pdf - WHALE

HARTECK: Which is 100 times more than we had. 29
It may have been 100 times more than Harteck or any of the high
profile scientists interred at Farm Hall had at their disposal, but it
was certainly not a number beyond the SS, with its hundreds of
thousands of concentration camp slave laborers. Hahn later
reinforces the pathetic plight of the "Heisenberg group" by adding
"Of course, we were unable to work on that scale." 30 Such facts
and methods would doubtless have been known to the
Kammlerstab, and doubtless he would have pursued them with his
customary "focus."
Harteck then corroborated this view in a statement regarding
the Clusius process, and his numbers reveal the dangerous potential
for isotope separation and enrichment that lay within Nazi
Germany's capabilities if worked on a similarly large scale as the
Manhattan Project:
If it is a fact that an explosive can be produced either by means of the
mass spectrograph - we would never have done it as we could never
have employed 56,000 workmen. For instance, when we considered
the Clusius-Linde business combined with our exchange cycle we
would have needed to employ 50 workmen continuously in order to
produce two tons a year. If we wanted to make ten tons we would have
had to employ 250 men. We couldn't do that. 31
For Harteck and the other Farm Hall scientists, the problem was
not means or methods, it was simply a labor shortage, a shortage
the SS was not experiencing.
Later, Harteck is even more specific:
Considering the figures involved I think it must have been mass
spectrographs. If they had had some other good method they wouldn't
have needed to spend so much. One wouldn't have needed so many
men.
29 Ibid., p. 120
30 Ibid., p. 121.
31 Ibid.
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