by Ray Furlong

BBC News, Berlin

March 14, 2005

The important thing in my book is the finding that the Germans had an atomic reactor near Berlin that was running for a short while, perhaps days or weeks," he told the BBC.  "The second important finding was the atomic tests carried out in Thuringia and on the Baltic Sea."

Rainer Karlsch describes what the Germans had as a "hybrid tactical nuclear weapon" much smaller than those dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

He said the last test, carried out in Thuringia on March 3, 1945, destroyed an area of about 500 square meters.  "We haven't heard about this before because only small groups of scientists were involved, and a lot of the documents were classified after they were captured by the Allies," said Karlsch.  "I found documents in Russian and Western archives, as well as in private German archives."

One of these documents is a memo from a Russian spy, brought to the attention of Stalin just days after the last test.  It cites "reliable sources" as reporting "two huge explosions" on the night of March 3, 1945.

Karlsch also cites German eyewitnesses as reporting light so bright that for a second it was possible to read a newspaper, accompanied by a sudden blast of wind.  The eyewitnesses, who were interviewed on the subject by the East German authorities in the early 1960s, also said they suffered nose-bleeds, headaches, and nausea for days afterwards.  Karlsch also pointed to measurements carried out recently at the test site that found radioactive isotopes.

It has been common knowledge for decades that the Germans carried out atomic experiments, but it has been widely believed they were far from developing an atomic bomb.  The Germans successfully tested a tactical nuclear weapon on March 3, 1945, more than four months before the first successful test of a nuclear weapon by the US federal government on July 16, 1945, according to Rainer Karlsch.