'I Saw Nazis Test A-bomb'

[Guest guest]

http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/4816.asp

Confident Hitler’s secret nuke missiles failed in World War II Sonia Joshi Oct. 3, 2005

According to media reports, Hitler in second world war was too confident of Nazi

Germany’s victory even in 1944-45 time frame when allies were closing in on him

from all sides.

Nazi Germany was inches away from delivering intercontinental ballistic missiles

with nuke warheads. Hitler’s confidence (fortunately for the world) never

materialized because though the prototypes were tested, they could not be

deliverd in the battlefield on time due to lack of resources and time

constraints.

According to an 88-year-old former Italian war correspondent, Hitler was

preparing to unleash a nuclear bomb on the Allies in the last days of the

Second World War. In his book ''Hitler's Secret Weapon'', Luigi Romersa claims

to be the last living witness to an experimental detonation of a Nazi weapon he

says was the world's first atom bomb.

Recently, historian Rainer Karlsch published a study suggesting that the Nazis

conducted three nuclear weapons tests in 1944 and 1945, killing 700 people.

According to think tanks, what really happened is that the Nazi Germany had

definitely invented the nukes and missiles but the technology could not be

delivered in the battlefield on time. The efforts failed due to lack of time

and resources.

Romersa claims that in September 1944, Benito Mussolini entrusted him with a

secret mission. Italy's wartime leader wanted to know more after Hitler boasted

to him of weapons capable of reversing the course of the war. Romersa, then a

27-year-old war correspondent for Corriere della Sera, was sent to Germany and

he met Hitler in a bunker in Rastenburg, northern Poland. He was also given a

tour around the Nazis'' secret weapons plant at Peenemunde, on the Baltic

coast.

Romersa said from his home in Rome how he saw weapons "streets ahead of any

conventional weapons the allies had at the time". He said: "They were

developing a missile which they said they intended to launch from Europe across

the Atlantic to bomb America."

Recent evidence from Russian archives has, however, shown one of the German

scientists lodged a patent claim for a plutonium bomb as early as 1941. Romersa

said: "Hitler and Nazi Germany had a very, very developed weapons programme and

were certainly capable of creating an atomic bomb."

Eyewitness - Germans Tested A-Bomb In October, 1944 'I Saw Nazis Test A-bomb' -

Author Rewrites History By John Hooper in Rome The Guardian - UK10-1-5

 

A book published in Italy is set to reignite a smouldering controversy over how

close the Nazis came to manufacturing a nuclear device in the closing stages of

World War II.

The author, Luigi Romersa, 88, is the last known witness to what he and some

historians believe was the experimental detonation of a rudimentary weapon on

an island in the Baltic in 1944.

Hitler's nuclear program has become a subject of intense dispute in recent

months, particularly in Germany. An independent historian, Rainer Karlsch, met

a barrage of hostility when he published a study containing evidence that the

Nazis had got much further than previously believed.

On October 12, 1944, Romersa, then a 27-year-old war correspondent, was taken to

the island of Rugen, where he watched the detonation of what his hosts called a

"disintegration bomb".

"They took me to a concrete bunker with an aperture of exceptionally thick

glass. There was a slight tremor in the bunker; a sudden, blinding flash, and

then a thick cloud of smoke. It took the shape of a column and then that of a

big flower.

"The officials there told me we had to remain in the bunker for several hours

because of the effects of the bomb. When we eventually left, they made us put

on a sort of coat and trousers which seemed to me to be made of asbestos and we

went to the scene of the explosion.

"The effects were tragic. The trees around had been turned to carbon. No leaves.

Nothing alive. There were some animals - sheep - in the area and they too had

been burnt to cinders."

When he wrote of his experiences after the war, "everyone said I was mad". By

then, it was universally accepted that Hitler's scientists had been years away

from testing a nuclear device.

However, documents published recently by Mr Karlsch and a US scholar, Mark

Walker, have punctured this consensus. Russian archives have shown one of the

German scientists lodged a patent claim for a plutonium bomb as early as 1941

and, in June, the two historians published an article in Physics World that

included what they said was the first diagram of one of the bombs Hitler's

scientists were trying to build, a device that exploited both fission and

fusion.