'
Ruegen is a Baltic island and Ohrdruf a top-secret bunker complex in Thuringia where local legend has it that an A-bomb was tested by the Nazis in the dying days of the war.
How close was Hitler to an atomic bomb? A German historian claims he was much closer than previously believed.
The United States needed 125,000 people, including six future Nobel Prize winners, to develop the atomic bombs that exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The uranium enrichment facility alone, including its security zone, was the size of the western German city of Frankfurt. Dubbed the Manhattan project, the quest ultimately cost the equivalent of about $30 billion.
In his new book, "Hitler's Bomb," Berlin historian Rainer Karlsch claims Nazi Germany almost achieved similar results with only a handful of physicists and a fraction of the budget. The author writes that German physicists and members of the military conducted three nuclear weapons tests shortly before the end of World War II, one on the German island of Ruegen in the fall of 1944 and two in the eastern German state of Thuringia in March 1945. The tests, writes Karlsch, claimed up to 700 lives.
If these theories were accurate, history would have to be rewritten. Ever since the Allies occupied the Third Reich's laboratories and interrogated Germany's top physicists working with wunderkind physicist Werner Heisenberg and his colleague Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, it's been considered certain that Hitler's scientists were a long way from completing a nuclear weapon.
Karlsch's publisher, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, is already issuing brazen claims about the "sensational results of the latest historic research." The Third Reich, says the publishing house, was "on the verge of winning the race to acquire the first functioning nuclear weapon." Even before the book was published, the generally reserved publishing house sent press kits to the media, in which it claimed that the author had solved "one of the great mysteries of the Third Reich."
The book is being presented Monday at an elaborately staged press conference. Karlsch, an unaffiliated academic, plans an extensive author's tour.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Jul 07, 2013 12:32 am Post subject:
Uranium and Plutonium shipment at the end of the war
An investigative documentary about where the famed U-234 may have gone in its secret mission at the close of World War Two
Critical Mass
The Real Story Of The Birth Of The Atomic Bomb And The Nuclear Age
by Carter P. Hydrick
1998
Part One - The Uranium Bomb
Chapter One - U-234/U235
"The most important and secret item of cargo, the uranium oxide, which I believe was radioactive, was loaded into one of the vertical steel tubes [of German U-boat U-234].... Two Japanese officers... [were]... painting a description in black characters on the brown paper wrapping.... Once the inscription U235 (the scientific designation for enriched uranium, the type required to make a bomb - author's note) had been painted on the wrapping of a package, it would then be carried over...and stowed in one of the six vertical mine shafts." [i]
Wolfgang Hirschfeld
Chief Radio Operator of U-234
"Lieut Comdr Karl B Reese USNR, Lieut (JG) Edward P McDermott USNR and Major John E Vance CE USA
will report to commandant May 30th Wednesday in connection with cargo U-234." [ii]
US Navy secret transmission
#292045 from Commander
Naval Operations to Portsmouth Naval Yard, 30 May 1945
"I just got a shipment in of captured material.... I have just talked to Vance and they are taking it off the ship.... I have about 80 cases of U powder in cases. He (Vance) is handling all of that now."iii
Telephone transcript between Manhattan Project security officers
Major Smith and Major Traynor, 14 June,1945.
The traditional history of the atomic bomb accepts as an unimportant footnote the arrival of U-234 on United States shores, and admits the U-boat carried uranium oxide along with its load of powerful passengers and war-making materials. The accepted history also acknowledges these passengers were whisked away to Washington for interrogation and the cargo was quickly commandeered for use elsewhere. The traditional history even concedes that two Japanese officers were onboard U-234 and that they committed a form of unconventional Samurai suicide rather than be captured by their enemies.
The traditional history denies, however, that the uranium on board U-234 was enriched and therefore easily usable in an atomic bomb. The accepted history asserts there is no evidence that the uranium stocks of U-234 were transferred into the Manhattan Project, although recent suggestions have hinted that this may have occurred. And the traditional history asserts that the bomb components on board U-234 arrived too late to be included in the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan. The documentation indicates quite differently on all accounts.
Before U-234 had landed at Portsmouth - before it even left Europe - United States and British intelligence knew U-234 was on a mission to Japan and that it carried important passengers and cargo.iv A portion of the cargo, especially, was of a singular nature. According to U-234's chief radio operator, Wolfgang Hirschfeld, who witnessed the loading of the U-boat:
The most important and secret item of cargo, the uranium oxide, which I believe was highly radioactive, was loaded into one of the vertical steel tubes one morning in February, 1945. Two Japanese officers were to travel aboard U-234 on the voyage to Tokyo: Air Force Colonel Genzo Shosi, an aeronautical engineer, and Navy Captain Hideo Tomonaga, a submarine architect who, it will be recalled, had arrived in France aboard U-180 about eighteen months previously with a fortune in gold for the Japanese Embassy in Berlin.
I saw these two officers seated on a crate on the forecasting engaged in painting a description in black characters on the brown paper wrapping gummed around each of a number of containers of uniform size. At the time I didn't see how many containers there were, but the Loading Manifest showed ten. Each case was a cube, possibly steel and lead, nine inches along each side and enormously heavy. Once the inscription U235 had been painted on the wrapping of a package, it would then be carried over to the knot of crewmen under the supervision of Sub-Lt Pfaff and the boatswain, Peter Scholch, and stowed in one of the six vertical mineshafts.v
Hirschfeld's straightforward account of the uranium being "highly radioactive" - he later witnessed the storage tubes being tested with Geiger counters,vi - and labeled "U235" provides profoundly important information about this cargo. U235 is the scientific designation of enriched uranium - the type of uranium required to fuel an atomic bomb. While the uranium remained a secret from all but the highest levels within the United States until after the surrender of U-234, a captured German ULTRA encoder/decoder had allowed the Western Allies to intercept and decode German and Japanese radio transmissions. Some of these captured signals had already identified the U-boat as being on a special mission to Japan and even identified General Kessler and much of his cortege as likely to be onboard, but the curious uranium was never mentioned. The strictest secrecy was maintained, nonetheless, around the U-boat.
As early as 13 May, the day before U-234 was actually boarded by the Sutton's prize crew, orders had already been dispatched that commanded special handling of the passengers and crew of U-234 when it was surrendered:
Press representatives may be permitted to interview officers and men of German submarines that surrender. This message applies only to submarines that surrender. It does not apply to other prisoners of war. It does not apply to prisoners of the U-234. Prisoners of the U-234 must not be interviewed by press representatives.vii
Two days later, while the Sutton was slowly steaming toward Portsmouth with U-234 at her side, more orders were received. "Documents and personnel of U-234 are most important and any and all doubtful personnel should be sent here,"viii the commander of naval operations in Washington, D.C. ordered. The same day, the commander in chief of the Navy instructed, "Maintain prisoners U-234 incommunicado and send them under Navy department representative to Washington for interrogation."ix
The effort to keep U-234 under wraps was only partially successful. Reporters had been allowed to interview prisoners from previous U-boats, and, in fact, were allowed to interview captured crews from succeeding U-boats, as well. When the press discovered U-234 was going to be off limits, a cry and hue went up that took two days to settle. Following extended negotiations, a compromise was struck between the Navy brass and the press core.x
The reporters were allowed to take photographs of the people disembarking the boat when it landed, but no talking to the prisoners was permitted.xi When they landed at the pier, the prisoners walked silently through the gawking crowd and climbed into buses, to be driven out of the spotlight and far from the glaring eyes of history. On 23 May, the cargo manifest of U-234 was translatedxii by the office of Naval Intelligence, quickly triggering a series of events. On the second page of the manifest, halfway down the page, was the entry "10 cases, 560 kilograms, uranium oxide."
Whoever first read the entry and understood the frightening capabilities and potential purpose of uranium must have been stunned by the entry. Certainly questions were asked. Was this the first shipment of uranium to Japan or had others already slipped by? Did the Japanese have the capacity to use it? Could they build a bomb?
Whatever the answers, within four days personnel from the Office of Naval Intelligence had brought U-234's second watch officer, Karl Pfaff - who had not been brought to Washington with the original batch of high-level prisoners, but who had overseen loading of the U-boat in Germany - to Washington and interrogated him. They quickly radioed Portsmouth:
Pfaff prepared manifest list and knows kind documents and
cargo in each tube. Pfaff states...uranium oxide loaded in
gold cylinders and as long as cylinders not opened can be
handled like crude TNT. These containers should not be
opened as substance will become sensitive and dangerous.xiii
The identification that the uranium was stowed in gold-lined cylinders and that it would become "sensitive and dangerous" when unpacked provides clear substantiation of radio officer Hirschfeld's assertion that the uranium was labeled with the title U235. Uranium that has had its proportion of the isotope U235 increased compared to the more common isotope of uranium, U238, is known as enriched uranium. When that enrichment becomes 70 percent or above, it is bomb-grade uranium. The process of enriching uranium during the war was highly technical and very expensive - it still is.
Upon first reading that the uranium on board U-234 was stored in gold-lined cylinders, this author tracked down Clarence Larsen, former director of the leading uranium enrichment process at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the Manhattan Project's uranium enrichment facilities were housed. In a telephone conversation, I asked Mr. Larsen what, if anything, would be the purpose of shipping uranium in gold-lined containers.xiv
Mr. Larsen remembered that the Oak Ridge program used gold trays when working with enriched uranium. He explained that, because uranium enrichment was a very costly process, enriched uranium needed to be protected jealously, but because it is very corrosive, it is easily invaded by any but the most stable materials, and would then become contaminated. To prevent the loss to contamination of the invaluable enriched uranium, gold was used. Gold is one of the most stable substances on earth. While expensive, Mr. Larsen explained, the cost of gold was a drop in the bucket compared to the value of enriched uranium. Would raw uranium, rather than enriched uranium, be stored in gold containers, I asked? Not likely, Mr. Larsen responded. The value of raw uranium is, and was at the time, inconsequential compared to the cost of gold.
Assuming the Germans invested roughly the same amount of money as the Manhattan Project to enrich their uranium, which it appears they did,xv the cost of the U235 on board the submarine was somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 an ounce; by far the most expensive substance on earth. The fact that the enriched uranium had the capacity to deliver world dominance to the first country that processed and used it made it priceless. A long voyage with the U235 stowed in anything but gold could have cost the German/Japanese atomic bomb program dearly.
In addition to the gold-lined shipping containers corroborating Hirschfeld's identification of the uranium as U235, the description of the uranium's characteristics when its container was opened also tends to support the conclusion the uranium was enriched. Uranium of all kinds is not only corrosive, but it is toxic if swallowed. In its raw state, however, which is 99.3 percent U238, the substance poses little threat to man as long as he does not eat it. The stock of raw uranium that eventually was processed by the Manhattan Project originally had been stored in steel drums and was sitting in the open at a Staten Island storage facility.xvi Much of the German raw uranium discovered in salt mines at the end of the war also was stored in steel drums, many of them broken open.
The material was loaded into heavy paper sacks and carried from the storage area by apparently unprotected G.I.s.xvii Since then, more precautions have been taken in handling raw uranium, but at the time, caution was minimal and raw uranium was considered to be relatively safe.xviii For the Navy to note the uranium would become "sensitive and dangerous" and should be "handled like crude TNT" when it was unpacked tends to indicate that the uranium enclosed was, in fact, enriched uranium. Uranium enriched significantly in U235 is radioactive and therefore should be handled with appropriate caution, as the communiqué described.
By 16 June 1945, a second cargo manifest had been prepared for U-234, this time by the United States Navy. But the uranium was not on the list. It was not even marked as shipped out or having once been on hand. It was never mentioned. It was gone - as if it never existed.
Where did the uranium go? Eleven days after U-234 was escorted into Portsmouth, and four days after Pfaff identified its location on the U-boat, a team was selected to oversee the offloading of U-234. Portsmouth received the following message:
Lieut. Comdr. Karl B Reese USNR, Lieut (JG) Edward P McDermott USNR and Major John E Vance CE USA [Corps of of Engineers, United States Army (the Manhattan Project's parent organization) - author's note] will report to commandant May 30th Wednesday in connection with cargo U-234.
It is contemplated that shipment will be made by ship to
ordnance investigation laboratory NAVPOWFAC Indian
Head Maryland if this is feasible.xix
The order, dispatched by the chief of naval operations, is revealing if not outright startling for the selection of one member of its three-man team. Including Major Vance of the Army Corps of Engineers in what was otherwise an all Navy operation seems a telling selection. The military services of the United States, as in most other countries, were highly competitive with one another. True, U-234's cargo included a mixed bag of aeronautics, rocketry and armor-piercing technology that the Army could use, too, but the Navy had programs for all of these materials and surely would have done its own analysis first and then possibly shared the information with its service brothers.
Someone, somewhere at a very high level, appears to have seen that the Army was brought into the scavenging operation that had become U-234; not just any Army group, but the group that oversees the Manhattan Project - the Corps of Engineers.
Major John E. Vance was not only from the Corps of Engineers, the Army department under which the Manhattan Project operated, but, if a telephone transcript taken from Manhattan Project archives refers to the same "Vance" as the Major assigned to offload U-234 - as it appears to - then he was part of America's super-secret atomic bomb project, as well. The transcript is of a conversation between Manhattan Project intelligence officers Smith and Traynor and was recorded two weeks after "Major Vance" was assigned to the team responsible for unloading the material captured on U-234.
Smith: I just got a shipment in of captured material and there were 39 drums and 70 wooden barrels and all of that is liquid. What I need is a test to see what the concentration is and a set of recommendations as to disposal. I have just talked to Vance and they are taking it off the ship and putting it in the 73rd Street Warehouse. In addition to that I have about 80 cases of U powder in cases. He (Vance) is handling all of that now. Can you do the testing and how quickly can it be done? All we know is that it ranges from 10 to 85 percent and we want to know which and what.
Traynor: Can you give me what was in those cases?
Smith: U powder. Vance will take care of the testing of that.
Traynor: The other stuff is something else?
Smith: The other is water.xx
U-234's cargo manifest reveals that, besides its uranium, among its cargo was 10 "bales" of drums and 50 "bales" of barrels. The barrels are noted in the manifest to have contained benzyl cellulose, a very stable substancexxi that may have been used as a biological shield from radiation or as a coolant or moderator in a liquid reactor.xxii The manifest lists the drums as containing "confidential material." As surprising as it may seem, this secret substance may have been the "water" that Major Smith noted in his discussion with Major Traynor. Why would Major Smith want the water tested? And what did he mean when he said that its concentration ranged "from 10 to 85 percent and we want to know which and what"?
The leaders of the German project to breed plutonium had decided to use heavy water, or deuterium oxide, as the moderator for a plutonium-breeding liquid reactor. The procedure of creating heavy water results in regular water molecules picking up an additional hydrogen atom. The percentage of water molecules with the extra hydrogen represents the level of concentration of the heavy water. Thus Major Smith's seemingly overzealous concern about water and his question about concentration is predictable if Smith suspected the material was intended for a nuclear reactor. And using heavy water as a major element of their plutonium breeding reactor project, it is easy to see why the Germans labeled the drums "confidential material." The evidence indicates that U-234 - if the captured cargo being tested by "Vance" was from U-234, which seems very probable given all considerations - carried components for making not only a uranium bomb, but a plutonium bomb, also.
Further corroborating the connection of the barrels and drums as those that were taken from U-234 is a handwritten note found in the Southeast national archives held at East Point, Georgia.xxiii Dated 16 June, 1945, two days after Smith's and Traynor's telephone conversation, the note described how 109 barrels and drums - the exact total given in the Smith/Traynor transcript - were to be tested with geiger counters to determine if they were radioactive. The note also included instructions that an "intelligence agent cross out any markings on drums and bbls. [sic. - abbreviation for barrels - authors note] and number them serially from 1 to 109 and make note of what was crossed out." The note goes on to say that this recommendation was given to and approved by Lt.Colonel Parsons, General Groves' right-hand man on the military side of the Manhattan Project. And lastly, the writer of the note had called Major Smith, apparently to report back to him, leading one to believe the note's author may have been Major Traynor.
Was the captured cargo discussed by Smith and Traynor from U-234? The presence of a Mr. "Vance" who was in charge of "U powder," almost certainly determines that such was the case. The documents under consideration and the conversation they detail are from Manhattan Project files and are about men who worked for the Manhattan Project. Using the letter "U" as an abbreviation for uranium was widespread throughout the Manhattan Project. That there could have been another "Vance" who was working with uranium powder - especially "captured" uranium powder - seems unlikely even for coincidence.
And the fact that the contents of the barrels listed on the U-boat manifest were identified as containing a substance likely to be used in a nuclear reactor, benzyl cellulose, and that the barrels in the Smith/Traynor transcript and the untitled note - as well as the drums - were tested for radioactivity by geiger counter, certainly links the "captured" materials to no other source than U-234. The new-found evidence taken en mass demonstrates that, despite the traditional history, the uranium captured from U-234 was enriched uranium that was commandeered into the Manhattan Project more than a month before the final uranium slugs were assembled for the uranium bomb.
The Oak Ridge records of its chief uranium enrichment effort - the magnetic isotope separators known as calutrons - show that a week after Smith's and Traynor's 14 June conversation, the enriched uranium output at Oak Ridge nearly doubled - after six months of steady output.[xxiv] Edward Hammel, a metallurgist who worked with Eric Jette at the Chicago Met Lab, where the enriched uranium was fabricated into the bomb slugs, corroborated this report of late-arriving enriched uranium. Mr. Hammel told the author that very little enriched uranium was received at the laboratory until just two or three weeks - certainly less than a month - before the bomb was dropped.[xxv] The Manhattan Project had been in desperate need of enriched uranium to fuel its lingering uranium bomb program. Now it is almost conclusively proven that U-234 provided the enriched uranium needed, as well as components for a plutonium breeder reactor.
Notes:
i Wolfgang Hirschfeld and Geoffrey Brooks, Hirschfeld:The Story of A U-boat NCO 1940-1946, pp. 198,199
ii US Archives NARA II, U-boat U-234 file, US Navy secret dispatch
#292045, 30 May 1945
iii US Archives Southeast Region, East Point, Georgia, telephone transcript titled Telephone Conversation Between Major Smith, WLO and Major Traynor, 14 June, 1945
iv US Archives NARA II, extract of intercepted transmission sent from Chief Inspector in Germany to Bureau of Military Operations and Military Affairs, #165, 15 April, 1945, declassified # NND975001, NARA date 9/15/97
v Wolfgang Hirschfeld and Geoffrey Brooks, Hirschfeld:The Story of A U-boat NCO 1940-1946, pp. 198,199
vi Wolfgang Hirschfeld and Geoffrey Brooks, Hirschfeld:The Story of A U-boat NCO 1940-1946, Appendix
vii US Archives NARA II, U-boat U-234 file, confidential dispatch #131509, 13 May 1945
viii US Archives NARA II, U-boat U-234 file, secret dispatch #151716, 15 May, 1945
ix US Archives NARA II, U-boat U-234 file, secret dispatch #151942, 15 May, 1945, declassified #NND745085
x US Archives NARA II, U-boat U-234 file, Log of Public Relations - Restricted, by Commander N.R. Collier, 17 May, 1945; transcript, Telephone Conversation Between Capt. V.D. Herbster, USN (Ret.), and Commodore Kurtz, U.S.N. E.S.F., 18 May, 1945; second telephone conversation transcript Captain Herbster and Commodore Kurtz, 18 May, 1945
xi US Archives NARA II, U-boat U-234 file, Log of Public Relations - Restricted, by Commander N.R. Collier, 17 May, 1945; transcript, Telephone Conversation Between Capt. V.D. Herbster, USN (Ret.), and Commodore Kurtz, U.S.N. E.S.F., 18 May, 1945; second telephone conversation transcript Captain Herbster and Commodore Kurtz, 18 May, 1945
xii US Archives NARA II, Manifest of Cargo For Tokio On Board U-234, translated from German, 23 May, 1945, declassified #NND903015, NARA Date 12/11/93
xiii US Archives NARA II, secret dispatch #262151, 27 May, 1945
xiv Personal telephone conversation between the author and Clarence Larsen, Director of Y-12 calutrons operations at Oak Ridge, no date recorded
xv Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, p 116; Paul Manning, Nazi In Exile, p.153; compare to Chapter Four, page 82
xvi Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. 427
xvii Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb,p p. 608, 609
xviii Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. 461
xix US Archives NARA II, U-boat U-234 file, US Navy secret dispatch #292045, 30 May 1945
xx US Archives Southeast Region, East Point, Georgia, telephone transcript titled Telephone Conversation Between Major Smith, WLO and Major Traynor, 14 June, 1945
xxi Personal telephone conversation between the author and Dr. Susan Frost, PhD, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, College of Medicine, University of Florida, 30 August 1999, also Dr. Wentworth, University of Houston
xxii Interscience Publishers, Concise Encyclopedia of Nuclear Energy, p. 688
xxiii US Archives NARA Southeast Region, East Point, GA, untitled handwritten note dated 6/16/45
xxiv US Archives NARA Southeast Region, East Point, GA, Beta Oxide Transfer Report; see also chart on page __
xxv Personal telephone conversation between the author and Edward Hammel, Manhattan Project metallurgist, 14 May, 1996
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Wed Aug 21, 2013 7:53 pm Post subject:
Crikey - more evidence - of course the Germans probably have a secret nuclear weapon programme to this day
Like the Israelis before they were discovered
Hitler 'tested small atom bomb'
By Ray Furlong - BBC News, Berlin Monday, 14 March, 2005, 17:33 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4348497.stm
A German historian has claimed in a new book presented on Monday that Nazi scientists successfully tested a tactical nuclear weapon in the last months of World War II.
Rainer Karlsch said that new research in Soviet and also Western archives, along with measurements carried out at one of the test sites, provided evidence for the existence of the weapon.
"The important thing in my book is the finding that the Germans had an atomic reactor near Berlin which was running for a short while, perhaps some days or weeks," he told the BBC.
"The second important finding was the atomic tests carried out in Thuringia and on the Baltic Sea."
Mr Karlsch describes what the Germans had as a "hybrid tactical nuclear weapon" much smaller than those dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
'Bright light'
He said the last test, carried out in Thuringia on 3 March 1945, destroyed an area of about 500 sq m, killing several hundred prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates.
The weapons were never used because they were not yet ready for mass production. There were also problems with delivery and detonation systems.
"We haven't heard about this before because only small groups of scientists were involved, and a lot of the documents were classified after they were captured by the Allies," said Karlsch.
"I found documents in Russian and Western archives, as well as in private German ones."
One of these is a memo from a Russian spy, brought to the attention of Stalin just days after the last test. It cites "reliable sources" as reporting "two huge explosions" on the night of 3 March.
Karlsch also cites German eyewitnesses as reporting light so bright that for a second it was possible to read a newspaper, accompanied by a sudden blast of wind.
The eyewitnesses, who were interviewed on the subject by the East German authorities in the early 1960s, also said they suffered nose-bleeds, headaches, and nausea for days afterwards.
Karlsch also pointed to measurements carried out recently at the test site that found radioactive isotopes.
Sceptical response
His book has provoked huge interest in Germany, but also scepticism.
It has been common knowledge for decades that the Nazis carried out atomic experiments, but it has been widely believed they were far from developing an atomic bomb.
"The eyewitnesses he puts forward are either unreliable or they are not reporting first-hand information; allegedly key documents can be interpreted in various ways," said the influential news weekly Der Spiegel.
"Karlsch displays a catastrophic lack of understanding of physics," wrote physicist Michael Schaaf, author of a previous book about Nazi atomic experiments, in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.
"Karlsch has done us a service in showing that German research into uranium went further than we'd thought up till now, but there was not a German atom bomb," he added.
It has also been pointed out that the United States employed thousands of scientists and invested billions of dollars in the Manhattan Project, while Germany's "dirty bomb" was allegedly the work of a few dozen top scientists who wanted to change the course of the war.
Karlsch himself acknowledged that he lacked absolute proof for his claims, and said he hoped his book would provoke further research.
But in a press statement for the book launch, he is defiant.
"It's clear there was no master plan for developing atom bombs. But it's also clear the Germans were the first to make atomic energy useable, and that at the end of this development was a successful test of a tactical nuclear weapon."
"We still have things that need to be finished, and when they are finished, they will turn the tide " Adolf Hitler, March 13, 1945, addressing officers of the German Ninth Army.
A. An Unusual Exchange at Nuremberg
At the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals after the war, an amazing exchange occurred between former architect cum Nazi minister of armaments, Albert Speer, and Mr. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor.
JACKSON: Now, I have certain information, which was placed in my hands, of an experiment which was carried out near Auschwitz and I would like to ask you if you heard about it or knew about it.
The purpose of the experiment was to find a quick and complete way of destroying people without the delay and trouble of shooting and gassing and burning, as it had been carried out, and this is the experiment, as I am advised.
A village, a small village was provisionally erected, with temporary structures, and in it approximately 20,000 Jews were put. By means of this newly invented weapon of destruction, these 20,000 people were eradicated almost instantaneously, and in such a way that there was no trace left of them; that is developed, the explosive developed, temperatures of from 400 degrees to 500 degrees centigrade and destroyed them without leaving any trace at all.
Do you know about that experiment? SPEER: No, and I consider it utterly improbable. If we had had such a weapon under preparation, I should have known about it. But we did not have such a weapon. It is clear that in chemical warfare attempts were made on both sides to carry out research on all the weapons one
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could think of, because one did not know which party would start chemical warfare first...1
This exchange is remarkable in several respects, not the least of which is that its "explosive contents" are almost entirely overlooked in standard histories of the war and its aftermath.
Previous chapters have presented evidence that there was a large, and very secret, uranium enrichment program inside Nazi Germany, beginning sometime ca. late 1940 or early 1941, and continuing, apparently unabated - as the surrender of the U-234
would imply - right up to the end of the war. Zinsser's affidavit goes further, and alleges an actual atom bomb test, complete with descriptions of all the signatures of an atom bomb: mushroom cloud, electromagnetic pulse effects, and continued combustion of nuclear materials in the cloud. The Japanese military attache in Stockholm further corroborated the story with undeniably fantastic allegations of the German use of some type of weapon of mass destruction on the Eastern Front ca. 1942 (the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimea), to 1943, just days prior to the massive German offensive at Kursk.
Now, at Nuremberg, we have a third corroboration of the use of some type of weapon of awesome explosive power in the east by the Germans, this time from no less an individual than the chief American prosecutor at the Tribunal. And in his case, it is apparent that he is relating information gathered by intelligence. It is worth pausing to consider the implications of the exchange between Jackson and former armaments Reichminister Speer.
We shall begin with Speer. Albert Speer was successor to Dr. Fritz Todt as minister of armaments and production for the entire Third Reich. Speer's accomplishments are not to be gainsaid, it was largely owing to his efforts to organize the huge Nazi industrial capacity and streamline its efficiency that the wartime production of Germany increased dramatically under his oversight. In fact, in all
1 Cited in Harald Fath, Geheime Kommandosache -S III Jonastal und die Siegeswaffenproduktion: Weitere Spurensuche nach Thuringens Manhattan Project (Schleusingen: Amun Verlag, 1999), pp. 82-83. Original text cited in English.
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pertinent areas of German industrial war production, Specr managed to achieve peak production levels in all categories during the same precise period that Allied strategic bombing also was at its height.
His methods in achieving this feat were simple but effective: German industry was decentralized and dispersed into smaller plants, and, to the extent possible, moved into underground bomb-proof factories. "Modular" construction techniques were employed wherever possible. For example, German U-boats were produced in modular fashion, in sections, far inland in such factories, and transported to ports for final assembly. The deadly Type XXI U-boats with their exotic and revolutionary underwater propulsion systems - allowing an underwater cruising speed in excess of 21 knots, an unheard of speed for that time - were produced in this fashion at the end of the war.
But notably absent from Speer's comments is any indication that he was even aware of the huge extent of the German atom- bomb project and its enormous uranium enrichment program. Lofty as his position in the Nazi hierarchy was, it would appear that Speer was entirely in the dark on the programs and totally oblivious to any progress that had been made. The reason for Speer's ignorance will be addressed in due course (and by Speer himself!), but suffice it to say, the German government, like its American counterpart, had rigidly "compartmentalized" its atom bomb production program and placed it under the tightest security. But clearly, by the time of the exchange between Jackson and him, Speer and the whole world had heard of the atom bomb. So Speer appears to obfuscate his answer somewhat by redirecting the topic to chemical warfare.
The question of a revolutionary chemical explosive is not, however, as far-fetched as it might at first seem, for Jackson's comments suggest it by referring to temperatures of 400 to 500 degrees centigrade, far below the enormous temperatures produced by an atomic explosion. Was Speer obfuscating his answer, or was Jackson his question?
The prosecutor's statements and question also corroborate in loose fashion another component of our developing story, for he
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clearly alludes to the use of some type of weapon of massdestruction, possessed of enormous explosive power, in the east,and significantly, at or near Auschwitz, site of the I.G. Farben"Buna factory." It is to be noted that the Nazis had apparently gone so Far as to build an entire mock town and placed concentration camp inmates in it, an obvious though barbaric move to study the effects of the weapon on structures and people. His statements, along with those of the Japanese military attache in Stockholm cited in the previous chapter, afford a serious clue - and one often overlooked even by researchers into this 'alternative history" of thewar - into the nature of the Nazi's secret weapons development and use, for it would appear that insofar as the third Reich possessed weapons of mass destruction of extraordinary power, atomic or otherwise, they were tested and used against enemies consider bythe Nazi ideology to be racially inferior, and that means, in effect,they were used on the Eastern Front theater of the Reich's military operations.
Thus we are also afforded a speculative answer to the all- important question: If the Germans had the bomb, why didn't they use it? And the answer is, if they had it, they were far more likely to use it on Russia than on the Western allies, since the war in the East was conceived and intended by Hitler to be a genocidal war from the outset. And it certainly was that: fully one half of the approximately fifty million fatalities of World War Two were inflicted by the efficient Nazi war machine on Soviet Russia.
The use of such weapons on the Eastern Front by the Germans would also tentatively explain why more is not known about it, for it is highly unlikely that Stalin's Russia would have publicly acknowledged the fact. To do so would have been a propaganda disaster for Stalin's government. Faced with an enemy of superior tactical and operational competence in conventional arms, the RedArmy often had to resort to threats of execution against its ownsoldiers just to maintain order and discipline in its ranks and prevent mass desertion. Acknowledgment of the existence and use of such weapons by the mortal enemy of Communist Russia couldconceivably have ruined Russian morale and cost Stalin the war, and perhaps even toppled his government. As we proceed further
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into our investigation of German secret weaponry, its connection to Nazi ideology, and its use on the eastern front, we will encounter more and more examples of the strange story or event.
For now, however, we note the strangely ambiguous quality of Mr. Jackson's remarks. "Now I have," he begins, "'certain' information, which was placed in my hands, of an experiment which was carried out near Auschwitz..." By the time Mr. Jackson uttered these remarks, Hans Zinsser's statements were almost a year old, raising the possibility that Zinsser's affidavit may itself have been the "certain information" alluded to by Jackson, who may have intentionally altered its correct location. In this regard, it is significant that Zinsser expressed mystification that the test took place so close to a populated area. If Jackson deliberately altered the location of the test, he did not alter the nature of its victims. But another possibility is that the event took place where he says it did, "near" Auschwitz.
B. A Marshal, Mussolini, and the First Alleged Test Site at RugenIsland
The question of the location of a possible German atom bomb test comes from five very unlikely sources: an Italian officer, a Russian marshal's translator, and Benito Mussolini himself, an American heavy cruiser, and an island off the coast of northern Germany in the Baltic Sea.
Before he and his mistress Clara Petacci were murdered by Communist partisans, and then later hung from meat hooks in Milan to be pelted with rocks from an angry mob. Benito Mussolini, by the end of the war reduced to a mere puppet of Hitler and governing a "Fascist republic" in German-controlled northern Italy, spoke often of the German "wonder weapons":
The wonder weapons are the hope. It is laughable and senseless for us to threaten at this moment, without a basis in reality for these threats.
The well-known mass destruction bombs are nearly ready. In only a few days, with the utmost meticulous intelligence, Hitler will probably execute this fearful blow, because he will have full
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confidence.... It appear, that there are three bombs -and each has an astonishing operation. The construction of each unit is fearfully complex and of a lengthy time of completion.2
It would be easy to dismiss Mussolini's statements as more delusional and insane ravings of a fascist dictator facing defeat, clinging desperately to forlorn hopes and tattered dreams. It would be easy, were it but for the weird corroboration supplied by one Piotr Ivanovitch Titarenko, a former military translator on the staff of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, who handled the Japanese capitulation to Russia at the end of the war. As reported in the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1992, Titarenko wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In it, he reported that there were actually three bombs dropped on Japan, one of which, dropped on Nagasaki prior to its actual bombing, did not explode. This bomb was handed over by Japan to the Soviet Union.3
Mussolini and a Soviet marshal's military translator are not the only ones corroborating the strange number of "three bombs", for yet a fourth bomb may actually have been in play at one point, being transported to the Far East on board the US heavy cruiser Indianapolis (CA 35), when the latter sank in 1945.4
These strange testimonies call into question once again the Allied Legend, for as has been seen, the Manhattan Project in late 1944 and early 1945 faced critical shortages of weapons grade uranium, and had yet to solve the fusing problem for the plutonium bomb. So the question is, if these reports are true, where did the extra bomb(s) come from? That three, and possibly four, bombs were ready for use on Japan so quickly would seem to stretch
2 Benito Mussolini, "Political Testament," April 22, 1945, cited in Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, Hitler und die ,,Bombe": Welchen Stand erreichte die deutsche Atomforschung und Geheimwaffenentwicklung wirklich? (Rottenburg: Kopp Verlag, 2002), p. 87, my translation from the German.
3 Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe: Gewann Hitlers Wissenschaftler den nuklearen Wettlauf doch? Die Geheimprojekte bei Innsbruck, im Raum Jonastal bei Arnstadt und in Prag. (Rottenburg: Kopp Verlag, 2001), p. 146.
4 Fath, op. cit., p. 81
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credulity, unless these bombs were war booty, brought from Europe.
But the strangest evidence of all comes from the German island of Rugen, and the testimony of Italian officer Luigi Romersa, an eyewitness to the test of a German atom bomb on the island on the night of 11-12 October, 1944, approximately the same time frame as indicated in Zinsser's affidavit, and it is also the same approximate area as Zinsser indicated.
In this context it is also extremely curious that this time frame in 1944 was, for the Allies, a banner year for atomic bomb scares. On Saturday, August 11, 1945, an article in the London Daily Telegraph reported British preparations for German atom bomb attack on London the previous year.
NAZIS' ATOM BOMB PLANS BRITAIN READY A YEAR AGO
Britain prepared for the possibility of an atomic attack on this country by Germany in August, 1944.
It can now be disclosed that details of the expected effect of such a bomb were revealed in a highly secret memorandum which was sent that summer to the chiefs of Scotland Yard, chief constables of provincial forces and senior officials of the defence services.
An elaborate scheme was drawn up by the Ministry of Home Security for prompt and adequate measures to cope with the widespread devastation and heavy casualties if the Germans succeeded in launching atomic bombs on this country.
Reports received from our agents on the Continent early last year indicated that German scientists were experimenting with an atomic bomb in Norway. According to these reports the bomb was launched by catapult, and had an explosive radius of more than two miles.
In view of our own progress in devising an 'atomic' bomb the Government gave the reports serious consideration. Thousands of men and women of the police and defence services were held in readiness for several months until reliable agents in Germany reported that the bomb had been tested and proved a failure.5
"Nazis Atom Bomb Plans," London Daily Telegraph, Saturday, August 11, 1945, cited in Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, Hitler und die ,,Bombe", p. 37.
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The August 1945 London Daily Telegraph Article about a 1944 German Atom Bomb Scare in Britain
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This article, coming as it does a mere two days after the bombing of Nagasaki, and almost a year since the actual alert in Britain was called, deserves careful scrutiny.
First, and most obviously, the alert in Britain was apparently conducted entirely in secret, as law enforcement, defense, and medical personnel were placed on high alert. The reason for security is obvious, since to have signaled a public alert would have notified the Germans that there were Allied spies close enough to the German bomb program to know about its tests.
Second, the site of the alleged test - Norway - is unusual in that the timing of the test would place it a full two years after the British commando raid on the Norsk heavy water plant at Ryukon. This might indicate two things:
(1)
It might indicate that Hitler's interest in maintaining troops in Norway had more to do with the German atom bomb project than anything else, since, if the report was accurate to begin with, it would indicate a large scale German atom bomb effort was underway there;
(2)
Conversely, the report may have been deliberately inaccurate, i.e., there may really have been a test, but one that took place somewhere else.
Third, the presumed "alert" continued from August 1944 "for several months," that is, the alert could conceivably have stretched into October, i.e., into the time frame of the test mentioned in Zinsser's affidavit. Thus, the news account indicates something else: Allied intelligence was aware, and genuinely fearful, of German atom bomb testing.
Fourth, the article mentions that the test concerned a bomb launched from a "catapult". The V-l "buzz bomb", the first generation of the cruise missile, was launched from large steam-driven catapults. Putting two and two together, then, the "Norway" test may have been a test of an atom bomb delivery system based on the V-l, or of an atom bomb itself, or possibly both an atom bomb and its delivery system.
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With these thoughts in mind, we come to the final point. The alert was canceled when the test was proven a failure. The question is, what failed? Was it the bomb itself? The delivery system? orboth? An answer lies, perhaps, in another curious news article that appeared in the British press almost a year earlier, on Wednesday, October 11, 1944, in the London Daily Mail:
BERLIN IS 'SILENT' 60 HOURS STILL NO PHONES
STOCKHOLM, Tuesday
Berlin is still cut off from the rest of Europe to-night. The 60- hours silence began on Sunday morning - and still there is no explanation for the hold-up, which has now lasted longer than on any previous occasion.
The Swedish Foreign Office is unable to ring up its Berlin Legation.
Unconfirmed reports suggest that the major crisis between the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party has come to a head and that "tremendous events may be expected."
To-day's plane from Berlin to Stockholm arrived four hours late. It carried only Germans, two of whom appeared to be high officials. They looked drawn and pale, and when Swedish reporters approached them they angrily thrust their way out of the Swedish Aero-Transport offices, muttering: "Nothing we can say."
German papers arriving here on to-day's plane seem extraordinarily subdued, with very small headlines.
It is pointed out, however, in responsible quarters that if the stoppage were purely the technical result of bomb damage, as the Germans claimed, it should have been repaired by now.6
Walter Farr, "Berlin is 'Silent' 60 Hours: Still No Phones," London Daily Mail, Wednesday, October 11, 1944, cited in Meyer and Mehner, Hitler und die ,,Bombe" p. 81, emphasis added.
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The October 1944 Daily Mail Article about Berlin Telephone Service Disruption
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Of course we now know what was not known in October of 1944: when an atomic or thermonuclear bomb is detonated, the extreme electromagnetic pulse knocks out or interferes with electrical equipment for miles from the detonation site, depending on the size of the blast, the proximity of such equipment to it, and the degree of "shielding" such equipment has. For the normal, non-military phone lines in Berlin, the strange disruption of phone service is explainable precisely as the result of such an electromagnetic pulse. But this would imply that such a pulse, if the result of an atom bomb test, be considerably closer to Berlin than Norway. Presumably if telephone service in Berlin was affected by an atom bomb test in Norway, similar disruptions would have occurred in large cities that were much closer to the test, such as Oslo, Copenhagen, or Stockholm. Yet, not such disruptions are mentioned; only Berlin appears to have been affected.7
Thus, if the atom bomb test mentioned in the 1945 London Daily Telegraph article occurred, then one must look for a site considerably closer to Berlin than Norway. The Daily Mail phone service disruption article stands as clear corroboration of the probable test of a German atom bomb sometime in October of 1944, the same time frame as Zinsser's affidavit, and within the time frame mentioned in the Daily Telegraph article about a secret alert in Britain from August of 1944, and continuing for "several months."
But the Daily Mail's phone service disruption article does more: it suggests why the Germans may have considered the test a failure. At that time the effects of nuclear explosions -electromagnetic pulse and disruption of electrical equipment, radioactivity and fallout - were still largely unknown and not well understood. The Berlin telephone service was one of the finest, if not the finest, in the world at the time.8 The Nazis may very well
7 There is another possibly, though extremely unlikely explanation, for the lack of reports in other cities. Very simply, it may reflect a lack of intelligence from those areas.
8 Up to the very end of the war, for example, the cable lines between Berlin and Tokyo remained open, allowing the Japanese to send condolences to the Nazi government even as Russian tanks were rolling over the streets of the city.
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have been shocked at this curious result of their alleged test of an atomic "wonder weapon", and therefore considered it a "failure" until more tests could be done and the phenomenon of electro-magnetic pulse more fully understood. After all, it would do no good, so to speak, to deploy the "ultimate weapon" only to be unable to receive the telephone call of surrender after having used it! And to the totalitarian and paranoid Nazi state, a disruption of communications from its capital city to its provinces, armed forces, and occupied territories was literally an unthinkable nightmare, being the perfect opportunity for a coup d'etat.
Finally, to round out the newspaper scavenger hunt, a curious series of articles from the London Times between May 15 and May 25, 1945, covered a story about German troops on the Danish Baltic Sea island of Bornholm that refused to surrender to attacking Russian forces.9 Bornholm was within one hundred miles of the German rocket site at Peenemunde, and quite close to an alleged atom bomb test site on the small island of Rugen on the Baltic coast close to the port city of Kiel.
It is here on this island that Italian officer Luigi Romersa was the guest and eyewitness to a German "wonder weapon" test on the night of October 11-12, 1944. After journeying by a night drive for two hours in the rain from Berlin, Romersa reached the island by motorboat. According to his statements to German atom bomb researchers Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, the island was guarded by a special elite unit, which we can only presume was an SS unit, and that admission to the island was only granted by special passes issued directly by the OberKommano Der
Most communications lines in Berlin were laid underground by the Deutsche Reichspost before the war for the express purpose of mitigating phone service disruption during bombing attacks. If the phone service disruption was therefore a result of EMP from a nuclear detonation, then the size of the detonation would have to have been rather large to cause this lengthy disruption of the entire city's telephone service for that length of time, shielded as the lines were by being underground. The other alternative, a second coup attempt, may be a possible explanation, but there is no mention of such an attempt in any literature.
9 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe, p. 51.
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Wehrmacht (OKW).10 At this point, it is best to cite Romersa's own words:
There were four of us: my two attendants, a man with worker's clothes, and I. "We will see a test of the disintegration bomb.11 It is the most powerful explosive that has yet been developed. Nothing can withstand it," said one of them. He hardly breathed. He glanced at his watch and waited until noon, the hour for the experiment. Our observation post was a kilometer from the point of the explosion. "We must wait here," the man with the worker's clothes ordered, "until this evening. When it is dark we may leave. The bomb gives off deathly rays, of utmost toxicity. its effective area is much larger than the most powerful conventional bomb. Around 1.5 kilometers...."
Around 4:00 PM, in the twilight, shadows appeared, running toward our bunker. They were soldiers, and they had on a strange type of "diving suit". They entered and quickly shut the door. "Everything is kaput," one of them said, as he removed his protective clothing. We also eventually had to put on white, coarse, fibrous cloaks. I cannot say what material this cloak was made of, but I had the impression that it could have been asbestos, the headgear had a piece of mica-glass12 in front of the eyes.
Having donned this clothing, the observation party then left the bunker and made its way to ground zero:
The houses that I had seen only an hour earlier had disappeared, broken into little pebbles of debris, as we drew nearer ground zero,13 the more fearsome was the devastation. The grass had the same color as leather, the few trees that still stood upright had no more leaves.14
There are peculiarities of Romersa's account that one must mention, if this were the test of nuclear bomb. First, some of the blast damage described is typical for a nuclear weapon: sheering of trees, obliteration of structures, and so on. The protective clothing
10 Meyer and Mehner, Hitler und die ,,Bombe", p. 64.
11 "Auflosungsbombe".
12 "Glimmerglas".
13 "Explosionspunkt".
14 Luigi Romersa, private telephone interview with Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, Hitler und die ,,Bombe", pp. 62-66, my translation from the German.
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worn by the German technicians as well as the polarized glasses also are typical. And the test does appear to have involved use in a "populated area" with houses and so on, in similar fashion to prosecutor Jackson's exchange with Speer, and Zinsser's own comments in his affidavit. However, Romersa, apparently a careful observer, fails to make any mention of a fusion of soil into silicate glassy material that also normally accompanies a nuclear blast close to the ground.
But whatever was tested at Rugen, it does have enough of the signatures of an atom bomb to suggest that this is, in fact, what it was. Most importantly it is to be noted that it coincides with the time frame of Zinsser's affidavit and the phone service outage in Berlin, and the timing of the British alert.15 Finally, it is perhaps quite significant that during this same time frame, Adolf Hitler finally signed an order for the development of the atom bomb. In context, this can only mean that he has given approval to develop more of a weapon already tested.16
C. The Three Corners (Dreiecken) and the Alleged Test at the Troop Parade Ground at Ohrdruf
A more controversial allegation, however, concerns the alleged test of a high yield atom bomb by the SS at the troop parade ground and barracks at Orhdruf, in south central Thuringia in March of 1945. As we shall see, this date too is significant. Shortly after the German reunification in 1989, old rumors of an atom bomb test conducted by the SS late in the war in south central Germany, in what was formerly East Germany, again surfaced. The test is alleged to have taken place on March 4, 1945.17 However, as
15 One significant difference that does emerge is that Zinsser's affidavit places the test close to the hours of twilight, whereas Romersa has it taking place in full daylight. The latter would make sense, from a security point of view, since daylight would tend to mask the visibility of the blast more effectively from prying eyes in the distance.
16 Rose, op. cit., notes that Hitler actually gave a formal order in October of 1944 for the immediate development of the atom bomb.
17 Meyer and Mehner, Hitler und die „ Bombe " , p. 226.
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we shall soon see, there is an additional problem associated with the allegation of this test near the Three Corners. The Three Corners part of the story begins with a component of
the Allied Legend. According to former Last German sources, one plausible reason for the swift advance of US General Patton's divisions on this region of Thuringia was that the last Fuhrer Headquarters (Fuhrerhauptquartier), a facility code-named "Jasmine" by the Germans, was located in the vast underground
facilities at Jonastal.18 "There exists an American document, under point number four, that informs us that the last (Fuhrer Headquarters) was not at the Obersalzburg, but in the region of Ohrdruf,"19 that is, in the region of the Three Corners. Thus, the Legend is elaborated: Patton's drive was to cut off the escape route
of fleeing Nazis and seize Hitler's last secret underground headquarters, and, presumably, the Grand Prize himself. This entire facili t y was part of a vast complex of underground sites under the command structure of the SS, and named "S III" - a designation not without its own suggestive possibilities as we shall discover in subsequent parts of this work - and the Fuhrer Headquarters was but one component of this complex.20 The problem with the view that this complex was simply a headquarters complex is that SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kammler - a man with whom we shall have much to do later in this work - was directly involved in the construction of all facilities in the region since 1942, thus making it unlikely that they were constructed merely for Hitler's last headquarters, since Kammler was directly involved with the most sensitive areas of the Reich's secret weapons research and development. It is therefore more likely that they were a part of Kammler's vast SS Secret weapons black projects empire.21 There is no mention of any of these facilities in surviving German archives, or, seemingly, any where else for that matter, and yet, they are definitely there for all to see.22
18 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe, p. 209.
19 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 207.
20 Ibid., p. 213., "Report of Mr. Oskar Muhlheim, Bad Durenberg."
21 Ibid., p. 239.
22 Ibid., p. 240.
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So what were these facilities researching? Almost nothing was known about them until witnesses and relatives of witnesses began to talk after German reunification. One such man was Adolf Bernd Freier who, before his death in Argentina, wrote German researchers Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner a letter detailing his knowledge of the facilities gained while he was on the construction staff. There were, Freier alleged, facilities dedicated to special circular aircraft(!), to the "Amerika Raket", the intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States, and research facilities of atomic experiments under the direction of Dr. Kurt Diebner, and a complete underground factory for the production of heavy water!23
But most importantly, Freier alleges that the "atomic weapon" was ready on July 2, 1944!24 What type of atomic weapon is meant here? A "dirty" radiological bomb, designed to spray a vast area with deadly radioactive material but far short of an actual nuclear fission bomb? Or an actual atom bomb itself? Freier's choice of words is not clear. But one thing does stand out, and that is the date of July 2, 1944, the same month as the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the - very aptly named - "Bomb Plot" approximately two weeks later. The consequence of a successful German development of even a radiological bomb might thus be one of the primary motivations for the anti-Hitler conspirators to attempt to remove the Fuhrer when they did, and might explain their hidden logic in assuming that the Allies would negotiate with an anti-Nazi (or at least un-Nazi) provisional German government in spite of the Allies' own demands for an unconditional surrender, for the possession of such a weapon would have given the conspirators considerable negotiation leverage. And if the conspirators knew of the existence of the weapon, and of Hitler's plans to deploy it in actual use, it may have been the final moral compulsion for them to act.
23 Meyer and Mehner, das Geheimnis., p. 242.
24 Ibid., p. 245. According to Freier's allegations, the bomb was ready on July 2, 1944, but not its delivery system, meaning presumably the "Amerikaraket" (p. 249).
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In any case, the most problematical aspect of the alleged test of an atom bomb by the Nazis in the Ohrdruf-Three Corners region of Thuringia comes from a rather specific, and rather startling, assertion. According to Freier, the test took place on March 4, 1945 at the old troop parade ground at Orhdruf. There, a small scaffold about 6 meters high had been erected, a the top of which a small "atomic weapon"25 was placed. The weapon, according to Freier, was "100 g", a mere one hundred grams! This is one of the most significant, and highly problematical, allegations regarding the real nature of the Nazi atom bomb project, made by someone supposedly involved in it, for as will be immediately obvious, 100 grams is far short of the 50 or so kilograms of critical mass reportedly needed for a uranium-based atom bomb, as has been seen, and it is still well below the amount needed for the critical mass for a typical plutonium bomb. Yet, Freier is insistent upon this point, and moreover alleges that all the "slaves", the luckless concentration camp victims that were forced to take part in the test, within a circle of 500-600 meters from ground zero were killed.26 This would give an area of approximately 1 to 1.2 kilometers of blast damage, roughly the effect of a modern tactical nuclear bomb. Such a blast radius would
require an enormous amount of the then available conventional explosives, and that amount would far exceed the mere 100 grams Freier alleges for the device. These points indicates that the "A- Waffe" or "atomic weapon" was in fact a fully fledged atom bomb. So how does one explain the extraordinarily small critical mass, especially since the Manhattan Project was aiming for a uranium critical mass of around 50 kilograms?
This question deserve serious consideration, for it affords yet another possible clue - if the allegation is to be credited with accuracy - into the real nature of the Nazi atom bomb project. We have seen already that the project was developed under several different and discreet groups for reasons partly due to security, and for reasons partly due to the practical nature of the German
25 "A -Waffe", the wording again is not "Atombombe" but only A-waffe, or "A-weapon".
26 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 245.
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program. For security reason, I believe the "Heisenberg" group and the high-profile names associated with it were deliberately used by the Nazis as the "front" group for public, namely Allied, consumption. The SS security and intelligence apparatus would have undoubtedly concluded, correctly, that these high profile scientists would be high priority targets for Allied intelligence for kidnapping and assassination. Accordingly, it is highly unlikely that the Nazis would have concentrated any genuine atomic bomb secrets or development exclusively in the hands of this group. The very existence of the Allied Legend for so many years after the war is direct testimony to the success of this plan. The real atom bomb development occurred far from the prying eyes of Allied intelligence, under the auspices of the Reichspost and more importantly, under the direct auspices of the SS.
The second facet of the German atom bomb program we have likewise previously encountered: its emphasis on what was practically achievable during the war. Hence, while the Germans knew of the possibilities of plutonium and a plutonium-based atom bomb, and therefore knew that a functioning reactor used to produce plutonium for bombs would thereby enable Germany to develop more bombs for the same investment of fissile material, they also knew that a major technical hurdle lay across the path: the development of a successful reactor in the first place. Thus, as has been previously argued, they opted to develop a uranium-based bomb only, since uranium could be enriched to weapons grade purity without the necessity of the development of a reactor, and since they already possessed the necessary technologies to do so, if employed en masse. Like its American Manhattan Project counterpart, the SS-run program relied on massive numbers of enrichment units to separate and purify isotope.
Now let us extend this line of reasoning further. Germany was also seeking to be able to deploy such bombs as warheads on its rockets. And that meant, given their limited lift capabilities, that the weight of the warheads had somehow to be reduced by several orders of magnitude for the rockets to be able to carry them. And there is an economic factor. Knowing that their industrial capacity would be stained by the effort, even with the help of tens of
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thousands of slave laborers from the camp-, another problem may have presented itself to the Germans, a problem illuminated for them by their own knowledge of the possibilities offered by plutonium-based bombs: How does one get more bang for the Reichsmark without the use of plutonium? Is there a way to rely on less uranium in a critical mass assembly than is conventionally thought?
And so we return to Freier's statement of a remarkably small 100 g atom bomb test at Ohrdruf on March 4, 1945. There does exist a method by which much smaller critical masses of fissile material can be used to make a bomb: boosted fission. Essentially, boosted fission simply relies on the introduction of some neutron- producing material - polonium, or heavy hydrogen: deuterium, or even tritium - to release more neutrons into the chain reaction than is actually released by the fissile critical mass assembly by itself. This raises the amount of free neutrons initiating chain reactions in the critical mass, and therefore allows two very important things:
(1)
It allows slightly lower purity of fissile material - materially not considered of sufficient purity to be weapons grade without boosted fission - to be used for an actual atom bomb; and,
(2)
it requires less actual fissilematerial for the critical mass assembly to make a bomb.
Thus, "boosted fission" would have afforded the German bomb program a practical way to increase the number of bombs available to them, and a reliable method for achieving an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction with lower purity of enriched material.27 it is perhaps quite significant, then, that Freier's testimony concerning the Three Corners underground weapons factories also mentions the existence of an underground heavy water plant in the facilities, for heavy water, of course, contains atoms of deuterium and tritium(heavy hydrogen atoms with one and two extra neutrons in the nucleus respectively).
27 Q.v. Meyer and Mehner, Hitler, pp. 121-123.
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In any case, the test of a small critical mass, boosted fission device of high yield at Ohrdruf on March 4, 1945, is at least consistent with the parameters of the German bomb program and its practical needs. But there are interesting, and intriguingly suggestive, corroborations of the test. According to Freier, Hitler himself was indeed in the Three Corners headquarters for a brief period at the end of march 1945.28 It is known that Hitler did personally visit and address the officers of the German Ninth Army, operating in that precise area, in March of 1945., and stated to them that there were still things that needed to be "finished", an interesting comment if seen in the light of Freier's allegations that it was not the bomb that Germany needed, but the delivery systems. It does make sense that if there were such a test, that Hitler would have been present as an observer to witness the final success of German science in delivering to him the "ultimate weapon".
But perhaps the most persuasive bit of evidence that there is far more about the end of World War Two than we have been told can be found in two exceedingly odd facts that emerge from the Three Corners region of Thuringia in south central Germany. In a statement made on March 20, 1968, former German General Erich Andress was in the Three Corners region at the end of the war, when suddenly, more American military personnel(who were already occupying the area), arrived with jeeps and heavy transports, and immediately ordered all the buildings and houses in the area to have their windows totally blacked out, leaving one to conclude that the Americans were removing something from the area of great value to them, something they wished no one to see. The second odd fact is even more curious, for it is a fact that, of all the areas in modern Germany, the region of Thuringia, precisely in the area of Jonastal and Ohrdruf, is the region of Germany with the highest concentration of background gamma radiation.29
So, what is really signified by the unique exchange of remarks between former Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, and Chief American Prosecutor Jackson at Nuremberg? That Jackson is privy to information similar in nature to reports only recently
28 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 228.
29 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 251.
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declassiefied is clear from his question. That this information concerns the real nature of German atom bomb research and its -what appear to be astounding achievements completely at variance with the postwar Allied Legend - would also seem to be indicated. And that Albert Speer seems either unwilling to talk about them candidly, or is simply entirely ignorant of them, also seems indisputable. Thus Jackson's question would seem to imply a test of the extent of Speer's knowledge of the program and his complicity in the wo tests at Rugen and Ohrdruf. If the Minister if Armaments for the entire Third Reich knew nothing of it, then indeed, we are dealing with a black Reich within the black Reich, a beast in the belly of the beast, of which even high ranking Nazis such as Speer knew very little, if anything. The great secret of World War Two, one which the victorious Allies and Russians wish to keep secret to this day, was that Nazi Germany was indisputably first to reach the atom bomb, and was indisputably for a very brief period before the end of the war, the world's very first nuclear power. But why is the Allied and Russian secrecy continued even to the present day? The answer to that disturbing question will be addressed more completely in the subsequent parts of this book, for the answer, disturbing as it is,
concerns far more than mere nuclear weapons. But why didn't the Nazis use their bombs if they had them? The answer to that question has already been partly addressed in this chapter: if they used any weapons of mass destruction, nuclear or Otherwise, they would have been far more likely to have used them in a fashion consistent with their racist and genocidal ideology, as well as against the enemy that was their largest military threat: on the Eastern Front, against the Soviet Union, where a paranoid Stalinist regime would have been loathe to admit to the world or to its own war-savaged people that they faced an enemy with overwhelming technological superiority. Such an admission would likely have so demoralized the Russians, already forced to spend rivers of their own blood in every engagement with the Wehrmacht, that Stalin's regime itself may not have survived such an admission. But why not use them against the Western Allies in the last stages of the war, as the military situation grew increasingly
Joined: 25 Sep 2013 Posts: 3 Location: Marton, New Zealand
Posted: Sat Oct 05, 2013 1:58 pm Post subject:
Tony, Carter Hydrick takes a bunch of assumptions and misconstrues them. The retired WW2 Japanese General Kawashima Touransouke who first requested shipments of Uranium from Germany on 7th July 1943 appeared on NHK TV in a 1982 interview. Kawashima stated that 2000kg of Uranium oxide, not enriched Uranium 235, reached Japan during WW2.
An intelligence report of US Navy Intelligence entitled "German Technical Aid to Japan, a Survey" dated June 15, 1945 talks emphatically about the voyage of U-234, stating that Uranium oxide was unloaded from her.
The difference in cargo manifests arises from the fact that whilst cruising the Kettegat between Denmark and Sweden in March 1945 another U-boat a type VII class boat surfaced underneath U-234 forcing her into a Norwegian port for repairs during which time some of her cargo was unloaded. U-234's radio operator Wolfgang Hirschfeld wrote in his autobiographical account that some of the cargo offloaded was so important that plans were discussed to fly the cargo direct to Japan from Norway.
Two Messerschmitt Me-262 fighters in the original manifest were not aboard her when she was offloaded in USA, thus one assumes these were offloaded in Norway.
Far more fascinating than Hydrick's assertion is the claim at page 198 of the report; "German Technical Aid to Japan, a Survey" dated June 15, 1945, was it's claim that in 1944 Germany provided japan with the technology to build minature atom bombs with a blast radius of 1,000 metres and elsewhere in the same report that Japan began building V-2 rockets at Mukden (Shenyang) Manchuria in January 1945.
Readings at site of Gusen camp near St
Georgen show elevated levels of uranium -
indications of subterranean implosions
seven decades ago
15 miles of tunnels lie under Gusen, a
sub-camp of Mauthausen where tens of
thousands of people were murdered
Hunt to find evidence of atomic research
after documentary by Andreas Sulzer
unnerved locals
Austrian authorities have ordered a search of
secret tunnels beneath a former concentration
camp complex where Nazi scientists are believed
to have conducted nuclear research in a bid to
build an atomic bomb.
The probe was triggered by a TV documentary
which accessed wartime archives containing
blueprints and eyewitness accounts of frantic
attempts to beat the Americans in the race for
the weapon to win the war.
And recently, readings were taken of the area at
St Georgen showing elevated levels of uranium -
indications of subterranean implosions seven
decades ago. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 25 Sep 2013 Posts: 3 Location: Marton, New Zealand
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 7:32 am Post subject:
There were in fact several underground factories producing nuclear weapons and/or V-2 rockets to deliver them.
For example at Ottamuchow south of Breslau was a factory adapting warheads to the V-2 which an OSS report dated 9 November 1944 noted had a destructing radius of several kilometres.
On 4th April 1944 a British officer named Saunders attached the British 8th Army stumbled across an underground factory at Eselkemp 74km west of Hannover. Inside he discovered a working nuclear reactor, 40 cyclotrons and an unused Atomic bomb weighing 3.8 tons named "76-Zentner" A more detailed report of this discovery has been published in STERN magazine and in La Republica in 2011. The story came to light through Keith Saunders mentioning his father's wartime experiences to a German researcher named Dirk Finkemeier.
At the Richard mine in Czechoslovakia the Red Army discovered banks of working cyclotrons and V-2 rockets being assembled for atomic warheads at the Weser Plant. Their warheads required the addition of a radioactive additive which fits the description of tritium. Tritium is often used these days to boost the yield of explosive nuclear devices.
These and similar facts remain concealed and classified.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2014 9:58 am Post subject:
Some interesting comments on this topic appeared on the YouTube Horizon 'Hitler's Nuke' documentary - reposted film below
Simon Gunson wrote:
A document archived at Maxwell AFB in Alabama documents recovery by the US 9th Army of a German 3.8 ton Atomic bomb ["76-Zentner"] from an underground complex near Goslar on 26 April 1845. Charles Linbergh who was both a member of the US Naval Technical Mission Europe and a qualified B-24 Liberator pilot personally flew the device back to USA from Germany. Prior to this the Manhattan Project had no LITTLE BOY bomb. USA had two Plutonium bomb projects, FAT MAN and THIN MAN.
Simon Gunson
During 1944 Germany had 40 Anschutz Mark IIIB centrifuges at an underground complex in Espelkamp, plus 20 Hellage Mark IIIB centrifuges at Kandern plus others at a complex in Celle each able to enrich 250 grams of Uranium by 7% per 24 hours, producing at least 10.5kg of 80% HEU every 12 days. Even Oak Ridge could not produce HEU at such a rate. Manhattan Project only produced 15kg HEU in total by late March 1945.
Joined: 25 Sep 2013 Posts: 3 Location: Marton, New Zealand
Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2014 9:42 am Post subject:
Simon Gunson wrote:
There were in fact several underground factories producing nuclear weapons and/or V-2 rockets to deliver them.
For example at Ottamuchow south of Breslau was a factory adapting warheads to the V-2 which an OSS report dated 9 November 1944 noted had a destructing radius of several kilometres.
On 4th April 1944 a British officer named Saunders attached the British 8th Army stumbled across an underground factory at Eselkemp 74km west of Hannover. Inside he discovered a working nuclear reactor, 40 cyclotrons and an unused Atomic bomb weighing 3.8 tons named "76-Zentner" A more detailed report of this discovery has been published in STERN magazine and in La Republica in 2011. The story came to light through Keith Saunders mentioning his father's wartime experiences to a German researcher named Dirk Finkemeier.
At the Richard mine in Czechoslovakia the Red Army discovered banks of working cyclotrons and V-2 rockets being assembled for atomic warheads at the Weser Plant. Their warheads required the addition of a radioactive additive which fits the description of tritium. Tritium is often used these days to boost the yield of explosive nuclear devices.
These and similar facts remain concealed and classified.
Correction & Apology
I have to apologise for errors in the above post due to translation errors in an email I received from German Lawyer Dirk Finkemeier who alerted me to this story.
The 40 cyclotrons were at another location code-name "Wesser-B" which i now understand to be the Richard Mine in the Czech republic. During WW2 the Germans built Panther tanks in part of the Richard Mine however another portion of it was deliberately destroyed with explosives to cave in the ceilings.
At Espelkamp which I originally referred to Dirk has since clarified for me that there were 40 Anschutz Mark III centrifuges there. Dirk advises me from his further research that in March 1946 Konrad Beyerle the chief engineer for Anschutz was interviewed about the machines found at Espelkamp. He revealed that each machine could enrich 250g of Uranium by 7% per 24 hours. This means 250 grams could be enriched to 80% HEU in just 12 days.
There were other Hellage Mark III centrifuges installed at Kandern and Celle during 1944. These were the same Anschutz design, Hellage merely refers to the Hellage linen factory at Freiberg.
Dirk Finkemeier also put me in touch with Keith Sanders clearing up other misunderstandings. Keith is a former British Army officer but it was his father in WW2 Corporal Fred Gwyndyr Sanders RAOC who entered the Espekamp underground factory hidden beneath a turpentine manufacturing plant.
Shortly before his death Keith's father told him of the Espelkamp facility. Sanders senior said that he found 40 Anschutz centrifuges there plus a Krupp nuclear reactor.
Keith Sanders also contradicted Dirk and told me the 76 Zentner bomb was found near Goslar on the 26th April by the US 9th Army. Dirk advised me that Lindbergh personally flew the German bomb back to the United States.
I apologise that I posted in haste and fell victim to miscommunication.
I have had a great deal of further communication on the issue since with Dirk Finkemeier and i continue to learn new facts on the issue.
Currently a junior school above the old underground nuclear factory has been closed due to children falling sick from what appears to be radiation sickness.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 10:03 am Post subject:
Horizon - Hitlers Atomic Bomb (1992) quite a bargaining chip in 1944/5
User - sploofmonkey
Researcher/Author Joseph P Farrell offers quite a different conversation that happened between the captured German physicists at the Farmhall manor in Britain. Farrell also claims that the IG Farben synthetic rubber plant by Auschwitz was not a rubber plant at all, but a nuclear facility.
By Stephanie Linning for MailOnline
12:20 28 Dec 2014, updated 17:18 28 Dec 2014
Facility was discovered near the town of St Georgen an der Gusen, Austria
Understood that it could be connected to another Nazi weapons facility
Experts believe that it was used to conduct research into atomic bombs
Supported by heightened radiation readings and witness testimonies
A labyrinth of secret underground tunnels believed to have been used by the Nazis to develop a nuclear bomb has been uncovered.
The facility, which covers an area of up to 75 acres, was discovered near the town of St Georgen an der Gusen, Austria last week, it has been reported.
Excavations began on the site after researchers detected heightened levels of radiation in the area - supporting claims that the Nazis were developing nuclear weapons.
Scroll down for video
Vast: The facility, which covers an area of up to 75 acres, was discovered near the town of St Georgen an der Gusen, Austria last week. It is believed to be connected to Nazi weapons facility B8 Bergkristall (above) +8
Vast: The facility, which covers an area of up to 75 acres, was discovered near the town of St Georgen an der Gusen, Austria last week. It is believed to be connected to Nazi weapons facility B8 Bergkristall (above)
Research: Excavations began on the site after heightened levels of radiation were detected in the area - supporting long-standing claims that the Nazis were developing nuclear weapons. Above, B8 Bergkristall +8
Research: Excavations began on the site after heightened levels of radiation were detected in the area - supporting long-standing claims that the Nazis were developing nuclear weapons. Above, B8 Bergkristall
Significant: Documentary maker Andreas Sulzer, who is leading the excavations, said that the site is 'most likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich. Above, B8 Bergkristall +8
Significant: Documentary maker Andreas Sulzer, who is leading the excavations, said that the site is 'most likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich. Above, B8 Bergkristall
Documentary maker Andreas Sulzer, who is leading the excavations, told the Sunday Times that the site is 'most likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich'.
It is believed to be connected to the B8 Bergkristall underground factory, where the Messerschmitt Me 262 - the first operational jet fighter - was built.
There are also suggestions that the complex is connected to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.
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Slave labour from the camp was used to build both complexes - with as many as 320,000 inmates in the harsh underground conditions.
But while the Bergkristall site was explored by Allied and Russia after the war, the Nazis appeared to have gone through greater lengths to conceal the newly-discovered tunnels.
Its entrance was only uncovered after the excavation team, which includes historians and scientists, pieced together information in declassified intelligence documents and testimonies from witnesses.
Hidden: While the nearby Bergkristall site was explored by Allied and Russian forces after the war, the Nazis appeared to have gone through greater lengths to conceal the newly-discovered tunnels near St Georgen +8
Hidden: While the nearby Bergkristall site was explored by Allied and Russian forces after the war, the Nazis appeared to have gone through greater lengths to conceal the newly-discovered tunnels near St Georgen
Military centre: The newly-discovered site is believed to be connected to the B8 Bergkristall underground factory, pictured above, where the Messerschmitt Me 262 - the first operational jet fighter - was built +8
Military centre: The newly-discovered site is believed to be connected to the B8 Bergkristall underground factory, pictured above, where the Messerschmitt Me 262 - the first operational jet fighter - was built
Development: While the Bergkristall site, pictured above, was explored by Allied and Russia after the war, the Nazis appeared to have gone through greater lengths to conceal the newly-discovered tunnels +8
Development: While the Bergkristall site, pictured above, was explored by Allied and Russia after the war, the Nazis appeared to have gone through greater lengths to conceal the newly-discovered tunnels
The team is now in the process of removing layers of soil and concrete packed into the tunnels and heavy granite plates that were used to cover the entrance.
Helmets belonging to SS troops and other Nazi relics are among the items that have been uncovered so far.
The excavation was halted last week by police, who demanded the group produce a permit for conducting research on historic sites. But Mr Sulzer is confident that work will resume next month.
He told the Sunday Times: 'Prisoners from concentration camps across Europe were handpicked for their special skills - physicists, chemists or other experts - to work on this monstrous project and we owe it to the victims to finally open the site and reveal the truth.'
Prisoners from concentration camps across Europe were handpicked for their special skills to work on this monstrous project and we owe it to the victims to finally open the site and reveal the truth
Excavation leader Andreas Sulzer
The probe was triggered by a research documentary by Mr Sulzer on Hitler's quest to build an atomic bomb.
In it, he referenced diary entries from a physicist called up to work for the Nazis. There is other evidence of scientists working for a secret project managed by SS General Hans Kammler.
Kammler, who signed off the plans for the gas chambers and crematorium at Auschwitz, was in charge of Hitler's missile programmes.
Mr Sulzer searched archives in Germany, Moscow and America for evidence of the nuclear weapons-building project led by the SS.
He discovered that on January 2, 1944, some 272 inmates of Mauthausen were taken from the camp to St Georgen to begin the construction of secret galleries.
By November that year, 20,000 out of 40,000 slave labourers drafted in to build the tunnels had been worked to death.
After the war, Austria spent some £10million in pouring concrete into most of the tunnels.
But Sulzer and his backers believe they missed a secret section where the atomic research was conducted.
Brutal: Slave labour from Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp (pictured) was used to build both the St Georgen site and Bergkristall with as many as 320,000 inmates in the harsh underground conditions +8
Brutal: Slave labour from Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp (pictured) was used to build both the St Georgen site and Bergkristall with as many as 320,000 inmates in the harsh underground conditions
The Soviets were stationed in St Georgen until 1955 and they took all of the files on the site back with them to Moscow.
Experts are trying to discover if there is a link between St Georgen and sites in Germany proper where scientists were assembled during the Third Reich in a bid to match American efforts to build the ultimate weapon.
In June 2011, atomic waste from Hitler's secret nuclear programme was believed to have been found in an old mine near Hanover.
More than 126,000 barrels of nuclear material lie rotting over 2,000 feet below ground in an old salt mine.
Rumour has it that the remains of nuclear scientists who worked on the Nazi programme are also there, their irradiated bodies burned in secret by S.S. men sworn to secrecy. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Feb 07, 2015 10:24 am Post subject:
youtube comment wrote:
The Nazis had the bomb.
Not as a fully functional weapon but as a miniaturized trigger for a much larger device, the difference being the that trigger was an isomer of Plutonium Pu240 or similar and thus relatively metastable in it's heightened energy state to the extent that a single zap from an explosive or neutron generator source could cause it to cascade with a huge gamma burst. This gamma burst was subsequently to be used to generate ENORMOUS thermal boundary pressures on Lithium Deuteride which a rather famous man in the Non-Uraneinverein 'club' had been working on, Manfred Von Ardenne.
This man may also have been involved with the transmutation of Plutonium (his Ardenee Source remained one of the purest generators of high capacitance voltage until the early digital systems of the 1970s) as it is stated that 'Die Glocke' or the Nazi Bell was in fact a massively large plasma discharge capacitor (Tokomak) and it was this which was used to generate the 500-800 millgrams of isomer material known variously as Xerum 525 or (later) 'Red Mercury'.
The element of significance here is that while gamma photons heat and pressure are enormous, they do not, in and of themselves cause fission of more normal U235. However; by causing simple fusion in the LD6 they cause the Deuterium (heavy hydrogen) to release a significant quantity of thermal neutrons and these do cause fission.
Essentially then, if you can fool a relatively small (2-10kg) secondary wad of Uranium to into thinking a massive primary detonation has just occurred, the thermal neutrons from that initial gamma+hydrogen flash can cause the secondary to initiate it's own fissile reaction (much more powerful) with what is nominally a subcritical mass of Uranium or Plutonium.
Why is this important? Germany had insight to the Manhattan District Project from at least late '42 or early '43. At which point Hitler reversed his decision on the development of the atomic bomb and large numbers of particle separators (cyclotrons) with a capture tank began to be used to separate out Uranium 235 from the less useful U238. There were at least 5 such facilities in the Greater Reich (including Austria and possibly Czechoslovakia), which had little use other than for atomic research and yet the Allied Myth acknowledges only that which was active in the Curie labs in France.
While these machines were very powerful, far more so than the Beta Calutron equivalents we used, they could still only harvest tiny amounts of U-235, on the order of single micrograms per pass. Which is to say, particles of dust.
Hence they could not, by themselves, create the large quantities (20-50kg) of weaponized radio material necessary for a bomb. What they could do was be transmuted to Plutonium in a Tokomak, reducing the required total amount, even as they were 'charged up' from ground to metastable states (an isomer is an isotope which doesn't decay) for use as 1-2KT triggers on the larger 15-20KT bombs.
Hitler had no use for a few kiloton class bombs. He felt he needed to make sweeping political statements inherent to the eradication of whole cities not city blocks (which a V-2 could destroy with conventional explosives). Similar to 'the message' which we sent with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons.
Yet thanks to the deliberate sabotage of Von Heisenberg in failing to emphasize the development of more conventional U-235 (centrifuge, sluice or gaseous diffusion) or Pu-239 (breeder reactor, including a 'hot pit' thorium reactor with molten reaction mass) as weapon fuel sourcing for the secondary, the larger bombs simply were not ready. It would in fact not be ready until November 1944, after the SS took over the program.
This is important. Because, by July 1944, the Allies were sufficiently into the Cotentin peninsula that it was unlikely they would be kicked out and thus Germany had no hope of winning the war by anything but the most extreme of unconventional means (in this, it must be remembered that the Allies had stockpiles of gas and biologics which would have decimated Germany's civilian population so battlefield nukes could be countered, with strategic depopulation, if need be).
Yet from July 20th onwards, when the basic concept met it's first criticality experiment in a deep mine in the Austrian Alps, the Germans had nukes and the OKW knew that once Hitler had them, or thought he had a path to them, they would never be able to end the war. And so they struck. Looking to secure the means to a victory if possible and a polite end of the campaign if not.
Operation Valkyrie was the result. And the failure of Von Stauffenberg to finish Hitler sunk the entire operation as or when the central conspirators failed to kill themselves and their group was collectively wiped out through expanding-ring interrogation efforts of people who knew all the cell leader identities.
IMO, far from being an artifact of Bormann's Flight Capital program (most of whose securities were 'soft' in the form of patents and franchising contracts rather than being hard commodities like gold or silver) it is likely that The Schwarz Ritter incident, being as it involved a submarine which was part of the active military fleet, albeit one which was deployed in Spain for the Aktion Feurland effort, was also a function of a military attempt to end the war and cover their asses not assets.
Why? Because the military would know, better than any, how badly they were losing. Because the civilian industrial agencies were, even then, transnationals as Ford, Continental Tire, SKF Ball Bearings and even Standard of Ohio (running Mexican Oil to Germany) were all in it, up to their ears, with efforts to preserve German industry to the point of 'forbidding' attacks on certain targets like neutral shipping going to Sweden (and thence to Germany) or the Schweinfurt/Regensberg attacks.
Industry would survive the war because industry was dependent on their part in the enemy war effort never being known and this would be simple enough secret to betray, just on the premise of U.S. plant workers being told that the company was supplying the Nazis (see: Trading With The Enemy, it actually happened and the factory workers threatened to tear the building and the management to pieces when they discovered Philadelphia ball bearings being shipped to 'South America' rather than the war effort...).
No, so long as BIS and the various linkages between the Rockefeller and Banco De Algemaine were maintained, Industry had little to fear. The people who were in a position to lose it all were those in the German military and aristocratic classes who were going to be charged with war crimes based on what the political class had ordered done, if they didn't avert catastrophe.
The easiest way to achieve this was through military connections in Washington and the military all operated under the penant of State when it came to diplomacy. When the U.S. heard of the failure of Valkyrie, it is likely that they realized that the Germans had nothing to offer and thus sank the boat as the simplest means of cutting all ties.
Hitler would go on to get his nukes, sometime in October or November, with initial test blasts on the Bug Peninsula (a fizzle which nonetheless caused a massive EMP event that put out telephone and telegraph around the Baltic) followed by another detonation in the Ohrdruf area.
Why didn't he use them?
All indications are that he wanted to and even tried to, but that his own vaunted SS formations bought their hides by sending rail wagons and even aircraft to the wrong locations where they sat on the weapons until U.S. forces could arrive to relieve them in place. This being a part of the reason for the mad rush into Pilsen (150km beyond the agreed force demarcation lines of the Elbe) by Patton as well as the American push into Austria where, again, massive SS formations guarded the frontier forward into Hungary against the advance of Koniev's southern pincer. And the majority of the nuclear research was actually undertaken.
Since we did not know, for sure, that SS General Hans Kammler hadn't gotten a few weapons north to Berlin, 'the honor and the glory' of tackling it was left firmly to the Russians who managed to lose somewhere around a quarter million troops for the privilege of knocking down a flag.
We wanted the production process means, the radio fuel and some say, the weapons themselves. And we got them. As any inspection of the Uranium Processing files at Oak Ridge will show: we simply couldn't have gotten the material for both the 132lb Little Boy and the 40lb Fat Man cores any other way. We weren't making enough to material for both a Uranium bomb of that size and as feeder stock for the Hanford plutonium breeder reactor.
If that secret is onboard the Schwarz Ritter, you can bet that it was paid a little visit by divers from a more modern sub because it essentially proves that the Nazis had the bomb and refused to use it on humanity, even within their own borders to save their freedom. While the U.S., having absolutely no need to bomb a Japan on the edge of starvation and within weeks of ending the war WITHOUT INVASION BEING NECESSARY was in fact attacked, twice, in a blatant violation of the Hague Laws Of Land Warfare on striking civilian targets at all and dual use targets without at least 24hrs of warning. Some 300,000 civilians dead, for nothing, and we didn't even know how far the Germans got until the end, when we fabricated this massive lie to cover up the obvious.
Groves And Now The Truth Can Be Told says there was no plutonium bomb effort. There wasn't. There was an isomer effort using third generation (lighweight, small enough to fit in a 'Werewolf' backpack) technology base engineering when our 'best and brightest' Jewish refugees could barely get a Gen-1, 10,000lb, weapon to go off at all.
It would be hilarious if it wasn't so damn tragic. The wrong people won WWII for the wrong reasons and Americans have been suffering for it, ever since.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 11:09 am Post subject:
The technical director for Anschutz & Co Dr Konrad Beyerle was taken Aswelde near Espelkamp in March 1946 and interrogated about the centrifuges found there. A number of German scientists who had been at Farm Hall were imprisoned at Aswelde to keep the Nazi nuclear facility at Espelkamp in operation producing HEU until 1948. This operation is still relatively unknown.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun May 17, 2015 10:31 pm Post subject:
Horizon - Hitlers Atomic Bomb (1992) Enriched Uranium quite a bargaining chip in 1944/5
Loads of interesting comments have been posted on this Youtube video
https://vimeo.com/128088968
David Rudnick
Heisenberg sabotaged the program towards the latter stages of the war... the Nazis beat the Allies in introducing most of the war's most cutting edge weaponry. Heisenberg is one of the 20th century's greatest scientists on so many levels.
Simon Gunson
A document archived at Maxwell AFB in Alabama documents recovery by the US 9th Army of a German 3.8 ton Atomic bomb ["76-Zentner"] from an underground complex near Goslar on 26 April 1845. Charles Linbergh who was both a member of the US Naval Technical Mission Europe and a qualified B-24 Liberator pilot personally flew the device back to USA from Germany. Prior to this the Manhattan Project had no LITTLE BOY bomb. USA had two Plutonium bomb projects, FAT MAN and THIN MAN.
Metsu Design Studios
Horizon - Hitlers Atomic Bomb (1992) quite a bargaining chip in 1944/5 (via Pocket) - http://buff.ly/UOtqCP
Simon Gunson
During 1944 Germany had 40 Anschutz Mark IIIB centrifuges at an underground complex in Espelkamp, plus 20 Hellage Mark IIIB centrifuges at Kandern plus others at a complex in Celle each able to enrich 250 grams of Uranium by 7% per 24 hours, producing at least 10.5kg of 80% HEU every 12 days. Even Oak Ridge could not produce HEU at such a rate. Manhattan Project only produced 15kg HEU in total by late March 1945.
AltitudeWarrior
+joe3072000
The technical director for Anschutz & Co Dr Konrad Beyerle was taken Aswelde near Espelkamp in March 1946 and interrogated about the centrifuges found there. A number of German scientists who had been at Farm Hall were imprisoned at Aswelde to keep the Nazi nuclear facility at Espelkamp in operation producing HEU until 1948. This operation is still relatively unknown.
Simon Gunson
Apologies yes, typo... Alswede 52°20'12.27"N, 8°33'44.43"E near Espelkamp. After their internment at Farm Hall the Nazi nuclear scientists plus other engineers and scientists involved in the Nazi Atomic project were held at Alswede and the British kept using Nazi centrifuges there until 1948 for the British nuclear program.
Helga Schmidlap
Your wrong and the Little Boy Uranium Bomb used 240 Pounds of enriched uranium. However the Fatman Bomb was the real killer and only used six and quarter ounces of Plutonium. Werner Heisenberg said they would need over a thousand of kilos for the German Bomb. The US with it's Plutonium Bomb was so far ahead of Germany because Plutonium was a by product of the Uranium Reactor. Please don't try to impress people with Germany Technology. By the way it a Jewish Professor known as Elise Mitner who figured the process and Otto Hann was Nazi-Chemist and Nazi agent who stole the process from Elise Mitner. I like how the British lie in the News Cast where they say American and British scientists built the bomb. The British are such greedy social climbers and the US did not give them any technology until the 1950's
TonyGosling wrote:
Some interesting comments on this topic appeared on the YouTube Horizon 'Hitler's Nuke' documentary - reposted film below
Simon Gunson wrote:
A document archived at Maxwell AFB in Alabama documents recovery by the US 9th Army of a German 3.8 ton Atomic bomb ["76-Zentner"] from an underground complex near Goslar on 26 April 1845. Charles Linbergh who was both a member of the US Naval Technical Mission Europe and a qualified B-24 Liberator pilot personally flew the device back to USA from Germany. Prior to this the Manhattan Project had no LITTLE BOY bomb. USA had two Plutonium bomb projects, FAT MAN and THIN MAN.
Simon Gunson
During 1944 Germany had 40 Anschutz Mark IIIB centrifuges at an underground complex in Espelkamp, plus 20 Hellage Mark IIIB centrifuges at Kandern plus others at a complex in Celle each able to enrich 250 grams of Uranium by 7% per 24 hours, producing at least 10.5kg of 80% HEU every 12 days. Even Oak Ridge could not produce HEU at such a rate. Manhattan Project only produced 15kg HEU in total by late March 1945.
Post WW2 World Order: US Planned to Wipe USSR Out by Massive Nuclear Strike
Was the US deterrence military doctrine aimed against the Soviet Union during the Cold War era really "defensive" and who actually started the nuclear arms race paranoia?
Just weeks after the Second World War was over and Nazi Germany defeated Soviet Russia's allies, the United States and Great Britain hastened to develop military plans aimed at dismantling the USSR and wiping out its cities with a massive nuclear strike.
Interestingly enough, then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had ordered the British Armed Forces' Joint Planning Staff to develop a strategy targeting the USSR months before the end of the Second World War. The first edition of the plan was prepared on May 22, 1945. In accordance with the plan the invasion of Russia-held Europe by the Allied forces was scheduled on July 1, 1945.
British generals warned Churchill that the "total war" would be hazardous to the Allied armed forces.
However, after the United States "tested" its nuclear arsenal in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Churchill and right-wing American policy makers started to persuade the White House to bomb the USSR. A nuclear strike against Soviet Russia, exhausted by the war with Germany, would have led to the defeat of the Kremlin at the same time allowing the Allied Forces to avoid US and British military casualties, Churchill insisted. Needless to say, the former British Prime Minister did not care about the death of tens of thousands of Russian peaceful civilians which were already hit severely by the four-year war nightmare.
"He [Churchill] pointed out that if an atomic bomb could be dropped on the Kremlin, wiping it out, it would be a very easy problem to handle the balance of Russia, which would be without direction," an unclassified note from the FBI archive read.
Unthinkable as it may seem, Churchill's plan literally won the hearts and minds of US policy makers and military officials. Between 1945 and the USSR's first detonation of a nuclear device in 1949, the Pentagon developed at least nine nuclear war plans targeting Soviet Russia, according to US researchers Dr. Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod. In their book "To Win a Nuclear War: the Pentagon's Secret War Plans," based on declassified top secret documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the researchers exposed the US military's strategies to initiate a nuclear war with Russia.
"The names given to these plans graphically portray their offensive purpose: Bushwhacker, Broiler, Sizzle, Shakedown, Offtackle, Dropshot, Trojan, Pincher, and Frolic. The US military knew the offensive nature of the job President Truman had ordered them to prepare for and had named their war plans accordingly," remarked American scholar J.W. Smith ("The World's Wasted Wealth 2").
These "first-strike" plans developed by the Pentagon were aimed at destroying the USSR without any damage to the United States.
The 1949 Dropshot plan envisaged that the US would attack Soviet Russia and drop at least 300 nuclear bombs and 20,000 tons of conventional bombs on 200 targets in 100 urban areas, including Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). In addition, the planners offered to kick off a major land campaign against the USSR to win a "complete victory" over the Soviet Union together with the European allies. According to the plan Washington would start the war on January 1, 1957.
A photo dated September 1945 of the remains of the Prefectural Industry Promotion Building after the bombing of Hiroshima, which was later preserved as a monument. (File)
Nuclear Bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki Was Unjustified – US Experts
For a long period of time the only obstacle in the way of the US' massive nuclear offensive was that the Pentagon did not possess enough atomic bombs (by 1948 Washington boasted an arsenal of 50 atomic bombs) as well as planes to carry them in. For instance, in 1948 the US Air Force had only thirty-two B-29 bombers modified to deliver nuclear bombs.
In September 1948 US president Truman approved a National Security Council paper (NSC 30) on "Policy on Atomic Warfare," which stated that the United States must be ready to "utilize promptly and effectively all appropriate means available, including atomic weapons, in the interest of national security and must therefore plan accordingly."
At this time, the US generals desperately needed information about the location of Soviet military and industrial sites. So far, the US launched thousands of photographing overflights to the Soviet territory triggering concerns about potential a Western invasion of the USSR among the Kremlin officials. While the Soviets hastened to beef up their defensive capabilities, the military and political decision makers of the West used their rival's military buildup as justification for building more weapons.
Meanwhile, in order to back its offensive plans Washington dispatched its B-29 bombers to Europe during the first Berlin crisis in 1948. In 1949 the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed, six years before the USSR and its Eastern European allies responded defensively by establishing the Warsaw Pact — the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Mutual Assistance.
Just before the USSR tested its first atomic bomb, the US' nuclear arsenal had reached 250 bombs and the Pentagon came to the conclusion that a victory over the Soviet Union was now "possible." Alas, the detonation of the first nuclear bomb by the Soviet Union dealt a heavy blow to US militarists' plans.
"The Soviet atomic bomb test on August 29, 1949 shook Americans who had believed that their atomic monopoly would last much longer, but did not immediately alter the pattern of war planning. The key issue remained just what level of damage would force a Soviet surrender," Professor Donald Angus MacKenzie of the University of Edinburgh remarked in his essay "Nuclear War Planning and Strategies of Nuclear Coercion."
Although Washington's war planners knew that it would take years before the Soviet Union would obtain a significant atomic arsenal, the point was that the Soviet bomb could not been ignored.
Eventually, in 1960 the US' nuclear war plans were formalized in the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP).
At first, the SIOP envisaged a massive simultaneous nuclear strike against the USSR's nuclear forces, military targets, cities, as well as against China and Eastern Europe. It was planned that the US' strategic forces would use almost 3,500 atomic warheads to bomb their targets. According to US generals' estimates, the attack could have resulted in the death of about 285 to 425 million people. Some of the USSR's European allies were meant to be completely "wiped out."
"We're just going to have to wipe it [Albania] out," US General Thomas Power remarked at the 1960 SIOP planning conference, as quoted by MacKenzie.
However, the Kennedy administration introduced significant changes to the plan, insisting that the US military should avoid targeting Soviet cities and had to focus on the rival's nuclear forces alone. In 1962 the SIOP was modified but still it was acknowledged that the nuclear strike could lead to the death of millions of peaceful civilians.
Read more: http://sputniknews.com/politics/20150815/1025789574.html#ixzz3iukpfte4 _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
20:12 15.08.2015(updated 13:29 22.08.2015) Ekaterina Blinova
Was the US deterrence military doctrine aimed against the Soviet Union during the Cold War era really "defensive" and who actually started the nuclear arms race paranoia?
Just weeks after the Second World War was over and Nazi Germany defeated Soviet Russia's allies, the United States and Great Britain hastened to develop military plans aimed at dismantling the USSR and wiping out its cities with a massive nuclear strike.
Interestingly enough, then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had ordered the British Armed Forces' Joint Planning Staff to develop a strategy targeting the USSR months before the end of the Second World War. The first edition of the plan was prepared on May 22, 1945. In accordance with the plan the invasion of Russia-held Europe by the Allied forces was scheduled on July 1, 1945.
British generals warned Churchill that the "total war" would be hazardous to the Allied armed forces.
However, after the United States "tested" its nuclear arsenal in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Churchill and right-wing American policy makers started to persuade the White House to bomb the USSR. A nuclear strike against Soviet Russia, exhausted by the war with Germany, would have led to the defeat of the Kremlin at the same time allowing the Allied Forces to avoid US and British military casualties, Churchill insisted. Needless to say, the former British Prime Minister did not care about the death of tens of thousands of Russian peaceful civilians which were already hit severely by the four-year war nightmare.
"He [Churchill] pointed out that if an atomic bomb could be dropped on the Kremlin, wiping it out, it would be a very easy problem to handle the balance of Russia, which would be without direction," an unclassified note from the FBI archive read.
Unthinkable as it may seem, Churchill's plan literally won the hearts and minds of US policy makers and military officials. Between 1945 and the USSR's first detonation of a nuclear device in 1949, the Pentagon developed at least nine nuclear war plans targeting Soviet Russia, according to US researchers Dr. Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod. In their book "To Win a Nuclear War: the Pentagon's Secret War Plans," based on declassified top secret documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the researchers exposed the US military's strategies to initiate a nuclear war with Russia.
"The names given to these plans graphically portray their offensive purpose: Bushwhacker, Broiler, Sizzle, Shakedown, Offtackle, Dropshot, Trojan, Pincher, and Frolic. The US military knew the offensive nature of the job President Truman had ordered them to prepare for and had named their war plans accordingly," remarked American scholar J.W. Smith ("The World's Wasted Wealth 2").
These "first-strike" plans developed by the Pentagon were aimed at destroying the USSR without any damage to the United States.
The 1949 Dropshot plan envisaged that the US would attack Soviet Russia and drop at least 300 nuclear bombs and 20,000 tons of conventional bombs on 200 targets in 100 urban areas, including Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). In addition, the planners offered to kick off a major land campaign against the USSR to win a "complete victory" over the Soviet Union together with the European allies. According to the plan Washington would start the war on January 1, 1957.
A photo dated September 1945 of the remains of the Prefectural Industry Promotion Building after the bombing of Hiroshima, which was later preserved as a monument. (File)
Nuclear Bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki Was Unjustified – US Experts
For a long period of time the only obstacle in the way of the US' massive nuclear offensive was that the Pentagon did not possess enough atomic bombs (by 1948 Washington boasted an arsenal of 50 atomic bombs) as well as planes to carry them in. For instance, in 1948 the US Air Force had only thirty-two B-29 bombers modified to deliver nuclear bombs.
In September 1948 US president Truman approved a National Security Council paper (NSC 30) on "Policy on Atomic Warfare," which stated that the United States must be ready to "utilize promptly and effectively all appropriate means available, including atomic weapons, in the interest of national security and must therefore plan accordingly."
At this time, the US generals desperately needed information about the location of Soviet military and industrial sites. So far, the US launched thousands of photographing overflights to the Soviet territory triggering concerns about a potential Western invasion of the USSR among the Kremlin officials. While the Soviets hastened to beef up their defensive capabilities, the military and political decision makers of the West used their rival's military buildup as justification for building more weapons.
Meanwhile, in order to back its offensive plans Washington dispatched its B-29 bombers to Europe during the first Berlin crisis in 1948. In 1949 the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed, six years before the USSR and its Eastern European allies responded defensively by establishing the Warsaw Pact — the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Mutual Assistance.
Just before the USSR tested its first atomic bomb, the US' nuclear arsenal had reached 250 bombs and the Pentagon came to the conclusion that a victory over the Soviet Union was now "possible." Alas, the detonation of the first nuclear bomb by the Soviet Union dealt a heavy blow to US militarists' plans.
"The Soviet atomic bomb test on August 29, 1949 shook Americans who had believed that their atomic monopoly would last much longer, but did not immediately alter the pattern of war planning. The key issue remained just what level of damage would force a Soviet surrender," Professor Donald Angus MacKenzie of the University of Edinburgh remarked in his essay "Nuclear War Planning and Strategies of Nuclear Coercion."
Although Washington's war planners knew that it would take years before the Soviet Union would obtain a significant atomic arsenal, the point was that the Soviet bomb could not be ignored.
Eventually, in 1960 the US' nuclear war plans were formalized in the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP).
At first, the SIOP envisaged a massive simultaneous nuclear strike against the USSR's nuclear forces, military targets, cities, as well as against China and Eastern Europe. It was planned that the US' strategic forces would use almost 3,500 atomic warheads to bomb their targets. According to US generals' estimates, the attack could have resulted in the death of about 285 to 425 million people. Some of the USSR's European allies were meant to be completely "wiped out."
"We're just going to have to wipe it [Albania] out," US General Thomas Power remarked at the 1960 SIOP planning conference, as quoted by MacKenzie.
However, the Kennedy administration introduced significant changes to the plan, insisting that the US military should avoid targeting Soviet cities and had to focus on the rival's nuclear forces alone. In 1962 the SIOP was modified but still it was acknowledged that the nuclear strike could lead to the death of millions of peaceful civilians.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Apr 10, 2017 10:44 am Post subject:
I had the privilege of discovering this work in the 1990s, in its first incarnation on the internet, and then later I found an earlier edition of this book in a Barnes and Noble, and after encouraging the author to seek out Trine Day and republish this work, I am enthused that he has done so and that Trine Day has added this signally important work to its offerings.
In the documents, test pilot Hans Zinsser describes seeing a mushroom cloud in the sky during a test flight near Ludwigslust in 1944
BYALLAN HALL 23 FEB 2017
Documents unearthed in an American archive suggest that Nazi Germany may have tested an operational nuclear bomb before the end of World War Two .
Recently declassifed file APO 696 from the National Archives in Washington is a detailed survey of how far Third Reich scientists got in the development of an atomic bomb - something leader Adolf Hitler craved.
In the file, obtained by the popular daily newspaper Bild, the task of the academics who prepared the paper between 1944 and 1947 was the “investigations, research, developments and practical use of the German atomic bomb.”
The report was prepared by countless American and British intelligence officers and also includes the testimony of four German experts - two chemical physicists, a chemist and a missile expert.
It concurs that Hitler’s boffins failed in the quest to achieve a breakthrough in nuclear technology - BUT that a documented test may have taken place of a rudimentary warhead in 1944.
The statement of the German test pilot Hans Zinsser in the file is considered evidence. The missile expert says he observed in 1944 a mushroom cloud in the sky during a test flight near Ludwigslust.
His log submitted to the Allied investigators reads: “In early October 1944 I flew away 12-15km from a nuclear test station near Ludwigslust (South of Lübeck).
“A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections (at about 7,000m) stood, without any seeming connections over the spot where the explosion took place.
Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lighting turned up.'
He estimated that the cloud stretched for 9km and described further “strange colourings” followed by a blast wave which translated into a “strong pull on the stick” - meaning his cockpit controls.
An hour later a pilot in a different machine took off from Ludwigslust and observed the same phenomenon.
According to other archival documents, the Italian correspondent Luigi Romersa observed on the ground the same explosion.
He had been sent by dictator Benito Mussolini to watch the test of a “new weapon” of the Germans. He was ordered to report his impressions back to Mussolini.
It is known that Hitler pursued the goal of nuclear technology and wanted his V-2 rockets to be able to carry them to destroy the UK.
The testimony of the four German scientists in the declassified American report mentions a top secret meeting held in Berlin in 1943 at which armaments minister and Hitler favourite Albert Speer was present for the discussion called a “nuclear summit.”
In the end the report states that the Allies believe the Germans fell short of triggering the nuclear chain reaction necessary to trigger a nuclear blast - but none could come up with an explanation for what occurred in the skies over Ludwigslust in 1944. _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
A SMALL trove of documents released last week throws cold water on the notion that high-minded German scientists tried to slow work on an atomic bomb for the Nazi regime during World War II. But the documents provide no definitive answer to the question of why German physicists, who were among the best in the world, made so little progress on an atomic weapon compared with their counterparts in the United States.
The idea that German scientists worried about the morality of atomic war and tried to head off the development of a bomb was given wide currency in "Copenhagen," Michael Frayn's award-winning play, which focuses on a pivotal meeting in September 1941 between Werner Heisenberg, the scientific head of the German nuclear project, and Niels Bohr, his Danish mentor. Both were Nobel laureates and towering figures in 20th-century physics.
The play is built around the differing recollections of the two men and the ultimate uncertainty of exactly what happened. In it, the Heisenberg character explains that he visited Bohr to warn him, in highly guarded language, that atomic bombs could be built and to feel him out on whether physicists on both sides could agree to stop the work. The Frayn play was greatly influenced by a book that argued that Heisenberg and his colleagues actually sabotaged the German bomb program from within, a view that is accepted by few historians who have looked into the question.
British and American Intelligence officers of the Alsos mission dismantle Prof. Heisenberg's last atomic pile, installed in a cave at Haigerloch. Photo from David Irving: The Virus House (1967).
The puzzle as to why the German atomic bomb program stalled has several overlapping explanations. Some of the best German physicists were Jewish and had been driven into exile, where many worked on the American or British atomic bomb programs. Nazi ideology had only scorn for "Jewish physics" and thus undervalued what theoretical physicists could contribute to the war effort. And as saturation bombing ravaged German cities, the Nazi industrial machine increasingly lacked the ability to mount a vast bomb development project to compete with the American Manhattan Project.
Still, it is clear that German physicists, for whatever reason, did fail to push hard enough to reach the goal. Some attribute that to surprising technical errors, like a grotesque overestimate of the amount of fissile material that was needed and a failure to realize that readily available graphite, if highly purified, could be used to moderate the atomic reaction instead of scarce, hard-to-get heavy water. Others blame arrogance and complacency on the part of German physicists who felt that if the job was hard for them, it would be impossible for the Allies. And some believe that there was a genuine reluctance to work on such an awesome weapon, either for moral reasons or for fear of failing and being blamed for a national defeat.
Recordings made surreptitiously of Heisenberg and other German scientists held in captivity after the German surrender show that they were stunned by news that the United States had exploded an atomic bomb over Hiroshima and refused to believe that it had actually been done. Even in these early recordings, one can discern the beginnings of a search for the moral high ground, as one German physicist contrasts the American development of "this ghastly weapon of war" with more peaceful nuclear reactor research under Hitler.
Heisenberg's own version of his meeting with Bohr was set out years after the war in a letter that was excerpted in a book on the atomic bomb projects. He recalled starting his conversation with Bohr by raising a question about whether it was "right" for physicists to work on uranium during the war, given that it could lead to "grave consequences." He also said he had told Bohr that developing atomic weapons would require such a terrific technical effort that one could hope they would not be ready in time. He felt the situation gave physicists leverage to dissuade government officials from even trying to build the bomb.
That letter so angered Bohr that he drafted a number of responses between 1957 and 1962 that were never sent but were released last week by the Bohr family. As Bohr recalled it, Heisenberg left "the firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons." Bohr said that Heisenberg "gave no hint about efforts on the part of German scientists to prevent such a development."
Even with these latest documents, we are still left with conflicting versions from the two participants. Most historians seem inclined to accept Bohr's version as more probable and Heisenberg's as revisionist history, a view that gains credence by looking at Heisenberg in a broader context than just that single meeting.
David Cassidy, a historian at Hofstra University who wrote a biography of Heisenberg, says there is no evidence from any other sources that moral issues were of particular concern to Heisenberg. Indeed, he says, Heisenberg seemed most concerned about using the war to prove the worth of physics to the nation and its rulers. With those motivations in mind, it seems likely that Heisenberg would have made a bomb if he could.
Relevant items on this website:
David Irving: The German Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster). Free download
Free download of book by David Irving: Overheard: transcripts of German prisoners secret conversations, including Heisenberg (in preparation)
IrvingDavid Irving comments:
ABSENT from all these articles about the Niels Bohr letter and the Nazi atomic bomb is any reference to the first ever book written on the Nazi atomic research programme, namely my own The Virus House, published by Simon & Schuster in New York as The German Atomic Bomb. Professor Werner Heisenberg, whom I interviewed extensively for the book, dedicated a glowing half-page review to the book in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; in the US National Archives (Manhattan Project files) is an equally flattering private typescript review by none other than Lieut.-General Leslie Groves, builder of the Pentagon and father of the Manhattan Project. (No doubt a modern Prof. Richard Evans, if paid enough to do so, would quirt slime over both these experts as "ignorant" and "should-know-betters", just as he did in the Lipstadt Trial).
I donated the verbatim transcript of the tape-recorded Heisenberg interview, along with all my other working papers on the book -- interviews with Walter Gerlach, Otto Hahn (right), HahnKurt Diebner, Kurt Strassman, Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Edward Teller and the rest -- to the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, and still have the original tapes. No subsequent historian of that topic has failed to take advantage of these interviews, as Thomas Powers himself admits; Michael Frayn pays generous praise to The Virus House in the introduction to his play.
Why this reticence on the part of American newspapermen, one wonders? Or perhaps not. --
Incidentally, I recall Niels Bohr coming to lecture at The Royal College of Science in South Kensington in about 1957; bookthe entire college poured in to the Physics theatre to hear the great man, and left baffled, his entire presentation having been conducted in a whisper inaudible even to the first row. Churchill had much the same problem with Bohr, he confessed to his private staff: Bohr, visiting him in 1939, had proved to be a man of impenetrable brilliance.
In the documents, test pilot Hans Zinsser describes seeing a mushroom cloud in the sky during a test flight near Ludwigslust in 1944
BYALLAN HALL 23 FEB 2017
Documents unearthed in an American archive suggest that Nazi Germany may have tested an operational nuclear bomb before the end of World War Two .
Recently declassifed file APO 696 from the National Archives in Washington is a detailed survey of how far Third Reich scientists got in the development of an atomic bomb - something leader Adolf Hitler craved.
In the file, obtained by the popular daily newspaper Bild, the task of the academics who prepared the paper between 1944 and 1947 was the “investigations, research, developments and practical use of the German atomic bomb.”
The report was prepared by countless American and British intelligence officers and also includes the testimony of four German experts - two chemical physicists, a chemist and a missile expert.
It concurs that Hitler’s boffins failed in the quest to achieve a breakthrough in nuclear technology - BUT that a documented test may have taken place of a rudimentary warhead in 1944.
The statement of the German test pilot Hans Zinsser in the file is considered evidence. The missile expert says he observed in 1944 a mushroom cloud in the sky during a test flight near Ludwigslust.
His log submitted to the Allied investigators reads: “In early October 1944 I flew away 12-15km from a nuclear test station near Ludwigslust (South of Lübeck).
“A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections (at about 7,000m) stood, without any seeming connections over the spot where the explosion took place.
Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lighting turned up.'
He estimated that the cloud stretched for 9km and described further “strange colourings” followed by a blast wave which translated into a “strong pull on the stick” - meaning his cockpit controls.
An hour later a pilot in a different machine took off from Ludwigslust and observed the same phenomenon.
According to other archival documents, the Italian correspondent Luigi Romersa observed on the ground the same explosion.
He had been sent by dictator Benito Mussolini to watch the test of a “new weapon” of the Germans. He was ordered to report his impressions back to Mussolini.
It is known that Hitler pursued the goal of nuclear technology and wanted his V-2 rockets to be able to carry them to destroy the UK.
The testimony of the four German scientists in the declassified American report mentions a top secret meeting held in Berlin in 1943 at which armaments minister and Hitler favourite Albert Speer was present for the discussion called a “nuclear summit.”
In the end the report states that the Allies believe the Germans fell short of triggering the nuclear chain reaction necessary to trigger a nuclear blast - but none could come up with an explanation for what occurred in the skies over Ludwigslust in 1944.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2017 6:55 pm Post subject:
Just look at how Der Spiegel is trying to pour cold water on, or smear, Rainer Karlsch
How Close Was Hitler to the A-Bomb? Why would Der Spiegel say Hitler wasn't close to building an A-Bomb? Ask yourself why.
Berlin historian Rainer Karlsch claims that the Nazis conducted three nuclear weapons tests in 1944 and 1945. But he has no proof to back up his theories.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/the-third-reich-how-close- was-hitler-to-the-a-bomb-a-346293.html
A SMALL trove of documents released last week throws cold water on the notion that high-minded German scientists tried to slow work on an atomic bomb for the Nazi regime during World War II. But the documents provide no definitive answer to the question of why German physicists, who were among the best in the world, made so little progress on an atomic weapon compared with their counterparts in the United States.
The idea that German scientists worried about the morality of atomic war and tried to head off the development of a bomb was given wide currency in "Copenhagen," Michael Frayn's award-winning play, which focuses on a pivotal meeting in September 1941 between Werner Heisenberg, the scientific head of the German nuclear project, and Niels Bohr, his Danish mentor. Both were Nobel laureates and towering figures in 20th-century physics.
The play is built around the differing recollections of the two men and the ultimate uncertainty of exactly what happened. In it, the Heisenberg character explains that he visited Bohr to warn him, in highly guarded language, that atomic bombs could be built and to feel him out on whether physicists on both sides could agree to stop the work. The Frayn play was greatly influenced by a book that argued that Heisenberg and his colleagues actually sabotaged the German bomb program from within, a view that is accepted by few historians who have looked into the question.
British and American Intelligence officers of the Alsos mission dismantle Prof. Heisenberg's last atomic pile, installed in a cave at Haigerloch. Photo from David Irving: The Virus House (1967).
The puzzle as to why the German atomic bomb program stalled has several overlapping explanations. Some of the best German physicists were Jewish and had been driven into exile, where many worked on the American or British atomic bomb programs. Nazi ideology had only scorn for "Jewish physics" and thus undervalued what theoretical physicists could contribute to the war effort. And as saturation bombing ravaged German cities, the Nazi industrial machine increasingly lacked the ability to mount a vast bomb development project to compete with the American Manhattan Project.
Still, it is clear that German physicists, for whatever reason, did fail to push hard enough to reach the goal. Some attribute that to surprising technical errors, like a grotesque overestimate of the amount of fissile material that was needed and a failure to realize that readily available graphite, if highly purified, could be used to moderate the atomic reaction instead of scarce, hard-to-get heavy water. Others blame arrogance and complacency on the part of German physicists who felt that if the job was hard for them, it would be impossible for the Allies. And some believe that there was a genuine reluctance to work on such an awesome weapon, either for moral reasons or for fear of failing and being blamed for a national defeat.
Recordings made surreptitiously of Heisenberg and other German scientists held in captivity after the German surrender show that they were stunned by news that the United States had exploded an atomic bomb over Hiroshima and refused to believe that it had actually been done. Even in these early recordings, one can discern the beginnings of a search for the moral high ground, as one German physicist contrasts the American development of "this ghastly weapon of war" with more peaceful nuclear reactor research under Hitler.
Heisenberg's own version of his meeting with Bohr was set out years after the war in a letter that was excerpted in a book on the atomic bomb projects. He recalled starting his conversation with Bohr by raising a question about whether it was "right" for physicists to work on uranium during the war, given that it could lead to "grave consequences." He also said he had told Bohr that developing atomic weapons would require such a terrific technical effort that one could hope they would not be ready in time. He felt the situation gave physicists leverage to dissuade government officials from even trying to build the bomb.
That letter so angered Bohr that he drafted a number of responses between 1957 and 1962 that were never sent but were released last week by the Bohr family. As Bohr recalled it, Heisenberg left "the firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons." Bohr said that Heisenberg "gave no hint about efforts on the part of German scientists to prevent such a development."
Even with these latest documents, we are still left with conflicting versions from the two participants. Most historians seem inclined to accept Bohr's version as more probable and Heisenberg's as revisionist history, a view that gains credence by looking at Heisenberg in a broader context than just that single meeting.
David Cassidy, a historian at Hofstra University who wrote a biography of Heisenberg, says there is no evidence from any other sources that moral issues were of particular concern to Heisenberg. Indeed, he says, Heisenberg seemed most concerned about using the war to prove the worth of physics to the nation and its rulers. With those motivations in mind, it seems likely that Heisenberg would have made a bomb if he could.
Relevant items on this website:
David Irving: The German Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster). Free download
Free download of book by David Irving: Overheard: transcripts of German prisoners secret conversations, including Heisenberg (in preparation)
IrvingDavid Irving comments:
ABSENT from all these articles about the Niels Bohr letter and the Nazi atomic bomb is any reference to the first ever book written on the Nazi atomic research programme, namely my own The Virus House, published by Simon & Schuster in New York as The German Atomic Bomb. Professor Werner Heisenberg, whom I interviewed extensively for the book, dedicated a glowing half-page review to the book in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; in the US National Archives (Manhattan Project files) is an equally flattering private typescript review by none other than Lieut.-General Leslie Groves, builder of the Pentagon and father of the Manhattan Project. (No doubt a modern Prof. Richard Evans, if paid enough to do so, would quirt slime over both these experts as "ignorant" and "should-know-betters", just as he did in the Lipstadt Trial).
I donated the verbatim transcript of the tape-recorded Heisenberg interview, along with all my other working papers on the book -- interviews with Walter Gerlach, Otto Hahn (right), HahnKurt Diebner, Kurt Strassman, Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Edward Teller and the rest -- to the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, and still have the original tapes. No subsequent historian of that topic has failed to take advantage of these interviews, as Thomas Powers himself admits; Michael Frayn pays generous praise to The Virus House in the introduction to his play.
Why this reticence on the part of American newspapermen, one wonders? Or perhaps not. --
Incidentally, I recall Niels Bohr coming to lecture at The Royal College of Science in South Kensington in about 1957; bookthe entire college poured in to the Physics theatre to hear the great man, and left baffled, his entire presentation having been conducted in a whisper inaudible even to the first row. Churchill had much the same problem with Bohr, he confessed to his private staff: Bohr, visiting him in 1939, had proved to be a man of impenetrable brilliance.
In the documents, test pilot Hans Zinsser describes seeing a mushroom cloud in the sky during a test flight near Ludwigslust in 1944
BYALLAN HALL 23 FEB 2017
Documents unearthed in an American archive suggest that Nazi Germany may have tested an operational nuclear bomb before the end of World War Two .
Recently declassifed file APO 696 from the National Archives in Washington is a detailed survey of how far Third Reich scientists got in the development of an atomic bomb - something leader Adolf Hitler craved.
In the file, obtained by the popular daily newspaper Bild, the task of the academics who prepared the paper between 1944 and 1947 was the “investigations, research, developments and practical use of the German atomic bomb.”
The report was prepared by countless American and British intelligence officers and also includes the testimony of four German experts - two chemical physicists, a chemist and a missile expert.
It concurs that Hitler’s boffins failed in the quest to achieve a breakthrough in nuclear technology - BUT that a documented test may have taken place of a rudimentary warhead in 1944.
The statement of the German test pilot Hans Zinsser in the file is considered evidence. The missile expert says he observed in 1944 a mushroom cloud in the sky during a test flight near Ludwigslust.
His log submitted to the Allied investigators reads: “In early October 1944 I flew away 12-15km from a nuclear test station near Ludwigslust (South of Lübeck).
“A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections (at about 7,000m) stood, without any seeming connections over the spot where the explosion took place.
Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lighting turned up.'
He estimated that the cloud stretched for 9km and described further “strange colourings” followed by a blast wave which translated into a “strong pull on the stick” - meaning his cockpit controls.
An hour later a pilot in a different machine took off from Ludwigslust and observed the same phenomenon.
According to other archival documents, the Italian correspondent Luigi Romersa observed on the ground the same explosion.
He had been sent by dictator Benito Mussolini to watch the test of a “new weapon” of the Germans. He was ordered to report his impressions back to Mussolini.
It is known that Hitler pursued the goal of nuclear technology and wanted his V-2 rockets to be able to carry them to destroy the UK.
The testimony of the four German scientists in the declassified American report mentions a top secret meeting held in Berlin in 1943 at which armaments minister and Hitler favourite Albert Speer was present for the discussion called a “nuclear summit.”
In the end the report states that the Allies believe the Germans fell short of triggering the nuclear chain reaction necessary to trigger a nuclear blast - but none could come up with an explanation for what occurred in the skies over Ludwigslust in 1944.
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More than 126,000 barrels of nuclear material that Hitler planned to use in an atom bomb programme now lies rotting over 2,000 feet below ground in an old salt mine
More than 126,000 barrels of nuclear material that Hitler planned to use in an atom bomb programme now lies rotting over 2,000 feet below ground in an old salt mine
German nuclear experts believe they have found nuclear waste from Hitler’s secret atom bomb programme in a crumbling mine near Hanover.
More than 126,000 barrels of nuclear material lie rotting over 2,000 feet below ground in an old salt mine.
Rumour has it that the remains of nuclear scientists who worked on the Nazi programme are also there, their irradiated bodies burned in secret by S.S. men sworn to secrecy.
A statement by a boss of the Asse II nuclear fuel dump, just discovered in an archive, said how in 1967 'our association sank radioactive wastes from the last war, uranium waste, from the preparation of the German atom bomb.'
This has sent shock waves through historians who thought that the German atomic programme was nowhere near advanced enough in WW2 to have produced nuclear waste in any quantities.
It has also triggered a firestorm of uncertainty among locals, especially given Germany’s paranoia post-Fukushima.
Germany was the first western nation to announce the closure of all its atomic power plants following the disaster at the Japanese facility following the catastrophic earthquake and Tsunami in March.
There are calls to remove all the nuclear material stored within the sealed site but this would cost billions of pounds.
Yet the thought of Nazi atomic bomb material stored underground has made headlines across Germany - and the country’s Greenpeace movement has backed a call for secret documents relating to the dump to be released to the state parliament from sealed archives in Berlin.
It was in January of 1939, nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War, that German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published the results of an historic experiment about nuclear fission.
The German 'uranium project' began in earnest shortly after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September.
Army physicist Kurt Diebner led a team tasked to investigate the military applications of fission. By the end of the year the physicist Werner Heisenberg had calculated that nuclear fission chain reactions might be possible.
Although the war hampered their work, by the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 Nazi scientists had achieved a significant enrichment in samples of uranium.
Mark Walker, a US expert on the Nazi programme said: 'Because we still don’t know about these projects, which remain cloaked in WW2 secrecy, it isn’t safe to say the Nazis fell short of enriching enough uranium for a bomb. Some documents remain top secret to this day.
'Claims that a nuclear weapon was tested at Ruegen in October 1944 and again at Ohrdruf in March 1945 leave open a question, did they or didn’t they?'
Ruegen is a Baltic island and Ohrdruf a top-secret bunker complex in Thuringia where local legend has it that an A-bomb was tested by the Nazis in the dying days of the war.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Thu Dec 26, 2019 9:21 pm Post subject:
Putin fury: How Russian President slammed US for ‘unjustified’ Hiroshima nuclear strike
VLADIMIR PUTIN and US President Donald Trump have both locked horns over numerous international disputes including ballistic missiles treaties, but it was the deadly atomic bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which the Russian President focused on as he blasted the US for the “unjustified” World War 2 attack.
By CHARLIE BRADLEY
PUBLISHED: 14:20, Thu, Dec 26, 2019 | UPDATED: 14:35, Thu, Dec 26, 2019
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1221277/putin-news-russian-presid ent-us-unjustified-hiroshima-nuclear-strike-japan-spt
In an end of year press conference in 2017, President Putin was asked whether Russia would step in to help with US-North Korea missile talks, as Washington tried to negotiate for denuclearisation in Pyongyang. While making a scathing assessment on President Trump’s efforts in talks, Mr Putin also lambasted the US for the 1945 strikes on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Now there is absolutely no need for this. It is important to be very careful.”
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occured on the August 6 and August 9, 1945, and preceeded Japan’s surrender on August 15.
The devastating strikes killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people overall, most of whom were civilians.
Over the next two to four months, the effects of the atomic bombings killed between 90,000 and 146,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000 and 80,000 people in Nagasaki.
The surrender by Japan effectively ended World War 2, and the use of the two nuclear bombs remain the only uses of such weapons in armed conflict.
However, Mr Putin spent most of him time addressing the issue of North Korea, appearing to hint that he saw the US as hypocritical in its handling of the negotiations with Kim Jong-un.
Pope Francis' nuclear weapons warning: 'We will be judged for this'
World War 3: US dropped bomb 1000 times more powerful than Hiroshima
Mr Putin added: “We believe that both sides need to stop ramping up tensions. At one point, we heard from our American partners that they would stop military exercises. Well, they have conducted another exercise, and the North Koreans have launched their missiles yet again.
“This spiral has to end because it is an extremely dangerous thing.
“You know some things, and you have no idea about others. And even one North Korean missile launch would have disastrous consequences. I repeat, the consequences would be disastrous.”
US-North Korea nuclear talks have continued to stall as President Trump struggles to find a breakthrough, leading to the breakdown of meetings and increased nuclear testing from Pyongyang.
In November, the North Korean government fumed at the US for embarking on joint military exercise with South Korea, with one figure stating that the Washington “screwed up” talks.
They said: “We explicitly defined the joint military drill being planned by the US and South Korea as a main factor of screwing up tensions of the Korean peninsula and the region out of control.
“Despite our repeated warnings, the US and the South Korean side decided to push ahead with the military drill hostile to the DPRK at the most sensitive time.”
Preface
When I was a boy, oddities fascinated me, particularly if they appeared to make no sense. Historical oddities or anomalous news stories especially attracted my interest, lingering in my mind for years to come. Like many Americans, I well remember where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated. I was home, sick, and watching television, sipping an endless stream of the chicken noodle soup that my mother always made for me when I was ill. My mother sat on the sofa, sewing and watching her shows. Then, the programs were interrupted by the familiar voice of Walter Cronkite, and the news began to break. Like many children in America, I cried that night.
A year or so later when the Warren Report was published and excerpted in almost every newspaper in the country, I remember thinking "bullets just don't do that." And I listened intently as family members debated the official conclusions of Oswald, the "lone nut" in his Texas School Book Depository, versus what was beginning to emerge with the "Grassy Knoll."
As a teenager I became fascinated with the history of World War Two, and particularly the European theater and the race for the atomic bomb. Physics was also an interest for me, and another oddity lodged in my mind as I read the standard histories: the United States had never tested the uranium bomb it dropped on Hiroshima. I thought that was an extremely odd oddity indeed. It seemed to have the same sharp angles and corners as the Warren Commission's "magic bullet". It just didn't fit. Other odd facts accumulated over the years as if to underline the strangeness of the war's end in general and that fact in particular.
Then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the two post-war Germanies raced toward reunification. The events seemed to unfold faster than the news media's ability to keep pace. I remember that day too, for I was driving with a friend in his van in Manhattan. My friend was Russian, as was his family, some of whom were veterans of the harsh conflict on the Russian front. We listened to the reports on the radio with a kind of breathlessness and anxiety. My friend hurried to me and said "Now it will start to come out in the wash." I nodded in agreement. We had often discussed what would happen in the eventuality of German reunification, and were agreed that many things from the end of the war would begin to surface, answering old questions and raising new ones. Our long talks about World War Two had convinced us that there was much about the war that did not make sense, Hitler's and Stalin's genocidal paranoia notwithstanding.
Gradually, and one must say, predictably, the Germans themselves raced to uncover what lay hidden in the formerly inaccessible archival vaults of East Germany and the Soviet Union. Witnesses came forward, and German authors endeavored to come to grips with yet another aspect of the darkest period in their nation's history. Much, if not all, of their work remains ignored in the USA., both by mainstream and by alternative researchers.
This present book is based in part on these Germans' efforts. It, like them, raises dangerous questions, and often presents dangerous and disturbing answers. As a consequence, while the Nazi regime's "image" becomes even more blackened, the image of the victorious Allies also suffers to a great degree. This book presents not only a radically different history of the race for the bomb, but also outlines a case that Germany was making enormous strides toward acquisition of a whole host of second and third and even fourth generation weapons technologies even more horrific in their destructive power.
That in itself would not be too unusual. After all, there have been a wealth of books on World War Two German secret weapons projects and their astonishing results. Those seeking new technical data on these weapons will find some new material here, for the thrust of the book is not on the weapons per se. Rather, the present work seeks a context within Nazi ideology and in some aspects of contemporary theoretical physics for these projects. This book argues that the Nazis' quest for this barbarous arsenal of prototypical "smart weapons" and weapons of mass destruction was intimately linked to the Nazi racial and genocidal ideology and war aims, to the machinery, bureaucracy, and technologies of mass death and slavery that the Nazis had perfected. Even more darkly, this relationship points to a hidden core of occult beliefs and practices that, allied with certain very "German" advances in physics, e.g., quantum mechanics, drove their quest for ultimate weapons.
Accordingly, this is not a work of history. But neither is it a work merely of fiction. It is best described as a case of possibilities, of speculative history. It is an attempt to make sense, by means of a radical hypothesis placed within a very broad context, of events during and after the war that make no sense.
I would like to thank Mr. Frank Joseph of Fate magazine for encouraging me to write about these ideas, after he had patiently listened to me outline them while we were both attending a conference in 2003. And I would like to thank the many people-too numerous to mention -who listened, read, and critiqued the book along the way.
Joseph P. Farrell
Tulsa, Oklahoma
PART ONE: GOTTERDAMMERUNG
"A comprehensive February 1942 (German) Army Ordnance report on the German uranium enrichment program includes the statement that the critical mass of a nuclear weapon lay between 10 and 100 kilograms of either uranium 235 or element 94.... In fact the German estimate of critical mass of 10 to 100 kilograms was comparable to the contemporary Allied estimate of 2 to 100.... The German scientists working on uranium neither withheld their figure for critical mass because of moral scruples nor did they provide an inaccurate estimate as the result of gross scientific error."
--Mark Walker, Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb, p. 216.
Reich of the Black Sun
Chapter 1: A Badly Written Finale
"In southern Germany, meanwhile, the American Third and Seventh and the French First Armies had been driving steadily eastward into the so-called 'National Redoubt'.... The American Third Army drove on into Czechoslovakia and by May 6 had captured Pilsen and Karlsbad and was approaching Prague."
--F. Lee Benns, Europe Since 1914 In Its World Setting [1]
The end of the Second World War in Europe, at least as normally recounted, does not make sense, for in its standard form as learned in history books that history resembles nothing so much as a badly written finale to some melodramatic Wagnerian opera.
On a night in October 1944, a German pilot and rocket expert by the same of Hans Zinsser was flying his Heinkel 111 twin-engine bomber in twilight over northern Germany, close to the Baltic coast in the province of Mecklenburg. He was flying at twilight to avoid the Allied fighter aircraft that at that time had all but undisputed mastery of the skies over Germany. Little did he know that what he saw that night would be locked in the vaults of the highest classification of the United States government for several decades after the war. And he certainly could not have been aware of the fact when his testimony finally was declassified near the end of the millennium, that what he saw would require the history of the Second World War to be rewritten, or at the very minimum, severely scrutinized. His observations on that one night on that one flight resolve at a stroke some of the most pressing questions and mysteries concerning the end of the war. By the same token, what he saw raises many more mysteries and questions, affording a brief and frightening glimpse into the labyrinthine world of Nazi secret weapons development. His observations open a veritable Pandora's
1. F. Lee Benns, Europe Since 1914 In Its World Setting (New York: F.S. Crofts and co., 1946), p. 630.
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box of horrifying research the Third Reich was conducting, research far more horrendous in its scope and terrible promise than mere atomic bombs. More importantly, his observations also raise the disturbing question of why the Allied governments - America in particular - kept so much classified for so long. What, really, did we recover from the Nazis at the end of the war?
But what precisely is that badly written finale?
To appreciate how badly written a finale it truly is, it is best to begin at the logical place: in Berlin, far below ground, in the last weeks of the war. There, in the bizarre and surreal world of the Fuhrerbunker, the megalomaniac German dictator huddles with his generals, impervious to the rain of Allied and Soviet bombs that are reducing the once beautiful city of Berlin to piles of rubble. Adolph Hitler, Chancellor and Fuhrer of the ever-diminishing Greater German Reich is in conference. His left arm shakes uncontrollably and from time to time he must pause to daub the drool that occasionally oozes from his mouth. His complexion is gray and pallid; his health, a shambles from the drugs his doctors inject in him. His glasses are perched on his nose as he squints at the map before him. [2]
Generaloberst [3] Heinrici, commander of the vastly outnumbered Army Group Vistula that faces the massed armies of Marshal Zhukov poised less than sixty miles from Berlin, is pleading with his leader for more troops. The general is questioning the disposition of the forces he sees displayed on the battle map, for it is clear to him that some of Germany's finest and few remaining battle worthy formations are far south, facing Marshal Koniev's forces in Silesia. These forces were thus, incomprehensibly, poised to make a stiff defense of Breslau and Prague, not Berlin. The general pleads for Hitler to release some of these forces and transfer them north, but
2. Contributing yet another nuance to the end of the war Legend of Hitler's delusional insanity, some have proposed that the German dictator's doctors had diagnosed him with heart disease and/or Parkinson's disease, and were keeping him drugged at the behest of Misters Bormann, Gobbels, Himmler et al. in a desperate attempt to keep him functioning
3. Generaloberst: i.e., Colonel General, the equivalent of a four-star American general.
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to no avail. "Prague," the Fuhrer responds stubbornly, almost mystically, "is the key to winning the war." Generaloberts Heinrici's hard-pressed troops must "do without." [4] One may also perhaps imagine Heinrici and the other assembled generals perhaps casting a doleful glance at Norway on the situation map, where thousands of German troops are still stationed, occupying a country that had long since ceased to be of any strategic or operational value to the defense of the Reich. Why indeed did Hitler maintain so many German troops in Norway up to the very end of the war?[5] These paradoxical German troops deployments are the first mystery of the badly written finale of the war in Europe. Both Allied and German generals would ponder it after the war, and both would write it off to Hitler's insanity, a conclusion that would become part of the "Allied Legend" of the end of the war. This interpretation does make sense, for if one assumed that Hitler were having a rare seizure of sanity when he ordered these deployments, what possibly could he have been thinking? Prague? Norway? There were no standard or conventional military reasons for the deployments. In other words, the deployments themselves attest his complete lack of touch with military reality. He therefore had to have been quite insane. But apparently his "delusional insanity" did not stop there. On more than one occasion during these end-of-the-war conferences with his generals in the Fuhrerbunker, he boasted that Germany would soon be in the possession of weapons that would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat at "five minutes past midnight." All
4. They did in fact "do without" and yet managed to put up a fierce resistance against overwhelming odds in the initial stages of Zhukov's final offensive on Berlin.
5. The standard versions, of course, are that he wished to maintain the supply line of iron ore from Sweden to Germany, and that he wished to continue to use the country as a base to interdict the lend-lease supply route to Russia. But by late 1944, with the huge losses of the German Kriegsmarine, these explanations no longer were militarily feasible, and hence do not make military sense. One must look for other reasons, if indeed there are any beyond Adolph Hitler's delusions.
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the Wehrmacht had to do was hold out a bit longer. And above all, it must hold Prague and lower Silesia. Of course, the standard historical interpretation of these and similar utterances by the Nazi leadership near the end of the war explains them - or rather, explains them away - by one of two standard techniques. One school understands them to refer to the more advanced versions of the V-1 and V-2, and on rare occasions, the intercontinental A-9/10 rockets, the jet fighters, anti-aircraft heat-seeking missiles, and so on that the Germans were developing. Sir Roy Fedden, one of the British Specialists sent to Germany to investigate Nazi secret weapons research after the war, left no doubt as to the deadly potential these developments held:
"In these respects (the Nazis) were not entirely lying. In the course of two recent visits to Germany, as leader of a technical mission of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realize that if they had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare." [6]
The other standard school of interpretation explains such remarks of the Nazi leadership as the utterances of madmen desperate to prolong the war, and hence their lives, by stiffening the resistance of their exhausted armies. For example, to make the insanity gripping the Reich government complete, Hitler's ever-faithful toady and propaganda minister, Dr. Josef Gobbels also boasted in a speech near the end of the war that he had seen "weapons so frightening it would make your heart stand still." More delusional ravings of a Nazi madman. But on the Allied side of the Allied Legend, things are equally peculiar. In March and April of 1945, U.S. General George S. Patton's Third Army is literally racing across southern Bavaria, as fast as is operationally possible, making a beeline for: (1) the huge Skoda munitions works at Pilsen, a complex all but
5. Sir Roy Fedden, The Nazis' V-Weapons Matured Too Late (London: 1945), cited in Renato Vesco and David Hatcher Childress, Man-Made UFOs: 1944-1994, p. 98.
blown off the map by Allied bombers;
(2) Prague; and
(3) A region of the Harz Mountains in Thuringia known to Germans as the Dreiecks or Three Corners," a region encompassed by the old mediaeval towns and villages of Arnstadt, Jonastal, Wechmar, and Ohrdruf.[7]
One is informed by countless history books that this maneuver was thought to be necessary by the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHEAF) because of reports that the Nazis were planning to make a last stand in the "Alpine National Redoubt", a network of fortified mountains stretching from the Alps to the Harz Mountains. The Third Army's movements, so the story goes, were designed to cut off the "escape route" of Nazis fleeing the carnage of Berlin. Maps are produced in old history books, accompanied in some cases by de-classified German plans-some dating from the Weimar Republic! - for just such a redoubt. Case settled. However, there is a problem with that explanation. Allied aerial reconnaissance would likely have told Eisenhower and SHAEF that there were precious few fortified strong points in the "National Redoubt". Indeed, it would have told them that the "Redoubt" was no redoubt at all. General Patton and his divisional commanders would most certainly have been privy to at least some of this information. So why the extraordinary and almost reckless speed of his advance, an advance the post-war Allied Legend would have us believe was to cut off the escape route of Nazis fleeing Berlin, who it turns out weren't fleeing, to a redoubt that didn't exist? The mystery deepens. Then, remarkably, in a strange twist of fate, General Patton himself, America's most celebrated general, dies suddenly, and, some would say, suspiciously, as a result of complications from injuries he sustained in a freak automobile accident soon after the end of the war and the beginning of the Allied military occupation. For many, there is little doubt that Patton's death is suspicious. But
4. Arnstadt is where the great German composer and organist J.S. Bach first began his career.
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what of the explanations offered for it by those who do not think it was accidental? Some propose he was eliminated because of his remarks about turning the Germans "right back around" and letting them lead an Allied invasion of Russia. Others believe he was eliminated because he knew about the Allies' knowledge of the Soviets' execution of British, American, and French prisoners of war, and threatened to make it public. In any case, while Patton's barbed tongue and occasional outbursts are well known, his sense of military duty and obligation were far too high for him to have entertained such notions. These theories play out best, perhaps, on the internet or in the movies. And neither seems a sufficient motivation for the murder of America's most celebrated general. But then, if he was murdered, what was sufficient motivation? Here too, the lone German pilot Hans Zinsser and his observations afford a speculative key as to the possibilities, if General Patton was murdered, of why he had to be silenced. Let us return, for a moment, to a less-well publicized explanation for his end-of-the war lightening-like strikes into south central Germany and into Bohemia: In Top Secret, Ralph Ingersoll, an American liaison officer at S.H.A.E.F., gives a version of the facts much more in line with German intentions:
"(General Omar) Bradley was complete master of the situation.... in full command of the three armies that had broken through the Rhine defenses and were free to exploit their victories. Analyzing the whole situation, Bradley felt that to take battered Berlin would be an empty military victory.... The German War Department had long since moved out, leaving only a rear echelon. The main body of the German War Department, including its priceless archives, had been transferred to the Thuringian forest..."[8]
But what exactly did Patton's divisions discover in Pilsen and the forests of Thuringia? Only with the recent German reunification and declassification of East German, British, and American documents are enough clues available to allow this fantastic story - and the reason for the post-war Allied Legend - to be outlined and its questions answered.
8. Vesco and Childress, op. cit., p. 97.
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Thus, finally, one arrives at the main theme of the post-war Allied Legend. As the Allied forces penetrated ever deeper into the German fatherland itself, teams of scientists and experts and their intelligence coordinators were sent in literally to scour the Reich for German patents, secret weapons research, and above all, to find out about the state of the German atomic bomb project.[9] Literally vacuuming the Reich of every conceivable technological development, this effort became the largest technology transfer in history. Even at this late stage of the war, as Allied armies advanced across western Europe, there was fear on the Allied side that the Germans were perilously close to the A-bomb, and might actually use one on London or other Allied targets. And Dr. Gobbels and his speeches about fearsome heart-stopping weaponry were doing nothing to alleviate their fears. It is here that the mystery of the Allied Legend only deepens. It is here that the badly written finale would be truly comical, were it not for the vast scale of human suffering involved with it, for the facts are clear enough if one examines them independently of the explanations we have become accustomed to apply to them. Indeed, one must wonder if we were not conditioned to think about them in a certain way, for as the Allied armies advanced deeper and deeper into the Reich, famous German scientists and engineers were either captured, or they surrendered themselves. Among them were first-class physicists, many of them Nobel laureates. And most of them were involved, at some level, with the various atomic bomb projects of Nazi Germany. [9] Among these scientists were Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Kurt Diebner, a nuclear physicist, Paul Hartek, a nuclear chemist, Otto Hahn himself, the chemist who actually discovered nuclear fission, and curiously, Walter Gerlach, whose specialty was not nuclear, but gravitational physics. Gerlach had written esoteric papers before the war on such abstruse concepts as spin polarization and vorticular physics, hardly the
9. "Alsos" was the code name of this effort. "Alsos" is a Greek word meaning "Grove", an obvious pun on General Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project. It is the name of the book about the Manhattan Project by Dutch-Jewish physicist Samuel Goudsmit.
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basics of nuclear physics, and certainly not the sort of scientist one would expect to encounter working on atom bombs.[10]
Much to the Allies' puzzlement, their scientific teams found but crude attempts by Heisenberg to construct a functioning atomic reactor, attempts that were wholly unsatisfactory and unsuccessful, and almost unbelievably inept. This "German ineptitude" in basic bomb physics became, and remains, a central component of the Allied Legend. And yet, that itself raises yet another mystery of the badly written finale.
Top German scientists - Werner Heisenberg, Paul Hartek, Kurt Diebner, Erich Bagge, Otto Hahn, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, Karl Wirtz, Horst Korsching, and Walter Gerlach - were carted off to Farm Hall, England, where they were kept in isolation, and their conversations recorded. The transcripts, the celebrated "Farm Hall Transcripts", were only declassified by the British government in 1992! If the Germans were so far behind and so incompetent, why keep them classified for so long?" Bureaucratic oversight and inertia? Or did they contain things the Allies did not wish to be known even at that late date?
What a surface reading of the transcripts reveals only deepens the mystery considerably. In them, Heisenberg and company, after hearing of the a-bombing of Hiroshima by the Americans on the BBC, debate the endless moral issues of their own involvement in the atomic bomb projects of Nazi Germany.
But that is not all.
In the transcripts, Heisenberg and company, who had suffered
10. Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point, p. 194.
Cook notes that these areas have little to do with nuclear physics, much less A-bomb design, but "much to do with the enigmatic properties of gravity. A student of Gerlach's at Munich, O.C. Hilgenberg, published a paper in 1931 entitled "About Gravitation, Vortices and Waves in Rotating Media".... And yet, after the war, Gerlach, who died in 1979, apparently never returned to these matters, nor did he make any references to them; almost as if he had been forbidden to do so. That, or something he had seen...had scared him beyond all reason."
11. It was Manhattan project chief General Leslie Groves who, in fact, revealed in his 1962 book about the bomb, Now It Can Be Told, that the German scientists' conversations had been recorded by the British. Apparently, however, not everything could be told in 1962.
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some inexplicable mathematical and scientific dyslexia during the whole six years' course of the war, the same Heisenberg and company who could not even design and build a successful atomic reactor to produce plutonium for a bomb, suddenly become Nobel laureates and first rank physicists after the war. Indeed, Heisenberg himself within a matter of a few days of Hiroshima, gave a lecture to the assembled German scientists on the basic design of the bomb. In it, he defends his first assessment that the bomb would be about the size of a pineapple, and not the one or two ton monster he maintained throughout most of the war. And as we shall discover in the transcripts nuclear chemist Paul Hartek is close - perilously close - to the correct critical mass of uranium for the Hiroshima bomb.[12]
This demonstrable mathematical prowess raises yet another question directly confronting the Allied Legend, for some versions of that Legend would have it that the Germans never aggressively pursued bomb development because they had - via Heisenberg -overestimated the critical mass by several order of magnitude, thus rendering such a project impractical. Hartek had clearly done the calculations before, so Heisenberg's estimates were certainly not the only calculations the Germans had available to them. And with a small critical mass comes the practical feasibility of an atomic bomb.
11. In his August 14, 1945 "lecture" to the assembled German Farm Hall physicists, Heisenberg, according to Paul Lawrence
12. Q.v. Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb project: A Study in German Culture (Berkeley: 1998), pp. 217-221. Thomas Powers notes of Heisenberg's lecture that "this was something of a scientific tour de force -to come up with a working theory of bomb design in so short a time, after years of laboring under fundamental misconceptions." (Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), pp. 439-440). Samuel Goudsmit, of course, used the transcripts to construct his version of the Allied Legend: "That the German scientists were at odds with one another, that they didn't understand bomb physics, and that they concocted a false story of moral scruples to explain their scientific failures.... The sources of Goudsmit's conclusions are all obvious in the transcripts, but what leaps out at the reader now are the many statements which Goudsmit failed to notice, forgot, or deliberately overlooked." (Ibid., p. 436)
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Rose, used a tone and phrasing that indicated that "he has only just now understood the solution" to a small critical mass for the bomb,[13] since "others" reported a critical mass of about 4 kg. This too only deepens the mystery. For Rose, an adherent of the Legend- though now in its highly modified post-Farm Hall declassification mode -the "others" could be the Allied press reports themselves.[14]
In the years immediately after the war, the Dutch-Jewish Manhattan Project physicist Samuel Goudsmit explained the whole
Dutch-Jewish Manhattan Project Physicist Samuel Goudsmit
13. Q.v. Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture (Berkeley: 1998), pp. 217-221. Thomas Powers notes that this lecture was "something of a scientific tour de force - to come up with a working theory of bomb design in so short a time, after years of laboring under fundamental misconceptions." (Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), pp. 439-440).
14. Ibid., p. 218.
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mystery, alone with many others, as being simply due to the Allies having been "better" nuclear scientists and engineers than the very Germans who had invented the whole discipline of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics. That explanation, in conjunction with Heisenberg's own sell-evidently clumsy attempts to construct a functioning reactor, served well enough until these transcripts were declassified.
With the appearance of the transcripts and their stunning revelations of Heisenberg's actual knowledge of atomic bomb design, and some of the other scientists' clear understanding of the means to enrich enough weapons grade uranium without having to have a functioning reactor, the Legend had to be "touched up" a bit. Thomas Powers' Heisenberg's War appeared, arguing somewhat persuasively that Heisenberg had actually sabotaged the German bomb program. And almost as soon as it appeared, Lawrence Rose countered with Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project, arguing even more persuasively that Heisenberg had remained a loyal German and had not sabotaged anything, but that he simply labored under massive misconceptions of the nature of nuclear fission, and consequently over-calculated the critical mass needed to make a bomb during the war. The Germans never obtained the bomb, so the new version goes, because they never had a functioning reactor by which to enrich uranium to plutonium to make a bomb. Besides, having grossly overestimated the critical mass, they had no real impetus to pursue it. Simple enough, case closed once again.
But again, neither Powers' nor Rose's books really go to the heart of the mystery, for the Legend still requires the belief that "brilliant nuclear physicists including Nobel prize winners before the war, apparently struck by some strange malady which turned them into incompetent bunglers during the...War,"[15] were suddenly and quite inexplicably cured of the malady within a few days of the bombing of Hiroshima! Moreover, two such widely diverging contemporary interpretations of the same material - Rose's and Powers' - only highlights the ambiguity of their contents in general,
15. Philip Henshall, The Nuclear Axis: Germany, Japan, and the Atom Bomb Race 1939-45, "Introduction."
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and Heisenberg's knowledge - or lack of it - in particular.
Matters are not helped by events on the other side of the world in the Pacific theater, for there American investigators would uncover similarly strange goings on after the war ended.
There, after Nagasaki, the Emperor Hirohito, overriding his ministers who wanted to continue the war, decided that Japan would surrender unconditionally. But why would Hirohito's ministers urge continuance of the war in the face of overwhelming Allied conventional arms superiority, and, from their point of view, facing a potential rain of atomic bombs? After all, "two" bombs could just as easily have turned into twenty. One could, of course, attribute the ministers' objections to the Emperor's intentions to "proud samurai traditions" and the Japanese sense of "honor" and so on. And that would indeed be a plausible explanation.
But another explanation is that Hirohito's cabinet ministers knew something.
What his ministers probably knew was what American intelligence would soon discover: that the Japanese, "just prior to their surrender, had developed and successfully test fired an atomic bomb. The project had been housed in or near Konan(Japanese name for Hungnam), Korea, in the peninsula's North."[16]
It was exploded, so the story goes, one day after the American plutonium bomb, "Fat Man", exploded over Nagasaki, i.e., on August 10, 1945. The war, in other words, depending on Hirohito's decision, could have "gone nuclear". By that time, of course it would have done Japan no good to prolong it, with no viable means of delivery of an atomic weapon to any worthwhile strategic American targets. The Emperor stood his ministers down.[17]
These allegations constitute yet another difficulty for the Allied Legend, for where did Japan obtain the necessary uranium for its (alleged) A-bomb? And more importantly, the technology to enrich
16. Robert K. Wilcox, Japan's Secret War, p. 15.
17. The Japanese were, in fact, developing large cargo submarines to transport a bomb to West Coast American port cities to be detonated there, much like Einstein warned in his famous letter to President Roosevelt that initiated the Manhattan Project. Of course, Einstein was more worried about the Germans using such a method of ship-born delivery, than the Japanese.
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it? Where did it build and assemble such a weapon? Who was responsible for its development? The answers, as we shall eventually see, possibly explain events far in the future, and even possibly down to our own day.
Yet even now, we have only begun to penetrate into the heart of this "badly written finale." There are also the "odd little, and little known, details" to consider.
Why, for example, in 1944, did a lone Junkers 390 bomber, a massive six engine heavy-lift ultra long-range transport aircraft capable of round trip intercontinental flight from Europe to North America, fly to within less than twenty miles of New York City, photograph the skyline of Manhattan, and return to Europe?[18] Germany launched several such top secret long-distance flights during the war, using these and other heavy-lift ultra-long range aircraft. But what was their purpose, and more importantly, the purpose of this unique flight?[19] That such a flight was extremely risky goes without saying. What were the Germans up to with this enormous aircraft, and why would they even risk such an operation just to take pictures, when they only ever had two of these enormous six engine monsters available?
Finally, and to round out the Legend, there are the odd details of the German surrender and the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals. Why does former Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, mass murderer and one of human history's most notorious criminals, try to negotiate a surrender to the Western Allies? Of course, one can dismiss this as delusion, and Himmler was certainly delusional. But what could he possibly have thought he had to offer the Allies in return for a surrender to the West, and the sparing of his own wretched life?
What of the strangeness around the Nuremberg Tribunals themselves? The Legend is well known: obvious war criminals like Reichmarschall Goring, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Army Chief of Operations Staff Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, are sent swinging from the gallows, or, in Goring's case, cheating the hangman by
18. v. Nick Cook, op. cit., p. 198, Henshall, op. cit., pp. 171-172.
19. Italy, as well, launched long-range air missions to Japan.
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swallowing cyanide. Other Nazi bigwigs like Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, mastermind of Germany's devastating U-boat campaign against Allied shipping, or Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, or Finance Minister and Reichsbank President Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, were imprisoned.
Missing from the docket of the accused, of course, were the Pennemunde rocket scientists headed by Dr. Werner von Braun and General Walter Dornberger, already headed to America to take charge of America's ballistic missile and space programs along with a host of scientists, engineers and technicians under the then super secret Project Paperclip.[20] They, like their nuclear physics counterparts in Germany, had seemingly suffered from a similar "bungler's malady", for once having produced the first successful V-1 and V-2 prototypes comparatively early in the war, they suffered a similar lack of inspiration and ingenuity and (so the Legend goes) managed to produce only "paper rockets" and theoretical study projects after that.[21]
But perhaps most significantly, by joint agreement of the Allied and Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg, missing from evidence in the tribunal was the vast amount of documentary evidence implicating the Nazi regime in occult belief systems and practice,[22] a fact that
20. The best sources on the overall outlines of Operation Paperclip are Mark Aaron's and John Loftus' Unholy Trinity: the Vatican, Nazis, and Soviet Intelligence (New York: St Martin's Press. 1991), and Christopher Simpson's Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. 1988).
21. Henshall, op. cit, "Introduction."
22 v., Jean-Michel Angebert, The Occult and the Third Reich (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974); Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press. 1992); Michael Howard, The Occult Conspiracy: Secret Societies- Their Influence and Power in World History (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1989); Peter Levenda, Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi involvement with the Occult (New York: Avon Books, 1995); Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the magicians, trans from the French by Rollo Meyers (New York: Stein and Day, 1964); Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult (New York: Dorset Press, 1977); James Webb, The Occult Establishment and The Occult Underground (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court)
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has given rise to a whole "mythology, and one that has never been adequately explored in connection with its possible influence on the development of German secret weapons during the war.
Finally, a curious fact, one of those obvious things that one lends to overlook unless attention is drawn to it: the atomic bomb test that took place at the Trinity site in New Mexico was a test of America's implosion-plutonium bomb, a test needed to see if the concept would actually work. It did, and magnificently. But what is immensely significant - a fact missing from almost all mainstream literature on the subject since the end of the war - is that the uranium bomb with its apparatus of a cannon shooting the critical mass of uranium together, the bomb that was actually first used in war, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was never tested. As German author Friedrich Georg notes, this tears a rather gaping hole in the Allied Legend:
Also another question is of great importance: Why was the uranium bomb of the USA, unlike the plutonium bomb, not tested prior to being hurled on Japan? Militarily this would appear to be extremely dangerous.... Did the Americans simply forget to test it, or did others already do it for them? [23]
The Allied Legend accounts for this in various ways, some ingenious, some not so ingenious, but basically they boil down to the assertion that it was never tested because it did not need to be, so confident were Allied engineers that it would work. So we have been asked to believe, by the post-war Allied spin, that the American military dropped an atomic bomb of untested design, based on concepts of physics that were very new and themselves very untested, on an enemy city, an enemy also known to be working on acquiring the atomic bomb as well!
It is indeed a badly written, truly incredible, finale to the world's most horrendous war.
1988). It should be noted that the SS Ahnenerbedienst did come under the tribunal's scrutiny.
23. Friedrich Georg, Hitlers Siegeswaffen: Band 1: Luftwaffe und Marine: Geheime Nuklearwaffen des Dritten Reiches und ihre Tragersysteme (Schleusingen: Amun Verlag, 200), p. 150, my translation.
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So, what exactly did the German pilot Hans Zinsser see on that night of October, 1944, as he flew his Heinkel bomber over the twilight skies of northern Germany? Something that, had he known it, would require the previous badly written Wagnerian libretto to be almost completely revised.
His affidavit is contained in a military intelligence report of August 19, 1945, roll number A1007, filmed in 1973 at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Zinsser's statement is found on the last page of the report:
47. A man named ZINSSER, a Flak rocket expert, mentioned what he noticed one day: In the beginning of Oct, 1944 I flew from Ludwigslust (south of Lubeck), about 12 to 15 km from an atomic bomb test station, when I noticed a strong, bright illumination of the whole atmosphere, lasting about 2 seconds.
48.The clearly visible pressure wave escaped the approaching and following cloud formed by the explosion. This wave had a diameter of about 1 km when it became visible and the color of the cloud changed frequently. It became dotted after a short period of darkness with all sorts of light spots, which were, in contrast to normal explosions, of a pale blue color.
49.After about 10 seconds the sharp outlines of the explosion cloud disappeared, then the cloud began to take on a lighter color against the sky covered with a gray overcast. The diameter of the still visible pressure wave was at least 9000 meters while remaining visible for at least 15 seconds.
50.Personal observations of the colors of the explosion cloud found an almost blue-violet shade. During this manifestation reddish-colored rims were to be seen, changing to a dirty-like shade in very rapid succession.
51.The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing.
52.About one hour later I started with an He-111 from the A/D[24] at Ludwigslust and flew in an easterly direction. Shortly after the start I passed through the almost complete overcast (between 3000 and 4000 meter altitude). A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections (at about 7000 meter altitude) stood, without any
24. "A/D" probably "aerodrome".
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seeming connections, over the spot where the explosion took place. Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lightning, turned up.
53. Because of the P-38s operating in the area Wittenberg-Mersburg I had to turn to the north but observed a better visibility at the bottom of the cloud where the explosion occured (sic). Note: It does not seem very clear to me why these experiments took place in such crowded areas. [25]
In other words, a German pilot had observed the test of a weapon, having all the signatures of a nuclear bomb: electromagnetic pulse and resulting malfunction of his radio, mushroom cloud, continuing fire and combustion of nuclear material in the cloud and so on. And all this on territory clearly under German control, in October of 1944, fully eight months before the first American A-bomb test in New Mexico! Note the curious fact that Zinsser maintains that the test took place in a populated area.
There is yet another curiosity to be observed in Zinsser's statement, one that his American interrogators either did not pursue, or, if they did pursue it, the results remain classified still: How did Zinsser know it was a test? The answer is obvious: Zinsser knew, because he was somehow involved, for clearly the Allies would not have control over a test site deep in Nazi Germany.
Earlier in the same report, there are clues that unravel the mystery:
14. When Germany was at this stage of the game, the war broke out in Europe. At first investigations on this disintegrating of [235U (sic) were somewhat neglected because a practical application seemed too far off. Later, however, this research continued, especially in finding methods of separating isotopes. Needless to say that the center of gravity of Germany's war effort at that time lay in other tasks.
25. The entire documentation of this report is as follows: "Investigations, Research, Developments and Practical use of the German Atomic Bomb," [A.P.I.U. (Ninth Air Force) 96/1945 APO 696, U.S. Army, 19 August 1945." The report is classified secret. Note that the report begins in no uncertain terms: "the following information was obtained from four German scientists: a chemist, two physical chemists, and a rocket specialist. All four men contributed a short story as to what they knew of the atomic bomb development." (Emphasis added). Note also the suggestive title of the report.
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15. Nevertheless the atomic bomb was expected to be ready toward the end of 1944, if it had not been for the effective air attacks on laboratories engaged in this uranium research, especially on the one in Ryukon in Norway, where heavy water was produced. It is mainly for this reason that Germany did not succeed in using the atomic bomb in this war.
These two paragraphs are quite revealing for several reasons.
First, what is the source for the assertion that the Germans expected the bomb to be ready in late 1944, well ahead of the Manhattan Project, and a statement in flat contradiction to the post-war Allied spin that the Germans were actually far behind? Indeed, during the war, Manhattan Project estimates consistently placed the Germans ahead of the Allies, and project chief General Leslie Groves also thought they were. But after the war, everything suddenly changed. Not only was America ahead, but according to the Legend, it had been consistently far ahead throughout the war.
Manhattan Project Chief General Leslie Groves
Zinsser's account raises a disturbing possibility -besides completely contradicting the Allied Legend - and that is, did the Allies learn of a German A-bomb test during the war? If so, then we may look for certain types of corroborating evidence, for the
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other Statements of the post-war report containing Zinsser's affidavit would seem to indicate that the Allied Legend is already beginning to take tenuous shape. The intelligence report talks, for example, only of laboratories being the facilities conducting isotope enrichment and separation research. But mere laboratories would simply be incapable of development of an actual functioning atom bomb. So one component of the Legend emerges in this early report: the German effort was lackadaisical, being confined to laboratories.
Secondly, note the clear assertion that Germany did not succeed in "using the atomic bomb in this war." The language of the report is very clear. Yet it would also appear to be designed to obfuscate in aid of the then emerging Allied Legend, for the statement does not say that the Germans never tested a bomb, only that they did not use one. The language of the report is oddly careful, deliberate, and for that reason, all the more thought provoking.
Thirdly, note how much is actually - and inadvertently it would seem -revealed about German atomic bomb research and development, for the statements make it clear that the Germans were after a uranium based A-bomb. A plutonium bomb is never mentioned. The theory of plutonium development and the possibility of a plutonium based A-bomb were clearly known to the Germans, as a Top Secret memorandum to the Heereswaffenamt (Army Ordnance Bureau) in early 1942 makes abundantly clear.[26]
So it is the absence of plutonium from this report that affords us a first significant clue into what was probably the real nature of
26. This memorandum obviously constitutes another sore spot for the Allied Legend that emerged after the war, namely, that the Germans never knew the correct amount of the critical mass of a uranium fission bomb, but that it had been grossly overestimated by several orders of magnitude, hence rendering the project "unfeasible" within the span of the war. The problem of the HWA memorandum is that the Germans had a good ball-park estimate as early as January-February of 1942. And if they knew it was so small, then the resulting "decision" of the German High Command as to the impracticality of its development becomes immensely problematical. On the contrary, because of this memorandum -most likely prepared by Dr. Kurt Diebner or Dr. Fritz Houtermans - they knew that the undertaking was not only practical but feasible within the span of the war.
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German atom bomb research. It is this absence that explains why the Germans never placed much emphasis on achieving a functioning reactor in order to enrich uranium to make weapons grade plutonium for an atom bomb: they did not need to do so, since there were other methods of enriching and separating enough U-235 to weapons grade purity and a stockpile of critical mass. In a nutshell: the Allied Legend about the German failure to obtain the atom bomb because they never had a functioning reactor is simply utter scientific nonsense, because a reactor is needed only it one wants to produce plutonium. It is an unneeded, and expensive, development, if one only wants to make a uranium A-bomb. Thus, there is sufficient reason, due to the science of bomb- making and the political and military realities of the war after America's entry, that the Germans took the decision to develop only a uranium bomb, since that afforded the best, most direct, and technologically least complicated route to acquisition of a bomb.
Let us pause a moment to put the indications of the German project in the context of the Manhattan Project taking place in the United States. There, with a production capacity larger than Germany's, and with an industrial base not being targeted by enemy bombing, the American project decided to concentrate on development of all available means to production of working atom bombs, i.e., uranium and plutonium bombs. But the production of plutonium could only be achieved in the construction of a functioning reactor. No reactor, no plutonium bomb.
But it should also be noted that the Manhattan Project also constructed the giant Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee to enrich uranium to weapons grade by gaseous diffusion and Lawrence's mass spectrometer processes, a facility that at no stage of its operation relied upon a functioning reactor in order to enrich uranium.
So, if the Germans were pursuing a similar approach to that employed at Oak Ridge, then we must find indicators to corroborate it. First, to enrich uranium by the same or similar methods as employed in Tennessee, the Reich would have had to build a similarly huge facility, or smaller facilities scattered throughout Germany, transporting the various levels of dangerous
23
uranium isotope from one point to another as feedstock until the desired level of purity and enrichment was achieved. The material would then have to be assembled in a bomb, and tested. So one must first look for a facilities or facilities. And given the Oak Ridge operation and its massive size, we know exactly what to look for: enormous size, close proximity to water, an adequate transportation infrastructure, enormous electrical power consumption, and finally, two other significant factors: an enormous labor pool, and enormous cost.
Secondly, in order to verify or corroborate Zinsser's astonishing affidavit, we must look for corroborating evidence. We must look for indications that the Germans had stockpiled enough weapons grade uranium to constitute a critical mass for an atom bomb. And then we must hunt for the test site or sites and see if it(or they) bear(s) the signature(s) of an atomic blast.
Fortunately, the information is now slowly coming available with the recent declassification of documents by Great Britain, the United States, the former Soviet Union, and as the archives of the former East Germany are being opened by the German government itself. This allows us to examine each of these aspects of the problem in a detail not possible until the last few years. The answers, as we shall see in the remaining chapters of part one, are disturbing, and horrifying.
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2. ELECTRICITY, SLAVES, AND "BUNA"
"Assertions made by General Groves after the war... were probably designed to divert attention from the German isotope separation program. The idea being that if the existence of the German uranium enrichment program could be hidden, then the cover story could be established that Germany's atomic bomb effort consisted only of failed attempts to create a reactor pile to bread plutonium"
--Carter P. Hydrick: Critical Mass: the Real Story of the Birth of the Atomic Bomb and the Nuclear Age.[1]
" The men who interrogated Heisenberg and other German scientists, read their reports, and gaped at the primitive reactor vessel in a cave in southern Germany were hard put to explain what had gone wrong. Germany had begun the war with every advantage: able scientists, material resources, and the support and interest of the highest military officials. How could they have achieved so little?" [2] These are the basic facts, and the central question, that have plagued every researcher into the subject of German secret weapons research since the end of World War Two. How indeed could Germany have not obtained the atom bomb?
The thesis of this book, among many others, is radical, namely, that Germany did acquire atomic bombs during the war. What must be explained, rather, is why Germany apparently did not use this and other dreadful weapons available to her, or, if she did, why we have not heard about it. But of course, to maintain such a radical thesis, one must argue persuasively that Germany had the bomb to begin with.
1. Carter Hydrick, Critical Mass: the Real Story of the Atomic Bomb and the Birth of the Nuclear Age, Internet published manuscript, www.3dshort.com/nazibomb2/CRITICALMASS.txt, 1998, p. 21. Hydrick's research is painstaking and meticulous, and his speculative reconstructions of the detailed history of the war's end merit close attention. It is earnestly hoped he will eventually publish this important work in book form.
2. Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War, p. viii.
This implies a relatively easy set of corroborative evidence to search for. If Germany had an uranium based atom bomb, one must look for the following things:
(1) A method or methods of separating and enriching uranium-235 isotope, the necessary isotope for an uranium atom bomb, to weapons grade quality, and in sufficient quantity to stockpile enough material for the critical mass, without the use of a functioning atomic reactor.
(2) An actual facility or facilities where such technologies are used en masse; This implies in turn
(a) enormous electrical power consumption;
(b) adequate water and transportation supplies;
(c) an enormous labor pool;
(d) a physically large facility or facilities that are relatively shielded from Allied and/or Russian bombing;
(3) The necessary basic theory for the design of a uranium bomb;
(4) Available and adequate supplies of uranium for use in enrichment;
(5) A site or sites to assemble and test the bomb
Fortunately, all these aspects of the investigation afford the researcher several clues, all of which corroborate the existence, at the minimum, of a very large and successful German uranium refinement and enrichment program during the war.
We begin by looking in a very unlikely spot: Nuremberg.
At the War Crimes Tribunal after the war, several formerly elegantly attired business executives and senior managers of the huge, enormously powerful, and quite notorious German chemicals cartel, I.G. Farben A.G., had their time in the dock. They story of this early "global corporation", its bankrolling of the Nazi regime and its central role in its "military-industrial complex", as well as its role in producing the deadly Zyklon-B poison gas for the death camps has been chronicled elsewhere.[3]
3. Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben; Anthony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.
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I.G. Farben had been more than just complicit in Nazi atrocities by its construction of a large Buna, or synthetic rubber, production plant at Auschwitz in the Polish part of Silesia during the war, committing atrocities against the concentration camp victims during its construction and operation.
For Farben, the choice of Auschwitz as the site for the Buna plant was logical, and made for "sound business reasons." The concentration camp nearby the site selected for the enormous facility guaranteed an endless supply of slave labor for its construction, and, conveniently, when the slaves had exhausted themselves in its secret construction and operation, they could be permanently "laid off". Farben director Carl Krauch assigned one of its top Buna synthetic rubber experts, Otto Ambros, to investigate the sites for the proposed plant and make a recommendation. The site eventually selected - Auschwitz - was "particularly suited for the installation" over a competing site in Norway for one very important reason.
A coal mine was nearby and three rivers converged to provide a vital requirement, a large source of water. Together with these three rivers, the Reich railroad and autobahn afforded excellent transportation to and from the area. These were not decisive advantages, however, over the Norwegian site. But the Silesian location had one advantage that was overwhelming: the S.S. had plans to expand enormously a concentration camp nearby. The promise of an inexhaustible supply of slave labor was an attraction that could not be resisted.[4]
The selection having been approved by the Farben board, Krauch then wrote a top secret letter to Ambros:
In the new arrangement of priority stages ordered by Field Marshal Keitel, your building project has first priority.... At my request, (Goring) issued special decrees a few days ago to the supreme Reich authorities concerned.... In these decrees, the Reich Marshal obligated the offices concerned to meet your requirements in skilled workers and laborers at once, even at the expense of other important building projects or plans which are essential to the war economy.[5]
4. Borkin, op. cit, p. 115.
5. Ibid., pp. 115-116.
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I.G. Farben Auschwitz "Buna" Expert Otto Ambros
With the Wehrmacht poised to blast its way into Russia soon, and sensing enormous profits to be made in the effort, the Farben directors decided to finance the enormous plant privately, rather than in concert with the Nazi regime, earmarking 900,000,000 Reichsmarks - nearly $250,000,000 in 1945 dollars or over $2 billion in contemporary dollars - to the project. It was to be the Buna plant to dwarf all other Buna plants.
However, as the testimony at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal unfolded, the Auschwitz Buna factory emerged as one of the big mysteries of the war, for in spite of the enormous sum of money set aside for its construction, in spite of the personal blessings of Hitler, Himmler, Goring, and Keitel, and in spite of an endless supply both of skilled company contract laborers and an endless supply of slave labor from Auschwitz, "the project was continually disrupted by shortages, breakdowns, and delays.... Some malign influence seemed to be affecting the entire operation" to such an extent that Farben appeared to be faced with the first failure in its long corporate history of technological success.[6] By 1942, the whole effort was viewed by many directors not only as a failure, but as a near disaster.[7]
6. Ibid., p. 118.
7. Ibid., p. 120.
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Disaster notwithstanding, the huge synthetic rubber and gasoline plants were completed, after 300,000 concentration camp workers had passed through the corporations construction mills. 25,000 of these inmates were simply and cruelly worked to death from exhaustion. The plants themselves were nothing less than gigantic. So gigantic, in fact, that "they used more electricity than the entire city of Berlin."[8]
During the war crimes tribunals, however, it was not this gruesome catalogue of facts about the plant that puzzled the Allied prosecutors. What puzzled them was that, in spite of such an enormous investment of lives, money, and material, "not a single pound of Buna was ever produced"[9] The Farben directors and managers in the docks were almost obsessively insistent on this point. More electricity than the entire city of Berlin - the eighth largest in the world at that time - to produce absolutely nothing? If this was true, then the enormous outlay of capital and labor and the huge electrical consumption contributed nothing significant to the German war effort whatsoever. Needless to say, there is something very wrong with this picture.
None of it made sense the, none of it makes sense now, unless of course the plant was not a Buna plant at all...
***
When I.G. Farben began its construction of the "Buna" plant at Auschwitz, one of the more unusual events to being the process was the removal of over 10,000 Polish inhabitants from their homes to make way for the thousands of German scientists, technicians, contract works and their families who were moved into the area. The parallel with the Manhattan Project in this respect is obvious. It is simply unbelievable in the extreme that, with such a technical and scientific effort on the part of the corporation with the most successful track record in advanced technologies and production
8. Ibid., p. 127.
9. Ibid., emphasis added.
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facilities, and a plant consuming more electricity than Berlin, that nothing whatsoever was ever accomplished or produced.[10]
One contemporary researcher who is also mystified by the whole "Buna plant affair" is Carter P. Hydrick. Contacting Ed Landry, an expert in the field of synthetic rubber production from Houston, Texas, and informing him of the I.G. Farben plant, its huge electrical consumption, and the directors' claims that it produced no Buna at all, Landry responded: "That was not a rubber plant - you can bet your bottom dollar on that." Landry simply does not believe the primary purpose of the "Buna plant" was the production of rubber at all.[11]
How then to account for the enormous electrical consumption and post-war insistence of Farben directors that the plant never produced any synthetic rubber at all? What other technology would require such enormous electrical power consumption, such an enormous technical and unskilled labor staff, and such close proximity to plentiful water supplies? At that time, there was only one other technological process that could conceivably require all these things. Hydrick puts the case this way:
Certainly there is something wrong with this picture. A compilation of the three central and readily known facts just outlined - electrical consumption, construction costs, and I.G. Farben's previous record -does not readily form a picture that a Buna processing plant was the type of project being constructed at Auschwitz. Such a compilation does sketch a picture, however, of another important wartime production process, though secret at the time. The process is uranium enrichment.[12]
So why call it a Buna plant? And why protest so vociferously to the Allied prosecutors that the plant never produced any Buna at all? One answer is that with so much labor being provided by the slave labor from the SS concentration camp nearby, the plant fell under SS security jurisdiction, and an effective "cover" would therefore been at the head of the list of Farben's and the SS' concerns. In the
10. Carter P. Hydick, op. cit., p. 34.
11. Hydrick, op. cit., p. 35.
12. Ibid., p. 38.
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unlikely event, for example, of an escape by one or more inmates, the "Buna" plant would have offered a plausible cover story should the Allies ever learn of it. Since isotope separation would have been such a secret and costly process, "it becomes hard to imagine the so-called Buna installation being anything but a cover for a uranium enrichment facility."[13] Indeed, there is odd corroboration as we shall see from the Farm Hall transcripts. The "Buna plant" became the cover story to explain the construction to the laborers - in the event that explanations were offered at all! - and to the Farben company contract employees who were "out of the loop."
In this respect, the delays in its construction and the difficulties Farben encountered are also best explained by its being a huge isotope separation facility, not unlike those the Manhattan Project encountered when constructing its own similarly sized plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Like its American counterpart, shortages and delays and technical difficulties dogged the project from its inception, and like its American counterpart, these delays were experienced in spite of its enjoying a similarly privileged position in the hierarchy of Nazi priorities as Oak Ridge.[14]
So the strange assertions and behavior of the Farben directors on trial after the war begins to make sense. Faced already with an emerging "Allied Legend" about German incompetence in nuclear matters, the Farben directors and managers were perhaps trying in a subtle way to "set the record straight" in the only way that would not overtly challenge that Legend. They were attempting, perhaps, to provide a clue as to the real nature and achievements of the German bomb program that would only be noticed over time and with careful scrutiny.
On 25 March 1945 U 234 left Kiel, Germany, for initial port calls at Horten, Larvik and Kristiansand, all in Norway, to eventually sail for Japan on 15 April 1945. On 19 May 1945 U 234 entered the US Naval Base at Portsmouth, NH in the USA, after it had surrendered at sea to the US destroyer USS Sutton (DE 771) on 14 May 1945 in observance of the general order to end hostilities and after an initial escort to Casco Bay, Maine, USA on 16 May 1945.
Indiensstellung von U 234
The commissioning of U 234
On board there was freight composed of strategic goods for the war ally Japan, among those a selection of rare raw material, blueprints of German aircraft and missile developments, plus supply for the German Embassy in Tokyo. All in all, a load surrounded by many secrets. In historic writing and literature this cargo gave permanent reason for speculations, some of them extremely wild. Based on motives of the voyage of U 234 even a well received TV movie with well-known actors (“The last U-boat/ Das letzte U-Boot”) was produced and screened first time on 21st of March 1997 at the Second German TV Channel (ZDF), also a TV documentary by SPIEGEL TV (“U 234 – Deadly Cargo”/ “U 234 – Tödliche Fracht”) was screened first time on 30 December 2002 and repeated many time since. The speculations about the cargo, its intended use in Japan and its further whereabouts in the USA, were nourished very much by the presence of strange passengers on board U-234, among those a German Air Force general, two Japanese officers and two engineers from the Messerschmidt aircraft producers.
Portsmouth New Hampshire USA - die Besatzung von U234 im Vordergrund auf DE 771 Sutton
Portsmouth New Hampshire USA – die crew of U234 in the foreground on DE 771 Sutton
The myths about U 234 hold until today, some of them persistently. Main subjects of these myths are the 560 kg of Uranium Oxyde on board and allegedly parts of a disassembled V-2 as well as from one Me-262 jet fighter (there are even allegations of up to three disassembled aircraft on board), plus parts from a Me-163 jet fighter, a Me 309 propeller fighter and the gigantic Me 323 transport aircraft. According to the myths, the Uranium Oxyde was to support the Japanese project of an own atomic bomb, and after its seizure by the US it shall have gone into the US atomic program (allegedly parts of the material ended in the US atomic bombs for the August 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The missile and aircraft parts were used to substantially support the respective US developments. There are claims, that the Me-262 parts were off loaded at Casco Bay, then brought to the US Wright Airfield Test Air Base at Dayton, Ohio, re-assembled by assistance of the Messerschmidt engineers of U 234 and actually flown.
An US Naval historian has published the probably most compre-hensive and sound study about the last voyage of U 234 yet. However, he remains vague with regard to certain aspects, in particular the cargo on board, and he is sometimes even wrong.
(Joseph Mark Scalia: Germany´s Last Mission to Japan – The Failed Voyage of U-234, published in 2000 at Naval Institute Press in Annapolis, USA as an extended MA thesis completing his university studies between 1994 and 1997. The German edition: In geheimer Mission nach Japan – U 234, published in 2002 at Motorbuchverlag and 2005 at Ullstein as paperback)
Johann-Heinrich Fehler - Kommandant von U 234
Commander of U 234 Kapitänleutnant (Lieutenant-commander) Johann-Heinrich Fehler
Also, an eye witness, the R/T Master Chief on board U 234, Wolfgang Hirschfeld, has published a book telling his memories of this last voyage. However, he as well remains very vague only as to the cargo on board or he simply follows the known speculative accounts
(Wolfgang Hirschfeld: Das letzte Boot, published in 1989 at Universitas at München)
What are the findings of today? By and large, the background of the embarkation of specialist passengers during this voyage is clarified, after the war many of these have explained their presence anyway. Therefore, there are no major secrets around those any longer, nevertheless, new interpretations come up occasionally.
The cargo list of the last voyage of U 234 known to us states the Uranium Oxyde and it also shows blueprints of aircraft and mis-siles. However, there are no documents available to the public (yet) that identifies the intended purpose of the raw material Uranium Oxyde in Japan, as well as the utilization of it in the USA, i.e. whatever is being said about it is mere speculation. Other than several boxes, inter alia those with blueprints of aircraft and missiles, there is no mentioning of boxes containing parts of disassembled air-craft or missiles in those lists. Moreover, the storing of such parts is hardly imaginable in those cramped conditions on board, similarly the size of the boxes simply would not fit, same as the measures of the mineshafts would not do.
Unless still existing restrictions to requirements of confidentiality around the transport of such aircraft and missile parts prevent so, any statements or stories concerning those should be rejected as mere speculation. Any research to find out about the true nature of the cargo is significantly hampered, as even renowned historians apparently plagiarize without prior checking. Therefore, the myths around the last voyage of U 234 seem to prove themselves simply through repeating allegations all over again. It rests with the U-boat Archive to make an appeal to every historian to share a healthy mistrust vis-á-vis such firm myths and to rather meet them with information which is a based on provable facts. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t8G5cPqNAc _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
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