Historian's Claim:Hitler Had the A-Bomb!

In a book to be published in Germany, a historian claims that Hitler's Germany possessed nuclear technology at the end of WW2:
www.msnbc.msn.com...


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

Wow... if this is true it makes the 'endgame' Hitler was playing in 1944-45 make a lot more sense. I've never been able to figure out why he wasted so many troops on delaying tactics as the US/UK and USSR were rushing towards Germany. It seems -- if this claim pans out -- that he may have been betting that he could reach a nuclear stalemate with the US.

As for these claims... I can't wait to look at this historian's proof. Radiological samples and records would go a long way towards proving this theory. If it's true than our understanding of the war's end stages will have to be rethought.

If they did, they didn't have the means to deliver it. However, Hitler was working on the "America Bomber" that would of been able to fly across the Atlantic and bomb American cities. It was not completed in time.

I read about this. I just can't believe it. If he had it, he would have used it. I don't doubt that the Germans had progressed very far, to the verge of making an a-bomb but really. Eh, who knows, it might be possible that this is true. We've discovered alot of amazing things in hindsight.

Even in the most deserted place in Europe, someone would have noticed a nuclear test. Like onlyinmydreams said, this fellow needs to provide soil samples from the test site.

I believe if they had the "bomb" they would have used it. They probably would have used it on the Russian front or dropped it on London. They had several methods of delivery including "V" rockets, bombers, and extremely large cannons/artillery. They were pretty ingenious at developing methods for delivering "bombs" over long distances. I just saw the info on the super bombers the other night and man, thank God they didn't have time to unleash those.

Originally posted by onlyinmydreams Radiological samples and records would go a long way towards proving this theory. If it's true than our understanding of the war's end stages will have to be rethought.

The article say it is backed up by soil samples but who knows if they are accurate.

Radiation measurements and soil analysis were also used to back up the assertions, he said. He said no further details on the book would be released until its publication.

Originally posted by skychief
I They had several methods of delivery including "V" rockets, bombers, and extremely large cannons/artillery.

The V-2's and the V-3 did not have the payload required for a WWII era device. The American bombs took up most of the bombload of a B-29 Super fort.

At any rate there was no bomb to deliver. Thier heavy water supply had been decimated early on, and there is ample evidence that Werner Heisenberg may have stalled the project to keep it out of the hand of Hitler. Even if he did not, the Nazi's did not even have a working reactor by the end of the war let alone the massive infrastructure the centerfuges would have required to separate and enrich uranium.

One of the first threads I started on ATS can be found here and it deal with this subject:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by FredT

Originally posted by skychief
I They had several methods of delivery including "V" rockets, bombers, and extremely large cannons/artillery.

The V-2's and the V-3 did not have the payload required for a WWII era device. The American bombs took up most of the bombload of a B-29 Super fort.

At any rate there was no bomb to deliver. Thier heavy water supply had been decimated early on, and there is ample evidence that Werner Heisenberg may have stalled the project to keep it out of the hand of Hitler. Even if he did not, the Nazi's did not even have a working reactor by the end of the war let alone the massive infrastructure the centerfuges would have required to separate and enrich uranium.

One of the first threads I started on ATS can be found here and it deal with this subject:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Yeah, you know I probably should have thought that one through as I forgot just how large/heavy those bombs were. I also agree that there was probably no way that they had the capabillity at the end of the war to create an atomic device. Of course, even today we are amazed at the weapons they were able to develop so who really knows for sure.

Originally posted by onlyinmydreams
It seems -- if this claim pans out -- that he may have been betting that he could reach a nuclear stalemate with the US.

I doubt that Hitler knew anything at all about our nuclear program. Very few Americans knew about it until it was dropped and it was dropped just a soon as it was perfected.

Even Vice-President Truman didn't know of the Manhattan project until after he was sworn into office following the death of President Franklin Roosevelt on 12 April 1945.

The first test of an atomic bomb took place on 16 July 1945. The uranium bomb, "Little Boy," was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

www.me.utexas.edu...

[edit on 05/3/6 by GradyPhilpott]

Personally, I don't think he had the bomb (at least a working, deployable one). However, I still think that -- if this claim is true -- it goes a long way towards explaining German strategy at the end of WW2.

Why? Because everything they did boiled down to just stalling the allies. Precious troops and equipment were wasted on operations that bought Germany weeks and months here and there rather than being concentrated on shoring up a lasting defense. This makes sense, though, if you figure that Hitler thought he might get an A-bomb by late spring. Once he had an operational device he'd only have to threaten the allies with it to end the war. He wouldn't even need to know about the US one (in fact, this endgame strategy would make more sense if he didn't know about the US one).

As for delivery system.... think about submarines. A bomb could have been piggybacked to one of the ultra advanced later generation Uboats and deposited in New York Harbor.

Hitler didn’t have the bomb, in the later stages of World War 2 after the Vemork Heavy Water Factory was destroyed during Operation Gunner side (here) in February of 1943. With this factory destroyed, he would have been unable to make Heavy Water (here) to build and purify any more atomic weapons. Although, it is possible before this factory was destroyed they might have had 1 bomb ready as the facility in Norway was built in the 1930’s.

It’s my guess they did have 1 weapon ready, which they probably used as a test to see how effective it was and in turn this prompted them to move the last of the Heavy Water from Norway to Germany in 1943/4, but this was luckily stopped before they had the chance to build a second.

It would of taken roughly 1year to 18months, to be able to build and enrich enough water to start making a hydrogen or atomic weapon - so it’s possible as the war was drawing to an end Germany could have been in the last stages of building a weapon but luckily this never happened.

I have read this book over 20 years ago and I can tell you that Hitler did not have an atomic weapon.

True German scientists were experimenting with something to do with charcoal blocks, graphite in much the way Fermier and Co did B4 they went to Nevada but that was before the raid on the heavy water plant in Norway. Simply put, there was no heavy water, so they started concentrating on Chemical Agents and associated weapon systems.

This was one of the main reasons the Germans fought so hard on the eastern front. They were fighting a 'delaying battle' knowing that they had to buy time for the German scientists who were in turn, fighting to perfect Nerve Agent and Blood Agent and the weapons to deliver them. (Remember they already had Zyklon-B -a Ricin type Nerve Agent and had shedloads of Phosgene Gas [Blister Agent])

It all came down to manpower. Germans were loosing far more than they could replace and the Russians had an unlimited supply of cannon fodder.

Hitler, as he often did, kept changing the goals on a day to day basis. In the end, it did not matter because the Russians captured far more Chemical scientists and the raw materiels than the Germans were able to destroy.

As to deployable weapons, true Focke-Wolfe were working on an aircraft to replace the Fw2000 Condor and several 2nd generation jet aircraft, but by 1945, their arms industry was shot to hell.

The all singing, all dancing Type XXIX U Boat was only on paper although there were several long range U Boats stationed off the continental US. They would have been able to launch the first generation of cruise missiles, but they were not produced in any quantity.

The Germans did have several short and medium range anti-ship missiles that had 'sea-skimming' capabilities and they developed a short range anti-aircraft missiles but all these arrived far too late to turn the tide of the war.

It is amazing to think that in 1944/5, German scientists were experimenting with 'flying wings' when you consider just how long it took the US to build the B2 Stealth bomber.

I think that Hitler have Japan a weapon that had the radiation effects of a nuclear bomb but with out the explosion or something like that. I think Japan was planning to drop it on like San Francisco but a few days earlier the US nuked them. BTW the last post had something about flying wings and i know that the us was working on flying wings during the 40's and 50's as well as the Germans. But they had many problems with out the help of modern computers. One of the big rpoblems was that if the plane stalled, due to its flying wing design, it would begin to tunble and spin completely our of control and even expienced pilots had trouble correcting. They solved this problem with the B-2 by having the computer onboard make it impossible for the pilot to slow the plane to below its stall speed.

Hitler and his gang didn't have 'the bomb'.

End of discussion.

They either imprisoned, murdered or threw out the very scientific base that might have developed one for them and their dispicable political 'system' ensured that of those left the brightest would not give Hitler the bomb in any event.

I suggest a look at the transcripts of the conversations of the captured nuclear scientists www.taivaansusi.net... you will see that only a few of the German scientists knew pretty well what was necessary to build the a-bomb.....

.....Heisenberg was able to accurately deduce the methods used in the allied bomb in a matter of a day or two of hearing radio reports about the attack on Japan (and imagine how little information they must have contained!).

The fact is we owe a huge debt of gratitude to those men.
They simply refused to let their criminal government have it.

It is true that German science did develop the nerve agents Sarin and Tabun and in plenty of time to develop and deploy them too.
But when British intelligence got warned that something along those lines was being developed Churchill let it be known that if Germany ever tried to deploy such weapons Britain would drench Germany from one end to the other in Anthrax (which the UK had back then along with the means to deliver and carry out the threat).
Hence Germany never did try to use it's nerve gases.

As for the Horten flying wings? (Especially the Ho IX)
This flew as an engineless unpowered glider in the first prototype form for about 30hrs and for about 2hrs as the 2nd powered prototype before killing it's pilot.
I'll agree they were interesting aircraft but about as far away as it is possible to get from a military aircraft ready for service deployment and hardly something capable of being judged as 'an about to be amazingly capable aircraft'.

I suggest people try and look up the information contained in the actual allied evaluation reports of the time rather than getting carried away with the 'guesstimate' nonsense of certain Luftwaffe 46/47....er 2005...um, blah blah blah sites.

www.twitt.org...



[edit on 6-3-2005 by sminkeypinkey]

if he had the a-bomb and we knew it, wedve got the h-bomb working THAT year, istead of like 15 years later or whatever it was, then theyd be scared and if not, wedve had the n-bomb read by then too probably, the gov-t wouldve dumped so much money into that wedve h-bombed germany 1, nuked japan twice(like normal) and n-bombed austria and france twice each. and for a tid bit info heres some information...



A-Bomb: Atomic bomb, also know as the Neuclear bomb, has a powerful effect from the splitting of two atoms.

H-Bomb: Hydrogen bomb, a powerful effect from the combing of two hydrogen atoms. 1 H-Bomb= 13,000 A-Bombs

N-Bomb- Neutron bomb, not a big explosion, spills out radiation for days, and less than a few miles wide, can take out enemys in tanks or other armored vehicles. Considered by many as in-humane.

Originally posted by sminkeypinkey

The fact is we owe a huge debt of gratitude to those men.
They simply refused to let their criminal government have it.

That remains open to debate. The fact remains though that Germnay had nowhere near the infrastructure to build an atomic bomb. The Manhattan Projects resources dwarfed anything that Germnay could have put together even if the bomb was a top priority.
If Heisenberg had had the resources he would have attempted to build it.

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

I find it hard to beleive that the nazis tested one nuke, rather than delivered it to london, and I refuse to even consider as plausible that they tested multiple nukes rather than used them. Its preposterous on its face.

I think that everyone who has looked into the matter has found out that the nazis were very very far from making a nuclear bomb, and probably 'never' would've had one. THere were number of threads on this possibility in soc.hist.what-if as I recall, and the more studied of the people there seemed to have reached that conclusion.

This guy, in all honesty, is just trying to get more money thru more book sales. He's making big claims, then says 'buy the book to find the proof'. There's the hook and the line, the sinker must be somewhere now.

Ground Zero is defined as "A point below which, on which or above which, a nuclear explosions occurs".

Even in 1944/45, I think the world would have sat up and noticed something as big as a nuclear explosion.

Even in 1944/45, seismic detectors would have detected a sub-terranian nuclear explosion on some off-shore island.

A 'Ground Burst' would have thrown up a massive amount of irradiated debris and the resulting 'mushroom' cloud would have been visible for hundreds of miles and recce aircraft would have spotted it.

A nuclear explosion beneath or on the sea causes all sorts of problems including a massive tidal wave - we would have evidence of that, wouldn't we?

An airburst - where the fireball does not touch the ground, still produces a mushroom shaped cloud but it takes slightly longer to form. The by-product of this type of explosion, is massive amounts of radiation. Nothing would be living in the area of such an explosion even now.

As for Exo-Atmospheric nuclear explosions - forget it. Werner von Braun was good, but not that good!

OK, despite the fact I seriously doubt the Germans had anything close to an Atomic Bomb near WW2's end, they had done extensive work on long-range bombers as deliverly methods for the proposed German Atomic Bomb (one such craft, a Heinkel He177A was even designed to specifically carry an Atomic Bomb) from as early as 1941 in the "AMERIKABOMBER" project.

Orignally, the German Aeronautical Company, Messerschmitt (who we all know invented the first jet aircraft, the Me262), created the ME264 as the original "AMERIKABOMBER" design. This was a 4-engine powered, long-range heavy bomber, which could carry a 3000kg payload of bombs, at an estimated range 11,000km at an altitude of 16,000m and still have enough capacity to carry 1000kg of armour plating, it also had an elaborate sleeping area and gallery for 2, three-man crews and had 4, 30mm machine gun turrets and 2, 46.7mm cannons as defensive armaments !!! It could also be fitted with 6 solid-fuel rockets to assist take-off in overload conditions (approx. an extra 750kg of weight)! The ME264 was completed by December 1941, and in December 1942 made its first test flight from a Luftwaffe base in Mont de Marsan on the Atlantic Coast of France, from where it approached to within 20km of New York and had enough fuel to reach the harbour and return safely (a flight of approx. 30 hrs! ). Scary stuff, eh?

Other "AMERIKABOMBER" projects such as the Focke-Wulf Ta-400 and the Junkers Ju390 and more were proposed and tested but were scrapped in favour of the ME264. However, by the time the ME264 was ready for mass production in late 1943, the German Industrial Infrastructure was crumbling and many proposed production factories had been destroyed as a result of Allied bombing raids. 2 completed ME264's remain nowadays, one in the Berlin Aeronautics and Maritime Mueseum and another in a war mueseum in St. Petersburg which was captured. Another case of too little, too late for yet another German Secret Weapon.

BTW, I got plenty of pic's, plz be patient I'll host them, then post 'em!

P.S. All information is from the book "Germany's Secret Weapons in WW2" by respected English WW2 Historian, Roger Ford (google him if you don't believe me).

[edit on 7/3/05 by The Godfather of Conspira]

In 1910, seven years after the first flights by the American inventors Orville and Wilbur Wright, the French scientist Henri Marie Coanda designed and built a jet-propelled biplane, which took off and flew under its own power with Coanda as pilot. Coanda used an engine that he termed a reaction motor, but, discouraged by the lack of public acceptance of his aircraft, he abandoned his experiments.

That was the First Jet plane, but nobody liked the idea of it and thus Henri Coanda faded. =)

Also, they nearly had an atomic weapon, 6months to a year, but without Hard Water...this set them back by about two years and then the war was over.

Odium:

I stand corrected about the Jet Plane, but I still refuse to believe that the Germans had anything close Atomic Bomb without any hard proof, anyhow I won't argue now. I do know however they had two operational Atomic Piles somewhere in Germany, I have seen pictures of them, so the theory isn't out of the question but still, there is lacking proof of anything like an Atomic Bomb was being manufactured towards the end of the war.

Here are the pics guys, (excuse the shizen quality, I took low-res shots with my camera from the book, I will post more soon, hopefully better quality :cool:

ME264:
photobucket.com...

Crappy close-up (please excuse ):
photobucket.com...

Underground ME264 Production Facility:
photobucket.com...

ME264 Re-fuelling (Tiny photo, yet again sorry )
photobucket.com...

Hopefully they come out right, not too much trouble for 56k users !
I will post more pictures soon...

[edit on 7/3/05 by The Godfather of Conspira]