Nuclear Weapons Research in the Third Reich

As the Third Reich disintegrated, German nuclear scientists were rounded up by the Americans and British, and held at a country estate in England, where hidden microphones secretly recorded their conversations. Transcripts of these recordings have recently been declassified, providing a glimpse into what they knew and when they knew it.

When told about the Hiroshima bomb, the German scientists were incredulous:

“Heisenberg asked if the report had mentioned uranium, and when this was denied he concluded that it had nothing to do with atoms and suggested that the story came from ‘some dilettante in America who knew very little about it’.” (p. 10)

Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in physics for his development of quantum mechanics. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Heisenberg, a Lutheran, was savagely attacked by some Nazi academics for his support of Einstein’s theories, which were condemned as “Jewish physics.” Heisenberg’s mother, however, was a friend of Heinrich Himmler’s mother (kleine Welt!), and he was considered so vital to training the next generation of German scientists that he was protected by Himmler, Göring, Speer, and other top officials of the Third Reich.

In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and Fritz Strassmann (1902 - 1980) discovered the nuclear fission of uranium, which opened the possibility of an incredible new source of energy with potential military applications. A German nuclear research project was organized on 1 September 1939, the day the war began, and Heisenberg was eventually put in charge of it. To put it mildly, he has been a controversial figure in the historiography of the Third Reich.

There was never any prospect that Germany would be able to develop a nuclear weapon during World War II, and the German nuclear physicists understood this quite clearly. The industrial infrastructure needed to achieve uranium isotope separation or plutonium production sufficient to build a bomb were far beyond the capacity of their wartime economy, especially as the Allied strategic bombing campaign systematically wrecked it. (On the Allied side, 80% of the Manhattan Project's two billion dollar budget – more than 30 billion in current dollars – was spent to produce fissionable material.) But to keep a generation of young scientists, engineers, and technicians from being sent off to die on the Eastern Front, they dangled the promise of war-winning Wunderwaffen (“wonder weapons”) – or at least workable nuclear reactors for U-boats – before the eyes of the increasingly demented Nazi leadership. By the Spring of 1945, Heisenberg’s team was close to assembling a prototype “uranium machine” (their term for a nuclear reactor.) The team was hindered by the lack of heavy water (which serves as a “moderator” in natural uranium reactors, to slow neutrons enough to cause fission). A series of daring commando raids had crippled the Norwegian heavy water plant at Vemork, the only facility in Occupied Europe capable of producing the substance. This effort was mythologized in the 1965 British film, The Heroes of Telemark.

Based on newly declassified information and meticulous archival research, this fascinating book revisits the issues. There is a great deal of information about the vicious academic politics and bureaucratic infighting of the Nazi regime, which many readers will find tedious, but overall this is a significant contribution to our understanding of this important history.

“In 1954, a year before Einstein’s death, he invited Heisenberg, who was in the United States giving lectures, to visit him at his home in Princeton. As in all their previous conversations, they only discussed physics.” (p. 214)

The author, Mark Walker, is Professor of History at Union College in New York. Fluent in German, he has published several books on science and technology in Nazi Germany.

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Our Reviewer: Mike Markowitz is an historian and wargame designer. He writes a monthly column for CoinWeek.Com and is a member of the ADBC (Association of Dedicated Byzantine Collectors). His previous reviews in modern history include To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923-1940, D-Day Encyclopedia: Everything You Want to Know About the Normandy Invasion, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, Loyal Sons: Jews in the German Army in the Great War, Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler’s "Final Solution" Undermined the German War Effort, Governments-in-Exile and the Jews During the Second World War,‘ Admiral Gorshkov, Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler, Rome – City in Terror: The Nazi Occupation 1943–44, A Raid on the Red Sea: The Israeli Capture of the Karine A, Strike from the Sea: The Development and Deployment of Strategic Cruise Missiles since 1934, 100 Greatest Battles, Battle for the Island Kingdom, Abraham Lincoln and the Bible, From Ironclads to Dreadnoughts: The Development of the German Battleship, 1864-1918, Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City, The Demon of Unrest, Next War: Reimagining How We Fight, and Habsburg Sons: Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Army

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