Nazis less Antisemitic = Nuclear program?

Watched a documentary about the Nazis nuclear program under leadership of Heisenberg.

What if Hitler and the Nazis where less Antisemitic and they would listen too important Jewish scientists like Einstein and thus taken the taming of the atom more seriously(hitler called it "Jew science"), would they have embraced a far better nuclear program?

They had the resources as i take it, Uranium from Belgium and heavy water from Norway... They lacked experts and funding though.

Would the Nazis, being less antisemitic have been able to employ nuclear physicists like Max Born, Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Niels Bohr maybe even Robert Oppenheimer(highly unlikely) and Enrico Fermi? But also keep prominent Jewish scientist at office like Lise Meitner, Fritz Haber and James Franck?

Any of this possible? Would the Manhattan project suffer under this? Would the Nazis be ahead of everyone else?
 
They'd be better off, but I'm unsure they'd be ahead even so. A lot of non-Jewish scientists left Germany as well - a lot of intellectuals would have left even if there were no anti-Semitic laws; they did not want to live under a totalitarian regime of any kind.
 
Less antisemitic nazis changes so much that it is utterly unpredictable to say what could happen.
 
I doubt Einstein or many of the refugee scientists would have helped a fascist regime even if it wasn't anti-semitic.

That's irrelevant though, the Germans already had some excellent scientists such as Werner Heisenburg and Kurt Diebner, what they crucially lacked was a well funded, well run bomb program.
 
Thats interesting. Sure Heisenberg was good. But don't they need a decent team instead of just 1 or 2 guys? I mean we are talking about the people who are gonna develop nuclear power and weapons here.
 
What if Hitler and the Nazis where less Antisemitic and they would listen too important Jewish scientists like Einstein and thus taken the taming of the atom more seriously(hitler called it "Jew science"), would they have embraced a far better nuclear program?

A very high possibility!
 
Thats interesting. Sure Heisenberg was good. But don't they need a decent team instead of just 1 or 2 guys? I mean we are talking about the people who are gonna develop nuclear power and weapons here.

That was only two mentions, there were many others who were capable. I don't personally believe Germany could pull it off even if it was well funded and resourced enough but scientists weren't the main problem.
 
Possible but not during a world war two analog, creating nukes is incredibly expensive and germany does not have the resources to fight russia and build nukes at the same time.
 
I don't think this is possible due to lack of funnding and also the fact I think that some of the scientist who created it in the OT would have been turned off by the thought of working for germany, due to the killing of the Jews. Also, there was no guarantee that they would use it against the Allies, due to the fact their master plan was to kill the Jews; So in that thought I think they might actually employ it against Jews, and the Allies if they had to
 
I doubt Einstein or many of the refugee scientists would have helped a fascist regime even if it wasn't anti-semitic.

That's irrelevant though, the Germans already had some excellent scientists such as Werner Heisenburg and Kurt Diebner, what they crucially lacked was a well funded, well run bomb program.

I figure Lise Meitner staying in Germany and working with Heisenberg would slow progress of Allied efforts a great deal and allow more rapid progress for the Germans. Provided of course they get adequate funding and that Germany gets certain resources and raw materials necessary for research.

Ouch. Scratch the previous post. Just realized she wouldn't have cooperated on a bomb, no matter what. I just seemed to remembered that she was listed in 'Plutonium history of the world most dangerous element' as having provided some vital contribution to Allies, but for the life of me, I cannot remember what. Wikipedia though doesn't mention it and I can't remember.
 
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Alienating creative intellectuals in general was one major limit on the German nuclear program. But a deeper and broader limit was that a successful bomb-building program would, if the American experience is any guide, have been hideously expensive. Not just a matter of spending money either--a matter of having access to certain rare resources. Then spending a whole lot of money to process said resources, in facilities that, as developed OTL by the USA anyway, would be both recognizable and easily destroyed by Allied reconnaissance and bombers.

Germany, under any sort of regime whatsoever, simply did not have the deep logistical pockets, the native resources, the access to global resources, nor the geographical separation from hazard and sheer size for both hiding and in a pinch defending the necessary sprawling facilities.

Mind, the Nazis not only hurt themselves by driving many of their most potentially creative people out, they drove them into the arms of Germany's ultimate enemies; had they not done so perhaps the USA would not have bestirred itself to develop nuclear weapons first or had a harder time doing it if the notion took hold in the leadership to try.

But even with the intellectual field shifted, the USA enjoyed so many logistical/geographical advantages it is hard for me to imagine the Germans ever beating the Americans to this punch.

Furthermore, a German regime that refrained from alienating these key people would not be recognizably Nazi; indeed I imagine it would be pacifistic and cosmopolitan in its outlook--there would simply not be a World War II in Europe at all! I disbelieve in the notion that Stalin was trying to conquer the world militarily. Or rather, that he rather liked the notion in principle, and was trying to arm the USSR beyond what was needed for strict defense--but every time he got close to having a world-conquering Red Army, he'd get paranoid about its leadership and purge it--so in effect, Stalin was not going to actually start WWII on his own. But say he did, targeting Poland then Germany first of course. A Germany benign enough to avoid driving off all these world-class scientists and keep them all loyally helping out the regime would surely, in such circumstances, not be limited to its own resources but would pool its strength with Western Europe--with Britain, probably under those conditions France as well. Germany alone would not have the ability to make an A-bomb in the 1940s, but I am pretty confident an alliance of all of Western Europe could have (the British supplying among other things access to global resources and strategic depth).
 
On second thought let me qualify a bit:

I suppose it's conceivable that there could have been an authoritarian, militaristic regime in Germany that had the ambition to expand and therefore alienated the Western powers, and yet also had the capability to eventually develop an A-bomb first. It would be difficult; they'd have to both avoid alienating and thus decimating their own intellectual community (which included people like Lise Meitner, who was from Austria and deemed "Jewish" by Nazi categories--indeed unlike many Germans and others the Nazis called Jewish, she would agree she was that--and lots of other non-Germans drawn into Germany by Germany's long-established leadership in science and technology). And also gain access to the global resources and also a big, long-running expensive program, one that would not alarm foreign competitors, not only Westerners in France, Britain, and the USA but also the Soviets, into launching crash programs of their own, one they could hide from foreign observation. To do this, they'd have to make it a national priority, and yet avoid tipping anyone else off, and have to carry out the intensive work of separating out suitable fissionable isotopes while safe from bombing interdiction. Therefore they'd have to do it either during peacetime, when foreigners had no excuse to be flying over German territory spying out their doings and they had access to global markets (again without tipping off their rivals), or else after they'd conquered a very broad territory and held it securely with air superiority over deep terrain. In the latter scenario they'd have to either secure peace after conquest--which seems unlikely unless one supposes the British would go for a truce, and so would the Russians--or they'd have to divert really large fractions of their limited national resources to a project with some question marks over its eventual success and utility even if they should technically succeed, while meanwhile fighting a conventional all-out war for their lives. Before the Manhattan Project was done, it was not after all certain that even if a bomb of sorts could be made that it would be of a size that it could be delivered! So prior to someone else demonstrating that the thing was practical as a weapon, investment in such a venture would be a gamble.

Given the USA's economic and geographical situation, it was a gamble the Americans could figure they could afford to make and lose, even in the middle of a total war. For Germany alone to roll those dice, the cost of losing would be much starker, and the odds of winning were clearly lower.

Anyway, politically speaking such a situation, where Germany had both the intellectual and material/geopolitical capital to risk in it, would be a long shot. And it definitely would not be Nazi Germany, however otherwise grim it might have been. The Nazis, if they were going to win, were going to win without nukes. That's what the regime calculated; it covered the bet with a certain level of effort, but even given an ASB gift of the most dedicated and capable cadre of first-class scientists to help them along I don't believe the Third Reich could possibly have done it, certainly not bearing in mind that no one knew going in just how much effort of what kinds it was going to take.

If a time-travelling ASB had disclosed to them the minimal requirements and the most direct path to a working bomb, allowing them to avoid wasting time in dead ends and promising approaches that turned out not to be the most cost-effective way to go, that would be a help to be sure, as would be the assurance that the effort would pay off eventually. But that's a different, ASB, scenario; the only way to get there realistically is to allow some other power to beat them to the punch and then pinch their results via espionage--and somehow hold the more advanced power at bay while they catch up. Even then, it would be hard to do it given Germany's limits, and the foreigners would know how to recognize efforts that were on the right track and take steps to stop them. Including if necessary a pre-emptive war on Germany involving use of nukes.

Anyway if in any long-shot scenario Germany could come up with practical A-bombs first, I am very confident that even in the best possible case for Germany, it would have been later than 1945. Germany would just have to spread the effort out over more years and no one could really get started much earlier than the British and then Americans did OTL. Building up a stockpile such that they were a major war-winning weapon system instead of a mere psychological demonstration would have taken more years, again it took the Americans, riding high on global victory with an undamaged and indeed revived homeland and effective supremacy over most of the globe, to build up a decent stockpile; Germans would take at least as long and probably longer.

So we can't be looking at an "A-bomb armed Germany" scenario much earlier than 1950, with one thing and another, and by then it seems likely someone else, even belatedly, would manage to catch up. 1950 is only reasonable if Germany avoids the decimation of a major conventional war in Europe, thus Britain will also avoid that battering, and hence be more capable, even if the Americans slumber away cluelessly. And the Soviets, while lacking the world-leading sheer economic capability of the USA, had everything else needed--their own world-class scientists and technicians, abundant (if hard-won) resources, deep swathes of land far from prying foreign eyes, and the ability to ruthlessly mobilize what resources the regime could scrape up to the orders of the top boss. Between Britain and the Russians I think even if the Germans (non-Nazi ones) manage somehow to get there first with A-bombs, by the time they have enough of them to matter, one or the other or both of these rival powers could match them.
 
Well thanks a lot Shevek23. Your explanation was both clear and plausible.

Clears up a lot of questions i still had.

This on the other hand:

PenguinOverlord said:
I don't think this is possible due to lack of funnding and also the fact I think that some of the scientist who created it in the OT would have been turned off by the thought of working for germany, due to the killing of the Jews. Also, there was no guarantee that they would use it against the Allies, due to the fact their master plan was to kill the Jews; So in that thought I think they might actually employ it against Jews, and the Allies if they had to

Doesn't make any sense at all.
 
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