Abstract
It is not widely known that an active nuclear research effort was conducted in Germany during World War II, and that this effort actually ran ahead of its Allied counterpart for a time. This chapter describes the origins and organization of the German effort, and how it eventually stalled due to organizational missteps, infighting, errors of physics, Allied countermeasures, and the increasingly dire situation in Germany as the war progressed. The reaction of German scientists to their Allied counterparts’ success is also described.
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Further Reading
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Reed, B.C. (2019). The German Nuclear Program. In: The History and Science of the Manhattan Project. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58175-9_9
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