Hundreds of prisoners of war were burned and killed in the tests in 1944 and 1945 which led Hitler to believe that he could win the race for the atomic bomb and tip the war in his favour.

Rainer Karlsch, a social historian, says that the Nazi bomb was never anywhere as strong as the US bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Postwar scholars have therefore tended to discount the likelihood of Hitler having, or being close to having, such a devastating weapon: there seemed to be no physical evidence.

But Dr Karlsch says in Hitler’s Bomb that Germany had built an atomic reactor in Gottow, a village outside Berlin that now amounts to no more than a few chunks of concrete. The Nazis were also, he says, harvesting sufficient nuclear material to build so-called “dirty bombs” whereby tons of conventional explosives are wrapped around a nuclear device. The effect of such bombs is to magnify several thousand times the force of a conventional explosion and Hitler, until close to the end of the war, seemed to be counting on these to drive back the Red Army.

Dr Karlsch’s arguments are based on East German, British, American and Russian archives. Soviet military intelligence infiltrated the SS unit supervising the nuclear tests.He also took soil samples from the test areas on the island of Rügen and the state of Thuringia and interviewed survivors who saw test explosions. “The evidence presented is very persuasive,” said Professor Mark Walker, of Union College in New York State, an authority on German nuclear research.

Dr Karlsch was alerted to the possibility of Nazi nuclear testing by the recollections of elderly residents from the region close to Ohrdruf concentration camp. “I was standing by the window at 9pm at night and there was suddenly a long, slim pillar of light. It became so bright that I could have read a newspaper,” said Claere Werner. “The pillars expanded at the top so that they looked like a leafy tree.” That was on March 3,

1945. “The next day, and the days following, we all became so tired.” The community started to suffer from nose bleeds, severe headaches and nausea.

Another witness described how his building company had to construct huge bonfires on the fringes of the forest. “Piles of corpses were waiting to be burned, obviously prisoners. They had no hair, some of had blistered skin, naked raw skin and were missing body parts.” Afterwards they were told to destroy their clothes.

At the beginning of March 1945 — with the Red Army only 40 miles from Berlin — the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, was optimistic. He had just been told of the nuclear test in Thuringia. “We still haven’t used our last miracle weapon,” he told his doctor. “In one or two strikes, New York and London will disappear.”

TESTING TIMES

1938: Nuclear fission demonstrated in Germany
1942: Manhattan Project, US atom bomb programme
1945: US drops bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
1949: USSR tests bomb
1952: Britain begins tests
1960: France carries out first nuclear test explosion
1964: China follows suit

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