How close was Hitler to using nuclear weapons?

by [deleted]

I know a fair amount about WW2, but none on this topic. Did Hitler know about nuclear weapons? Were they in research? If so, when and where would they be used?

expostfacto-saurus

Someone can answer this much better than I, but the Germans were working on developing nuclear weapons, but as far as I know, they were very far off from actually being able to build a workable weapon.

They had procured a decent amount of uranium but I think the big issue is that they were not able to enrich it enough to build a weapon. An interesting aside, one of the last U-Boats going to Japan had as part of the cargo some uranium (U-235, some of the crew thought the crates labeled as such were mis-labeled since the boat was U-234). --This book is Germany's Last Mission to Japan: The Failed Voyage of U-234.

The act of sending uranium to Japan seems to show that Germany wasn't close to building a functional weapon. If they were, I would assume they would keep every bit of uranium for themselves.