by Jim Marrs
The following is according to a statement by Lieutenant Colonel…Kenji, adviser to the attaché in Hungary and formerly…in this country, who by chance saw the actual scene immediately after the above took place: “All the men and the horses [within radius of] the explosion of the shells were charred black and even their ammunition had all been detonated. Moreover, it is a fact that the same type of war material was tried out in the Crimea too. At that time the Russians claimed that this was poison gas, and protested that if Germany were ever again to use it, Russia, too, would use poison gas.”…Recently the British authorities warned their people of the possibility that they might undergo attack by German atom-splitting bombs. The American authorities have likewise warned that the American east coast might be the area chosen for a blind attack by some sort of flying bomb….
The Japanese report then goes into a remarkably accurate description of the splitting of the atom, ending with the statement, “[T]he German atom-splitting device is the Neuman disintegrator. Enormous energy is directed into the central part of the atom and this generates an atomic pressure of several tens of thousands of tons per square inch. This device can split the relatively unstable atoms of such elements as uranium. Moreover, it brings into being a store of explosive atomic energy…. That is, a bomb deriving its force from the release of atomic energy.”
Some elements of the Japanese report were obviously in error, such as the confusion over descriptions of a fission versus a fusion bomb and the date of the Kursk offensive, which did not begin until July 5, 1943. Mistakes notwithstanding, it is clear that Japanese intelligence was firmly convinced that the Germans had used a revolutionary type of weapon on the Eastern Front.
But if the Nazis had deployed a tactical nuke or other exotic weapon on the Eastern Front, why would the Soviets have kept such an attack secret? Farrell pointed out that had Nazi Germany used such a weapon, it would most likely have been against the Russians, whom the Nazis considered “subhuman,” in Nazi ideology. Fully one-half of the 50 million casualties of the war occurred in Russia, and several massive explosions, such as the one that destroyed a section of Sevastopol, have never been fully explained. It was announced that a hundred-foot below-ground ammunition bunker was destroyed after being struck by a lucky shot from Dora, a 311/2-inch German railway gun considered the largest in the world.
Such attacks were never reported by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, due to the fear of losing control over a panicked and war-weary Russian population. The use of a super-weapon on the Eastern Front also might explain why more is not known about this issue. Accurate war news from Russia was extremely hard to come by during the war and grew more so during the Cold War. To make public the use of a nuclear or unconventional weapon “would have been a propaganda disaster for Stalin’s government,” noted Farrell. “Faced with an enemy of superior tactical and operational competence in conventional arms, the Red Army often had to resort to threats of execution against its own soldiers just to maintain order and discipline in its ranks and prevent mass desertion. Acknowledgment of the existence and use of such weapons by the mortal enemy of Communist Russia could conceivably have ruined Russian morale and cost Stalin the war, and perhaps even toppled his government.”
IF THE NAZIS had operational atomic weapons, is it possible they were transferred to the United States? Documents exist showing that America’s secret development of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project, could not have produced enough enriched uranium to make a bomb by mid-1945. Since only a plutonium bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, researchers have wondered where America acquired the uranium bombs dropped on Japan less than a month later. Some have speculated that the United States used a Nazi bomb or used Nazi enriched uranium to manufacture its bombs.
The Trinity bomb exploded near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, was a plutonium bomb. Why then would the United States first drop the Little Boy, an untested uranium bomb, on Japan on August 6, 1945? “A rational explanation is [that] ‘Little Boy’ was not tested by the Americans because…[t]he Americans did not need to test it, because its German designers already had,” surmised Farrell. This idea is supported by the statement of German authors Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” maintained that the bomb dropped on Japan was of “German provenance.” Of course, this idea would fly in the face of the long-accepted Allied Legend that Germany simply couldn’t manufacture an atomic bomb by the war’s end.
Where could the Nazis have obtained enriched uranium for such a bomb? One potential source was the secure underground laboratory of Baron Manfred von Ardenne, built in Lichterfelde outside Berlin, which contained a 2-million-volt electrostatic generator and a cyclotron. In 1941, von Ardenne, along with Fritz Houtermans, had calculated the critical mass needed to create U-235. It should be noted that Hitler visited the laboratory toward the end of the war, at a time when he spoke enthusiastically of a new wonder weapon that would turn the tide in Germany’s favor.
Some researchers contend that the Nazi development of a uranium bomb was kept secret because the work was not part of the German military-industrial system but hidden within the German Postal Service. According to Carter Plymton Hydrick, author of a well-documented book Critical Mass: How Nazi Germany Surrendered Enriched Uranium for the United States’ Atomic Bomb, “[A]ll of Ardenne’s facilities…were provided by and ongoing funding made available through, the patronage of one man, Reich minister of posts and a member of the Reich President’s Research Council on Nuclear Affairs, Wilhelm Ohnesorge.”
Reportedly, Hitler once remarked that while his party and military leadership worried about how to win the war, it was his postal minister who brought him the solution.
Farrell explained that the Reichspost was “awash with money, and could therefore have provided some of the massive funding necessary to the [uranium enrichment] project, a true ‘black budget’ operation in every sense.”
Another source may have been a giant synthetic-rubber plant built by I. G. Farben next to Auschwitz, the notorious death camp. The site was chosen for its proximity to transportation hubs, both rail lines and rivers, as well as the nearby supply of slave labor found at the Auschwitz camp. This site probably was also selected with the idea that the Allies would not bomb a concentration camp, a supposition that proved correct. Yet, despite the facts—established during the Nuremberg trials—that more than $2 billion in today’s dollars were spent; that 300,000 slave laborers had been used in both the construction and operation of this plant; and that it had consumed more electricity than Berlin, not one pound of buna, or synthetic rubber, was ever produced.
So, what was produced? “The facility has all of the characteristics of a uranium enrichment plant,” noted Hydrick, adding, “the various components of the German atomic bomb efforts could have been implemented with a high degree of secrecy, even from other high-level Nazis, given Bormann’s close-knit relationships with Ohnesorge; Schmitz, who was chief of I. G. Farben; [Rudolf] Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz; and Heinrich Mueller, who, among his many other duties as head of the Gestapo, oversaw the supplying of forced laborers to Auschwitz.”
A theory has been offered that, late in the war, certain Nazis arranged the transfer of enriched uranium to the United States in exchange for immunity from prosecution. At the heart of this transfer theory lies the saga of a Nazi submarine—the U-234.
Unterseeboot-234 was originally designed as a mine-layer but was converted to a cargo carrier prior to its only mission into enemy waters: the last German shipment to its ally, Japan. It sailed from Kiel in March 1945, with a most unusual cargo consisting of several high-level German officials, including Dr. Heinz Schlicke, the inventor of fuses for atomic bombs, and two Japanese officers—Air Force Colonel Genzo Shosi and Navy Captain Hideo Tomonaga. Also listed on the boat’s manifest of 240 metric tons of cargo were two dismantled ME-262 jet fighters, ten gold-lined cylinders containing 560 kilograms of uranium ox
ide, wooden barrels of “water,” and infrared proximity fuses.
On May 14, 1945, six days after the German surrender, the U-234 was intercepted by the USS Sutton and taken into captivity. Oddly enough, the sub had been overflown several times by Allied aircraft but never fired upon. The circumstances implied a preplanned meeting and surrender. Here the mystery began. Who issued the orders for this enemy sub to surrender, and why to the Americans? Upon arrival at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, it appeared that some of the boat’s cargo was missing.
The two Japanese officers, after learning that the ship’s captain planned to surrender, had committed suicide and were buried at sea with full honors. But, suspiciously, the two ME-262s were missing, as well as the uranium oxide. In fact, when the U.S. Navy prepared its own manifest for the U-234, there was no accounting for seventy tons of cargo.
Dr. Velma Hunt, a Colorado environmental scientist, said she uncovered information that the U-boat made a secret stop at South Portland, Maine, sometime between May 14 and May 17, 1945, where the cargo in question could have been unloaded. There has been controversy as to whether this uranium had been enriched enough for use as a weapon.
Cook noted that the gold-lined cylinders indicated the uranium was emitting gamma radiation, which meant the normally harmless uranium oxide had been brought to enrichment through the use of a working nuclear reactor. “And yet, officially, there had been no nuclear reactor in Germany capable of fulfilling this task,” wrote Cook. “[At least] not in Speer’s orbit of operations.”
Farrell further explains, “The use of gold-lined cylinders is explainable by the fact that uranium, a highly corrosive metal, is easily contaminated if it comes into contact with other unstable elements. Gold, whose radioactive shielding properties are as great as lead, is also, unlike lead, a highly pure and stable element, and is therefore the element of choice when storing or shipping highly enriched and pure uranium for long periods of time, such as a voyage. Thus, the uranium oxide on board the U-234 was highly enriched uranium, and most likely, highly enriched U-235, the last stage, perhaps, before being reduced to weapons grade or to metalicization for a bomb (if it was already in weapons grade purity) [emphasis in the original].”
Adding weight to Farrell’s deduction is an anecdote regarding the German crew of the U-234. Some crew members were amused when they saw the Japanese officers bring on board cargo marked “U-235.” They apparently thought their Japanese guests couldn’t even get the number of the boat correct. Some now believe the labels indicated the presence of uranium 235, the only isotope found in nature that has the ability to cause an expanding fission chain reaction—in other words, the element needed for a uranium fission bomb. Uranium that has undergone an extraction process to boost its U-235 proportion is known as enriched uranium.
Wolfgang Hirschfeld, radioman on the U-234, stated the submarine’s orders were “only to sail on the orders of the highest level. Fuehrer HQ.” He also revealed after the war that crew members believed Japan had succeeded in testing an atomic weapon before their departure from Germany in March 1945. The U-234 met an inglorious end in November 1947, when it was used as a torpedo target and sunk off Cape Cod.
Hydrick published copies of documents from the National Archives to show a connection between the Manhattan Project and the U-234. One such document is a secret cable from the commander of naval operations directing that a three-man party take possession of the sub’s cargo. In addition to two naval officers was the name of Major John E. Vance with the Army Corps of Engineers, the department of the army under which the Manhattan Project operated.
A few days after the visit by Vance, a manifest of the cargo indicated the uranium was no longer in navy possession. Furthermore, telephone transcripts between Manhattan intelligence officers about a week later stated a captured shipment of uranium powder was being tested by a person identified only as “Vance.” “That there could have been another ‘Vance’ who was working with uranium powder—especially ‘captured’ uranium powder—is improbable,” noted Hydrick.
But author Henry Stevens found an even more disturbing cover-up. After receiving a statement from the National Archives denying that any canisters containing fissionable material was onboard the U-234, Stevens, recalling that the submarine had surrendered to the USS Sutton, wrote to the Naval Historical Center at the Washington Navy Yard requesting a cargo manifest from the U-234 in the files of the Sutton. For a $5 microfiche charge, Stevens received the manifest that was identical to the one from the National Archives except that the uranium oxide canisters were listed. This discrepancy in the manifests can only be explained by someone altering the documents.
A plutonium bomb, such as the one Manhattan scientists were developing, required a critical mass to be achieved within 1/3000th of a second, a speed far exceeding the capabilities of fuses available at that time. According to Farrell, there is evidence to support the idea that the necessary fuses were obtained from U-234 passenger Dr. Schlicke. A message from the chief of Naval Operations to the authorities in Portsmouth, where the U-234 was taken after its surrender, indicated that Dr. Schlicke along with his fuses were to be taken to Washington accompanied by naval officers. Once there, the doctor was scheduled to present a lecture on his fuses in the presence of a “Mr. Alvarez,” apparently meaning Dr. Luis Walter Alvarez, the man who is credited with producing fuses for the plutonium bomb. Alvarez and his student Lawrence Johnson are credited with designing the exploding-bridgewire detonators for the spherical implosives used in the Trinity bomb test as well as the Nagasaki bomb.
On March 3, 1945, President Roosevelt received an ominous memo from Senator James F. Byrnes, a Democrat from South Carolina and a longtime confidant to the president. This “Memorandum for the President” stated, “I understand that the expenditures for the Manhattan Project are approaching 2 billion dollars with no definite assurance yet of production…. Even eminent scientists may continue a project rather than concede its failure.” Byrnes, who went on to become a secretary of state and a Supreme Court justice, was voicing the concern of many that the atom bomb project was foundering and might even prove a failure. Byrnes may have been aware of a letter dated December 28, 1944, in which Eric Jette, chief metallurgist at Los Alamos, expressed reservations over the lack of sufficient amounts of uranium for the atomic bomb. He wrote, “A study of the shipment of [weapons grade uranium] for the past three months shows the following…: At present rate we will have 10 kilos by February 7 and 15 kilos about May 1.” According to Hydrick, Edward Hammel, a metallurgist who worked at Los Alamos, where enriched uranium was made into material for the atomic bomb, reported that very little enriched uranium was received there until less than a month before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, carried 64.15 kilograms of enriched uranium, virtually the entire quantity that could have been produced since mid-1944 by the enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, even working around the clock. One explanation for the lack of enriched uranium was that some of this fissionable material had been used to produce plutonium in Enrico Fermi’s breeder reactors at Hanford, Washington.
The mounting pressure on Manhattan Project directors to produce a bomb before the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands must have been terrific. If the submarine’s cargo did indeed include U-235 and Dr. Schlicke’s fuses, its acquisition by the United States solved two pressing problems of the Manhattan atomic bomb project—a lack of sufficient amounts of uranium and adequate fuses. The American bomb-makers may have been greatly relieved that the two major problems facing the Manhattan Project were solved with the surrender of the U-234. “The fact that U-234 arrived on American soil carrying 560 kilograms of uranium that was enriched and went on to be used in the bombs that were dropped on Japan can scarcely be argued any longer except by those who refuse to consider the evidence,” concluded Hydrick. While it may remain a controversy whether the acquisition of the U-234 was a fortuitous capture or the planned tran
sfer of technology from Germany to the United States, the evidence strongly indicates the latter.
If additional uranium was obtained from the U-234, this would have provided more than could ever have been produced by the Manhattan Project, and the equivalent of about eight Hiroshima bombs. It also means the German nuclear program was much further advanced than believed by conventional historians. In late July 1945, atomic bomb components—and perhaps additional German uranium bombs—were delivered to Tinian Island in the Pacific following a secret and rushed voyage from California by the USS Indianapolis. After delivering its deadly cargo, this Portland-class heavy cruiser suffered the largest single at-sea loss of life in U.S. naval history and became the last American ship sunk in World War II after being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the Philippines.
Farrell voiced the suspicion that the Indianapolis may have delivered much more than America’s atomic bomb—it may have carried a German bomb in addition to its cargo of uranium and fuses. He was supported by Stevens, who wrote that the “unexploded German atomic bombs fell into the hands of the Americans at the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, two months before the ‘first’ explosion of an atomic weapon in the New Mexico desert. What a present for the Americans! All they did was to put new tail fins on the bombs, repaint them, and drop them on Japan. Naturally, the American scientists involved with the Manhattan Project were given credit.”
But, if the Nazis had developed a working atomic bomb, why was it not used as Allied armies closed in on Germany? One answer seems to be that they did not have a reliable delivery system in place. The Nazis’ V-3, a smooth-bore 150-mm gun dubbed the Centipede, designed to launch large-finned shells into London, along with its multistage A-10 rocket, was still undependable. Witkowski voiced his suspicions that the fatal flight of Lieutenant Joseph Kennedy, older brother to the future president, might have been an ill-fated attempt to destroy the V-3 complex at Mimoyecques, France. The giant airfield in Norway, home to the massive six-engine bombers, had not yet been completed.
