GERMAN NUCLEAR ENERGY PROJECT

:''See also Germany and weapons of mass destruction
The 'German nuclear energy project' was an endeavor by scientists during World War II in Nazi Germany to develop nuclear energy and an atomic bomb for practical use. Unlike the competing Allied effort to develop a nuclear weapon the German effort resulted in two rival teams, one working for the military, the second, a civilian effort co-ordinated by the Reichspost.

''The German experimental nuclear pile at Haigerloch''

Overview

Effectiveness and implications

Post war

Heisenberg's 1941 meeting with Bohr

Battle of Berlin

Analysis and legacy

Overview

The nuclear research effort most widely discussed was that of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, or KWG team led by the physicist Werner Heisenberg. The second was a Heereswaffenamt ("HWA") military team under the scientific leadership of Prof. Kurt Diebner. Diebner also had some interaction with Heisenberg on nuclear reactor design during the war, but the projects which they led were quite separate.
Immediately before the end of the War, Diebner had a laboratory under a school stadium in Stadtilm, Leipzig. There he was working on development of a uranium atomic bomb. After postwar interrogation, Diebner was considered an unrepentant Nazi and was not allowed to resume a scientific career. He died 13 July 1964.
All German nuclear research was originally funded through the German Post Office, under the Reich Research Council; however, in 1942, armaments minister Albert Speer reorganised nuclear research and switched all funding to only support development of nuclear reactors.
Dr Groth and Dr Paul Harteck were dismayed at the loss of funding for military use of nuclear energy for weapons. Harteck in particular had worked with Dr Fritz Houtermanns on the problem of Plutonium chemical separation (from uranium). These men were keenly aware of the Austrian scientist Prof Josef Schintlmeister, who proposed in 1940 for the construction of a nuclear reactor to breed plutonium for bombs.
Groth and Harteck led a team of physicists and chemists in 1942 to persuade Herman Goering and Martin Bormann to fund an alternate nuclear project to Heisenberg's.
Dr. Paul Harteck, chief physicist of the German army, had helped to develop the gaseous uranium centrifuge invented by Dr. Erich Bagge, in 1942 at Kiel. The gaseous centrifuge was also known as an isotope sluice. It has since come to be known as the Harteck process.
Harteck initially led a team at Hamburg attempting to create a nuclear propelled U-boat. After the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943, the Kriegsmarine shifted its nuclear project to Stettin under Admirals Karl Witzell and vice-admiral Otto Rhein. Physicist Dr Otto Haxel took over scientific leadership of the Kriegsmarine, or OKM nuclear project. In April 1944 Harteck was responsible for gaining Nazi funding for industrial scale enrichment of uranium. Orders were placed with BMAG Meguin for production of gaseous uranium centrifuges.
Uranium ore was sourced from western Czechoslovakia at Jachymov, then known as Joachimsthal. It was refined by Auer Gessellschaft at Oranienberg north of Berlin.
Controversy around Nazi development of nuclear weapons places huge reliance upon Heisenberg's inability to identify the average cross section of neutron release in a chain reaction. At the presentation given by Harteck to Nazi leaders in 1942, however, it was correctly identified that one only needed a uranium warhead "the size of a pineapple."
The intentions of Heisenberg's team are a matter of historical controversy, centering on whether or not the scientists involved were genuinely attempting to build an atomic bomb for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, or were trying to hinder development of nuclear weapons. Heisenberg's project was not a military success by any measure.
In efforts with Dr Robert Dopel at Leipzig in May 1942, a fission chain reaction had been sustained by using two concentric shells of uranium oxide separated by heavy water. However, Heisenberg failed to provide any means for controlling the reaction. It quickly resulted in a runaway nuclear reaction which ended with a massive steam explosion.
A heavy water nuclear test reactor was built in a cave in Haigerloch. This reactor never reached critical condition, because the amount of uranium was never sufficient. Its approach was different from the earlier experiment and used cubes of uranium suspended by chains. The cave is now a museum.^[1]

Effectiveness and implications

Nuclear fission was discovered in Germany in 1938-1939 through the work of Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman, Lise Meitner, and Otto Robert Frisch (following up on work done by Enrico Fermi). By the beginning of World War II the scientific community was well aware of the early German lead in this area of nuclear physics.
The threat of a Nazi atomic bomb was one of the primary driving forces behind the creation of the British Tube Alloys project which would eventually lead to the Allied nuclear weapons effort: the Manhattan Project. Several European exiles from Germany, Italy, Hungary and other nations eventually would make significant contributions to the Allied nuclear effort. The German government never did finance a full crash program to develop weapons, as they estimated it could not be completed in time for use in the war, thus the German program was much more limited in capacity and ability when compared to the eventual size and priority of the Manhattan Project.
In 1945, a U.S. investigation called Operation Alsos determined that German scientists under Heisenberg were close, but still short, of the point that Allied scientists had reached in 1942, the creation of a sustained nuclear chain reaction, a crucial step for creating a nuclear reactor (which in turn could be used for either peaceful purposes, or for creating plutonium, needed for nuclear weapons). The U-234 submarine tried to deliver uranium and advanced weapons technology to Japan, but after the German capitulation, it surrendered to the U.S. before reaching Japan.
There has been a historical debate, however, as to whether the German scientists purposefully sabotaged the project by under-representing their chances at success, or whether their estimates were based in either error or inadequacy.

Post war

After the war, ten German scientists: Erich Bagge, Kurt Diebner, Walther Gerlach, Paul Harteck, Horst Korsching, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Karl Wirtz, Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn (who had co-discovered nuclear fission), and Max von Laue (an ardent anti-Nazi), were taken captive by Allied forces and put under secret watch at Farm Hall, England, as part of Operation Epsilon. Their conversations were recorded as Allied analysts attempted to discover the extent of German knowledge about nuclear weapons. The results were inconclusive, but they allowed them to hear the results of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which sent Hahn into a near-suicidal despair. By the next morning, Heisenberg claimed to have worked out exactly how the American atomic bomb must have worked, judging from reports of the damage and explosive size, and gave a lecture to the rest of the captive scientists on the effort.
While it is clear that Heisenberg had a firm understanding of the principles involved, he, either consciously or erroneously, greatly overestimated the amount of fissionable material required by several orders of magnitude.

Heisenberg's 1941 meeting with Bohr

In September of 1941, Werner Heisenberg met and spoke with his former mentor Niels Bohr in occupied Denmark. The exact content of their conversation has, since the 1950s, been a matter of some controversy as there were no witnesses. The meeting and its controversy was the subject of a Tony Award-winning play from 1998 by Michael Frayn, ''Copenhagen''.
There is considerable speculation on what occurred at the real-life meeting, and the actual accounts of it from the parties involved differ. The pro-Bohr version of the story asserts that Heisenberg was seeking to recruit Bohr to the Nazi nuclear effort, and offering him academic advancement in return. The pro-Heisenberg version asserts that Heisenberg was attempting to give Bohr information about the state of the German atomic programme, in the hope that he might pass it to the Allies through clandestine contacts. At that point the German atomic programme was not progressing well (the Nazi government had decided not to undertake the investment required to develop a weapon during the war); Heisenberg may have suspected that the Allies had a viable atomic program, and hoped that by disabusing them of the idea that the German program was also successful he could dissuade the Allies from using an atom bomb on Germany.
Much of the initial controversy resulted from a 1956 letter Heisenberg sent to the journalist Robert Jungk after reading the German edition of Jungk's book ''Brighter than a Thousand Suns'' (1956). In the letter, Heisenberg described his role in the German bomb project. Jungk published an excerpt from the letter in the Danish edition of the book in 1956 which, out of context, made it look as if Heisenberg was claiming to have purposely derailed the German bomb project on moral grounds. (The letter's whole text shows Heisenberg was careful not to claim this.) Bohr was outraged after reading this excerpt in his copy of the book, feeling that this was false and that the 1941 meeting had proven to him that Heisenberg was quite happy with producing nuclear weapons for Germany.
After the play inspired numerous scholarly and media debates over the 1941 meeting, the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen released to the public all heretofore sealed documents related to the meeting, a move intended mostly to settle historical arguments over what they contained. Among the documents were the original drafts of letters Bohr wrote to Heisenberg in 1957 about Jungk's book and other topics. The documents added little to the historical record but were interpreted by the media as supporting the "Bohr version" of the events. According to the archivists, the letters were released "to avoid undue speculation about the contents of the draft letter", which had been known about but not been open to historians previously.
Although the motives of the meeting will continue to be debated, several aspects of the meeting cannot be denied. By September of 1941, Germany had been at war for two years, and as Heisenberg was the head of the secret German atomic bomb project, he was risking severe punishment by just speaking to Bohr. Since Bohr was half-Jewish he would never have been allowed to participate in the project. Also, since Bohr was a famous physicist, it would have been fairly easy to conclude that Bohr would be attempting to escape to the West soon, making Heisenberg's meeting with him an even more serious breach of security.

Battle of Berlin

According to the military historian Antony Beevor possession of the German nuclear energy project was a primary motive for Stalin authorising the launching of the Battle for Berlin.^[2] The pre-emptive destruction of as much of this infrastructure as possible, so that it would not fall into Soviet hands, was the motive behind the raid on 15 March 1945 by the USAAF Eighth Air Force on the German atomic energy research facility in Oranienburg, a suburb of Berlin.^[3]

Analysis and legacy

There have been numerous other cited factors for the failure of the German program. One is that the repressive policies under Hitler encouraged many top scientists to flee Europe, including many who worked on the Allied project (Heisenberg himself was a target of party propaganda for some time during the ''Deutsche Physik'' movement). Another, put forth by Alsos scientific head Samuel Goudsmit, was that the stifling, utilitarian political atmosphere adversely affected the quality of the science done. Another is that the German homeland was nowhere as secure from air attack as was the USA. Had the many massive centralized factories and production facilities constructed for the US bomb project been built in Germany, they would have been prime targets for Allied bombing raids.
In fact, laboratories were founded for uranium enrichment in at least three locations, which were hounded by Allied bombing. The British spy Paul Rosebaud worked for a metal industry magazine, and thus had unparalleled access to nuclear projects up until April 1944. Rosebaud fed information to the Allies through Project Epsilon in Stockholm. This, rather than lack of technical expertise foiled Nazi nuclear efforts.
The Germans’ only source of heavy water, a necessary component of some of their bomb research, was Norsk Hydro's plant in Vemork, Norway. In February 1943, a Norwegian Commando unit sabotaged the plant. The plant was later bombed from the air and a shipment of heavy water was destroyed in transit. Whether this affected the German program is not clear.
Following the 20 July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, control of nuclear projects came under control of the SS and in particular of SS Lt General Dr. Ing Hans Kammler. Kammler himself disappeared at the end of the war. Kammler's boss, Heinrich Himmler, who was trying to negotiate an end to the war through Count von Folke Bernadotte in Sweden, took a sudden interest in the nuclear project in August 1944.
According to Farm Hall transcripts of a conversation by General Walter Dornberger with another general, Dornberger said that in October 1944, he and V-2 rocket engineer Wernher von Braun went to Lisbon to negotiate a capitulation of Nazi scientists to the US forces. They negotiated with two representatives of General Electric corporation. At this time in the war such a trip could only have been made if it was sanctioned by both Kammler and Himmler.
In 2005, Berlin historian Rainer Karlsch published a book, ''Hitlers Bombe'' (in German), which was reported in the press as claiming to provide evidence that Nazi Germany had tested crude nuclear weapons on Rügen island (October 12th 1944) and near Ohrdruf, Thuringia (March 4th, 1945), the latter killing 500 prisoners of war under the supervision of the SS. Allegedly, this second test was documented in a film classified after the war in Soviet possession, with the relevant available KGB files also noting highly increased levels of radioactivity in the area of the latter blast. Some press reports, however, have reported the book as only having claimed to provide evidence that the Nazis had been successful with a radiological weapon (a dirty bomb), not a "true" nuclear weapon powered by nuclear fission; while Karlsch asserts that it could have been a thermo-nuclear hybrid bomb based on the nuclear fusion experiments using shaped charges performed by the ''Heereswaffenamt'' under the supervision of Professor Kurt Diebner since 1943. If this is true, it means that the Germans successfully developed nuclear fusion without first developing nuclear fission. Karlsch's primary evidence, according to his publisher's reports, are "vouchers" for the "tests" and a patent for a plutonium weapon from 1941. Karlsch cites a witness of the Ohrdruf blast and another witness of the scorched bodies of victims afterwards. He also claims to have radioactive samples of soil from the test sites. At the Nuremberg trials in 1946 Nazi munitions minister Albert Speer was questioned by prosecutors about the Ordruf blast, in an attempt to hold Speer accountable for its victims.
Mainstream American historians have expressed skepticism towards any claims that Nazi Germany was in any way close to success at producing a true nuclear weapon, citing the copious amounts of evidence which seem to indicate the contrary. Others counter that Prof. Kurt Diebner had a project which was far more advanced than that of Dr. Werner Heisenberg. A recent article in ''Physics Today'' by the respected American historian Mark Walker has presented some of Karlsch's less controversial claims—that the Germans had done research on fusion, that they were aware that a bomb could potentially be made with plutonium, that they had engaged in some sort of test of some sort of device, that a patent on a plutonium device (of unspecified detail) had been filed and found—as substantiated.
An important footnote to the German nuclear effort is that as part of the Paris Treaties of 1955 and Adenauer's "non-nuclear pledge", Germany has perpetually forsworn nuclear (as well as chemical and biological) weapons. It was this pledge that ultimately cleared the way for West Germany's entry into NATO.

References

★ Amerikas Einschätzung der deutschen Atomforschung, Walker M., , , Physik in unserer Zeit, 2002

Footnotes

1. Haigerloch cave survived the war, Folberth O. G., , , Physics Today, 2001
2. Antony Beevor ''Berlin: The Downfall 1945'', Penguin Books, 2002, ISBN 0-670-88695-5 Preface xxxiv
3. Richard G. Davis,''Bombing the European Axis Powers. A Historical Digest of the Combined Bomber Offensive 1939–1945'' Alabama: Air University Press, 2006, page 518

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GERMAN NUCLEAR ENERGY PROJECT

Overview

Effectiveness and implications

Post war

Heisenberg's 1941 meeting with Bohr

Battle of Berlin

Analysis and legacy

See also

References

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