The Aryan Origins of the Atom Bomb
A Review of Carter Plymton Hydrick, 1998, ‘Critical Mass: The Real Story of the Birth of the Atom Bomb and the Atomic Age’, 1st Edition, Self-Published: USA
The subject of the Axis powers’ Atom Bomb research has recently received a significant amount of fresh intellectual attention with Dwight Rider and Eric Hehl recently arguing that the Thai-Burma Railway – made famous by the film ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai’ – was actually part of the Japanese Atomic Bomb research project.
Carter Hydrick’s book ‘Critical Mass: The Real Story of the Birth of the Atom Bomb and the Atomic Age’ deserves to be widely read not only because of its excellent scholarship and sceptical cross-checking of the stories of the participants of the Manhattan Project and the German atomic bomb research effort as well as primary sources.
Why with such serious and innovative scholarship was Hydrick’s book not published by a solid academic publisher or at least one of the smaller specialist publishers out there?
The answer to my mind lies in the fact that ‘Critical Mass’ is a book of two parts. The first section concerns the German and American Atomic Bomb race, but the second is a fantastical attempt to prove the survival of Martin Bormann – the head of NSDAP’s Party Chancellery and a key confident of Adolf Hitler – as well as the existence of the so-called ‘Bormann Brotherhood’ operating in South America.
This second intellectually toxic section to the book – largely a rehash of the theories of jewish historian Ladislas Farago’s book ‘Aftermath’ and American journalist Paul Manning’s ‘Martin Bormann’ – is almost certainly why publishers wouldn’t have wanted to handle it, because to associate their name with the ‘Bormann Brotherhood’ lunacy in the mid-to-late 1990s would have been damaging to the intellectual and public perception of their brand as well as have exposed them to significant (and serious) ridicule.
It is not uncommon for otherwise excellent books to have ridiculous chapters. For example, Adrian Weele’s otherwise excellent ‘Army of Evil: A History of the SS’ predictably has a chapter on the so-called ‘Holocaust’ but in it he repeats long discarded claims about homicidal gas chambers at the Dachau concentration camp as well as the myth of the shrunken heads and human skin lampshades as if they were an established fact rather than generally accepted among ‘Holocaust historians’ as being a historical nonsense.
Thus, if we discard the second part of Hydrick’s book and focus on the first part – they are in essence two books published together in my estimation – which is intellectually solid.
Hydrick’s argument is as complex as is his sourcing, but it boils down to a series of very simple and well-evidenced contentions:
A) The American Atomic Bomb project believed it was at least a year behind the Germans in terms of Atomic Bomb research by late 1942 (2) and in fact Germany was probably circa two years ahead at this point so it is very unlikely the American Atomic Bomb project could have caught up with the German Atomic Bomb project. (3)
B) That there were two separate German Atom Bomb projects with the one led by Werner Heisenberg and Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker was funded by the Wehrmacht and hampered by its notorious bureaucracy (4) and a second run by the maverick physicist and inventor Baron Manfred von Ardenne funded directly by NSDAP and supervised by Wilhelm Ohnesorge - the Reich Minister of Post Affairs and member of the Reich President’s Council on Nuclear Affairs who was himself a noted mathematician and physicist – supported by Fritz Houtermans who was one of the first people to articulate thermo-nuclear theory in 1932. (5)
C) That Werner Heisenberg and Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker systemically derided Baron Manfred von Ardenne’s work after the war because he wasn’t a formally trained academic as well as to cover up their own involvement with the Third Reich, but yet the latter developed a magnetic isotope separator in 1940 that had begun production by April 1942, which was four times more efficient than the method the Manhattan project would begin to use after the completion of their magnetic isotope separator at the Oak Ridge facility in the summer of 1944. (6) Also countering this is the fact that Baron Manfred von Ardenne’s process is still used today as the best source of particle rays and ion plasma. (7)
D) That Auschwitz’s important synthetic rubber plant that was to be run by I.G. Farben but which famously never produced any actual synthetic rubber yet cost huge amounts of money ($250 million which is suspiciously similar to the $240 million cost of the US’ Oak Ridge enrichment facility), employed 25,000 workers and allegedly took 4 and a half years to build while using more electricity than the entire city of Berlin [synthetic rubber doesn’t require electricity to produce it] was actually the main German uranium enrichment plant and the site of Baron Manfred von Ardenne’s centrifuges. (8)
E) That the German submarine U-234 was captured by the United States in June 1945 while transporting the refined uranium and associated devices – such as infra-red fuses – with German specialists on their way to Japan and its capture was covered up to make the Manhattan Project – whose own estimates were that they wouldn’t have enough enriched uranium to make one atom bomb by November/December 1945 or early 1946 at the earliest, but suddenly acquired enough to make two devices in June 1945 as well as the required detonators that they didn’t have previously. (9)
This contention is backed up by Baron Manfred von Ardenne’s later centrality to the Soviet and East German Atomic Bomb research effort (10) as well as the ‘Holocaust historians’ conundrum surrounding I.G. Farben’s directors ‘not knowing’ what the SS were allegedly doing at Auschwitz even though they would have had to as well as the fact that the ‘Buna Inmates’ [i.e., those working in the synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz] seem to have often held doctorates. (11)
Hydrick’s ‘Critical Mass’ has the kind of intuitive sense to it that often accompanies a historical theory that suddenly causes a lot of different facts to click together and make an eerie sort of sense all of a sudden (for example Hitler’s regular visits to Baron Manfred von Ardenne’s laboratory in Berlin and the famous later push by Hitler to develop and use ‘Wonder Weapons’ that would change the course of the war). The beauty of Hydrick’s thesis underlies the fundamental tragedy of it in that the Third Reich and German science deserves the credit for being the true creators of the Atom Bomb, but this credit was stolen by the jewish ‘former’ Communist Robert Oppenheimer and his fame hungry boss Major General Leslie Groves.
References
(1) Dwight Rider, Eric Hehl, 2020, ‘Railway of Infinite Regret: Uranium on the Thai-Burma Railway. 1943-1945’ (https://www.academia.edu/43421086/Railway_of_Infinite_Regret_Uranium_on_the_Thai_Burma_Railway_1943_1945)
(2) Carter Plymton Hydrick, 1998, ‘Critical Mass: The Real Story of the Birth of the Atom Bomb and the Atomic Age’, 1st Edition, Self-Published: USA, p. 46
(3) Ibid., p. 43
(4) Ibid., p. 55
(5) Ibid., pp. 49; 54; 55-56; 58-59; 145
(6) Ibid., pp. 56; 75
(7) Ibid., pp. 45; 49; 55-56
(8) Ibid., pp. 49-51; 66-70
(9) Ibid., pp. 14-15; 22-23; 25; 84-85; 88
(10) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_von_Ardenne#In_the_Soviet_Union
(11) Jurgen Graf, 2001, ‘The Giant with Feet of Clay: Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work on the “Holocaust”’, 1st Edition, Theses & Dissertations Press: Capshaw, pp. 72-74