“Our technological superiority is undisputed in very numerous fields of armaments… We possess inventions that will enable us to inflict the most terrible blows on the enemy.”
Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, in a speech on November 8th 1943 hinting at the new weapons to come
In a town just north of Berlin lies a strange legacy of the Third Reich: ‘Germany’s most radioactive ground’.
The story involves a secret weapons project, a bizarre consumer product promising radioactive health, and a devastating Allied bombing raid whose effects linger today. This is the story of the Auergesellschaft factory in Oranienburg, a place central to understanding one of the war’s most persistent myths.
The question isn’t just what the Nazis were building there, but why, in the final weeks of the war, the Allies felt it had to be obliterated. The answer reveals just how close Hitler really came to wielding atomic power.
–
The Radioactive Ghosts of Oranienburg
“Oranienburg became the primary center for uranium production in Germany. We worked tirelessly to refine the uranium oxide into the metal cubes that were essential for the experimental reactors… All roads for the ‘Uranium Club’ led, in one way or another, through our facility.”
Nikolaus Riehl, Scientific Director of Auergesellschaft in his memoir, Ten Years in a Golden Cage
The small Brandenburg town of Oranienburg, just north of Berlin, holds a grim superlative.
It is, by some measures, the most dangerously radioactive place in all of Germany.
It is also littered with unexploded bombs.
Decades after the end of the Second World War, specialised disposal teams are still routinely called out to defuse decaying ordnance, and residents are evacuated from their homes as bombs are carefully unearthed. The source of this dual contamination—the radioactivity and the bombs—is the ghost of a single factory and the epic, terrifying ambition it once represented.
Near the site of the former Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp stood the Auergesellschaft works, a large industrial plant with a curious product line.
Before and during the war, this company was involved in all manner of chemical and industrial manufacturing. Its shareholders, like so many others, were Aryanized early in the Nazi regime, its Jewish owners forced out.
For a time in the 1940s, the company produced a toothpaste called ‘Doramad’.
In an era when the dangers of radiation were poorly understood and its supposed curative properties were a marketing fad, Doramad was sold to the public with a bold promise.
Containing small amounts of thorium, a radioactive metal, its advertisements claimed it would provide a “natural freshness” by using the “biological healing effects of radium rays” to strengthen the “defenses of teeth and gums.”
The back of the tube boasted that through its radioactive properties, “cells are loaded with new life energy.”
This was, of course, dangerous quackery. But it was a side business. The thorium for the toothpaste was a byproduct of the company’s main enterprise: producing mantles for gas lanterns, rare-earth metals—and, crucially, refining uranium.
By the early 1940s, the Auer plant in Oranienburg had become the industrial heart of Hitler’s most secret and feared weapons program. This is where the raw materials for a German atomic bomb were being processed.
When the Allies discovered the factory’s true purpose, they decided to mount a raid that would conclusively end all development.
On the afternoon of March 15th 1945, with the Red Army closing in from the east, the skies over Oranienburg filled with the drone of 612 B-17 Flying Fortresses of the U.S. Eighth Air Force.
In the space of 45 minutes, they dropped over 1,500 tons of high-explosive and nearly 180 tons of incendiary bombs onto the Auer works.
The factory was annihilated.
The raid not only flattened the facility but also blasted its radioactive materials—its refined uranium and thorium stockpiles—into the atmosphere and soil, contaminating the town for generations to come. Today, every discovery of a dud bomb armed with a complex, chemically-delayed fuse is a reminder of that desperate, targeted attack.
But the raid was not just about stopping Hitler.
It was about what came after.
It was a violent opening move in the Cold War, intended to deny the spoils of the German nuclear program to the approaching Soviets.
But what exactly were the Allies so afraid of?
Was the world truly on the brink of seeing a swastika-shaped mushroom cloud?
–
The ‘Uranium Club’ - Nuclear Development In Nazi Germany
“I have no doubt that Germany will… make a major effort to build uranium bombs… Germany has the physicists who have the ability, and they have a government that has the will to use it.”
Leó Szilárd, the Hungarian-American physicist who drafted the Einstein-Roosevelt letter, warning of German capabilities in 1939
The story of the atom bomb begins, ironically, not in the deserts of New Mexico, but in a laboratory in Berlin.
In December 1938, in Berlin’s Dahlem district, chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, made a discovery that would change the world.
While bombarding uranium with neutrons, they were bewildered to find traces of barium—an element roughly half the size of uranium. Hahn wrote to his exiled former colleague, the brilliant physicist Lise Meitner, who had fled Nazi persecution and was now in Sweden. Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch quickly realized the earth-shattering implication: Hahn and Strassmann hadn’t chipped a piece off the uranium atom; they had split it.
They had achieved nuclear fission.
The energy released from this single event was immense.
The military potential was terrifyingly obvious.
Word spread through the international physics community like a shockwave.
By April 1939, German physicists, including Wilhelm Hanle and Georg Joos, formally alerted the Reich Ministry of Education to the potential of a ‘uranium machine’.
This led to the formation of the first Uranverein, or ‘Uranium Club’—an informal gathering of Germany’s top nuclear scientists to investigate the military applications of fission.
The project, however, was soon interrupted by the invasion of Poland, as many of its physicists were drafted into the Wehrmacht. But the military was not about to let such a potentially decisive weapon go unexamined.
On the very day the war began, September 1st 1939, the Army Ordnance Office (Heereswaffenamt) established a second, official Uranprojekt.
It commandeered the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and brought Germany’s greatest remaining scientific minds into its orbit.
The project was led by luminaries like Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel laureate and a founder of quantum mechanics, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and Walther Gerlach.
Their task was to investigate two terrifying possibilities: a controlled chain reaction, which could power submarines and warships, and an uncontrolled one—an atomic bomb.
They had a significant head start on the Allies, access to brilliant scientists, a powerful industrial base, and, for a time, the full backing of the German military.
–
Heavy Water & Hindering The Nazi Programme
“Compared with the British and American war research efforts united in the Manhattan Project, to this day the prime example of “big science,” the Uranverein was only a loosely knit, decentralized network of researchers with quite different research agendas. Rather than teamwork as on the American end, on the German side we find cut-throat competition, personal rivalries, and fighting over the limited resources.”
German historian Klaus Hentschel
To build a ‘uranium machine’—a nuclear reactor—the German scientists knew they needed two key ingredients: uranium and a moderator.
The moderator’s job is to slow down the neutrons released during fission so they are more likely to split other uranium atoms, thus sustaining a chain reaction.
The two best candidates for a moderator were highly pure graphite and ‘heavy water’, water in which the hydrogen atoms are replaced with a heavier isotope, deuterium.
The scientists made a fateful error.
Walther Bothe, a leading experimental physicist, conducted an experiment that incorrectly concluded that graphite was unsuitable as a moderator, believing it absorbed too many neutrons. The mistake likely stemmed from using impure graphite. This error, born of a single miscalculation, steered the entire German program down a much more difficult and ultimately doomed path: the pursuit of heavy water.
The only place in the world producing heavy water on an industrial scale was the Vemork hydroelectric plant in Nazi-occupied Norway.
This made the plant one of the most critical single targets of the war for Allied special forces. A series of daring and costly sabotage missions carried out by Norwegian commandos and Allied bombers throughout 1942 and 1943 famously crippled production and, in a final dramatic raid, sank a ferry carrying the last of the German heavy water stockpile to the bottom of a fjord.
While the struggle for a moderator took place in the Norwegian mountains, the struggle for uranium was centered in Oranienburg.
Dr. Nikolaus Riehl, the scientific director of Auergesellschaft, had seen a business opportunity. The company had large quantities of uranium as a waste product from its work with radium.
In 1939, he convinced Army Ordnance to give him an order, and the Auer plant began refining uranium oxide on an industrial scale. Soon, with the help of the Degussa corporation, they were producing metallic uranium plates and cubes—the very fuel for Heisenberg’s experimental reactors. The plant became the primary supplier for the secret tests being conducted across Germany, from a bunker in Berlin to a cave in Haigerloch in the war’s final days.
For years, the factory operated in relative obscurity.
However, in November 1944, the Allied intelligence unit known as the Alsos Mission, tasked with discovering the extent of the Nazi nuclear program, got a breakthrough.
In liberated Paris and Strasbourg, they found documents connecting Auergesellschaft to the processing of uranium and thorium.
They had found the industrial heart of the Uranprojekt.
General Leslie Groves, the military commander of America’s own, far larger Manhattan Project, made a strategic calculation.
The Oranienburg plant lay in the path of the advancing Red Army and would soon fall into the future Soviet occupation zone. Groves recommended to General George Marshall that the plant be utterly destroyed by air, not primarily to stop the Nazis, who were by now clearly losing the war, but to deny its equipment and stockpiles to the Soviets.
In his memorandum to Marshall, General Leslie Groves said: “The Auer Company at Oranienburg, north of Berlin, is producing uranium metal… Investigations in Paris have confirmed that this plant is the one which has been processing the Belgian and other ores. The product is used in the German experimental piles. While the Germans are not believed to have a practical atomic weapon now, this plant, if it is not destroyed, will be of the utmost value to the Russians in their efforts to develop the weapon.”
When Riehl visited the ruins of his factory with the Soviets after the bombing, he noted the astonishing precision of the raid and recalled later that the Russians knew exactly why the Americans had done it.
The attack, he said, had been “directed at them rather than the Germans.”
–
The Reality Of Nazi 'Wunderwaffen'
“It seemed likely that, if the Germans had succeeded in perfecting and using these new weapons six months earlier than they did, our invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible.”
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, on the V-2 rocket
The legend of the Nazi A-bomb is often bundled with a host of other supposedly revolutionary “Wunderwaffen” or wonder weapons, which a desperate Third Reich hoped would turn the tide of the war.
An examination of these weapons reveals much about German technological priorities.
While the Uranverein struggled with infighting, limited resources, and critical scientific errors, the Nazi regime poured immense capital and engineering talent into weapons that were technologically impressive but ultimately irrelevant to the war’s outcome.
The most famous of these were the V-weapons.
The V-1 flying bomb, a simple cruise missile powered by a pulsejet engine, was a terror weapon used against London, but its inaccuracy made it strategically ineffective.
The V-2 rocket, developed by Wernher von Braun’s team at Peenemünde, was a true technological marvel—the world’s first long-range ballistic missile.
It was a weapon years ahead of its time, but it was fantastically expensive, required enormous resources to build, and, like the V-1, was too inaccurate and its warhead too small to serve as anything more than a tool of vengeance.
For all the resources spent on the V-2 program, it had a negligible effect on the Allied war effort.
Beyond the V-weapons lay a veritable zoo of futuristic, and often fantastical, projects:
- The Horten Ho 229, a jet-powered flying wing that looked like a modern stealth bomber. A few prototypes flew, but it never entered production.
- The gargantuan Panzer VIII ‘Maus’, a 188-ton super-heavy tank that was so overweight it could barely move and was mechanically unreliable.
- Speculative designs for a ‘Sun Gun’, a giant orbital mirror designed to focus sunlight to burn cities, and a ‘Sonic Cannon’ that would use sound waves to kill.
- Advanced guided munitions like the Fritz X, an early smart bomb that successfully sank the Italian battleship Roma.
The diminutive Goliath tracked mine, a remote-controlled miniature tank filled with explosives. - The colossal Schwerer Gustav, the largest artillery piece ever built, capable of firing a seven-ton shell over 29 miles.
While many of these projects were engineering dead-ends, they demonstrate where Nazi Germany’s priorities lay.
The regime, and Hitler in particular, was captivated by tangible, intimidating machines of war—colossal tanks, long-range rockets, futuristic jets.
These projects received funding, manpower, and political support that dwarfed what was allocated to the highly theoretical and uncertain atomic bomb project.
Thankfully, the German war machine focused on engineering, not theoretical physics.
–
Operation Paperclip, Operation Big & Atomic Secrets
“We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous… Their former eminence as Nazi Party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.”
Albert Einstein, in a letter to President Truman protesting Operation Paperclip
When the war in Europe ended, the ‘success’ of the Nazi nuclear program was measured not in weapons built, but in the knowledge possessed by its scientists.
The frantic final weeks of the war saw a new kind of conflict emerge: a race between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union to capture German scientific and technological assets.
Berlin, with its world-class research hubs like the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik, Frederick William University, and the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, was the grand prize.
The Soviets, having captured Berlin, had a significant geographical advantage.
They immediately began systematically dismantling research facilities and securing scientists.
Nikolaus Riehl, the man who had overseen uranium production at the Auer plant, was ‘invited’ to meet with Soviet officials in Berlin. That invitation turned into a ten-year relocation to the USSR, where he and other captured German scientists were instrumental in developing the Soviet atomic bomb project.
The nearly 100 tons of uranium oxide the Soviets recovered from the Oranienburg site, even after the bombing, saved them at least a year on their own nuclear timeline.
The Americans had their own highly effective program, Operation Paperclip.
Its goal was to identify and recruit hundreds of German scientists, engineers, and technicians—including many with devoted Nazi pasts—and bring them to the United States.
The most famous of these was Wernher von Braun and his entire V-2 rocket team.
They were seen as too valuable to be left for the Soviets or to face full accountability for their roles in the Nazi war machine.
While the American Alsos mission captured the core nuclear physicists, including Heisenberg and Hahn (who were famously interned at Farm Hall in England and secretly recorded), the real prize for the American military-industrial complex was the rocket technology that would form the bedrock of the U.S. space program and its intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal.
The hunt for atomic secrets had turned into a hunt for the men who possessed them.
–
Conclusion
“The German physicists knew at least so much about the manufacture and construction of atomic bombs that it was clear to them that the manufacture of bombs in Germany could not succeed during the war. For this reason, they were spared the moral decision whether they should make an atomic bomb, and they had only worked on the uranium engine.”
Werner Heisenberg, lead scientist in the German nuclear program
So how close were the Nazis to building an atomic bomb?
The simple, definitive answer is: not even remotely close.
The evidence gathered by the Alsos mission by late 1944 was already clear—the formidable German project the Allies had feared was a disorganized, underfunded, and scientifically misguided effort.
The captured scientists at Farm Hall were genuinely stunned to hear the news of the Hiroshima bombing on August 6th 1945; their secret recordings reveal disbelief and an immediate scramble to rationalise how the Americans could have succeeded where they had failed.
The German program failed for a constellation of reasons.
The expulsion of brilliant Jewish scientists like Lise Meitner and Albert Einstein had drained the project of crucial intellectual capital.
Illustrative of those who remained in Germany was the case of Fritz Strassmann, who along with Otto Hahn identified the element barium as a product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons. Strassman resigned from the Society of German Chemists in 1939 when it became part of a Nazi-controlled public corporation and was blacklisted by the Nazi regime. Famously stating “despite my affinity for chemistry, I value my personal freedom so highly that to preserve it I would break stones for a living.”. His disdain for the Nazi regime he voiced in adding: “If my work would lead to Hitler having an atomic bomb I would kill myself.”
The Nazi leadership itself was divided, with competing teams often working against each other. Key scientific errors, like the dismissal of graphite as a moderator, sent them on a wild goose chase for heavy water. And perhaps most importantly, the project never received the political priority or the resources necessary for success.
The final comparison is the most telling.
The Manhattan Project, which successfully developed and tested the first atomic bomb in July 1945—two months after the war in Europe was over—was the largest scientific and industrial undertaking in human history. The contrast in scale with the German effort is staggering:
- The Manhattan Project cost approximately $2 billion (about $34 billion in 2024 dollars). It employed a peak of 120,000 people and involved a total of nearly 500,000 workers, almost 1% of the entire U.S. civilian labor force at the time.
- The Uranverein, by comparison, was budgeted a mere 8 million Reichsmarks. This is equivalent to about $2 million in 1945 dollars—a thousandth of the American expenditure. The number of scientists actively involved numbered in the dozens, not the thousands.
The Third Reich never made a serious, committed attempt to build an atomic bomb.
However, the mere threat of its realisation was one of the main driving factors behind the US development of nuclear weapons. “The Manhattan Project was built on fear: fear that the enemy had the bomb, or would have it before we could develop it,” said Robert Furman, an intelligence officer on the project. General Leslie Groves, the military director of Manhattan, later admitted that until near the end of the war they had “to assume that the most competent German scientists… were working on an atomic program with the full support of their government…. Any other assumption would have been unsound and dangerous”
Fortunately, Hitler was a man impressed by what he could see—giant tanks, screaming rockets, jet fighters.
A theoretical device requiring years of research and a budget that could have funded thousands more conventional weapons never captured his imagination or that of his inner circle.
In 1942, when Albert Speer asked Werner Heisenberg whether a bomb was feasible, the scientist’s cautious and uncertain timeline led the Nazi leadership to downgrade the project’s priority. They pursued a ‘uranium machine’, a nuclear reactor for naval propulsion, but the bomb was deemed too costly and too far off.
The myth of the nearly-completed Nazi atomic bomb persists because it makes for a better story.
It fuels a narrative of a knife-edge “what if” scenario and plays into the legend of the Nazis’ secret technological prowess.
The reality is far more mundane, but no less important.
The German nuclear project was a failure not of German science, but of the Nazi system itself: a regime driven by confused priorities, internal rivalries, ideological blindness, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the very physics its scientists had discovered.
The ghosts of Oranienburg are not a testament to how close they came, but a permanent, radioactive monument to how far away they truly were.
***
If you’ve enjoyed reading this article, consider booking one of our private guided tours of Berlin.
Bibliography
Bernstein, Jeremy (ed.) (2001), Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, Copernicus Books, ISBN 978‑0‑387‑95089‑1
Cassidy, D. C. (1992). Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg. W. H. Freeman.
Goudsmit, Samuel (1947), Alsos, Henry Schuman
Karlsch, Rainer (2005), Hitler’s Bomb, Deutsche Verlags‑Anstalt, ISBN 978‑3‑421‑05809‑6
Pash, Boris T. (1969), The Alsos Mission, Award House
Powers, Thomas (1993), Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, Knopf
Rhodes, Richard (1986), The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Simon & Schuster
Rose, Paul Lawrence (1998), Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project, University of California Press
Speer, Albert (1970), Inside the Third Reich (trans. Richard & Clara Winston), Macmillan
Tooze, A. (2007). The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Viking.
Walker, Mark (1995), Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb, Perseus (or Plenum) Press, ISBN 978‑0‑306‑44941‑3
HISTORICAL ARTICLES
Mythbusting Berlin
Are There Any Nazi Statues Left In Berlin? – Mythbusting Berlin
Visitors to Berlin often arrive expecting to find the physical remnants of the tyranny of the 20th century still standing – statues of dictators, triumphal arches, or bronze idols. Instead, they often find none. The stone symbols and statues of the Third Reich are still gazing down on them, however, hiding in plain sight. But why are there no statues of Hitler? Did the Allies destroy them all in 1945, or is the truth stranger
Could The Western Allies Have Captured Berlin? – Mythbusting Berlin
To contemplate a Western Allied capture of Berlin in 1945 is to challenge the established endgame of the Second World War. What was the true military and logistical feasibility of a Western Allied assault on the Nazi capital? What factors truly sealed Berlin’s fate, and what might have changed had the Allies pushed eastward?
Answering these questions means delving into the complex interplay of logistics, political maneuvering, and the competing visions for a post-war world
Did Any Of The Rothschild Dynasty Die In The Holocaust? – Mythbusting Berlin
The Rothschild name is synonymous with immense wealth, influence, and persistent conspiracy theories—especially during the era of Nazi Germany. Often targeted by antisemitic propaganda, the family’s survival during World War II has sparked myths about their supposed immunity from Nazi persecution. But did any Rothschild family member actually perish in the Holocaust? This article explores that compelling question, unraveling historical misconceptions and revealing the reality behind one of Europe’s most famous dynasties.
Did Frederick The Great Introduce The Potato To Germany? – Mythbusting Berlin
One of the more bizarre claims to fame attributed to the first King of Prussia is that the man who would go down in history known as Frederick the Great introduced the potato to Germany during his reign back in the 1700s. This starchy root vegetable has undoubtedly become a staple part of German cuisine – an essential addition to any plate of Schnitzel, Schweinshaxn, and Königsberger Klopse – however, whether Frederick the Great is
Did Hitler Escape To Argentina In 1945? – Mythbusting Berlin
Although Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, certainly remains an inescapable figure, could there be any truth to the story of his escape to Argentina in 1945? That the most wanted man on earth could simply vanish, to spend the rest of his life peacefully in South American obscurity captivates imaginations. Yet, despite numerous investigations, this tale persists primarily as myth—fueled by speculation, hearsay, and conspiracy theories.
Did Hugo Boss Design The Nazi Uniforms? – Mythbusting Berlin
The idea that Hugo Boss – the man whose name now adorns expensive suits and fragrances – was the creative genius behind the Nazi uniforms suggests a terrifying collision of haute couture and holocaust – a marriage of high style and high crimes. The image is striking: a German tailor sketching the ultimate villain’s costume. But history, as usual, is far messier, more bureaucratic, and more banal than the internet memes suggest. To understand who
Did Rudolf Hess Really Commit Suicide? – Mythbusting Berlin
On a summer’s day in 1987, the last Nazi war criminal of the Nuremberg trials was found dead in a prison built for hundreds, yet for two decades, housed only him. The official verdict was suicide, a straightforward end to a life defined by fanaticism, delusion, and contradiction.
But the simplicity of the report belied the complexity of the man and the 46 years he had spent in Allied custody. In the meticulously controlled
Did The Nazis Develop Nuclear Weapons? – Mythbusting Berlin
The Nazi obsession with super-weapons became so serious in the closing stages of the Second World that Adolf Hitler personally believed that such ‘Wunderwaffen’ both existed in a usable form – and would save the country from defeat. Had the Nazis managed to develop nuclear weapons by 1945 – the outcome of the war would surely have been different. But how close were Hitler, Himmler, and his henchmen to developing an A-bomb?
Did The Nazis Invent Decaf Coffee? – Mythbusting Berlin
Persistent rumors claim that Nazis preferred their coffee anything but pure, leading some to wonder if they might have influenced the development of decaffeinated coffee. Although decaf was already widely available across Europe by the mid-20th century, speculation continues: could the Nazis really have played a role in popularizing—or even discovering—this caffeine-free alternative, or is this simply another caffeinated conspiracy cooked up to sensationalize an ordinary historical detail?
Did The Nazis Invent The Bicycle Reflector? – Mythbusting Berlin
The fruits of wartime ingenuity are plenty – so many, in-fact, that it has become somewhat of a worn cliche that as the guns start firing the innovators get to work, often solving problems while providing more problems for the enemy to overcome.The kind of progress that results in the production of newer improved, more lethal weapons, such as to increase the chances of victory.
Did The Nazis Run The Largest Counterfeiting Operation In History? – Mythbusting Berlin
During the Second World War the Nazis masterminded an astonishing plot to destabilise Britain by flooding its economy with counterfeit banknotes. Crafted in secret by concentration camp prisoners, this forged fortune became the most ambitious counterfeiting operation ever attempted. But was it history’s largest? Dive into the extraordinary tale of Operation Bernhard,
rife with deception, survival, and intrigue—revealing the truth behind one of the Third Reich’s most audacious schemes and its surprising legacy.
Did The Second World War End In Berlin? – Mythbusting Berlin
When is a war ever truly over? When the last shot is fired in anger would seem like the best measure. Rarely, though, is it possible to gain insight into such a moment.
Remarkably, a record still exists of such a moment at the end of the First World War on the Western Front. A seismic register and recording of the last belching battery of British guns firing artillery across no-man’s-land, followed by a profound
Did The Spanish Flu Pandemic Help The Nazis Take Power? – Mythbusting Berlin
The devastating Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919 struck amid Germany’s post-war turmoil, compounding social instability, economic hardship, and widespread political disillusionment. Could this catastrophic health crisis have indirectly paved the way for Nazi ascension? While often overshadowed by war and revolution, the pandemic’s profound psychological and societal impacts arguably contributed to the perfect storm, enabling extremist ideologies—including Nazism—to gain popularity and ultimately seize power in a fractured Germany.
Have Adolf Hitler’s Remains Been DNA Tested? – Mythbusting Berlin
In the smouldering ruins of Berlin in 1945, the world’s most wanted man vanished. Did Adolf Hitler, as official history attests, die by his own hand in the Führerbunker? Or did he escape, fuelling a thousand conspiracy theories that have echoed for decades? For years, the Soviets claimed to hold the gruesome proof of his death: a skull fragment and a set of teeth, locked away in Moscow archives. But in an age of definitive
How Did The Nazi Concentration Camps Differ From The Soviet GULAG?
The Nazi concentration camps and Soviet Gulag system have often been conflated in popular imagination—twin symbols of twentieth-century totalitarian horror. Yet the two systems operated on fundamentally different principles. One extracted labor to fuel industrialisation while accepting mass death as collateral damage; the other evolved into purpose-built machinery of genocide. Understanding these distinctions isn’t merely academic—it reveals how different ideologies produce different atrocities, and why Germany and Russia reckon with these legacies so differently today.
How Long Did It Take To Build The Berlin Wall? – Mythbusting Berlin
It is one of the most enduring images of the 20th century: a city divided overnight. The popular narrative tells us that Berliners went to sleep in a unified city and woke up in a prison. While the shock of August 13th 1961, was very real, the idea that the ‘Wall’ appeared instantly is a historical illusion. The physical scar that bisected Berlin was not a static creation, but a living, malevolent beast that evolved
How Many Assassination Attempts On Adolf Hitler Were There? – Mythbusting Berlin
Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, projected an aura of invincibility, a man of destiny shielded by providence. But behind the carefully constructed image of the untouchable Führer lies a story of constant threat, of bombs that failed to detonate, and errant bullets that missed their mark. Unearth the hidden history of the numerous attempts on Hitler’s life as we explore the courage of those who tried to change the course of history and the devil’s luck
How Many Jews Died In The Holocaust? – Mythbusting Berlin
The answer to the question posed of how many Jews died in the Holocaust is a simple one: too many. That merely one death was an unforgivable obscenity is a fundamental and necessary realisation in understanding the capriciousness of this unparalleled racial genocide. To comprehend, however, the full number of Jews murdered in Europe by the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s is a detective story of epic proportions: the evidence overwhelming, multifaceted, and
How Many People Died Trying To Escape East Germany? – Mythbusting Berlin
The image of the Berlin Wall is seared into our collective memory, a concrete symbol of Cold War oppression. We think of the daring escapes and the tragic deaths of those who failed. But that well-known number is only a fraction of the truth. The story of those who died trying to escape East Germany is far broader and more complex than most imagine, stretching along a thousand-kilometer border and out into the cold waters
How Old Is Berlin? – Mythbusting Berlin
A relatively new arrival in Europe, Berlin is over 1000 years younger than London, nevermind Rome or Athens, Jerusalem or Jericho. Just how old is Berlin though?
A question fraught with false assumptions and distortions – that has more often than not been answered with propaganda as it has with the cold hard truth.
Was Adolf Hitler A Drug Addict? – Mythbusting Berlin
Solving the enigma of the ‘Führer’ has become a preoccupation for many, since the arrival of the Austrian-German onto the world stage – although moving beyond the mythology without falling into the trap of prejudically extrapolating on the psychopathography of Hitler or demonising so as to excuse his actions has proven problematic. What to make of the man who became more than the sum of his masks? The painter; the military dilettante, the mass murderer,
Was Adolf Hitler A Freemason? – Mythbusting Berlin
History abhors a vacuum, but adores a mystery. Such is the speculative fiction suggesting a secret allegiance behind the rise of the Third Reich – that the catastrophe of the Second World War was orchestrated from the shadows of a Masonic lodge. The image of Adolf Hitler—the drifter from Vienna turned dictator—as a covert initiate of the very brotherhood he publicly reviled, however, creates a paradox that collapses under scrutiny. As when we unlock the
Was Adolf Hitler Gay? – Mythbusting Berlin
In the shadowy corridors of Third Reich history, few questions provoke as much tabloid curiosity and scholarly exasperation as the sexuality of Adolf Hitler. For decades, rumors have swirled—whispered by political enemies in 1930s Munich, psychoanalyzed by American spies in the 1940s, and sensationalized by revisionist authors today. Was the dictator who condemned thousands of men to concentration camps for “deviant” behavior hiding a secret of his own? By peeling back the layers of propaganda,
Was Adolf Hitler Jewish? – Mythbusting Berlin
Was the dictator who orchestrated the murder of millions of European Jews secretly one of them? It is perhaps the darkest irony imaginable, a story whispered for decades in backrooms, bars, and conspiracy forums alike. The most-common rumour – the ‘Frankenberger Myth’ – suggests that Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather was Jewish, a secret so damaging it could have unraveled the entire Nazi regime. But where does this claim come from? And, more importantly, is there
Was Currywurst Invented In Berlin? – Mythbusting Berlin
Explore the story behind what many consider Berlin’s most iconic snack—the ever-so-humble Currywurst. Often hailed as an enduring symbol of culinary creativity amid Cold War scarcity, this humble dish has inspired fierce debate about its true origin. But was it genuinely invented here in Berlin, or have proud locals simply adopted and elevated this spicy street-food favorite into legendary status all their own?
Was Fanta Invented By The Nazis? – Mythbusting Berlin
As one of the most secretive organisations in the world, the Coca Cola corporation refuses to share its secret recipe with anyone. Famously insisting only on shipping the base syrup of its drinks to plants around the world to be carbonated and distributed.
This combined with the trade limitations of the Second World War may have led to the introduction of one of the most popular soft-drinks in the world. But could it be true:
Was Frederick The Great Gay? – Mythbusting Berlin
Frederick II of Prussia, better known as Frederick the Great, is often remembered as the archetypal enlightened monarch – a brilliant military commander, patron of the arts, and learned philosopher. Yet behind the stern portraits of this 18th-century warrior-king lies a personal life long shrouded in intrigue and speculation. Intrigue around the king’s sexual orientation has persisted through the centuries, chiefly revolving around one question: Was Frederick the Great gay?
Was Henry Ford A Nazi? – Mythbusting Berlin
US auto tycoon, Henry Ford, holds the ignominious distinction of being the only American Adolf Hitler praised by name in his National Socialist manifesto: ‘Mein Kampf’. This was not, as it turns out, the only connection between Ford and the Party of Hitler, Himmler, and the Holocaust.
Ford’s overt affinity with the Third Reich reveals a troubling past. How deep these connections ran, and how consequential they were for both sides, is a chapter
Was The Colour Blue Invented In Berlin? – Mythbusting Berlin
Tracing the true history of blue—from ancient Egyptian dyes to the accidental discovery of Prussian Blue in a Berlin lab. We’ll debunk myths about seeing blue, explore colonial indigo plantations, scale mountains with a cyanometer, and trace Van Gogh’s starry skies—all to answer one question: how did Berlin shape our understanding of the world’s rarest color?
Was The Döner Kebab Invented In Berlin? – Mythbusting Berlin
Unlikely icon of immigrant success; fast food symbol of the working class; over-hyped midnight disco eat; or culturally appropriated cuisine? Its influence goes far beyond layers of seasoned meat and fresh vegetables stuffed into pita bread. But does Berlin deserve credit as the Döner Kebab’s true birthplace, or has the city merely refined and popularized a culinary tradition imported from elsewhere?
Was The Fall Of The Berlin Wall An Accident? – Mythbusting Berlin
On a seasonally crisp night in November 1989, one of the most astonishing events of the 20th century occurred. After twenty eight years, three months, and twenty eight days of defining and dividing the German capital, the Berlin Wall ceased to exist – at least in an abstract sense. Although the removal of this symbol of the failure of the East German system would take some time, its purpose – as a border fortification erected
Was The Nazi Party Democratically Elected? – Mythbusting Berlin
The myth persists that Adolf Hitler rose to power through popular democratic choice. Yet history reveals a darker, more complicated truth. Hitler’s ascent involved exploiting democratic institutions, orchestrating violence, propaganda, and political intrigue—not a simple election victory. Understanding how Germany’s democracy collapsed into dictatorship helps illuminate the dangerous interplay between public desperation, elite miscalculations, and extremist ambition, providing crucial lessons for safeguarding democracy today.
Were The Allied Bombings Of Germany War Crimes? – Mythbusting Berlin
The history of the Allied bombing of Germany during the Second World War still triggers fierce debate. Was reducing cities to rubble a necessary evil – justice from above in a just war – or an unforgivable crime? Can the intentional targeting of civilians ever be justified as militarily necessary?
In a conflict where all rules seemed to vanish, an even more pertinent question persists: by the very standards they would use to judge their
Were The Nazi Medical Experiments Useful? – Mythbusting Berlin
Before the Nazi period, German medicine was considered the envy of the world – a shining monument to progress. But deep within that monument, a rot was spreading, one which would collapse the entire structure into an abattoir. From the wreckage, we are left with a profoundly uncomfortable inheritance: a moral enigma wrapped in doctor’s whites.
What to make of the data, the images, and the terrible knowledge gleaned from unimaginable human suffering. Whether
What Are The Origins Of The Nazi Salute? – Mythbusting Berlin
A specter is haunting the modern mind, a gesture so charged with the dark electricity of history that its mere depiction can unleash a storm of controversy.
It is a simple movement: the right arm, stiff and straight, raised to the sky. But in that simplicity lies a terrifying power, a symbol of a regime that plunged the world into an abyss and a chilling reminder of humanity’s capacity for organised hatred.
This
What Are The Origins Of The Nazi Swastika? – Mythbusting Berlin
Long before the legions of the Third Reich marched beneath its stark, unnerving geometry, the swastika lived a thousand different lives. It was a symbol of breathtaking antiquity, a globetrotting emblem of hope and good fortune that found a home in the most disparate of cultures. To even begin to understand its dark 20th-century incarnation, one must first journey back, not centuries, but millennia.
What Are The Pink Pipes In Berlin? – Mythbusting Berlin
A first-time visitor to Berlin could be forgiven for thinking the city is in the midst of a bizarre art installation. Bright pink pipes, thick as an elephant’s leg, climb out of the ground, snake over pavements, arch across roads, and disappear back into the earth. Are they part of a complex gas network? A postmodern artistic statement? A whimsical navigation system? These theories, all logical, are all wrong. The truth is far more elemental,
What Do The Colours Of The German Flag Symbolise? – Mythbusting Berlin
What does a flag mean? Is it merely a coloured cloth, or does it hold the hopes, struggles, and identity of a nation? The German flag, with its bold stripes of black, red, and gold, is instantly recognisable. But the story of its colours is a tumultuous journey through revolution, suppression, and reinvention. The common explanation for their symbolism is a simple, romantic verse, yet the truth is a far more complex and contested tale,
What Happened To Adolf Hitler’s Alligator? – Mythbusting Berlin
It is often said that you can tell a lot about a person by their relationship with animals; that owners often come to look and behave like their pets. Or is it perhaps more that people choose their pets to correspond to their personality? Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s love of dogs, for example, is well documented but what is there to make of his relationship with reptiles?
What Happenened To The German Royal Family? – Mythbusting Berlin
When the smoke cleared over the trenches in November 1918, the German Empire had evaporated, and with it, the divine right of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Conventional wisdom suggests the family simply vanished into the sepia-toned obscurity of history books—exiled, forgotten, and irrelevant. But dynasties, like weeds in a landscaped garden, are notoriously difficult to uproot entirely. The story of the German royals did not end with the Kaiser’s flight to Holland; it merely shifted gears.
What Is The Difference Between Fascism & Nazism? – Mythbusting Berlin
While the terms ‘Fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ are often bandied around interchangeably as shorthand for tyranny – Italian fascism and German National Socialism were distinctly different beasts. Albeit ideological kin. One an ideology of state-worship, born from post-war chaos and national pride; the other built upon a fanatical, pseudo-scientific obsession with race. Two peas in the same totalitarian pod – twins in tyranny – more succinctly summarised as the Nazi chicken to the Fascist egg.
What Was Checkpoint Charlie? – Mythbusting Berlin
Checkpoint Charlie remains among Berlin’s most visited historical sites, famed worldwide for its significance during the Cold War. Originally established as a modest border-crossing point, it evolved dramatically over the decades into an international symbol of freedom, espionage, and intrigue. Today, critics and locals often dismiss it as little more than a tourist trap—Berlin’s Disneyland—but how exactly did Checkpoint Charlie get its peculiar name, and what truths hide behind its popularity?
What Was Prussia? – Mythbusting Berlin
Prussia’s legacy is both remarkable and contentious—once a minor duchy, it rose dramatically to shape modern European history. Renowned for military discipline, administrative efficiency, and cultural sophistication, Prussia was instrumental in uniting the German states, laying foundations for a unified Germany. But how did this kingdom, with its roots in Baltic territories, achieve such prominence, and why does its complex history continue to evoke admiration, debate, and occasional discomfort in Germany today?
What Was The Berlin Airlift? – Mythbusting Berlin
In the ruins of 1948, the silence of Berlin was not a sign of peace, but a held breath before a new catastrophe. The city, drowning in rubble and political intrigue, became the staging ground for the twentieth century’s most audacious gamble. While popular history remembers the chocolate parachutes and smiling pilots, the reality of the Berlin Airlift was a terrifying operational nightmare born from a ruthless currency war. It wasn’t just a humanitarian mission;
What Was The Socialist Kiss? – Mythbusting Berlin
It is one of the most curious and enduring images of the Cold War: two middle-aged, grey-suited men, locked in a fervent embrace, their lips pressed together in a kiss of apparent revolutionary passion. This was the ‘Socialist Fraternal Kiss’, a ritual that, for a time, seemed to encapsulate the unwavering solidarity of the Eastern Bloc.
But what was behind this seemingly intimate gesture? Was it a genuine expression of camaraderie, a piece of
Who Built The Berlin Wall? – Mythbusting Berlin
One of the most common questions I have encountered from people curious about Berlin, and often so cryptically phrased. Who built the Berlin Wall? A simple five-word query, yet one that can be read one of two ways. More than thirty years since the ‘Fall of the Wall’, the story of its construction continues to baffle many who are mainly familiar with its existence through knowledge of its importance…
Who Really Raised The Soviet Flag On The Reichstag? – Mythbusting Berlin
One iconic photograph has come to symbolise the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945—the Soviet flag waving triumphantly above Berlin’s battered Reichstag building. Yet behind this enduring image lies controversy, confusion, and political manipulation. Who truly raised the Soviet banner atop the Reichstag? Was it a spontaneous act of heroism or carefully staged Soviet propaganda? Decades later, unraveling the truth reveals surprising layers beneath the mythologized symbol of Soviet triumph.
Who Was Really Responsible For The Reichstag Fire? – Mythbusting Berlin
Various theories have been posited as to who actually set fire to the German parliament in 1933. Was it the opening act in an attempted Communist coup or a calculated false flag operation carried out by elements of the Nazi Party, intended to create the conditions necessary for introducing single-party rule? And what part did the young man from Holland, arrested shirtless inside the building the night of the fire, play in this event?
Who Were The Last Nazis On Trial? – Mythbusting Berlin
More than eighty years after the Holocaust, courtrooms across Germany still echo with testimony from the final chapter of Nazi justice. Centenarian defendants in wheelchairs, their faces hidden behind folders, arrive to answer for crimes committed in their youth. These are not the architects of genocide—those men faced their reckoning at Nuremberg decades ago. These are the guards, the secretaries, the bookkeepers: ordinary people who enabled extraordinary evil. Their trials represent a legal revolution: the
Why Is Berlin The Capital Of Germany? – Mythbusting Berlin
There was little in its humble origins—as a twin trading outpost on a minor European river—to suggest that Berlin was destined for greatness. It sits on the flat expanse of the North European Plain, a landscape once dismissively referred to as the “sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire.” Unlike other world capitals, it lacks breathtaking scenery or a naturally defensible position. It is a city built not on majestic hills or a grand harbour, but
RELATED TOURS
Our Private Guided Tours
One Hour Experiences
Half Day Experiences
Full Day Experiences
