A friend recently pointed me in the direction of some authors who have seemingly made a career out of discussing Nazi super weapons and the fact that they could have developed an atomic bomb before the United States during WWII, and while interesting, seems to be a less-than accepted truth for the war.
Not being a historian myself, I was curious if there was any credibility to these claims, or that of the Nazi super weapon argument, in general.
Absolutely none whatsoever. They were never in any position to do any actual development of a weapon, period. A good read from a while ago.
They weren't even at the "can we actually build a bomb?" stage by 1945, let alone capable of building one. The resources required were immense, and at no point in time could Nazi Germany marshal them towards that end.
I wrote recently on my blog about a recent supposed discovery in this field. It talks a little bit about some of the work relating to this question, and about the technical and historical hurdles that any such work would need to reach to be taken very seriously:
The plausibility of any new arguments about German successes with their nuclear programs is always limited in part by what we know about the technical requirements of such an endeavor. The Manhattan Project need not be the only model of a successful nuclear program (it was in many ways unusual), but it does provide some baseline metrics for talking about nuclear programs of the 1940s. Any successful plutonium-breeding program is going to require fairly large reactors, because plutonium reprocessing extracts only grams of “product” from each ton of uranium fuel that goes into it. (Each of the three early Hanford reactors extracted only 225 grams of plutonium from every ton of uranium processed.) Any successful isotopic-enrichment program is going to require huge feed supplies of uranium (the Manhattan Project approaches consumed thousands of tons of uranium), pretty large facilities, and a lot of electricity.
Separate from the technical argument is a bureaucratic one — if the Germans supposedly made such progress, why is was there no organizational evidence of it in the copious reports, papers, formal and informal statements, and so on that were discovered by the Alsos project, later researchers, and at Farm Hall? Big programs leave big traces. If one wants to claim that the German program was big, one has to show where those traces are, or come up for a plausible argument for why there are no traces.
This does not mean that one might not find more evidence in the future. It just means that any claims and evidence need to fit within the existing technical and bureaucratic narratives. For example, one could argue, “oh, but they did have a massive isotopic enrichment plant, and it was here, and here is evidence of — if one had the evidence. On the bureaucratic side, one could argue that people who we previously thought were important in the program (e.g. Gerlach) were actually out of the loop entirely. Or something along those lines.
The basic point is that we have a lot of information about the German program, and it all points to them not hitting the minimum technical requirements for a serious weapons program and not hitting the organizational requirements. It's always possible they did things we don't know about, but these things would have to be plausibly fit within the other evidence that we have, which is that their reactor program never got very far, and they never pursued isotopic enrichment to any significant capacity.
There's a terrific book about the race to build atomic weapons: Richard Rhodes, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." The book won a pulitzer prize, it's just that good.
Even though Weimar Germany had led the world in atomic physics in the 1920s, Nazi Germany never came close to building a bomb. The "could they have" question can't be answered: if they had made it a priority, who knows how far they might have gotten? Nevertheless, the fact remains that they didn't make it a priority.
Finally, a lot of the key nuclear scientists were either Jewish or leftists, and thus opposed the Nazi regime. Leó Szilárd, who first realized how powerful an atomic weapon would be, had himself fled Germany when the Nazis came to power, and had his realization in England. Lise Meitner, who first realized Uranium would create a chain reaction, similarly had her brainwave in Sweden as a refugee. Both Szilárd and Meitner were Jewish. Neither were born in Germany, but they both had academic careers in Germany before Hitler drove them away. Poetic Justice? Karma's a bitch? You be the judge.