Figure 1.--.

"Thank God we did not have it!"

-- Otto Hahn, German nuclear scientist, August 1945

German scientists after the War claimed that they had no intention of building a bomb and that there was no major effort to do so. This is stll unlear. And to our knowledge , no one has yet written a definitive assessment of the German nuclear program. It is thus difficult to know just what the intentions of the German researchers were. And of course a number of different people were involved. We do know that the NAZIs during the War showed considerable interest in resources needed to build a bomb. So the scientists must have to a degree alerted officials as to the potential resources that would be useful in building a bomb. As with the American nuclear bomb program, the Gerans also identified a plutonium and uranium bomb option program. The plutonium option explains their interest in heavy water. The Germans made some progress in uranium enrichment. And there is reason to believe that they did considerable work aimed at metalizing uranium--one of several difficult undertakings involved in developing a fision weapon.

Plutonium

The German reserarch team concluded at an early point that the plutonium 239 option was preferable because the critical mass was smaller and the bomb itself would be easier to construct. The German scientists failed to perfect a graphite-moderated reactor for plutonium production. They thus explored a heavy water based reactor. This would be useful for bomb research and eventually breed the plutonium for a fission weapon. Heavy water is also called deterium oxide. It is an isotope of hydrogen which has a neu\uton in the nucleus. Thus it has double the atomic weight of ordiary hydrogen. This characteristic slows down neutrons in radoactive elements. In the case of uranium 235, it facilitates a chain reaction of exploding atoms that produces plutonium, another fissionable element. Heavy water itself was not a component of the atom bomb, but it was essential in experiments associated in the manufacture of a bomb. Enormous quantities of electrical powerwere needed to produce heavy water in any quantity. This could not be done in the Reich because the diversion of electical power would have dusrupted war industries. The United States had the electricalm power generating capacity to do this. Germany did not. There was only one place in Europe capable pf producing large quatities of heavy water--Telemark, Norway. And the NAZis had occupied Norway (April 1940). The Norwegians had constructed the Vemork hydroelectricity power plant outside Rjukan in Tinn. The 60-MW Vemork plant was named after a waterfall, but is often referred to as Telemark which is the name of the county. The plant was constructed for Norsk Hydro (1911). The primsary purpose was to produce hydrogen needed to manufacture fertilizer. Norsk Hydro built the first commercial plant at Vemork specifically to produce heavy water (1934). It had the capacity to produce of 12 tons of heavy water annually. Just before the German invasion, Deuxi�me Bureau (French intelligence) successfully removed 185 kilograms of heavy water from the plant. Many Norwegian scientists fled Norway when the NAZIs occupied the country. Professor Leif Tronstad, designer and construction supervisor of the Vemork plant, remained with his family in Norway. He managed to inform the British of German plans to increase production of heavy water. A double agent informed Tronstad that the Germans had learned of his illegal transmissions and he had to flee to Britain (September 1942). British and Resistance attacks prevented the Germans from getting much of the plant's production back to the Reich. Norwegian resistance damaged the plsnt. The attacks were code named Freshman, Grouse and Gunnerside. The Gunnerside attack argeted the fuel cells and destroyed the plant woks (February 1943). . The Germans attempted to repair the damage and had the plant opersational agin (August 1943). The resistance kept the Allies informed of German sactivities. The Americans bombed the plant (November 16, 1943). The plant was so severly damaged that G�ring, responsible for bomb projrct, ordered the heavy water production effort moved back to the Reich. About 14 tons of heavy water survived the bombing. The Germans attempted to transpoort the drums of heavy water protected by SS gusrds by rail and ferry (February 20, 1944). The resistance blue up the ferry. The Germans were only able to salvage three drums. By this time the war siutation had been significantly changed. German had suffered enormous defeats in the East and Mediterraean. the Allies were achieving air superiority over Germany. The Germans did not haver capacity to produce heavy water in 1940 and had even less capavity in 1944. And without the heavy water, the German researchers had not been able to pursue planned operations.

Uranium

At the time of World War II there were few sources of uranium ore. The major sources were Canada, Czechoslovakia, and the Belgian Congo. The Germans occupied Czecholovakia (March 1939). They imediately stopped all exports of uranium ore. The Belgian Congo was the major sources of uranium at the time of World War II. The Shinkolobwe Mine was particularly important. After the NAZI invasion of Belgium, authorities in the Congo declared loyalty to the Government in Exile in London. The NAZIs thus had no access to the mines or way to trsnsport prodution. The Belgians had, however, stockples of about 3,500 t of high-grade ore in Belgium when the the NAZIs invaded (May 1940). The Belgians imediately when the Germans invaded evacuated their huge stock of uranium from Brussels to Paris, trying to prevent it from falling into German hands. Within a few weeks France fell. The Belgian uranium was turned over to the the French government. The Juliot-Curies in Paris were engaged in atomic research. The Germans seized the uranium ore (yellow cake). This was more than the Americans had access to until several years later. They stored it in salt mines near Strassfurt, Germany. Professor Dr. Riehl was responsible for uranium during the War. The Germans reportedly refined 600 tons of the Belgian uranium to its oxide form (1941). [Gowing] (Historians disagree as to the amounts and not all the ore has been accounted for.) The oxide form could be ionized into a gas. The uranium/plutoinium isotopes could then be magnetically or thermally separated or the oxide could be reduced to a metal for a reactor pile. For either a uranium or plutonium bomb, it was necessary to create uranium metal. There is some evidence that the Germans were enriching uranium on a massive scale. Such an undertaking would have require a substantial effort. It would have required hundreds if not thousands of technicians and a very large facility or facilties. Some authors believe that I.G. Farben's "Buna" factory at Auschwitz was actually a massive uranium enrichment facility. This is, however, highly speculative. If labor was needed to enrich uranium that would mke sence, but what was needed was vast amounts of electrity. And this was not avsailanle in Auschwitz. And some authors believe there may even have been a second facility. (We would probably know more about this, but the Soviets after the War may have kept what they learned secret.)

Failure

The German atomic bomb project was the Uranverein (Uranium Club), a wartime research program led by Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Diebner to explore nuclear fission. They never produced a weapon, never came even close. The Uranverein only led to a small-scale reactor experiments before being shut down. The Uranverein Project was launched under the Nuclear Museum overview shortly after Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission (April 1939). (Notice how the Germans omitted mentioning a key figure--Lisa Meitner, an Austrian Jewish scientist.) The Uranverein was managed initially by the Reich Research Council and later taken over by the Army Ordnance Office (Heereswaffenamt) and the SS. But the prestigious German scientists without Meitner and other Jewish scientists failed and failed miserably even though in 1939 they had all the advantages. But stripped to basics, they were just not good enough. Their failure of course required some explaining. Immediately after hearing the news of the American Bomb they didn't believe it. Notice that Heisenberg dis no say he had faked his fundamental miscalculations that would stall the Uranverein Project. He continued at first to insisted that it could not have been an atomic weapon, his calculations had proven that such a weapon could not be built in a few years. Surreptitious British recordings at Farm Hall where the 10 leading Germans scientists were interned captured all of this. These were men who thought of themselves as the most brilliant scientists in the world. Now the German physicists were forced ti rationalize why they had failed. Their Aryan professional pride was at stake which meant that did not want to admit that the failure was because of their technical incompetence. They quickly shaped a narrative that they had lacked moral intent to build a weapon for Hitler and that war-time resource shortages limited their efforts. The oral intent was a lie. War-time shortages might explain why they could not build the bomb, it did not explain why their scientific conceptual calculations were so far off. They failed because without Jewish scientists, they were not good enough while the Americans with Jewish scientists succeeded. It all goes down to a meeting in Berlin soon after Hitler became Chancellor. Legendary theoretical physicist, Max Planck--the dean of German science, was pleading with Hitler that Jewish scientists be protected. He told the new Chancellor that to purge Jewish scientists would mean disarming Germany in physics. Working himself into a frenzy, Hitler screamed, "Our national policies will not be revoked or modified. Even for scientists. If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!" This is why Germany failed and America succeeded. And the world as we know it today survived.

Created: 1:00 AM 4/6/2011
Last updated: 7:03 PM 8/2/2026