The phrase in parallel with an unsuccessful professorial team hints at a connection between Professor Heisenberg’s failed Leipzig experiment in 1942 and what Houtermans was now attempting at Lichterfelde. Precisely as at Leipzig, or so we may be permitted to assume, the underground bunker below Manfred von Ardenne’s property was a laboratory for the production of plutonium-enriched irradiated uranium powder. A number of aluminium spheres containing the powder, heavy water and a Präparat, surrounded by an array of measuring instruments, sat immersed in their respective tubs of ordinary water for a period of months breeding plutonium and the radioactive products of fission. So secret was the laboratory work at Jungfernstieg 19, Lichterfelde-Ost, that even Hitler’s personal SS-bodyguard could not be permitted to see anything of what went on there. Presumably when Hitler arrived he would be escorted inside by Ohnesorge and von Ardenne leaving the 3-axled Mercedes charabanc with Schaub and the SS-Führerbegleit in the driveway. After a conversation in the Baron’s pleasant reception room with its heavy curtains and suits of armour, Hitler would descend into the bunker to inform himself of how it was all coming along. Here he would be welcomed by Professor Houtermans and probably Dr Siegfried Flügge, who was with von Ardenne at material times and who refused to sign the Farm Hall declaration.
Henry Picker copied into his notebook the very words spoken by Hitler. The target of the Uraniumbomben was to be the civilian population of the United States. The means of delivery was to be the A9/10 intercontinental rocket. According to Hitler’s personal ADC Julius Schaub, who had been told about the Uraniumbombe by SS-colleagues at the place where it was assembled, it was in der Grösse eines kleinen Kürbis, “the size of a small gourd”. Hitler was confident that the arrival of the first few Uraniumbomben on New York would swiftly render the American President “ready for peace” - (friedensbereit zu schiessen).
Rumours of a Miracle Weapon Begin to Circulate
The hope inspired by the development of Heisenberg’s V-2 bomb can be seen from the growth of rumours about a miracle weapon beginning in the late summer of 1943. Coinciding with the termination of von Ardenne’s involvement in the project, the breeding of the radioactive material, the month of July 1943 was marked by the first verbal salvoes opening the V-weapons campaign, and SS-originated rumours soon began to circulate about new bombs “built on the atomic principle” of which twelve would suffice to destroy one million inhabitants of a city. In visits to the Ruhr and Rhineland, Goebbels is alleged to have said a good deal more on the subject of ‘atomic type’ weapons than he ever allowed to appear in print. On 23 February 1944, at a confidential meeting of all Gauleiters, Reichsminister Goebbels promised,
“Retribution is at hand. It will take a form hitherto unknown in warfare, a form the enemy, we hope, will find impossible to bear.”
The use of monstrous explosives spraying radioactivity far and wide was previously unknown in warfare, whereas the use of rockets and bombs was not. Goebbels’ dark references were echoed by Hitler himself in a speech to troops reported in the RMfVP (Reich Propaganda Ministry) circular Tdtigkeitsbericht of 25 September 1944 when he said,
“God forgive me if I have to turn to that terrible weapon to end the conflict.”
He could not have meant the V-1 and V-2, since by then both had been used against Britain, and the V-3 High Pressure Pump was not only still undergoing research but was also out of range. Therefore he must have meant the V-4.
From Lichterfelde-Ost the material for V-4 was passed to the SS scientists with instructions for manufacture. Schaub told Picker that the Uraniumbomben were being produced in a “subterranean SS factory in the South Harz mountains with a force of 30,000 workers” (werden in einem unterirdischen SS-Werk im Südharz mit einer Produktionskapazitdt von 30,000 Arbeitskrdften hergestellt.) Professor Seuffert’s SS laboratory was located in an underground section of the Ohrdruf complex in the southern Harz and one presumes this was where Schaub must have meant.
Although the V-2 was conceived as a long-range weapon for use from mobile launch sites, in the summer of 1943 a huge assembly and storage bunker with a concrete roof seven metres thick was begun at Watten south-west of Dunkirk. On 27 August and 8 September 1943 it was hit by 484 heavy bombs and destroyed. A massive new bunker complex extending over five hectares at Wizernes near St Omer survived all efforts to destroy it and was operational until Allied forces overran the area in 1944.
The British rocket scientist Philip Henshall stated that these monumental bunkers were capable of launching not only the V-2 but all projected developments including the gigantic A9/10 two-stage intercontinental rocket which was 26 metres in length and nine metres wide across the tail assembly.
Measurements proved that the working heights inside each silo could accommodate the projected A9/10 rocket minus its warhead. He considered that Watten was completely self-contained and impregnable from the exterior by virtue of its massive armoured doors, while at both locations the 23-feet-thick lid forming the dome to the structures could not be penetrated by any known bomb even hitting directly. Since the greater part of the concrete constructions were bunkers and silos, none of which were necessary for launching V-2 rockets, the actual purpose must have been to store nuclear materials and house the A9/10 “New Yorker”.
In November 1944, according to Otto Skorzeny, all the talk was of
“a dreadful weapon based on artificially bred radioactivity”. 80
Such talk stemmed from among his own SS colleagues. But it was just talk. The budgetary restrictions, the diversification and experimentation into other interesting rockets and guided missiles, the invasion of Normandy and the time required to mass-produce a huge stock of the V-4 atomic explosives ensured that nothing would come of the weapon for America on which Hitler was pinning all his hopes. By the time they were finally ready even London was out of range.
Covering Over the Traces
On 1 August 1943, according to his autobiography, von Ardenne at last obtained vacant possession of the underground bunker complex and proceeded to remove most of his laboratory into it, thus terminating his association with the ‘atomic’ project.
Von Ardenne does not state how Professor Houtermans occupied his time at the laboratory between August 1941 and August 1944. Whilst von Ardenne and his co-workers produced a total of forty scientific papers in that period, Houtermans published only his August 1941 report, amended in 1944, and a brief work on separation in ultracentrifuges in February 1942.
Houtermans told the Swiss scientific author Robert Jungk 81 that he was in no position to refuse a task set him by Professor von Ardenne. He stated that, although he knew that plutonium could be bred in a nuclear reactor, he “did not report on that aspect of his work” since he had not wished to alert the authorities to the possibility of making atom bombs. He also stated that his 1941 thesis had been placed in a safe at Post Office Headquarters by Dr Otterbein so that there should be no publication of his studies in the Heereswaffenamt secret dossiers, and in that safe it had safely remained until 1944.
This was not true. He had reported on U239, known today as plutonium, in one and a half closely typed pages, and, as his 1944 amendment to the report clarifies, he had intended for the report to remain secret, but, as it had been circulated, he now wanted to add some notes to it.
Hitler once said that he would tell any lie for Germany, but never for himself. Perhaps that is the criterion we should use to judge kindly the scientists and military men who manufactured the bogus history of the failed German atomic project. Groves and Houtermans definitely did lie about it after the war: Goudsmit insinuated that Heisenberg was lying: despite what British Intelligence and Senator Picker might say, nothing ever went on at Baron von Ardenne’s Institute, or so he maintained, unless you meant honest-to-goodness work on identifying potato bacilli and microscopic radioactive tracers; nor, for that matter, did Hitler ever visit, according to von Ardenne’s published diaries, from which may be inferred either that von Ardenne was lying or Hitler
’s SS-valet Julius Schaub was lying. And von Below, who was not only Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC but also Speer’s ADC to Hitler at FHQ, who swore a certificate that Henry Picker’s shorthand diaries were, as far as he knew, verbatim and true, ultimately knew nothing whatever about anything which one might call an Uraniumbombe, although as Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC he, of all people, would have known about it. All this dishonesty was and is directed at misleading the public, and even in Houtermans’ case one feels aggrieved that ultimately he wasn’t forthright.
In May 1940, as a Jewish communist, Houtermans was proscribed, under the Nazi racial and political laws, from working in any State enterprise and was subject to Gestapo supervision, often a slippery path to extinction. His scientific prowess saved him. By 1944, however, Professor Houtermans was employed at the Reich Bureau of Standards, a civil service institution, which meant that he had ceased to be classified as Jewish. Later he was entrusted with an intelligence gathering mission to the Soviet Union which meant effectively that he had done a complete volte-face as regards Communism. In fact, not only was he no longer a Jewish Communist, he was attached to the SS Sicherheitsdienst, for after 1942 all German agents were operated by Amt VI at the SS-RSHA 82 under Walter Schellenberg.
Our gripe with Houtermans is not for all his manouevring (since, for all we know, he may actually have become, if not a National Socialist then at least a convinced anti-Communist, and that is entirely his affair) but that ultimately, in common with people like Groves, he became part of the Allied-German conspiracy against true history. He was the only scientist of any consequence attached to the Reichspost project to be interviewed by the American Intelligence Mission Alsos. When seen by them at Göttingen on 17 April 1945, he gave them the impression that he had only been on the fringe of German nuclear research and satisfied them that he was unable to contribute any intelligence of particular importance. His Government had sent him to the Soviet Union to learn what nuclear research was being undertaken there, but he had discovered nothing much of note, although he thought that the Russians were very interested in the subject and he had heard a rumour that Professor Kapitza was working on it, obtaining uranium ore from the Ferghana district of Turkestan.
It was all pretty vague and Alsos let him go. They reasoned that he was obviously not the kind of man from whom anything useful might be obtained: he had merely worked on the independent Reichspost project under the ridiculous figure of Postmaster Ohnesorge, and, as Professor Goudsmit, head of the Alsos scientific intelligence mission stated in his book 83, the Reichspost nuclear programme was something of a joke for the Americans. Whether they actually thought that, or whether Goudsmit said so to disguise its importance, is another matter entirely but certainly London had been under no illusions. On 28 November 1944 the British Nuclear Physics Directorate known under the cover name as Tube Alloys (TA) sent an intelligence report to General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, advising him:
“The activities of the Reichspost research department may of course imply that this Government department has a connection with the official nuclear physics work. In the first instance, detailed investigations of the TA project in Germany [should] be concentrated in two areas, Berlin and Bisingen and the surrounding country. In Berlin it should be possible to examine the various laboratories of the Reichspost and the private laboratory of von Ardenne. These two preliminary investigations are likely, if conditions are favourable, to provide an accurate picture of TA work in Germany.”
At the end of hostilities in Europe, the Lichterfeld-Ost villa, together with all its valuable equipment, including the ruins of the 1-million volt Van de Graaf generator, the unused cyclotron and the prototype electromagnetic isotope separator all went to the Russians, as did von Ardenne himself, as he had planned. For the next six years he worked on the USSR atomic weapons project on the Black Sea. Ohnesorge, too, preferred the Soviet zone. In March 1962, in the West the death passed unnoticed of the man who “led the way for the great advance of atomic development in the Third Reich”.
CHAPTER 7
The Doomsday Bomb
In captivity at Farm Hall, Cambridgeshire after the capitulation, the atom scientists Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn were secretly tape-recorded in conversation immediately following the announcement of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Heisenberg: “Did they use the word “uranium” in connection with this atomic bomb?”
Hahn: “No.”
Heisenberg: “Then it’s got nothing to do with atoms, but the equivalent of 20,000 tons of HE. I am willing to believe that it is a high pressure bomb and I don’t believe that it has anything to do with uranium, but that it is a chemical thing where they have enormously increased the whole explosion.”
(PRO, Kew WO 208/5019)
B RITISH INTELLIGENCE KNEW about the dual project of atom bomb and heavy-air bomb. In BIOS Final Report No 142(g) it was said that:
“as the research on the atomic bomb under Graf von Ardenne and others was not proceeding as rapidly as had been hoped in 1944, it was decided to proceed with the development of a liquid air bomb.”
This was very probably the pressure bomb spoken of by Heisenberg in captivity at Farm Hall. The Fuel-Air Explosive (FAE) belongs today in the arsenal of all the major powers. It is made up of liquid ethyl oxide and certain secret aluminium compounds. The substance is released as a cloud of gas and ignited, resulting in a fearful explosion with an enormously strong pressure wave. The weapon was developed by Dr (Ing) Mario Zippermayer, an Austrian born in Milan in 1899 who had been an Assistant Professor at the Karlsruhe Technical University.
Taking up his work, the Ballistics Institute of the TAL (Technische Akademie der Luftwaffe) began to research the physics of rarified media explosions. When in mid-1944 a series of devastating explosions caused by the accidental escape of ethylene gas flattened the synthetic gasoline refineries at Ludwigshafen, a small special TAL team sat on the commission of enquiry. TAL’s huge factory in the Bavarian Alps cooperated with the nearby Heereswaffenamt experimental centre at Garmisch-Partenkirchen and developed small cylinders charged with both gaseous and liquid ethylene. This was the forerunner of the modern FAE bomb.
Dr Zippermayer’s original intention had been for an anti-aircraft explosive having coal-dust as its principal ingredient. When ignited it exploded, creating, as was hoped, a huge shock wave which could destroy a group of enemy bombers. Zippermayer’s laboratory was at Lofer in the Austrian Tyrol. His preliminary experiments there confirmed that an aircraft in flight could be brought down by having a violent, fiery gust fracture its wings or rudder, but difficulties in determining the correct charge, and problems timing the ignition phase, led his technical staff to consider changing the combustible from solid to gas.
The Tornado Bomb
A special catalyst had been developed by the SS in 1943 and the following year Zippermayer turned his energies to a heavy air (Schwere Luft) bomb. Encouraging results were obtained from a mixture consisting of 60% finely powdered dry brown coal and 40% liquid air. The first trials were carried out on the Döberitz grounds near Berlin using a charge of about 8 kg powder in a tin of thin plate. The liquid air was poured on to the powder and the two were mixed together with a long wooden stirrer. The team then retired and after ignition everything living and trees within a radius of 500 to 600 metres were destroyed. Beyond that radius the explosion started to rise and only the tops of trees were affected, although the explosion was intense over a radius of 2 kilometres.
Zippermayer then conceived the idea that the effect might be improved if the powder was spread out in the form of a cloud before ignition, and trials were run using an impregated paper container. This involved the use of a waxy substance. A metal cylinder was attached to the lower end of the paper container and hit the ground first, dispersing the powder. After 0.25 seconds a small charge in the metal cylinder exploded, igniting the funnel-shaped cloud of coal dust and liquid air.
The ordnance had to be
filled immediately prior to the delivery aircraft taking off. Bombs of 25 kgs and 50 kgs were dropped on the Starbergersee and photographs taken. SS-Standartenführer Klumm showed these to Brandt, Himmler’s personal adviser. The intensive explosion covered a radius of 4 kilometres and the explosion was felt at a radius of 12.5 kilometres. When the bomb was dropped on an airfield, destruction was caused as far as 12 kilometres away, although only the tops of trees were destroyed at that distance, but the blast flattened trees on a hillside 5 kilometres away.
These findings appear in the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee Final Report No 142 Information Obtained From Targets of Opportunity in the Sonthofen Area. Although one suspects initially that the radius of the area allegedly affected as described in this report had been worked upon by the Propaganda Ministry, the fact is that this bomb is never heard of today. Furthermore British Intelligence published the report without comment and what tends to give the description weight is the fact that the Luftwaffe wanted aircrews flying operationally with the bomb to have knowingly volunteered for suicide missions. The idea that the bomb had unusual effects was hinted at not only by the head of the SS-weapons test establishment but also possibly by Goering84 and Renato Vesco85. On 7 May 1945 in American custody, Goering told his captors, “I declined to use a weapon which might have destroyed all civilization”. Since nobody knew what he meant, it was reported quite openly at the time. The atom bomb was not under his control, although the Zippermayer bomb was. Vesco reported that the supreme explosive was “a blue cloud based on firedamp” which had initially been thought of “in the anti-aircraft role”. On the Allied side, Sir William Stephenson, the head of the British Security Coordination intelligence mission stated:
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