The Uranverein ( en, "Uranium Club") or Uranprojekt ( en, "Uranium Project") was the name given to the project in
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
to research
nuclear technology
Nuclear technology is technology that involves the nuclear reactions of atomic nuclei. Among the notable nuclear technologies are nuclear reactors, nuclear medicine and nuclear weapons. It is also used, among other things, in smoke detectors an ...
, including
nuclear weapons
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...
and
nuclear reactors
A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat from nu ...
, during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
. It went through several phases of work, but in the words of historian Mark Walker, it was ultimately "frozen at the laboratory level" with the "modest goal" to "build a nuclear reactor which could sustain a nuclear fission chain reaction for a significant amount of time and to achieve the complete separation of at least tiny amount of the uranium isotopes." The scholarly consensus is that it failed to achieve these goals, and that despite fears at the time, the Germans had never been close to producing nuclear weapons.
The first effort started in April 1939, just months after the
discovery of nuclear fission
Nuclear fission was discovered in December 1938 by chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch. Fission is a nuclear reaction or radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits in ...
in December 1938, but ended only months later shortly ahead of the
German invasion of Poland
The invasion of Poland (1 September – 6 October 1939) was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week afte ...
, when many notable physicists were drafted into the ''
Wehrmacht
The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the ''Heer'' (army), the ''Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmacht''" replaced the previous ...
''.
A second effort began under the administrative purview of the ''Wehrmacht's ''
''Heereswaffenamt'' on 1 September 1939, the day of the invasion of Poland. The program eventually expanded into three main efforts: the ''Uranmaschine'' (
nuclear reactor
A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat from nu ...
), uranium and
heavy water production, and uranium
isotope separation
Isotope separation is the process of concentrating specific isotopes of a chemical element by removing other isotopes. The use of the nuclides produced is varied. The largest variety is used in research (e.g. in chemistry where atoms of "marker" n ...
. Eventually, it was assessed that nuclear fission would not contribute significantly to ending the war, and in January 1942, the ''Heereswaffenamt'' turned the program over to the
Reich Research Council (''Reichsforschungsrat'') while continuing to fund the program. The program was split up among nine major institutes where the directors dominated the research and set their own objectives. Subsequently, the number of scientists working on applied nuclear fission began to diminish, with many applying their talents to more pressing war-time demands.
The most influential people in the ''Uranverein'' were
Kurt Diebner
Kurt Diebner (13 May 1905 – 13 July 1964) was a German nuclear physicist who is well known for directing and administrating the German nuclear energy project, a secretive program aiming to build nuclear weapons for Nazi Germany during World War ...
,
Abraham Esau,
Walther Gerlach
Walther Gerlach (1 August 1889 – 10 August 1979) was a German physicist who co-discovered, through laboratory experiment, spin quantization in a magnetic field, the Stern–Gerlach effect. The experiment was conceived by Otto Stern in 1921 an ...
, and
Erich Schumann
Erich Schumann (5 January 1898 – 25 April 1985) was a German physicist who specialized in acoustics and explosives, and had a penchant for music. He was a general officer in the army and a professor at the University of Berlin and the Technic ...
; Schumann was one of the most powerful and influential physicists in Germany. Diebner, throughout the life of the nuclear weapon project, had more control over nuclear fission research than did
Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 – 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
,
Klaus Clusius
Klaus Paul Alfred Clusius (19 March 1903 – 28 May 1963) was a German physical chemist from Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; he worked on isotope s ...
,
Otto Hahn
Otto Hahn (; 8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner ...
,
Paul Harteck
Paul Karl Maria Harteck (20 July 190222 January 1985) was an Austrian physical chemist. In 1945 under Operation Epsilon in "the big sweep" throughout Germany, Harteck was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces for suspicion of ...
, or
Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series ...
. Abraham Esau was appointed as
Reichsmarschall
(german: Reichsmarschall des Großdeutschen Reiches; ) was a rank and the highest military office in the ''Wehrmacht'' specially created for Hermann Göring during World War II. It was senior to the rank of , which was previously the highes ...
Hermann Göring
Hermann Wilhelm Göring (or Goering; ; 12 January 1893 – 15 October 1946) was a German politician, military leader and convicted war criminal. He was one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, which ruled Germany from 1933 to 1 ...
's plenipotentiary for nuclear physics research in December 1942; Walther Gerlach succeeded him in December 1943.
Politicization of the German
academia
An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary education, secondary or tertiary education, tertiary higher education, higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membershi ...
under the
Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
regime had driven many physicists, engineers, and mathematicians out of Germany as early as 1933. Those of Jewish heritage who did not leave were quickly purged from German institutions, further thinning the ranks of academia. The politicization of the universities, along with the demands for manpower by the German armed forces (many scientists and technical personnel were conscripted, despite possessing technical and engineering skills), substantially reduced the number of able German physicists.
At the end of the war, the Allied powers competed to obtain surviving components of the nuclear industry (personnel, facilities, and
materiel
Materiel (; ) refers to supplies, equipment, and weapons in military supply-chain management, and typically supplies and equipment in a commercial supply chain context.
In a military context, the term ''materiel'' refers either to the specifi ...
), as they did with the pioneering
V-2
The V-2 (german: Vergeltungswaffe 2, lit=Retaliation Weapon 2), with the technical name ''Aggregat 4'' (A-4), was the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was develope ...
SRBM
A short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) is a ballistic missile with a range of about or less. In past and potential regional conflicts, these missiles have been and would be used because of the short distances between some countries and their rela ...
program.
Discovery of nuclear fission
In December 1938, German chemist
Otto Hahn
Otto Hahn (; 8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner ...
and his assistant
Fritz Strassmann
Friedrich Wilhelm Strassmann (; 22 February 1902 – 22 April 1980) was a German chemist who, with Otto Hahn in December 1938, identified the element barium as a product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons. Their observation was the ke ...
sent a manuscript to the German science journal ''
Naturwissenschaften
''The Science of Nature'', formerly ''Naturwissenschaften'', is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Springer Science+Business Media covering all aspects of the natural sciences relating to questions of biological significance. I ...
'' ("Natural Sciences") reporting that they had detected and identified the element
barium
Barium is a chemical element with the symbol Ba and atomic number 56. It is the fifth element in group 2 and is a soft, silvery alkaline earth metal. Because of its high chemical reactivity, barium is never found in nature as a free element.
Th ...
after bombarding
uranium
Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium is weak ...
with
neutrons
The neutron is a subatomic particle, symbol or , which has a neutral (not positive or negative) charge, and a mass slightly greater than that of a proton. Protons and neutrons constitute the nuclei of atoms. Since protons and neutrons behave ...
. Their article was published on 6 January 1939. On 19 December 1938, eighteen days before the publication, Otto Hahn communicated these results and his conclusion of a ''bursting'' of the uranium nucleus in a letter to his colleague and friend
Lise Meitner
Elise Meitner ( , ; 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on rad ...
, who had fled Germany in July to the Netherlands and then to Sweden. Meitner and her nephew
Otto Robert Frisch
Otto Robert Frisch FRS (1 October 1904 – 22 September 1979) was an Austrian-born British physicist who worked on nuclear physics. With Lise Meitner he advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission (coining the term) and firs ...
confirmed Hahn's conclusion of a ''bursting'' and correctly interpreted the results as "
nuclear fission
Nuclear fission is a reaction in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei. The fission process often produces gamma photons, and releases a very large amount of energy even by the energetic standards of radio ...
" – a term coined by Frisch. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.
First ''Uranverein''
On 22 April 1939, after hearing a colloquium paper by
Wilhelm Hanle
Wilhelm Hanle (13 January 1901 – 29 April 1993, Gießen) was a German experimental physicist. He is known for the Hanle effect. During World War II, he made contributions to the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club. Fr ...
proposing the use of
uranium
Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium is weak ...
fission in a ''Uranmaschine'' (uranium machine, i.e.,
nuclear reactor
A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat from nu ...
),
Georg Joos
Georg Jakob Christof Joos (25 May 1894 in Bad Urach, German Empire – 20 May 1959 in Munich, West Germany) was a German experimental physicist. He wrote ''Lehrbuch der theoretischen Physik'', first published in 1932 and one of the most influ ...
, along with Hanle, notified Wilhelm Dames, at the ''
Reichserziehungsministerium
The Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture (german: , also unofficially known as the "Reich Education Ministry" (german: ), or "REM") existed from 1934 until 1945 under the leadership of Bernhard Rust and was responsible for unifying t ...
'' (REM, Reich Ministry of Education), of potential military applications of nuclear energy. The group included the physicists
Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 – 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
,
Robert Döpel
Georg Robert Döpel (3 December 1895 – 2 December 1982) was a German experimental nuclear physicist. He was a participant in a group known as the " first ''Uranverein''", which was spawned by a meeting conducted by the ''Reichserziehungsmin ...
,
Hans Geiger
Johannes Wilhelm "Hans" Geiger (; ; 30 September 1882 – 24 September 1945) was a German physicist. He is best known as the co-inventor of the detector component of the Geiger counter and for the Geiger–Marsden experiment which discover ...
,
Wolfgang Gentner
Wolfgang Gentner (23 July 1906 in Frankfurt am Main – 4 September 1980 in Heidelberg) was a German experimental nuclear physicist.
Gentner received his doctorate in 1930 from the University of Frankfurt. From 1932 to 1935 he had a fellowship wh ...
(probably sent by
Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 – 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
),
Wilhelm Hanle
Wilhelm Hanle (13 January 1901 – 29 April 1993, Gießen) was a German experimental physicist. He is known for the Hanle effect. During World War II, he made contributions to the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club. Fr ...
,
Gerhard Hoffmann
Gerhard Hoffmann (4 August 1880 – 18 June 1945) was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he contributed to the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club.
Education
Hoffmann studied at the University of Götting ...
, and
Georg Joos
Georg Jakob Christof Joos (25 May 1894 in Bad Urach, German Empire – 20 May 1959 in Munich, West Germany) was a German experimental physicist. He wrote ''Lehrbuch der theoretischen Physik'', first published in 1932 and one of the most influ ...
;
Peter Debye
Peter Joseph William Debye (; ; March 24, 1884 – November 2, 1966) was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
Biography
Early life
Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, D ...
was invited, but he did not attend. After this, informal work began at the
Georg-August University of Göttingen by Joos, Hanle, and their colleague
Reinhold Mannkopff; the group of physicists was known informally as the first ''Uranverein'' (Uranium Club) and formally as ''Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kernphysik''. The group's work was discontinued in August 1939, when the three were called to military training.
[.][.]
Other 1939 initiatives
Paul Harteck
Paul Karl Maria Harteck (20 July 190222 January 1985) was an Austrian physical chemist. In 1945 under Operation Epsilon in "the big sweep" throughout Germany, Harteck was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces for suspicion of ...
was director of the physical chemistry department at the
University of Hamburg
The University of Hamburg (german: link=no, Universität Hamburg, also referred to as UHH) is a public research university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by combining the previous General Lecture System ('' Allgemeines Vor ...
and an advisor to the ''
Heereswaffenamt
''Waffenamt'' (WaA) was the German Army Weapons Agency. It was the centre for research and development of the Weimar Republic and later the Third Reich for weapons, ammunition and army equipment to the German Reichswehr and then Wehrmacht
...
'' (HWA, Army Ordnance Office). On 24 April 1939, along with his teaching assistant
Wilhelm Groth
Wilhelm Groth (9 January 1904 in Hamburg – 20 February 1977 in Bonn) was a German physical chemist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; his main activity was the development of cen ...
, Harteck made contact with the ''Reichskriegsministerium'' (RKM, Reich Ministry of War) to alert them to the potential of military applications of nuclear chain reactions. This initiative led, later in the year, to the Second ''Uranverein''. Two days earlier, Joos and Hanle had approached the REM, leading to the First Uranverein.
The industrial firm ''
Auergesellschaft'' had a substantial amount of "waste"
uranium
Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium is weak ...
from which it had extracted
radium
Radium is a chemical element with the symbol Ra and atomic number 88. It is the sixth element in group 2 of the periodic table, also known as the alkaline earth metals. Pure radium is silvery-white, but it readily reacts with nitrogen (rather t ...
. After reading a June 1939 paper by
Siegfried Flügge
Siegfried Flügge (16 March 1912, in Dresden – 15 December 1997, in Hinterzarten) was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to nuclear physics and the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons. He worked on the German nuclear en ...
, on the technical use of nuclear energy from uranium,
Nikolaus Riehl
Nikolaus Riehl (24 May 1901 – 2 August 1990) was a German nuclear physicist. He was head of the scientific headquarters of Auergesellschaft. When the Russians entered Berlin near the end of World War II, he was invited to the Soviet Union, wh ...
, the head of the scientific headquarters at Auergesellschaft, recognized a business opportunity for the company, and in July he went to the HWA (''Heereswaffenamt'', Army Ordnance Office) to discuss the production of uranium. The HWA was interested and Riehl committed corporate resources to the task. The HWA eventually provided an order for the production of uranium oxide, which took place in the Auergesellschaft plant in
Oranienburg
Oranienburg () is a town in Brandenburg, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Oberhavel.
Geography
Oranienburg is a town located on the banks of the Havel river, 35 km north of the centre of Berlin.
Division of the town
Oranienburg ...
, north of Berlin.
Second ''Uranverein''
![Atomreaktor Museum Stadtilm](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Atomreaktor_Museum_Stadtilm.jpg)
The second ''Uranverein'' began after the HWA squeezed out the ''Reichsforschungsrat'' (RFR, Reich Research Council) of the REM and started the formal German nuclear weapons project under military auspices. This second ''Uranverein'' was formed on 1 September 1939, the day World War II began, and had its first meeting on 16 September 1939. The meeting was organized by
Kurt Diebner
Kurt Diebner (13 May 1905 – 13 July 1964) was a German nuclear physicist who is well known for directing and administrating the German nuclear energy project, a secretive program aiming to build nuclear weapons for Nazi Germany during World War ...
, advisor to the HWA, and held in Berlin. The invitees included
Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 – 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
,
Siegfried Flügge
Siegfried Flügge (16 March 1912, in Dresden – 15 December 1997, in Hinterzarten) was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to nuclear physics and the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons. He worked on the German nuclear en ...
,
Hans Geiger
Johannes Wilhelm "Hans" Geiger (; ; 30 September 1882 – 24 September 1945) was a German physicist. He is best known as the co-inventor of the detector component of the Geiger counter and for the Geiger–Marsden experiment which discover ...
,
Otto Hahn
Otto Hahn (; 8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner ...
,
Paul Harteck
Paul Karl Maria Harteck (20 July 190222 January 1985) was an Austrian physical chemist. In 1945 under Operation Epsilon in "the big sweep" throughout Germany, Harteck was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces for suspicion of ...
,
Gerhard Hoffmann
Gerhard Hoffmann (4 August 1880 – 18 June 1945) was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he contributed to the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club.
Education
Hoffmann studied at the University of Götting ...
,
Josef Mattauch
Josef Mattauch (21 November 1895 – 10 August 1976) was a nuclear physicist and chemist. He was known for the development of the Mattauch-Herzog double-focusing mass spectrometer, for his work on the investigation of isotopic abundances using mas ...
, and
Georg Stetter. A second meeting was held soon thereafter and included
Klaus Clusius
Klaus Paul Alfred Clusius (19 March 1903 – 28 May 1963) was a German physical chemist from Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; he worked on isotope s ...
,
Robert Döpel
Georg Robert Döpel (3 December 1895 – 2 December 1982) was a German experimental nuclear physicist. He was a participant in a group known as the " first ''Uranverein''", which was spawned by a meeting conducted by the ''Reichserziehungsmin ...
,
Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series ...
, and
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker (; 28 June 1912 – 28 April 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under ...
. Also at this time, the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik'' (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, after World War II the
Max Planck Institute for Physics
The Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPP) is a physics institute in Munich, Germany that specializes in high energy physics and astroparticle physics. It is part of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and is also known as the Werner Heisenberg Institu ...
), in
Berlin-Dahlem
Dahlem ( or ) is a locality of the Steglitz-Zehlendorf borough in southwestern Berlin. Until Berlin's 2001 administrative reform it was a part of the former borough of Zehlendorf. It is located between the mansion settlements of Grunewald and L ...
, was placed under HWA authority, with Diebner as the administrative director, and the military control of the nuclear research commenced.
[
Heisenberg said in 1939 that the physicists at the (second) meeting said that "in principle atomic bombs could be made.... it would take years.... not before five." He said, "I didn't report it to the ]Führer
( ; , spelled or ''Fuhrer'' when the Umlaut (diacritic), umlaut is not available) is a German word meaning "leader" or "guide". As a political title, it is strongly associated with the Nazi Germany, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Nazi Germany ...
until two weeks later and very casually because I did not want the Führer to get so interested that he would order great efforts immediately to make the atomic bomb. Speer felt it was better that the whole thing should be dropped and the Führer also reacted that way." He said they presented the matter in this way for their personal safety as the probability (of success) was nearly zero, but if many thousands (of) people developed nothing, that could have "extremely disagreeable consequences for us." So we turned the slogan around to ''make use of warfare for physics'' not "make use of physics for warfare." Erhard Milch
Erhard Milch (30 March 1892 – 25 January 1972) was a German general field marshal (''Generalfeldmarschall'') of Jewish heritage who oversaw the development of the German air force (''Luftwaffe'') as part of the re-armament of Nazi Germany foll ...
asked how long America would take and was told 1944 though the group ''between ourselves'' thought it would take longer, three or four years.
When it was apparent that the nuclear weapon project would not make a decisive contribution to ending the war in the near term, control of the KWIP was returned in January 1942 to its umbrella organization, the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft
The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science (German: ''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften'') was a German scientific institution established in the German Empire in 1911. Its functions were taken over by ...
'' (KWG, Kaiser Wilhelm Society, after World War II the Max-Planck Gesellschaft). HWA control of the project was subsequently passed to the RFR in July 1942. The nuclear weapon project thereafter maintained its ''kriegswichtig'' (war importance) designation, and funding continued from the military, but it was then split into the areas of uranium
Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium is weak ...
and heavy water production, uranium isotope separation, and the ''Uranmaschine'' (uranium machine, i.e., nuclear reactor). It was in effect broken up between institutes where the different directors dominated the research and set their own research agendas.[ The dominant personnel, facilities, and areas of research were:
*]Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 – 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
Director of the ''Institut für Physik'' (Institute for Physics) at the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für medizinische Forschung'' (KWImF, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, after 1948 the Max-Planck-Institut für medizinische Forschung), in Heidelberg
Heidelberg (; Palatine German language, Palatine German: ''Heidlberg'') is a city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. As of the 2016 census, its population was 159,914 ...
.
**Measurement of nuclear constants. ''6 physicists''
*Klaus Clusius
Klaus Paul Alfred Clusius (19 March 1903 – 28 May 1963) was a German physical chemist from Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; he worked on isotope s ...
Director of the Institute for Physical Chemistry at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operatio ...
**Isotope separation
Isotope separation is the process of concentrating specific isotopes of a chemical element by removing other isotopes. The use of the nuclides produced is varied. The largest variety is used in research (e.g. in chemistry where atoms of "marker" n ...
and heavy water production. ''ca. 4 physical chemists and physicists''
*Kurt Diebner
Kurt Diebner (13 May 1905 – 13 July 1964) was a German nuclear physicist who is well known for directing and administrating the German nuclear energy project, a secretive program aiming to build nuclear weapons for Nazi Germany during World War ...
Director of the HWA ''Versuchsstelle'' (testing station) in Gottow and of the RFR experimental station in Stadtilm
Stadtilm is a town in the Ilm-Kreis district, in Thuringia, Germany. It is situated on the river Ilm, 15 km northeast of Ilmenau, and 11 km southeast of Arnstadt. In July 2018 the former municipality of Ilmtal was merged into Stadtilm.
...
, Thuringia; he was also an advisor to the HWA on nuclear physics.
**Measurement of nuclear constants. ''ca. 6 physicists''
*Otto Hahn
Otto Hahn (; 8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner ...
Director of the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Chemie'' (KWIC, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, after World War II the '' Max Planck Institut für ChemieOtto Hahn Institut''), in Berlin-Dahlem
Dahlem ( or ) is a locality of the Steglitz-Zehlendorf borough in southwestern Berlin. Until Berlin's 2001 administrative reform it was a part of the former borough of Zehlendorf. It is located between the mansion settlements of Grunewald and L ...
.
**Transuranic elements
The transuranium elements (also known as transuranic elements) are the chemical elements with atomic numbers greater than 92, which is the atomic number of uranium. All of these elements are unstable and decay radioactively into other elements. ...
, fission products, isotope separation, and measurement of nuclear constants. ''ca. 6 chemists and physicists''
*Paul Harteck
Paul Karl Maria Harteck (20 July 190222 January 1985) was an Austrian physical chemist. In 1945 under Operation Epsilon in "the big sweep" throughout Germany, Harteck was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces for suspicion of ...
Director of the Physical Chemistry Department of the University of Hamburg
The University of Hamburg (german: link=no, Universität Hamburg, also referred to as UHH) is a public research university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by combining the previous General Lecture System ('' Allgemeines Vor ...
.
**Heavy water production and isotope production. ''5 physical chemists, physicists, and chemists''
*Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series ...
Director of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Leipzig
Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 Decemb ...
until summer 1942; thereafter acting director of the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik'' (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics), in Berlin-Dahlem
Dahlem ( or ) is a locality of the Steglitz-Zehlendorf borough in southwestern Berlin. Until Berlin's 2001 administrative reform it was a part of the former borough of Zehlendorf. It is located between the mansion settlements of Grunewald and L ...
.
**''Uranmaschine'', isotope separation, and measurement of nuclear constants. ''ca. 7 physicists and physical chemists''
*Hans Kopfermann
Hans Kopfermann (26 April 1895, in Breckenheim near Wiesbaden – 28 January 1963, in Heidelberg) was a German atomic and nuclear physicist. He devoted his entire career to spectroscopic investigations, and he did pioneering work in measuring ...
Director of the Second Experimental Physics Institute at the Georg-August University of Göttingen.
**Isotope separation. ''2 physicists''
*Nikolaus Riehl
Nikolaus Riehl (24 May 1901 – 2 August 1990) was a German nuclear physicist. He was head of the scientific headquarters of Auergesellschaft. When the Russians entered Berlin near the end of World War II, he was invited to the Soviet Union, wh ...
Scientific Director of the Auergesellschaft.
**Uranium production. ''ca. 3 physicists and physical chemists''
* Georg StetterDirector of the ''II. Physikalisches Institut'' (Second Physics Institute) at the University of Vienna
The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich histor ...
.
**Transuranic elements and measurement of nuclear constants. ''ca. 6 physicists and physical chemists''
The point in 1942 when the army relinquished control of the project was its zenith in terms of the number of personnel devoted to the effort, and this was no more than about seventy scientists, with about forty devoting more than half their time to nuclear fission research. After this the number diminished dramatically, and many of those not working with the main institutes stopped working on nuclear fission and devoted their efforts to more pressing war related work.
On 4 June 1942, a conference regarding the project, initiated by Albert Speer
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer (; ; 19 March 1905 – 1 September 1981) was a German architect who served as the Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. A close ally of Adolf Hitler, he ...
as head of the " Reich Ministry for Armament and Ammunition" (RMBM: '' Reichsministerium für Bewaffnung und Munition''; after late 1943 the Reich Ministry for Armament and War Production), decided on its continuation merely for the aim of energy production. On 9 June 1942, Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
issued a decree for the reorganization of the RFR as a separate legal entity under the RMBM; the decree appointed Reich Marshal Hermann Göring
Hermann Wilhelm Göring (or Goering; ; 12 January 1893 – 15 October 1946) was a German politician, military leader and convicted war criminal. He was one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, which ruled Germany from 1933 to 1 ...
as its president. The reorganization was done under the initiative of Minister Albert Speer
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer (; ; 19 March 1905 – 1 September 1981) was a German architect who served as the Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. A close ally of Adolf Hitler, he ...
of the RMBM; it was necessary as the RFR under Bernhard Rust
Bernhard Rust (30 September 1883 – 8 May 1945) was Minister of Science, Education and National Culture ( Reichserziehungsminister) in Nazi Germany.Claudia Koonz, ''The Nazi Conscience'', p 134 A combination of school administrator and zealou ...
the Minister of Science, Education and National Culture was ineffective and was not achieving its purpose. The hope was that Göring would manage the RFR with the same discipline and efficiency as he had the aviation sector. A meeting was held on 6 July 1942 to discuss the function of the RFR and set its agenda. The meeting was a turning point in National Socialism's attitude towards science, as well as recognition that the policies which drove Jewish scientists out of Germany were a mistake, as the Reich needed their expertise. Abraham Esau was appointed on 8 December 1942 as Hermann Göring's ''Bevollmächtigter'' (plenipotentiary) for nuclear physics research under the RFR; in December 1943, Esau was replaced by Walther Gerlach
Walther Gerlach (1 August 1889 – 10 August 1979) was a German physicist who co-discovered, through laboratory experiment, spin quantization in a magnetic field, the Stern–Gerlach effect. The experiment was conceived by Otto Stern in 1921 an ...
. In the final analysis, placing the RFR under Göring's administrative control had little effect on the German nuclear weapon project.[Document 99: ''Record of Conference Regarding the Reich Research Council'', 6 July 1942, in .]
Speer states that the project to develop the atom bomb was scuttled in the autumn of 1942. Though the scientific solution was there, it would have taken all of Germany's production resources to produce a bomb, and then no sooner than 1947. Development did continue with a "uranium motor" for the navy and development of a German cyclotron
A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest O. Lawrence in 1929–1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and patented in 1932. Lawrence, Ernest O. ''Method and apparatus for the acceleration of ions'', filed: Janu ...
. However, by the summer of 1943, Speer released the remaining 1200 metric ton
The tonne ( or ; symbol: t) is a unit of mass equal to 1000 kilograms. It is a non-SI unit accepted for use with SI. It is also referred to as a metric ton to distinguish it from the non-metric units of the short ton (United States c ...
s of uranium stock for the production of solid-core ammunition.[
Over time, the HWA and then the RFR controlled the German nuclear weapon project. The most influential people were ]Kurt Diebner
Kurt Diebner (13 May 1905 – 13 July 1964) was a German nuclear physicist who is well known for directing and administrating the German nuclear energy project, a secretive program aiming to build nuclear weapons for Nazi Germany during World War ...
, Abraham Esau, Walther Gerlach
Walther Gerlach (1 August 1889 – 10 August 1979) was a German physicist who co-discovered, through laboratory experiment, spin quantization in a magnetic field, the Stern–Gerlach effect. The experiment was conceived by Otto Stern in 1921 an ...
, and Erich Schumann
Erich Schumann (5 January 1898 – 25 April 1985) was a German physicist who specialized in acoustics and explosives, and had a penchant for music. He was a general officer in the army and a professor at the University of Berlin and the Technic ...
. Schumann was one of the most powerful and influential physicists in Germany. He was director of the Physics Department II at the Frederick William University (later, University of Berlin), which was commissioned and funded by the ''Oberkommando des Heeres'' (OKH, Army High Command) to conduct physics research projects. He was also head of the research department of the HWA, assistant secretary of the Science Department of the OKW, and ''Bevollmächtigter'' (plenipotentiary) for high explosives. Diebner, throughout the life of the nuclear weapon project, had more control over nuclear fission research than did Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 – 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
, Klaus Clusius
Klaus Paul Alfred Clusius (19 March 1903 – 28 May 1963) was a German physical chemist from Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; he worked on isotope s ...
, Otto Hahn, Paul Harteck
Paul Karl Maria Harteck (20 July 190222 January 1985) was an Austrian physical chemist. In 1945 under Operation Epsilon in "the big sweep" throughout Germany, Harteck was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces for suspicion of ...
, or Werner Heisenberg.
Isotope separation
Paul Peter Ewald
Paul Peter Ewald, FRS (January 23, 1888 in Berlin, Germany – August 22, 1985 in Ithaca, New York) was a German crystallographer and physicist, a pioneer of X-ray diffraction methods.
Education
Ewald received his early education in the classi ...
, a member of the ''Uranverein'', had proposed an electromagnetic isotope separator, which was thought applicable to 235U production and enrichment. This was picked up by Manfred von Ardenne
Manfred von Ardenne (20 January 1907 – 26 May 1997) was a German researcher and applied physicist and inventor. He took out approximately 600 patents in fields including electron microscopy, medical technology, nuclear technology, plasma physi ...
, who ran a private research establishment.
In 1928, von Ardenne had come into his inheritance with full control as to how it could be spent, and he established his private research laboratory the ''Forschungslaboratorium für Elektronenphysik'', in Berlin-Lichterfelde, to conduct his own research on radio and television technology and electron microscopy
An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times shorter than that of visible light photons, electron microscopes have a hi ...
. He financed the laboratory with income he received from his inventions and from contracts with other concerns. For example, his research on nuclear physics and high-frequency technology was financed by the ''Reichspostministerium
The Reich Postal Ministry (German: ''Reichspostministerium'', RPM) in Berlin was the Ministry in charge of the Mail and the Telecommunications of the German Weimar Republic from 1919 until 1933 as well as of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Afte ...
'' (RPM, Reich Postal Ministry), headed by Wilhelm Ohnesorge
''This article is based on a translation of the corresponding article in the German Wikipedia.
Wilhelm Ohnesorge (8 June 1872 – 1 February 1962) was a German politician in the Third Reich who sat in the Hitler Cabinet. From 1937 to 1945, he ...
. Von Ardenne attracted top-notch personnel to work in his facility, such as the nuclear physicist Fritz Houtermans
Friedrich Georg "Fritz" Houtermans (January 22, 1903 – March 1, 1966) was a Dutch-Austrian-German atomic and nuclear physicist and Communist born in Zoppot near Danzig, West Prussia to a Dutch father, who was a wealthy banker. He was brought up ...
, in 1940. Von Ardenne had also conducted research on isotope separation. Taking Ewald's suggestion he began building a prototype for the RPM. The work was hampered by war shortages and ultimately ended by the war.
Aside from the ''Uranverein'' and von Ardenne's team in Berlin-Lichterfelde, there was also a small research team in the Henschel Flugzeugwerke: the study group under the direction of Prof. Dr. Ing. Herbert Wagner (1900–1982) searched for alternative sources of energy for airplanes and became interested in nuclear energy in 1940. In August 1941, they finished a detailed internal survey of the history and potential of technical nuclear physics and its applications (''Übersicht und Darstellung der historischen Entwicklung der modernen technischen Kernphysik und deren Anwendungsmöglichkeit sowie Zusammenfassung eigener Arbeitsziele und Pläne'', signed by Herbert Wagner and Hugo Watzlawek (1912–1995) in Berlin. Their application to the Aviation Ministry (RLM) to found and fund an Institute for Nuclear Technology and Nuclear Chemistry (''Reichsinstituts für Kerntechnik und Kernchemie'') failed, but Watzlawek continued to explore potential applications of nuclear energy and wrote a detailed textbook on technical nuclear physics. It includes one of the most detailed presentations of contemporary German knowledge about the various processes of isotope separation, and recommends their combined usage to get to sufficient amounts of enriched uranium. Walther Gerlach refused to print this textbook, but it is preserved as a typed manuscript and it appeared after the War in 1948 virtually unchanged (with just a few additions on the US atomic bomb released in 1945). In October 1944, Hugo Watzlawek wrote an article on the potential usage of nuclear energy and its many potential applications. In his view, to follow up this route of research and development was the "new pathway" to becoming the "Master of the World". It is thus a mistake to focus only on the efforts of the ''Uranverein''—other research groups in Germany were also active in research to exploit nuclear energy, especially for military purposes.
Moderator production
The production of heavy water was already under way in Norway when the Germans invaded on 9 April 1940. The Norwegian production facilities for heavy water were quickly secured (though some heavy water had already been removed) and improved by the Germans. The Allies and Norwegians had sabotaged Norwegian heavy water production and destroyed stocks of heavy water by 1943.
Graphite (carbon) as an alternative was not considered, because the neutron absorption coefficient value for carbon calculated by Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 – 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
was too high, probably due to the boron in the graphite pieces having high neutron absorption.
Exploitation and denial strategies
Near the end of World War II, the principal Allied war powers each made plans for exploitation of German science. In light of the implications of nuclear weapons, German nuclear fission and related technologies were singled out for special attention. In addition to exploitation, denial of these technologies, their personnel, and related materials to rival allies was a driving force of their efforts. This typically meant getting to these resources first, which to some extent put the Soviets at a disadvantage in some geographic locations easily reached by the Western Allies, even if the area was destined to be in the Soviet zone of occupation by the Potsdam Conference
The Potsdam Conference (german: Potsdamer Konferenz) was held at Potsdam in the Soviet occupation zone from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to allow the three leading Allies to plan the postwar peace, while avoiding the mistakes of the Paris Pe ...
. At times, all parties were heavy-handed in their pursuit and denial to others.
The best known US denial and exploitation effort was Operation Paperclip
Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from the former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World Wa ...
, a broad dragnet that encompassed a wide range of advanced fields, including jet and rocket propulsion, nuclear physics, and other developments with military applications such as infrared technology. Operations directed specifically towards German nuclear fission were Operation Alsos
The Alsos Mission was an organized effort by a team of British and United States military, scientific, and intelligence personnel to discover enemy scientific developments during World War II. Its chief focus was on the German nuclear energy pr ...
and Operation Epsilon
Operation Epsilon was the codename of a program in which Allied forces near the end of World War II detained ten German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's nuclear program. The scientists were captured between May 1 and ...
, the latter being done in collaboration with the British. In lieu of the codename for the Soviet operation, it is referred to by the historian Oleynikov as the Russian "Alsos".
American and British
Berlin had been a location of many German scientific research facilities. To limit casualties and loss of equipment, many of these facilities were dispersed to other locations in the later years of the war.
Operation BIG
Unfortunately for the Soviets, the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik'' (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics) had mostly been moved in 1943 and 1944 to Hechingen
Hechingen ( Swabian: ''Hächenga'') is a town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated about south of the state capital of Stuttgart and north of Lake Constance and the Swiss border.
Geography
The town lies at the foot of t ...
and its neighboring town of Haigerloch
Haigerloch is a town in the north-western part of the Swabian Alb in Germany.
Geography Geographical location
Haigerloch lies at between 430 and 550 metres elevation in the valley of the Eyach river, which forms two loops in a steep shelly limes ...
, on the edge of the Black Forest
The Black Forest (german: Schwarzwald ) is a large forested mountain range in the state of Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany, bounded by the Rhine Valley to the west and south and close to the borders with France and Switzerland. It is t ...
, which eventually became the French occupation zone. This move allowed the Americans to take into custody a large number of German scientists associated with nuclear research. The only section of the institute which remained in Berlin was the low-temperature physics section, headed by , who was in charge of the experimental uranium pile.
American Alsos teams carrying out Operation BIG raced through Baden-Wurttemburg near the war's end in 1945, uncovering, collecting, and selectively destroying ''Uranverein'' elements, including capturing a prototype reactor at Haigerloch and records, heavy water, and uranium ingots at Tailfingen. These were all shipped to the US for study and utilization in the US atomic program.
Nine of the prominent German scientists who published reports in ''Kernphysikalische Forschungsberichte'' as members of the ''Uranverein'' were picked up by Operation Alsos
The Alsos Mission was an organized effort by a team of British and United States military, scientific, and intelligence personnel to discover enemy scientific developments during World War II. Its chief focus was on the German nuclear energy pr ...
and incarcerated in England under Operation Epsilon
Operation Epsilon was the codename of a program in which Allied forces near the end of World War II detained ten German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's nuclear program. The scientists were captured between May 1 and ...
: Erich Bagge Erich Rudolf Bagge (30 May 1912, in Neustadt bei Coburg – 5 June 1996, in Kiel) was a German scientist. Bagge, a student of Werner Heisenberg for his doctorate and Habilitation, was engaged in German Atomic Energy research and the German nuclear e ...
, Kurt Diebner
Kurt Diebner (13 May 1905 – 13 July 1964) was a German nuclear physicist who is well known for directing and administrating the German nuclear energy project, a secretive program aiming to build nuclear weapons for Nazi Germany during World War ...
, Walther Gerlach
Walther Gerlach (1 August 1889 – 10 August 1979) was a German physicist who co-discovered, through laboratory experiment, spin quantization in a magnetic field, the Stern–Gerlach effect. The experiment was conceived by Otto Stern in 1921 an ...
, Otto Hahn
Otto Hahn (; 8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner ...
, Paul Harteck
Paul Karl Maria Harteck (20 July 190222 January 1985) was an Austrian physical chemist. In 1945 under Operation Epsilon in "the big sweep" throughout Germany, Harteck was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces for suspicion of ...
, Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series ...
, Horst Korsching
Horst Korsching (12 August 1912 – 21 March 1998) was a German physicist. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Epsilon.
Education
Born in Danz ...
, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker (; 28 June 1912 – 28 April 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under ...
, and Karl Wirtz
Karl Eugen Julius Wirtz (24 April 1910 – 12 February 1994) was a German nuclear physicist, born in Cologne. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation ...
. Also incarcerated was Max von Laue
Max Theodor Felix von Laue (; 9 October 1879 – 24 April 1960) was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals.
In addition to his scientific endeavors with cont ...
, although he had nothing to do with the nuclear weapon project. Goudsmit, the chief scientific advisor to Operation Alsos, thought von Laue might be beneficial to the postwar rebuilding of Germany and would benefit from the high level contacts he would have in England.
Oranienburg plant
With the interest of the ''Heereswaffenamt'' (HWA, Army Ordnance Office), Nikolaus Riehl
Nikolaus Riehl (24 May 1901 – 2 August 1990) was a German nuclear physicist. He was head of the scientific headquarters of Auergesellschaft. When the Russians entered Berlin near the end of World War II, he was invited to the Soviet Union, wh ...
, and his colleague Günter Wirths, set up an industrial-scale production of high-purity uranium oxide at the '' Auergesellschaft'' plant in Oranienburg
Oranienburg () is a town in Brandenburg, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Oberhavel.
Geography
Oranienburg is a town located on the banks of the Havel river, 35 km north of the centre of Berlin.
Division of the town
Oranienburg ...
. Adding to the capabilities in the final stages of metallic uranium production were the strengths of the Degussa corporation's capabilities in metals production.
The Oranienburg plant provided the uranium sheets and cubes for the ''Uranmaschine'' experiments conducted at the KWIP and the ''Versuchsstelle'' (testing station) of the ''Heereswaffenamt'' (Army Ordnance Office) in Gottow. The G-1 experiment performed at the HWA testing station, under the direction of Kurt Diebner
Kurt Diebner (13 May 1905 – 13 July 1964) was a German nuclear physicist who is well known for directing and administrating the German nuclear energy project, a secretive program aiming to build nuclear weapons for Nazi Germany during World War ...
, had lattices of 6,800 uranium oxide cubes (about 25 tons), in the nuclear moderator paraffin.
Work of the American Operation Alsos teams, in November 1944, uncovered leads which took them to a company in Paris that handled rare earths and had been taken over by the ''Auergesellschaft''. This, combined with information gathered in the same month through an Alsos team in Strasbourg
Strasbourg (, , ; german: Straßburg ; gsw, label=Bas Rhin Alsatian, Strossburi , gsw, label=Haut Rhin Alsatian, Strossburig ) is the prefecture and largest city of the Grand Est region of eastern France and the official seat of the Eu ...
, confirmed that the Oranienburg plant was involved in the production of uranium and thorium metals. Since the plant was to be in the future Soviet zone of occupation and the Red Army's troops would get there before the Western Allies, General Leslie Groves
Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves Jr. (17 August 1896 – 13 July 1970) was a United States Army Corps of Engineers officer who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project, a top secret research project ...
, commander of the Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...
, recommended to General George Marshall
George Catlett Marshall Jr. (December 31, 1880 – October 16, 1959) was an American army officer and statesman. He rose through the United States Army to become Chief of Staff of the US Army under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry ...
that the plant be destroyed by aerial bombardment, in order to deny its uranium production equipment to the Soviets. On 15 March 1945, 612 B-17 Flying Fortress
The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress is a four-engined heavy bomber developed in the 1930s for the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC). Relatively fast and high-flying for a bomber of its era, the B-17 was used primarily in the European Theater ...
bombers of the Eighth Air Force
The Eighth Air Force (Air Forces Strategic) is a numbered air force (NAF) of the United States Air Force's Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC). It is headquartered at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. The command serves as Air Force ...
dropped 1,506 tons of high-explosive and 178 tons of incendiary bombs on the plant. Riehl visited the site with the Soviets and said that the facility was mostly destroyed. Riehl also recalled long after the war that the Soviets knew precisely why the Americans had bombed the facility—the attack had been directed at them rather than the Germans.
French
From 1941 to 1947, Fritz Bopp
Friedrich Arnold "Fritz" Bopp (27 December 1909 – 14 November 1987) was a German theoretical physicist who contributed to nuclear physics and quantum field theory. He worked at the '' Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik'' and with the '' Ura ...
was a staff scientist at the KWIP, and worked with the ''Uranverein''. In 1944, when most of the KWIP was evacuated to Hechingen
Hechingen ( Swabian: ''Hächenga'') is a town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated about south of the state capital of Stuttgart and north of Lake Constance and the Swiss border.
Geography
The town lies at the foot of t ...
in Southern Germany due to air raids on Berlin, he went there too, and he was the Institute's Deputy Director there. When the American Alsos Mission evacuated Hechingen and Haigerloch
Haigerloch is a town in the north-western part of the Swabian Alb in Germany.
Geography Geographical location
Haigerloch lies at between 430 and 550 metres elevation in the valley of the Eyach river, which forms two loops in a steep shelly limes ...
, near the end of World War II, French armed forces occupied Hechingen. Bopp did not get along with them and described the initial French policy objectives towards the KWIP as exploitation, forced evacuation to France, and seizure of documents and equipment. The French occupation policy was not qualitatively different from that of the American and Soviet occupation forces, it was just carried out on a smaller scale. In order to put pressure on Bopp to evacuate the KWIP to France, the French Naval Commission imprisoned him for five days and threatened him with further imprisonment if he did not cooperate in the evacuation. During his imprisonment, the spectroscopist
Spectroscopy is the field of study that measures and interprets the electromagnetic spectra that result from the interaction between electromagnetic radiation and matter as a function of the wavelength or frequency of the radiation. Matter wav ...
, who had a better relationship with the French, persuaded the French to appoint him as Deputy Director of the KWIP. This incident caused tension between the physicists and spectroscopists at the KWIP and within its umbrella organization the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft
The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science (German: ''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften'') was a German scientific institution established in the German Empire in 1911. Its functions were taken over by ...
'' (Kaiser Wilhelm Society).
Soviet
At the close of World War II, the Soviet Union had special search teams operating in Austria and Germany, especially in Berlin, to identify and obtain equipment, material, intellectual property, and personnel useful to the Soviet atomic bomb project
The Soviet atomic bomb project was the classified research and development program that was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during and after World War II.
Although the Soviet scientific community dis ...
. The exploitation teams were under the Soviet Alsos and they were headed by Lavrentij Beria's deputy, Colonel General A. P. Zavenyagin. These teams were composed of scientific staff members, in NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
...
officer's uniforms, from the bomb project's only laboratory, Laboratory No. 2, in Moscow, and included Yulij Borisovich Khariton, Isaak Konstantinovich Kikoin, and Lev Andreevich Artsimovich. Georgij Nikolaevich Flerov had arrived earlier, although Kikoin did not recall a vanguard group. Targets on the top of their list were the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik'' (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics
The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science (German language, German: ''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften'') was a German scientific institution established in the German Empire in 1911. Its functions we ...
), the Frederick William University (today, the University of Berlin
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...
), and the ''Technische Hochschule Berlin'' (today, the ''Technische Universität Berlin'' (Technical University of Berlin
The Technical University of Berlin (official name both in English and german: link=no, Technische Universität Berlin, also known as TU Berlin and Berlin Institute of Technology) is a public research university located in Berlin, Germany. It was ...
).
German physicists who worked on the ''Uranverein'' and were sent to the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
to work on the Soviet atomic bomb project
The Soviet atomic bomb project was the classified research and development program that was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during and after World War II.
Although the Soviet scientific community dis ...
included: , Robert Döpel
Georg Robert Döpel (3 December 1895 – 2 December 1982) was a German experimental nuclear physicist. He was a participant in a group known as the " first ''Uranverein''", which was spawned by a meeting conducted by the ''Reichserziehungsmin ...
, Walter Herrmann
Walter Herrmann Heinrich (born June 26, 1979) is an Argentine former professional basketball player. He is listed at 6'9" and 225 lbs. He was a key member of the senior men's Argentine national basketball team that won the gold medal durin ...
, Heinz Pose
Rudolf Heinz Pose (10 April 1905 – 13 November 1975) was a German nuclear physicist who worked in the Soviet atomic bomb project.
He did pioneering work which contributed to the understanding nuclear energy levels. He worked on the German nu ...
, Ernst Rexer Ernst Rexer (2 April 1902 – 14 May 1983) was a German nuclear physics, nuclear physicist. He worked on the German nuclear energy program during World War II. After the war, he was sent to Laboratory V, in Obninsk, to work on the Soviet atomic ...
, Nikolaus Riehl
Nikolaus Riehl (24 May 1901 – 2 August 1990) was a German nuclear physicist. He was head of the scientific headquarters of Auergesellschaft. When the Russians entered Berlin near the end of World War II, he was invited to the Soviet Union, wh ...
, and Karl Zimmer
Karl Günter Zimmer (12 July 1911 – 29 February 1988) was a German physicist and radiation biologist, known for his work on the effects of ionizing radiation on DNA. In 1935, he published the major work, ''Über die Natur der Genmutation un ...
. Günter Wirths, while not a member of the ''Uranverein'', worked for Riehl at the '' Auergesellschaft'' on reactor-grade uranium production and was also sent to the Soviet Union.
Zimmer's path to work on the Soviet atomic bomb project was through a prisoner of war camp in Krasnogorsk, as was that of his colleagues Hans-Joachim Born Hans-Joachim Born (8 May 1909 – 15 April 1987) was a German radiochemist trained and educated at the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Chemie''. Up to the end of World War II, he worked in Nikolaj Timofeev-Resovskij, Nikolaj Vladimirovich Timofee ...
and Alexander Catsch
Alexander Siegfried Catsch (also Katsch; –16 February 1976) was a German-Russian medical doctor and radiation biologist. Up to the end of World War II, he worked in Nikolaj Vladimirovich Timefeev-Resovskij's ''Abteilung für Experimentelle Ge ...
from the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Hirnforschung'' (KWIH, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, today the '' Max-Planck-Institut für Hirnforschung''), who worked there for N. V. Timofeev-Resovskij
Nikolaj Vladimirovich Timofeev-Resovskij (also Timofeyeff-Ressovsky; russian: Николай Владимирович Тимофеев-Ресовский; – 28 March 1981) was a Soviet biologist. He conducted research in radiation genetic ...
, director of the ''Abteilung für Experimentelle Genetik'' (Department of Experimental Genetics). All four eventually worked for Riehl in the Soviet Union at Laboratory B in Sungul'.
Von Ardenne, who had worked on isotope separation for the ''Reichspostministerium
The Reich Postal Ministry (German: ''Reichspostministerium'', RPM) in Berlin was the Ministry in charge of the Mail and the Telecommunications of the German Weimar Republic from 1919 until 1933 as well as of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Afte ...
'' (Reich Postal Ministry), was also sent to the Soviet Union to work on their atomic bomb project, along with Gustav Hertz
Gustav Ludwig Hertz (; 22 July 1887 – 30 October 1975) was a German experimental physicist and List of Nobel laureates in Physics, Nobel Prize winner for his work on inelastic electron collisions in gases, and a nephew of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz ...
, Nobel laureate and director of Research Laboratory II at Siemens
Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad.
The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', '' ...
, Peter Adolf Thiessen
Peter Adolf Thiessen (6 April 1899 – 5 March 1990) was a German physical chemist. He voluntarily went to the Soviet Union at the close of World War II, and he received high Soviet decorations and the Stalin Prize for contributions to the ...
, director of the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie'' (KWIPC, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and Electrochemistry, today the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max-Planck Society), and Max Volmer
Max Volmer (; 3 May 1885 – 3 June 1965) was a German physical chemist, who made important contributions in electrochemistry, in particular on electrode kinetics. He co-developed the Butler–Volmer equation. Volmer held the chair and director ...
, director of the Physical Chemistry Institute at the Berlin ''Technische Hochschule'' (Technical University of Berlin), who all had made a pact that whoever first made contact with the Soviets would speak for the rest. Before the end of World War II, Thiessen, a member of the Nazi Party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...
, had Communist contacts. On 27 April 1945, Thiessen arrived at von Ardenne's institute in an armored vehicle with a major of the Soviet Army, who was also a leading Soviet chemist, and they issued Ardenne a protective letter (''Schutzbrief'').
Comparison to the Manhattan Project
The United States, British, and Canadian governments worked together to create the Manhattan Project that developed the uranium and plutonium atomic bombs. Its success has been attributed to meeting all four of the following conditions:
#A strong initial drive, by a small group of scientists, to launch the project.
#Unconditional government support from a certain point in time.
#Essentially unlimited manpower and industrial resources.
#A concentration of brilliant scientists devoted to the project.
Even with all four of these conditions in place the Manhattan Project succeeded only after the war in Europe had been brought to a conclusion.
For the Manhattan Project, the second condition was met on 9 October 1941 or shortly thereafter. Germany for a long time was thought to have fallen short of what was required to make an atomic bomb. Mutual distrust existed between the German government and some scientists. By the end of 1941, it was already apparent that the German nuclear weapon project would not make a decisive contribution to ending the German war effort in the near term, and control of the project was relinquished by the ''Heereswaffenamt'' (HWA, Army Ordnance Office) to the ''Reichsforschungsrat'' (RFR, Reich Research Council) in July 1942.
As to condition four, the high priority allocated to the Manhattan Project allowed for the recruitment and concentration of capable scientists on the project. In Germany, on the other hand, a great many young scientists and technicians who would have been of great use to such a project were conscripted into the German armed forces, while others had fled the country before the war due to antisemitism and political persecution.
Whereas Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and ...
, a scientific Manhattan Project leader, had a "''unique double aptitude for theoretical and experimental work''" in the 20th century, the successes at Leipzig until 1942 resulted from the cooperation between the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg and the experimentalist Robert Döpel
Georg Robert Döpel (3 December 1895 – 2 December 1982) was a German experimental nuclear physicist. He was a participant in a group known as the " first ''Uranverein''", which was spawned by a meeting conducted by the ''Reichserziehungsmin ...
. Most important was their experimental proof of an effective neutron increase in April 1942. At the end of July of the same year, the group around Fermi also succeeded in the neutron increase within a reactor-like arrangement.
In June 1942, some six months before the American Chicago Pile-1
Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) was the world's first artificial nuclear reactor. On 2 December 1942, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated in CP-1, during an experiment led by Enrico Fermi. The secret development of t ...
achieved man-made criticality for the first time anywhere, Döpel's L-IV "''Uran-Maschine''" was destroyed by a chemical explosion introduced by oxygen
Oxygen is the chemical element with the symbol O and atomic number 8. It is a member of the chalcogen group in the periodic table, a highly reactive nonmetal, and an oxidizing agent that readily forms oxides with most elements as wel ...
, which finished the work on this topic at Leipzig. Thereafter, despite increased expenditures, the Berlin groups and their extern branches did not succeed in getting a reactor critical until the end of World War II. However, this was realized by the Fermi group in December 1942, so that the German advantage was definitively lost, even with respect to research on energy production.
German historian Klaus Hentschel
Klaus Hentschel (born 4 April 1961) is a German physicist, historian of science and Professor and head of the History of Science and Technology section in the History Department of the University of Stuttgart. He is known for his contributions in ...
summarizes the organizational differences as:
:Compared with the British and American war research efforts united in the Manhattan Project, to this day the prime example of "big science," the Uranverein was only a loosely knit, decentralized network of researchers with quite different research agendas. Rather than teamwork as on the American end, on the German side we find cut-throat competition, personal rivalries, and fighting over the limited resources.
In terms of financial and human resources, the comparisons between the Manhattan Project and the ''Uranverein'' are stark. The Manhattan Project consumed some US$2 billion (1945, ~US$ billion in dollars) in government funds, and employed at its peak some 120,000 people, mostly in the sectors of construction and operations. Total, the Manhattan Project involved the labor of some 500,000 people, nearly 1% of the entire US civilian labor force. By comparison, the ''Uranverein'' was budgeted a mere 8 million reichsmarks, equivalent to about US$2 million (1945,~US$ million in dollars) – one one-thousandth of the American expenditure.
See also
*Germany and weapons of mass destruction
Although Germany has the technical capability to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD), since World War II it has generally refrained from producing those weapons. However, Germany participates in the NATO nuclear weapons sharing arrangeme ...
*Japanese nuclear weapon program
The Japanese program to develop nuclear weapons was conducted during World War II. Like the German nuclear weapons program, it suffered from an array of problems, and was ultimately unable to progress beyond the laboratory stage before the ato ...
References
Footnotes
Citations
Sources
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* See also ''Letters to the Editor'' by Klaus Gottstein and a reply by Jeremy Bernstein in ''Am. J. Phys.'' 72 (9): 1143–45 (2004).
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* (1967 interviews with Heisenberg, Harteck and others).
*
*
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*Hahn, Otto ''My Life'' (Herder and Herder, New York 1970)
*
*Heisenberg, Werner ''Research in Germany on the Technical Applications of Atomic Energy'', ''Nature'' Volume 160, Number 4059, 211–15 (16 August 1947). See also the annotated English translation: ''Document 115. Werner Heisenberg: Research in Germany on the Technical Application of Atomic Energy 6 August 1947' in .
* [This book is a collection of 121 primary German documents relating to physics under National Socialism. The documents have been translated and annotated, and there is a lengthy introduction to put them into perspective.]
*
*Hoffmann, Klaus ''Otto Hahn – Achievement and Responsibility'' (Springer, New York. 2001)
*
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* The author has been a group leader at the Institute of Technical Physics of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center in Snezhinsk
Snezhinsk ( rus, Сне́жинск, p=ˈsnʲeʐɨnsk) is a closed town in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. Population:
History
The settlement began in 1955 as Residential settlement number 2, a name which it had until 1957 when it received town ...
(Chelyabinsk-70).
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Further reading
*Albrecht, Ulrich, Andreas Heinemann-Grüder, and Arend Wellmann ''Die Spezialisten: Deutsche Naturwissenschaftler und Techniker in der Sowjetunion nach 1945'' (Dietz, 1992, 2001)
*
*Beyerchen, Alan ''What We Know About Nazism and Science'', ''Social Research'' Volume 59, Number 3, 615–641 (1992)
*
*
*Cassidy, David C. ''A Historical Perspective on Copenhagen'', ''Physics Today'' Volume 53, Issue 7, 28 (2000). See also ''Heisenberg's Message to Bohr: Who Knows'', ''Physics Today'' Volume 54, Issue 4, 14ff (2001), individual letters by Klaus Gottstein, Harry J. Lipkin, Donald C. Sachs, and David C. Cassidy.
*Eckert, Michael ''Werner Heisenberg: controversial scientist'' physicsweb.or
(2001)
*
*Heisenberg, Werner ''Die theoretischen Grundlagen für die Energiegewinnung aus der Uranspaltung'', ''Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenschaft'', Volume 9, 201–212 (1943). See also the annotated English translation: ''Document 95. Werner Heisenberg. The Theoretical Basis for the Generation of Energy from Uranium Fission 6 February 1942' in .
*Heisenberg, Werner, introduction by David Cassidy, translation by William Sweet ''A Lecture on Bomb Physics: February 1942'', ''Physics Today'' Volume 48, Issue 8, Part I, 27–30 (1995)
*Hentschel, Klaus ''The Mental Aftermath: The Mentality of German Physicists 1945–1949'' (Oxford, 2007)
*Hoffmann, Dieter ''Zwischen Autonomie und Anpassung: Die deutsche physikalische Gesellschaft im dritten Reich'', ''Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschafts Geschichte Preprint 192'
(2001)
*Hoffmann, Dieter and Mark Walker ''The German Physical Society Under National Socialism'', ''Physics Today'' 57(12) 52–58 (2004)
*Hoffmann, Dieter and Mark Walker ''Zwischen Autonomie und Anpassung'', ''Physik Journal'' Volume 5, Number 3, 53–58 (2006)
*Hoffmann, Dieter and Mark Walker ''Peter Debye: "A Typical Scientist in an Untypical Time"'' Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaf
*Hoffmann, Dieter and Mark Walker (editors) ''Physiker zwischen Autonomie und Anpassung'' (Wiley-VCH, 2007)
* Karlsch Rainer ''Hitlers Bombe. Die geheime Geschichte der deutschen Kernwaffenversuche.'' (Dva, 2005)
*Karlsch, Rainer and Heiko Petermann ''Für und wider "Hitlers Bombe"'' (Waxmann, 2007)
*Krieger, Wolfgang ''The Germans and the Nuclear Question'' German Historical Institute Washington, D.C., Occasional Paper No. 14 (1995)
* Pash, Boris T. ''The Alsos Mission'' (Award, 1969)
* Rhodes, Richard ''The Making of the Atomic Bomb'' (Simon and Schuster, 1986)
*Rife, Patricia, ''Lise Meitner: Ein Leben fuer die Wissenschaft'' (Dusseldorf: Claassen, 1990).
*Rife, Patricia, ''Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age'' (e-Book, Plunkett Lake Press, 2015
*Rose, Paul Lawrence, ''Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture'' (California, 1998). For a critical review of this book, please see .
*Schaaf, Michael ''Heisenberg, Hitler und die Bombe. Gespraeche mit Zeitzeugen.'' (GNT-Verlag, 2018)
*Schumann, Erich ''Wehrmacht und Forschung'' in Richard Donnevert (editor) ''Wehrmacht und Partei'' second expanded edition, (Barth, 1939) 133–151. See also the annotated English translation: ''Document 75. Erich Schumann: Armed Forces and Research 939' in .
*Walker, Mark ''National Socialism and German Physics'', ''Journal of Contemporary Physics'' Volume 24, 63–89 (1989)
* Walker, Mark ''Heisenberg, Goudsmit and the German Atomic Bomb'', ''Physics Today'' Volume 43, Issue 1, 52–60 (1990)
*Walker, Mark ''German Work on Nuclear Weapons'', ''Historia Scientiarum; International Journal for the History of Science Society of Japan'', Volume 14, Number 3, 164–181 (2005)
*Mark Walker ''Otto Hahn: Responsibility and Repression'', ''Physics in Perspective'' Volume 8, Number 2, 116–163 (2006). Mark Walker is Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, New York.
External links
(February 2002) Aaserud, Finn ''Release of documents relating to 1941 Bohr-Heisenberg meeting''
*GlobalSecurity.org
'
(6 February 2002)
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20170608004040/http://alsos.wlu.edu/qsearch.aspx?browse=warfare%2FGerman%20Atomic%20Bomb%20Program (June 2008) Annotated bibliography on the German atomic bomb project from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues]
*Rife, Patricia, ''Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age'' (Birkhauser/Springer Verlag, 1999)
*Walker, Mar
''Nazis & the Bomb''
from Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educati ...
Nova
A nova (plural novae or novas) is a transient astronomical event that causes the sudden appearance of a bright, apparently "new" star (hence the name "nova", which is Latin for "new") that slowly fades over weeks or months. Causes of the dramati ...
episode
''Hitler's Sunken Secret''
(originally aired 8 November 2005).
{{DEFAULTSORT:German Nuclear Weapon Project
World War II weapons of Germany
Nuclear weapons
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...