Imperial radium reserve
The Reichsradiumreserve was a strategic reserve in the Second World War that was created on the decision of the Reich Ministry of Economics and for which the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) in Berlin was responsible.
The Reichsradiumreserve had a total weight of 21.8 grams of radium . It was worth about 3 million Reichsmarks, or $ 2 million . The radium was needed for the production of fluorescent paints , the uranium project and research.
It was originally stored in the basement of the PTR in Berlin-Charlottenburg , but as a result of the increasing air raids in 1943 it was first moved to a mine tunnel near Lower Saxony Werfen in the Harz Mountains and finally to Ronneburg in East Thuringia . From 1944 onwards the responsible department V for atomic physics and physical chemistry of the PTR was located here, and it was also evacuated from Berlin. Before the US Army invaded in April 1945, the head of Department V, Dr. Weiss, the Reichsradiumreserve to Bavaria, where it was to be handed over to the SS on the orders of Gauleiter Sauckel . However, he defied the order and buried them near Bad Tölz . On June 14, 1945, Dr. Weiss arrested by American secret service employees in Ronneburg and forced to dig up the Reichsradium reserve with his own hands. On June 26, 1945, the discovery of the Reichsradiumreserve was announced in the New York Times .
Individual evidence
- ^ Mining Association Ronneburg ( Memento from February 27, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ report to Lieutenant Colonel Garkuschka about the removal of radium reserve of the German Empire by American troops. Quoted from: Rainer Karlsch, Paid alone? The reparations payments of the Soviet occupation zone / GDR 1945 - 1953 , ISBN 3861530546