OK, where ? As in, what are the sources for these rather definitive statements ?
Happy to oblige Lauge. Glad to come across someone willing to do some real reading and research...
I could suggest you read a whole library of books but best you start with just four or five.
Firstly there was no Nazi H-bomb. Some seem to confused by the use of Plutonium in H-bombs to suggest that the Nazis had an H-bomb. I have never found any such evidence or suggestions.
To create an H-bomb you first need to create a Plutonium A-bomb and the Nazis were never close to producing sufficient Plutonium. To do so would require three years of fission in a Heavy water reactor with precisely correct ratios of U235 and U238. If you get these ratios wrong you simply produce useless Plutonium 240 which is why North Korea failed to create it’s own A-bomb recently.
After three years of fission the Nazis then would have required two years to cool the spent fuel rods, before chemical separation of Plutonium from other radionuclides. The Nazis for one thing lacked the time to harvest Plutonium even had they built a working heavy water reactor.
They were however a lot nearer to producing a Uranium A-bomb from centrifuge enriched bomb grade Uranium and this is the untold story of WW2.
With the interest of the Heereswaffenamt (Army Ordnance Office), or HWA, Riehl, and his colleague Günter Wirths, set up an industrial-scale production of high-purity uranium oxide at the Auergesellschaft plant in Oranienburg. Adding to the capabilities in the final stages of metallic uranium production were the strength’s of the Degussa corporation’s capabilities in metals production.
The Auer Oranienburg plant provided the uranium sheets and cubes for the Uranmaschine (uranium machine, i.e., nuclear reactor) experiments conducted at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft’s Institut für Physik (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics) and the Versuchsstelle (testing station) of the Heereswaffenamt (Army Ordnance Office) in Gottow, under the German nuclear energy project Uranverein.
The G-1 experiment performed at the HWA testing station, under the direction of Kurt Diebner, had lattices of 6,800 uranium oxide cubes (about 25 tons), in the nuclear moderator paraffin.
If you read David Irving’s meticulously researched book “The Virus House” you will discover that Dr Erich Bagge had invented and demonstrated a gaseous uranium centrifuge at Kiel Unavernin in 1942. During 1943 Dr Paul Harteck was tasked with creating a Uranium Enrichment laboratory in Hamburg to develop the so called Harteck process. This laboratory was destroyed by days of Allied bombing in July 1943.
A new HWA enrichment laboratory was created at Kummersdorf and a production facility at Freiberg code named Volmer’s Furniture factory. Degaussa received a contract from the Nazi Government for industrial scale production of uranium centrifuges which was ten times greater than the entire budget for Hiesenberg’s nuclear research at Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft “KWA”. This Freiberg plant was destroyed by Allied bombing.
The new HWA uranium enrichment laboratory was shifted to Austria, code named Angora Farm. From July 1944 the SS took over Harteck’s work and shifted the centrifuges to an underground mine complex in Czechoslovakia. Ironically the uranium itself was being mined in Czechoslovakia at Jac-y-mov.
The ore was sent from Jac-y-mov to Oranienberg for refining to un-enriched yellow cake Uranium oxide. If sceptics think that Nazi germany had no significant Uranium reserves then perhaps they should explain why there was any need to bomb Oranienberg at the end of the war ?
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, confirmed that the Auergesellschaft Oranienburg plant was involved in the production of uranium and thorium metals.
Since the Oranienberg plant was to be in the future Soviet zone of occupation and the Russian troops would get there before the Allies, General Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project, recommended to General George Marshall that the plant be destroyed by aerial bombardment, in order to deny its uranium production equipment to the Russians. On 15 March 1945, 612 B-17 Flying Fortress bombers of the Eighth Air Force dropped 1,506 tons of high-explosive and 178 tons of incendiary bombs on the plant.
Nikolaus Riehl visited the site with the Russians and said that the facility was mostly destroyed. Riehl also recalled long after the war that the Russians knew precisely why the Americans had bombed the facility – the attack had been directed at them rather than the Germans.
When a Soviet search team arrived at the Auergesellschaft facility in Oranienburg, they had, however, found nearly 100 tons of fairly pure uranium oxide. The Soviet Union took this uranium as reparations, which amounted to between 25% and 40% of the uranium taken from Germany and Czechoslovakia at the end of the war. Khariton said the uranium found there saved the Soviet Union a year on its atomic bomb project
These are some sources to corroborate what I say:
Pavel V. Oleynikov, author of German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project, The Nonproliferation Review Volume 7, Number 2, pages 1 – 30 , published 2000. See page 9. Oleynikov has been a group leader at the Institute of Technical Physics of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center in Snezhinsk (Chelyabinsk-70).
Nikolaus Riehl and Frederick Seitz who co-authored “Stalin’s Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb” (American Chemical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundations, published 1996) ISBN 0-8412-3310-1
Norman M. Naimark, “The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949” (Belknap, published 1995) see page 236.
David Holloway, “Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956” (Yale, published 1994) ISBN 0-300-06056-4, see page 111
