Looking for a Coal Depot in Germany, bombed in 1944-45? And Hitler's "Synfuel"
It sounds like Wallaken? Wannaken? And did you know that Germany has almost no indigenous supplies of petroleum? Read more to find out more.
As part of work transcribing oral histories, we research EVERYTHING. In this interview, a gentleman who was in the 39th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron says he still has some of the original photos he took while flying at the end of WW2. He says: “And I do have some original photographs taken at 20,000 feet of, I believe, Hanover, Germany, and a few other places. And one of those cameras shot of coming into [??? inaudible___00:30:18] to see how much damage they had done to it.” It sounds like Wallaken? Wannaken? Does anybody have a clue?
He’s talking about a coal depot in Germany that had been bombed, and we’re trying to find the place name. In the process, I came across some fascinating information about Germany’s preparation for WW2. The Department of Energy has a section called Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. In their article on the internet, Early Days of Coal Research, they talk about part of Hitler’s strategy in entering the war.
The leaders of World War II, on both sides, knew that an army's lifeblood was petroleum. Ironically, before the War, experts had scoffed at Adolph Hitler's idea that he could conquer the world largely because Germany had almost no indigenous supplies of petroleum. Hitler, however, had begun assembling a large industrial complex to manufacture synthetic petroleum from Germany's abundant coal supplies.
Germany ultimately produced more than 124,000 barrels of synfuel per day from 25 plants. “More than 92 percent of Germany's aviation gasoline and half its total petroleum during World War II had come from synthetic fuel plants.”
When Allied bombing of the synfuels plants in 1944 and 1945 intensified, the Nazi war machine began grinding to a halt.
After the war, in 1950, the United States decided to do more work on “turning coal into gas.” The Bureau of Mines had worked on a scheme to squeeze oil from shale in the 1920s and had experimented with the process of coal hydrogenation, a process that Frederick Bergius had discovered in the early part of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1931. The Nobel organization explains:
Fossil fuels - coal, oil and gas - contain energy that can be converted into other forms through combustion. Coal in solid form is largely made up of the element carbon in pure form, while oil is rich in compounds of carbon and hydrogen - hydrocarbons. In 1913 Friedrich Bergius developed a method for transforming a solid form of coal - lignite - into liquefied oil. The method entails exposing the coal to hydrogen gas under high pressure to form hydrocarbons. The process has been used primarily to produce fuel for vehicles.
Friedrich Bergius – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2022. Fri. 1 Apr 2022. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1931/bergius/facts/>
In the US, the Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act was approved in 1944, and the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, acting through the Bureau of Mines, was directed to establish demonstration plants that would collect enough data to allow business to assess the feasibility of synethic fuels, without significantly affecting the sales of the industry as it existed.
Hitler’s efforts to make oil out of coal seem particularly relevant now that Germany relies on Russian oil!
One of our researchers, Julia Hart, finally found the coal depot! Waldecken Coal Depot.
The Digital Collections of the National WWII Museum : Oral Histories | Oral History (ww2online.org)
The Digital Collections of the National WWII Museum : Oral Histories | Oral History
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