Hitler's Terror Weapons (13 page)

The Uranium Bomb

The only publication from an authoritative source where the actual building of a German uranium bomb is mentioned specifically is Henry Picker's
Hitlers Tischgespräche,
which is based on stenographic notes taken down at mealtimes at the Führer's HQ between 1941 and 1944.

The daily routine at Führer HQ
Wolfsschanze
was described by Hitler's Luftwaffe ADC Nicolaus von Below in his memoir
Als Hitlers Adjutant 1937-1945.
⁷⁹
Hitler ate punctually at two in the afternoon and at seven thirty. If no special visitors were expected, he would take his time at table, often up to two hours. In these several years at mealtimes he would speak freely on many subjects, maybe just seizing on a random theme. The atmosphere at table was free and unforced. Conversation was spontaneous and there was no kind of compulsion about what could be discussed. On subjects of general interest, when Hitler contributed his opinion, silence would be maintained. It might occur occasionally that he held the floor for up to an hour, but this was the exception rather than the rule.

The major part of these monologues was taken down in shorthand by a National Socialist lawyer, Heinrich Heim. When Heim decided to return to Munich in the spring of 1942, the Gauleiters were canvassed to suggest a candidate to fill the vacancy. Among the names supplied was that of a senior privy councillor, Dr Henry Picker. The Party Chancellors drew up a short list of names and left it to Hitler to make the decision. Senator Henry Picker had been active for the NSDAP in Wilhelmshaven and in 1929 had arranged for Hitler to meet representatives of the Navy and naval dockyard. On his visits to the port Hitler was made welcome on numerous occasions as a guest in the Picker household and his selection of Picker was therefore much of a formality.

Picker's position at Führer HQ was dissimilar to that of Heim in that he had no standing as a Party official or lawyer but was only Martin Bormann's adjutant. One of his standing duties was to take a note of Hitler's conversations during the official meals, a task performed for the information of Bormann who was thereby enabled to keep abreast of developments in Hitler's thinking more or less as it cropped up.

The notebooks were released in 1951 by German Bundespresident Theodor Heuss and the shorthand jottings used as the basis for the volumes of
Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier
which have been published in many editions subsequently. All three of Hitler's military adjutants of the time authenticated the texts, affirming that they truly and accurately reflect the substance of Hitler's conversations at table.

Picker was in almost permanent contact with Hitler's Chief ADC, SS-Obergruppenführer Julius Schaub (1898-1968), who had been a Party member from its beginnings. A willing and devoted manservant, Schaub was also Hitler's chauffeur and the only member of the Führer's entourage who belonged to the
Alte Kämpfer.
He was the guardian of nearly all Hitler's secrets.

There are numerous references to
Uraniumbomben
in Dr Picker's testimony, but these were not atom bombs as such, which physicists and politicians knew by the term
Uranbomben.
Hitler had no wish for a fullblown nuclear explosion and so we must be clear that
Uraniumbomben
were not atom bombs but something else.

Picker reported Schaub as saying that the
Uraniumbomben
were the fearsome weapons
(die fürchterlichen Waffen)
on which Hitler was actually basing his strategy and his hopes. Picker described where the
Uraniumbomben
were developed and mentioned the unprecedented security measures in force there:

“Dr Ohnesorge's
Reichspost-Forschungsanstalt
in Berlin Lichterfelde where - in parallel with an unsuccessful professorial team - a prototype of the German
Uraniumbombe
was in fact developed up to the stage of construction, received visits from Hitler during his periods of residence in Berlin, during which Dr Ohnesorge never once permitted Hitler's military entourage to view the research establishment. Ohnesorge, born in 1872, insisted on the greatest secrecy. Amongst co-workers in the Reich Research Institute were such authorities as the atom physicist Baron Manfred von Ardenne.”

The phrase
in parallel with an unsuccessful professorial team
hints at a connection between Professor Heisenberg's failed Leipzig experiment in 1942 and what Houtermans was now attempting at Lichterfelde. Precisely as at Leipzig, or so we may be permitted to assume, the underground bunker below Manfred von Ardenne's property was a laboratory for the production of plutonium-enriched irradiated uranium powder. A number of aluminium spheres containing the powder, heavy water and a
Präparat,
surrounded by an array of measuring instruments, sat immersed in their respective tubs of ordinary water for a period of months breeding plutonium and the radioactive products of fission. So secret was the laboratory work at Jungfernstieg 19, Lichterfelde-Ost, that even Hitler's personal SS-bodyguard could not be permitted to see anything of what went on there. Presumably when Hitler arrived he would be escorted inside by Ohnesorge and von Ardenne leaving the 3-axled Mercedes charabanc with Schaub and the
SS-Führerbegleit
in the driveway. After a conversation in the Baron's pleasant reception room with its heavy curtains and suits of armour, Hitler would descend into the bunker to inform himself of how it was all coming along. Here he would be welcomed by Professor Houtermans and probably Dr Siegfried Flügge, who was with von Ardenne at material times and who refused to sign the Farm Hall declaration.

Henry Picker copied into his notebook the very words spoken by Hitler. The target of the
Uraniumbomben
was to be the civilian population of the United States. The means of delivery was to be the A9/10 intercontinental rocket. According to Hitler's personal ADC Julius Schaub, who had been told about the
Uraniumbombe
by SS-colleagues at the place where it was assembled, it was
in der Grösse eines kleinen Kürbis,
“the size of a small gourd”. Hitler was confident that the arrival of the first few
Uraniumbomben
on New York would swiftly render the American President “ready for peace” -
(friedensbereit zu schiessen).

Rumours of a Miracle Weapon Begin to Circulate

The hope inspired by the development of Heisenberg's V-2 bomb can be seen from the growth of rumours about a miracle weapon beginning in the late summer of 1943. Coinciding with the termination of von Ardenne's involvement in the project, the breeding of the radioactive material, the month of July 1943 was marked by the first verbal salvoes opening the V-weapons campaign, and SS-originated rumours soon began to circulate about new bombs “built on the atomic principle” of which twelve would suffice to destroy one million inhabitants of a city. In visits to the Ruhr and Rhineland, Goebbels is alleged to have said a good deal more on the subject of ‘atomic type' weapons than he ever allowed to appear in print. On 23 February 1944, at a confidential meeting of all Gauleiters, Reichsminister Goebbels promised,

“Retribution is at hand. It will take a form hitherto unknown in warfare, a form the enemy, we hope, will find impossible to bear.”

The use of monstrous explosives spraying radioactivity far and wide was previously unknown in warfare, whereas the use of rockets and bombs was not. Goebbels' dark references were echoed by Hitler himself in a speech to troops reported in the RMfVP (Reich Propaganda Ministry) circular
Tdtigkeitsbericht
of 25 September 1944 when he said,

“God forgive me if I have to turn to that terrible weapon to end the conflict.”

He could not have meant the V-1 and V-2, since by then both had been used against Britain, and the V-3 High Pressure Pump was not only still undergoing research but was also out of range. Therefore he must have meant the V-4.

From Lichterfelde-Ost the material for V-4 was passed to the SS scientists with instructions for manufacture. Schaub told Picker that the
Uraniumbomben
were being produced in a “subterranean SS factory in the South Harz mountains with a force of 30,000 workers”
(werden in einem unterirdischen SS-Werk im Südharz mit einer Produktionskapazitdt von 30,000 Arbeitskrdften hergestellt.)
Professor Seuffert's SS laboratory was located in an underground section of the Ohrdruf complex in the southern Harz and one presumes this was where Schaub must have meant.

Although the V-2 was conceived as a long-range weapon for use from mobile launch sites, in the summer of 1943 a huge assembly and storage bunker with a concrete roof seven metres thick was begun at Watten south-west of Dunkirk. On 27 August and 8 September 1943 it was hit by 484 heavy bombs and destroyed. A massive new bunker complex extending over five hectares at Wizernes near St Omer survived all efforts to destroy it and was operational until Allied forces overran the area in 1944.

The British rocket scientist Philip Henshall stated that these monumental bunkers were capable of launching not only the V-2 but all projected developments including the gigantic A9/10 two-stage intercontinental rocket which was 26 metres in length and nine metres wide across the tail assembly.

Measurements proved that the working heights inside each silo could accommodate the projected A9/10 rocket minus its warhead. He considered that Watten was completely self-contained and impregnable from the exterior by virtue of its massive armoured doors, while at both locations the 23-feet-thick lid forming the dome to the structures could not be penetrated by any known bomb even hitting directly. Since the greater part of the concrete constructions were bunkers and silos, none of which were necessary for launching V-2 rockets, the actual purpose must have been to store nuclear materials and house the A9/10 “New Yorker”.

In November 1944, according to Otto Skorzeny, all the talk was of

“a dreadful weapon based on artificially bred radioactivity”.
⁸⁰

Such talk stemmed from among his own SS colleagues. But it was just talk. The budgetary restrictions, the diversification and experimentation into other interesting rockets and guided missiles, the invasion of Normandy and the time required to mass-produce a huge stock of the V-4 atomic explosives ensured that nothing would come of the weapon for America on which Hitler was pinning all his hopes. By the time they were finally ready even London was out of range.

Covering Over the Traces

On 1 August 1943, according to his autobiography, von Ardenne at last obtained vacant possession of the underground bunker complex and proceeded to remove most of his laboratory into it, thus terminating his association with the ‘atomic' project.

Von Ardenne does not state how Professor Houtermans occupied his time at the laboratory between August 1941 and August 1944. Whilst von Ardenne and his co-workers produced a total of forty scientific papers in that period, Houtermans published only his August 1941 report, amended in 1944, and a brief work on separation in ultracentrifuges in February 1942.

Houtermans told the Swiss scientific author Robert Jungk
⁸¹
that he was in no position to refuse a task set him by Professor von Ardenne. He stated that, although he knew that plutonium could be bred in a nuclear reactor, he “did not report on that aspect of his work” since he had not wished to alert the authorities to the possibility of making atom bombs. He also stated that his 1941 thesis had been placed in a safe at Post Office Headquarters by Dr Otterbein so that there should be no publication of his studies in the
Heereswaffenamt
secret dossiers, and in that safe it had safely remained until 1944.

This was not true. He had reported on U
²³⁹
, known today as plutonium, in one and a half closely typed pages, and, as his 1944 amendment to the report clarifies, he had intended for the report to remain secret, but, as it had been circulated, he now wanted to add some notes to it.

Hitler once said that he would tell any lie for Germany, but never for himself. Perhaps that is the criterion we should use to judge kindly the scientists and military men who manufactured the bogus history of the failed German atomic project. Groves and Houtermans definitely did lie about it after the war: Goudsmit insinuated that Heisenberg was lying: despite what British Intelligence and Senator Picker might say, nothing ever went on at Baron von Ardenne's Institute, or so he maintained, unless you meant honest-to-goodness work on identifying potato bacilli and microscopic radioactive tracers; nor, for that matter, did Hitler ever visit, according to von Ardenne's published diaries, from which may be inferred either that von Ardenne was lying or Hitler's SS-valet Julius Schaub was lying. And von Below, who was not only Hitler's Luftwaffe ADC but also Speer's ADC to Hitler at FHQ, who swore a certificate that Henry Picker's shorthand diaries were, as far as he knew, verbatim and true, ultimately knew nothing whatever about anything which one might call an
Uraniumbombe,
although as Hitler's Luftwaffe ADC he, of all people, would have known about it. All this dishonesty was and is directed at misleading the public, and even in Houtermans' case one feels aggrieved that ultimately he wasn't forthright.

In May 1940, as a Jewish communist, Houtermans was proscribed, under the Nazi racial and political laws, from working in any State enterprise and was subject to Gestapo supervision, often a slippery path to extinction. His scientific prowess saved him. By 1944, however, Professor Houtermans was employed at the Reich Bureau of Standards, a civil service institution, which meant that he had ceased to be classified as Jewish. Later he was entrusted with an intelligence gathering mission to the Soviet Union which meant effectively that he had done a complete
volte-face
as regards Communism. In fact, not only was he no longer a Jewish Communist, he was attached to the SS Sicherheitsdienst, for after 1942 all German agents were operated by Amt VI at the SS-RSHA
⁸²
under Walter Schellenberg.