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posted by janrinok on Saturday October 29 2016, @06:41AM   Printer-friendly

As part of Operation Epsilon, captured German nuclear physicists were secretly recorded at Farm Hall, a house in England where they were interned. Here's how the German scientists reacted to the news (on August 6th, 1945) that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, taken from the now-declassified transcripts (pp. 116-122 of this copy):

Otto Hahn (co-discoverer of nuclear fission): I don't believe it... They are 50 years further advanced than we.

Werner Heisenberg (leading figure of the German atomic bomb effort): I don't believe a word of the whole thing. They must have spent the whole of their £500,000,000 in separating isotopes: and then it is possible.

It's interesting to read how the German scientists reacted, and how some of them seemed to have not wanted to succeed in doing the same thing for the Nazis.


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  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday October 29 2016, @02:55PM

    by Francis (5544) on Saturday October 29 2016, @02:55PM (#420119)

    It's not just that, the Nazis had probably the most advanced propaganda the world had ever seen and it probably still is respectable decades later.

    There were a fair number of Germans that didn't know that the country was losing until the very end of the war. Absent real and accurate intelligence from the US program, it's natural that they'd assume the other guys weren't that far ahead of them. The American team was operating on the assumption that the Germans were a risk to develop the technology first.