The attack was set for June 1945, according to transcripts of interrogations of a senior Nazi official, declassified by the FSB
Adolf Hitler planned to use nuclear weapons against the USSR in June 1945, according to a transcript of testimony by Werner Waechter – a close associate of Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister. The declassified document has been published by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
The unsealing of the testimony coincides with the 79th anniversary of the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II.
According to photocopies of the documents related to the case of the former Nazi official, the nuclear strikes were to be carried out using “very long-range bombers capable of bombing the military construction centers of the Soviet Union in the Urals.”
In his testimony in October 1945, Wachter told Soviet investigators that he had learned of the development of atomic weapons from an Nazi engineer in 1943, who told him that German scientists had “succeeded in splitting the atomic nucleus and that engineers were developing methods and techniques for the practical use of atomic energy as a means of warfare.”
In the late 1930s, German scientists had discovered the fission of uranium atoms and made major contributions to the foundations of atomic physics. Nazi Germany was the first country to launch a project focused on the creation of an atomic bomb.
Wachter also said that, in 1945, the editor of the secret government bulletin, Hans Hertel, told him that the German Ministry of Armaments was preparing to use an atomic bomb, which it planned to equip on board “aircraft of the latest design” that were stationed at an airfield near the town of Celle in north Germany.
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