Hitler had an atom bomb, though quite a poor one.
The Soviet spy Maxim Maximovich Isaev, more widely known as Standardtenfuehrer Stierlitz, did not save the world from the Nazi atomic bomb. The cult Soviet serial "Seventeen Minutes of Spring" refutes Rainer Karlsch's book, which the German DVA publishing company is supposed to release on March 14. The author asserts that at the very end of the Second World War, Germany had the opportunity to produce a nuclear weapon. The book unpretentiously announces: "Sensational results. In 1944-45, under SS supervision, German scientists conducted tests of atomic bombs on the island of Ruegen. During this time hundreds of convicts and prisoners of war perished."
The announcement also said that "from the documentation that verifies the execution of nuclear tests, Karlsch also discovered a 1941 project for plutonium bombs, along with the first industrial German atomic reactor in the outskirts of Berlin."
In the meantime, the Germany mass media expressed serious doubts as to the authenticity of the upcoming "sensation." The German newspaper, "Suddeutsche Zeitung," was upset with the words of Mark Walker, who consented to lift the veil of secrecy from the yet-to-be-released book. It asserted that in the last months of the war, scientists of the Third Reich supposedly made desperate attempts to finalize the work on the atomic bomb. "Physicists took pre-enriched uranium (a small part of the material that was used to produce the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima), enclosed it with ordinary explosive material and detonated it. That's not how you make an atomic bomb. So the explosive material exploded and scattered particles of uranium," the newspaper wrote.
American scientists assert that after the war Kurt Dibner and Walter Gerlach preferred to keep silent about the experiments they performed at the time. In the opinion of the German publication, if the tests were done exactly as Walker described, then it was plain why the physicians were not ready to provide the details of their past. The story there did not lie in the unwillingness to talk about the fact of collaboration with the Nazis, as much as it did in similar stories, told with permission, that said experts would ridicule the "nuclear tests."
A feeling was created that the "sensational" book would be very similar to the Soviet blockbuster about Stierlitz. It's unlikely to have as artistic merit as it does authenticity.
Utro.Ru, 05.3.05, Dmitriy Kartsev
