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Mad Myths in History that Just Won’t Go Away

Khalid Elhassan March 24, 2022 37 min

Children picking cotton in 1913 Texas, falsely claimed to be Irish slaves by peddlers of the Irish slavery myth. Humanities Texas

20. Just How Close Was Germany to an Atomic Bomb in WWII?

American and British personnel inspect and dismantle a captured German experimental nuclear pile in April, 1945. YouTube

Another WWII dramatic myth revolves around what would have happened if Hitler had ever gotten his hands on an atomic bomb. An untrue narrative developed after the war to the effect that German physicists were on the verge of unlocking the secret of fission and giving Hitler a nuke. It was not born in a vacuum. During the war, the Manhattan Project had operated on the assumption that Hitler had an advanced nuclear program that might bear fruit at any time.

Those in the know thus viewed the US as being in a race against Germany over which country would first produce nuclear weapons. However, it was discovered after the war that the German nuclear program was not as advanced as had been assumed. Early in their research, German physicists took a wrong turn and followed it away from the path that leads to nuclear weapons. The war could have lasted another decade, and Germany would have been no closer to an atomic bomb in 1955 than in 1945.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.