Hitler's nukes?
 

Hey PPOT historians, anything to this story or is it just a myth? Saw this on the news today...interesting if true:

Nazi History Hunters Say Hitler's Secret Nuclear Bombs Lie Under Thuringian Forest - NBC News

The story states that they "think" they are nukes based solely on images obtained by ground scan radar. Could be old V2 shells. Who knows. But if Hitler had them I believe he'd have used them before committing suicide.

It is well documented that the Nazis were farther from a functioning nuke than we believed. The Norwegian ski raid Hero of the Telemark dies aged 101: WWII who carried out raid on Hydroelectric plant to thwart Hitler's nuclear ambitions | Daily Mail Online on their heavy water plant was not as successful as initially believed, but it was enough to prevent the Nazis from developing a nuclear bomb.

Proof that the Nazis weren't close to nukes is self evident. If Hitler had nukes, or had them within his grasp, he would have expenses all resources to develop them and would have used them. The fact that he didn't proves that he didn't have them.

The "Nazi nukes" headline belongs with a 75 year line of breathless headlines pronouncing various lost Nazi treasure that have never been found. The Amber Room is a more likely target than Nazi Nukes. And professionals have been searching for that since it was lost. Despite a hundred hot rumors proving where it is, the Amber Room remains elusive. Nazi nukes are even more elusive, since they never
Existed in the first place.

Interesting. Who knows what's still out there - remember that train that got unearthed last year?

The train they never found?

Scientists in Poland think Nazi gold train was a hoax after digging and finding nothing | Daily Mail Online

japan was closer and understood the science
but did not have the production ability

germans had the ability but the nazi fools didnot understand the science
as they ran off the jews who did understand
and put in nazi ideologues who hated the jews for understanding it
hitler called atomic bonbs ''jew science'' and refused real funding

I worked with some of the German scientists that were brought to the U.S. after the war. They were no dummies...but rather, brilliant physicists (and not Jews). They claimed that the Germans were pretty darned close.

Oh yeah, that's for sure what they would have done with functioning bombs - bury them. And tell nobody. ;)

The nuclear weapon project was pretty lame - as you mentioned before, a lot of the talent was long driven out of the country and academic positions. And there was no focus on it by the government after the war started. Even in the US it took massive government support and a special group of talented scientists - the big progress was made after the European part of WW2 had ended.

G

If Edith Keeler hadn't been killed in a traffic accident, the Nazis would have won the war.

Wile I entertain no expectation of a functional bomb buried in Germany, I believe the Germans were very technologically advanced. We used German scientists ourselves....and Einstein who emigrated in the 30's was one of the first to warn about a potential German bomb. From his bio:

"In 1933, Einstein took on a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey and never went back to his native land. It was here that he would spend the rest of his life working on a unified field theory—an all-embracing paradigm meant to unify the varied laws of physics. Other European scientists also left regions threatened by Germany and immigrated to the states, with there being concern over Nazi strategies to create an atomic weapon.

In 1939, Einstein and fellow physicist Leo Szilard wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to alert him of the possibility of a Nazi bomb and to galvanize the United States to create its own nuclear weapons. The U.S. would eventually initiate the Manhattan Project, though Einstein would not take direct part in its implementation due to his pacifist and socialist affiliations."

It's an interesting idea but like others have posted if the Nazis had the bomb they would have used it.

And if there was a Nuke buried there surely after all this time there would be higher radiation detected in the area. (Corrosion of the bomb shell and the decay of the core)

I'm sure they were smart and yes I would expect they would claim they were close regardless of the truth ... Just like a lot of Germans did when asked what they were doing the war. ;)

And nother trekie comes out of the closet SmileWavy

So if the Germans even had a bomb how would they have delivered it late in the war? The allies had pretty serious air defense, the enigma code had been broken, with a V2 you'd be just as likely to nuke yourself, axis ships on special missions were being hunted down pretty effectively, etc.

"do you know what you just did Captain?"
"he knows doctor, he knows"

SmileWavy

When one looks back through the lens of history and sees the massive and overwhelming effort the United States put into the production of just three atomic bombs, a German nuclear bombs become a silly myth.

We set of the one test bomb, and dropped two on Japan. That was all we could produce at the time. Look at the facilities in numerous states and thousands of workers it took for us to make the three bombs. We spent several billion dollars and had no one dropping bombs on our production facilities and it took years for us to be make those bombs. No one else could have done it. Even after all these years and with the help of computers, North Korea has a real challenge to make one.

The issue was power. It took as much or more energy to produce the Uranium bomb than the bomb unleashed when dropped. It was part of the reason why so much work went into the plutonium bomb.

There is no evidence that anyone else created an atomic chain reaction.

Also, the "production line" for making bombs was to support bombing Germany post 1945, if England were invaded and/or Europe D-day failed. They would have been dropped using the B-36 with flights from North America.

I read more than 300,000 people were involved in making the bomb.

Think about that one statistic for a few minutes. How would you feed cloth and shelter them, not to mention pay them?
Could it have be done today by any other country other than the US at the time?

The Germans & Japanese simply didn't have the resources.

^ Oak Ridge Tennesee.

Created by the government specifically for the Manhattan Project.

There may have been 300 000 ultimately working on the bomb, but this town had less than that.

The fact that we brought them here and plugged them into the program as soon as Germany fell...tells me that they were likely very far along (as Einstein warned). Particularly with the delivery systems which became our ICBM forces.