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German POW Physicists React to the Hiroshima Bombing

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PraiseVectron

From July 3, 1945, to January 3, 1946, the Allies incarcerated ten German nuclear physicists at the English country estate of Farm Hall. Like most POW camps for important German officials, the estate was filled with bugs. This is a transcript of the private conversations the POWs had when they learned of the Hiroshima bombing.

Operation "Epsilon" (6th-7th August 1945) National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, RG 77, Entry 22, Box 164

Whenever the Germans refer to an ENGINE or NUCLEAR ENGINE, they're talking about nuclear power plants. The ten individuals are Erich Bagge, Kurt Diebner, Walther Gerlach, Otto Hahn, Paul Harteck, Werner Heisenberg, Horst Korsching, Max von Laue, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and Karl Wirtz.
 
The whole document is incredible, and I found this part especially illuminating:

WEIZSÄCKER: If we had started this business soon enough we could have got somewhere. If they were able to complete it in the summer of 1945, we might have had the luck to complete it in the winter 1944/45.
WIRTZ: The result would have been that we would have obliterated LONDON but would still not have conquered the world, and then they would have dropped them on us.
WEIZSÄCKER: I don't think we ought to make excuses now because we did not succeed, but we must admit that we didn't want to succeed. If we had put the same energy into it as the Americans and had wanted it as they did, it is quite certain that we would not have succeeded as they would have smashed up the factories.
DIEBNER: Of course they were watching us all the time.
WEIZSÄCKER: One can say it might have been a much greater tragedy for the world if Germany had had the uranium bomb. Just imagine, if we had destroyed LONDON with uranium bombs it would not have ended the war, and when the war did end, it is still doubtful whether it would have been a good thing.
 
I find the situation of the internment rather fascinating myself. The Wikipedia article states that they were interred no earlier than practically when V-E Day was on the horizon but it seems like they may have been interred for a significant length of the war.
 
Dear god, Hahn considered suicide?

It's nice to see that they could look at the big picture. Germany with fission weapons would have left a very different map. They all seem to understand that, and aren't blinded by Nationalism.
 
Hahn also wasn't a big fan of Nazism to begin with. That tends to be common among Germany's top scientists of the period although Heisenberg's sympathies is one of the great debates about this subject.

I forgot who (obviously not Von Braun) but one of the Operation Paperclip-legacy scientists was turned over to Mossaud once we were basically done with him.
 
Gitaxian said:
The whole document is incredible, and I found this part especially illuminating:
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I find that bit to be a piece of denialism on the Germans part, a refusal of their ego to accept that they had failed intellectually as well as ignoring that Germany very much did not have the resources to grab an atomic bomb in the middle of a giant war. Heisenberg would even go so far as to later claim he had deliberately sabotaged the German atomic bomb program by screwing up the math because he was really secretly anti-Nazi, even though he had quite the enthusiasm for joining them in clearing out his academic competitors i. the pre-war and the record of his conversations with people like Albert Speer show him resolutely pushing for an atom bomb program. So I tend to throw those kinds of self-pitying justification in alongside the German generals post-war memorandum sob stories and find Alex Wallerstein's assessment to be rather more accurate:

A consistent theme in the Farm Hall transcripts and the Alsos investigation is that the Germans seem to have honestly thought that their work on the "uranium problem" was well beyond what anyone else might have been doing, and that the Allies would be desperate to "buy" their reactor research in the postwar. They apparently were not motivated to check to see whether this arrogance was founded, and part of the depression and desperation one sees them going through after Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a remark on their perception of irrelevance. As Otto Hahn chided them right after they learned of Hiroshima: "If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you're all second raters."
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obssesednuker said:
I find that bit to be a piece of denialism on the Germans part, a refusal of their ego to accept that they had failed intellectually as well as ignoring that Germany very much did not have the resources to grab an atomic bomb in the middle of a giant war.
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That's not what Weizäcker is saying, though; he's saying that they never could have realistically achieved the atomic bomb because of the Allied bombing campaigns, and that it's a good thing they didn't, because Germany would have been glassed itself if it had dared to use them.
 
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Fernandel said:
That's not what Weizäcker is saying, though; he's saying that they never could have realistically achieved the atomic bomb because of the Allied bombing campaigns, and that it's a good thing they didn't, because Germany would have been glassed itself if it had dared to use them.
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Well, the first issue is that he's wrong. Even had they the intellectual capitol, the German atomic bomb program likely would not have succeeded realistically Allied bombing campaign or not because it would have absorbed so much resources and taken so much time, the Soviets (or even Anglo-French, if they begin early enough) would have rolled through Berlin long before they could have born a bomb to fruition. The American experience, subsequently confirmed by the Soviets, is that developing an atom bomb with a 1940s tech base is an enormous industrial project quite comparable to prosecuting a large scale war. It's why Speer basically killed as much of the program as he could around the start of 1943... he recognized the Reich didn't have the resources to do it without compromising the restitution of an army that had just received a shattering blow by the Russians. And if they didn't restitute said army, then it wouldn't matter how much they threw into the program because they would be lined up against a wall by Stalin regardless.

The second issue is that I'm specifically honing in on his "but we must admit that we didn't want to succeed" line. This is basically the start of the sort of disassociation with past actions and re-writing of history that would culminate in Heisenberg claiming he really sabotaged the whole thing from the beginning among the WW2 German physcists that kinda irks me in how flagrantly self-serving it is...
 
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obssesednuker said:
Well, the first issue is that he's wrong. Even had they the intellectual capitol, the German atomic bomb program likely would not have succeeded realistically Allied bombing campaign or not because it would have absorbed so much resources and taken so much time, the Soviets (or even Anglo-French, if they begin early enough) would have rolled through Berlin long before they could have born a bomb to fruition. The American experience, subsequently confirmed by the Soviets, is that developing an atom bomb with a 1940s tech base is an enormous industrial project quite comparable to prosecuting a large scale war. It's why Speer basically killed as much of the program as he could around the start of 1943... he recognized the Reich didn't have the resources to do it without compromising the restitution of an army that had just received a shattering blow by the Russians. And if they didn't restitute said army, then it wouldn't matter how much they threw into the program because they would be lined up against a wall by Stalin regardless.

The second issue is that I'm specifically honing in on his "but we must admit that we didn't want to succeed" line. This is basically the start of the sort of disassociation with past actions and re-writing of history that would culminate in Heisenberg claiming he really sabotaged the whole thing from the beginning among the WW2 German physcists that kinda irks me in how flagrantly self-serving it is...
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Congratulations, I know all that. I'm SV's ex-Deutschmod. :V

Of course Weizäcker is wrong, obviously. But he also didn't say what you claim he said in the excerpt you quoted.
It is quite certain that we would not have succeeded as they would have smashed up the factories.
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He said that even if they had tried, they would have been bombed flat by that point in time. A realistic assessment, if anything else.
 
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I just read the entire thing from start to finish.

These are certainly not unintelligent men blinded by politics and ideology. They discuss in great detail as to why Nazi Germany's rocky relationship between politicians and scientists, the lack of cooperation between different groups of scientists, and limited resources being divided amongst too many projects combined with limited ability to lobby led to a breakdown in wartime German nuclear research.

They even accurately predict some of the future trends in the Cold War, though they're obviously wrong about the exact details.

I'm really interested in reading the original German transcripts. There's probably a lot of nuance the translation is missing.
 
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obssesednuker said:
I find that bit to be a piece of denialism on the Germans part, a refusal of their ego to accept that they had failed intellectually as well as ignoring that Germany very much did not have the resources to grab an atomic bomb in the middle of a giant war. Heisenberg would even go so far as to later claim he had deliberately sabotaged the German atomic bomb program by screwing up the math because he was really secretly anti-Nazi, even though he had quite the enthusiasm for joining them in clearing out his academic competitors i. the pre-war and the record of his conversations with people like Albert Speer show him resolutely pushing for an atom bomb program. So I tend to throw those kinds of self-pitying justification in alongside the German generals post-war memorandum sob stories and find Alex Wallerstein's assessment to be rather more accurate:
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I meant the idea that even if ROB magically granted them the resources to make nukes, they still would have lost.
 
obssesednuker said:
Fair enough. I'm actually slightly dubious on that, but it turns mainly on the issue of when ROB grants the Germans nukes.
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In 1940, the Germans miscalculated the amount of uranium needed to get a supercritical mass by a lot. So it could occur that ROB gives them enough uranium, but they still don't try to proceed because they think they need many times more.
 
Fernandel said:
That's not what Weizäcker is saying, though; he's saying that they never could have realistically achieved the atomic bomb because of the Allied bombing campaigns, and that it's a good thing they didn't, because Germany would have been glassed itself if it had dared to use them.
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I think Germany would have been hit if the war was still on in summer 1945, whether they had atomic bombs or not.
 
Sufficient Juice said:
I think Germany would have been hit if the war was still on in summer 1945, whether they had atomic bombs or not.
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Not necessarily at all.

The bombs were used on Japan because the alternative was a large-scale amphibious assault on the world's largest, most densely populated archipelago.

Germany in 1945 can best be accurately described as "who moves fastest through it to get to Berlin first".

The two theatres are are not at all the same in terms of military necessity.
 
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Fernandel said:
YMMV.
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The Invasion had a projected casualty tally of over a million GIs. On D-day + 0. And, every Japanese citizen was being trained, like the Volksturm on steroids. That's several more million dead.

Alternatively, a siege, and starving the Japanese would kill probably just as many. The elderly would die first, then children would be placed on short rations. The most food would be going to troops and workers, and even then, all of Japan in peacetime can't support a large population.

Thousands, versus millions. Cold mathematics, but a clear choice.
 
Burning Baron said:
The Invasion had a projected casualty tally of over a million GIs. On D-day + 0. And, every Japanese citizen was being trained, like the Volksturm on steroids. That's several more million dead.
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:rofl: People still believe this.

Weizsacker and Wirtz were far too optimistic about Germany's nuclear capabilities if you ask me. Not because Germany would have been physically or materially unable to build a nuclear weapon mind you, but because of Nazi Leadership. The Nazis Party simply was not equipped to enable the success of such a huge intellectual and scientific effort as a nuclear weapon. Aside from gutting their own intellectual base in anti-Jewish pogroms, the Nazis would've been unwilling to supply a nuclear weapons project with the kind of autonomy, resources, and authority that it would've needed. The Manhattan Project was after all, a project highly independent from Government oversight and yet still received massive backing from US infrastructure and federal investments. The Nazis could not possibly reconcile those two requirements in their perpetually embattled, kleptrocratic, chaos-ocracy. Nor would they be pleased with the projected timetables for the weapon's development. The Nazis were measuring the timetable of the war in months. A weapon projected to take years to achieve practical use was doomed to cancellation.
 
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DocHawkeye said:
Weizsacker and Wirtz were far too optimistic about Germany's nuclear capabilities if you ask me.
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Like, please read the entire thing. They weren't optimistic at all.

They mention how research initiatives started too late, how arguments about costs would delay actual research, a lack of manpower, the lack of "courage" within the researchers to ask for more resources from Nazi leaders, how the state didn't trust its researchers for various reasons, etcetera.

They are remarkably clear-headed about and cognizant of why they failed where the Americans succeeded.
 
Not only that, but they were much more cognizant of the social and political limitations of the program than I had believed.

"BAGGE: If the Germans had spent 10 milliard marks on it and it had not succeeded, all physicists would have had their heads cut off.

WIRTZ: The point is that in Germany very few people believed in it. And even those who were convinced it could be done did not all work on it."

The "will" for the program simply wasn't there. I had expected far more blame to be laid at the feet of resource shortages but it seems I was wrong.
 
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