Book: Nazis Tested Crude Nuclear Device
Mon Mar 14, 3:39 PM ET
World - AP
By TONY CZUCZKA, Associated Press WriterBERLIN - Nazi scientists trying to build an atomic bomb set off a test
explosion two months before the end of World War II, killing hundreds of
people in eastern Germany, a German researcher claims in a book
published Monday.
AP Photo
Related Links
• How Close Was Hitler to the A-Bomb? (Der Spiegel)
"Hitler's Bomb" theorizes that the March 1945 device didn't achieve
fission, but did scatter telltale radioactive particles at the Ohrdruf
test site. It also claims that Nazi Germany briefly had a working
nuclear reactor, something historians generally dispute.
Author Rainer Karlsch, an economic historian, offers no first-hand
proof, saying his account is an interpretation of available evidence and
he hopes it will spur more research.
He said soil samples from the Ohrdruf site he had analyzed for his book
turned up above-average levels of radioactive isotopes such as cesium
137 and cobalt 60, though he quotes the testers as saying the site poses
no radiation hazard.
However, access to what he believes was ground zero was barred because
of old munitions at the site, which served as a Soviet military training
area in East Germany after the war.
A U.S. mission that arrived in Germany with American troops in 1945 to
investigate the German atomic bomb program concluded that the Germans
were nowhere near making a nuclear weapon.
Karlsch doesn't claim they were near. But based on witness accounts
recorded after the war, postwar Allied aerial photos and Soviet military
intelligence reports, he argues that a test blast happened March 3,
1945, at Ohrdruf — then being run as a Nazi concentration camp. He says
there probably were several previous tests.
"Hitler's bomb — a tactical nuclear weapon with a potential for
destruction far below that of the two American atomic bombs — was tested
successfully several times shortly before the end of the war," the book
says.
Gerald Holton, a professor of physics and the history of science at
Harvard University, said the main scientists in the Nazi atomic bomb
program never mentioned a test blast or having built a working nuclear
reactor.
British intelligence bugged the scientists — including a key planner,
Walther Gerlach — while they were interned at Farm Hall manor in England
after the war.
Any claims of a Nazi test blast "would have to have a lot of documentary
evidence behind it," Holton said.
"It also would have to be checked against the remarks that Gerlach made
during his period at Farm Hall ... where none of that sort of planning
was discussed by him or anyone else."
Karlsch says scientists around Gerlach had "a certain amount" of
enriched uranium from an as yet unknown source.
The German device probably was a 2-ton cylinder containing enriched
uranium, he writes. The amount of uranium was small, meaning the
conventional explosives used to trigger the device did not set off a
vastly more destructive nuclear chain reaction, Karlsch said.
That would mesh with an account Karlsch said he found in Soviet military
archives, apparently based on information from a German informant, that
said the blast felled trees within a radius of about 500 to 600 yards.
Witnesses reported a bright flash of light and a column of smoke over
the area that day, and residents said they had nausea and nosebleeds for
days afterward, Karlsch says.
One witness said he helped burn heaps of corpses inside the military
area the next day. They were hairless and some had blisters and "raw,
red flesh."
Karlsch concludes that the blast killed several hundred prisoners of war
and inmates forced to work at the site. Two months later, on May 8,
1945, Nazi Germany surrendered after the Soviets captured Berlin.
The book also seeks to turn attention from famous physicists like Werner
Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker — who historians believe
were often ambivalent about building a nuclear bomb for Hitler — to
lesser-known but fiercely ambitious scientists and Nazi officials who
Karlsch theorizes were directly involved in the testing program.
Physicist Jeremy Bernstein, who edited the Farm Hall transcripts for the
book "Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall," said a
key question was where the enriched uranium could have come from.
"To enrich uranium, you need an plant the size of Oak Ridge, and the
Germans never had one," he said, referring to the sprawling U.S.
facility that produced enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb.
Russian officials were unaware of any such test by the Germans, said
Nikolai Shingaryov, a spokesman for Russia's Federal Nuclear Agency. "Of
course we don't know everything, but we don't have data about this," he
said.
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