Do you remember the pre- 9/11 BBC which used to make public service programmes?
Horizon: Hitler's Bomb (24 Feb. 1992)
Producer: David Sington
In December 1938, in Berlin, a simple chemical experiment showed for the first time that the atom can be split, releasing immense power. Within months, the Wehrmacht had started research into nuclear weapons. The Germns were the first to start work on the atom bomb. The programme investigates the reasons why Hitler was not the first leader to use it, drawing on new evidence gathered by historian Mark Walker. Dramatised scenes, eyewitness accounts from Allied and German scientists, interviews and archive footage are all employed.
German physicists and members of the military conducted three nuclear weapons tests shortly before the end of World War II, one on the German island of Ruegen in the fall of 1944 and two in the eastern German state of Thuringia in March 1945. The tests, writes Karlsch, claimed up to 700 lives.
It was in January of 1939, nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War, that German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published the results of an historic experiment about nuclear fission.
The German 'uranium project' began in earnest shortly after Germany's invasion of Poland in September.
Army physicist Kurt Diebner led a team tasked to investigate the military applications of fission. By the end of the year the physicist Werner Heisenberg had calculated that nuclear fission chain reactions might be possible.
Although the war hampered their work, by the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 Nazi scientists had achieved a significant enrichment in samples of uranium.
Mark Walker, a US expert on the Nazi programme said: 'Because we still don't know about these projects, which remain cloaked in WW2 secrecy, it isn't safe to say the Nazis fell short of enriching enough uranium for a bomb. Some documents remain top secret to this day.
'Claims that a nuclear weapon was tested at Ruegen in October 1944 and again at Ohrdruf in March 1945 leave open a question, did they or didn't they?'
Ruegen is a Baltic island and Ohrdruf a top-secret bunker complex in Thuringia where local legend has it that an A-bomb was tested by the Nazis in the dying days of the war.
Nazi nuclear waste from Hitler's secret A-bomb programme found in mine
By Allan Hall UPDATED: 09:36, 13 July 2011
More than 126,000 barrels of nuclear material that Hitler planned to use in an atom bomb programme now lies rotting over 2,000 feet below ground in an old salt mine
German nuclear experts believe they have found nuclear waste from Hitler's secret atom bomb programme in a crumbling mine near Hanover.
More than 126,000 barrels of nuclear material lie rotting over 2,000 feet below ground in an old salt mine.
Rumour has it that the remains of nuclear scientists who worked on the Nazi programme are also there, their irradiated bodies burned in secret by S.S. men sworn to secrecy.
A statement by a boss of the Asse II nuclear fuel dump, just discovered in an archive, said how in 1967 'our association sank radioactive wastes from the last war, uranium waste, from the preparation of the German atom bomb.'
This has sent shock waves through historians who thought that the German atomic programme was nowhere near advanced enough in WW2 to have produced nuclear waste in any quantities.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2014146/Nazi-nuclear-waste-Hitlers-secret-A-bomb-programme-mine.html
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