Nazi nuclear waste from Hitler's secret A-bomb programme found in mine

More than 126,000 barrels of nuclear material that Hitler planned to use in an atom bomb programme now lies rotting over 2,000 feet below ground in an old salt mine

German nuclear experts believe they have found nuclear waste from Hitler’s secret atom bomb programme in a crumbling mine near Hanover.



More than 126,000 barrels of nuclear material lie rotting over 2,000 feet below ground in an old salt mine.



Rumour has it that the remains of nuclear scientists who worked on the Nazi programme are also there, their irradiated bodies burned in secret by S.S. men sworn to secrecy.



A statement by a boss of the Asse II nuclear fuel dump, just discovered in an archive, said how in 1967 'our association sank radioactive wastes from the last war, uranium waste, from the preparation of the German atom bomb.'



This has sent shock waves through historians who thought that the German atomic programme was nowhere near advanced enough in WW2 to have produced nuclear waste in any quantities.



It has also triggered a firestorm of uncertainty among locals, especially given Germany’s paranoia post-Fukushima.



Germany was the first western nation to announce the closure of all its atomic power plants following the disaster at the Japanese facility following the catastrophic earthquake and Tsunami in March.



There are calls to remove all the nuclear material stored within the sealed site but this would cost billions of pounds.



Yet the thought of Nazi atomic bomb material stored underground has made headlines across Germany - and the country’s Greenpeace movement has backed a call for secret documents relating to the dump to be released to the state parliament from sealed archives in Berlin.



It was in January of 1939, nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War, that German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published the results of an historic experiment about nuclear fission.



The German 'uranium project' began in earnest shortly after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September.



Army physicist Kurt Diebner led a team tasked to investigate the military applications of fission. By the end of the year the physicist Werner Heisenberg had calculated that nuclear fission chain reactions might be possible.



Although the war hampered their work, by the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 Nazi scientists had achieved a significant enrichment in samples of uranium.



Mark Walker, a US expert on the Nazi programme said: 'Because we still don’t know about these projects, which remain cloaked in WW2 secrecy, it isn’t safe to say the Nazis fell short of enriching enough uranium for a bomb. Some documents remain top secret to this day.



'Claims that a nuclear weapon was tested at Ruegen in October 1944 and again at Ohrdruf in March 1945 leave open a question, did they or didn’t they?'

