During the Second World War, the USA constantly feared the possibility that Hitler would drop an atomic bomb on the West and thus conquer the world. In fact, the main motive for the development of the American atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project was the race against the clock and the competition with Hitler - the fear that he might have a weapon of mass destruction in his hands
In recent days there is fear that Iran will launch missiles with a nuclear warhead on us and the West. We hear....heavy water, uranium...deuterium....hydrogen, helium, enriched here, enriched there, reactor, centrifuges.
Perhaps we should remember what happened more than half a century ago when the world was so afraid of the possibility of Hitler possessing an atomic bomb. During the Second World War, the USA constantly feared the possibility that Hitler would drop an atomic bomb on the West and thus conquer the world. In fact, the main motive for the development of the American atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project was the race against the clock and the competition with Hitler - the fear that he might have a weapon of mass destruction. In the end, neither bears nor forest... But Hitler in 1942 was disappointed when the chief physicist in Germany, Werner Heisenberg, could not assure him that an atomic explosion could ignite the atmosphere.
Germany at that time was one of the biggest centers of physics in Europe. Some of Germany's greatest physicists went out of their way to work for the Nazis. The Nazi war machine longed to release energy and create a bomb from the atom. The threat of the German bomb was terrifyingly real.
Some of the leading physicists remained in Germany during the war, such as Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn, and information about the latest research was leaked all the time. In September 1939, Heisenberg was offered to escape to the USA from Germany, but he refused. He wanted to stay in Germany. It seems that in the summer of 1939 Heisenberg was dealing with the possibility of an atomic bomb. But he was convinced that the war would end long before the first atomic bomb was built because of the technical difficulties. In Germany there was no method for separating uranium 235 from natural uranium.
Niels Bohr talked in 1939 about turning the entire US into a factory to get this fissile enriched uranium. The critical mass needed for detonation was still considered in terms of tons and so the Germans thought that the effort and time it would take to obtain quantities of Uranium 235 for a bomb was far beyond their ability and reach for the foreseeable future. It might have been possible to obtain a bomb using plutonium, which is the byproduct obtained in reactors when enriching uranium, but there were still many technical problems even after 1940. Therefore no such reactor was built in Germany and the German scientists did not know how to build a plutonium bomb.
If the Germans didn't know why should the Americans know? Because in England there was a breakthrough in the critical mass that was not made in Germany. During the summer of 1939 as the winds of war blew, Germany's military scientists followed the discovery of nuclear fission and the resulting excitement in the US media. The German military realized the potential of nuclear weapons and encouraged leading physicists to speed up their research. On September 26, nine well-known physicists in nuclear physics in Germany met to form the Uranium Verein. Physicists at the University of Göttingen who noticed the potential of nuclear power urged the Minister of Education to establish this club.
The goal of building an atomic bomb was discussed and roles were divided. When the group met again about a month later, among the new recruits were Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weitzker. But they were not the only ones interested in nuclear fission and uranium. The army received a proposal for research into nuclear fission in uranium from other parties.
On September 29, a more decisive meeting was held in the Army Artillery office that included Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Hans Geiger, von Weitzker, Paul Hertzack, a group of nuclear physicists, military personnel, and scientific bureaucrats. The scientists talked about the utilization of uranium for energy and weapons purposes and concluded that additional, theoretical and experimental research is required before the goals and means are defined.
In the meantime, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society received a message from the army that the Institute of Physics was seized for war work - its director Peter Debay of Dutch nationality had to give up the position of managing the institute. The work and people at the institute were to focus on nuclear research under the title Nuclear Physics Research Group. This is how the institute's independence was sacrificed from the beginning of the war to the goals of the Nazi war. The Uranium Society disbanded in the meantime because it was not well led and its goals were not well defined either. Each of its people was scattered in the research institutes and universities. The German scientists undoubtedly knew about the theoretical nuclear research and the data since the experimental discovery of nuclear fission.
In addition, the Third Reich had huge reserves of uranium in mines owned by Czechoslovakia. The Nazi state would further move towards establishing a nuclear research program directly under military supervision with Heisenberg being a key figure in this project. But there was a problem with the German plan. The German program progressed in two areas: separating uranium isotopes and building a reactor for this purpose. A reactor was built at Heisenberg's institute in Leipzig. To measure properties of nuclear reactions, the Germans needed cyclotrons and these were in the possession of the USA. There was not a single cyclotron in Germany until 1944.
On December 6, 1939, Heisenberg wrote top secret reports three months after the September meeting in Berlin entitled: "Visas for the Technical Purchase of Energy from Nuclear Fission". In these reports, he talked about building a uranium machine (reactor), enriching uranium, and assembling a bomb with an explosive power unlike any other. He restated the knowledge of his time regarding the need for uranium enrichment and a chain reaction. He also indicated the need for a neutron moderator that would slow down the speed of the neutrons to reduce the chance that they would be swallowed by the uranium-238 and thus increase the chance that they would fission the uranium-235 nuclei. Heisenberg proposed two types of neutron moderators: carbon and heavy water.
In February 1940, Heisenberg submitted a secondary report to the army in which he was more careful and did not mention the bomb, but only the engineering difficulties of realizing a reactor for energy purposes. Heisenberg recommended building a factory to create heavy water and believed that a cyclotron was needed. Following the invasion of Norway, the Germans captured the only heavy water plant in the world at the time. After the fall of Paris in July the Germans began to move to the Collège de France in Paris where Frédéric Julio-Curie was to finish work on the cyclotron. But a year later in 1940 Heisenberg was unsuccessful in experiments on the Leipzig reactor in Berlin while attempts to produce significant quantities of uranium 235 proved disappointing. The Germans never had a working reactor and they did not reach the stage of practical technical discoveries in building an atomic bomb.
The Manhattan Project scientists built atomic bombs because they thought Hitler had a similar bomb. On April 30, 1945 Adolf Hitler committed suicide and eight days later Germany surrendered. But Hitler tried with all his might to get the bomb...
24 תגובות
Edward Teller was a Hungarian Jew and was an American scientist/inventor
The Jews made a significant contribution to the Manhattan Project
Einstein who convinced Roosevelt, and E=mc^2 the element of the bomb.
Robert Oppenheimer - scientific project manager
Richard Feynman - Nobel Prize.
Leo Szilard-Abby chain reaction theory
Please check if Jewish or not: Edward Teller.
And non-Jewish refugees:
Enrico Fermi
Regarding Jews in combat:
Between 250000-500000 Jews served in the allied armies and some reached senior ranks.
Not to forget the Bielski brothers - bordering on crime and accused of eliminating accomplices - but what's important: they successfully employed an entire division and saved children, women, and old people.
Yehuda - in connection with the conspiracy theory
https://www.hayadan.org.il/hitler-wanted-atom-bomb-101111/#comment-314104
Shmuel Tamir in "The Kastner Trial" had an even worse theory - the settlement in Israel knew, but the leadership of the settlement, headed by Mapai, which Kastner was a member of, and Ben Gurion headed, were quite interested in keeping the Holocaust issue quiet because it served their purposes.
See Judge Halevi's statement: "Kastner sold his soul to the devil."
And by the way, the Holocaust - it's interesting that the more religious you were during the Holocaust - the higher your chances of being killed.
So who says there is no God?
post Scriptum. To Judah - on the subject of Leviticus. As far as I know, they tried to make contact with the Nazis, thinking that they might be helped as enemies of Britain.
They did not understand who the Nazis were. Since as enemies of Britain, they mistakenly believed that the Nazis would help them against the mandate rule...
Hanan
I accept the Judah and Israel amendment...
Perhaps the terminology "didn't want to know" is more in line with the reality at the time, or "didn't believe that was the case"...
Hanan
There is a very powerful scene in one of the episodes of the Pillar of Fire in which a woman who returned from Europe in a prisoner exchange - the Germans received their prisoners from the British and in return they released citizens of Palestine (whom, at least temporarily, were treated differently - as bargaining chips and not as more Jews). She walked around Tel Aviv and asked what line people were standing in - they told her to the cinema. She started screaming. Jews are being slaughtered in Europe and you go to the cinema here?
It's not that accurate Hanan
I came across a newspaper from 1941 in which it was said: Great mortality among Vilna Jewry.
What does it mean?, illness?, accident?, was not explained.
As I said in my conspiracy, it was convenient for the girls of the alliance to keep their mouths shut and the settlement believed the talk that it is better to sit quietly so that the victory will come faster.
It seemed to me that only the Lahi organization tried to make connections with the Nazis in order to stop the extermination. But not sure
Very sad
Two thirds of European Jewry perished!
Sabdarmish Yehuda
Hanan
I also once believed that the settlement in Israel did not know. So I went to the Hebrew University archives and looked at some old newspapers.
They knew and how. What do you think of such a headline in "Yedyot" in 1944: "Hungarian Jewry is transported by trains to extermination in Auschwitz" more or less.
It was not for nothing that they sent Hana Senesh Yoel Pelagi and Goldstein to Hungary.
As for the Jews, the answer is complex: they were German patriots, who did not understand what was happening and some of them, since they had Jewish roots, even appealed to Hitler to accept them in the army, since they thought that service in the army was in the best interest of Germany and the nation.
In addition, there were cases in which the service in the army of those who had a Jewish background constituted a deterrent and a certain protection against the SS and the Gestapo, and therefore they thought that their family was protected, as long as they served.
We judge them from a distance of 70 years. It must be remembered that at the time, many understood that Hitler was anti-Semitic, but did not understand what was going on under the surface. They didn't even hear about the extermination and not just there. After all, even in Israel (Palestine at the time), they did not believe that a massacre on such a scale was taking place.
I laughed
And the truth, how funny it is!
Shabbat Shalom
Sabdarmish Yehuda
Yehuda
They were kosher supervisors
Well, the story I heard talked about several tens of thousands, so in order not to sound like just exaggerating, I only talked about thousands, and now you say one hundred and fifty thousand?
It's interesting how we hardly heard about them. What did they do in the army?
Jews are a strange people
Shabbat Shalom
Sabdarmish Yehuda
Yehuda is right... there is a book called "Jews in Hitler's Army" in which there is an assessment not of a few thousand Jews, but of about 150,000 people of Jewish origin and roots who served in the German army.
There is also another book, "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers", which deals with exactly this topic.
Hanan
I heard that several thousand Jews served in the Nazi army... Do you know about it?
Good Morning
Sabdarmish Yehuda
The absurdity and the laughter of fate:
It is not enough that Jewish scientists, such as Fritz Haber, had a hand in the development of chemical warfare in World War I, after all, those who founded NASA and the American space industry were the same Nazis who were brought to the USA in Operation Paperclip. Therefore, fate had its way and the field of space was occupied by Nazi technology from the ground up.
Fate also had its way, and the field of human experimentation, which is notorious in Nazi Germany, continued decades later in the USA, as a direct continuation of the experiments of the Japanese Unit 731 and the experiments of the Nazi doctors. How ironic, that at the head of one of these projects, MK-ULTRA, was the Jewish Dr. Sidney Gottlieb...
jelly
You are of course right in terms of the Jewish point - but not in terms of the rest of the world.
Because in Scenario B of the same presentation, Hitler conquers the world (and the Jews die), and in Scenario A (the real one) Hitler commits suicide in a bunker (and the Jews die).
And also - in Scenario B, more Jews die.
Israel,
In any case, a holocaust would have occurred:
Let's say and hypothesize that the rise would have happened. Hitler would have recruited the Jews to his side, who indeed would have longed to help Germany in their innocence and fight alongside it. The Jewish scientists were helping Hitler and he had an atomic bomb.
Right after the Jewish scientists would finish working on the bomb and would finish helping Hitler and the rest of the Jews would finish helping him... he would send them to the ghettos and burn them all and destroy them all.
So it doesn't seem to me that the scenario was different - one way or another Hitler would have destroyed the Jews, so it's good that they didn't help him.
I have a disgusting conspiracy that says that the Allies did not threaten the Germans who exterminated the Jews, only because the extermination of the Jews suited the military needs (of the Allies) and perhaps also because of anti-Semitism for its own sake.
It sounds terrible, but the possibility that Germany would decide to use the European Jews for their scientists and their productive and economic power, was an influential factor to ignore the extermination. In the planning of the bombings of Germany, it almost never happened that the extermination camps were bombed, even though Allied bombers frequently flew over the camps.
Like I said, it's a horrifying and disgusting conspiracy.
When Golda Meir was once asked:- What do you think was your biggest mistake?, after she ignored the question several times and refused to answer, she finally answered, the biggest mistake was that towards the end of the thirties of the twentieth century we did not agree with the Peel Committee that gave us a tiny land . And she added :- How could everything be different if we had a country in the Holocaust!
So that's what there is.
Let's hope that the next decisions of our leaders from the left and the right will be better!
Good Day
Sabdarmish Yehuda
The funny part is that if Hitler had kept his hatred for the Jews on a low flame the main scientists who fled to the United States would have stayed with him long enough to possibly produce a nuclear bomb for him even before the Americans...
In fact, the Americans owe their nuclear program to Hitler and here is the irony...if it weren't for his whole campaign of terror and intimidation, the Jewish scientists would not have given up and fled to the United States in the first place.
Funny how Shroe fails himself..
Even then the academic and intellectual leftists opposed the war against Hitler, it's terrible to think what would have happened if it had been up to them, lucky that Churchill understood that sometimes the attack is necessary and that wars are sometimes forced upon you.
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In addition, it seems to me that atomic bombs do not use uranium 238 but uranium 235, or plutonium.
Herman Walk in his book "War and Memory" raises an interesting thesis: if Hitler had turned to the Jews instead of going against them - he would almost certainly have won the war.
According to his logic, the persecuted Jews everywhere would have been happy to join the Germans if the Germans had given them true equality and the possibility of belonging to the Germany they loved. A similar idea is raised in Amos Elon's "German Requiem", in which the Jewish yearning of German Jews to be considered another "German tribe" is raised.
Many Yakims, even after the Holocaust, always missed the old Germany.
According to Vok, those Jews who were slaughtered by the Gestapo as obedient sheep, could have easily become brave warriors as was discovered after the war in Israel, and help the Wehrmacht in the war on the Eastern Front.
But more than that, the persecution of the Jews drove away many scientists, Jews and their supporters, who instead of building the atomic bomb for the Germans - built it for their enemies.
I find a lot of sense in his words.
So those who are looking for some logic and historical justice for the holocaust, the most terrible of all, may take some comfort in the thought that if it hadn't happened, maybe Hitler would have conquered the world.
correction
The article states that:- "Also, he indicated the need for a neutron moderator that would slow down the speed of the neutrons to reduce the chance that they would be swallowed by the uranium-238 and thus increase the chance that they would hatch the uranium-235 nuclei." End quote.
It seemed to me that it should be written:-" He also indicated the need for a neutron moderator that would slow down the speed of the neutrons in order to ***increase**** the chance that they would be swallowed by the 238-type uranium and thus increase the chance that they would hatch the uranium-235 nuclei.
A slow neutron will be swallowed inside uranium and as a result the nucleus is distorted until at a certain moment the repulsive forces increase and the nucleus splits in two. The sum of the products is a thousandth smaller and it turns into energy.
A fast neutron will simply pass through the uranium atom without splitting it.
Please do not forward this comment to Iranians
(:))
Good night
Sabdarmish Yehuda