A talented physicist. F. Ardenne was the favorite physicist of the Fuhrer. He had his own private laboratory near Berlin, which was generously funded by the Post Office for the German "Uranium Project" (Kerwaffenprojekt) 1938-1945. It was Manfred F. Ardenne who developed the method of gas-diffusion purification of uranium isotopes (hexafluoride, or uranium hexafluoride) and separation of uranium 235 isotopes in a centrifuge.
His laboratory was guarded by an SS regiment. And it was he who headed a large team of German and Soviet physicists, radio engineers and even glass blowers who created the technology for the production of uranium 235, the "filling" of the first Soviet atomic bomb.
As is known, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American planes that dropped atomic bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945, took place immediately after the end of the Potsdam Conference of the leaders of the USSR, the USA and Great Britain. Stalin reacted calmly to the report about the American atomic bombing, which seemed all the more strange: just on August 9, the day of the bombing of Nagasaki, Soviet troops began military operations against Japan. The beginning of hostilities against Japan was carried out in accordance with the decisions of the Yalta Conference (February 4-11, 1945).
The reason for Stalin's calmness was, apparently, in his confidence that the USSR would soon have its own atomic bomb. Indeed, by this time, 15 tons of uranium metal, purified to the required level, the necessary equipment, uranium centrifuges and the most valuable technical documentation had already been delivered to the Soviet Union. But the main thing was that highly qualified German atomic physicists, headed by Baron Manfred von Ardenne, were already in the USSR and began to work.
20 years later, Khrushchev exclaimed cheerfully: "Are you the Ardenne who managed to pull his head out of the noose?" Baron von Ardenne, with his 600 patents for Germans, is as iconic an inventor as Edison is for Americans. He was one of the pioneers of television, created a generation of electron microscopes and mass spectrometers, and many other devices. In the last days of the war, almost the entire leadership of the laboratory, led by von Ardenne, entered into negotiations with the head of a special unit of the NKVD, General of the Army Ivan Serov, and voluntarily surrendered to the Soviet troops. As Brown tells you - Nam the Ardennes …
In 1945, a group of colonels, who were actually not colonels, but secret physicists, were looking for specialists in Germany - future academicians Artsimovich, Kikoin, Khariton, Shchelkin … The operation was led by First Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Ivan Serov, which opened any doors. In addition to scientists, undercover academicians found 200 tons of uranium metal, which, according to Kurchatov, reduced the work on the bomb by a year and a half. The United States managed to export even more uranium from Germany, as did the specialists headed by the head of the German atomic project, Nobel laureate Werner von Heisenberg. Mechanics, electrical engineers, glass blowers were sent to the USSR. Many were taken away from prisoner of war camps. Max Steinbeck, the future Soviet academician and vice-president of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, was found,when, at the whim of the camp chief, he made a sundial. In total, 7 thousand German specialists worked on the atomic project in the USSR and another 3 thousand on the rocket project.
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So, together with von Ardenne, over two hundred of his colleagues were brought to Moscow - the most prominent German physicists (about half of them were doctors of sciences), radio engineers and foremen. In addition to the equipment of the Ardenne laboratory, equipment of the Berlin Kaiser Institute and other German scientific organizations, documentation and reagents, stocks of film and paper for recorders, photo recorders, wire tape recorders for telemetry, optics, powerful electromagnets and even German transformers were later delivered to Moscow. The Germans also brought to Moscow the worked out schemes of an industrial nuclear reactor and a breeder reactor. Note that in those years in the USSR all this simply did not exist. Therefore, the radio lamp factory dismantled near Vienna was transported,whose tungsten vacuum furnaces played an important role in the implementation of the Soviet atomic project, as they allowed obtaining a deep vacuum.
But back to the spring Moscow of 1945. Here, on the Oktyabrskoye field, a special high-security facility was built, officially called the Research Institute of Glavmosstroy No. 9. Manfred von Ardenne and his wife lived for some time on the territory of this facility in a two-story comfortable mansion, his wife played music on the piano she had brought with her. They even say that the baron, allegedly, in moments of rest, admired his paintings, also brought from Germany. Work on the atomic project with the participation of German specialists was carried out at other highly classified facilities. At one of them, the Chelyabinsk-40 facility, weapons-grade plutonium for the first Soviet atomic bomb was obtained in an industrial reactor. For this achievement, after the successful test of the atomic bomb, the outstanding German scientist Dr. Nikolaus Riehl was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.
Witnesses recall that German specialists worked with the conscientiousness characteristic of Germans and even took part in socialist competition on an equal footing with our specialists (!). Soon, the von Ardenne team was relocated from Moscow, transformed into Object A and placed in Abkhazia on the outskirts of Sukhumi on the basis of the Sinop sanatorium … Nearby there was also the Agudzera sanatorium, which was also given to German physicists.
The sanatoriums have forever lost their historical name. "Sinop" was named "Object" A "- it was led by the scientist Baron Manfred von Ardenne. "Agudzers" became "Object" G "- it was headed by Gustav Hertz. Prominent scientists worked at objects "A" and "D" - Nikolaus Riehl, who was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor by Stalin, Max Volmer, who built the first heavy water production plant in the USSR, and then became President of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, a member of the NSDAP and adviser to Hitler in science Peter Thyssen, the designer of the legendary centrifuge for the separation of uranium Max Steinbeck and the owner of the first Western patent for the centrifuge Gernot Zippe … A total of about 300 people. All these scientists created an atomic bomb for Hitler, but in the USSR they were not reproached for this. Many German scientists have become - and more than once - the Stalin Prize laureates.
One of the important tasks successfully solved at Object A, after a new scientific center was built on the shores of the Sukhum Bay, was the purification of uranium in industrial volumes. Rumor has it that some of the production units of this center were located even under the seabed of the Sukhum Bay. There, under the leadership of the baron, already a laureate of the Stalin Prize (1947), modern equipment was created for the separation of uranium isotopes. This center was later transformed into the Sukhumi Institute of Physics and Technology (SPTI), whose scientific director for some time was Manfred von Ardenne.
In the memoirs of some participants in those events, it is said that at the first stages of mastering the experimental equipment, several accidents occurred, accompanied by the release of radioactive isotopes. The radioactive waste was collected and poured into the nearest river in buckets by young employees, all their protection from radiation was in white cotton coats. Little is known about their further fate. But the first Soviet atomic bomb was successfully tested on August 29, 1949 in a desert area near Semipalatinsk. Since then, the Semipalatinsk test site has become the main test site for nuclear weapons in the USSR.
But back to the fate of Baron Manfred a von Ardenne. In 1953 he became a laureate of another Stalin Prize, and two years later he received permission to return to his homeland. Around the same time, the Soviet Union and its colleagues left. Manfred von Ardenne was bathed in glory and knew nothing of denial. All devices confiscated in 1945 were returned to him and delivered back to Germany. And the socialist baron brought so much money from the USSR to Germany that he was able to open and equip the first private scientific institute in the socialist world. Von Ardenne lived in the GDR, was director of his own research institute in Dresden, twice - in 1958 and 1965. - was awarded the National Prize of the GDR. In the last years of his life, he was successfully engaged in physical methods of fighting cancer. Manfred von Ardenne passed away in 1997 at the age of ninety.
Without denying the role of Soviet foreign intelligence in obtaining secret materials related to the American atomic bomb (mainly with its design), and the role of Soviet scientists in the creation of a domestic bomb, we must pay tribute to the outstanding contribution to its creation of German scientists, first of all - Baron von The Ardennes, without which the creation of the atomic industry in the USSR would have dragged on for many years.