Skip to content
Menu
  • Original Short Fiction
Menu

World War Two History: The Nazi’s and the A-Bomb

Posted on 5 February 2016 by The Tactical Hermit

Being a World War Two History buff and also an amateur historian and writer, I am always on the lookout for new books, movies or documentaries on the subject. Recently, Netflix came out with a 6-part Norwegian Mini-Series entitled The Heavy Water War that portrays Nazi Germany’s race to develop Atomic Weapons and the Allies subsequent race to destroy their capability to do so. The series was entertaining and thought provoking to say the least. The ideal that Hitler was well on his way to building an Atomic Bomb makes one both shudder and marvel at the possible historical consequences.

I pulled up an article on the subject that I think captures the historical relevance from NOVA. It is written by Mark Walker, an author and teacher of German History and Technology.

bomb

Nazis and the Bomb

By Mark Walker

How close were the Nazis to developing an atomic bomb? The truth is that National Socialist Germany could not possibly have built a weapon like the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. This was not because the country lacked the scientists, resources, or will, but rather because its leaders did not really try.

They were certainly trying to win the war. And they were willing to devote huge amounts of resources to building rockets, jet planes, and other forms of deadly and sometimes exotic forms of military technology. So why not the atomic bomb? Nazi Germany, it turns out, made other choices and simply ran out of time.

A NUCLEAR PROGRAM IS BORN

In January of 1939, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published the results of an historic experiment: after bombarding uranium with neutrons—neutrally charged particles—they found barium, an element roughly half the size of uranium. Their former colleague Lise Meitner, who a few months before had been forced to flee Germany and seek refuge in Sweden, and her nephew Otto Frisch realized that the uranium nucleus had split in two. These revelations touched off a frenzy of scientific work on fission around the world.

The German “uranium project” began in earnest shortly after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, when German Army Ordnance established a research program led by the Army physicist Kurt Diebner 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. When slowed down and controlled in a “uranium machine” (nuclear reactor), these chain reactions could generate energy; when uncontrolled, they would be a “nuclear explosive” many times more powerful than conventional explosives.

During the last months of the war, a small group of scientists working in secret built and tested a nuclear device.

Whereas scientists could only use natural uranium in a uranium machine, Heisenberg noted that they could use pure uranium 235, a rare isotope, as an explosive. In the summer of 1940, Carl Friedrich von Weizsí¤cker, a younger colleague and friend of Heisenberg’s, drew upon publications by scholars working in Britain, Denmark, France, and the United States to conclude that if a uranium machine could sustain a chain reaction, then some of the more common uranium 238 would be transmuted into “element 94,” now called plutonium. Like uranium 235, element 94 would be an incredibly powerful explosive. In 1941, von Weizsí¤cker went so far as to submit a patent application for using a uranium machine to manufacture this new radioactive element.

Researchers knew that they could manufacture significant amounts of uranium 235 only by means of isotope separation. At first German scientists led by the physical chemist Paul Harteck tried thermal diffusion in a separation column. In this process, a liquid compound rises as it heats, falls as it cools, and tends to separate into its lighter and heavier components as it cycles around the column. But by 1941 they gave up on this method and started building centrifuges. These devices use centripetal force to accumulate the heavier isotopes on the outside of the tube, where they can be separated out. Although the war hampered their work, by the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 they had achieved a significant enrichment in small samples of uranium. Not enough for an atomic bomb, but uranium 235 enrichment nonetheless.

Heisenberg used this diagram during a secret lecture in February 1942. On the left is a schematic diagram of a “uranium machine” (nuclear reactor); on the right is a schematic of a nuclear explosive, either uranium 235 or plutonium.

NEARING A NAZI BOMB

Uranium machines needed a moderator, a substance that would slow down the neutrons liberated by chain reactions. In the end, the project decided to use heavy water—oxygen combined with the rare heavy isotope of hydrogen—instead of water or graphite. This was not (as one of the many myths associated with the German nuclear weapons effort had it) because of a mistake the physicist Walther Bothe made when he measured the neutron absorption of graphite. Rather, it appeared that the Norsk Hydro plant in occupied Norway could provide the amounts of heavy water they needed in the first stage of development at a relatively low cost.

The Norwegian resistance and Allied bombers eventually put a stop to Norwegian production of heavy water (see Norwegian Resistance Coupand See the Spy Messages. But by that time it was not possible to begin the production of either pure graphite or pure heavy water in Germany. In the end, the German scientists had only enough heavy water to conduct one or two large-scale nuclear reactor experiments at a time.

Heisenberg and his colleagues did not push as hard as they could have to make atomic bombs.

By the very end of the war, the Germans had progressed from horizontal and spherical layer designs to three-dimensional lattices of uranium cubes immersed in heavy water. They had also developed a nuclear reactor design that almost, but not quite, achieved a controlled and sustained nuclear fission chain reaction. During the last months of the war, a small group of scientists working in secret under Diebner and with the strong support of the physicist Walther Gerlach, who was by that time head of the uranium project, built and tested a nuclear device.

At best this would have been far less destructive than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Rather it is an example of scientists trying to make any sort of weapon they could in order to help stave off defeat. No one knows the exact form of the device tested. But apparently the German scientists had designed it to use chemical high explosives configured in a hollow shell in order to provoke both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion reactions. It is not clear whether this test generated nuclear reactions, but it does appear as if this is what the scientists had intended to occur.

A diagram of the final lattice design of a nuclear reactor developed by two different research groups in Nazi Germany, one led by Kurt Diebner and the other by Werner Heisenberg.

TIME RUNS OUT

All of this begs the question, why did they not get further? Why did they not beat the Americans in the race for atomic bombs? The short answer is that whereas the Americans tried to create atomic bombs, and succeeded, the Germans did not succeed, but also did not really try.

This can best be explained by focusing on the winter of 1941-1942. From the start of the war until the late fall of 1941, the German “lightning war” had marched from one victory to another, subjugating most of Europe. During this period, the Germans needed no wonder weapons. After the Soviet counterattack, Pearl Harbor, and the German declaration of war against the United States, the war had become one of attrition. For the first time, German Army Ordnance asked its scientists when it could expect nuclear weapons. The German scientists were cautious: while it was clear that they could build atomic bombs in principle, they would require a great deal of resources to do so and could not realize such weapons any time soon.

Army Ordnance came to the reasonable conclusion that the uranium work was important enough to continue at the laboratory scale, but that a massive shift to the industrial scale, something required in any serious attempt to build an atomic bomb, would not be done. This contrasts with the commitment the German leadership made throughout the war to the effort to build a rocket. They sunk enormous resources into this project, indeed, on the scale of what the Americans invested in the Manhattan Project.

Thus Heisenberg and his colleagues did not slow down or divert their research; they did not resist Hitler by denying him nuclear weapons. With the exception of the scientists working on Diebner’s nuclear device, however, they also clearly did not push as hard as they could have to make atomic bombs. They were neither heroes nor villains, just scientists working on weapons of mass destruction for Hitler’s Germany.

This feature originally appeared on the site for the NOVA program Hitler’s Sunken Secret.

Read the Original Article at PBS

1 thought on “World War Two History: The Nazi’s and the A-Bomb”

  1. Pingback: World War Two History: The Nazi’s and the A-Bomb | Rifleman III Journal

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Tactical Hermit Substack

Recent Post

  • Govt. Subsidized ‘Going Green’ Tyranny Coming to a Zip Code Near You
  • Know Your Real White History: The Battle of Blood River (1838)
  • New Mexico’s New Law Lets Non-Citizens Become Cops
  • Race Reality 101: Blacks on Blacks (Priceless)
  • Know Your Firearms History: The Dillinger Gang’s Assault Rifle
General Franco (2008-2024)

Book of the Month

Fellow Conspirators

Area Ocho

American Partisan

Western Rifle Shooters Association

Brushbeater

Von Steuben Training and Consulting

CSAT

Politically Incorrect Humor and Memes

Freedom is Just Another Word

Prepared Gun Owners

Fix Bayonets

The Firearm Blog

BorderHawk

Cold Fury

Don Shift SHTF

NC Renegades

Big Country Ex-Pat

The Bayou Renaissance Man

Bustednuckles

The Feral Irishman

It Ain’t Holy Water

Evil White Guy

Pacific Paratrooper

Badlands Fieldcraft

Riskmap

Stuck Pig Medical

Swift Silent Deadly

Spotter Up

The Survival Homestead

Bacon Time!

SHTF Preparedness

Sigma 3 Survival School

The Organic Prepper

The Zombie Apocalypse Survival Homestead

Texas Gun Rights

The Gatalog

Taki’s Magazine

Defensive Training Group

The Trail Up Blood Hill

No White Guilt

Europe Renaissance

Vermont Folk Truth

The Occidental Observer

The Dissident Right

Daily Stormer

American Renaissance

Blacksmith Publishing

Arktos Publishing

Antelope Hill Publishing

White People Press

White Rabbit Radio

White Papers Substack

Viking Life Blog (Archived)

Identity Dixie

The Texian Partisan

Southern Vanguard

League of the South

The Unz Review

Dissident Thoughts

The Third Position

Renegade Tribune

COPYRIGHT NOTICE/DISCLAIMER & FAIR USE ACT

All blog postings, including all non-fiction and fictional works are copyrighted and considered the sole property of the Tactical Hermit Blog. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in the short stories and novelettes are entirely fictional and are of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or organizations or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, The information contained in the articles posted to this site are for informational and/or educational purposes only. The Tactical Hermit disclaims any and all liability resulting from the use or misuse of the information contained herein.

The views and opinions expressed on this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any of the companies that advertise here. 

Much of the information on this blog contains copyrighted material whose use has not always been specifically authorized by the rightful copyright owner. This material is made available in an effort to educate and inform and not for remuneration. Under these guidelines this constitutes "Fair Use" under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. The publisher of this site DOES NOT own the copyrights of the images on the site. The copyrights lie with the respective owners.

© 2025 | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme