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       It is well known that Hitler’s Third Reich was working on the development of nuclear weapons during the World War II. At the end of the war more than six hundred small uranium cubes were confiscated by Allied forces from one research laboratory. They were shipped to the United States where they were scattered to public and private collections.
       Timothy Koeth is a physicist at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is a collector of World War II memorabilia, including some artifacts relating to nuclear weapons research. In 2013, he received a small metal cube from a mysterious source. The cube was about two inches on a side. It was wrapped in a piece of paper which had writing on it. The writing said “Taken from the reactor that Hitler tried to build. Gift of Ninninger.”
       Koeth decide that the cube was from the cache of German uranium cubes that had be confiscated at the end of the war. The surface of the cube was pockmarked with bubbles. This indicated that it had be created with primitive technology such as that available to the Germans during the War. The name “Ninninger” on the piece of paper was another clue to its origins. It turned out that the name was probably a misspelling of “Nininger,” the last name of Robert Nininger who had been involved in the Manhattan Project, the U.S. project to develop a atomic bomb for use in World War II. The widow of Nininger told Koeth that her husband did, in fact, own a small cube of German uranium which he eventually gave to a friend. Koeth believes that the cube was passed along by several people until it was ultimately was passed to him. There was no danger from radioactivity to the people who handled the cube.
      Most nuclear reactors today are fueled with uranium in which the ratio of U-235 to U-238 has been raised to at least five percent. It is known that the Germans were trying to develop a nuclear reactor with naturally occurring uranium which is mostly U-238. When Koeth tested the cube, it turned out to be emitting gamma rays consistent with naturally occurring uranium. Additional tests indicated that the cube had never been a part of a working reactor. If the cube had been in a functional reactor, it would have contained cesium-137 but none was detected.
      Computer models of possible German nuclear reactor designs suggested that German cache of six hundred and sixty-four cubes of uranium were not sufficient to create a working nuclear reactor. In order to create a self-sustaining nuclear reaction, what is called a “critical mass” must be assembled. It turns out that the Germans would have needed hundreds of addition uranium cubes in order to achieve the necessary critical mass. Records from World War II show that there was another German nuclear research group that had four hundred of the uranium cubes. It was only the competition of the two German research groups that prevented them from assembling enough cubes to actually make a nuclear reactor. It would have taken a great deal of additional work to actually produce an atomic bomb.
       Koeth displays the cube as part of his World War II memorabilia collection. He intends to give it to a museum at some point. It is fortunate that Hitler never obtained an atomic bomb because he had missiles that could have delivered such bombs to his enemies. This could have changed the outcome of World War II and the world would be much different today.