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The German nuclear energy project was an endeavor by scientists during World War II in Nazi Germany to develop nuclear energy for practical use, led by the physicist Werner Heisenberg. The intentions of the project are a matter of historical controversy, centering on whether or not the scientists involved were attempting to built an atomic bomb for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. The project was not a success by any measure.
The threat of a Nazi atomic bomb was one of the main reasons the Allied nuclear weapons effort—the Manhattan Project—began in the first place, as much of the original work on nuclear fission had been completed by German scientists. However, the Nazi government did not finance a full crash program to develop weapons, as they estimated it could not be completed in time for use in the war. In 1945, a U.S. investigation—Project ALSOS—determined that German scientists had only almost reached the point that Allied scientists had reached in 1942, the creation of a sustained nuclear chain reaction, a crucial step for creating a nuclear reactor (which in turn could be used for either peaceful purposes, or for creating plutonium, needed for nuclear weapons). There has been a historical debate, however, as to whether the German scientists purposefully sabotaged the project by under-representing their chances at success, or whether their estimates were based in either error or inadequacy.
After the war, a number of German scientists including Heisenberg, Otto Hahn (who had co-discovered nuclear fission), and Max von Laue (an ardent anti-Nazi), were taken captive by Allied troups and put under secret watch at Farm Hall, England, as part of Operation Epsilon. Their conversations were recorded as Allied analysts attempted to discover the extent of German knowledge about nuclear weapons. The results were inconclusive, but they allowed them to hear the results of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which sent Hahn into a near-suicidal despair. By the next morning, Heisenberg claimed to have worked out exactly how the American atomic bomb must have worked, judging from reports of the damage and explosive size, and gave a lecture to the rest of the captive scientists on the effort.
There have been numerous other cited factors for the failure of the German program. One is that the repressive policies under Hitler encouraged many top scientists to flee Europe, including many who worked on the Allied project (Heisenberg himself was a target of party propaganda for some time during the Deutsche Physik movement). Another, put forth by ALSOS scientific head Samuel Goudsmit, was that the stifling, utilitarian political atmosphere adversely affected the quality of the science done. Another is that the German homeland was nowhere as secure from air attack as was the USA, whose own bomb project resulted in the construction of many massive centralized factories and production facilities which would have been prime targets for Allied bombing raids.
See also
Further reading
- Jeremy Bernstein and David Cassidy, Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (2001).
- Charles Frank, ed. Operation Epsilon: the Farm Hall transcripts (1993).
- Samuel Goudsmit, ALSOS: The failure of German science (1947).
- David Irving, Virus House, (1967).
- Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (Knopf, 1993).
- Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
- Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939-1949 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
- Mark Walker, Nazi science: Myth, truth, and the German atomic bomb (New York: Plenum Press, 1995).
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