4 ms·

It turns out, driving out all of your physicists and mathematicians because they were Jewish and gutting your academic system wasn't quite the smartest idea in

It turns out, driving out all of your physicists and mathematicians because they were Jewish and gutting your academic system wasn't quite the smartest idea in the world.

expertentipp 11y ago
It almost looks like the nuclear and hydrogen bombs were a "Jewish revenge" (Teller, Ulam, Szilard, Rabi, von Neumann, ...). Even Fermi was kicked out of Italy because of remote Jewish connotation of his wife. Entire Europe, not only Germany, shoot itself in the foot at this point.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  Some, but certainly nowhere near all of the scientists involved were jewish. What did happen was that rising antisemitism (in many many countries) caused jewish academics to suddenly become more mobile, more willing to move about the planet or country and take positions on strange projects. I think it less revenge and more market forces that resulted in a relatively large number of jewish experts working on the bomb.
- afarrell 11y ago
  I think a better interpretation is that they were able to convince themselves that bringing nuclear weaponry into the world was the lesser of two evils.
weinzierl 11y ago
And the physicists and mathematicians that stayed where either unable or had no interest in building an atomic bomb. Here is an excerpt from what Hans Bethe wrote about Heisenberg[1]: The best proof of his lack of interest came at the end of the war. Heisenberg and about ten other German nuclear scientists were interned at Farm Hall, a country estate in England. All of their conversations were secretly taped. When the news of the Hiroshima atomic bomb was broadcast, these scientists could not believe it. When they recognized that it was real, they asked Heisenberg how it could have been done. His first attempt at explanation was totally wrong! He hypothesized something like a nuclear reactor, with the neutrons slowed by many collisions with a moderator. [1] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/news/Bethe.html http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/news/Bethe....
- Animats 11y ago
  One of the other Germans at Farm Hall was closer to being right. He thought the Americans must have separated and enriched uranium, perhaps by building millions of mass spectrometers. The Manhattan Project tried something like that, building many huge "calutrons" which used magnetic separation to sort atoms by atomic weight. This is incredibly inefficient, but with enough money thrown at it, works. It was the Manhattan Project's plan B, in case the gaseous diffusion plants didn't work. But the Germans never built any. They never built the huge industrial installations needed to separate uranium or make plutonium. The project never got beyond the lab stage. The Manhattan Project built several square miles of industrial plants. That was General Groves' contribution - he was a Corps of Engineers builder, had been in charge of building the Pentagon, and knew how to run a big project. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron
  - rtkwe 11y ago
    It helps that we were so far from either side of the war. We could build huge facilities like that above ground and just camouflage the building where Germany would have had to build much more fortified or even underground facilities.
  - Bluestrike2 11y ago
    Even if the Germans were willing to pursue a Manhattan Project of their own, they didn't have the industrial capacity to divert to build up the infrastructure for it (let alone support the ongoing resource commitment it'd require). Hell, they didn't have enough to adequately support their war effort even considering Speer's efforts after he was appointed Minister of Armaments. The political games between top Nazi officials, the refusal to mobilize women as factory workers due to ideology (good German women stayed at home and plopped out babies, basically), and the reliance on slave labor all helped the Germans thoroughly screw themselves. I like this quote from William Knudsen, which really sums things up: "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible."
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

It turns out, driving out all of your physicists and mathematicians because they were Jewish and gutting your academic system wasn't quite the smartest idea in the world.

expertentipp 11y ago

It almost looks like the nuclear and hydrogen bombs were a "Jewish revenge" (Teller, Ulam, Szilard, Rabi, von Neumann, ...). Even Fermi was kicked out of Italy because of remote Jewish connotation of his wife. Entire Europe, not only Germany, shoot itself in the foot at this point.

sandworm101 11y ago
Some, but certainly nowhere near all of the scientists involved were jewish. What did happen was that rising antisemitism (in many many countries) caused jewish academics to suddenly become more mobile, more willing to move about the planet or country and take positions on strange projects. I think it less revenge and more market forces that resulted in a relatively large number of jewish experts working on the bomb.
afarrell 11y ago
I think a better interpretation is that they were able to convince themselves that bringing nuclear weaponry into the world was the lesser of two evils.

weinzierl 11y ago

And the physicists and mathematicians that stayed where either unable or had no interest in building an atomic bomb. Here is an excerpt from what Hans Bethe wrote about Heisenberg[1]: The best proof of his lack of interest came at the end of the war. Heisenberg and about ten other German nuclear scientists were interned at Farm Hall, a country estate in England. All of their conversations were secretly taped. When the news of the Hiroshima atomic bomb was broadcast, these scientists could not believe it. When they recognized that it was real, they asked Heisenberg how it could have been done. His first attempt at explanation was totally wrong! He hypothesized something like a nuclear reactor, with the neutrons slowed by many collisions with a moderator. [1] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/news/Bethe.html http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/news/Bethe....

Animats 11y ago
One of the other Germans at Farm Hall was closer to being right. He thought the Americans must have separated and enriched uranium, perhaps by building millions of mass spectrometers. The Manhattan Project tried something like that, building many huge "calutrons" which used magnetic separation to sort atoms by atomic weight. This is incredibly inefficient, but with enough money thrown at it, works. It was the Manhattan Project's plan B, in case the gaseous diffusion plants didn't work. But the Germans never built any. They never built the huge industrial installations needed to separate uranium or make plutonium. The project never got beyond the lab stage. The Manhattan Project built several square miles of industrial plants. That was General Groves' contribution - he was a Corps of Engineers builder, had been in charge of building the Pentagon, and knew how to run a big project. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron
- rtkwe 11y ago
  It helps that we were so far from either side of the war. We could build huge facilities like that above ground and just camouflage the building where Germany would have had to build much more fortified or even underground facilities.
- Bluestrike2 11y ago
  Even if the Germans were willing to pursue a Manhattan Project of their own, they didn't have the industrial capacity to divert to build up the infrastructure for it (let alone support the ongoing resource commitment it'd require). Hell, they didn't have enough to adequately support their war effort even considering Speer's efforts after he was appointed Minister of Armaments. The political games between top Nazi officials, the refusal to mobilize women as factory workers due to ideology (good German women stayed at home and plopped out babies, basically), and the reliance on slave labor all helped the Germans thoroughly screw themselves. I like this quote from William Knudsen, which really sums things up: "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible."

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]