Bernd Thälmann, 64, found the uranium based object near where a secret Third Reich factory was destroyed with 16,000 RAF bombs.
The industrial firm Auergesellschaft was founded in 1892 with headquarters in Berlin but its main plant was some 40 miles distant near Oranienburg.
Acquired by Degussa in 1934 – manufacturers of the gas Zyklon B which was used in the Holocaust to murder people in the death camps – its Oranienburg facility in 1939 began the development of industrial-scale, high-purity uranium oxide production.
This was the place where Hitler’s scientists raced to develop the weapon that would win them the war.
After defeat and conquest in 1945, Soviet research teams, sent equipment, material, and staff from the plant to the Soviet Union for use in their own nuclear weapon project.
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When Thälmann found the clump of material last Friday he triggered a major safety alert – and found himself at the centre of a criminal probe for the “illegal use of radioactive substances”.
Thälmann originally took the mysterious, metal-like lump back to his home. Although it appeared to be metal it was not magnetic. As he researched it on the Internet he began to become alarmed and called the police.
Together with the fire brigade a cordon was thrown around his home and those of 15 neighbours. Experts wearing anti radiation suits used specialist equipment to determine that his find was indeed radioactive.
It was packaged into a lead lined box and taken away. Experts say it was part of the Nazi atom bomb project that was dispersed into the countryside after one of the bombing raids to level the plant.
Thälmann has refused to tell police exactly where he found it because he intends to return to the site in future for further expeditions. Prosecutors have not yet decided whether to press charges against him.
On Thursday morning near the site of the old factory 3600 people had to leave their homes after an unexploded 250-kilogram bomb was defused.
In February this year documents unearthed in an archive suggest that Hitler may have tested an operational nuclear bomb before the end of the war.
A declassified file from the National Archives in Washington is a detailed survey of how far Nazi scientists got in the development of an atomic bomb.
The wartime report concluded that Hitler’s boffins failed in the quest to achieve a breakthrough in nuclear technology – BUT that a documented test may have taken place of a rudimentary warhead in 1944. The enriched uranium would have come from the Oranienburg works.