@@ Germany tested A-bomb - Hitler almost nuked the filthy British @@
- From: "Arash" <A7000@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 10:30:48 -0400
Guardian UK
September 30, 2005
Eyewitness - Germans Tested A-Bomb In October, 1944
Author fuels row over Hitler's bomb
Germany 'came close to nuclear device in 1944'
Last living witness saw Baltic test explosion
By John Hooper
Rome -- 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.
Luigi Romersa, a supporter of Rainer 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 Luigi Romersa was a 27 year-old war correspondent for Corriere della Sera
(http://www.corriere.it).
Luigi 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, Luigi 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 U.S. 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 Rainer 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 Rainer Karlsch's research, though, is to have turned the
spotlight off Werner Heisenberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg) and
onto a competing project run by one Kurt Diebner
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Diebner).
A Nazi since 1939, Kurt Diebner (http://www.mbe.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/rivals.htm)
had his own group at Gottow near Berlin. Rainer Karlsch found evidence to show that,
sponsored by Walther Gerlach
(http://www.aip.org/history/esva/catalog/esva/Gerlach_Walther.html) 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 Luigi 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 Cläre 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. Walther
Gerlach, whose research in other fields won him praise from the likes of Albert
Einstein, returned to academic life and died a revered figure. Kurt 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.
"Kurt Diebner and Walther Gerlach said nothing about this", said Professor Walker.
"They took it to their graves".
* "Le armi segrete di Hitler", by Luigi Romersa, is published by Ugo Mursia Editore
(http://www.mursia.com/testimonianze/armisegretehitler.html).
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1581812,00.html
Did Hitler Have the Bomb?
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1518173,00.html
New light on Hitler's bomb
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/18/6/3
How Close Was Hitler to the A-Bomb?
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,346293,00.html
German nuclear energy project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_energy_project
Hitler's Sunken Secret
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/hydro
The Virus House: history of Hitler's atomic bomb
http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/VirusHouse/VH.zip (2MB)
Getting even with Heisenberg
http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/VirusHouse/Heisenberg_review.zip (200kb)
Interview with Werner Heisenberg on Nuclear Energy Development in Germany
http://www.haigerloch.de/stadt/atomkeller/heisenberg.html
Declassified files reopen "Nazi bomb" debate
Did leading German physicists choose not to "know" how to build an A-bomb?
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=sep92goldberg
Atom Museum at Haigerloch
http://www.haigerloch.de/stadt/atomkeller.html
Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
http://alsos.wlu.edu/default.aspx
Nuclear Files
http://www.nuclearfiles.org
Atomic Archive
http://www.atomicarchive.com
.
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