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Chapter 10: GATEWAY TO THE BLACK SUN: CONCLUSIONS TO PART ONE
1 Carter Hydrick, Critical Mass, internet publisher manuscript (www.3dshort.com/nazibomb2/CRITICALMASS.txt), p. 133. 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 consistent 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 electricity 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 metallization. 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 mother-load 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 super-weapon 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 Russians - 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. 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.
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