According to some online newspapers, from some secret documents declassified by the US government, evidence has emerged that would prove the existence of nuclear devices designed by Nazi Germany. But what actually emerged from the APO 696 report , it is a long-distance mail communication carried out by US troops present in Europe in 1944 and Washington.
According to this military communication, sent in October 1944, archived in 1947 and declassified only in 2017, some civilian witnesses have seen a huge explosion, which today, in hindsight, we can associate with a nuclear explosion. But where was Nazi Germany's nuclear weapons program actually in 1944?
Together with debunker Juanne Pili , we made a video in which we explained what actually emerged from the report APO 696 and at what stage are actually the historiographical researches linked to the nuclear weapons program of Nazi Germany, I leave you below the video published on his youtube channel.
As for the historiographic investigations, these, as often happens in any historiographic research, are currently in a stalemate, literally bogged down by the lack of data and material information, in the specific case of this particular research, the absence of information is due mainly to three different factors.
- Destruction of documents by the Nazis during the war
- Destruction of documents as a result of Allied raids and bombings
- Classification of documentary material recovered by the allies
During the retreat, in the final stages of the war ( 1944-1945 ), the officers of the Wehrmacht and the SS, undertook to ensure that no Reich documents fell into the hands of the allies, providing for the systematic destruction of documents. There are numerous strategic reasons why this choice was adopted and the transformation of the war, underway since the Napoleonic campaigns, in which information represents one of the most powerful weapons in the hands of generals, represents only one of the infinite reasons why, any armed force engaged in a strategic retreat, proceed with the destruction of any information.
The first documents to be destroyed are those that can allow the identification and location of any other military bases, production or research plants more or less secret, and more or less distant, followed by documents containing information on the strategy of retreat, on movements, supplies, shelters , evacuation routes and plans, etc., etc. And in the fortuitous case in which some documents managed to survive the systematic destruction carried out by Reich officials, fires, water infiltrations, collapses and rubble generated by the bombing of Europe, indirectly contributed to the destruction of information material.
However, it could happen that, for various reasons, the allied troops, US or Soviet, were able to take and liberate some military bases before the destruction work was completed, thus managing to get their hands on important and valuable information that, especially for on the scientific side, they could be used by either nation to gain an advantage at the end of the war over their allies, which it was known would not remain so for long after the war was over. In this sense, the example of Wernher von Braun's V2 rockets , is perfect for supporting this thesis.
During the Yalta Conference , the leaders of the three major allied powers, Iosif Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill , took some important decisions regarding the future territorial organization of Poland and Germany, thus defining what would later become the spheres of influence of the United States and the Soviet Union. In December 1944 the Soviet Union had identified the location of a major V2 rocket manufacturing plant, located in an area that would later be handed over to the influence of the United States and Great Britain, the discovery prompted the men of the Red Army to transfer in the shortest time possible most of the documentation, instrumentation and prototypes present in the plant in an area after the war would have remained under Soviet control, and thanks to that technology, in the 1950s the Soviet Union could have started the own space program, having as a point of origin for its aerospace vectors, the design base and the prototypes of the V2 designed by Wernher von Braun. This information remained secret throughout the Cold War and was only published after the end of the Soviet Union, providing researchers active in the 1990s with new and important information to work on, both in terms of the Cold War years and what is about Nazi technology during World War II.
This new information inevitably ended up fueling numerous theoretical speculations about the level of technology actually achieved by Nazi Germany, to the point that even today one continues to wonder if the Nazis actually built nuclear weapons, lasers of the death, underground bases in Europe, the Arctic, Antarctica, and on the moon . And many laymen wonder, how much of the material that the Soviet Union has kept secret for decades has actually been disclosed and how much, for various reasons, is still protected by military secrecy.
As for the historiographical research on Nazi nuclear power and all the research in progress, they make extensive use of oral testimony, received above all through the civilian population. This information, by its nature, is generally considered circumstantial, since as is known, human memory can be deceived and altered, contaminated by fears, prejudices and subsequent information that allow a posthumous re-elaboration of memory. For these reasons the testimony, even the direct one, is taken into consideration in the process of historiographic investigation, and assumes all the more value when that testimony is shared and supported by empirical evidence, such as finds, documents or other witnesses that confirm that given version. facts.
In this specific case the testimonies that have come down to us are very varied, and in most cases collected and documented only since 1946 , that is after the end of the war, but more importantly, after the episodes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , whose devastating and dramatic nature, inevitably ended up impressing itself in the collective memory of the entire human civilization.
Among the many more or less reliable testimonies, some seem to be more interesting than others, as in the case of the Italian war correspondent Luigi Romersa , sent to Germany in 1944 to observe and some ballistic tests, and on this occasion Romersa seems to have personally met Wernher von Braun. During his visit Romersa recounts, he was allowed to attend the test of a new explosive device, this test, which took place in October 1944, would have had the effect of an explosion which, in terms of scope and effect, could be associated with a nuclear explosion. Romersa also features the characteristic cloud mushroom. This test appears to have taken place in a secret research base located on an unspecified North Sea island.
Romersa's testimony, however, presents some slight inconsistencies, from the inaccurate location, to the description of the explosion, his story in fact comes out only after the episodes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and if well the explosion he described reminds of a nuclear explosion, some data reported by Romersa do not seem to be totally consistent with the effects of an actual nuclear explosion. In fact, in his testimony, the atomic mushroom is present, but its dimensions seem to be strongly contained compared to the atomic mushrooms of Los Alamos , Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, it could be a simple error of assessment due to the great distance and for these reasons Romersa is given the benefit of the doubt.
If his testimony were real, somewhere in the North Sea, there would be a certain concentration of radiation, consistent with the explosion of a nuclear device that took place 70 years ago, but the temporal distance could make the search particularly complicated. as rain, bad weather and natural decay could have completely washed away all traces of any radiation.
Looking for spikes of radiation along the Baltic Sea is consequently not the easiest way to demonstrate the actual progress of the Nazi nuclear program, a program we know to be real, and which could also have concealed a parallel nuclear weapons program, at least. according to men of the caliber of Albert Einstein and other European scientists who fled to the USA, who in August 1939 wrote a letter addressed to the then US president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who would then start what would become the Manhattan Project .
However, the nuclear program that began in 39 seems to have ended in 1941, when project leader Werner Karl Heisenberg , he would have given up on the idea of producing a nuclear device, engaging his team in the design of a nuclear reactor dedicated to energy production. The Heisenberg experimental reactor it was identified as early as 1945 and dismantled by the military forces of the United States and Great Britain. I will not go any further in this direction as this information is widely available and extremely easy to find.
As we said, looking for radiation peaks in the Baltic is extremely problematic, a more "simple" and traditional search is linked to the existing documentary material, if indeed the Reich continued its research for the creation of a nuclear weapon after 1941, someone must have worked on that project and somewhere, sooner or later, some document will have to come up.
Furthermore, some link is hypothesized between a hypothetical nuclear program and the missile program led by the aforementioned Wernher von Braun, who, as the Reich's foremost expert in missile engineering, it is conceivable that he would have been involved in the design of a medium -long range capable of carrying an object from the weight and mass of a nuclear device. If this hypothesis is taken into consideration, it is interesting to observe the results achieved by the aforementioned von Broun in the United States in the second half of the 1950s and 1960s, when, involved in the US space program, he engaged in the design of new more powerful vectors, this time in able to reach space and not “just London”.
Investigations to clarify the actual state of Nazi Germany's nuclear weapons program are still ongoing, at the moment the only certain information we have is a program started in 1939 and abandoned in favor of an energy program in 1941. Parallel to this. there are some more or less reliable testimonies not supported by any document or empirical evidence, and if anything will ever come out, it will be thanks to the careful analysis of an extremely limited documentation and the field investigations of the Nazi archaeologists engaged in the research of all structures, bases and bunkers that the Nazis planted throughout the Reich.