Hitler's Terror Weapons by Brooks, Geoffrey (life books to read .txt) 📗

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