The Nazi atom bomb programme
| Date | 1939 - 1945 |
|---|
October 1944 - Alleged Lüneburger Heide atom bomb test
On 23rd February 2017 well-respected, German speaking British journalist, Allan Hall, published an article in the Daily Mirror entitled Secret files reveal Nazis 'tested nuclear bomb' before end of WW2 as Adolf Hitler plotted to decimate Britain. He quotes Bild and cites U.S. National Archives intelligence reports file, APO 696, which, he says, contains two eyewitness accounts of a Nazi atomic bomb test in 'early October 1944'.
Documents unearthed in an American archive suggest that Nazi Germany may have tested an operational nuclear bomb before the end of World War Two .
Recently declassifed file APO 696 from the National Archives in Washington is a detailed survey of how far Third Reich scientists got in the development of an atomic bomb - something leader Adolf Hitler craved.
In the file, obtained by the popular daily newspaper Bild, the task of the academics who prepared the paper between 1944 and 1947 was the “investigations, research, developments and practical use of the German atomic bomb.”[1]
The interviewees describe seeing a 'mushroom cloud' near the North German town of Ludwigslust, close to the Lüneburger Heide (Luneburg Heath) near the city of Hamburg.
This report was corroborated in January 2018 in a BCFM radio interview with Argentinian born blogger, son of a Nazi scientist and former Swiss banker, Manfred Petritsch. He cites conversations with an unnamed former Nazi scientist [2] who says two German wartime atomic bomb tests took place, one at the 'Lüneburger Heide' and one 'on a North Sea Island', possibly Heligoland, which is well away from the mainland. Petritsch also suggests that Nazi expertise was essential for the Manhattan Project's Trinity test to be successful, which, he says, is why the first test didn't take place until Nazi scientists had been captured and debriefed by the Allies.
