Karlsch didn't particularly know what he was looking at. Although he is a very good researcher and a legitimate historian, he is not very knowledgeable about the mechanics and engineering of nuclear weapons.
Rider has gone to the Deutsches Museum and a number of other archives in Germany. Also many libraries and archives in the US, UK, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Holland, and Australia. It's all in his book.
So you admit that Karlsch himself admitted that he had no solid evidence and then you state he didn't know what he was looking at but then rattle off the number of countries he visited. Karlsch is an economic historian, not a technical military historian. We can agree on this. But it opens up criticism that he may have been making uninformed leaps and conjecture. If we can't trust his knowledge then we can't trust his hypothesis.
Speer later discussed the nuclear effort in a little known book that appeared the same year he died, 1981.
Do you mean his book
Infiltration? By all accounts a rather technocratic account of the industrial history that seemed to outline his personal battle against Himmler.
Historians have long puzzled over why Hitler ordered that some Me-262's be completed as fighter-bombers.
What other explanation do you have for Hitler's order for a Jabo variant of the Me-262 to be produced?
I don't recall this being a puzzle. Hitler favoured offense over defence and actually thought that jet fighters would be useless in fighter combat because of their high speed - Speer shares this insight into Hitler's mind in
Infiltration.
To him the 'Blitz' bomber relying on high-speed was one way to negate Western allied air superiority.
Again, no need to fret over the V-2, it was designed to lob a 1-tonne HE warhead over a reasonable distance with reasonable accuracy to hit a big sprawling target like a city for the purposes of strategic intimidation and sapping of morale. It wasn't a super-weapon, it wasn't an ICBM, it was just a highly technical and highly expensive way of lobbing some HE around given German bombers (and V-1 cruise missiles) were getting hacked out of the sky.
available for the last gasp attack against US and/or UK forces in the field to the west of Berlin.
Why the obsession with nuking the Western allies? Conventional wisdom has it that the Germans still clung to some hope of a negotiated peace with the West, indeed many German soilders felt surrender there to be preferable to being on the Eastern Front. Plus the Allies were nowhere near Berlin, Eisenhower didn't even want Berlin. But the Soviets were at the gates of Berlin and any nuclear weapon would have strengthened its hand against the overwhelming numbers the Soviets had. There is no logic in this argument.
also required a suicide attack to have any chance of getting through Allied defenses, it is easy to see why an apparent Luftwaffe mutiny may be the explanation for why this mission was never carried out.
Another big maybe. What mutiny? I've never heard of a Luftwaffe mutiny.
Maybe it was lack of fuel to actually fly? Maybe it was too cloudy that day? Maybe it was lack of any such plans? Maybe it was because the bombs didn't exist? Anyone could make a dozen suppositions for an event that didn't happen. History isn't built on speculations on events that didn't happen - that's called Alternate History.
The man was a dumbass who got lucky early on, and listened too much to liars and crackpots who promised wunderwaffen that they had no chance of producing. Wunderwaffen, like, say, nuclear bombs.
Agreed. I always find it remarkable that people attribute him with any military genius. This was a guy who spent most of 1944 and early 1945 pushing counters around battlefield maps of imaginary divisions that didn't exist!
Romersa's book first appeared in 1955.
Wrong, he actually first put his experience to paper for a news paper article two years after the war ended, before he wrote his book.
https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2020/11/28/the-italian-atomic-bomb-i/
The link also points out the obvious ludicrous notion a foreign press correspondent would be invited to a top secret German project that even most of the other German nuclear scientists never knew about.
Why is there no testimony from any German engineers who were present?
Lieutenant Romersa called to report that he has returned from his trip to Germany and to ask to be received by the DUCE, possibly within the day. 29 Oct. 1944.
And? Have you read the document yourself?
The fact he had a meeting with Mussolini tells us nothing. They could have discussed anything.
He might have done so during that time. The report is dated 19 August, which means it is almost a certainty that he was interrogated, perhaps repeatedly, prior to that date.
Yeah he might have told have told them all about a A-bomb before he had a chance to read newspaper or hear radio accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki too, but he didn't. I don't think a rather mundane pilot PoW would be heavily interrogated for four months, more likely he heard the news and had a bright idea to approach his guards with 'information' on German A-bomb tests in the hope they might let him out or give him better treatment.
At least one historian who wrote prior to the widespread archival declassifications enacted since 1995 described Russian forces making a beeline for Gottow in the closing hours of the war. This was Anthony Beevor in one of his books, sorry, I don't know which one just now.
That's nice but Orhdruf isn't in Brandenberg.
Beevor's
Berlin: The Downfall 1945?
There is no indication that Zinsser's He-111 was "borrowed". The pilot is named Hans Zinsser in some documents, but this may have been a middle name or a nickname. His given name was apparently Rudolf Zinsser, and he was a technician and inventor who received two US patents after the war.
That's just a guess on my part. I stated, rather clearly I thought, that some sources name the He-111 bomber pilot as "Hans". Rider states that his name was Rudolf. So, either a clerical, archival or typographic error, or maybe he gave a false name to his interrogators, or maybe something else. Or maybe he was just known as "Hans" to his friends. I don't know.
The American intelligence report often cited gives only the name as "a man named ZINSSER" and describes him as a "flak rocket expert". Many online sources, mostly newspaper articles on the story, describe him as "Hans" and as a "test pilot".
Is it Hans? Is it Rudolf? We could make guesses all day. Who says Rider guessed correctly? Who says the unknown guy who guessed Hans was right?
History is not based on guesses.
I would imagine there would be some kind of unit operational history regarding the night fighters you state were stationed near Rugen in October, 1944. It would be interesting to see if such a document exists, and if so, what it says regarding the Rugen event, whatever it was.
Ludwigslust is in southwest Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, some 163km inland from Rugen. So I somehow doubt they could tell us much and if the explosion and mushroom cloud was seen from 163km away then it blows apart all this low-yield low-impact test nonsense apart and potentially thousands of people would have witnessed such an event.
But yes, such a unit history if it still exists might have noted such atmospheric phenomena had it occurred or any relevant closure of airspace over Rugen that day.
Sadly nobody else recorded seeing anything, Allied aircraft were in the area that day too and again no further record of witnessing anything.
You missed the Firefox-style mind-reading controls for all this stuff if you skipped the medical chapters.
Yeah I just the read the chapter I was most able to peer review, not being an expert in mind-reading, plate tectonics or deep-pile carpets. Sounds like I had a lucky escape to be honest.