Chemical Evidence Shows the Nazis Weren't At All Close To Having the Bomb

TheAlexKnapp writes: The Nazis winning World War II by getting the bomb first is a staple of alt-history and it's the reason why James T. Kirk lost the love of his life, Edith Keeler. Einstein also noted possible German efforts to build one in his letter to FDR urging the U.S. develop an atomic weapon. But it turns out there really wasn't a race to build a bomb at all. Materials from Germany's atomic weapons program have been studied by an international team of researchers, who determined that Germany never achieved a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction — something that Fermi and his colleagues had accomplished in 1942 — which was a key step to actually building an atomic weapon. This chemical evidence supports other historical accounts that the German atomic program never achieved this result.

Comments

we are in an alt-history

[turkeydance]

of our Nazi multiverse

Possible air mail delivery of one

[Anonymous Coward]

The allies might have determined Germany was ready to "receive" an atomic bomb via air mail though.

Re: Possible air mail delivery of one

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's a GLOWING ruin now.

Re:Possible air mail delivery of one

[LordHighExecutioner]

What if the nazis had returned the parcel to the sender ?

Re:Possible air mail delivery of one

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't nuke all Japan, just two cities and neither was a ruin at the time. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were excluded from the conventional bombing raids and kept in relatively good shape to test the effects of the nuclear bomb in a living city.

Captcha: misuse

Bit late

[aaaaaaargh!]

That news is something like 65 years late - a new /. record!!

It's nice to mention Jáchimov in the article.

[Sique]

Jáchimov (today's Czech Republic) was determined to be the source of the Uranium ore German scientists were experimenting with, and it's nice that they added a "fun fact" for the town, but the most important fun fact, they omitted. Silver coins minted since 1519 in Jáchimov (called St. Joachimsthal at the time) were so common that the name Joachimsthaler for the coins got shortened to Thaler which eventually lead to the U.S. Dollar.

How will the History Channel cope?

[Required Snark]

The History Channel has a lock on "OMG!!! the Nazis almost won the war, what if their super secret had been built, we would all be speaking GERMAN and eating sauerkraut, OMG!!!". Of course was either only a prototype or was never built at all, but who cares, RATINGS!!!

So no Nazi atom bomb is a big dower for them.

I talked to a producer who knew some History Channel people, and she said they called it the Hitler Channel. No mater what series, if you could tie something to Hitler or the Nazis then it was a big plus. She said that when they had a series on the Spartans they compared them to Germany during WWII, and the management was thrilled.

Re:How will the History Channel cope?

[Chris Mattern]

Actually, by the time of the Valkyrie plot, the Allies didn't want Hitler assassinated. If he had been, he might have been replaced by someone competent who might have prolonged the war.

Re:How will the History Channel cope?

[jandrese]

I've always thought this would be a good twist for one of those "Oh, I've got a time machine, lets go back and assassinate Hitler." stories, where they screw it up and end up just getting him replaced by someone competent.

The Nazis Could Have Won

[Etherwalk]

The History Channel has a lock on "OMG!!! the Nazis almost won the war, what if their super secret had been built, we would all be speaking GERMAN and eating sauerkraut, OMG!!!". Of course was either only a prototype or was never built at all, but who cares, RATINGS!!!

So no Nazi atom bomb is a big dower for them.

I talked to a producer who knew some History Channel people, and she said they called it the Hitler Channel. No mater what series, if you could tie something to Hitler or the Nazis then it was a big plus. She said that when they had a series on the Spartans they compared them to Germany during WWII, and the management was thrilled.

The Nazis could easily have won the war, if Hitler wasn't insane and had settled for controlling mainland Europe west of Stalin. Only an idiot fights on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots invades Russia during the winter. If Hitler had not betrayed Stalin, he could have held mainland Europe indefinitely. If he had not declared war after Pearl Harbor, but had let Japan fight the United States alone, the war would have dragged for an extra decade. But an extended war against the biggest industrial powers in the world is impossible without technological advantage that cannot be countered.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the Nazis could have won if they didn't have a racial idealogue. Einstein, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, and James Frank all came from Germany and Hungary. Enrico Fermi and Emilo Segre came from Italy. These were many key men of the Manhattan Project and ancillary research.

They already had a rocket delivery system, and they were ahead in jet aircraft. Mix von Braun with those guys, and Germany would have been unstoppable in the late 1940s.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[gtall]

Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941. The problem, which you note, is that Hitler was military dolt. He split his forces and decided to go south to capture oil fields. Things went great at first, but Hitler didn't understand that a map doesn't portray just how big the Soviet Union was or that Stalin was prepared to sacrifice untold numbers of Russian troops. Because Hitler didn't prepare for a long campaign, his troops were left unprepared for the winter of '41.

Great generals do not make the mistake of thinking the enemy thinks like they do. They are able to put themselves in their enemies' heads and think like the enemy. Hitler was more or less a pompous ass. The Soviet generals were not all that great either, Stalin had already purged the good ones. Their hero, Zhukov, was more or less a bulldozer driver. He'd have never risen in rank in pre-war Germany. Of course the Americans had their pompous asses, e.g., MacArthur. Admiral Nimitz was once asked why he kept a picture of MacArthur in his office given that they never got along together. His reply was something along the lines of, I want to remind myself what a real ass looks like.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Rei]

It's a good point. Nazi Germany had many talented engineers. But their basic sciences in many regards had been ideologically purged - not just by driving out the jews and other undesirables, but also those who supported them and didn't support the general principles of Nazism.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[fnj]

The Nazis could easily have won the war, if Hitler wasn't insane and had settled for controlling mainland Europe west of Stalin.

No they couldn't. Not even close. They made a miserable failure out of trying to defeat a tiny force of Spitfires with their vaunted Luftwaffe in 1940 after the fall of France, when Britain stood alone. They didn't have a clue how to fully mobilize their economy on a war footing. They were ideologically opposed to harnessing the 50% of the potential economy that females represented: females were only supposed to spend their time bearing and raising teutonic warriors. Britain's blockade was strangling them. Their idea of efficiently harnessing workers in conquered territories was to beat and starve them to death wastefully and stupidly, as well as evilly. Their economy was not put on a full war footing until 1943, after they had lost the war.

German naval power on the surface was a sick joke, and the U-boats, even with gigantic industrial effort, fell short, even with Japan diverting much of the US's navy.

If Hitler hadn't gone for Stalin's throat, the reverse would have happened, and the situation would have been even worse for Germany.

Only the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots invades Russia during the winter.

Arguably so, but Hitler Invaded the USSR in June 1941, not the winter. The invasion went spectacularly well, and by September, despite stupid decisions to divert forces at the critical period, German forces approached to within 11 km of Moscow, reaching streetcar lines in the suburbs.

If he had not declared war after Pearl Harbor, but had let Japan fight the United States alone, the war would have dragged for an extra decade.

No way in hell. Britain plus the USSR would have finished it without us. Maybe one extra year at the utmost. And the US would have devastated Japan much faster without our own second front (which actually had priority). Then we would have swarmed into Europe in full undiverted force by 1944 or 1945.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Nidi62]

Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941. The problem, which you note, is that Hitler was military dolt. He split his forces and decided to go south to capture oil fields. Things went great at first, but Hitler didn't understand that a map doesn't portray just how big the Soviet Union was or that Stalin was prepared to sacrifice untold numbers of Russian troops. Because Hitler didn't prepare for a long campaign, his troops were left unprepared for the winter of '41.

What compounded this problem was that historically, even when Moscow was captured Russia was able to keep fighting. What Hitler didn't realize was that Moscow was much more important to the Stalin regime than it had been in previous wars. To Hitler, Moscow wasn't the prize that state capitals usually are. Had he not pulled those divisions and sent them to help Army Group South (which didn't really need the help anyway) Moscow would likely have fallen, and the Soviet Union along with it.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Chris Mattern]

The Nazis could easily have won the war, if Hitler wasn't insane and had settled for controlling mainland Europe west of Stalin. Only an idiot fights on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots invades Russia during the winter. If Hitler had not betrayed Stalin, he could have held mainland Europe indefinitely.

If Hitler had not betrayed Stalin, Stalin would've betrayed Hitler. The non-agression pact was, for Hitler, supposed to be a chance to take care of the West first before invading Russia, and for Stalin, a chance to rebuild and re-organize his armies before taking on Hitler while Hitler beat up the west (who had just given him a massive cold shoulder in the negotiations prior to WWII). This was even largely recognized at the time.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Maxo-Texas]

There was a much more easy method than that.

Nazi's were greeted as liberators by russian peasants. Who they started slaughtering.

If they had treated the peasants decently, they would have conquered russia easily.

But it just wasn't in their nature.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[blankinthefill]

If Hitler had supported Rommel in North Africa with as little as a few more battalions of ground troops and hardware, it's pretty likely that the Allies would have lost the campaign there, and Hitler would have been able to take the Middle East basically unimpeded. But Hitler didn't like Rommel, and he didn't trust him, which is one of the reasons Rommel was in North Africa in the first place... and because of that, Hitler wasn't going to provide the support that Rommel needed to succeed, since he believed he could easily seize the Russian oil fields. He saw the North African campaign as a minor offshoot of the war, and didn't realize the huge potential involved in being able to easily secure the most rich oil fields in the world without pissing off one of the more crazy dictators of the modern world.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Talderas]

There was also an attempted military coup to prevent surrender.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Nidi62]

Nazi's were greeted as liberators by russian peasants. Who they started slaughtering.

If they had treated the peasants decently, they would have conquered russia easily.

But it just wasn't in their nature.

That problem can again be attributed to Hitler and those he placed in power. Certainly many of the professional officers on the ground realized that decent treatment of civilians would cut down on issues, but they were ordered to be harsh with civilians and cooperate with Einsatzgruppen in their area. As atrocities and mistreatment mounted partisan activity could only increase; especially with the Red Army tactic of leaving behind trained soldiers to organize, coordinate, and lead partisan groups in bypassed or occupied areas. Barring Hitler's other many blunders in matters of military strategy the Germans could have still won even with the mistreatment of civilians. But there is a difference between conquering a country and pacifying it. Even if they had won, they would have been tied down for years clearing out the large swathes of Russia they passed over, with literally divisions worth of troops in pockets all over the country fighting a guerrilla warfare led by Commissars and hardline officers. But in any case it was a good case study of what kind of policies not to put in place when you are trying to occupy an area.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Carewolf]

Had Japan delayed the surrender, the inability of the US to launch a third nuclear attack would have resulted in the reveal of the bluff.

Had US delayed the launch of the nuclear bombs then it is likely that the surrender had came anyway.

Actually they did surrender, just not with the term unconditionally which the US president had promised the US people. And yes it would have upgraded anyway, it was just semantics.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Fire_Wraith]

The bigger point was that they didn't need to start a war, at all, period.

Look at Europe today - who's the most dominant nation in the European Union, economically and politically? Germany - and that's after they were bombed all to hell, split in half for 50 years by the USA/USSR, not to mention stripped of various bits of land in the east that were given to Poland and Russia. While Germany wouldn't be the strongest power in the world, certainly, they'd have done a lot better for themselves had they not started an aggressive war.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Fire_Wraith]

Not to mention that Italy had already invaded Greece, and was bogged down fighting the Greeks.

Overall though, Hitler became grossly overconfident as a result of the 'easy' victory in France. Like most average people at the time, he was expecting a war that would be akin to World War I - ugly, slow, and brutal. The "Lightning War" in France was a huge shock to everyone (except perhaps the Panzer generals that came up with it) in the equivalent of the worldwide pundit class at the time, Hitler included. He didn't think he'd need to do anything particularly different against Russia, and expected the campaign would be quick and easy. "One swift kick, and the entire rotten structure will collapse."

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Anonymous Coward]

The Americans had two Bombs ready to go. There was a third Bomb that needed another week or so of development. After that, with the current Tech, they could roll out one single "Atomic" Bomb every month or so.
That was the Plan. This is something simply not understood these days. The Manhattan Project wasn't simply about making a couple of Bombs to drop on Germany or later, Japan, and then the War would be over, and everybody could go Home.
One Bomb a month, and maybe a second Bomb a month... forever. It was an Industry, with thousands of determined workers.

(This is all second hand of course- but I have Primary Sources, now all dead.)

Germany quickly folded, and an isolated Imperial Japan would starve itself to death. Forget all that Invasion nonsense, it was just folderol for public consumption. Isolation was the ultimate goal, and the Bombs were then convenient.
Dropping the Bombs just gave the Saner Japanese an excuse to easily and quickly Surrender. Don't forget the Japanese Coup that led to this Surrender, and how the Emperor was then forced to grovel to keep his head. Others lost theirs.

So what happened to those other early Bombs? They became Science Projects, with a twinge of Security Theater added. My Best Source used to fly through those Mushroom Clouds, grabbing bits of them on Filter paper, to see what actually happens in the few seconds following a Nuclear Fission. Realize that Nuclear _Fusion_ is quite common, and it surrounds us every time we go outside. Nuclear Fission in Nature is rarer; Stars usually have to Explode for this to naturally occur at any great scale. This is Basic Nucleosynthesis.

My Best Source lived to be 94. He was so fucking Radioactive, (Mainly long lived Americium and Curium isotopes.), that he refused at some point to be studied any longer. But he had some great and very funny stories to tell, and his mind was sharp right up the very end. Thanks for everything, Al.

Another Source was the thoroughly Evil and Corrupt Edward Teller. We took an immediate dislike to each other, but that didn't stop his boasting. He actually was a Monster. A family member of his later divulged to me certain details...
Edward Teller was pretty much the worst Monster that a little kid can imagine. That he is now so fondly regarded by Republicans is no wonder.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[DerekLyons]

Actually, the Nazis could have won if they didn't have a racial idealogue.

That's a popular theory... but it's not at all clear there's any truth to it, as the things that beat Germany weren't the things those guys were working on. True, they were key to the Manhattan Project (except for Einstein who took no part in the war and von Neumann who mostly did mathematical consulting work across a broad number of fields including the Manhattan project), but it's not the Manhattan project that beat Germany - it was the difference between Germany's industrial output and that of the US and the rest of the Allies.
 
WWII was, like most wars, largely a war of attrition - and the Axis lacked the capacity to win that war due to their relative (to the US and the allies) lack of industrial capacity and manpower, as well as the fragile conditions of their supply chain. This page concentrates mostly on the naval war in the Pacific, but it speaks to the grim disparity that all the Axis powers faced.
 
Or, as I like to say - the atomic bomb didn't win the war, it ended the war. The war was already won, and the only remaining question was how large the butcher's bill was going to be.
 

They already had a rocket delivery system, and they were ahead in jet aircraft. Mix von Braun with those guys, and Germany would have been unstoppable in the late 1940s.

They didn't have a rocket delivery system until late 1944 - by which time they were already in deep trouble, barely able to sustain their existing forces and starting to be pinched by lack of petroleum and access to raw materials. (Germany's industrial output peaked in Q3 of 1944.) The same holds true of jet aircraft. While they were technologically ahead... their production capacity was starting to lag. And by the time they started figuring out how to use it effectively, the Allies had figured out how to partially counter it in flight and how to attack it at it's most vulnerable points in flight. (On top of the fuel and raw material problems.) They never could have survived to the late 1940's to become unstoppable.

Or, to put it another way, real history is very different than the urban legend version endlessly touted in a variety of poorly researched TV programs and books. The poor research incidentally is deliberate - breathless accounts of how close the Germans came and how they might have won sell by the truck load.

On a side note, I'm actually quite pleased with TFA - it and researchers acknowledge the truth, this is just a shovelful added to the already existing mountain of evidence that the Germans weren't anywhere close to the bomb... and that it's not clear they were even trying. The common consensus among those who have studied (as opposed to watching TV and reading urban legends and deliberate misinformation) the issue is that they were not.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[david_thornley]

The big problem with the invasion was that neither Hitler nor the General Staff ran it, and so the focus shifted over time. Hitler wasn't a great general, but he wasn't that bad on strategy, and having the invasion go according to this vision would have been better than changing vision during the campaign.

The reasons German forces were sent south in greater force were (a) the Red Army had fought the Germans to a standstill near Smolensk, and (b) there were very large Soviet forces there. The move south bagged about six hundred thousand Soviet soldiers that otherwise would have been on the German flank, perhaps with a halfway competent commander (Kirponos?). Stalin was prepared to sacrifice the Red Army, but there were limits as to how many soldiers he could get, and half-million-man losses cut sharply into that.

The problem with winter was that the German Army was advancing on a logistical shoestring. There was barely enough capacity to keep the armies moving and fighting. When winter approached, the Germans had a choice between sending winter supplies or sending munitions to make another push, in the hope that defeating the Red Army would make it a lot easier to spend the winter. They chose wrong, but it wasn't an obviously stupid choice.

The Soviet High Command (Stavka) had to build a new army while the old one was being torn to pieces and large parts of the country were overrun by the enemy. The fact that they succeeded suggests a good deal of ability. They also were able to learn to conduct effective offensives and counteroffensives. They never were as good at the actual division-level fighting as the Germans (who was?), but their strategy and logistics were good.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[david_thornley]

The question about supplying more troops to Rommel is how to transport and supply them. Even if Rommel had been able to win at El Alamein, he wouldn't have been able to push into the Middle East. Auchinleck had a plan to withdraw to the south, where the Germans couldn't pursue, and hanging on Rommel's flank if he drove into the Middle East. Further, there was no way the Germans would be able to exploit the Middle East oilfields, given British commerce raiding in the Mediterranean, the lack of Axis oilers there, and the difficulty of getting the oil across long miles of desert. (Assuming, of course, that the British didn't sabotage everything, forcing the Axis to try to rebuild oilfields and refineries, somehow getting all that equipment to the oilfields.)

Those were far from being the most rich oil fields in the world during WWII. The US produced the majority of the world's oil back then. The Middle East was a whole lot richer than anything in Europe, and somehow (cue the alien space bats) would have been extremely useful if Hitler could have gotten it to Europe, but it didn't dominate.

Hitler referred to Africa as "the glacis of Europe", meaning that the Allies would have to defeat the Axis in Africa before proceeding to Europe. What he wanted to to was to stave off defeat in Africa as long as he could, and holding off the final surrender to something like May 1943 was an accomplishment.

How did they go to the moon then?

[Ecuador]

I call BS! If they weren't close to a nuclear reaction, how did they get to the moon?

Their own scientists weren't even close

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Well we already knew that the Nazis were very far from a nuclear weapon. They didn't even have the theories right by the end of the war. So this is just confirming something that wasn't under much question.

Heisenberg himself didn't realise that with compression the mean free path becomes much shorter and hence you can get a supercritical assembly with much less fissile material than you would otherwise need. When told of the Hiroshima explosion he calculated that the Americans had just managed to refine 500kg of U235 in order to make a bomb. An overestimate by about a factor of ten.

The German physicists also discarded plutonium early on as an alternative, and whey they discovered their error it was far too late in the programme to do anything about it.

Also Heisenberg himself seems to not have been too keen on the idea, always downplaying the possibility, and trying to convince Bohr that on-one should work on developing the bomb.

Re:Their own scientists weren't even close

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are saying that Heisenberg was uncertain?

Re:Their own scientists weren't even close

[Nidi62]

So you are saying that Heisenberg was uncertain?

At least he had principles.

We just thought they were close to having the bomb

[Anonymous Coward]

We just thought they were close to having the bomb because someone found a prototype of a digital clock in the wreckage of the Reichstag.

Stop the presses!

[Maury Markowitz]

So exactly what everyone has been saying without variation since the Alsos teams arrived in Paris in 1944 turns out to be correct?

Slow news day.

p.s. Had a nice chat with one of the Alsos guys once. Described showing up in one of the labs and everyone there being shocked to see just who was walking through the door. All their former colleges were in fatigues, which they kinda thought was weird. But then when they explained why they were there, and what they were trying to stop, all of the Germans immediately went "What?!? No, we were never doing that!" but then understood why they were in uniform and armed.

Re:WMDs

[Chrisq]

Not the first time the US thought an enemy had WMDs but didn't, huh?

Hitler certainly had WMDs, just not nuclear

Re:WMDs

[onthemightofprinces]

Those weren't exactly WMDs. It took tens of thousands of them to do severe damage.

Boron in Graphite

[tomwrake]

The Nazi team went the very expensive heavy water route because the graphic route appeared unworkable . After reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb I concluded that the Nazi were unable to make a good estimate the needed critical mass because of Boron in their graphite. Essentially the US National Carbon had a better process than the German Siemans process. Or perhaps this was because Fermi was on the American team and demanded a better process. Another possibility was that Heisenberg just missed the Boron.

Also see the Nuclear Graphite History section for some details.

Re:It's nice to mention Jáchimov in the artic

[dunkelfalke]

The English word "slavery" has a completely different root, it came originally from the Greek "sklabos". Slav as in ethnicity comes from the slavic word "slovo", meaning "word" - as in people speaking an understandable language. In fact, even today, after more than a millennium of separation all Slavic languages are still partially mutually intelligible.

Nimitz on MacArthur

[calidoscope]

The quote according to Eddie Layton was, "To remind myself not to be a horse's ass." It's unfortunate that Nimitz isn't as well known as some of the other WW2 principals, as he did a very good job as CinCPAC.

Re:They were not alone

[tehcyder]

Nobody ever claimed Iraq had nukes. WMDs can be chemical or biological as well, and everyone knew Saddam had used chemical weapons on the Kurds.

Calling chemical weapons Weapons of Mass Destruction is pushing things though. I suppose theoretically a biological weapon could wipe out a whole city if you could properly weaponise anthrax or something, but I don't think anyone has actually proved this can be done in practice. And a chemical attack, although psychologically unpleasant, doesn't really kill any more people than a conventional bombing or rocket raid.

The whole "WMD" thing was just a way of conflating theoretical threats with that of nuclear weapons, which are genuinely capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people at once.