Death-Rays as Life-Savers in the Third Reich - Pedro Waloschek ...

may come out. After all, some brainless historian or malicious
colleague may get the idea that those who were in on the project
had themselves believed in it …”
I also spoke about this to Wolfgang Paul (1913-1993) who was a
Professor in Bonn and the Director of the DESY research centre
where I worked at the time. Wolfgang Paul was very familiar with the
German Betatron projects and even described them shortly after the
end of the war [Pa47]. I asked him about the reasoning by which
constructing such equipment would be ‘essential to the war effort’,
particularly for combating aircraft. He too maintained that these ideas
had been complete twaddle, but was unwilling to talk about it in detail.
On the one hand Schmellenmeier probably had justifiable doubts
that pre-ionisation (i.e. the separation of electrons from the gas
mixture’s molecules by means of radiation) could impede the ignition
of engines in any way. He could hardly refer to the eccentric inventor
Grindell-Matthews’ presentations using unknown beams. On the other
hand he knew that the calculation he made at the time for the range of
the radiation and its intensity over long distances in air was
problematic. Schmellenmeier’s attitude is typified in the following
remark: “Gans said to me, ‘Yes, you’ve forgotten the Compton
Effect!’ To which I replied, ‘Mr Gans, now that the glorious Third
Reich is on the verge of collapse, do you want to produce good
physics, or would you rather survive?’”
As Schmellenmeier declared explicitly, he was counting that his
proposal would not be examined by an expert, since this would have
caused him to “be left looking like a charlatan”. In fact, ambitious
bureaucrats duly recommended his proposal for approval, evidently
without any technical advice.
However, there was barely an expert in Germany at the time who
could have claimed (or wanted to claim) that Schmellenmeier’s
proposals and calculations were fundamentally wrong. There were
only a few physicists in the world who were sufficiently familiar with
quantum theory to be able to execute these kinds of calculations. Had
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