Nazi Hopes for Weapons
of Mass Destruction

"Early this morning we heard the bombers going out. It was the sound of a giant factory in the sky."

So began Edward R. Murrow’s radio broadcast from London on D-Day (6 June 1944). The air armada, he went on, "seemed to shake the old gray stone buildings in this bruised and battered city beside the Thames. The sound was heavier, more triumphant than ever before."

Murrow was right to stress the part played by sky warriors on that day of days, for it was Allied air power that guaranteed the success of the Normandy invasion.

And it was largely America’s ability to produce aircraft — 86,000 of them in 1943 alone — that secured this all-important command of the skies. The extent of Allied air superiority still has the power to startle: On 6 June, Hitler could count a mere 319 Luftwaffe aircraft in the west to send against the Allies’ 12,837.

Given the growing string of Russian victories on the eastern front, the success of the Normandy invasion meant that all over Europe the swastika would come down within a period of months.

Yet Hitler kept the loyalty of millions of Germans to the end. His armies were fighting to the finish with slogans like "Death and dishonor to those who fear an honorable death!"

Why did the German people remain good Nazis to the last minute? Because in their eyes, the course of events seemed to bear out Hitler’s most terrifying visions.

From the beginning of his career he had warned Germans that they were surrounded by foes who would force them to fight for survival. He had portrayed all of Germany’s military offensives as preemptive, not aggressive: the Nazis were invading other countries in order to defeat evil Jewish schemes and protect the "master race."

According to the Hitler regime’s propaganda machine, the German attempt to conquer the world was only a means of defending itself against the global Jewish conspiracy.

When Allied bombs destroyed German cities, killing thousands of civilians, and foreign troops ground down German armies, the world was exposed for what Hitler always said it was: hostile to the master race by its very nature. Germany’s fault, then, lay not in its warring ways, but in failing to rise to all of its challenges.

Berlin in Ruins
after Allied Bombing Campaigns, 1944

At the beginning of 1945, in his last New Year’s message to the German people, Hitler predicted that an Allied victory "would mean not only the dismemberment of the German Reich, the deportation of 15 to 20 million Germans to foreign lands, and the enslavement of the rest of our people, but also the mass starvation of further millions of Germans."

When he sent a message to his soldiers before the Battle of the Bulge, the dictator had been even more emphatic: "This war will decide whether the German people will continue to exist or perish."

But Hitler never preached hopelessness. Even during the last months of the war, he still thought it possible to return to the offensive, for revolutionary weapons of mass destruction — veritable miracles of German ingenuity — would soon be part of his arsenal.

The atomic bomb became his particular source of hope. On 14 February 1945, as Anglo-American bombers were reducing the city of Dresden to rubble and ashes, he told Dr. Erwin Geising that, though Germany was being savaged, he "would get her out of it. The British and the Americans have miscalculated badly. Some time ago we solved the problem of nuclear fission, and we have developed it so far that we can exploit the energy for armaments purposes."

Hitler thrilled to imagine atomic fireballs descending on the Allied armies: "They won’t even know what hit them! It’s the weapon of the future. With it, Germany’s future is assured. It was Providence that allowed me to perceive this final path to victory."

Hitler's Dream Weapon

In his overheated imagination, which became ever more detached from reality during the closing weeks of his life, Hitler would reduce all the Allied victories to ashes in the twinkling of an eye. With atomic bombs to clear the terrain before him, his drive for global domination would proceed with overpowering destructiveness. For the "final path to victory" would end in nothing less than the whole world bowed before his feet.

It was to be the ultimate form of blitzkrieg, and the United States was high up on Hitler’s list to meet its doom in an atomic Armageddon. Hitler expected to mate his mighty bombs to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that would obliterate American cities. He knew that Wernher von Braun, whose V-2s terrorized England late in the war, had drawn up plans for an ICBM, designated the A-10, that was meant to strike the US from Germany.

What was the reality behind Hitler’s endgame delusions? In fact, he had done little to encourage the Nazis’ nuclear program, refusing in the late 1930s to credit claims that the "Jewish physics" of Albert Einstein could result in a fabulous breakthrough in destructive technology.

Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, made matters worse by arresting some of Germany’s leading nuclear physicists on suspicion of disloyalty. What is more, many Nazi scientists, sincerely believing that the war would be over before any nation could produce a fission weapon, failed to encourage work on Hitler’s most desired weapon of mass destruction.

So, in 1945, the Nazi atomic bomb project was still very small and offered no prospect of success. Hitler’s unwarranted optimism of that February was probably the result of conversations with Martin Bormann, whose specialty was telling the German dictator what he wanted to hear.

© 1998 by Larry Hedrick. All rights reserved.

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