Did Hitler have an atomic bomb - The controversial claim uncovered.
Latest hand-picked WWII news. See also: Manhattan project: A-Bombs in Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
126,000 barrels of Nazi nuclear waste from Hitler's A-bomb project found in mine near Hanover
German nuclear experts believe they have found nuclear waste from Hitler's secret atom bomb programme lie rotting over 2,000 feet below ground in a crumbling mine near Hanover. 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." Mark Walker, an expert on the Nazi programme said: "We still don't know about these projects, which remain cloaked in WW2 secrecy... 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?"
(dailymail.co.uk)
Lost Nazi nuclear-weapons-project uranium found in Dutch scrapyard
Bits of uranium found in a Dutch scrapyard originated in the Nazi nuclear-weapons programme of the 1940s. Forensic nuclear scientists at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) traced the two metal pieces (a cube and a plate) back to their origins: The Joachimsthal mine. The JRC's Institute for Transuranium Elements (ITU) says the cube was made in 1943 for the Nazi nuclear programme and used in the lab of Werner Heisenberg. The plate was part of experiments by Karl Wirtz. After WWII Heisenberg said: "Probability that this would lead to atomic bombs during the War was nearly zero."
(theregister.co.uk)
Scientist Tells How He Buried Adolf Hitler's Atomic Bomb
In the last days of the World War II, the Nazis tried to develop the a-bomb before the Allies. Now Erwin Klinge has revealed how he hid the secret of producing it from Adolf Hitler. He and his team buried the plans to stop the Nazis aquiring the bomb. He had planned to quit Nazi Germany for Britain but WW2 broke out, and later he was recruited to work in a lab outside Berlin. "My boss sent me to Frankfurt for 4 weeks to learn how to produce a metal. I did not know until later that the metal was uranium." It was essential to Hitler's atomic plans. "My boss was digging most of the material into the ground to stop Hitler... getting close to an atomic bomb."
(sundaymail)
Nazi Nuclear Scientist Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker dies at 94
Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, a physicist who researched atomic weapons for the Nazis and became a philosophy professor who espoused pacifism after World War II, died at 94. He claimed he worked on the atomic bomb to avoid being conscripted into the Nazi army and in postwar interviews that he was grateful the nuclear technology was never used by the Nazis. But a secret recording of German scientists captured by the Allies caught him saying, after hearing of the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan that, "If they were able to finish it by summer 1945, then with a bit of luck, we could have been ready in winter 1944-1945."
(iht.com)
Notes on Japan's wartime atomic bomb program found in U.S. (Article no longer available from the original source)
The U.S. Library of Congress possesses memos by two Japanese scientists involved in Japan's unsuccessful attempt to develop atomic bombs during World War II. The memos were written by Sakae Shimizu and Yoshiaki Uemura -- they worked under Bunsaku Arakatsu, a professor at Kyoto Imperial University, which was ordered by the Imperial Japanese Navy to develop a-bombs. The notebooks were seized by the General Headquarters of the Allied Forces which occupied Japan after the war. Documents written by scientists involved in the front line of Japan's atomic bomb program are rare.
(kyodo)
Nazis tested their A-bomb in 1945
According to historian Rainer Carlsch, the Nazi scientists made a secret nuclear test near Ordruff on March 3, 1945. He argues that the Nazis detonated a bomb that had up to 5 kilos of plutonium, using about 700 Soviet PoWs as 'guinea pigs'. "My mom told me a story about some strange things that took place here early March of 1945," says Elsa Kelner, a resident of Ordruff. German scientists headed by Erich Bagge built the first centrifuge back in 1942. But the project deadlocked in 1943 after guerillas damaged a "heavy water" plant in Norway. Heinrich Himmler, the chief of SS and Gestapo, took over the project dubbed the "Miracle Weapon."
(pravda)
Soil tests reveal no evidence of Hitler's Bomb, but radioactive material was found
Soil tests have revealed no evidence that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler tested a nuclear weapon just two months before losing the WWII, government scientists said. A Berlin historian, Rainer Karlsch, brought out a book last year on Nazi nuclear research and offered circumstantial evidence that the Germans may have tested a bomb on March 3, 1945 at the Ohrdruf army training camp. A statement said radioactive material was found at the site, but this could be explained by the fallout from the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl. The PTB stressed that it found no evidence to disprove the Karlsch hypothesis either.
(haaretz)
How did the development of the "atom bomb" fare in Hitler's Germany?
In 1939, Erich Schumann, head of the Berlin weapons research office of the German Army Ordnance, had a nuclear team including Otto Hahn and Heisenberg. It seemed that Hitler's Nazi Germany would develop the "atom bomb" ahead of the US. The man who prevented it was Hitler, not that he underestimated the it's geostrategic importance - he compared the advent of nuclear weapons to that of gunpowder. If Hitler had been given a promise that the nuclear weapons could be expected not later than, say 1943, Hitler probably would not have launched a conventional war, but concentrated the resources on the nuclear project.
(worldtribune)
Historian Rainer Karlsch suggests Adolf Hitler had a nuclear bomb?
Historian Rainer Karlsch claims in "Hitler's Bomb" that the Nazis did 3 nuclear weapons tests - one on the German island of Ruegen in the fall of 1944 and two in Thuringia in March 1945. The tests claimed up to 700 lives. Karlsch focuses on Erich Schumann, a chief of research for Nazi Germany's weapons division until 1944, who wrote that in 1944 he discovered a method of generating the high temperatures and extreme pressure needed to cause nuclear fusion using conventional explosives. During WWII explosives experts experimented with hollow charges which have extremely high penetration force - for example the bazooka is based on this effect.
(spiegel.de)
Last known witness to detonation of "disintegration bomb"
Author Luigi Romersa is the last known witness to what he and some historians believe was the experimental detonation of a rudimentary weapon on an island in the Baltic in 1944. Romersa said that when Mussolini had met Hitler earlier in the conflict, the Nazi dictator had alluded to Germany's development of weapons capable of reversing the course of the war. After meeting Josef Goebbels and Hitler in Nazi Germany, Romersa was shown around the Nazis' top-secret weapons plant at Peenemünde and then, on October 12 1944, taken to island of Rügen, where he watched the detonation of what his hosts called a "disintegration bomb".
(Guardian)
See also:
Manhattan project: A-Bombs in Hiroshima, Nagasaki.