Forbidden History - The Nuclear Race: How Close Were the Nazis?

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

During World War II, Nazi Germany launched a secretive program to harness the power of the atom - but just how close did they really get to building a nuclear weapon? In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we explore the science, the scientists, and the sabotage behind Hitler’s atomic ambitions. Was the world closer to a Nazi bomb than we realise, or was it doomed from the start? Cast List: Guy Walters: Author, historian and journalist  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Imagine a world in which Adolf Hitler held the power to obliterate entire cities at the press of a button. Picture London, Moscow, or even New York, vanishing in a blinding flash. It's a chilling scenario. But during the darkest moments of the Second World War, it wasn't far-fetched.

One of the most frightening what-ifs of the Second World War is what would have happened if the Nazis had got the atom bomb. And, you know, it doesn't bear thinking about if Hitler had his finger on a big red button. You know, the world would be very different now. Probably wouldn't even exist. And I think the first thing that Hitler would have done is put it on an airplane and dropped it on London. I have no doubt that's what he would have done. But how close did they actually come? In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we analyze Nazi Germany's race to develop nuclear weapons,

weapons capable of unimaginable destruction. To unravel this terrifying possibility, we've brought in Guy Walters, historian, author, and expert on World War II and Nazi Germany. Guy has dedicated his career to examining and uncovering truths long-bearings. beneath propaganda and myth. The big question is, how close were they? How close were the Nazis to having an A-bomb? They did have a serious atomic weapons program. They were researching whether they could build the bomb.

But, you know, what the Nazis didn't have was anything like the Manhattan Project, you know, with its massive government backing and coordination. And like so much in Nazi Germany, the German attempt to build an A-bomb suffered from the kind of disorganization of, Nazi Germany. There's too much internal competition and it had a lack of resources and there was too much of interference on an ideological level. But what you did have was a program that was

primarily led by a man called Werner Heisenberg and the Uranvarain, the Uranium Club. But, you know, it never reaches, as we know, plot spoiler the stage of producing a functional bomb. We know that because we're all alive today. But who exactly were these scientists? Men like Werner Heisenberg, who found themselves at the heart of Hitler's atomic ambition. Were they reluctant participants or enthusiastic architects of destruction? So the Nazi nuclear effort was led, of course, by Phytists, and Werner Heisenberg being probably the most famous, then he had Otto Hahn, Karl Friedrich von Weitzhacker, and another guy called Paul Hartec.

This secretive group at the heart of Nazi Germany. Germany's nuclear ambitions was known as the Uranvaryne or the Uranium Society, a collection of scientists handpicked by Hitler's regime to unlock the power of atomic vision. Now Heisenberg was a seriously impressive guy. I mean, he was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, and he plays a leading role. Although even today, his exact level of commitment to building the bomb does remain, you know, highly debatable. You also have Otto Hahn and his

This discovery of nuclear fission in 38 was absolutely crucial, critical, if you like, to use the nuclear word, to nuclear science. But Hahn's work was never really exploited and capitalised by the Nazis. These were scientists whose groundbreaking discoveries would pave the path toward nuclear capability. Yet history is rarely straightforward. Were these scientists driven purely by scientific curiosity? or did they willingly place their genius at the service of a monstrous regime?

The Nazis had the talent and they had the intellect. But somehow, despite possessing some of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century, they still fell short of their atomic ambitions. What exactly went wrong? Was it fate, incompetence, or sabotage that prevented Hitler from acquiring history's most devaluing The Nazis, as we know, failed, thank goodness to develop an atomic bomb, but there are several reasons as to why that happened. By 1942, the Nazis had the science and the scientists, but they were missing some seriously

crucial components. First of all, they had a lack of resources. They don't have, in the same way as the Americans did, access to vast quantities of uranium and indeed also heavy water that they needed for their form of nuclear research. So that's one problem. Then also you had a lot of scientific disagreement amongst the rival factions within the German nuclear weapons program. There was a lack of centralized control.

Unlike the American Manhattan Project, which benefited from nearly unlimited government funding, centralized coordination and resources, the Nazi-atoules. The Nazi atomic effort was plagued by chaotic mismanagement and internal rivalry. As we know with the Manhattan Project, you know, there was very efficient, systematized control program in the United States, under of course Oppenheimer. You've probably all seen the film. And so the Manhattan Project wasn't just a great scientific achievement, but it's also, frankly, a great bureaucratic achievement.

And that's the type of thing that Nazi Germany was so bad at. The bureaucracy was not its strong suit, because often people are operating in competition, and that is true of the nuclear program. While America poured an estimated $2 billion, around $30 billion in today's money, into the Manhattan Project, the Nazis struggled to keep their scientists from sabotaging each other's work, let alone secure adequate materials. But it wasn't just internal chaos and a lack of funding that crippled Nazi ambitions. And then you've got quite a lot of misunderstandings of nuclear physics.

You've got some of the German scientists, including Heisenberg. They've totally miscalculated the feasibility and requirements of an atomic bomb. Their science is going in slightly the wrong direction compared to the science going in the right direction in the United States. America was just so rich, so rich, and could put it at the time, I think it was something like $300 million in 1940s money, which is billions and billions and billions now. And they could put in just so much money and resources. And of course, you can develop things in the middle of America during the war.

But it doesn't stop there. Then, of course, you had people attacking the German nuclear program. You've got the famous attack carried out by the Norwegian Resistance and the British Special Operations Executive, SOE, attacking the heavy water plant in Norway. The most tangible blow came in a daring commando raid on Norway's heavily guarded Vamork hydroelectric plant in February 1943. A mission so bold, it became legendary. The Nazi atom scientists felt they needed this stuff called heavy water,

deuterium oxide for their nuclear weapons program. And without going to too much of the science, what deuterium oxide does is it moderates a nuclear reactor that's using natural uranium. Now, it's very hard to get hold of this stuff. synthesize it and the main source of it was the Vermeark hydroelectric plant in Norway. And the British realized that. And we got to go and take this place out. It's very hard to bomb it because it's going in a very tight valley.

What we need to do is to target it with a kind of commando raid. And this takes place in the war carried out by Norwegian resistance fighters and British SOE agents and by blowing up Vermeck and also by blowing up a boat going across a fjord carrying lots of deuterium oxide, we are really slowing down the Nazi nuclear weapons program successfully. British Special Agents and Norwegian Resistance fighters destroyed approximately 1,100 pounds of heavy water, setting the Nazi nuclear program back months, possibly years. However, the operation had been long in the making.

The first attempt to sabotage a heavy water plant. in Norway. There was a complete disaster. It was called Operation Freshman and its mission was to, of course, disrupt the whole atomic project by destroying all heavy water. So you had all these gliders with the men being carried out across, you know, being taken across the North Sea. But the whole operation fails disastrously because you have terrible harsh weather, you have these terrible navigation issues and both guiders crash. People are killed. The survivors are captured by the Germans. They're tortured and they're executed. the Hitler's Commando Order.

And then you have, you know, the few survivors are just having to survive on this sort of snowy wasteland for months and months and months. So, you know, I think that failure really underscores quite how difficult the mission was and obviously leads to the much more successful mission, which is called Operation Gunnicide, in 1943 the following year. Yet, as we'll discover next, some historians argue the Nazis may have come closer than we dared to believe. Did Hitler secretly test a nuclear device? Even today, controversy and mystery swirl around Nazi Germany's atomic ambitions. Persistent rumors claim that Hitler's scientists

did more than just research. They supposedly tested primitive nuclear devices. Whispers from the past tell of secret experiments near Erdrouf in central Germany, and on the isolated, isolated island of Rheugan nestled in the cold waters of the Baltic Sea. Could these chilling stories be true? Or are they merely myths born from wartime fears? Historian Guy Walters weighs in. One of the questions is did the Nazis test a nuclear device? There are some unverified claims that say that the Germans did test a very primitive nuclear device in 1945, perhaps at a place called Ordruth or another place called Rugen, which is an island in the Baltic. And there are some declassified Soviet reports and American reports that hints at the fact

that maybe some small-scale tests were rumoured to have taken place. But you know what? It's all a bit hearsay. There's no evidence for it. There had been some sort of nuclear test carried out. Post-war interrogation of all those scientists, eaves dropping on these scientists, all would have been revealed in those. in his investigations. And of course, there would have been some physical remnants of a nuclear explosion. Because if you're testing a nuclear device, you're either testing a reactor and you're going to get, you know, you're going to find the reactor and find it's working, or you're going to find if they've blown up a little nuclear bomb, again, very unlikely, there's going to be some,

you know, tell-tale signs if you've blown up a nuke. I think the most credible conclusion is that Nazi Germany never actually got anywhere near the technology and the technological advances needed to build a functioning aggressive bomb before the war came to an end. With no physical evidence, no radioactive residue, no confirmed eyewitness accounts, these alleged tests remain speculative at best. Yet the very idea that the Nazis might have crossed the nuclear threshold even briefly continues to haunt historians. But if Nazi Germany never truly came close to the bomb, why did this be the war?

Why did the Allies scramble so urgently across Europe at the war's end, hunting down Nazi scientists and confiscating uranium supplies? The Allies went around Germany after the war and they tried to look for any remnants of the German nuclear program. And there was this top secret Allied mission called Operation Alsos, and that was there to locate and dismantle any German nuclear research and also to get there before the Russians. Just don't forget that this time the only country on the planet within Nuke is the United States. As World War II drew to a close in 1945, Allied forces raced desperately across Germany. But what exactly did they find? Intelligence reports hinted at dangerous discoveries, possibly nuclear, hidden deep within German laboratories and bunkers. But the Allies' goal wasn't only to defeat the Nazis militarily, but to also seize their scientific secrets.

And as part of Alsos, you have US troops capturing, you know, key scientists, including Heisenberg and Hahn, and they are confiscating uranium stockpiles. These scientists are largely later interned in Britain under an operation called Operation Epsilon. They're held in a country house, and their conversations are there secretly recorded. I've been to the very room in which those conversations were recorded. It's just like a lovely big English country house and a lovely drawing room. And when those Nazis hear that the Americans have dropped the atomic bomb in August 1945, you can still read the transcripts of the recordings.

They think at first it must be propaganda. They feel that, well, if we were years and years away from developing, how did the Americans get there? But once they're shown absolute proof that the bomb is being. been detonated. You can see on those recordings, these German nuclear scientists are absolutely blown away and they realized just how far behind they were. Operation Alsace ultimately confiscated around 1200 tons of uranium ore from Nazi laboratories and captured dozens of Germany's top nuclear scientists. The revelations from secretly

recorded conversations during Operation Epsilon showed beyond any doubt that Germany's nuclear ambitions had failed dramatically. But amid the Allies' relief lay unsettling questions. Could these brilliant men truly have failed by accident? Or might some have sabotaged their own work out of moral conviction? The Allies' investigations after the war revealed an astonishing gap between Nazi ambitions and reality. Yet this discovery opened the door to a troubling question. Why had Germany's best scientists failed so spectacularly? One controversial explanation points directly at Werner Heisenberg, the theoretical physicist and leader of the Nazi nuclear program. After the war, Heisenberg made a stunning claim.

He had intentionally sabotaged the German atomic project for moral reasons, deliberately steering Hitler away from obtaining the bomb. But is this true or simply a convenient fiction crafted to rewrite his legacy? As we all know from watching the film Oppenheimer, people working on the nuclear weapons program in the United States have moral problems with what they're doing. You know, they know that what they've got they're developing is something that can destroy mankind, it can destroy the planet. And you've got some German scientists, particularly Heisenberg, who later claim that they actually deliberately didn't build the bomb for moral. reasons. They're saying that actually I deliberately got it all wrong so Hitler couldn't have the bomb. Some people think, you know, Heisenberg's, you know, pulling a bit of a fast one there, and actually he had just kind of totally miscalculated the challenges of developing the nuke,

rather making a conscious ethical decision not to do so. It's very convenient for Heisenberg to say that. I don't know the answer. Indeed, historians remain divided. Was Heisenberg truly the ethical hero he later portrayed himself to be, quietly protecting humanity from devastation? Or was he simply a brilliant scientist who had overestimated his own abilities and underplayed his own failures? Whatever the truth, the Allies had no intention of letting German expertise slip away. As peace descended upon a shattered Europe, a new and shadowy competition was already underway, a secret of scramble to capture German scientists and weaponize their knowledge.

But just how did these operations inadvertently shape the dangerous nuclear arms race of the Cold War era? What you have is many German nuclear scientists, not just nuclear scientists, but scientists in other fields. They're recruited by the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and you have these post-war programs of rounding up these guys, and the most famous one is that carried out by the US, called Operation Paperclip. As the dust of war settled over Europe, the world's superpowers moved swiftly, not just to rebuild, but to rearm. For the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union, the next battlefield wasn't defined by

tanks or trenches. It was defined by intellectual capital, and that meant one thing, getting their hands on Germany's scientific elite. The Americans led the charge with Operation Paperclip, a covertive. intelligence program designed to recruit over 1600 Nazi scientists, engineers and technicians. Many had worked directly on weapons research, including rockets, nerve agents and atomic energy. Among them were men like Heisenberg and physicist Kurt Dibner, whose wartime knowledge could tip the balance in the brewing Cold War.

So as a result, you have some of these guys, they just go into developing weapons program, programs, but some like Heisenberg carry on working in academia, and you have people like Kurt Diebner, and he continues nuclear research in all sorts of different capacities and roles. So there was a huge competition to grab German scientific expertise, and that plays a crucial role in that Cold War nuclear arms race. These once loyal servants of the Reich now became architects of the atomic age, not in Berlin, in New Mexico, Oxford, and Moscow. Some designed weapons of mass destruction.

Others helped lay the foundations of modern physics and space exploration. In the end, Nazi science didn't vanish. It was absorbed, reshaped, and redeployed by the very powers that once fought to destroy it. But what if the Nazis had succeeded first? What if, instead of rushing to stop Nazi Germany's nuclear program, the Allies had been just a few months too late? What if Hitler, armed not just with tanks and terror, but with atomic firepower, had gotten

there first? It's not just a question of science. It's a question of survival. Because if Hitler had developed an atomic bomb before the United States, the entire trajectory of the 20th century might have changed. changed in a single radioactive flash. The big question is, what would Nazi Germany have done with the A-bomb? And if it had had it, would it have won the war?

Of course, if Germany, if Hitler had got the A-bomb before the Americans, what would he have done? Well, that would have been his long-promised wonder weapon. And I think the first thing that Hitler would have done is put it on an airplane and dropped it on London. I have no doubt that's what he would have done. And had he dropped it on London, that would have meant. the end of the war in Germany's favour, because if he could do that, he knew that he could then probably wipe out all of Britain, he could wipe out Moscow, he could do whatever he wanted. If he had the ability to develop lots of nukes, he would have won the war overnight.

Obviously, goes without saying, pretty happy that Hitler didn't have the bomb. The thought is harrowing, but not impossible. By 1944, the Luftwaffe was developing long-range bombers capable of reaching Britain, and Hitler's scientists were working feverishly to solve the final technical hurdles. Had just one element fallen into place, a shipment of uranium secured, a reactor successfully moderated, or a test device refined, history could have taken an apocalyptic turn. Instead, what remains is the shadow of a near miss, the terrifying possibility of a Nazi atomic age that never came to be. But even in failure, the Nazis left behind something dangerous, a scientific legacy that helped launch the Cold War.

Even though Nazi Germany didn't get the A-bomb, there's still a legacy to all that atomic nuclear ambition, if you like. A lot of its nuclear research may have gone the wrong direction, but a lot of it went in the right direction. And that was useful. Harner discovered nuclear fission. And fission creates the groundwork for the nuclear age. So, you know, a very, very useful thing in nuclear reactors and in nuclear bombs. And it's no accident that the Americans and the Brits and the Soviets were trying to get their hands on German scientists.

And of course, you know, by getting hold of those German scientists and putting them onto weapons programs and their nuclear program, that, of course, is fueling not only bombs, but also tension during the Cold War. But for my money, the Allies had no other choice. You had to grab those guys because otherwise the Soviets would have grabbed them. So I think, you know, the whole story of the nuclear weapons program in Germany, while it's, you know, obviously it's quite nice to know that Germany didn't develop the bomb, it makes you realise that you can't divorce scientific progress from politics.

You can't divorce it from ideology and you can't divorce it from war. Now matter what you like, science still has to get its hands dirty like the rest of us. That's the uncomfortable truth. The pursuit of knowledge, even the most powerful and promising kind, is never neutral. The story of the Nazi nuclear program is not just a tale of failure and relief. It's a cautionary reminder that science, left unchecked or corrupted by ideology, can shape the fate of nations. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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