Did Hitler have an atom bomb?

According to media reports, Hitler in second world war was too confident of Nazi Germany’s victory even in 1944-45 time frame when allies were closing in on him from all sides.

Nazi Germany was inches away from delivering intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuke warheads. Hitler’s confidence (fortunately for the world) never materialized because though the prototypes were tested, they could not be deliverd in the battlefield on time due to lack of resources and time constraints.

According to an 88-year-old former Italian war correspondent, Hitler was preparing to unleash a nuclear bomb on the Allies in the last days of the Second World War. In his book ''Hitler's Secret Weapon'', Luigi Romersa claims to be the last living witness to an experimental detonation of a Nazi weapon he says was the world's first atom bomb.

Recently, historian Rainer Karlsch published a study suggesting that the Nazis conducted three nuclear weapons tests in 1944 and 1945, killing 700 people.

According to think tanks, what really happened is that the Nazi Germany had definitely invented the nukes and missiles but the technology could not be delivered in the battlefield on time. The efforts failed due to lack of time and resources.

Romersa claims that in September 1944, Benito Mussolini entrusted him with a secret mission. Italy's wartime leader wanted to know more after Hitler boasted to him of weapons capable of reversing the course of the war. Romersa, then a 27-year-old war correspondent for Corriere della Sera, was sent to Germany and he met Hitler in a bunker in Rastenburg, northern Poland. He was also given a tour around the Nazis'' secret weapons plant at Peenemunde, on the Baltic coast.

Romersa said from his home in Rome how he saw weapons "streets ahead of any conventional weapons the allies had at the time". He said: "They were developing a missile which they said they intended to launch from Europe across the Atlantic to bomb America."

Recent evidence from Russian archives has, however, shown one of the German scientists lodged a patent claim for a plutonium bomb as early as 1941. Romersa said: "Hitler and Nazi Germany had a very, very developed weapons programme and were certainly capable of creating an atomic bomb."