Filmmaker says he has uncovered a Nazi underground weapons facility

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/30/filmmaker-says-hes-uncovered-the-nazis-biggest-secret-weapons-facility-buried-underground-near-a-concentration-camp/

by AxisOfEval • 12 years ago

27 14 12 years ago

washingtonpost.com

Animats• 12 years ago

Those "Nazi tunnels" shown are clean, dry, and equipped with modern fluorescent lights. Those are not recently discovered tunnels.

The "Nazi atomic bomb program" never went anywhere. There was one. It was never very big or very successful. The US effort to find out about the Nazi atomic bomb program was bigger than the Nazi atomic bomb program. After the war, the big-name physicists were kept in a mansion called Farm Hall, which was bugged to listen in on them. The recordings were released in the 1990s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Epsilon

Even after they hear about the Hiroshima bomb, they can't figure out how it was done. "If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you are all second-raters.", says Otto Hahn.

spacefight2• 12 years ago

" Those "Nazi tunnels" shown are clean, dry, and equipped with modern fluorescent lights. Those are not recently discovered tunnels."

That picture is from a site nearby. The newly discoverd site is connected to the one depicted in the image. This is well written within the article:

"The underground complex is connected to the B8 Bergkristall underground factory, where Germans produced the first jet fighters, the Messerschmitt Me 262."

tjradcliffe• 12 years ago

The NAZIs had some nuclear research, but its a stretch to call it a bomb program, as they hadn't even done the most basic back-of-the-envelope calculations as to the size of assembly required for criticality. Thus Heisenberg's initial estimate at Farm Hall was wildly wrong, but he refined it to something more-or-less correct in about a week.

If anyone at Farm Hall had been working on a bomb program of any kind they would have done that basic diffusion equation calculation the very first thing, before they even started, to get an idea if the whole thing was practical. No one did. Ergo, no one was working on a bomb, or if they were they were spectacularly incompetent.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

A nuclear bomb was only one of the possibilities listed:

“aspired to create a combination of missiles and weapons of mass destruction,” historian Rainer Karlsch, who has long researched Hitler’s pursuit of an atomic bomb and worked with Sulzer on the project, told the Sunday Times. “They wanted to equip [a V-2] missile, or more advanced rockets, with poison gas, radioactive material or nuclear warheads.”

benzofuran2• 12 years ago

This is some more fancy fishing out of a filmmaker - as Animats has indicated, the Nazi's had no serious atomic bomb program - their leading physicists hadn't worked out 'fast fission' and had no workable design for a bomb.

The logistics involved with Uranium separation on an industrial scale simply were impossible during the second half of WW2 for the Nazis - they did not have the materials or the expertise to construct enrichment / separation plants.

The theory nor materials were there to produce a Plutonium device either - no critical pile of any significant size was made, and as far as I know the understanding that a much smaller critical mass of Plutonium was needed was missed entirely as well.

The Nazi bomb program is a great example of the effects of a Scientific embargo - all of the powers at be at WW2 knew the US and UK were up to something involving radiation as most of the leading scientists in the field stopped publishing in the late 1930's until the conclusion of the war.

An interesting read on the subject is Heisenberg's War - http://www.amazon.com/Heisenbergs-War-Secret-History-German/...

spacefight2• 12 years ago

They might not have had a serious A-bomb program, but they sure had lots of interesting scientific researchers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

"By 1947 this evacuation operation had netted an estimated 1,800 technicians and scientists, along with 3,700 family members. Those with special skills or knowledge were taken to detention and interrogation centers, such as one code-named DUSTBIN,[16] to be held and interrogated, in some cases for months."

benzofuran2• 12 years ago

They definitely had a huge number of interesting researchers - however the support, lack of collaboration, and decentralization of those researchers prevented them from making significant headway in the understanding of nuclear fission and related processes.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

Well one thing is true, nuclear piles leave behind marks of their operation, some with half-lives measured in centuries. So if they did have a program and it was buried under Austria somewhere, then it could be easily 'proven' or not by the presence of those elements. It could kill an ill prepared film crew or exploratory group if they weren't equipped to detect and avoid nuclear hot spots.

anoother• 12 years ago

On a related note, this particular tale will keep you hooked if you have the patience for it, and a reasonable tolerance for cliffhangers:

http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?t=543304

Guthur2• 12 years ago

"where thousands of Jews were killed."

Would be more appropriate and reflective to say "where thousands of people/inmates were killed.". There were many victims in this camp, why is one group held above the rest? I don't think there is even evidence to suggest any particular group was in the majority; considering figures for actual victims varies wildly from 150K to 300K.

In my opinion this sort of emotive journalism is very dangerous, and seems to perpetuate quite widely.

tokenadult2• 12 years ago

You have offered no evidence whatsoever that that statement in the article is incorrect. By contrast, I just finished reading a while ago the three-volume series about the history of the Third Reich by historian Richard Evans (which was recommended in a Hacker News comment in August 2014), and I am sure that there is nothing incorrect at all about saying that thousands of Jews were killed as part of that project. It is true that people of various categories as the Nazis reckoned "races" were killed in slave labor for the Third Reich war effort, but Jews were very prominent among those innocent victims.

Guthur2• 12 years ago

I did not say it was incorrect. I said it was not appropriate to single out one single group of a disparate grouping of victims. Why single out anyone, what purpose does that serve?

There is no definitive evidence about the exact number of inmates killed, and therefore there will be no definitive evidence about the proportional make up. Many records were destroyed and what has survived is from many second hand sources.

Therefore the figures seem to vary widely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauthausen-Gusen_concentration...

But I am not writing for Washington Post and so my comments will not be widely read. So why do you ask for sources from me but not this article.

ajuc• 12 years ago

Compare to "where thousands of white people were killed" to see why some people may have issue with that. Also technicaly true.

Filmmaker says he has uncovered a Nazi underground weapons facility

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