The Rise of the Fourth Reich - ThereAreNoSunglasses

72 THE RISE OF THE FOURTH REICHBut, if the Nazis had developed a working atomic bomb, why was it notused as Allied armies closed in on Germany? One answer seems to be thatthey did not have a reliable delivery system in place. The Nazis’ V-3, asmooth-bore 150-mm gun dubbed the Centipede, designed to launchlarge-finned shells into London, along with its multistage A-10 rocket,was still undependable. Witkowski voiced his suspicions that the fatalflight of Lieutenant Joseph Kennedy, older brother to the future president,might have been an ill-fated attempt to destroy the V-3 complex atMimoyecques, France. The giant airfield in Norway, home to the massivesix-engine bombers, had not yet been completed.This idea was echoed by Stevens, who became convinced that the ThirdReich produced an atomic bomb. “The Germans did make atomic bombs,”he stated emphatically. “Not only did they make atomic bombs, they madeuranium as well as plutonium bombs and other atomic weapons whichremain somewhat of a mystery. What the Germans could not do, in thesedying days of the Third Reich, was to match up one of these nuclear weaponswith an effective delivery system. The reasons for this differ with eachweapon, individually, and run the [gamut] from mistake to treachery toincompetence.”One thought that must have crossed the minds of Nazi leaders was thetotal destruction of Germany that would have resulted from the use of anuclear weapon. The devastation of London or New York would not havematerially altered the course of the war in the spring of 1945. And theretaliation of the Allies would have been unimaginable. Further,high-ranking Nazis, such as Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann, who bywar’s end had become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany,realized the war was lost, and used advanced technology as a bargainingchip with the Western allies.Hydrick proposed just that intriguing possibility: that the U-234 waspurposely handed over to U.S. authorities on the order of Bormann in exchangefor immunity as part of a covert plan for the continuation of Naziresearch. Although there was criticism over Hydrick’s technical descriptionsof both the atomic bomb and its detonators, his mass of documentationconcerning the transfer of nuclear technology from Germany to