Hitlers Bomb. Italian witness publishes book.
- From: "The Enlightenment" <bernxard@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 7 Oct 2005 06:29:23 -0700
Its the story that won't go away.
******************************
A book published in Italy today is set to reignite a smouldering
controversy over how close the Nazis came to manufacturing a nuclear
device in the closing stages of the second world war.
The 88 year-old author, Luigi Romersa, is the last known witness to
what he and some historians believe was the experimental detonation of
a rudimentary weapon on an island in the Baltic in 1944.
Hitler's nuclear programme has become a subject of intense dispute in
recent months, particularly in Germany. An independent historian,
Rainer Karlsch, met with a barrage of hostility when he published a
study containing evidence that the Nazis had got much further than
previously believed.
Mr Romersa, a supporter of Mr Karlsch's thesis, lives today in an
elegant flat in the Parioli district of Rome. His study walls are
covered with photographs from a career during which he interviewed many
of the major figures of the 20th century, from Chiang Kai-shek to
Lyndon Johnson. Though he suffers from some ill-health these days, he
is still lucid and articulate. He told the Guardian how, in September
1944, Italy's wartime dictator, Benito Mussolini, had summoned him to
the town of Salo to entrust him with a special mission. Mussolini was
then leader of the Nazi-installed government of northern Italy and Mr
Romersa was a 27 year-old war correspondent for Corriere della Sera.
Mr Romersa said that when Mussolini had met Hitler earlier in the
conflict, the Nazi dictator had alluded to Germany's development of
weapons capable of reversing the course of the war. "Mussolini said to
me: 'I want to know more about these weapons. I asked Hitler but he was
unforthcoming'."
Mussolini provided him with letters of introduction to both Josef
Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, and Hitler himself. After meeting
both men in Germany, he was shown around the Nazis' top-secret weapons
plant at Peenemünde and then, on the morning of October 12 1944, taken
to what is now the holiday island of Rügen, just off the German coast,
where he watched the detonation of what his hosts called a
"disintegration bomb".
"They took me to a concrete bunker with an aperture of exceptionally
thick glass. At a certain moment, the news came through that detonation
was imminent," he said. "There was a slight tremor in the bunker; a
sudden, blinding flash, and then a thick cloud of smoke. It took the
shape of a column and then that of a big flower.
"The officials there told me we had to remain in the bunker for several
hours because of the effects of the bomb. When we eventually left, they
made us put on a sort of coat and trousers which seemed to me to be
made of asbestos and we went to the scene of the explosion, which was
about one and a half kilometres away.
"The effects were tragic. The trees around had been turned to carbon.
No leaves. Nothing alive. There were some animals - sheep - in the area
and they too had been burnt to cinders."
On his return to Italy, Mr Romersa briefed Mussolini on his visit. In
the 1950s, he published a fuller account of his experiences in the
magazine Oggi. But, he said, "everyone said I was mad".
By then, it was universally accepted that Hitler's scientists had been
years away from testing a nuclear device. Allied interrogators who
questioned the German researchers concluded that there were vast gaps
in their understanding of nuclear fission. In any case, the US had
needed 125,000 people to develop the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in 1945, whereas Germany's programme involved no more than
a few dozen physicists, led by the Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg.
But documents published recently by Mr Karlsch and an American scholar,
Mark Walker of Union College, Schenectady, have punctured this
consensus. Russian archives have shown that one of the German
scientists lodged a patent claim
for a plutonium bomb as early as 1941 and, in June, the two historians
published an article in the British monthly, Physics World, that
included what they claimed was the first diagram of one of the bombs
Hitler's scientists were trying to build - a device that exploited both
fission and fusion.
The true novelty of Mr Karlsch's research, though, is to have turned
the spotlight off Heisenberg and onto a competing project run by one
Kurt Diebner. A Nazi since 1939, Diebner had his own group at Gottow
near Berlin.
Mr Karlsch found evidence to show that, sponsored by Walther Gerlach of
the Reich Research Council, this group abandoned its quest for an
A-bomb to concentrate on a weapon made of conventional high explosives
packed around a
nuclear core. "It was a tactical battlefield weapon they probably
wanted to use against the approaching Soviet armies," said Professor
Walker.
Could Mr Romersa have seen the detonation of an early prototype? He is
not the only person to have claimed to have witnessed similar
explosions. Former East German archives have produced this account by
Cläre Werner: on the evening of March 3 1945, she claimed, she was
near the town of Ohrdruf when she saw a "big, slim column" rise into
the air, "so bright that one could have read a newspaper".
Ohrdruf had a concentration camp, part of the Buchenwald complex. Heinz
Wachsmut, who worked for a local excavating company, told officials
that the day after Ms Werner claimed to have seen an explosion he was
ordered to help the SS build wooden platforms for the cremation of the
corpses of prisoners. He said their bodies were covered with horrific
burns.
After the war, the scientists engaged in the Nazi project were
interned. Gerlach, whose research in other fields won him praise from
the likes of Albert Einstein, returned to academic life and died a
revered figure. Diebner eventually got a job in West Germany's defence
ministry. Neither man ever alluded to their work on what would have
been the world's first tactical nuclear weapon.
"Diebner and Gerlach said nothing about this," said Prof Walker. "They
took it to their graves."
******
NB: Enlightenments comments. Germany was not allowed to build
aircraft or aircraft engines untill well after 1955 at all. It was the
same with Atomic power. It appears Germany's Chancellor Konrad
Adenaouer wanted to suppress any discusions of German atomic bombs and
the German atomic scientists knew that any German atomic program might
be shut down due to Allied or Soviet fears. Everyone wanted to get on
with it.
.
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