from Hacker News

Filmmaker says he has uncovered a Nazi underground weapons facility

by AxisOfEval on 1/1/15, 6:30 PM with 14 comments

• by Animats on 1/1/15, 9:09 PM

  Those "Nazi tunnels" shown are clean, dry, and equipped with modern fluorescent lights. Those are not recently discovered tunnels.

  The "Nazi atomic bomb program" never went anywhere. There was one. It was never very big or very successful. The US effort to find out about the Nazi atomic bomb program was bigger than the Nazi atomic bomb program. After the war, the big-name physicists were kept in a mansion called Farm Hall, which was bugged to listen in on them. The recordings were released in the 1990s.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Epsilon

  Even after they hear about the Hiroshima bomb, they can't figure out how it was done. "If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you are all second-raters.", says Otto Hahn.

• by benzofuran on 1/1/15, 10:45 PM

  This is some more fancy fishing out of a filmmaker - as Animats has indicated, the Nazi's had no serious atomic bomb program - their leading physicists hadn't worked out 'fast fission' and had no workable design for a bomb.

  The logistics involved with Uranium separation on an industrial scale simply were impossible during the second half of WW2 for the Nazis - they did not have the materials or the expertise to construct enrichment / separation plants.

  The theory nor materials were there to produce a Plutonium device either - no critical pile of any significant size was made, and as far as I know the understanding that a much smaller critical mass of Plutonium was needed was missed entirely as well.

  The Nazi bomb program is a great example of the effects of a Scientific embargo - all of the powers at be at WW2 knew the US and UK were up to something involving radiation as most of the leading scientists in the field stopped publishing in the late 1930's until the conclusion of the war.

  An interesting read on the subject is Heisenberg's War - http://www.amazon.com/Heisenbergs-War-Secret-History-German/...

• by anoother on 1/1/15, 11:18 PM

  On a related note, this particular tale will keep you hooked if you have the patience for it, and a reasonable tolerance for cliffhangers:

  http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?t=543304

• by Guthur on 1/1/15, 11:23 PM

  "where thousands of Jews were killed."

  Would be more appropriate and reflective to say "where thousands of people/inmates were killed.". There were many victims in this camp, why is one group held above the rest? I don't think there is even evidence to suggest any particular group was in the majority; considering figures for actual victims varies wildly from 150K to 300K.

  In my opinion this sort of emotive journalism is very dangerous, and seems to perpetuate quite widely.