"Contrary to the widely held view, the United States may have known about the Japanese project before the end of the war, and this information might have influenced President Harry Truman's decision to use the bomb on Japan.¹

"... when UN forces had been at Hungnam in connection with the retreat from Chosin, a mysterious installation in the mountains around it had been discovered. "¹²

An ancient Japanese legend has it that the Japanese people are descended from a blonde haired blue eyed race that came from the stars, a legend remarkably similar to the doctrines that percolated in the secret societies that fostered and mid-wifed the Nazi Party into existence in Germany between the World Wars. Nor did this legend play a small part in the history of World War Two, for it was partly because of its mere existence that Hitler could proclaim the Japanese "honorary Aryans" and conclude the incorporation of Japan into the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis without contradicting Nazi Party racial ideology. This was in no small part due to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin's diplomatic skill in pointing out this little known fact of Japanese legends to the Germans. Of course, there were pressing military and political reasons for Italy and Germany to conclude an alliance with Japan, but for the race and ideology obsessed Nazi government, so much the better if the Japanese had some sort of Nordic-Aryan connection, no matter how tenuous that might be.

An early and continuous problem for the three Axis partners was to arrange the transfer of technology and raw materials from Europe to the Far East. Most transfers occurred via U-boats or Japanese submarines, though both Germany and Italy undertook long range, and militarily quite risky, flights to Japan as well. The Italians, for example, mounted such a flight with a Savoia Marchetti S 75 GA during 1942, ostensibly for the purpose of supplying the Italian embassy in Tokyo with copies of new Italian code books, since the Commando Supremo had concluded that the Allies had broken Italian codes.³ As the war progressed, the Germans found themselves increasingly trading their high technology for very little in return other than the prospect of stiffening Japanese resistance and perhaps drawing American force to the Pacific and lessening pressure on the Reich. And the Japanese, their industry hard-pressed to maintain pace with American and British technological developments, were always very eager, and very specific, in their demands for high technology from their Aryan brethren.

Even the conventional military technology transfers form Germany to Japan are staggering enough. By 1944 Japan had requested and received either working models or full production designs for the following:

Fortunately for American and Commonwealth forces in the Pacific theater, these weapons never saw full scale production by the Japanese. What is intriguing is the last item. Why bomb fuses? Surely the Japanese, who had been raining bombs all over China, Indochina, Burma, and the Pacific knew how to fuse a conventional bomb. The request suggests that the fuses were of a sophistication beyond the capabilities of Japanese industry. And why a request for heavy bombers so close to the end of the war, at least one of which was reputedly capable of ultra-long-range flight and heavy payload?

As with the end of the war in Europe, the end of the Pacific war carried with it the odd rumor or two, some of which managed to appear in short articles in the Western Press, before the curtain of the Allied Legend slammed down to hide their implications from view. Robert K. Wilcox, in a book that may well in retrospect be the first book on the German bomb project from a revisionist perspective, Japan's Secret War, revitalized these reports and rumors:

Shortly after World War II had ended, American intelligence in the Pacific received a shocking report: The Japanese, just prior to their surrender, had developed and successfully test-fired an atomic bomb. The project had been housed in or near Konan (Japanese name for Hungnam), Korea, in the peninsula's North. The war had ended before this weapon could be used, and the plant where it had been made was now in Russian hands.

By the summer of 1946 the report was public. David Snell, an agent with the Twenty-fourth Criminal Investigation Detachment in Korea... wrote about it in the Atlanta Constitution following his discharge.⁶

Snell's source for the allegation was a Japanese officer returning to Japan. The officer informed him that he had been in charge of security for the project. Snell, paraphrasing the officer in his article, stated:

In a cave in a mountain near Konan men worked, racing against time, in final assembly of "genzai bakudan," Japan's name for the atomic bomb. It was August 10, 1945 (Japanese time), only four days after an atomic bomb flashed in the sky over Hiroshima and five days before Japan surrendered.

To the north, Russian hordes were spilling into Manchuria. Shortly after midnight of that day, a convoy of Japanese trucks moved from the mouth of the cave, past watchful sentries. The trucks wound through valleys, past sleeping form villages.... In the cool predawn,

Off the coast, near an islet in the sea of Japan, more frantic preparations were under way. All that day and night, ancient ships, junks and fishing vessels moved into the anchorage.

Before dawn on August 12, a robot launch chugged through the ships at anchor and beached itself on the islet. Its passenger was genzai bakudan. A clock ticked.

The observers were 20 miles away. The waiting was difficult and strange to men who had worked relentlessly so long, who knew their job had been completed too late.

The light in the east, where Japan lay, grew brighter. The moment the sun peeped over the sea there was a burst of light at the anchorage, blinding the observers, who wore welder's glasses. The ball of fire was estimated to be 1,000 yards in diameter. A multicolored cloud of vapors boiled toward the heavens, then mushroomed in the atmosphere.

The churn of water and vapor obscured the vessels directly under the burst. Ships and junks on the fringe burned fiercely at anchor.

When the atmosphere cleared slightly the observers could detect several vessels had vanished.

Genzai bakudan in thut moment had matched the brilliance of the rising sun to the east.

Japan had perfected and successfully tested an atomic bomb as cataclysmic as those that withered 1 liroshima and Nagasaki.⁷

How had Japan, hard-pressed for even conventional military technology, pulled off this feat of testing an atom bomb of the same approximate yield as Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Where did they get the enriched uranium for the weapon? Moreover, the Japanese had tested their bomb only three days after the plutonium "Fat Man" fell on and obliterated Nagasaki. Small wonder then, that the Japanese cabinet debated whether or not to surrender. This important fact, in conjunction with Wilcox's startling revelations, will serve as the basis for further speculation in a moment. Finally, the test itself suggested that the Japanese envisioned deploying the weapon against naval targets. What possible thoughts may have been going through the Japanese cabinet's surrender debate? Possible clues lie in the nature of the Japanese program itself, and its significant reliance on technology transfers from Germany.

The chief physicist involved in the Japanese project was Yoshio Nishina, a "colleague of Niels Bohr."⁸ It was Nishina who in fact headed the Japanese army team that investigated Hiroshima after the bombing of that city.⁹ The reports of the Japanese test at Konan were a steady source of consternation and mystification to American intelligence units in occupied Japan after the war, for unlike its obsession with the German bomb program, Allied intelligence consistently placed the Japanese far behind, as conducting only theoretical studies, and maintaining that the Japanese "had neither the talent nor the resources to make a bomb."¹⁰ Resources Japan may have lacked, but there was no lack of talented physicists who understood bomb physics. In any case the reports caused enough concern tor the American occupying forces to send several intelligence teams throughout Japan to destroy its cyclotrons, of which there were no less than five, and presumably more!¹¹ This curious fact raises a question. What were the Japanese doing with that many cyclotrons? Could they have perhaps been given the secrets of Baron Manfred Von Ardenne's method of mass spectrograph separation and enrichment of uranium 235? Or did the Japanese physicists, like their German and American counterparts, come to the realization that the cyclotron afforded a method for isotope enrichment? Both are possible, and the latter is probable.

Further confirmation of a Japanese atom bomb test led Wilcox to connect Nishina to a Japanese industrialist named Noguchi. Searching through American declassified records, Wilcox quickly concluded that "subsequent directives in the same boxes ordered reinvestigations in 1947 and 1948 of Japanese wartime atomic research, indicating that (American intelligence) still did not know exactly what had happened. In fact, (it) was continually ordering reinvestigations of Japanese wartime atomic research and discovering new facts at least up until 1949, according to additional documents that I found."¹⁰¹¹ Then Wilcox struck a very rich vein:

Box 3 of Entry 224 yielded a high mark of my two days at Suitland:¹² an interrogation of a former engineer at the Noguchi Konan complex, Otogoro Natsume, conducted on October 31, 1946. "Subject" of the interrogation was listed as "Further questioning the newspaper story about atomic bomb explosion in Korea."

In attendance were head(sic) of the Science and Technology Division, Dr. Harry Kelly; an interpreter, "T/4 Matsuda," and a "Mr. Donnelly," identified only as "5259 TIC." He apparently was some

sort of intelligence officer and,			judging	from	their questions,	the
interrogators	had more	information	about	the	Konan-Hungnam	story
than was in the	newspaper.
Natsume,	a chemical	engineer,	according	to	the interrogation,	had

been imprisoned by the Russians and then released to run a Konan plant until he escaped "on a small sailing boat" in December 1945. He told the investigators he'd heard the rumors about the atomic bomb explosion at Konan but knew nothing about it. According to the transcript, the following exchange then ensued:

Donnelly: "We haven't actually found anything concrete. Last few days we have been talking with people here in and around Tokyo and asking them about report(s) of decomposition of hydrogen peroxide and asking them if they knew about it or which plant it was."

Donnelly: "Ask him if he knows anything about the NZ plant making hydrogen peroxide."

Matsuda: "He says that he heard about the factory but it was under the Navy and highly secret. He had never been in it."

Matsuda: "He says that there are two factories under management of this company - one in Konan and one in Honbu. There are about 700 chemists altogether (approximately 300 at Konan)."

In a lengthy exchange, Natsume indicated that most of the scientists, engineers, and workers at Konan were arrested and then later released to go back to work. But six key technical people from NZ, whom he later named, were not released and he had "no idea" what the Russians were doing with them except they were being held in the "secret plant."

Matsuda: "The six men mentioned are the only ones who knew much about the secret plant."¹³

As we shall see momentarily, perhaps the most significant thing about this interrogation is the date, October 31, 1946. It is also significant that the bulk of the scientists involved appear to have been chemists. Finally, as is apparent from the interrogation, the plant or plants at Konan were of significant size.

So what was the Konan complex? To reconstruct it requires a similar process to that used in examining the German uranium enrichment program. The transcript connects the Konan complex and a Japanese industrialist named Noguchi.

Jun Noguchi had built the huge Japanese complex of factories that nestled about the Yalu, Chosin, and Fusen rivers. The latter two rivers had been dammed by Noguchi to supply the enormous electrical power needed by his factories. "Together the three rivers delivered more than 1 million kilowatts of power" to the complex.¹⁴This was for the time a prodigious amount of electricity, especially in view of the fact that all of Japan produced no more than 3 million.¹⁵ Begun in 1926 in a deal struck with the Japanese Army Noguchi's Konan empire expanded along with Japan's imperial appetites.

So, like the I.G. Farben "Buna" plant at Auschwitz, we note already two key ingredients are present at Konan: large electrical power production infrastructure, and proximity to large amounts of water. Konan, in fact, was the largest industrial complex in all of Asia, and relatively sheltered and even unknown to Allied bomber and the intelligence committees that prepared their targets lists.¹⁷But there is more.

Declassified documents noted that Konan was also near uranium ore deposits. "This was the logical place for an end-of-the-war atomic bomb project."¹⁸ Moreover, as Wilcox discovered,

1946 and originating within the US Army's chief of staff office in South Korea, it stated:

Of increasing interest have been recent reports dealing with an apparent undercover research laboratory operated by the Japanese ... at ... Hungnam.... All reports agree that research and experiments on

Russians were able to remove some of the machinery. Further reports stated that the actual experiments on atomic

energy were conducted in Japan, and the Hungnam plant was opened for the development of the practical application of atomic energy to a bomb or other military use. This section of the ... plant ... was always heavily guarded.... These reports received separately are surprisingly

uniform as to content. It is felt that a great deal of credence should be attached to these reports as summarized.¹⁶

We may now speculate as to the real significance of these US Army intelligence reports in the light of subsequent events.

Clearly, the US Army is taking seriously allegations of a Japanese atom bomb project based in the northern Korean Peninsula, very close in fact, to the international border with China, and scene of one of the Korean War's bloodiest battles. At the Chosin Reservoir, General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur had been dealt a significant defeat and was forced to retreat. Indeed, after his celebrated landing at Inchon, MacArthur had relentlessly driven his troops northward in a classic blitzkrieg style campaign, designed in part to seize the Yalu River crossings, crucial to any

further operations in China, as well as for defense against any Chinese invasion of the peninsula. And the Chosin Reservoir, and hence Noguchi's vast Konan complex, was also a prime military target. With MacArthur's insubordination and the subsequent

Chinese entry into the war, Truman fired MacArthur. So goes the standard history.

But could the real motivations for MacArthur's lightening dash up the peninsula toward Chosin alter the Inchon landings in fact have been based on a very different, and highly secret, agenda of military objectives? Given the US Army's own intelligence memoranda concerning the Konan complex and Russian activities it seems all too likely. And this in turn may mean that the real motivations for his subsequent firing by Truman may also lie in what he uncovered there: certain knowledge of the extent, capabilities, and actual achievements of the Japanese scientists and engineers working on the genzai bakudan.

But what would have been so sensitive about the Japanese atom bomb project, beyond its actual achievements? To answer this question, we must speculate once again. What isotope separation and enrichment methods were known to the Japanese? What did physicist Nishina and his team of scientists finally rely on? Like them German counterparts, the Japanese knew that the ultra-centrifuge was the simplest path, at least in theory, toward the uranium bomb. But Japanese scientists calculated the needed revolutions-per-minute of such a device to be between 100,000 and 150,000 rpms. The United States itself, because of the difficulties in designing turbines of this speed, decided to forego enrichment via this

At this point, Wilcox's reconstruction begins to run into a bit of trouble, for the Japanese, he reports, were able to design, and apparently to build, a large ultra-centrifuge.¹⁷¹⁸ Their only problem, according to Wilcox, was a large enough supply or uranium. However, there is a significant weakness in this construction, for the Japanese, it will be recalled, had to request German assistance in the design and production of jet engines, a request that led not only to the exchange of blueprints for the Messerschmitt 262, the world's first operational jet fighter, but of technicians able to show the Japanese the necessary production methods and tolerances to construct such high speed turbines operating under the stress of

tremendous heat. In other words, while Japanese theoretical capabilities were not lacking at that time, they did lack certain industrial expertise which only the Germans possessed. Moreover, as we have already seen, the centrifuge idea had originated and been developed by the Germans. So if the Japanese successfully designed and built a large ultra-centrifuge, it would seem likely that German assistance was involved at some point.

The other method, a cheaper method and certainly one well within Japanese wartime industrial capability, and one taken to extremely large size by them, was very much a German device.

What the Nishina group finally did settle on was a process called thermal diffusion. This had been one of the first isotope separation processes devised. But until it was perfected by two German scientists, Klaus Clusius and Gerhard Dickel, in 1938, it had not been practical. Stated simply, thermal diffusion relied on the fact that light gas moves toward heat. Clusius and Dickel constructed a simple device consisting chiefly of two metal tubes placed on inside the other. The inner tube was heated; the outer one was cooled. When the apparatus was turned on, the lighter U-235 moved to the heat wall; the U-238, to the cold wall. Convex currents created by this movement sent the U235 upward; the U-238 downward.... At a certain point the U-235 at the

top could be collected, and new gas pumped in. it was a simple and rapid way to get relatively large concentrations of U-235.¹⁹As Wilcox notes, this process, developed as it was in Germany, gave the Japanese access to the latest development of this simple and unusual technology. And as we have already seen, the Germans also deliberately fabricated an alloy - Bondur - to offset the highly corrosive effects of uranium gas.

Used in large size and enough quantity - At Auschwitz and Konan - and perhaps in conjunction with other technologies of enrichment, Von Ardenne's mass spectrograph adaptations of cyclotrons, it is entirely feasible that the Japanese also had a highly secret uranium enrichment project being run near the Konan complex.

So one may advance the line of speculation further: with the surrender of the U-234 and its cargo of infrared proximity fuses and

their inventor, Heinz Schlicke, and Japan's own request for "fuses" and plans for German strategic heavy bombers, MacArthur's troops at the Chosin Reservoir may have uncovered not only evidence of Japanese progress and eventual testing of a uranium atomic bomb but they may have uncovered further evidence of the success of the program that lay behind it: Nazi Germany's. Indeed, the fuses point to a possible plutonium bomb project underway in both countries.

And so we return to the decision of the Japanese cabinet, and speculate further. If the Japanese government knew of the German program, they may also have known of the extent of its success Two bombs had fallen, and according to the translator for Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, another had fallen but not detonated. In any case, the Japanese were probably aware that while America's single bomb project may not have been capable of delivering more bombs within a short span of time, there would have been no way to estimate how many bombs might have been taken as war booty from the Germans. And the failure of the U-234's mission would have told them that at the minimum, fuses capable of use in a plutonium bomb as well as a large supply of enriched uranium had fallen into Allied hands. By August 12, 1945, with the successful test of the Japanese bomb and the German test of October 1944. the war had gone nuclear.

Thus, if the Japanese had been informed of the successful test of the German atom bomb in October of 1944, then the debate of the Imperial Cabinet in Tokyo is understandable. Japan was faced with a potential rain of atom bombs "of German provenance," to quote Oppenheimer's curious remark once again. Surrender, ganzai bakudan notwithstanding, was the logical choice, even for a nation steeped in "proud samurai traditions of honor."

Perhaps it is significant, in the light of contemporary problems with a nuclear North Korea, that the Japanese government issued a strong warning to North Korea that it could arm itself to the teeth with nuclear and thermonuclear weapons in a heartbeat, and would not hesitate to do so if threatened.

In this light, perhaps the most significant fact uncovered by Wilcox is that "contrary to the conventional military history that Japanese atomic efforts were bombed into extinction by spring

Emperor's August 15 surrender."²⁰ Wilcox does not elaborate much farther than this, but the statement raises a chilling prospect: How could a Japanese project survive right under the noses of the occupying American forces?

THE HEERESWAFFENAMT AND HOUTERMANS MEMORANDA

that the bomb that was dropped on Japan was of German provenance. " Edgar Mayer and Thomas Mehner, Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe²¹

One of the most problematical documents to explain from the standpoint of the postwar Allied Legend is the top secret memorandum concerning the development of an atom bomb anonymously submitted to the German Army Ordnance Bureau (Heereswaffenamt) in early 1942. This document not only correctly estimated the critical mass for a uranium-235 based bomb, but also indicated the possibility of transmutation of uranium into plutonium - called "Element 94" by the memorandum - and its use in a bomb. The memorandum's origin and authorship has been attributed to various interred Farm hall scientists, including Dr. Kurt Diebner. But the authorship is unknown, and the problem of its existence remains: How could the German army, knowing that the required amount of uranium for a nuclear bomb was comparatively small and therefore technically feasible, not have pursued its development? And how could they have pursued such laughably pathetic attempts toward a functioning reactor? The mystery only deepens when we consider a possible ancestry for the Heereswaffenamt memo written in a paper the previous year.

In 1941, Baron Manfred Von Ardenne decided to circulate an unusual paper by his colleague Dr. Fritz Houtermans. The full title of the paper was "On the Question of the Release of Nuclear chain

reactions, by Fritz G. Houtermans: A Communication from the Laboratory of Manfred Von Ardenne, Berlin-Lichterfelde-Ost."²²

The paper is remarkable in several respects, not the least for its revealing table of contents:

The general outline suggests that Houtermans had already thought his way through the process, not only of initiating nuclear explosions via fast neutrons, but also of the transformation of U²³⁵into higher elements not chemical identifiable with it. This is the first step toward plutonium, and to the use of plutonium rather than U²³⁵ as the explosive fuel for a bomb.

The contents of the paper confirms that this is what Houtermans has figured out in no uncertain terms:

We are able to envision here an apparatus, that would allow...a certain amount of U²³⁵ to undergo nuclear reaction, simultaneously as an isotope transforming apparatus. The advantage vis-a-vis an isotope enrichment apparatus is therefore that the newly-created product, which would have an atomic number of 93 or more, is not chemically identical with uranium, and therefore is separable by chemical methods. Now since much larger amounts, namely 139 times more, of

U²³⁸ are available, so the amount that would be convertible as fuel for a chain reaction is, from the standpoint of our theme, much more important than isotope separation that would result in mere U²³⁵.²⁴

In other words, before the 1942 Heereswaffenamt memo (which not only gave a critical mass of a bomb with U²³⁵ as the explosive fuel that is within the range of accuracy, but which also indicates the transformation of uranium into plutonium in a reactor as an alternative fuel returning more bang for the Reichsmark) Houtermans has clearly seen another path to the atom bomb. He may therefore also be considered a leading candidate, if not the leading candidate, for the authorship of the anonymous Heereswaffenamt memorandum. His Jewish background would explain why the memorandum was authored anonymously.

So, having speculated in previous pages that Nazi Germany had actually pursued a uranium bomb as the primary component of its bomb, and conducted a large and very secret uranium enrichment project in order to acquire it, we now come to the subject of the possibility of a plutonium bomb project, conducted once again in secret, and far from the "public exposure" laboratory tinkering of the Farm Hall scientists. In this respect there has already been one indication: the allegation of a second nuclear test of a bomb wilh a very small critical mass via the process of boosted fission, near the Three Corners region of Thuringia, an area that has the highest gamma background radiation in all of Germany.

Are there corroborating indications that the Germans might have successfully developed an atomic reactor, and hence, plutonium, in the secret recesses of Kammler's SS black programs secret weapons empire? Henry Picker, in his book Hitler's Table Talk, makes one significant statement. Not only does he indicate that the Reichspost had something to do with the atom bomb project, but he offers more detail. The bomb was to be constructed in a plant "in an underground SS factory in the southern Harz mountains, which had a foreseen production capacity of 30,000 workers."²⁵ Once again, the trail leads back to the SS, the southern Harz mountains of Thuringia, and large underground factories. This facility, according to Picker, "was transferred back to the USSR by the Red Army" after the German surrender.²⁶ According to Picker, it was for this reason that Stalin reacted with such detachment when President Truman informed him of the successful test of the plutonium bomb at the Trinity site in New Mexico, for Stalin had already acquired the necessary technology to make his own atom bomb. Moreover, Stalin awarded Manfred Von Ardenne the "Soviet 'Nobel Prize,' the Stalin Prize."²⁷ Mayer and Mehner comment on the real significance of this series of admissions:

Everything clear? The Russians thus came into possession of some means of production - which from then until now remains unknown -and paid off Manfred Von Ardenne, who was certainly the best consultant in these things, who must have clarified for them the things the Russians had found there.²⁸

It is an intriguing idea, for we have already discovered a possible plutonium bomb detonation near Ohrdruf very late in the war.²⁹ This would of necessity imply that the Germans had acquired a successful atomic reactor, the question is, where? In any case, the reason for lack of knowledge about this project is clear: it was in the control of the SS, and therefore, within the portfolio of the security-obsessed General Kammler.

In any case, Houtermans' reactor concept was significantly different than Heisenberg's, or for that matter, even Enrico Fermi's successful atomic pile at the University of Chicago, since it aimed at the production not of energy, but of radioactive isotopes. For this reason, it would be able to operate at low temperature using liquid methane as a moderator, rather than heavy water or graphite. This meant that it would be an efficient producer of "element 93 or higher" that could be chemically separated and used as a nuclear explosive.¹⁰

This is significant, for it differentiates the Von Ardenne-Houtermans effort both from the Heisenberg effort to design and construct a working atomic pile, and from Enrico Fermi's success in doing so.¹¹

So at one end of the war, ca. 1945, we find the allegations on tested weapon of small critical mass which, if true, is most liked that of a plutonium bomb using a process of boosted fission, and at the other end, ca. 1941, we have a paper outlining a project to achieve a reactor for the production of the explosive fuel of such a bomb. There is an odd piece of corroboration that the Germans may also have been perilously close to, if not in actual possession of, a plutonium atom bomb, from the Pacific Theater and the Japanese program. Robert Wilcox, in his Japan's Secret War, recounts how the Spanish Nationalist government successfully ran a spy ring both for the Germans and for the Japanese, an espionage operation that had no little success in penetrating the Manhattan Project, even to the extent of acquiring in 1943 the earliest Allied designs for a detonator for such a bomb. Interviewing Angel Alcazar de Velasco, the alleged head of the ring, Wilcox quotes a rather astonishing statement:

The information was that the American work on a nuclear weapon was very advanced but they had a long way to go. There were even notes ³⁰³¹ about the detonator. It was similar to one already in use by the Germans. 12

A complicated detonator - presumably for use in a plutonium bomb, since the detonator mechanism for a uranium bomb is a much simpler piece of equipment - already in use by the Germans in 1943!? Why would the Germans have had the need for such a complex detonator? The timing of the allegation is also disturbing, since it corroborates the assertions, examined earlier, of the Japanese military attache in Stockholm, that the Germans were using some type of weapon of mass destruction on the Eastern Front ca. 1943, in the region of Kursk.³²³³

But Houtermans was interested in more than just atom bombs. Even Paul Lawrence Rose admits that Houtermans' role in Nazi atom bomb research "remains enigmatic."³⁴ The reason why, though, is clear enough, once its enormous implications are understood, for Houtermans' real specialty lay in the first theoretical description of the process of thermonuclear fusion of heavy hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) atoms through high heat in stars, the very heat produced by an uncontrolled chain reaction.³⁵With this, we are a step closer to unlocking the riddle of just exactly what types of weapons Kammler's "think tank" was working on, for if Hotelmans' idea was seized upon, then hydrogen bombs would have been the next logical progression in the

"technology tree" from the atom bomb, just as it was for the Americans and Russians after the war. Is there any indication the this was in fact the real ultimate goal of the secret German SS atom bomb program? In other words, was it really an atom bomb program at all? Or was it a hydrogen bomb program?

Fantastic as it may be to believe, the latter possibility would seem to be the actual case. The letter of Professor Lachner referred to previously also gives further illumination on the goal of Kammler's SS Sonderkommando:

Work was also conducted on the hydrogen bomb. A factory for the manufacture of heavy hydrogen was constructed in Norway but was of course destroyed by the enemy. The small uranium bombs were primarily intended as detonators for the hydrogen bombs, so their immediate use was not contemplated.³⁶

Another corroboration for this astonishing assertion may be found in a pre-war Austrian patent for a "molecular bomb", an early version of the hydrogen bomb, from 1938.³⁷ In any case, Professor Lachner asserts unequivocally that the real goal of the project was weapon more terrifying and destructive than the atom bomb.

Another factor is worth mentioning in this regard. The pursuit of the hydrogen bomb would also explain why the Nazis were interested in small atom bombs, made smaller via boosted fission, for a hydrogen bomb, at least with the technology available back then, would have been an enormously heavy and cumbersome object. The quest for "miniaturization" was therefore another practical aim: any such bomb would have to be made small enough for German bombers or rockets to carry, and even then, only the very largest bombers or rockets would have been up to the task, if at all.³⁸

But to produce hydrogen bombs, one must have an adequate supply of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. Here again, however, the Allied Legend intervenes, and maintains that after the successful Allied destruction of the Norwegian heavy water plant at Ryukon, German production of the precious destructive substance was never able to recover, and, as a consequence, heavy water for a moderator in reactors (much less a hydrogen bomb!) was never in enough supply. The further implication of this assertion is, of course, that the failure of Heisenberg and other scientists to construct a reactor based on heavy water as a moderator was doomed to failure because of the lack of supply.

But again, the reality was quite different. Dr. Diebner in an exchange with Dr. Wirtz - both later interred at Farm Hall -indicated that a complete heavy water plant was built in Germany by the end of 1943.³⁹⁴⁰ However, revelations made at the end of the war were even more important as a means of measuring the truly significant extent of German heavy water production: a large heavy water factory, hitherto entirely unknown, had been discovered by the Allies in Kiel in northern Germany. But most importantly, after the German reunification in 1989, when the vast SS underground factories in the Harz region of Thuringia in the former eastern zone were rediscovered, many of these were found to contain several large electrical generators, enough to supply power for a few small cities!20

Such high electrical output would certainly not have been needed for the last Fuhrer Headquarters, but it certainly would have been required for factories separating uranium isotope(especially if they used Von Ardenne's cyclotron process), and that manufactured heavy water. Was the hydrogen bomb the real goal? Does this explain the reason that, if Germany did have the atom bomb, it (or they) were seldom if ever actually used, being husbanded as detonators for something lar more powerful? Does this also explain, in part, the real reason for the curtain of secrecy that fell over Kammler's special SS "think tank" command structure?

One indication that this may be so were remarks made by Dr. Josef Gobbels to the Italian officer Luigi Romersa who witnessed the Rugen atom bomb test, whom we encountered earlier. According to Romersa, Gobbels told him "Heavy water is an important material in the manufacture of the disintegration bomb.⁴¹We had already before the war made some headway in the direction..."⁴² Headway indeed, if an Austrian patent for prototype had already been taken out in 1938!⁴³

That the ultimate goal of the German atom bomb project was the hydrogen bomb, and not the atom bomb at all, seems in retrospect both quite logical and quite disconcerting. As we shall discover in the remaining parts of this book, however, even hydrogen bombs pale by comparison not only just to the "paper projects" being studied in Kammler's SS Sonderkommando, but to the very real projects and experiments with forces of even larger potential destructive capability than hydrogen bombs. Having foreseen the thermonuclear future, the SS was already planning and experimenting with countermeasures, and with second and third generations of offensive strategic weapons even more horrifying.

POSSENSPIEL BEI FARM HALL AND OTHER FARCES

"Bagge in Berlin and Clusius and Dickel in Munich developed isotope separation methods but achieved little practical success. They never obtained enough U²³⁵ to make the proper measurements and certainly too little for a bomb."

The transcripts of the German scientists interred at Farm Hall seem like a microcosm of Nazi German culture itself, simultaneously charming and paranoid, moralizing and utterly amoral, suffused with brilliant subtlety and ham-fisted bluntness. In view of the thesis that has been examined throughout the previous pages, the Farm Hall transcripts also reveal an equal schizophrenic on the part of commentators ever since their declassification in the early 1990s by the British government. Consider for example the following remark by Jeremy Bernstein with regard to Samuel Goudsmit's "ALSOS" mission to Germany at the end of the was "As the mission progressed, and the Alsos team learned more and more about the paucity of the German program, the concern focused on not letting the Russians get at the Germans and so glean 'any major bomb secrets.'"⁴⁴⁴⁵ If the German bomb program was in a state characterized as "paucity," and if there were fundamental "problems" in Heisenberg's understanding of nuclear fission and bomb physics - as there indeed were - then why the concern at all? But then early on in the transcripts an exchange betwen Heisenberg, Diebner, and Korsching occurs, in which the three German scientists discuss the possibility that they may have been viewed by the Allies and Soviets at Potsdam as war booty.

Barnstein then comments "presumably Heisenberg is worried here about being taken to task in German for failing to build a bomb. The notion that these ten German scientists would be discussed at the Potsdam Conference borders on the ludicrous."⁴⁶ If so ludicrous, then why inter them for months, secretly record their conversations and transcribe them, and then keep them classified until the early 1990s? Clearly it would seem that something more is going on at Farm Hall that either eludes commentators, or that they are simply ignoring.

The conversations proceeds among the ten scientists, with one concern (prior to the announcement of the a-bombing of Hiroshima) being how to continue with their "work", totally oblivious to the fact that others had indeed carried on their "work" to brilliant conclusion.⁴⁷ The schizophrenia grows whenever the subject of isotope separation comes up in conversation. In the epigraph that began this chapter, reference is made to the Clusius tube "thermal diffusion" method perfected by Clusius and Dickel: "Bagge in Berlin and Clusius and Dickel in Munich developed isotope separation methods but achieved little practical success. They never obtained enough U²³⁵ to make the proper measurements and certainly too little for a bomb."⁴⁸ However, in the transcripts themselves, Heisenberg remarks that one reason he and his fellow scientists were interred was that the Allies did not "want us to pass on our knowledge to other people."⁴⁹ However it is the editorial comment of this remark that really intrigues; the Germans, notes Bernstein, would have had little knowledge "that would have been of any use to the Allies," but a great deal of expertise that they would have wanted to keep from the hands of other powers such as France and Russia. Then follows another remark concerning Harteck's "ultra-centrifuge" technology, which "would have been an extraordinarily useful thing for any country to possess."⁵⁰ Indeed, this was a technology that even the US and UK had not brought to such an advanced state of perfection.

And then, on July 26, 1945, a remark is made by Otto Hahn that only increases the mystery: "1 read an article in the Picture Post about the uranium bomb; it said that the newspapers had mentioned that such a bomb was being made in Germany. Now you can understand that we are being 'detained' because we are such men."⁵¹The editorial comment only increases the problem: "This was before the bomb was used on Japan, when its existence was kept in strict secrecy!"⁵² Had Hahn unwittingly let the cat out of the box? It is an odd thing for a scientist of Hahn's stature to say, especially since, as we have seen, there were a wealth of "indications" of the size of the German project that appeared in short articles in the Allied press both during and after the war.

Then on July 21, 1945, the handsome and cynical Horst Korsching, discussing the prospects for making a living with Diebner and Bagge, offers a curious observation:

BAGGE: For the sake of the money, I should like to work on the uranium engine; on the other hand, I should like to work on cosmic rays. I feel like Diebner about this.

KORSCHING: Every layman can see that these ideas are exceedingly important. Hence there won't be any money in it. You only make money on ideas which have escaped the general public. If you invent something like artificial rubies for the watch making industry, you will make more money than with the uranium engine.⁵³

Artificial rubies? Of course, such things were used in watchmaking before the invention of quartz movement. But in 1945, the idea was fantastic. Of course, by the time of the declassification of these transcripts, the world's first laser, which did in fact use an artificial

ruby as the main component of the lasing optical cavity, was history, having been invented in 1961. But in July of 1945 the idea

was more than a little ahead of its time. Is this another possible, though slight, indication that something else was going on inside Nazi Germany? Later in the conversation, Korsching expresses his desire to return to Hechingen to collect his telescope, lenses and prisms, an indication that he was perhaps involved in optical as well as nuclear research.

Of course it would be an idea to go to the Argentine with two people and say: "Here we are, we know how to do this and that; we have a good method for the separation of isotopes, we do not need to produce heavy water." Somehow in this fashion we have to do it. It would not come to anything if you collaborated with Heisenberg on a uranium engine. They did not even bring along the small fry to this place, that is how outsiders judge the work.¹¹

If the thesis presented thus far is true, and there was a very secretive SS bomb project and if the Heisenberg represented a false front "sham" project being deliberately shut out of the loop by the SS and maintained for Allied consumption, then indeed there may be other motivations for the internment of the German scientists than are commonly supposed. If, for example, General Patton's Third Army troops did indeed find and discover components and scientists from the SS project, then it would have been crucial to ascertain whether or not the "big fish" - to paraphrase Korsching's rather self-important view of the scientists at Farm Hall - had had any knowledge of these SS projects.

Then, in the transcripts of conversations from August 1-6, 1945, Dr. Kurt Diebner briefly mentions a fact that carries great significance in the light of what we have discovered of the German atom bomb project and the SS Sonderkommando underground factories in the Harz Mountains in Thuringia. Diebner mentions very briefly that his supply of radium was obtained "from the Harz."⁵⁴⁵⁵ Bernstein's comment at this juncture is of a brevity huge with omissions: "A mountain range in central Germany." Bernstein does not have anything more to say about the subject. Is he ignorant of the claims being uncovered by contemporary German researchers? Or does the omission of mention stem from some other motivation?

In any case, the tenor and mood of the scientists quickly changes when they learn of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The first reactions, recorded by the British microphones, occurs between Hahn and Wirtz:

A discussion quickly ensues between all the German scientists, and again it is Diebner who makes a short statement pregnant with significance: "We always thought we would need two years for one bomb."⁵⁷ Moreover, Bernstein at this point betrays a hesitation and uncertainty unusual in his otherwise straightforward commentaries and annotations whose aim is clearly to maintain the Allied Legend: "I am not sure whom Diebner includes in his 'we' here or on what his estimate is based. But his use of the word 'bomb' is unchallenged by the others."⁵⁸ Who indeed were the people that Diebner referred to when he said "we"? Bernstein appears not to know, but given that Diebner has earlier referred to his supply of radium "in the Harz", we may rationally speculate that Diebner was referring obliquely, and no doubt intentionally so, to his colleagues in the SS run program.

Then follows a short, but astonishing, exchange between Hahn, Weizsacker, Harteck, Wirtz, and Diebner:

HAHN: I think it's absolutely impossible to produce one ton of uranium 235 by separating isotopes. ⁵⁹

HARTECK: You can never get pure "235" with the centrifuge. But I don't believe that it can be done with the centrifuge.

HAHN: Yes, but they could do it with mass spectrographs. Ewald has some patent.⁶⁰

Now let us put all this in context, for this little exchange is an indication that a possible "farce" is being played out at Farm Hall, not only by the interred German scientists, but also possibly by the declassification of the transcripts themselves. What do I mean by this? Note that the transcripts are declassified by the British after the German reunification in 1989, an oblique admission, perhaps, that there was no more purpose in maintaining whatever secrets they still held, since there would now be other sources available to tell the story that had been long suppressed: that the Nazis had been either perilously close to, or had actually acquired the atom bomb before the Allies.

First, note in the above exchange that Otto Hahn, whose remarks began this chapter, has now changed his mind. His earlier remarks mention isotope separation as the means to a bomb. Now, he has reversed himself, and all on the same day. But then comes Weizsacker's remark: What else would one used centrifuges for?⁶²This is countered by remarks from the inventor himself, Paul Harteck, who maintained one cannot obtain "pure 235" via that process. Wirtz then chimes in with agreement, and then Hahn, ever the radio-chemist, reverses himself again, within a matter of minutes, by coming to the obvious conclusion from a scientific and engineering standpoint: the best way to obtain "pure" U²³⁵ was via mass spectrography.

But then comes the bombshell. Diebner, who clearly has some connection to Kammler's SS "think tank" special projects empire in the Harz mountains, alludes to an unknown "photochemical" process for isotope separation and enrichment. Even Bernstein admits that whatever Diebner meant by this remark is "unclear"⁶³In all likelihood, it is unclear, because it remains classified, somewhere, by someone. And that should give us pause, for it means that the Kammlerstab may have found a method of isotope separation and enrichment that remains otherwise unknown to this day!

Shortly after this revealing little exchange, Wirtz then offers another solution: "I would bet," he says, "that it is separation by diffusion with recycling."⁶⁴ Wirtz is clearly proposing that separation was a multi-staged process, with the result of one pass through the separation process then being used as feedstock for another pass for enrichment to greater purity, and the process being repeated until the desired grade of purity - weapons grade - was obtained. The diffusion process mentioned in this context is vague, for there were at least two methods known to the Germans, the Allies, and the Japanese under the name of "diffusion". One method, cited by Bernstein as the explanation of Wirtz's remarks, is the manufacture of uranium gas, and forcing it under pressure through sinterized metal. Sinterization simply means that a metal contains billions of micro-pores or holes of specific and tiny size, through which the atoms of different isotopes diffuse at slightly different rates of speed. "The original estimate was that 5,00 of these barriers would be needed for nearly complete separation, as opposed to 22,000 centrifuges."²¹ The other process was thermal diffusion that was already examined more closely in chapter 7.

The thermal diffusion method is mentioned briefly in the published Farm Hall transcripts during the conversations of the German scientists on the day of the Hiroshima bombing by Weizsacker.⁶⁵⁶⁶ Bernstein notes of this method that it was being tried by Korsching, and that it consisted of a "glass tube and heating coil to separate isotopes. It never worked well for uranium."⁶⁷ But what Bernstein has described is the original Clusius-Dickel tube for thermal diffusion, a process that was not efficient, as Bernstein correctly indicates. However, a different method of Clusius tubes was described by Wilcox in reference to the Japanese program:

What the Nishina group finally did settle on was a process called thermal diffusion. This had been one of the first isotope separation processes devised. Bu until it was perfected by two German scientists, Klaus Clusius and Gerhard Dickel, in 1938, it had not been practical. Stated simply, thermal diffusion relied on the fact that light gas moves toward heat. Clusius and Dickel constructed a simple device consisting chiefly of two metal tubes placed one inside the other. The inner tube was heated; the outer tube was cooled. When the apparatus was turned on, the lighter U-235 moved to the heat wall; the U-238, to the cold wall. Convex currents created by this movement sent the U-235 upward; the U-238 downward. The result was something like a heated house in winter; hot air rising, cold air staying at the bottom. At a certain point the U-235 at the top could be collected, and new gas pumped in. It was a simple and rapid way to get relatively large concentrations of U-235.⁶⁸

And with repeated passes through a series of such vessels, purity would be increased. In any case, there is some discrepancy in the method as described by Bernstein, and that by Wilcox. Perhaps the latter described a modification made to the original method, with extremes of heat and cold being applied.

Harteck, Wirtz, and Heisenberg then continue the subject to isotope separation and enrichment a little further on:

HARTECK: They have managed it with mass spectrographs on a large scale or else they have been successful with a photochemical process.

WIRTZ: Well I would say photochemistry or diffusion, ordinary diffusion. They irradiate it with a particular wavelength (all talking together).

At this juncture, Bernstein again observes that "it is not clear" what this photochemical process is.⁶⁹ In any case, whatever the process was, Wirtz's mention of it and of irradiation with a particular "wavelength" appears to have provoked a burst of conversation from the other scientists. Were they intentionally trying to drown him out and mask his statements so as not to be recorded? We will never know. But in any case, the conversation continues:

HARTECK: Or using mass spectrographs in enormous quantities. It is perhaps possible for a mass spectrograph to make 1 milligram in one day - say of "235." They could make quite a cheap mass spectrograph, which, in very large quantities, might cost a hundred dollars. You could do it with 100,000 mass spectrographs.

Again, Bernstein's comment is suggestive: "This is essentially what the Allies did."⁷⁰ But it is also, as we have seen, very probably what the Germans did at the "Buna plant" at Auschwitz and later, in the large underground factories run by Kammler's SS Sonderkommando. The Farm Hall scientists, as to be expected, seemed totally oblivious to this program, but have worked out the basic facts for themselves.

HEISENBERG: Yes, of course, if you do it like that, and they seem to have worked on that scale, 180,000 people were working on it.

It may have been 100 times more than Harteck or any of the high profile scientists interred at Farm Hall had at their disposal, but it was certainly not a number beyond the SS, with its hundreds of thousands of concentration camp slave laborers. Hahn later reinforces the pathetic plight of the "Heisenberg group" by adding "Of course, we were unable to work on that scale."⁷² Such facts and methods would doubtless have been known to the Kammlerstab, and doubtless he would have pursued them with his customary "focus."

Harteck then corroborated this view in a statement regarding the Clusius process, and his numbers reveal the dangerous potential for isotope separation and enrichment that lay within Nazi Germany's capabilities if worked on a similarly large scale as the Manhattan Project:

If it is a fact that an explosive can be produced either by means of the mass spectrograph - we would never have done it as we could never have employed 56,000 workmen. For instance, when we considered the Clusius-Linde business combined with our exchange cycle we would have needed to employ 50 workmen continuously in order to produce two tons a year. If we wanted to make ten tons we would have had to employ 250 men. We couldn't do that.⁷³

For Harteck and the other Farm Hall scientists, the problem was not means or methods, it was simply a labor shortage, a shortage the SS was not experiencing.

Considering the figures involved I think it must have been mass spectrographs. If they had had some other good method they wouldn't have needed to spend so much. One wouldn't have needed so many men.

Korsching responds, and a small debate ensues, in which a sensitive topic is barely touched upon by Harteck, and Bernstein's editorial comment becomes either an exercise in ignorance, or deliberate omission:

KORSCHING: You try and vaporize one ton of uranium. HARTECK: You only need ten men for that. I was amazed at what saw at I.G. ⁷⁴

Bernstein's only comment here is to note the obvious, that "I.G." means "I.G. Farben," nothing else is said. Either Bernstein is unaware of the Farben "Buna plant" and its mysterious properties of consuming more electricity than Berlin and producing no Buna, or he has intentionally omitted any further clarification of Harteck's remark. The Allied Legend, in so far as Bernstein is concerned, is intact.

For his part however, Harteck is either clearly implying that he saw some large scale effort underway by I.G. Farben, employed tens of thousands of workers, or his remarks might also be construed to indicate that the Germans had discovered a method to make the process less labor intensive. In any case, I know of no other Farben facility in Germany at the time that was known to be working on enrichment. The only facility with the requisite "enrichment facility" signature is the one at Auschwitz, and this means that Harteck may have seen not only a project as large as that at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but one that was either more efficient - as we know Von Ardenne's mass spectrographs to be - than its

for the labor at Auschwitz, was "inexhaustible", and unfortunately, suspendable.

In any case, if all this is so, then it is a strong indicator that Harteck's and possibly some or all of the other interred scientists' remarks in the Farm Hall transcripts are careful stage-acting, a script that reveals just enough engineering savvy to indicate that the scientists knew at least the broad outlines of how an atom bomb could be achieved without a nuclear reactor (or "uranium engine" as they called it), and yet interlarded with just enough ignorance on specifics to indicate either that they were not involved at the highest levels, or that they were deliberately dissembling. In Harteck's case, at least, we must opt for deliberate dissembling to a certain degree, for what he saw - if he was not completely involved with it - was a vast enrichment program proceeding on the emaciated backs of concentration camp laborers.

As if this were not enough, Weizsacker later corroborates the broad outlines of the top secret SS program we have outlined previously:

WEIZSACKER: If you had wanted to make a bomb we would probably have concentrated more of the separation of isotopes and less on heavy water.... 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 1944-45.⁷⁵

Note that he not only corroborates the broad time frame we have aleady found for the alleged German atom bomb test at Rugen, but more importantly, his statement comes after Harteck's clear allusion to the existence of just such a program in Nazi Germany.

A little later, the British military intelligence summary of the conversation that ensues interjects the following cryptic summary of comments made by Walter Gerlach, without any further commentary: "Gerlach goes on to explain that the Nazi party seemed to think that they were working on a bomb and relates how the Party people in Munich were going round from house to house

on the 27th or 28th of April last telling everyone that the atomic bomb would be used the following day."⁷⁶ Bernstein's editorial note reflects his confusion, and confirms that he is in all likelihood not familiar with the allegations of the tests at Rugen and Ohrdruf: " It is not clear who has supposed to be using this weapon and against whom."⁷⁷

In any case, so far from contradicting the possibility of a secret enrichment and bomb program, however, in the main the Farm Hall scientists seem to corroborate it.

Finally, Harteck again must have stunned his British captors with a remark made near the end of the transcript for August 6, 1945:

HARTECK: The multiplication factor with "235" is 2.8, and when one collides with the other how long is the path until it happens? 4 centimeters, Rx is the radius. Then you have to multiply that by the mean free path and divide it by the square root of the multiplication factor. That should be 3.2. Rx is about 14 centimeters, the weight is 200 kilograms; then it explodes.³⁶

Even Bernstein cannot ignore this, and his comment indicates the there is a "possible something" lurking behind Harteck's figures:

This apparently off-hand calculation of the critical mass by Harteck which does lead to a sensible answer, unlike Heisenberg's shows some evidence that he had done this problem before. It is difficult to believe that he would have known, for example, that the critical radius involved the inverse square root of the multiplication factor if he had not thought about it. How Harteck got the number 2.8 for the multiplication factor is unclear. During the war the Los Alamos people, who certainly knew a lot more than he did, used 2.2. Only after the war was the number increase to 2.52 as the measurements became better. Perhaps it was Harteck who supplied the German Army Ordnance report of January 1942 with its numbers in the scientists' attempts to interest the Army in continuing support of bomb research.³⁷ perhaps Harteck had "run the numbers" before. But there is another possibility.

Perhaps, on his visit to "I.G." that he alluded to earlier, someone had shown Harteck the numbers. In this regard it is perhaps significant that of all the Farm Hall scientists, his comments most consistently point to the acknowledgment of a feasible method that, with large enough scale, could lead to sufficient quantities of fissile weapons grade uranium. And it is significant too that the transcripts reveal a variety of methods known and available to the Germans that, used in sufficient numbers and with a sufficient labor pool, could have done exactly that. Harteck's comments point in the consistent and general direction of Manfred Von Ardenne, Fritz Houtermans, and the rubberless "Buna facility" of I.G. Farben at Auschwitz. Like the Farben directors themselves in the dock at Nuremberg, Harteck is perhaps, in his own subtle way, trying to set the record straight. These facts and associated speculations also perhaps explain why, after so many years, the Farm Hall transcripts were finally declassified, for they do not, in the final analysis, serve the Allied Legend well.

GATEWAY TO THE BLACK SUN: CONCLUSIONS TO PART ONE

"So it is that proof of an arrangement between Martin Bormann and the United States, if there was one, does not appear to exist. What is apparent, however, is that the United States went to some trouble to ensure that such evident of a relationship does not exist!" Carter Hydrick, Critical Mass⁷⁸

I believe a strong prima facie case has been outlined that Nazi Germany developed and successfully tested, and perhaps used, an uranium atom bomb before the end of World War Two, and possibly that it had made significant strides toward the acquisition if not outright testing, of a boosted fission plutonium bomb of small critical mass and high yield. This thesis, radical as it is, does seem to resolve at a stroke discrepancies and anomalies - some seemingly trifling and others much more blatant - about the political and operational history of the war. The idea of an actual German atom bomb and project, and not the small, miserably failed, laboratory effort proffered by the Allied Legend, seems to provide suitable explanations for a host of things that have long puzzled analysts and commentators.

For example, what of Hitler's declaration of war against the United States in December of 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor? Analysts have puzzled over this decision and his possible motivations in doing so for decades, and a variety of unsatisfactory explanations have been advanced, from his bourgeois sense of "duty" to his Japanese ally, to the secret naval war fought "off the books" for months between the Third Reich and the United States and the need to make it "official", to Hitler's impatience, delusions, and/or insanity, to the realization by the Nazi leadership that Roosevelt meant to enter the European war one way of

another no later than 1943. But regardless of what Hitler's motivations or thought processes may have been, from the standpoint of conventional military analysis, the German declaration of war on America was sheer suicide, as her overwhelming production capacity and oceanic insulation virtually assured her of initial supremacy over the Nazi war-making juggernaut. Hitler's decision, as German armies were stalled and freezing to death at the gates of Moscow in 1941, seems more than suicidal. Hitler was shown for what he was: a madman.

But from the perspective of the evidence presented here, that was not the real military picture in December 1941 at all, not was it in the secret counsels that the German dictator kept in his mind. His scientists, after all, had discovered nuclear fission, and his scientists had proposed a method of obtaining an atom bomb via large quantities of isotope separation and enrichment machines and huge concentrations of labor. His scientists would, in a month or so, assure him, via the Heereswaffenamt memorandum, that the amount of material needed for a bomb was not tons, but kilograms. And his favorite atomic scientist, Manfred Von Ardenne, and his associate Dr. Fritz Houtermans, had already published a manuscript on how it could all be done. And he knew, too, that Germany had the needed material - uranium - in an abundance that the United States could only scarcely imagine.

In retrospect, then, the secrecy surrounding the German project seems all too clear, for the best source of cheap labor lay in the death camps, camps that Hitler desired to keep secret from the German people, for obvious reasons. By early 1941 Farben had already begun construction of its "Buna plant" at Auschwitz. And there was more probably lurking in Hitler's twisted mind: before the war, some scientists in the Reich had spelled out the basic idea behind a weapon even more powerful than the atom bomb, for which the latter was but a fuse. Hitler, on this view, ever the gambler, too the risk, confident of being in the possession of a fearful arsenal within a short span of two to three years, and declared war on the United States.

So too the military deployments and operations of the European war's end that made little sense before now begin to take on an operational logic that is almost irresistible. The madcap, and some would say, militarily and politically indefensible, Allied dash away from Berlin and to south central Germany and Prague are consistend with American knowledge, at some very high level, of Kammler's SS Sonderkommando black projects and secret weapons empire. Hitler's own obsession with the defense of Breslau in lower Silesia and of Prague itself, an obsession that made no sense to his generals, make military sense only in the context of an atom bomb and intercontinental rocket project that was successful in the attainment of the first and perilously close to the attainment of the second.

Similarly, Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler's offer of a surrender to the Western Allies has usually been dismissed as the frantic attempts of a desperate mass murderer to avoid his inevitable fate, and nothing more. But Himmler, like Hitler, and possibly only Martin Bormann, was one of the "inmost circle" who knew the full extent of Kammler's empire and its actual activities Himmler may have therefore used this knowledge as a possible bargaining chip. His offer was rejected, not so much because it was not genuine(from Himmler's point of view), but because he had long lost genuine control of it. The deal had already probably been cut between Kammler's representatives and OSS station chief in Zurich, Allen Dulles, or via General Patton himself. Bormann, too as we have seen, was implicated in this plot, and, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, is directly linked to Kammler.

The thesis of an actual German atom bomb also explains the odd little events that began to surface in scattered Allied press reports toward and immediately after the end of the European War long-range heavy lift round trip "proof of concept" flights from Europe to within sight of New York City, Luftwaffe maps of Manhattan with blast damage estimates for an atom bomb of the same approximate yield as Hiroshima, a Norwegian airfield filled with over forty long range bombers capable of making the flight, "Buna plants" that incomprehensibly use more electricty than Berlin and paradoxically produce no rubber during the entire course of the war, U-boats loaded with infrared fuses - a device whose technical complexity betokens an immediate nuclear application - and enriched uranium powder ready for metalicization. Likewise, this thesis provides a more plausible explanation, for those inclined to think it suspicious, for the mysterious death of America's most celebrated and famous, and for the equally impossible "triple death" of Germany's most sinister, generals. Patton, as was seen, was the commander of the very America army entrusted with seizing the motherload of secret weapons research treasures in Thuringia and at Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. He, at the top of the Third Army's command structure, would have been privy to all the first intelligence reports of his units entering those areas, and would easily have been the first man outside Kammler himself to see enough of the pieces to put together a reasonable picture of the whole. If indeed Patton was deliberately silenced, and I am by no means convinced that he was, then surely this is the most plausible motivation for the deed. And finally, as was seen, a successful German atom bomb project might very well me the inner moral logic at work in the German Resistance's bomb plot against Adolf Hitler in July of 1944.

Similarly, the thesis puts on a firmer foundation another set of "oddities," such as the ludicrous notion that the Allied engineers were so confident that their design for the Little Boy uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima was so good it did not need to be tested, or (in another explanation), that there was not enough weapons grade uranium to build two such bombs to test one before dropping the other. That the US military would have dropped an untested superweapon on an enemy city, an enemy known to be working on acquiring the very same weapon, is simply ridiculous in the extreme. The Allied Legend is made even more ridiculous when one considers the fact that the plutonium bomb had been successfully tested, and that a plutonium bomb was already ready for deployment against the Japanese. Why then was the "untested" Little Boy dropped first, instead of the plutonium "Fat Man"? A rational explanation is afforded by the thesis of this part of the book: Little Boy was not tested by the Americans because, as Oppenheimer hinted, the bomb was "of German provenance." The Americans did not need to test it, because its German designers already had.

Moreover the infusion of German bomb technology into not only the American, but the Japanese effort, explains Japan's rather slow response to Allied demands for unconditional surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for only a day after Nagasaki, the Japanese too, for a brief moment, joined the nuclear club. And five years later, MacArthur presided over one of America's worst military debacles at the Chosin reservoir in the midst of the largest industrial complex in Asia, built by Japanese industrialist Jui Noguchi, and nerve center of the Japanese atom bomb program Were the operational risks MacArthur took to secure and hold Chosin due in part to a hidden intelligence agenda, to secure more information about an enemy only recently defeated, and to deny the technology to potential enemies such as Red China?

And last, but surely not least, there is simply too much enriched uranium, and too many bombs, around by the end of World War Two, to have come entirely from the Manhattan Project. Marshal Rodion Malinovsky's translator told of a "dud" dropped on August 8 on Nagasaki and surrendered by the Japanese to the Russians⁷⁹ - a Japanese bomb, two separate German tests, a bomb sunk on board the USS Indianapolis en route to Japan - and all these bombs from a Manhattan Project critically short of weapons grade uranium as late as December 1944, and only projected to achieve half the necessary critical mass by May of 1945? Where did all this extra uranium come from, not to mention the "extra bombs"? I have argued that most likely all of it came from Nazi Germany, courtesy of Nazi Party Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, and SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kammler.

But these conclusions leave several problems to be resolved, and in their resolution, a further glimpse into Kammler's dark empire of secret weapons, think tanks, underground factories and slave labor is afforded.

Robert K. Wilcox, Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race against Time to Build is Own Atomic Bomb, p. 18.

Dr. Publio Magini, Military History Quarterly, Summer 1993. I am very grateful to Frank Joseph for uncovering and sharing this information with me. The updating of Italian code books would be a pressing enough matter for the Italians to undertake such a flight.

This rather odd-looking twin engine aircraft had a bulbous cupola slung beneath the nose of the main fuselage, in which was mounted a 75mm automatically reloading high velocity anti-tank gun projecting from its nose. It was a deadly and efficient tank-busting airplane used with great effectiveness on the Eastern Front, curiously resembling a similar ground assault aircraft in the modern American arsenal, the A-10 "Warthog."

Joseph Mark Scalia, Germany's Last Mission to Japan: The Failed Voyage of the U-234, pp. 7-9.

Ibid., p. 17, referencing an article in the January 1978 edition of Science magazine.

Edgar Mayer and Thomas Mehner, Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe: Gewann Hitlers Wissenschaftler den nuklearen Wettlauf doch? Die Geheimprojekte bei Innsbruck, im Raum Jonastal bei Arnstadt und in Prague, p. 122.

Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War, p. 112. The table of contents page of the original memorandum may be found in Mayer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 33.

Henry Picker, Hitler's Tischgesprachen im Fuhrerhauptquartier, 2 Auflage (Berlin: Propylaen taschenbuch bei Ullstein, 1997), cited in Mayer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 34.

Uranium could of course have been used in a boosted fission device, but the process works better with plutonium, and plutonium would more likely account for such a small critical mass as was reported, namely, 100 grams, since more than that would have been necessary for a uranium bomb even with boosted fission.

Researcher Frank Joseph has found another source for a reactor, and consider his information to be so crucial to this story, and so sensational, that cannot in good conscience mention it in this work. I believe that it is a story that he best tells himself, since it is his discovery. He was kind enough to share it with me as this book was being written.

The attache, it will be recalled, actually maintained that these weapons -whatever they were - were also used in the "Crimea", making it most likely during the siege of the Russian fortress of Sevastopol in 1942. Thus would seem to weigh very heavily against this mystery weapon being an atom bomb. But if not, what other weapon could have caused such destruction? This is a question that will be more fully addressed in subsequent parts of this book. Powers notes that Allen Dulles in Zurich received reports of a German project in "vast underground factories" that were after "putting out a new explosive in aerial bombs. He has even heard that the container of the explosive is spherical." (Rose, op. cit., p. 272, emphasis added) A spherical detonator, of course, is the type of implosion-compression detonator used to assemble the critical mass of a plutonium bomb.

for such a bomb. The only practical method of delivering a hydrogen bomb, it seems to me, would have been via a large submarine or ship to a port city, a militarily quite risky venture, and one that, for the German crews involved, would have been a one way venture.

Such a patent would have been immediately classified as a "Geheime Reichsache" or "secret state matter", i.e., a matter of national security as would now be said. As such, it would have definitely made its way directly to Kammler's "think tank," as will be seen in subsequent parts of this book.

David Cassidy, "Introduction," in Jeremy Bernstein, ed., Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, Second Edition, (new York: Copernicus, 2001), p. xxix.

Ibid., p. 91, the conversation is between Heisenberg, Von Weizsacker, Wirtz, Harteck and Diebner on July 18, 1945.

This comment, in the light of what has already been learned about the size of the German enrichment program, can mean only one of two things: (1) Hahn is deliberately lying here, to deflect his on possible involvement in the program; or (2) he is telling the truth, and knows nothing about it. Of the two, the latter is the much more likely.

Again, Hahn has pointed the way clearly to Baron Manfred Von Ardenne's cyclotron modifications. Thus, the German scientists knew how to do it, and as is therefore extremely likely, the SS also knew which was the best method. Hence, the extraordinary power consumption at Auschwitz points, as does the most efficient method itself, to Von Ardenne's method as the method most likely used there and elsewhere to separate isotope.

As we shall discover, there may well have been another use to which this, or a modified, technology had been put by the SS.

How did the Russians know to request this bomb? Surely the United States would not have told them. The only other plausible explanation is that the Russians knew where the bomb was ultimately from, and had done the mathematics.

Donnelly: "ask him what NZ plant made	and	what does		NZ
mean?" Matsuda: "He doesn't know."
A few more questions about the ownership plant, then: Kelly: "About how many chemists worked up there?"	and	location	of	the
Matsuda: "He says there are so many classes mean University Graduate?"	of	chemists.	Do	you

7.

THE HONORARY ARYAN BRETHREN

THE HEERESWAFFENAMT AND HOUTERMANS MEMORANDA

9.

POSSENSPIEL BEI FARM HALL AND OTHER FARCES

GATEWAY TO THE BLACK SUN: CONCLUSIONS TO PART ONE