U 234

[Historical-Truth]

A very good book on the U 234 is: Critical Mass: How Nazi Germany Surrendered Enriched Uranium for the US Atomic Bomb – by Hydrick [an older version is available free on internet. The new and more complete version is a hardcover book. Another unanswered question if whether the U-boat contained some secret persons onboard offloaded secretly along the route.....perhaps one or two VERY high Nazi officials.

[zmija]

Wolfgang Hirschfeld also wrote: Das letzte Boot - Atlantik Farewell.
https://ssl.kundenserver.de/deutscher-b ... =3272.html

Shake-Speer: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0100012/

DVD on U 234: http://www.toavi.com/info/xbiiiihohxuxh

[Simon Gunson]

This webpage has some interesting intelligence summaries about far east U-boat operations. One that caught my eye had something to say about U 234's intended route:

http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/srh232.htm

Para Five
German Naval Attaché in Tokyo was informed by Berlin on 8 March to count on only two U/bs (U 234 and U 876) going to southeast area, leaving Germany in March and April. Each will be a transport U/b carrying only 8 torpedoes for possible operation enroute. Comment: U 876 is a 1200 tonner X U 234 is a 1600 tonner for which charts of Tierra Del Fuego and Pacific areas have been requisitioned suggesting route via Cape Horn. Both U/boats are currently estimated in the Baltic. On 14 March Berlin informed Tokyo there was no longer any possibility of delivery new merchant ship recognition signals before August 1945.

As for U 234's manifest discrepancy the explanation is a suggestion based upon Colorado environmentalist Dr Velma Hunt's investigations.

The difference in cargo weights suggests a cover up by the USN and has yet to be explained by the conventional story of her surrender. The visit to Portsmouth may or may not be correct, but until the discrepancy in cargo is explained can't be discarded out of hand.

[martin13666]

The plan of mixing uranium oxide with usual explosive in bombs (dirty bomb concept) sounds too futuristic for 1945. As we know from history the dangers of radiation were practically unknown in 1945. I would like to remember you about Japanese scientists, who suffered badly of radiation while learning the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagassaki. So there should have been some other plan for the use.

[ohrdruf]

It was pointed out by Wing Cdr Pither, RAAF, in his article published in "Flight and Aircraft Engineering" (official organ of the Royal Aero Club), 26 July 1945, p.87 (Section 'Here and There') that: "...Had the Germans been given the extra period in which to perfect it, they would have used a "uranium disintegrating bomb" which, gram for gram, was 100 times more destructive than the V 2 warhead."

In an article "Germans are still striving to perfect new V-weapons" by Harry Vosser published in the New York Times on 22 October 1944 at page E5, the author explained how the "uranium disintegrating bomb" worked: "...an electrical charge from a small instrument detonates the conventional explosive and the atom substance simultaneously. The expansion of the explosion in gaseous form is greatly increased by the force of the released disintegrating atoms."

A British BIOS intelligence report on an SS test conducted at Döberitz, Berlin, in late 1944 mentioned a mixture of coal dust and liquid air as the conventional explosive. This had originally been designed as the warhead of the Enzian and Schmetterling flak rockets. Upon explosion, a violent shock wave broke the wings of any aircraft within a certain radius. When a strange "waxy substance" was added to the conventional explosive, it vastly increased the radius of the hurricane shock wave to three of four kilometres. Within this radius all life was extinguished, and all aircraft plummeted to earth in pieces.

Although the theory behind the "uranium disintegrating bomb" was broadly understood by Western scientists, the indications are that the SS successfully kept to themselves the technical process, (mainly by shooting everybody who knew something about it), hence all the secrecy which remains to this day. The probability that the ten cylinders of "uranium oxide" aboard U 234 contained the magic substance seems very high.