Hitler's Terror Weapons

by Brooks, Geoffrey

  Albert Speer wrote disapprovingly72 about the unaccountable optimism in Hitler’s demeanour whenever the subject of nuclear energy came under discussion in the early summer of 1942, and the Führer’s disposition appeared to Speer to have the closest possible connection with a clique consisting of the Postmaster-General, Ohnesorge, Goebbels and Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, who were all apparently party to some big secret.

  Speer concluded that, since Hitler spurned responsible sources of information and preferred to rely instead on having knowledge peddled to him by these amateurs, it all went to prove not only Hitler’s partiality for dabbling, but also how little he understood of the scientific principles involved.

  Hitler’s Reichspost handled all telecommunications as well as the mails and had a large budget for research. Part of this was allocated to an atomic development programme for which the Postmaster-General, Wilhelm Ohnesorge, had a particular interest. The Post Office was almost completely excluded from the proceedings of the official physics community in Germany, with whom few relations were maintained beyond the odd house-call, and it was in this atmosphere of secrecy that the atomic project was enabled to flourish.

  Wilhelm Ohnesorge (1872-1962) had doctorates in mathematics and physics but pursued a career in telecommunications. One of his patents, the four-wire trunking switchgear, found worldwide application. During the First World War he served at the Kaiser’s General HQ as Chief of Telegraphy. At the Armistice he was 46 years of age and continued his career into diverse areas of Post Office management. An early convert to National Socialism, he was close to Hitler from the beginning of the movement and set up the first NSDAP district organization outside Bavaria, at Dortmund, in 1920. By 1929 he had become President of the Reichspost Central HQ at Berlin Tempelhof. Following the seizure of power, Ohnesorge accepted the portfolio as Secretary of State for the Post Office on 2 February 1933 and entered the Cabinet as Reichspostminister in 1937, retaining this position until the defeat.

  He was a disciple of Philipp Lenard, founder of Aryan Physics, and delivered the keynote address during the physicist’s 80th birthday celebrations in 1942. 73 Ohnesorge was a reserved, diligent individual much admired by Hitler74 for his industriousness: Hitler always observed Ohnesorge’s birthday with a congratulatory telegram and often an invitation to an intimate table talk at the Reich Chancellery.

  Von Ardenne-The Early Career

  Baron Manfred von Ardenne (1907-1997) was the eldest of five children of an Army officer. During the First World War his father served at the War Ministry evaluating secret weapons. Shortly after leaving university Manfred von Ardenne served an apprenticeship in a radio workshop laboratory. By 1924, when his first book Rundfunk was published, he had already acquired a small income from technical treatises, royalties and patents. While specializing in the investigation of High Frequency circuitry problems at a laboratory in his parents’ house, he spent four semesters at the University of Berlin studying the principles of physics, chemistry and mathematics. Because this was the only formal training he had had in Physics, during the war the professorial team labelled him The Dilettante - ‘The Amateur’. He was often invited to speak publicly about his radio experimental work and even made broadcasts on technical subjects. In 1926 he developed the simple triple-valve receiver which sold several million units and led to the purchase price of domestic wireless sets in Germany being cut by two-thirds.

  By January 1928 von Ardenne was employing a number of scientific assistants and, because of the expansion of his activities, he rented a large house at Jungfernstieg 19 in the Berlin suburb of Lichterfelde Ost. The dwelling stood in 5,000 square metres of land. A Post Office contract for the production of measuring instruments enabled von Ardenne to purchase the property in 1930. He had met Ohnesorge for the first time at the Berlin Technical University in 1930. The occasion was a public meeting chaired by the Commissioner for the Reich Radio Service examining von Ardenne’s far-reaching proposals to install a chain of radio relay stations across the country aimed at overcoming the problem of poor quality wireless reception in cities.

  On Christmas Eve 1930 he demonstrated an elementary television to the Post Office and spent the next three years experimenting with the cathode ray tube. In 1933 at the Berlin Radio Exhibition Ohnesorge introduced him to Hitler with the most generous references to his early work for the Post Office. Early the following year Ohnesorge granted von Ardenne a private laboratory facility for radar research inside Post Office Central HQ and he patented a transducer on 25 February 1934. Despite pressure, he resisted becoming a Party member.

  When Ohnesorge was appointed Reichspostminister in 1937 he signed a permanent contract between von Ardenne’s Lichterfelde-Ost Institute and the Research Establishment of the German Post Office for the development of radar and television, supplemented in 1940 by nuclear physics. For the three years following 1937 von Ardenne developed electron-microscopy and his work was rewarded in July 1940 when Krupps gave him a contract for their entire research programme in that field.

  Early that same year von Ardenne asked Otto Hahn and Heisenberg outright for an estimate of the critical mass of uranium for a bomb and was told “a few kilos”. In these conversations, and also with Ohnesorge privately, von Ardenne had stated that he considered it technically feasible, using highly sophisticated mass separators, to obtain enough U235 for a bomb if one could get the cooperation of industry. He had in fact already designed a prototype separator based on the mass spectrograph, he said: a preliminary study had indicated that electro-magnetic techniques were probably the most efficient of all for separating the uranium isotopes. His paper Respecting a New Magnetic Isotope Separator for High Mass Transport was issued by the Reichspost Research Institute in April 1942, but ignored by the official project. When the design was examined at Oak Ridge in 1947, Physical Review recognized that von Ardenne’s design had a better ion source than the American equivalent.

  Ohnesorge was enthusiastic, but when he proposed the atom bomb to Hitler in a short interview Hitler replied, “Das wäre ja noch schöner, daß mein Postminister die Atombombe erfunden hätte!” (That would look good, wouldn’t it, having my Minister of Posts invent the atom bomb!”) 75

  Von Ardenne turned his attention to radioactive isotopes for use as tracers in the analytical fields of medicine, biochemistry and biology. He became a leading authority and his manual The Physical Principles of the Application of Radioactive or Stable Isotopes as Tracers published in 1944 was widely acclaimed. Representations he had made to Ohnesorge in December 1939 resulted in the Postmaster issuing instructions for the building of a one-million volt Van De Graaf generator (subsequently completed in 1941) at Lichterfelde-Ost, and he also received the component parts of a small 60-ton cyclotron for construction on site.

  Professor Fritz Houtermans Joins Von Ardenne

  State institutions and state-controlled or subsidized laboratories of industry in National Socialist Germany were subject to the provisions of the racial law of 7 April 1933 which proscribed Jews and various other categories of people from employment. As von Ardenne’s laboratory was privately owned he was not bound by this legislation, could employ whomsoever he wanted and had made it known that he was prepared to assist in suitable cases. In May 1940 Professor Max von Laue suggested he should employ the Jewish nuclear physicist Fritz Georg Houtermans.

  An Austrian national with a Jewish mother and Dutch father, Houtermans was a Communist and in National Socialist Germany his circumstances could hardly have been less favourable. He had obtained his PhD at Göttingen in 1927 and was Assistant Professor at the University of Berlin by 1933. His special field was chain reaction theory. In 1935 he accepted a position in the Soviet Union at the Ukraine Institute of Physics in Kharkov and in 1937 lectured on neutron absorption to the Soviet Academy of Science. That same year, together with other foreign communists, he was imprisoned and tortured during Stalin’s great purge. In 1939 the Russians offered him rehabilitation and a ful
l restoration of his former offices, together with Soviet citizenship, but he declined on the grounds of their maltreatment. For a Jewish Communist to prefer to take his chances with the Nazis in 1939 speaks volumes for what type of place Soviet Russia must have been at that time.

  The following year he was handed over to the Gestapo at Brest-Litovsk. Paroled into the custody of Professor von Laue on the condition that he remained under Gestapo observation and did not engage in any State or University research project, Houtermans was thus placed with von Ardenne. In August 1944 Houtermans issued a report from the Reich Bureau of Standards, a State office, which indicates that for the purposes of the Civil Service law he had been reclassified as a non-Jew. 76 What he must have done in the meantime to achieve this turnaround is suggested further on in this chapter.

  Houtermans started work with von Ardenne on 1 January 1941. His most significant work at Lichterfelde-Ost was the report published in August 1941 describing the building of a zero-energy breeder reactor for plutonium which caused the furore with Heisenberg.

  The Underground Developments at Lichterfelde-Ost

  In his autobiography77 von Ardenne stated that, because of his arrangement with Ohnesorge to install the cyclotron, an apparatus which required the personnel using it to be shielded against radiation, he now had a reason for requesting the construction of several large underground concrete bunkers at his Lichterfelde-Ost institute.

  The main bunker was ten metres down and had a floor area of 100 square metres. The steel-reinforced concrete walls and ceiling were 1² metres thick and, needless to say, this would have given enough radiation protection to the occupants of the house and the neighbours against whatever might have been going on in the bunker. Adjacent to it was a smaller bunker housing the 250 kW transformer station and next to that, but without a connecting door, an air-raid bunker measuring six metres square.

  This underground complex was ready by the late autumn of 1942 which was, as von Ardenne confirms, just before the step-up in bombing activity over German cities in which Berlin was to become the major target. He added that he had made up his mind to put all the most valuable instrumentation and the important installations into a small area of the bunker in a working condition, but according to his diary of events added as an Appendix, the main evacuation of the laboratory did not take place until 1 August 1943. There is, therefore, a period of about nine months between the autumn of 1942 and the end of July 1943 when the use of the greater part of the main bunker has not been accounted for, and at a time when Berlin was being subjected to extremely severe air raids. Moreover, von Ardenne mentioned that Professor Houtermans had been overjoyed at the chance to use a cyclotron, of which the only other such model available in all of Germany was at Miersdorf. Use of the machine had also been promised to Professor Hahn as a means of forging a closer relationship with Hahn’s Berlin-Dahlem circle, but von Ardenne’s cyclotron was never operational “because of the air war”. So it came about that the cyclotron, the purpose for which the bunker complex had been built, an invaluable apparatus of which only one other model existed in the Reich in 1942, and a source of envy to all, was never completed.

  The Lichterfelde-Ost cyclotron was an excuse: the bunkers were obviously constructed for war work with radioactive materials. They were, in fact, the laboratory where the prototype V-4 was to be built. Heisenberg’s Leipzig experiment was to be continued by Houtermans.

  Contaminated Uranium Delays Project

  When the Heereswaffenamt ordered the changeover from uranium oxide yellow-cake to uranium metal powder in December 1940, the manufacturer Degussa turned out a metal which was contaminated by calcium from the thermic reduction process. The plant was small and had a production capacity of one tonne of metal per month. There were only six workers, but output never reached capacity. Throughout his 1941 report, Professor Houtermans had stressed the importance of using the purest metallic uranium to reduce the capture of neutrons by impurities. The Degussa product was not good in this respect.

  According to the returns, all the uranium metal produced in Germany during the war was allegedly cast at one of the two Degussa plants and totalled about 14 tonnes. Nine tonnes was powder and five tonnes plates or cubes. It was reported that the reduction of the oxide to metal powder in quantity and to a high specification was not an economical enterprise in Germany. This is not a very convincing statement, but, if true, one assumes that the material would have been imported. Uranium metal powder is fine, grey and highly pyrophorous and tends to ignite spontaneously on contact with air. If shipped aboard a merchant vessel it would have to be stowed on deck as hazardous cargo and located where it could be jettisoned easily if necessary, since once afire it is extremely difficult to extinguish.

  It may, of course, have been something else entirely, but a shipment of seventy to eighty sacks of a very fine grey powder, each sack being about 10 inches high with a diameter of about 12 inches and estimated to weigh 200 cwts (100 kilos) was reported to have been stowed aboard a German blockade runner at Yokohama in 1942. A mate with many years’ experience of cargo handling, Fritz Kurt 78, stated that he had never seen a similar substance before and, despite his tactful enquiries, failed to establish the nature of the “mysterious heavy contents”. The author Charles Gibson observed that Goering, who was head of the Reich Research Council in charge of nuclear supplies in addition to his other roles, had an unexplained special interest in the material.

  It seems at least an interesting possibility that, for reasons of product quality, a technical cooperation existed between Japan and Germany for the manufacture or purification of uranium metal powder, and by 1944 at the latest nuclear materials such as beryllium were being exported in the other direction.

  The Uranium Bomb

  The only publication from an authoritative source where the actual building of a German uranium bomb is mentioned specifically is Henry Picker’s Hitlers Tischgespräche, which is based on stenographic notes taken down at mealtimes at the Führer’s HQ between 1941 and 1944.

  The daily routine at Führer HQ Wolfsschanze was described by Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC Nicolaus von Below in his memoir Als Hitlers Adjutant 1937-1945.79 Hitler ate punctually at two in the afternoon and at seven thirty. If no special visitors were expected, he would take his time at table, often up to two hours. In these several years at mealtimes he would speak freely on many subjects, maybe just seizing on a random theme. The atmosphere at table was free and unforced. Conversation was spontaneous and there was no kind of compulsion about what could be discussed. On subjects of general interest, when Hitler contributed his opinion, silence would be maintained. It might occur occasionally that he held the floor for up to an hour, but this was the exception rather than the rule.

  The major part of these monologues was taken down in shorthand by a National Socialist lawyer, Heinrich Heim. When Heim decided to return to Munich in the spring of 1942, the Gauleiters were canvassed to suggest a candidate to fill the vacancy. Among the names supplied was that of a senior privy councillor, Dr Henry Picker. The Party Chancellors drew up a short list of names and left it to Hitler to make the decision. Senator Henry Picker had been active for the NSDAP in Wilhelmshaven and in 1929 had arranged for Hitler to meet representatives of the Navy and naval dockyard. On his visits to the port Hitler was made welcome on numerous occasions as a guest in the Picker household and his selection of Picker was therefore much of a formality.

  Picker’s position at Führer HQ was dissimilar to that of Heim in that he had no standing as a Party official or lawyer but was only Martin Bormann’s adjutant. One of his standing duties was to take a note of Hitler’s conversations during the official meals, a task performed for the information of Bormann who was thereby enabled to keep abreast of developments in Hitler’s thinking more or less as it cropped up.

  The notebooks were released in 1951 by German Bundespresident Theodor Heuss and the shorthand jottings used as the basis for the volumes of Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptqua
rtier which have been published in many editions subsequently. All three of Hitler’s military adjutants of the time authenticated the texts, affirming that they truly and accurately reflect the substance of Hitler’s conversations at table.

  Picker was in almost permanent contact with Hitler’s Chief ADC, SS-Obergruppenführer Julius Schaub (1898-1968), who had been a Party member from its beginnings. A willing and devoted manservant, Schaub was also Hitler’s chauffeur and the only member of the Führer’s entourage who belonged to the Alte Kämpfer. He was the guardian of nearly all Hitler’s secrets.

  There are numerous references to Uraniumbomben in Dr Picker’s testimony, but these were not atom bombs as such, which physicists and politicians knew by the term Uranbomben. Hitler had no wish for a fullblown nuclear explosion and so we must be clear that Uraniumbomben were not atom bombs but something else.

  Picker reported Schaub as saying that the Uraniumbomben were the fearsome weapons (die fürchterlichen Waffen) on which Hitler was actually basing his strategy and his hopes. Picker described where the Uraniumbomben were developed and mentioned the unprecedented security measures in force there:

  “Dr Ohnesorge’s Reichspost-Forschungsanstalt in Berlin Lichterfelde where - in parallel with an unsuccessful professorial team - a prototype of the German Uraniumbombe was in fact developed up to the stage of construction, received visits from Hitler during his periods of residence in Berlin, during which Dr Ohnesorge never once permitted Hitler’s military entourage to view the research establishment. Ohnesorge, born in 1872, insisted on the greatest secrecy. Amongst co-workers in the Reich Research Institute were such authorities as the atom physicist Baron Manfred von Ardenne.”