Birger Stromsheim, leader of the Allies’ greatest sabotage mission during WWII, has died at the age of 101.
The description of the harrowing mission to disrupt the Nazi A-Bomb making effort is well worth a read. Stromsheim and his team clearly had tremendous courage and technical skill to go with it.
My hat is off. Well done, sir.
Author: Keith Humphreys
Keith Humphreys is the Esther Ting Memorial Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University and an Honorary Professor of Psychiatry at Kings College London. His research, teaching and writing have focused on addictive disorders, self-help organizations (e.g., breast cancer support groups, Alcoholics Anonymous), evaluation research methods, and public policy related to health care, mental illness, veterans, drugs, crime and correctional systems. Professor Humphreys' over 300 scholarly articles, monographs and books have been cited over thirteen thousand times by scientific colleagues. He is a regular contributor to Washington Post and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (UK), The Telegraph (UK), Times Higher Education (UK), Crossbow (UK) and other media outlets.
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The film is a decent and watchable tribute, if of course inaccurate.
AFAIK, in 1943 there was no serious “Nazi A-Bomb making effort” anymore, in the sense of any effort that had enough resources so that it could have resulted in a bomb in the next couple of years. This may not have been known to the Allies at the time, though.
This may not have been known to the Allies at the time, though.
Well, yes. There is that.
Going by the notes to Michael Frayn´s fine play Copenhagen based on the wartime meeting bewtween Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, it´s still a matter of dispute whether Heisenberg was in earnest or not about building the German A-bomb. The Nazis had a programme, and it might have worked, as did that of Los Alamos. No amount of Enigma decrypts would have settled the question of feasibility. Stromsheim and his heroic companions were right to risk their lives to make the failure certain.