Categories: History

The Nazi Nuclear Weapons Project During WWII

On August 6th, 1945, the world entered a new nuclear age when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan during World War I. Three days later, it dropped another bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. These two bombings represented the culmination of a massive secret effort on the part of the United States to produce nuclear devices appropriate for use in the war. Though over 200,000 people died in the bombings, the attack also saved lives by bringing the war to an early end. Could the war have been ended even earlier, however? What would have happened if Germany had developed a nuclear weapon before the United States did?

Although Germany had a nuclear weapons program during World War II, it was not as advanced as its US counterpart and was not a national priority. Whereas the United States invested $23 billion of today’s dollars, in the project, German funding for nuclear research was sporadic and the Germans failed to organize a single, massive project as the Americans did. In fact, the Germans made the mistake of having at least two competing teams of ill-equpied scientists working at the same time. This was a result of factional rivalry from within the Nazi government, and resulted in great waste of manpower, ideas, and money.

Nuclear weapons research in Germany began at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute under the leadership of Werner Heisenberg and later a separate program led by Professor Kurt Diebner. For a while, these two programs worked simultaneously and independently of each other. After Reich armament minister Albert Speer cut off funding for Heisenberg’s project in 1942, several scientists convinced Hermann Goering to fund an alternative project. Working without the benefit of any of the research done by the other projects, this third group began by working on nuclear propulsion for u-boats. When their project headquarters was bombed by the Allies, however, they moved locations and started concentrating more and more on enriching enough uranium to produce a bomb. That effort did not begin until mid 1944, however, and by that time it was too late.

The Nazi’s might have developed a nuclear bomb if they had organized their projects better, because they initially had a lead in nuclear technology. They produced the fission reaction necessary to produce enriched uranium before the Americans did. Unfortunately for them, their authoritarian and anti-semitic policies had driven many of the best scientists from Germany. Those who remained did not collaborate the way the Americans did, and had trouble finding a way to control fission. Heisenberg believed that heavy water was key to the enrichment process, but Germany had no source of heavy water. It had to be shipped from Norway. Once their station there was destroyed, however, the Germans had no way of procuring more heavy water for their enrichment efforts.

Some of the German scientists may have even sabotaged their projects intentionally. There is some debate about whether or not the scientists working on the project actually wanted to produce a bomb, because there is some evidence that they underreported their own progress. In so doing, they ensured that their projects were de-prioritized as something that could not come to fruition until after the war. Whether or not he scientists involved intentionally sabotaged their own efforts, we can be thankful that they were not more successful. If they had been, Hitler would not have hesitated for a moment to drop a nuclear bomb on London or New York. If he had managed to get his hands on such a weapon, the war might have ended very differently.