Die Bombe des Dritten Reiches

With Mark reading up on the 3rd Reich and all the talk of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, this recent article came to my attention.

Soil tests reveal no evidence of ‘Hitler’s Bomb’

BRAUNSCHWEIG, GERMANY – Soil tests in Germany have revealed no evidence whatever that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler tested a nuclear weapon just two months before losing the Second World War, government scientists said Wednesday. A Berlin historian, Rainer Karlsch, brought out a book last year on Nazi nuclear research and offered circumstantial evidence that the Germans may have tested a bomb on March 3, 1945 at the Ohrdruf army training camp in central Germany.

[...] A statement Wednesday said radioactive material was found at the site, but this could be explained by the fallout all over Europe from the 1986 explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine. The PTB stressed that it found no evidence to disprove the Karlsch hypothesis either.

The book is available from Amazon.de here (no English translation yet but there is an English Wikipedia article.). Wikipedia also has some additional information on alleged nuclear testing by Germany. The English summary of the book is as follows:

Under supervision of the SS, from 1944-45, German scientists in Thuringia tested some form of “nuclear weapon”, possibly a dirty bomb (for the differences between this and a standard fission weapon, see nuclear weapon design). Several hundred prisoners of war are alleged to have died as a result. Karlsch’s primary evidence are alleged vouchers for the atomic weapon attempts, a preliminary plutonium bomb patent from the year 1941 (which had been known about, but not yet found), and conducted industrial archaeology on the remains of the first functioning German nuclear reactor.

There is also a two-part documentary coming out soon on this subject whose website is here which includes a two and a half minute trailer of it (in English).

And lastly, as Miss Chirol noted, if the Nazis did test some form of an atomic weapon in Thüringen, it would explain why they talk so funny there!