PICTURES FROM HISTORY: Rare Images Of War, History , WW2, Nazi Germany: Did Hitler have an atom bomb?

According to media reports, Hitler in second world war was too confident of Nazi Germany’s victory even in 1944-45 time frame when allies were closing in on him from all sides.

Nazi Germany was inches away from delivering intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuke warheads. Hitler’s confidence (fortunately for the world) never materialized because though the prototypes were tested, they could not be deliverd in the battlefield on time due to lack of resources and time constraints.

According to an 88-year-old former Italian war correspondent, Hitler was preparing to unleash a nuclear bomb on the Allies in the last days of the Second World War. In his book ''Hitler's Secret Weapon'', Luigi Romersa claims to be the last living witness to an experimental detonation of a Nazi weapon he says was the world's first atom bomb.

Recently, historian Rainer Karlsch published a study suggesting that the Nazis conducted three nuclear weapons tests in 1944 and 1945, killing 700 people.

According to think tanks, what really happened is that the Nazi Germany had definitely invented the nukes and missiles but the technology could not be delivered in the battlefield on time. The efforts failed due to lack of time and resources.

Romersa claims that in September 1944, Benito Mussolini entrusted him with a secret mission. Italy's wartime leader wanted to know more after Hitler boasted to him of weapons capable of reversing the course of the war. Romersa, then a 27-year-old war correspondent for Corriere della Sera, was sent to Germany and he met Hitler in a bunker in Rastenburg, northern Poland. He was also given a tour around the Nazis'' secret weapons plant at Peenemunde, on the Baltic coast.

Romersa said from his home in Rome how he saw weapons "streets ahead of any conventional weapons the allies had at the time". He said: "They were developing a missile which they said they intended to launch from Europe across the Atlantic to bomb America."

Recent evidence from Russian archives has, however, shown one of the German scientists lodged a patent claim for a plutonium bomb as early as 1941. Romersa said: "Hitler and Nazi Germany had a very, very developed weapons programme and were certainly capable of creating an atomic bomb."

Quotes about war....

"War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man."
--Napoleon Hill

"We have failed to grasp the fact that mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide."
--Havelock Ellis

'Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."
--Mao Tse-Tung (1893 - 1976)

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."
--George McGovern

"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."
--Joseph Stalin

In war, truth is the first casualty.
-- Aeschylus

"The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery."
--Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil

"The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."
--Adolf Hitler

"To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization."
--George Orwell

"Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country."
--Bertrand Russell

Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.
--Francis Meehan

Snippets From History

German Soldiers in Russia: Part 1

Hubert Menzel was a major in the General Operations Department of the OKH (the Oberkommando des Heers, the German Army headquarters), and for him the idea of invading the Soviet Union in 1941 had the smack of cold, clear logic to it: 'We knew that in two years' time, that is by the end of 1942, beginning of 1943, the English would be ready, the Americans would be ready, the Russians would be ready too, and then we would have to deal with all three of them at the same time.... We had to try to remove the greatest threat from the East.... At the time it seemed possible.'

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Battle for Berlin, 1945

'We started to fire at the masses,' says one former German machine gunner. 'They weren't human beings for us. It was a wall of attacking beasts who were trying to kill us. You yourself were no longer human.'

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Berlin after it fell to the Russians, 1945

"Vladlen Anchishkin, a Soviet battery commander on the 1st Ukrainian Front, sums up the horror of the whole event, when he tells how he took personal revenge on German soldiers: 'I can admit it now, I was in such a state, I was in such a frenzy. I said, 'Bring them here for an interrogation' and I had a knife, and I cut him. I cut a lot of them. I thought, 'You wanted to kill me, now it's your turn.'
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Dramatic Pictures: Battle For Stalingrad

"...Effective command no longer possible... further defense senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops."
General Paulus' radio message to Hitler on January 24, 1943
"...Capitulation is impossible. The 6th Army will do its historic duty at Stalingrad until the last man, the last bullet..."
Hitler's response to General Friedrich Paulus' request to withdraw from the city