"The Uranium Project": How I Met Hitler's Scientist

While the whole world fears whether Moscow will use an atomic bomb in Ukraine and, if it does, how America will react, I remembered how exactly seventy years ago I learned that Hitler was close to his own nuclear weapons, only he was not. aware. It's not a novel, it's not fiction, but the real truth.

Eight years after I was released from the concentration camp, I shaved again in Germany, the editorial office of the "Omladina" newspaper sent me to write reprotags. I was in Hamburg when I had the chance to speak with the quantum physicist Erich Bage. He agreed to be interviewed by a twenty-four-year-old Yugoslav journalist about his work on the atomic bomb in Nazi Germany. It coincided, I guess, that just then he felt the need to tell how the Germans prevented themselves from getting the atomic bomb because they chased away scientists of Jewish origin. Of course, I grabbed that opportunity. A young journalist must also be lucky.

From 1938, Professor Bage worked for Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg on the "Uranium Project", which was code for the work on the German atomic bomb. Heisenberg formulated the foundations of quantum mechanics in 1925, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932.

The "Uranium Project" was part of Hitler's Ministry of Defense. Heisenberg justified his agreement to work on it after the war by saying that they did not actually intend to make an atomic bomb, but to check whether it was possible to make one. So, in 1941, he traveled to Copenhagen to consult Nils Bohr, a Danish Nobel laureate who had been making atomic models during the First World War, whether it was theoretically possible to make an atomic bomb. Bohr was scared, managed to escape to America and told his old friend Albert Einstein that the Germans were working on an atomic bomb, which prompted Einstein to write to Roosevelt and thus accelerated American work on the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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Bage told me in 1953 that Einstein's theory of relativity and Heisenberg's quantum mechanics represent the basis for the practical use of atomic splitting. He talked, and my head was spinning. I didn't like physics at school, I didn't understand anything, but I took notes of everything the professor said about the possibility of Hitler getting nuclear weapons before others. A terrible thought.

Heisenberg and his colleagues, Bage told me, in 1942 reported to the Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer, that there was no possibility of Germany making an atomic bomb based on the fission of the uranium nucleus, because there was not enough of this ore, but that it could possibly be possible using plutonium, for which only hard water needed. Asked by Speer how long it would take them to build such a bomb, Heisenberg said at least three, probably five years. After Speer's report, Hitler said that it was too late for him.

After the war, the victors immediately started looking for and arresting German scientists who were working on secret weapons. The English established "Project Y", Heisenberg, Bagge and a few others were arrested and taken to the "Farm Hall" estate near London. Bage told me that they were stunned when they heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They quickly began to check how the Americans managed to construct the atomic bomb. After a few months, the British released them all.

From 1948, Bage was a professor at the University of Hamburg and dealt with the use of nuclear technology on merchant ships, which at the time still sounded like science fiction, like a Gilvern story about a trip to the moon.

During the war, the Germans wandered around the atomic bomb. The versatile scientist Manfred von Ardene experimented with the goal of creating a nuclear bomb in the laboratory of the Ministry of Posts. Minister Wilhelm Onesorge reported this to Hitler, who scoffed: "It is the postmen who will turn the tide of war!" The Führer did not realize how serious it was. Von Ardene would later be picked up by the Russians, he participated in the development of their first hydrogen bomb.

Wernher von Braun, devoted to the construction of rockets since his youth, was given the opportunity to make flying bombs and rockets called V-1 and V-2 at the Peneminde base with which London was bombed. He was taken by the Americans, so he constructed the most powerful rockets with which space was conquered.

What would have happened if Heisenberg had not gone to Bohr to tell him about the German plans, if the frightened Bohr had not informed Einstein, who alerted Roosevelt, so the Americans quickly began working on the atomic bomb, if Hitler had understood that the atomic bomb was real, if would the war in Europe have lasted longer, if Brown's rockets with the Ardennes charge had been ready a minute before the surrender of Germany?

This story is not fiction, it is based on fact. Just as the fear of using the atomic bomb these days does not rest on some futuristic horror story, but stems from what is happening before our eyes.

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