Were the Nazis close to building a bomb?

When nuclear fission was discovered in 1938, it took only months for German scientists to launch an effort to weaponise it into the first nuclear bomb. The Nazi nuclear project was known as the Uranprojekt (Uranium Project) or Uranverein (Uranium Club). However, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 ended that first effort when resources were needed to support the war effort, and many of the project’s physicists were drafted into the military. The Wehrmacht took up the project on the very day of the invasion of Poland, but Germany lacked the money and resources to create a working nuclear bomb. The project also suffered from an antisemitic rejection of theoretical physics as ‘Jewish’.

According to Albert Speer, the Nazi official in charge of arms and ammunition, in his memoir Inside the Third Reich, German scientists had the scientific and technical capability to build a nuclear bomb, but the cost of doing so was too high. He estimated that it would have taken all of Germany’s resources to develop a working bomb and that even if that were possible, one would not have been ready before 1947. Over the course of the war, Germany starved the programme of resources when officials determined that a nuclear bomb would not contribute significantly to victory, preferring to fund the more immediate success of the country’s rocket programme.