WOW another little know fact!

[I-25]

Lookie what i found...

Old Japanese army tests A-bomb in sea off Korea

Pyongyang, August 8 (KCNA) -- The Japanese Tokyo Shimbun August 6 disclosed that the old Japanese army tested an A-bomb in the sea off Hungnam on the east coast of Korea just before the end of World War II. According to a secret document of the U.S. Army quoting the Jiji news from the U.S. National Archives, the U.S. Army was informed of the fact that a test related to the atomic power took place at a chemical factory in Hungnam in 1945 and ordered investigation into it. It also said in an investigation report worked out on January 16, 1947, that the Japanese army made an explosion test with the help of a boat in waters off the east coast of the North Korea, the result of which was like an A-bomb.
The U.S. forces received information from an intelligence officer of the old Japanese army that it tested an A-bomb in waters 30 km away from Hungnam at the dawn of August 12, 1945, and huge mushroom-like clouds rose at that time. Tokyo Shimbun said that Japan began an A-bomb research in secrecy on the order of the army headquarters from about 1940.

http://www.kimsoft.com/korea/jp-hung.htm

[STEED]

Interesting bit of info. :huh:

[SUBMAN1]

I doubt there wasn't a single country major country not trying to devlope something like this in the 1940's. Good thing the US did it first!

-S

[Egan]

The same sort of stories exist for germany too, of course. They were suppossed to have tested one in the closing months of the war, using death camp inmates as guinea pigs.

[STEED]

From what I know Germany never built one, due to the fact they got there sums badly wrong.

[SUBMAN1]

The same sort of stories exist for germany too, of course. They were suppossed to have tested one in the closing months of the war, using death camp inmates as guinea pigs.

Yeah, I saw Germany's reactor project on Discovery when they were researching Germany's importation of Heavy Water from Norway. They were no where near a bomb, or even a reactor for that matter. It was almost a joke to look at what was actually completed.

The real problem - Hitler didn't make it a high priority because the idea came from a Jew.

-S

[SUBMAN1]

From what I know Germany never built one, due to the fact they got there sums badly wrong.

They didn't get it wrong, they just were not on the path of a bomb due to it being a low priority research project.

-S

[STEED]

From what I know Germany never built one, due to the fact they got there sums badly wrong.

They didn't get it wrong, they just were not on the path of a bomb due to it being a low priority research project.

-S

Sorry they did, the German physicists, headed by the theoretical physicists Werner Heisenburg, who were developing the bomb had their calculations wrong and believed they needed far more U-235 was needed to build a bomb.


German Special Weapons


Unlike the United States' Manhattan Project, the WWII German Kernphysik (Nuclear Physics) program was never able to produce a critical nuclear reactor, despite many attempts by physicists Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Diebner. The German attempt to build a reactor was feeble and disorganized -- and their effort to build an atomic weapon nonexistent -- but the Allies didn't know that. At the end of the war, an Allied fact-finding mission captured the subcritical uranium piles and sent them to the United States.
Werner Heisenberg, a German theoretical physicist, proposed in 1925 in his famous Uncertainty Principle that we can know either the position or the momentum of a subatomic particle, but not both. Further, Heisenberg said, the more precisely we know the particle’s momentum, the less we can know about its position. At the atomic scale, Newton’s laws of classical mechanics give way to mathematical functions, developed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1926, that describe particle behavior in terms of probabilities. The work of Heisenberg and Schrödinger is the foundation of quantum mechanics, the theory that has proved eminently successful in describing and predicting the behavior of subatomic particles. Heisenberg is most famous for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, but also spent much of his career investigating the complex dynamics of turbulence.
Edward Teller received his Ph.D. in physics in 1930 at the University of Leipzig in Germany, where he helped Werner Heisenberg lay the foundation of nuclear physics.
The nuclear arms race began with the race to develop the atomic bomb. Many dates and events could be chosen as the starting point. In 1932 James Chadwick demonstrated the existence of the neutron, or non-charged particle, within the nucleus of an atom. Later that year, J.D.Cockroft and E.T.S.Walton successfully split lithium atoms in a particle accelerator. In 1933, Leo Szilard first envisioned the dual potential of the atom when he surmised that the collision of neutrons within a chain reaction would release energy and speculated on the use of this energy in making bombs. Szilard formalized these thoughts in a patent application on July 4, 1934 that described how explosions could be induced through chain reactions and introduced the concept of critical mass. It would be 2 years, however, before the British Admiralty accepted Szilard ’s offer of his patents.
In contrast to prevailing studies that required a high energy source to accelerate positive-charged proton beams and alpha particles,Enrico Fermi experimentally bombarded 63 elements with neutrons, reasoning that little resistance would be encountered by uncharged particles entering the nucleus.One of the experimental elements was uranium. Over the next several years, the international scientific community focused on neutron bombardment as a more promising technology for splitting atoms and uranium as a key element. Enrico Fermi's team at the University of Rome originally thought that their bombardment of uranium by slow neutrons in the mid-1930s had produced elements heavier than uranium, or transuranic elements. By experiments which were carried out during the years 1936-38, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner believed they could confirm Fermi's statement that the transuranium elements are formed by irradiating the heaviest elements with neutrons.
It is generally accepted that the atomic age began in Berlin with the discovery in 1938 that uranium can undergo nuclear fission. Earlier workers had achieved fission by bombarding uranium with neutrons, but did not recognize it as such.
When the discovery of nuclear fission was first reported in January 1939, it appeared that the chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had performed the crucial experiments, while the physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch provided the first theoretical explanation of the fission process. Historical accounts have tended to emphasize that divide ever since, as did the award of the Nobel Prize in chemistry to Hahn alone. But history and the published record can be deceptive, and Nobel committees can make mistakes. Meitner was not present when the crucial experiments were made, having been forced to flee Berlin to exile in Sweden in the summer of 1938, when her native Austria was annexed by the Nazis. Meitner and nuclear physics were crucial to the discovery, but that Meitner’s role was obscured by her forced emigration, the political conditions in Nazi Germany, and the deliberate “forgetting” of the postwar period.
Late in 1938, Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman discovered the phenomenon of atomic fission. Meitner worked in Germany with physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann until fleeing to Sweden to escape Nazi persecution. From her work in Germany, Meitner knew the nucleus of uranium-235 splits (fission) into two lighter nuclei when bombarded by a neutron. Interestingly, the sum of the particles derived from fission are not equal in mass to the original nucleus. During a visit with her nephew, Meitner speculated that release of energy--energy a hundred million times greater than normally released in the chemical reaction between two atoms--accounted for the difference. Still somewhat nervous about their finding, Frisch approached the eminent Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, who grasped the concept immediately with much enthusiasm.
Hahn published the experimental results in Naturwissenschaften on December 21, 1938. Meitner was not credited in the report signed by Hahn and Strassmann. Frisch, however, confirmed her explanation in a separate physics experiment in England. Hahn feared the result would be rejected if it were known to be tainted by "Jewish science" -- female Jewish science at that -- that he might even lose his position, and that all of German science might thereby suffer.
On January 13, 1939, Otto Frisch substantiated these results and, together with Lise Meitner, calculated the unprecedented amount of energy released. Frisch applied the term “fission,” from biological cell division, to name this process. Bohr sailed for the U.S. shortly thereafter, and upon his arrival announced the discovery on January 26, 1939, at the Princeton Monday Evening Journal Club, a weekly gathering of Princeton physicists. Almost immediately, related work emerged nearly everywhere.
On August 31, Bohr and John A.Wheeler, working at Princeton University, published their theory that the isotope uranium-235,present in trace quantities within uranium-238, was more fissile than uranium-238 and should become the focus of uranium research. In this publication, they also postulated that a then unnamed,unobserved transuranic element (referred to simply as 94 239 or, more descriptively,as “high octane ”) produced during fissioning of uranium-238 would be highly fissionable.
Enrico Fermi and exiled Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, realized the first split or fission could cause a second, and so on in a series of chain reactions expanding in geometric progression. They agreed not to publish their findings, lest Germany use them to produce a super weapon. Instead, Szilard and émigré Eugene Wigner persuaded Albert Einstein to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt and request atomic research receive high priority.
Physicists everywhere soon realized that if chain reactions could be tamed, fission could lead to a promising new source of power. What was needed was a substance that could "moderate" the energy of neutrons emitted in radioactive decay, so that they could be captured by other fissionable nuclei. Heavy water was a prime candidate for the job.
After the discovery of fission, Heisenberg was recruited to work on a chain-reacting pile in September 1939 by Nazi physicist Kurt Diebner. While the Americans under Enrico Fermi chose graphite to slow down, or "moderate," the neutrons produced in the fission of uranium 235 so that they could cause further fissions in a chain reaction, Heisenberg chose heavy water.
Heisenberg calculated the critical mass for a bomb in a December 6, 1939 report for the German Army Weapons Department. His formula, with the nuclear parameter values assumed at that time, yielded a critical mass in the hundreds of tons of "nearly pure" uranium 235 (U235) required for an exploding reactor, Heisenberg's model for a bomb at that point. This was vastly beyond what Germany could hope to produce. With uranium out of the question, the Germans decided to go for plutonium, which meant building an atomic pile [a nuclear reactor] to convert natural uranium into plutonium.
In March 1940, Otto Frisch met up with Rudolf Peierls in the United Kingdom, and they argued that if uranium 235 (0.7% naturally occurring) could be extracted from naturally occurring uranium 238, the amount needed for an atomic bomb could be measured in kilograms, rather than the early estimates of tons. They also suggested that, if the fissile component of the weapon was made in two parts each less than the critical mass, the bomb could be set off simply by bringing the two parts rapidly together.
In 1941, one of the leading German scientists at the University of Heidelberg, Walther Böthe, a highly regarded German physicist, greatly underestimated the diffusion path length of slow neutrons in graphite, apparently because graphite of inadequate purity was used in the German studies. Consequently, the German scientists selected heavy water as the moderator, rather than graphite, which was used in the U.S. program. These results were based upon mistaken calculations and gave Fermi an advantage. Heavy water was also chosen because Heisenberg's early experiments with paraffin as a moderator failed to produce any chain reaction.
German interest in heavy water was a major factor in the race to build the A-bomb. When, in late 1939, the Germans began ordering heavy water in very large quantities, Norsk Hydro management suspected "some kind of deviltry." Frédéric Joliot knew perfectly well what kind of deviltry, and with the cooperation of Norsk Hydro, the French managed to spirit the company's entire stock of heavy water, some 185 kilograms, out of the country.
Heisenberg's first experiments with heavy water at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem and in Leipzig, Germany, were encouraging enough for him to promote nuclear energy to the German government.
The very scanty contact with the German physicists during the occupation contributed – as already mentioned – to strenghten the impression that the German authorities attributed great military importance to atomic energy. Werner Heisenberg and his mentor Niels Bohr had a pivotal meeting in September 1941 in Copenhagen. Bohr, a Jew, was living in occupied Denmark but had contact with physicists on the Allied side. Heisenberg's covert trip at great risk to see Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, in Copenhagen results in disaster. Something in this meeting destroyed their longstanding friendship. According to Bohr, Heisenberg travelled to Copenhagen to brag about his German colleagues' progress in building the bomb. Bohrwas shocked at his former student's nationalistic zeal. At the time Bohr had no knowledge of what the Allies were doing. Werner Heisenberg and C.F. von Weizsäcker were in Copenhagen on other business, but in a private conversation with Heisenberg they brought up the question of the military applications of atomic energy. Heisenberg expressed his scepticism because of the great technical difficulties that had to be overcome, but Heisenberg thought that the new possibilities could decide the outcome of the war if the war dragged on.
Heisenberg warned the German government in the fall of 1941 that the Americans were pursuing a nuclear explosive (plutonium) that could be made in a chain-reacting pile. The warning resulted in receiving the highest priority for his work from Albert Speer, Hitler's minister of munitions.
Weizsäcker had stated how fortunate it would be for the position of science in Germany after the victory to help so significantly towards this end with atomic weapons. But there was no possibility of carrying out such a large undertaking in Germany before the end of the war.
The German scientists had produced nuclear fission in the laboratory. They had also been looking at nuclear fusion and U-235 separations and were approaching criticality in a nuclear pile in a cave at Haigerloch. Their nuclear program was inhibited somewhat by a lack of enthusiasm on the part of Adolph Hitler, who believed the time frame was too long, and even more so by a serious miscalculation in its early stages.
After the War, Heisenberg recounted (http://www.haigerloch.de/stadt/keller_englisch/INT.HTM) "It was a new situation for us scientists in Germany. Now for the first time we could get money from our government to do something interesting and we intended to use this situation. The official slogan of the government was: We must make use of physics for warfare.... We felt already in the beginning that if it were possible at all to actually make explosives it would take such a long time and require such an enormous effort that there was a very good chance the War would be over before that could be accomplished.... We definitely did not want to get into this bomb business. I wouldn't like to idealize this; we did this also for our personal safety. We thought that the probability that this would lead to atomic bombs during the War was nearly zero. If we had done otherwise, and if many thousand people had been put to work on it and then if nothing had been developed, this could have had extremely disagreeable consequences for us."
On 26 February 1942, Heisenberg spoke at a Berlin conference organized to garner support for the fission project. Heisenberg reported that a reactor could be used to power submarines, and to generate "...a new substance (element 94) ...which in all probability is an explosive with the same unimaginable effectiveness as pure uranium-235."
Until 1942 Heisenberg headed a small reactor research group in Leipzig and advised a second, larger group in Berlin. Heisenberg built an early experimental pile in Leipzig, alternating layers of uranium and paraffin, to test the properties of a chain reaction. The Leipzig pile burned in a fire caused by a pyrophoric reaction of its powdered uranium with air.
Allied bombing of Berlin forced Heisenberg to move his materials to Haigerloch in Wurttemberg, Germany. In 1944 it was rented by the Kaiser-Wilhelm-lnstitut für Physik (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics) in Berlin. The Atomkeller is a long, rectangular room, the walls are the rough, undisguised rock face. The whole tunnel reminds its original origin: an (uncompleted) railroad tunnel. The reactor prototype was once located at the end of this tunnel. The famous "B8"-experiment was carried out at the end of March and the beginning of April 1945. The reactor didn't become critical. Further calculations showed that a functioning nuclear reactor would have had to be about 1.5 times the size of this reactor. However, expanding the reactor was no longer possible in April 1945 due to the lack of both heavy water and additional quantities of uranium blocks.
The US Army Air Corps bombed the German nuclear production works near Berlin. Thus ended the German nuclear threat. Although General Groves was aware of this fact, he did not pass the information on to the scientists in the Manhattan Project.
In 1944, as Germany was falling, the Alsos Mission under Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash and Samuel Goudsmit, its civilian scientist, gathered information on all aspects of Germany's advanced technology, particularly the development of atomic energy. The American intelligence force quickly nabbed all the German nuclear documentation and scientists they could find to keep them out of the hands of the Soviets. (Alsos was a thinly disguised code name; in Greek it means "grove.") The mission found that the Germans working on an atomic bomb under Werner Heisenberg were far behind the United States.
Hahn, who was involved with the desultory German effort to harness atomic power, was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize (delayed in presentation until 1946) by an uninformed prize committee. Possibly anxious to defend the status of German science in the postwar years, he never bothered to correct the record.
A persistent historical debate still rages about the motivations of Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, and the other members of the German "Uranium Club." The 1993 book by the journalist Thomas Powers, "Heisenberg's War," argued that Heisenberg destroyed the German project from within. But Heisenberg, who was not a Nazi, compromised his principles by acquiescing in Nazi rule because he believed that it would return Germany to "its rightful place" as an economic and military leader in the world. Did he delay the German bomb project in order to prevent the Nazis from acquiring the bomb--as he claimed--or were they were not able to develop a bomb because they were unabile?
After the war Heisenberg maintained that he understood the principles of an atomic bomb, but that he had deliberately misled the German program into concentrating on reactors. In fact, under Heisenberg, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons.
After the war, Heisenberg and nine of his colleagues were interned at Farm Hall, a British country house. Hidden microphones recorded their reaction to the bombing of Hiroshima. Heisenberg did not understand bomb physics, and had vastly overestimated how much U-235 was needed. At Farm Hall Heisenberg had calculated that the amount of fissionable material necessary for a bomb was somewhere in the range of several metric tons. The Germans were forced to forswear the production of atomic, biological, and chemical weapons as part of the Paris Treaties of 1955 (embodying the so­called Adenauer "nonnuclear pledge"), which cleared the way politically for West Germany to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/germany/nuke.htm

[Smaragdadler]

Ohrdruf Speculations

http://www.palba.cz/files/thumbs/t_jonastal-plan1.jpg

Located near Ohrdruf, Thuringia was located the S-III Führer headquarters. Constructed by approximately 15- to 18,000 inmates of the nearby Ohrdruf, Espenfeld and Crawinkel concentration camps, from autumn 1944 to spring 1945, was a tunnel system over 1,5 miles in length.
Ohrdruf was reached by General Patton about April 11, 1945. Colonel R. Allen accompanying him described the installations extensively in his book.¹

"The underground installations were amazing. They were literally subterranean towns. There were four in and around Ohrdruf: one near the horror camp, one under the Schloss, and two west of the town. Others were reported in near-by villages. None were natural caves or mines. All were man-made military installations. The horror camp had provided the labour. An interesting feature of the construction was the absence of any spoil. It had been carefully scattered in hills miles away. The only communication shelter, which is known, is a two floor deep shelter, with the code "AMT 10".
Over 50 feet underground, the installations consisted of two and three stories several miles in length and extending like the spokes of a wheel. The entire hull structure was of massive reinforced concrete. Purpose of the installations was to house the High Command after it was bombed out of Berlin. This places also had paneled and carpeted offices, scores of large work and store rooms, tiled bathrooms with bath tubs and showers, flush toilets, electrically equipped kitchens, decorated dining rooms and mess halls, giant refrigerators, extensive sleeping quarters, recreation rooms, separate bars for officers and enlisted personnel, a moving picture theatre, and air-conditioning and sewage systems".

1. Sources and Reference Material.
a. The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW, High Command) and Luftwaffe war diaries and all copies of them for the period March 1945 have disappeared and are suspected to be in American keeping.

b. On April 7, 1945, the United States Atomic Energy Commission inspected various underground workings at Ohrdruf, and removed technical equipment before dynamiting surface entrances. The US authourities have classified all 1945 documents relating to Ohrdruf for a minimum period of 100 years.
Fortunately for researchers, in 1962 a quasi-judicial tribunal sat at Arnstadt in the then DDR, to take depositions from local residents for an enquiry entitled "Befragung von Buergern zu Ereignissen zur oertlichen Geschichte". The enquiry was principally interested in what went on at the Ohrdruf Truppenuebungsplatz (TUP) in the latter years of the war. The depositions became common property in 1989 upon the reunification of Germany and may be viewed at Arnstadt town hall.

2. The Ohrdruf military training ground.
a. There had been a military training ground at Ohrdruf since imperial times. It was a large, rugged area of upland, nowadays disused and strewn with shells and other military scrap. Its perimeter can be circumnavigated by land rover in about three hours. Through binoculars, small parts of the ruins of Amt 10, described below, can be made out but not visited.
During 1936-1938, an Army underground telephone/telex exchange known as Amt 10 was built in the limestone strata below the Ohrdruf Truppenuebungsplatz. Its entrances were disguised as chalets. The bunker was 50 feet down and measured 70 by 20 metres. Both floors had a central corridor about 3 metres wide with rooms either side, and 2 WCs. End-doors were gas-proofed, the installation had central heating, air was supplied under pressure, water drawn from a spring 600 feet below. A 475 hp ship's diesel was on hand as the emergency electrical generator, and this piece of equipment plays an important role in understanding the Ohrdruf mystery.
One of the three full-time Reichpost maintenance engineers employed there from 1938 to 1945 stated that Amt 10 was never used until the last few months of the war when it was "more than it seemed" and "its clandestine purpose was fairly obvious."
Col Robert S Allen, a Staff officer with General Patton's Third Army described in his book¹ a completed underground reinforced-concrete metropolis 50 feet down "to house the High Command". It was on two or three levels and consisted of galleries several miles in length and "extending like the spokes of a wheel." The location of Hitler's Führer headquarters was not stated and Amt 10 was described misleadingly as "a two-floor deep concrete shelter."
If the structure was built like a wheel, the Führer headquarters would logically be at the hub, and Amt 10 was at the hub. Allen's description of Amt 10 as having two floors on April 1945 conflicts with the evidence of two persons who worked there: one hinted that there were more than two floors, the other testified there were three. The latter witness also stated that Amt 10 was two great bunkers of the same size, each of three floors, but not connected except by underground piping. Each bunker was guarded on each level by an SS sentry and passes for each entrance were not common to both. The most likely explanation is that the second bunker was constructed in 1944 at the same time as a third level was added to the first Amt 10 bunker as the Führer-suite.
As regards the second bunker, a witness stated that in 1944 there was an installation below the Ohrdruf Truppenuebungsplatz which created an electro-magnetic field capable of stopping the engines of a conventional aircraft at seven miles. During the war, the Allies never photographed Ohrdruf from the air, nor bombed it, even though their spies must have assured them it was crawling with SS and scientific groups. A German electro-magnetic field which interfered with their aircraft at altitudes of up to seven miles is admitted by a 1945 United States Air Force Intelligence document (see sources). The USAF suspected that it was a device to bring down their bombers, but it obviously had some other purpose, or it would have been operating below Berlin.
Many Arnstadt witnesses described occasions when electrical equipment and automobile engines cut out. They always knew when this was about to happen, for the ship's diesel engine at Amt 10 would smoke. A diesel motor is not affected by an electro-magnetic field. In 1980, Russians scientists were still able to measure the field on their equipment, but they were never able to identify the source.

3. The Führer headquarters at Ohrdruf.
The Führer headquarters at Ohrdruf is not admitted by academic historians. The evidence for it, however, is strong:

a. S-III was an SS military factory complex below Jonastal near Ohrdruf where 1,000 Buchenwald inmates began digging in June 1944. No decision had been taken to build a Führer headquarters in Thuringia before 24 August 1944.

b. In September 1944, a geologist consulted by SS-WVHA regarding the suitability of Jonastal for a Führer headquarters suggested theOhrdruf Truppenuebungsplatz instead.

c. In October 1944, General von Gockl, Ohrdruf Truppenuebungsplatz commandant, evacuated all Wehrmacht personnel from the plain. Within a fortnight the notorious Ohrdruf-KZ had been set up while SS-Fuehrungsstab S-III, in charge of the Führer headquarters project, occupied a school at nearby Luisenthal. Firms working on building projects in Poland were ordered immediately to Ohrdruf.

d. At the end of 1944, Hauptsturmfuehrer Karl Sommer, deputy head of WVHA-DH (forced labour) assembled a workforce at Buchenwald to build a secret Führer headquarters named S-III at Ohrdruf. S-III had a fully-equipped telephone-telex exchange before work started, thus identifying it as around Amt 10.

e. Hitler's Luftwaffe aid Nicolaus von Below stated in his memoirs that in early 1945 he visited the location of the new Thuringian Führer headquarters and it was at the Ohrdruf Truppenuebungsplatz.

f. In late January 1945, Hitler spoke openly of evacuating Ministry staff from Berlin "perhaps to Oberhof in Thuringia".

g. In compliance with order 71/45 and the communique from Führer headquarters Berlin issued by Wehrmacht ADC General Burgdorf on 9 March 1945, General Krebs of the Army General Staff reported that between 12 February and 29 March 1945 a substantial proportion of OKW Staff had transferred to the Ohrdruf area.

h. On the nights of 4 and 12 March 1945, "a small explosive of terrific destructive power" was tested on the Ohrdruf Truppenuebungsplatz. 200 KZ inmates and 20 SS guards were scorched to death on the first test due to a miscalculation of the extent of the effect. The bodies were immolated on a common pyre, the ashes being scattered across central-Germany from aircraft. In mid-March, a 30-metre long rocket was reported test fired into the night sky from a weapons site within five miles of the Truppenuebungsplatz. The Amt 10 telephone engineer gave evidence that "200 so-called female signals auxiliaries" arrived to staff the second bunker in this period. Why they were "so-called" is not explained.

i. In early March 1945, Organization Todt began work on the Brandleite railway tunnel at Oberhof to accommodate the special trains of Hitler and Goering, installed a telephone exchange in the station-master's house and positioned flak batteries on surrounding peaks.

j. A witness stated that the Fuehrer-Sperrkreis at Ohrdruf was called Burg and alleged that Hitler spent at least one day there in late March 1945.

k. In late March a Luftwaffe mutiny occurred in which General Barber and over three hundred pilots and air base command personnel were executed for refusing to obey an unknown order (the Luftwaffe War Diaries for March and first part April 1945 have vanished).

l. Upon his arrest in May 1945, Goering told his captors that he had engineered the mutiny thus saving the world by "refusing to deploy bombs that could have destroyed all civilisation". It was freely reported at the time, since nobody knew what he meant.

A further interesting set of depositions from the 1962 Arnstadt DDR enquiry refer to the test of a rocket apparently the size of an A9/10 "Amerika" rocket.
Witness 1 was Claere Werner, throughout the war custodian of the Wachsenburg watch-tower. She stated that a rocket with a huge tail-fire was fired after 21.00 hours on the night of March 16, 1945 while she was looking through binoculars towards Ichtershausen. She had been informed earlier by a friend working for the Reichspost Sonderbauvorhaben at Arnstadt that a tremendous achievement was to be celebrated in the sky that night.
Witness 2 was a former KZ-inmate who gave evidence to the DDR tribunal that he helped erect staging for "an enormously long rocket" at MUNA Rudisleben. From the Wachsenburg watch tower, Rudisleben is close to Ichtershausen.
Witnesses 3 and 4 were a technician and fuel system engineer respectively who all stated that they worked on the construction of a huge rocket over 30 metres in length which was fired on the night of March 16, 1945 at Polte II underground facility, one kilometer from Rudisleben.
The first of the rocket series successfully tested that night may have been intended as the carrier for the mysterious explosive referred to in the opening article of this thread, and intended to bring New York under attack, as had been promised by Hitler in his references to a miracle weapon in "Hitlers Tischgespraeche" (Picker's version). Following this successful launch, at what stage the rocket could have entered series production is an interesting question.

4. The Magnetic Ray.
A similar device to the one operating below Ohrdruf finds a place in declassified literature as follows: On December 6, 1944, the US Military Intelligence Service commenced Research Project 1217 "Investigation into German Possible Use of Rays to Neutralize Allied Aircraft Motors". This resulted from "recent interference phenomena occasionally experienced on operations over Germany in the Frankfurt/Main area." It was usually described as "freakish interference to engines and electrical instruments" over the north bank of the Main River, about ten miles from Führer headquarters Adlerhorst.
In a top secret report entitled "Engine Interference Counter-Measures" addressed to the Director, Air Technical Service Command, Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, reference was made to OSS discussions about a German unit somewhere near Frankfurt/Main operating:
"...an influence interfering with conventional aircraft... however incredible it may appear to project from the ground to a height of 30,000 feet sufficient magnetic energy to interfere with the functioning of the ignition system of an airplane, it must be concluded that the enemy not only intends to interfere with our aircraft by some immaterial means, but has also succeeded in accomplishing this intention..."

5. The Miracle Explosive.
The four items of literature appearing to relate to the explosive tested at Ohrdruf in March 1945 are as follows:

a. British Security Coordination (BSC) was the largest integrated intelligence network enterprise in history. Its Director was Sir William Stevenson, a Canadian industrialist. His code-name was "Intrepid". In his autobiography², Stevenson relates: "One of the BSC agents submitted a report, sealed and stamped THIS IS OF PARTICULAR SECRECY which told of "...liquid air bombs being developed in Germany... of terrific destructive effect."
The reader should not be misled into thinking that these were modern common-or-garden "liquid air bombs": Stevenson noted that they were "as powerful as rockets with atomic warheads".

b. The book "German Secret Weapons" was authored by Brian Ford, Barrie Pitt and Capt Sir Basil Liddell Hart.³ At page 28, the text states:
"...The Whirlwind Bomb produced an artificial hurricane of fire and is absolutely authentic even though it may seem improbable. The explosive was developed and tested by Dr. Zippermayr at Lofer, an experimental Luftwaffe institute in the Tyrol. The explosive was pulverzied coal dust and liquid air. Its effect was sufficient to create an artificial typhoon and was intended initially as an anti-aircraft weapon able to destroy aircraft by excessive turbulence. The effective radius of action was 914 metres..."

c. This is a 4-page declassified US Intelligence document of the Zalzburg Detachment of the US Forces Austria Counter-Intelligence Corps, describing Dr. Zippermayr was interrogated at Lofer on August 3, 1945. His laboratories were established at Lofer with head office at Weimarerstrasse 87, Vienna. Staff was 35, work financed by RLM and under direction of Chef der Technischen Luftruestung.
Zippermayr worked on three projects of which one was the Enzian/Schmetterling anti-aircraft rockets "charged with a coal dust explosive so strong that the concussion could break the wings of a bomber." This item "was proved successful by August 1943, but orders for its production were not issued until March 9, 1945..."

d. This item is an extract from BIOS (British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee) Final Report 142(g) "Information Obtained from Targets of Opportunity in the Sonthofen Area, (HMSO London).
The report states that during 1944, an explosive mixture of 60% liquid air and 40% finely powdered coal dust invented by Dr. Mario Zippermayr was tested at Doeberitz explosives ground near Berlin, and was found to be very destructive over a radius of up to 600 metres.
Waffen-SS scientists then became involved and added some kind of waxy substance to the explosive. The bombs had to be filled immediately prior to the aircraft taking off. Bombs of 25 and 50 kgs were dropped on Starnberger See and photos taken. Standartenfuehrer Klemm showed these to Brandt (Himmler's scientific adviser). The intensive explosion covered an area up to 4.5 kms radius.
This waxy substance was a reagent of some kind which was said to interact with air during the development of the explosion, causing it to change its composition and so create meteorological change in the atmosphere. A lightning storm at ground level consumes all the available oxygen. Goering's statement upon his arrest in May 1945 is significant: he claimed to have led a revolt against Luftwaffe use of a bomb "which could have destroyed all civilisation." The bomb was not a nuclear weapon, and it appears to have been a conventional explosive which used a reagent or catalyst produced by Tesla methodology or similar for its inexplicable effect.

6. Conclusion.

The suggestion at this point is that by late 1944, Waffen-SS scientists in Germany had developed a catalyst or reagent, apparently a waxy substance, maybe a plasmoid of some kind, which when added to a conventional explosive containing liquid air vastly magnified the effect, killing everything within a three mile radius by blast, tremendous heat and suffocation. It appears also to have had undesirable meteorological effects.
On April 16, 1945 the Type XB submarine U-234 (KL Fehler) departed Kristiansand, Norway for Japan direct. She had loaded at Kiel in January and February, and besides a strategic cargo in the region of 260 tonnes carried ten German and two Japanese passengers, all of whom were specialists in the military field or scientists.
On May 17, 1945, against his express orders, Kptlt. Fehler decided to surrender his submarine to the US Navy, and arrived two days later at Portsmouth Navy Yard, New Hampshire.
What is principally of interest is the cargo, and in particular ten cases of "uranium oxide" of 560 kilograms weight, and several items which were not included on the Unloading Manifest.
The Unloading Manifest (US NAT Arch, College Park MD, Box RG38, Box 13, Document OP-20-3-G1-A (Unloading Manifest) dated May 24, 1945) is a falsified document purporting to show the entire cargo aboard U-234. The true Manifests, both American and German, have never been declassified. In the normal course of events, a Manifest upon declassification would bear the censor's deletions where it was intended that certain items should not be displayed. The USN alleged Unloading Manifest is clean of any deletions and purports to be the true Unloading Manifest. From a declassified cable, it is evident that 80 cases of Uranium Powder have been omitted, as was also, from the statements of the U-boat crew members and Kptlt. Fehler, a two-seater Me 262 bomber aircraft brought from Rechlin and stowed in its component parts.
Germany had 1,200 tonnes of uranium oxide on hand at Oolen in Belgium throughout the war, but made no strides towards making an atom bomb. Nevertheless, many commentators fantasize an embryonic atom bomb in the 560 kilos of "uranium oxide" aboard U-234. It is a fantasy, for such evidence as exists points to this being a cover word for something else.
Two official documents address the ten cases of "uranium oxide" directly.

a. A report headed "Regarding 'URANIUM OXIDE' and other CARGO aboard U-234" on the interrogation of Geschwaderrichter Kay Nieschling, U-234 passenger by USN Intelligence Officer Lt Best states that "Lt Pfaff was the man responsible for loading the U-boat" and that "the meaning behind the ore" - peculiar phrase suggesting that the ore was not the ore - would be known by Kptlt. Falk (or Falck) who took some secret courses before he boarded the U-boat. Kptlt. Fehler should also know something about the ore."
It does not appear that Kptlt. Falk or Falck survived his interrogation, for there is no record of his return to Germany, and the US authorities have not been able to account for his movements in their custody after interrogating him on May 26, 1945. There are other indications that the "uranium ore" was extraordinary. Lt. Col. John Lansdale, chief of security for the Manhattan Project, wrote in a 1996 newspaper article published in Britain and Germany that he had personally handled the disposal of the ten cases. He stated that the American military authorities "reacted with panic" when they learned what the cases contained.

b. The second document was found by researcher Joseph Mark Scalia, a former 12-year US Navy man, during a rummage through old boxes at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. It is a secret cable from CNO to NYPORT on the subject "MINE TUBES, UNLOADING OF" and states:
"Interrogation Lt. Pfaff IIWO U-234 discloses he was in charge of cargo and personally supervised loading all mine tubes. Pfaff prepared Manifest List and knows kind cargo in each tube. Uranium Oxide loaded in gold-lined cylinders and as long as cylinders not opened can be handled like crude TNT. These containers should not be opened as substance will become sensitive and dangerous..."
The so-called "Uranium Oxide" would become sensitive and dangerous if exposed to air. The so-called "Uranium Oxide" was perfectly safe in its cylinders provided one respected it as one would dynamite. The so-called "Uranium Oxide" was sealed in a cylinder lined with gold.
In nuclear physics gold is used to absorb fission fragments plus gamma rays in containers, and is particularly efficient at capturing neutron radiation as well. From this it is evident that the material in the ten cylinders was not just highly radioactive - it was extraordinarily dangerous and behaving as if it were itself a nuclear reactor. No atomic physicist who has examined the evidence about these ten cases has been able to deliver an opinion as to what substance kept within a lead case might have required these extraordinary precautions.
On May 24, 1945, when the US Navy began to unload U-234, it is clear from the US State papers that no decision regarding the atom bomb had been taken by the US government. On May 30, 1945, both Secretary of State Stimson and President Truman were agreed that no alternative existed to deploying America's atomic arsenal against Japan.
They had no alternative to using the atom bomb, and no satisfactory reason has ever been forthcoming why that decision was made. So what could have caused these two decent men to decide that such a course of action was unavoidable?
What was aboard U-234 might also be aboard other Japan-bound U-boats. The Japanese had at least two submarines with a range of 30,000 miles, that were capable of being used as aircraft launchers. The Japanese had a plan of mixing the uranium from U-234 with standard explosives, and loading them in bombs or planes which were to take off the submarines and attack San Francisco. The target date was August 1945; they were ready, only waiting for the shipment of uranium to arrive.
That would make no sense unless the "uranium" from U-234 was the waxy substance which when mixed with conventional explosives turned the material into the miracle weapon. These two Japanese submarines would be very close to San Francisco, and the pilots of the bomber aircraft would have to be kamikazes, for proximity to the waxy substance meant certain death.
If the Japanese were indeed in the process of being supplied with this material by German U-boats for use against the United States west coast, then this was the reason for the nuclear attacks against Japan.
The miracle explosive known nowadays as R-Waffe was not based on uranium, although uranium was used in the creation of the plasmoid. The plasmoid worked as a catalyst on a conventional coal-dust/liquid air mixture to vastly expand the explosion.

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¹ Lucky Forward: The History of Patton's 3rd US Army, Col. Robert S. Allen, published by Vanguard Press, New York, 1947, ² A Man Called Intrepid, Sphere Books, 1977, page 414, ³ German Secret Weapons, Ballantyne Press, UK, also Libr. Edit. San Martin, Madrid, 1975, authored by Brian Ford (military scientist), Barrie Pitt (academic historian) and Capt Sir Basil Liddell Hart (military historian), º US Forces Austria Counter-Intelligence Corps, Salzburg Detachment, Zell am See report 4 August 1945, Case No S/Z/55 Dr Mario Zippermayr; NARA RG 319 Entry 82a Reports and messages, ALSOS Mission.
Additional sources: US Nat Archive NARA/US Strategic Air Forces in Europe - Air Intelligence Summaries, January 1945 et seq. 6 February 1945, Subject: Engine Interference Counter-measures. To: The Director, Air Technical Service Command, Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, Engineering Division. From: Taylor Drysdale, Director Technical Services, HQ European Theatre of Operations, PoW and X Detachment, Military Intelligence Service, US Army.
Originally published under "Ohrdruf (http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=57853)" by Geoffrey Brooks at the Axis History forums.
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[Egan]

From what I know Germany never built one, due to the fact they got there sums badly wrong.
To be honest, I would have thought that if they had built one, testing would have been done by dropping it on the nearest allied unit and seeing what happened rather than messing around with KZ inmates. It's not like they were in much of a position to take it slow and careful by that time.

In his autobiography, Albert Speer makes some interesting comments about the German research program. I'll have to rake them out. I seem to remember he claims that it was something other than mathematics that held them up - but then I tend to take anything that Speer claims in his book with a huge pinch of salt.