
Filmmaker says he has uncovered a Nazi underground weapons facility - AxisOfEval
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/
======
Animats
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](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.

~~~
spacefight
" 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."

------
benzofuran
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/...](http://www.amazon.com/Heisenbergs-War-Secret-History-
German/dp/0306810115)

~~~
spacefight
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](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."

~~~
benzofuran
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.

------
anoother
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](http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?t=543304)

------
Guthur
"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.

~~~
tokenadult
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.

~~~
Guthur
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauthausen-
Gusen_concentration_camp#cite_ref-FOOTNOTEWnuk_.281961.2920-22_52-3)

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.

~~~
tokenadult
Because there are already are sources that show that the article statement was
just fine, and because I was quite astonished that you would object to that
statement on the grounds you mentioned.

