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Götterdämmerung and Aftermath

German Atom Bomb and WMDs - Part 1

German Nuclear "Wunderwaffen" in 1945?

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By  Daniel W. Michaels 
1 September 2005

Since World War II the history of the Third Reich has been written –for the most part– in English by the victors.

Understandably, the picture painted of German life and the accomplishments of the people under National Socialism has not been flattering, with the exception of German scientific and technological achievements, the value of which few would deny.

As testimony to this appreciation, at the end of the war, with Germany in total ruins, the British, Americans, French, and Russians all competed to recruit, bribe, or kidnap leading German scientists, to loot German industrial secrets, confiscate patents, and take whatever else their own societies could not provide.

Because Germany did not build nuclear bombs during the war, Western analysts believed that German scientists were incapable of doing so.

Today, however, books are being written in both Russia and Germany that considerably alter the previous prejudiced views of German nuclear competence entertained by the victors.

Two such books by German historians, Thomas Mehner's "The Atomic Bomb and the Third Reich" [1] and Rainer Kalsch's "Hitler’s Bomb" [2] now report advances made in Nuclear Physics by German scientists late in the war and in the immediate post-war period and later in the employ of their Soviet and American employers that had not been noted earlier.

The arguments concerning the seeming failure of the Germans to build a bomb ranged from the prejudiced contention the nuclear physicists were simply incompetent and incapable of building such a complex bomb.

A more kindly argument is that leading German physicists out of the noblest of motives had deliberately undermined and discouraged the Nazis’ attempt to build the bomb.

Although now somewhat dated, David Irving’s "The Virus House"  remains the earliest and most objective study of German efforts during the war. [3]

Evidence now available from German and Russian sources [the Soviets had confiscated the scientific papers of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin] now suggest that the Germans had quite possibly conducted several field tests of a nuclear device in the spring of 1945, thereby demolishing both arguments.

Some German scientists were indeed working on the development of a nuclear weapon; others preferred to work on non-military applications of nuclear power.

While Heisenberg, von Weizäcker, Albert Speer and others very likely did try for various reasons to dissuade their government from building the bomb, lesser-known German physicists of the time allegedly attempted to develop a nuclear weapon, albeit a much smaller device than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Among the better known German physicists who were interred and interrogated by the Western Allies at Farm Hill, England, after the war were: Werner Heisenberg, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Otto Hahn, Max van Laune, Erich Bagger, Kurt Diebner, Walther Gerlach, Paul Harteck, Horst Korsching, and Karl Wirtz.

Another group of equally competent physicists, including Manfred von Ardenne, Gernot Zippe, Peter Thiessen, Max Steenbeck, and Gustav Hertz [Hertz, being half-Jewish, went willingly] were simply kidnapped to the Soviet Union and ordered to reproduce their work in Sukhumi, a Georgian city on the Black Sea.

The Soviets promised to release them after they had completed their assignments, a promise they eventually kept.

As early as 1940, all German nuclear physicists and a considerable segment of the military were aware of the potential of developing weapons of great destructive power based on the release of energy from nuclear fission/fusion.

Although von Weizsäcker and Heisenberg later distanced themselves from the development of nuclear weapons [Uranium and Plutonium) for wartime use, the former by accepting a professorship in Strasbourg and the later by concentrating on reactor development, both knew exactly the destructive potential the bomb would have.

For example, in 1941 Weizsäcker submitted a patent application [cited by Karlsch] that read: [4]

“The production of element 94 [Plutonium] in practically useful amounts is best done with the ‘Uranium machine’ [nuclear reactor].

It is especially advantageous –and this is the main benefit of the invention– that the element 94 thereby produced can easily be separated from Uranium chemically. With regard to energy per unit weight this explosive would be around ten million times greater than any other existing explosive and comparable only to pure Uranium 235.

[Further, he describes a] process for the production of explosive energy from the fission of element 94, whereby element 94 is brought together in such amounts in one place, e.g., a bomb, so that the overwhelming majority of neutrons produced by fission excite new fissions and do not leave the substance.

The 1941 "Plutonium" patent,  is not news:

Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker  was a member of the Heisenberg team, and in the Oak Ridge, Tennessee archives of the US Atomic Energy Authority David Irving found the original proposal made by him to the Heereswaffenamt [German Army Ordnance Dept] on 1 July 1940, for the production of Plutonium from a nuclear reactor - once they had got it critical. 
 

In February 1942 Heisenberg, while still the most prominent figure in the German Uranium Project [Uranverein], gave a public lecture on the possibilities of developing nuclear weapons, in which he concluded that energy generation from Uranium fission was undoubtedly possible, providing the enrichment of isotope U-235 is successful.

Isolating U-235, he contended, would lead to an explosive of unimaginable power.

In another lecture in the summer of 1942 Heisenberg spoke of America’s exceptionally great interest in nuclear weaponry and predicted that, if the war lasted long enough, the technical realization of atomic nuclear energies could play a decisive role in the war.

Because of his notoriety and brilliance [he had earlier won a Nobel Prize] Werner Heisenberg and his associates became the main focus of Allied concern, even to the point where the Allies planned to assassinate him at a conference in Switzerland before he could develop a German bomb. [5]

Then, as now, American Intelligence tended to concentrate on celebrity figures, often disregarding lesser-known but extremely competent individuals.

Actually, Heisenberg was competing with a lesser-known German team in a race to get an atomic pile critical.

It was precisely this other group of lesser-known German physicists, working directly for the German Armed Forces and under SS protection, that actually developed an atomic pile that went critical. This team, according to Karlsch, also experimented with a nuclear device in the last months of the war in a desperate attempt to stop the Russian juggernaut.

With the tide of war turning, Army officials, now convinced that pure U-235 could become an explosive a million times more powerful than conventional explosives, intensified their interest in possible military applications of the Uranium Project.

The Reich Research Council and the German Army took charge of the program. Heinrich Himmler was appointed head of the German Army Weapons program in the summer of 1944.

Party member Kurt Diebner, always closest to the Army Weapons Center operations, assumed responsibility for nuclear weapons development.

With the exception of Diebner, who was a member of the National Socialist Party, the other German physicists [like most scientists everywhere] were for the most part apolitical.

According to the authors, the main effort of the Germans to develop a nuclear weapon took place in the Arnstadt-Wechmar-Ohrdruf [AWO] triangle in Thuringia.

Kurt Diebner and Walther Gerlach, the scientific leaders of the research team attempting desperately to develop a nuclear weapon in the last days of the war, were housed in the basement of the high school near Arnstadt in the Jonastal valley. [6]

SS General Hans Kammler, himself a doctor of engineering, headed the protective forces surrounding the experimental area.

Extensive underground galleries to house various facilities were excavated in Jonastal; the army training grounds in Ohrdruf was used as the bomb test range and a reactor, better designed than Heisenberg’s in Haigerloch, was situated in the town of Gottow.

Also involved in this project, according to the authors, was the research office of the Reichspost under Wilhelm Ohnesorge as well as offices of the Skoda Works in Prague.

The Siemens electrical enterprises were involved in critical stages of the project. Laborers were drawn from various concentration camps in the area.

Also, German naval authorities, including Admirals Karl Witzell and Wilhelm Rhein as well as physicists Otto Haxel, Fritz Houtermans, and Pascual Jordan, took an active part in researching the potential of nuclear power. The Navy’s main interest was of course in the development of the “Uranium machine” as the basis for propulsion systems for surface ships and submarines. [7]

It is the contention of the authors of both books that the Germans actually succeeded in developing and testing the prototypes of a small nuclear device [a subcritical 100-g A-weapon] as well as a delivery system, the long-range A9/A10 missile whose characteristics and capabilities were comparable to the later U.S. Titan II.

The project was code-named S-III [S = Sondervorhaben, Special Project]. The code name “Olga” referred to the so-called “America Rocket".

Thomas Mehner provides U.S. aerial photographs taken by the 7th US Photo Group of the launch pad of the prototype rocket, which the authors believe was successfully tested on 16 March 1945.

Moreover, as Karlsch makes clear, the Soviet government was also informed about the German nuclear experiments.

A Soviet Intelligence report Karlsch introduces, submitted to Stalin on 23 March 1945 by Kurchatov, the head of the Soviet Nuclear Bomb Program, on the initiative of the head of military Intelligence [GRU] in Germany, Lieutenant General Il’ichëv, [8] reads: [9]

"Just recently, the Germans detonated two massive explosions in a wooded area of Thuringia under the greatest secrecy. Trees at a distance of 500 to 600 meters were knocked down. Prisoners used in the experiment were killed, often no remains were found. Others suffered facial and body burns. A strong shock wave and high temperatures accompanied the bomb detonations. The bombs were spherical in shape and had a diameter of 130 cm".

Karlsch maintains that the Gattow reactor, combined with the output of centrifuges, and electromagnetic mass separators –all of which were available– could have produced the several hundred grams of enriched Uranium required by the device.

Mayer and Mehner believe that a French-designed betatron and Norwegian-built heavy water facilities were also at the Germans disposal.

Based on Schumann’s hollow charge principle for focusing the energy to a single spot in the shell, the device so developed and tested, according to Karlsch, created a shock wave, a heat wave, and released considerable radioactivity.

In all, three tests were conducted. The earliest occurred in October 1944 on Rügen Island. It was witnessed by Italian war correspondent Luigi Romersa who informed Mussolini of the event. [10] The final test, and the one about which the most information is available, took place on 4 March 1945 in Ohrdruf.

Karlsch concludes that the Ohrdruf device was more of a small, tactical-type device, much less powerful than the U.S. bombs being developed at the time, the critical mass of which was about 50 kilograms of U-235.

The destructive range of the German device was about 500 meters in diameter. Its importance today is that it was what is now referred to as a kind of “dirty” bomb. Regrettably, in the German experiment several hundred people [mostly from a nearby concentration camp], who were used as support personnel, are reported to have been killed by the experiment.

He also surmises that because several hundred innocent individuals died in the German experiment that Diebner, Gerlach, and others involved in these tests have never spoken openly about their work during the last months of the war. Fear of being accused as war criminals is believed to have kept all involved mute.

Karlsch provides both eyewitness accounts of the test as well as forensic [crater photo, ground sampling for radioactive isotopes, etc.] on-site evidence to support his literature and document studies.

Ground-sampling tests first done on Rügen Island yielded disappointing results, which Karlsch attributed to soil erosion over the years. Similar tests conducted in the Ohrdruf test range showed a significant increase in cesium values the closer one approached to the center of the explosion; cobalt 60, an artificial element that occurs when fast neutrons strike iron or nickel, was also detected.

Gerald Kirchner of the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection maintains that so far there is no evidence of a nuclear bomb burst. However, Uwe Keyser of the German Federal Technical Physics Office in Braunschweig insists that the measured values of radioactive substances at the site have been so significant that the explosion of a simple nuclear device cannot be excluded. [11]

Eyewitness accounts of the event include statements by a worker who helped cremate those who perished on improvised pyres right on the test site, comments made by Werner Grothmann, Himmler’s adjutant [the tests were run under the supervision of the SS], as well as the following graphic statement by Cläre Werner, who witnessed the test from the heights of the Wachsenburg: [12]

“I can still remember the day very well. It was 4 March, 1945. We had scheduled a birthday party for that evening, but it was cancelled. In the afternoon the BDM [Federation of German Girls] of Gotha was on the mountain. Hans was also there to help out and told us that world history would be written today in this area. It would be something the world had never seen before.

"We were to go on the mountain that evening and look off in the direction of Lake Röhren. He didn’t know himself what the new thing would look like. So we were on the site at 8 PM. At half past 9 PM the area behind Lake Röhren lit up like as though a hundred lightning bolts had struck. It was red inside and yellow on the outside.

"You could read the newspaper by the light. It all happened very quickly and we couldn’t see anything except what sounded like a squall, after which everything was quiet.

"I, like many inhabitants from Lake Röhren, Holzhausen, Mühlberg, Wechmar and Bittstädt had nose bleeds, headaches, and felt pressure on the ear, the next day. At about 2 PM there were about 100-150 SS-men on the mountain. They asked where the bodies were, where they were taken, and who was there.

"We didn’t know anything and they asked us if they were here in the 'Burg Object'. I told them they were on the Veste Wachsenburg, which the people always call the Burg.

" A motorcyclist reported that the Burg could be reached via Ringhofen. Then the cars drove from the Burg to Mühlberg. I saw that from there they drove to the test area”.

According to a 1997 edition of the magazine "Wissenschaft ohne Grenzen" up to 3,000 people including SS personnel and scientists, including their women and children, all of "pure Aryan origins",  just prior to capture by Patton's 3rd army,  disappeared into an underground facility in the Jonas Valley called "Burg".

After the people were inside, the entrance was sealed with explosives. 

Karlsch also cites an exuberant exclamation made by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler in March 1945: [13]

“We have not yet deployed our last miracle weapon. To be sure, the V1s and V2 are effective weapons, but our decisive miracle weapon will demonstrate such results that no one can even imagine.

"One or two strikes and cities like New York or London will disappear from the face of the earth".

Elements of Patton’s 3rd Army occupied the AWO area on 12 April 1945 and immediately reported their findings to higher headquarters.

American forces quickly began to dismantle some of the facilities together with copious documents for shipment back to the United States.

Soviet forces relieved the Americans in July 1945 and continued investigating the area.

A Major Robert Allen of Patton’s forces wrote about what he encountered, as did a Soviet defector, Gregory Klimov, formerly associated with the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, about the Red Army’s finds. [14]

As later evidence of Diebner’s advanced work late in the war, Karlsch notes that as soon as German physicists were permitted by the Allies to resume their work in the postwar period [1955].

Diebner submitted several noteworthy patents not just on reactors but also on the construction of a hydrogen bomb.

Diebner also wrote about the potential use of nuclear energy in controlled underground explosions, in port construction, the shipbuilding industry, and for ship propulsion, including submarines.

Indeed, Germany commissioned the world’s second [the 'USS Savannah' was first] nuclear-powered merchant-research ship, 'Otto Hahn', in 1968.

The 15,000-t ship sailed 650,000 nautical miles in 10 years without suffering any technical problems. Nor did the eventual mating of nuclear propulsion with submarines escape the wartime German researchers.

Also, with respect to methods of building a hydrogen bomb, Karlsch reviewed the papers of physicist Erich Schumann, director of the research center of the German Army Weapons-Research Office.

In a  series of sensationalistic books, Thomas Mehner has written about
secret Third Reich Weapon research, 
including one with the title 
“Nuclear Target New York” 
on long-range missles and space vehicles to attack major U.S. cities.

Schumann claims that as early as 1944 he had found a way through the use of conventional explosives to generate sufficiently high temperatures of several million degrees Celsius and extreme pressures to produce nuclear fusion.

According to Schumann, two hollow charges, directed against each other under special conditions, releases enough energy to create nuclear fusion. Schumann believes that the Diebner team actually tested this procedure at the Ohrdruf test range in Thuringia.

In mid-April 1945 the German transport and minelayer submarine U-234, [15] also referred to as an undersea aircraft carrier, was deployed by the German High Command to Japan carrying examples of the latest high-tech German developments in armaments [radar, jet engines, Henschel HS-293 glider bombs, Me-262 jet fighters, a V2 rocket, etc.] for use by its Japanese ally.

Most importantly, U-234, after it surrendered to the United States Navy when the war ended, was found to carry some 560 kilograms of Uranium oxide in its cargo. [16]

Western analysts have speculated as to its intended use in Japan. Some think it was to support Japan’s own nuclear program, others speculate that it was for the production of synthetic methanol used in aviation fuel, but others have suggested that perhaps it was intended for the production of "dirty" bombs [atomic material combined with conventional explosives] by the Japanese to be dropped over the U. S Pacific coast.

Although the U-234 also carried German civilian engineers and scientists, none are said to have been specialists in nuclear matters. The contents of the documents seized on the U-234 have not been made public.

All the documentation regarding the recoveries in Thuringia, the load of U-234 and what Americans found in several I.G. Farben plants has been classified for 100 years,

it won’t be viewable until 2045
.

With regard to the development of so-called "dirty" bombs, mention must be made of the group of German scientists forced to work in the Soviet Union.

The head of the group, Manfred von Ardenne, was ordered by his captors to build the bomb. Von Ardenne explained to the Russians that it was first essential to perfect an efficient method of enriching Uranium to fuel, as it were, the bomb.

Upon receiving the permission of the Soviets to make the enrichment of Uranium first priority, von Ardenne appointed Max Steenbeck and Guernot Zippe responsible, the former being the theoretician and the latter the experimentalist.

Within five years Zippe had built a highly cost- and task-efficient centrifuge model, which, by 1953, the Russians had adopted and were already building full-scale plants to accommodate and implement them.

The Soviet authorities then agreed to permit the Germans to return to their shattered Fatherland, but only after a “cooling-off” period of several years. Zippe utilized these years as he endured them by learning English.

He returned home in July 1957 and was soon commissioned by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to build such a centrifuge system for the United States.

Since the Russians did not permit Zippe to take any notes, papers, or drawings of his work in the Soviet Union, Zippe reproduced his centrifuge entirely from memory.

The centrifuge, which used only about 10% as much electricity as the established gaseous diffusion process, was much in advance of existing designs in the West and was therefore quickly accepted here and in the Urenco consortium in Europe.

The United States, until Zippe’s major centrifuge contribution, had been using energy-guzzling electromagnetic caultrons for isotope separation.

In effect, Zippe not only revolutionized the centrifuge method throughout the world but, by doing so, also dangerously lowered the nuclear threshold, making the development of nuclear weapons accessible to many poorer nations.

Under the terms of the cease-fire in the first Gulf War, the International Atomic Energy Commission’s inspection team confirmed that Iraq was indeed trying, but as yet not succeeding, in realizing the benefits of the centrifuge system.

Another German centrifuge expert, Bruno Stemmler, who was also familiar with the work done in Urenco, had earlier [1988-89] assisted the Iraqis in adopting the centrifuge system, but subsequently was ordered by Germany to sever his collaboration. [17]

There is little doubt that the Iraqis were attempting to develop nuclear weaponry utilizing Zippe’s method before they were dissuaded forcibly after the first Gulf War.

Since 1990 the professional literature on Zippe’s centrifuges has become so voluminous that almost any country with the requisite resources and professionals can attempt to duplicate Zippe’s original work. [18]

Comments

Both books "Die Atombombe und das Dritte Reich" and "Hitler’s Bombe", especially the former, are highly speculative and inconclusive.

The use of the term “atomic bomb” in the titles of these books is entirely misleading – an example of advertising hype by German publishing houses.

The nuclear device, about which the German authors speak, was probably even less powerful than the smallest known nuclear tactical weapon in the Western arsenal, the XW-54 "Davy Crocket".

Without the bombs and the bombast, these books still tell the fascinating story of the desperate, heroic efforts of German engineers and scientists, in the face of imminent defeat, to turn the tide of battle.

The Mehner book relies heavily on hearsay and the informative letters of the mysterious Hans Michael Ritterman, alias Hans David Hoffmann, who, we are told, occupied a high position as a construction engineer in the AWO triangle from 1938 to 1945.

Upon the arrival of the American forces he became a collaborator with the occupying forces and was awarded Jewish identification papers and the privilege of living in Israel as a reward. As the ultimate insider, his information provides the backbone of the Mehner book. 

Conveniently for the author, but inconvenient for anyone wishing to vet him, he is said to have died in 2001.

Unfortunately, other important key figures in the story about the AWO triangle, as for example SS General Hans Kammler, were also officially declared unaccounted for after the war and assumed dead, although they may have been held incommunicado for interrogation by either U.S. or USSR authorities after the war and given new identities for their co-operation.

The death of SS boss Heinrich Himmler after the war, now believed by some to have been at British hands, [19] was particularly unfortunate in that he would have known most about the experiments.

The genre of the Mehner book is very much similar to the many speculative books and articles written, for example, about Germany’s Neu-Schwabenland expedition to Antarctica in 1938-1939.

For years it was rumored that the Germans had used the area to build submarine pens and to launch flying saucers, while it was nothing more than a scientific expedition, possibly to lay the groundwork for an official claim to the area.

As for the Ritterman letters, one recalls the several volumes of journals, ostensibly written by the former head of the Gestapo [German secret police] Heinrich Müller.

A good writer with a fertile imagination can invent all manner of things to dress up a bare topic. He can even resurrect ghosts from the past to lend verisimilitude to his story.

The more recent Karlsch book "Hitler’s Bombe", however, is much better researched and documented, and far more convincing.

It cannot, and indeed has not, been dismissed out of hand.

To begin with, Karlsch makes no reference whatsoever to a mysterious Hans Ritterman.

Quite the contrary, Karlsch has consulted with and sought the advice of contemporary scientists whose opinions he cites. Among the original documents he includes in his work are:

1. The von Weizäcker patent applications;
2. Diebner’s 1942 report of the Army Weapons Center in which in states that – theoretically – an atomic bomb can be built;
3. Formulas for the fusion of light elements and the critical mass for a Plutonium bomb, written by Friedrich Berkei, Diebner’s deputy. [Incidentally, Berkei died in 1966 at age 55 of radiation sickness]; [20]
4. A letter written by Diebner in late 1944 to Heisenberg reporting on reactor problems;
5. Gerlach’s 1944 notes, sketches, and formulas for thermo-nuclear reactions;
6. A Schumann letter to Ernst Telschow concerning tests on the fusion of light elements;
7. The Kurchatov report on German atomic bomb work.

altEven the publication of a drawing of the German atomic bomb in reference, [4] made after the war had ended, is not conclusive in any way

Rügen, which was a military area until 1991 [when the airbase of Dranske was closed] and it became a protected area, was analyzed.

Analysis shows some things:

1} In a crater 25m wide and deep 5m deep, soil samples, taken by Physicists of Justus Liebig University, exhibited values of Cesium of 137, five times higher than normal, with "vitrified and fused black particles", found in the bottom.

2) Analysis was done after Chernobyl by the University of Giessen in 2003

3) Analysis in the area of Ohrdruf by Uwe Keyser in 2005 shows an abnormal amount of fissionable material in such a wide spectrum that it can not be attributed to any natural cause.

A drawing of the bomb is far removed from actually building it.

Although the title of his book, "Hitler’s Bomb", suggests more than the author could actually deliver, Karlsch defines the main thesis of his book much more soberly.

He states very clearly that German scientists did not develop a nuclear device at all comparable to the American or Soviet hydrogen bombs of the 1950s.

However, they knew in general terms how they functioned and were in a position to excite an initial nuclear reaction by means of their perfected hollow-charge technology.

Only further research will determine whether their experiment represented fusion or fission reactions, or both.

Without access to the dismantled equipment and documents confiscated by the occupying forces, hard physical evidence proving that a nuclear device was indeed detonated in the Ohrdruf test grounds is almost impossible to find.

Consequently the author has had to rely on detective work and the accumulation of circumstantial evidence, which still remains inadequate.

Uwe Keyser, a nuclear physicist from the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology, currently testing soil samples at the site, has found that traces of radioactive substances are sufficiently abnormal as to warrant further investigations.

Analysis shows some things:

1) In a crater 25m wide and deep 5m deep, soil samples, taken by Physicists of Justus Liebig University, exhibited values of Cesium of 137, five times higher than normal, with "vitrified and fused black particles", found in the bottom.
2) Analysis was done after Chernobyl by the University of Giessen in 2003
3) Analysis in the area of Ohrdruf by Uwe Keyser in 2005 shows an abnormal amount of fissionable material in such a wide spectrum that it can not be attributed to any natural cause.

[1] Edgar Mayer, Thomas Mehner, "Die Atombombe und das Dritte Reich: Das Geheimnis des Dreiecks Arnstadt-Wechmar-Ohrdruf [AWO]" [The Atomic Bomb and the Third Reich: The Secret of the Arnstadt-Wechmar-Ohrdruf Triangle], Jochen Kopp Verlag, Rottenburg a. N., 2002. 
[2] Rainer Karlsch, "Hitlers Bombe: Die geheime Geschichte der deutschen Kernwaffenversuche", Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, 2005.  
[3] Irving remains the only independent researcher who personally interviewed most of the Nazi nuclear physicists, including also Reich armaments minister Albert Speer. Subsequent noteworthy works on this topic are Thomas Powers’ "Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb" and Mark Walker’s "Nazi Science. Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb". 
[4] 'New light on Hitler’s bomb', "Physics World", June 2005, UK. Also, op. cit., Karlsch. 
[5] See Gerhard Sommer, 'Certainty about Werner Heisenberg', TR¸ 1 [1] [2003]. 
[6] Not to be confused with Joachimstal, which Soviet forces also occupied and immediately began mining the Uranium deposits there. A Soviet aerial photograph of Jonastal indicating the location of some of the galleries is reproduced on pages 170-173 of the Mayer/Mehner work. 
[7] R. Karlsch, op. cit. 
[8] Ivan Ivanovich Il’ichëv headed the GRU during the war until 1942, at which time Fëdr Kuznetsov took over command. After the war Il’ichëv served as Soviet High Commissioner to Austria and later as Ambassador to Copenhagen. Strangely, Pavel Sudoplatov in his book "Special Tasks" gives Il’ichëv’s first name as Leonid rather than Ivan. 

"The German device probably was a 2-ton cylinder containing enriched Uranium", Karlsch writes.

"The amount of Uranium was small, meaning the conventional explosives used to trigger the device did not set off a vastly more destructive nuclear chain reaction".

That would mesh with an account Karlsch said he found in Soviet military archives, apparently based on information from a German informant, that said the blast felled trees within a radius of about 500 to 600 yards.  

"Russian officials were unaware of any such test by the Germans", said Nikolai Shingaryov, a spokesman for Russia's Federal Nuclear Agency. "Of course we don't know everything, but we don't have data about this", he said.

[9] R. Karlsch, op. cit.
[10] In March 1959 Romersa published a series of articles in the Spanish newspaper "Las Provincias", in which he recounts his knowledge of German wartime technological and scientific advances and his personal acquaintance with Wernher von Braun.  
[11] R. Karlsch, op. cit. 
[12] Edgar Mayer, Thomas Mehner, op. cit. 
[13] R. Karlsch, op. cit.
[14] Robert S. Allen, "Lucky Forward: The History of Patton’s Third U.S. Army", Vanguard Press, New York, 1947; Grigorii Klimov, "Berliner Kreml", Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne, 1951. 
[15] Coincidentally and suggestively, the boat number U-234 is also the element uranium II. Both Germany and Japan would have found use for these boats had the war lasted longer. With the aircraft launched from the submarines Japan could have attacked targets along the U.S. Pacific Coast and the Panama Canal, while the Germans could have done the same against the U.S. Atlantic Coast. 
[16] R. Karlsch, op. cit. 
[17] Dan Charles, 'In the beginning was Uranium...', "New Scientist", 24 October 1992, UK. 
[18] William J. Broad, 'Slender and Elegant, It Fuels the Bomb: How an Austrian POW Devised the Machine That Spun the Nuclear Age'. "The New York Times", 23 March 2004.
[19] See Joseph Bellinger, "Himmlers Tod. Freitod oder Mord?", Arndt Verlag, Kiel 2005. 
[20] Karlsch reports that Irving had requested to study Berkei’s wartime notebooks, but before they could be delivered they disappeared. 

New Light on Hitler's Bomb

Controversial new historical evidence suggests that German physicists built and tested a nuclear bomb during the Second World War
Rainer Karlsch and Mark Walker
"Physics World" Volume 18, Number 6   
June 2005
 
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the American nuclear attack on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in August 1945 were the fruit of a herculean wartime effort by the American, British and émigré scientists involved in the Manhattan Project.

They had to overcome great obstacles and were only able to test their first atomic bomb after Germany surrendered in May of that year. The main motivation for these scientists when the project began in 1941 was the possibility that they were engaged in a race with their German counterparts to harness nuclear fission for war.
 
Even Albert Einstein had been involved, signing a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 urging that the US take nuclear weapons seriously. And in December 1943 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr visited Los Alamos -the home of the Manhattan Project- to offer both scientific and moral support.

But when the war was over, it was clear that the Germans did not have atomic bombs like those used against Japan.
 
The German "Uranium project" -which had been set up in 1939 to investigate nuclear reactors, isotope separation and nuclear explosives- amounted to no more than a few dozen scientists scattered across the country. Many of them did not even devote all of their time to nuclear-weapons research.

The Manhattan Project, in contrast, employed thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians, and cost several billion dollars.
 
Not surprisingly, historians have concluded that Germany was not even close to building a working nuclear device. However, newly discovered historical material makes this story more complicated - and much more interesting.
 
Germany and the Bomb: a turbulent tale
 
Our understanding of the German nuclear-weapons project during the Second World War has changed over time because important new sources of information keep turning up.

For example, in 1992 the British government released transcripts of secretly recorded conversations between 10 German scientists who had been interned at Farm Hall near Cambridge in 1945.

With the exception of Max van Laue, all the scientists -Erich Bagge, Kurt Diebner, Walther Gerlach, Otto Hahn, Paul Harteck, Werner Heisenberg, Horst Korsching, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Karl Wirtz-  had been involved in the Uranium project.

What was most interesting was the surprise with which the scientists greeted the news that Hiroshima had been bombed. Ironically, at the end of the war German scientists had been convinced that they were ahead of the Allies in the race for nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.
 
Further intriguing material appeared in 2002 when the "Niels Bohr Archives" in Copenhagen released drafts of letters that had been written by Bohr in the late 1950s about a visit to occupied Denmark by Heisenberg and von Weizsäcker in September 1941.

After the war, the two German physicists claimed that they had merely gone to Copenhagen to assist Bohr and enlist his help in their efforts to forestall all nuclear weapons. But in the letters, Bohr denied that their actions or motivations had been so noble. The intrigue surrounding the visit has been well dramatized in Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen".
 
We now have an extra twist to the tale with new documents that were recently discovered in Russian archives, including papers from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin.

There are four particularly notable items among this material: An official report written by von Weizsäcker after a visit to Copenhagen in March 1941; a draft patent application written by von Weizsäcker sometime in 1941; a revised patent application in November of that year and the text of a popular lecture given by Heisenberg in June 1942.
 
Rainer Karlsch has used these documents -as well as many other sources- as the basis of a new book "Hitlers Bombe".

The book, which was published in March, prompted a heated debate about how close Germany was to acquiring nuclear weapons and how significant these weapons were [see "Physics World" April 2005].

Working with the journalist Heiko Petermann, Karlsh discovered that a group of German scientists had carried out a hitherto-unknown nuclear-reactor experiment and tested some sort of a nuclear device in Thüringen, eastern Germany, in March 1945.

According to eyewitness accounts given at the end of that month and two decades later, the test killed several hundred prisoners of war and concentration-camp inmates. Although it is not clear if the device worked as intended, it was designed to use nuclear fission and fusion reactions. It was, therefore, a nuclear weapon.
 
Following the publication of "Hitlers Bombe", another document has turned up from a private archive.

Written immediately after the end of the war in Europe, the undated document contains the only known German drawing of a nuclear weapon.
 
What did German scientists know?
 
Over the years, several authors have concluded that Heisenberg and his colleagues did not understand how an atomic bomb would work. T

hese authors include the physicist Samuel Goudsmit, who in 1947 published the results of a US Army investigation -entitled "Alsos"- into Germany's bomb effort.

The historian Paul Lawrence Rose came to the same conclusion in his 1998 book "Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project 1939-1945". These critics argue that the German scientists did not understand the physics of a nuclear-fission chain reaction, in which fast neutrons emitted by a Uranium-235 or Plutonium nucleus trigger further fission reactions.

Both Goudsmit and Rose also say the Germans failed to realize that Plutonium can be a nuclear explosive.
 
These criticisms of the Germans' scientific incompetence are apparently reinforced by the Farm Hall conversations, which reveal that Heisenberg initially responded to the news of Hiroshima with a flawed calculation of critical mass, although within a few days he had improved it and provided a very good estimate.

However, there was other evidence that, no matter how Heisenberg responded at Farm Hall, he and his colleagues understood that atomic bombs would use fast-neutron chain reactions and that both Plutonium and Uranium-235 were fissionable materials.
 
For example, in February 1942 the German army officials who were responsible for weapons development described the progress of the Uranium project in a report entitled 'Energy production from Uranium'. This overview, which was discovered in the 1980s, drew upon all classified material from Hahn, Harteck, Heisenberg and the other scientists working on the project.

The report concluded that pure Uranium-235 -which forms just 0.7% of natural Uranium, the rest being non-fissionable Uranium-238- would be a nuclear explosive a million times more powerful than conventional explosives.

It also argued that a nuclear reactor, once operating, could be used to make Plutonium, which would be an explosive of comparable force. The critical mass of such a weapon would be "around 10-100 kg", which was comparable to the Allies' estimate from 6 November 1941 of 2-100 kg that is recorded in the official history of the Manhattan Project - the so-called Smyth report.
 
Von Weizsäcker's draft patent application of 1941, which is perhaps the most surprising find from the new Russian documents, makes it crystal clear that he did indeed understand both the properties and the military applications of Plutonium.

"The production of element 94 [i.e. Plutonium] in practically useful amounts is best done with the "Uranium machine" [nuclear reactor], the application states. "It is especially advantageous -and this is the main benefit of the invention- that the element 94 thereby produced can easily be separated from Uranium chemically".
 
Von Weizsäcker also makes it clear that Plutonium could be used in a powerful bomb.

"With regard to energy per unit weight this explosive would be around ten million times greater than any other [existing explosive] and comparable only to pure Uranium 235," he writes.

Later in the patent application, he describes a "process for the explosive production of energy from the fission of element 94, whereby element 94...is brought together in such amounts in one place, for example a bomb, so that the overwhelming majority of neutrons produced by fission excite new fissions and do not leave the substance".
 
This is nothing less than a patent claim on a Plutonium bomb.
 
On 3 November 1941 the patent application was resubmitted with the same title: "Technical extraction of energy, production of neutrons, and manufacture of new elements by the fission of Uanium or related heavier elements".

This submission differed in two significant ways. First, the patent was now filed on behalf of the entire Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, instead of just von Weizsäcker. Second, every mention of nuclear explosive or bomb had been removed.
 
The removal of any reference to weapons could reflect the change of fortunes in the Second World War:

In November 1941 a quick German victory no longer appeared as certain as it had done earlier in the year. Another possible explanation is that von Weizsäcker and his colleagues had a change of heart - perhaps their initial enthusiasm for the military applications of nuclear fission had cooled.

This would support Heisenberg's and von Weizsäcker's post-war claims that they had visited Bohr in September 1941 because they were ambivalent about working on nuclear weapons. Perhaps the most forceful exponent of this thesis is Thomas Powers in his 1993 book "Heisenberg's War".
 
But another of the new Russian documents -von Weizsäcker's report on his visit to Copenhagen in spring 1941- suggests that, at least at that time, he was enthusiastic about the Uranium work.

Indeed, we know that, after the war, scientists from Bohr's institute accused Heisenberg and von Weizsäcker of acting as German spies when they came to Copenhagen. There may at least be some truth to this because in March 1941, when Germany had not yet invaded the Soviet Union and victory appeared likely, von Weizsäcker reported the following to the Army:

"The technical extraction of energy from Uranium fission is not being worked on in Copenhagen. They know that in America Fermi has started research into these questions in particular; however, no more news has arrived since the beginning of the war.

"Obviously Professor Bohr does not know that we are working on these questions; of course, I encouraged him in this belief...

"The American journal 'Physical Review' was complete in Copenhagen up to the 15 January 1941 issue. I have brought back photocopies of the most important papers. We arranged that the German Embassy will regularly photocopy [make photographs of] the issues for us".
 
The spotlight turns to Diebner
 
"Hitlers Bombe" draws upon what was already known about the German wartime work on nuclear reactors and isotope separation, and uses documents from Russian archives, oral history and industrial archaeology to open up a new chapter in the history of German nuclear weapons.

For most of the war, there were two competing groups working on nuclear reactors: A team under the Army physicist Kurt Diebner in Gottow near Berlin; and scientists directed by Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig and Berlin.
 
Whereas the experiments under Heisenberg used alternating layers of Uranium and moderator, Diebner's team developed a superior 3D lattice of Uranium cubes embedded in moderator.

Heisenberg never gave Diebner and the scientists working under him the credit they were due, but the Nobel laureate did take up Diebner's design for the last experiment carried out in Haigerloch in south-west Germany. Karlsch now reveals that Diebner managed to carry out one last experiment in the last months of the war.

The exact details of the experiment are unclear. After a series of measurements had been taken, Diebner wrote a short letter to Heisenberg on 10 November 1944 that informed him of the experiment and hinted that there had been problems with the reactor.

Unfortunately, no more written sources have been found relating to this final reactor experiment in Gottow. Industrial archaeology done at the site during 2002 and 2003 suggests that this reactor sustained a chain reaction -if only for a short period of time- and may have ended in an accident.
 
In 1955 Diebner submitted a patent application for a new type of "two-stage" reactor that could breed Plutonium. An internal section would use enriched Uranium to achieve a self-sustaining chain reaction, while a much larger external section would surround the internal reactor and run at a subcritical level.

Plutonium could then be removed from internal section. It appears likely that Diebner's 1955 patent application drew upon his last wartime experiment.
 
More surprising, if not shocking, is another revelation in Karlsch's book: A group of scientists under Diebner built and tested a nuclear weapon with the strong support of both Walther Gerlach - an experimental nuclear physicist who by 1944 was in charge of the Uranium project for the Reich Research Council. [Hahn, Heisenberg, von Weizsäcker and most of the better-known scientists in the Uranium project apparently were not informed about this weapon].

This device was designed to use fission reactions, but it was not an "atomic" bomb like the weapons used against Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And although it was also designed to exploit fusion reactions, it was nothing like the "hydrogen" bombs tested by the US and the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
 
Instead, conventional high explosives were formed into a hollow shape, rather than a solid mass, to focus the energy and heat from the explosion to one point inside the shell.

Small amounts of enriched Uranium, as well as a source of neutrons, were combined with a deuterium-lithium mixture inside the shell. This weapon would have been more of a tactical than a strategic weapon, and could not have won the war for Hitler in any case.

It is not clear how successful this design was and whether fission and fusion reactions were provoked. But what is important is the revelation that a small group of scientists working in the last desperate months of the war were trying to do this.

Shortly after the end of the war in Europe, an unknown German or Austrian scientist wrote a report that describes work on nuclear weapons during the war.

This report, which Karlsch discovered after "Hitlers Bombe" was published, contains both accurate information and less accurate speculation about nuclear weapons, and may well include some information from the Manhattan Project - the word "Plutonium" is used, for example. Unfortunately, the title page is not included and there is no other evidence of who composed it. However, this individual does not appear to have been a member of either the mainstream German Uranium project or the group working under Diebner.

What the report does demonstrate is that the knowledge that Uranium could be used to make powerful new weapons was fairly widespread in the German technical community during the war, and it contains the only known German diagram of a nuclear weapon. This diagram is schematic and is far removed from a practical blueprint for an "atomic bomb".

The unknown author also mentions a critical mass of slightly more than 5 kg for a Plutonium bomb. This estimate is fairly accurate, because the use of a tamper to reflect neutrons back into the Plutonium would cut the critical mass by a factor of two. Moreover, this estimate is particularly significant because such detailed information was not included in the Smyth report.

The new report is also interesting because it makes clear that German scientists had worked intensively on theoretical questions concerned with the construction of a hydrogen bomb. Two additional sources confirm this.

The papers of Erich Schumann, director of the Army's weapons-research department, include many documents and theoretical calculations of nuclear fusion. The Viennese physicist Hans Thirring also discussed this topic in his book "The History of the Atomic Bomb", which was published in the summer of 1946.

Not the last word

Historians, scientists and others have debated for decades whether Heisenberg and von Weizsäcker wanted to build atomic bombs.Taken together, the new revelations change our picture of German nuclear weapons. None of this new information supports in any way either the interpretation of Heisenberg and his colleagues as resistance fighters [Powers] or as incompetents with Nazi sympathies [Rose].

However, these new documents and Karlsch's revelations do place Heisenberg and von Weizsäcker in a different context by making their ambivalence about nuclear weapons much clearer. Although they continued to work on nuclear reactors and isotope separation, and dangled the prospect of nuclear weapons in front of powerful men in the Nazi state, they did not try as hard as they could to create nuclear weapons for Hitler's regime.

Other scientists were doing that, notably Walther Gerlach, Kurt Diebner and the researchers working under him.

It would be rash indeed to believe that this is the last word on the matter. The German atomic bomb is like a zombie: Just when we think we know what happened, how and why, it rises again from the dead.

Heisenberg's role

During the Second World War, Werner Heisenberg was one of the most influential scientists in Germany and its leading theoretical physicist. He had won a Nobel prize for his work on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, had become one of the youngest full professors in Germany when he began teaching at the University of Leipzig, and in 1942 at the age of 40 was appointed director of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics as well as professor at the University of Berlin.

However, in the early years of the Third Reich, Heisenberg had been attacked by his fellow Nobel laureate Johannes Stark in an SS publication for being a "white Jew" and "Jewish in spirit". A subsequent investigation by the SS ended in 1939 with his public and political rehabilitation. The result was that, by 1942, Heisenberg enjoyed the support of influential figures in the Nazi regime, including the armaments minister Albert Speer, as well as the industrialist Albert Vögler, who was president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.

 

Nazi Physics and the Atom Bomb

Why did Nazi Germany fail to develop an atomic bomb during World War II? After all, Albert Einstein, the man who started it all, was a German citizen until 1933 and Germany had some of the finest physicists in the world even after expelling its Jewish scientists.

One thing is certain –the race for the bomb was certainly not hastened by a strange anomaly that crept up in the German academic world known as "Deutsche Physik" [German Physics].

"Deutsche Physik" was a strange German scientific movement of the 1930s, peopled by reactionaries who were upset that Jews, like Einstein, were taking physics down an illusionary path, fueled by what they called "Jewish over-imagination".

The name was taken from the title of a four-volume physics textbook published by a leader of the movement, Nobel Prize Laureate, Phillip Lenard. During World War I, Lenard and other scientists complained that Britain was stealing too much of the limelight in the scientific world, even having the gall to rename German-discovered phenomena with English names. For example, the Röntgen ray had become the X-Ray.

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity perturbed these Germans even more because it upset classical science. Many scientists fought Relativity in its early days but Lenard and a second Nobel Prize Laureate, Johannes Stark, gave the battle an ideological twist. They compared Relativity to moral relativism [the belief that all morals are relative to circumstances and that there is no absolute truth], and pointed out that it was espoused mainly by Jews and their sympathizers.

Physics for the Fatherland

"Deutsche Physik" proffered the notion that nations differed not only in their investigation of science but that there was a "national character" to science that affected how they approached objective truth. They claimed that Jewish nationalism made people mistakenly think there was no monopoly to the truth.

"As with everything that man creates, science is determined by race or by blood", Lenard preached in 1935. "Nations of different racial mixes practice science differently".

"The German nation has a right to resolutely foster its own nature in science as well", he insisted, "and this is not only for the sake of the Fatherland but because, in this way, we are cultivating the best that mankind has to offer".

"With the massive introduction of Jews into influential positions, also at universities and academies, the basis of all scientific knowledge, the observation of nature itself, was forgotten and was no longer considered valid", he complained.

Knowledge of things of the external world was supposed to be based upon the fancies of the human mind. These ideas, immediately called "theories," had then to be "proven" by experimenters. The latter usually compiled dutifully and promptly with the most superficial research possible. With the repression of candid remarks against such proceedings, "freedom of research" took on a new flavor.

The results can already be felt generally: Large segments of the population have lost faith in currently accepted science. Only technology, which is based upon earlier sound research achievements, could continue to earn this trust".

After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Lenard and Stark used "Deutsche Physik" as a rallying cry to harness the reins of German science into their hands. Stark’s goal was to install himself as the Führer of physics.

"Finally, the time has come when we can make our conception of science and research count", he wrote to Lenard. "I used the opportunity presented by my congratulatory letter to Minister [Wilhelm] Frick, whom I know personally, to also let him know that you and I will be happy to advise him with regard to the scientific institutes under his authority".

The SS Gets Involved

So successful was their anti-Relativity campaign that the world’s greatest physicist after Einstein, Werner Heisenberg [inventor of the famous "uncertainty principle"] was shocked, after returning home from his honeymoon in1937, when his university rector informed him that Stark had persuaded the SS weekly, "Das Schwarze Corps" [The Black Corps] to publish an article accusing Heisenberg of being a "white Jew".

It was not long before Heisenberg was hauled to the basement of the SS headquarters at Prinz Albert Strasse in Berlin for questioning.

At this juncture, history took one of its strange twists and "Deutsche Physik" was dealt a crushing blow. It so happened that Heisenberg’s mother had grown up with the mother of SS head, Heinrich Himmler, and she decided to pay her old friend a visit. As Heisenberg related later, his mother worked on her friend’s maternal feelings, telling her, "Oh, you know, Frau Himmler, we mothers know nothing about politics, neither your son’s nor mine. But we know that we have to care for our boys. That is why I have come to you".

The visit worked its magic. Shortly afterwards, Heisenberg received a personal letter "from the Office of the Director of the SS".

"Very esteemed Herr Professor Heisenberg", the letter began. "Only today can I answer your letter of 1 July 1937 in which you direct yourself to me because of Dr. Stark’s article…

"Because you were recommended to me by my family, I have had your case investigated with special care and precision. I am glad that I can now inform you that I do not approve of the attack, and that I have taken measures against any further attack against you.

"With friendly greetings, yours, H. Himmler".

However, appended to the letter was a threatening postscript:

"P.S. I consider it best, however, if, in the future, you make a distinction for your audience between the results of scientific research and the personal and political attitude of the scientists involved".

In other words, Heisenberg was to make maintain a strict separation between science and the wrong kind of scientists.

Himmler kept his promise. He ordered that Stark’s attacks against Heisenberg be brought to an end and, the following year, he issued a memo to the SS, commending Heisenberg as "a man of great standing in science".

There is a debate whether Heisenberg went on to try and build an atom bomb for Germany, or whether he deliberately did his best to prevent this from happening.

Out of Favor
 
"Deutsche Physik" fell out of favor among the Nazi hierarchy for a number of reasons, the most significant of which was that the Nazis understood that it was more important to use science to win the war rather than to distort it in the name of ideology.

A number of prominent German physicists, including Heisenberg and Max Planck, consistently lobbied against the "Deutsche Physik" nonsense. It was acknowledged that even believers of Jewish science could be good Nazis.

For example, Pascual Jordan, one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century, who developed many details of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, was also an ardent Nazi Storm-trooper. And unlike most German physicists, Jordan was unafraid to mention Einstein by name.

As time went on, the Nazis sometimes ignored their own racial laws in the interests of science. Thus Herman Göring declared during a 1942 conference:

"He [Hitler] will approve and sanction exceptions [to Nazi racial laws] even more readily where prominent research projects or scientists are involved. Really, we ought to be punishable for rejecting a man of the highest intellectual capacity in the field of science for such reasons or if we refused him the opportunity to conduct research because, as I said, he has a Sarah [a Jewish wife] or is perhaps a quarter-Jew or whatever else. The prerequisite is obviously always that we get an actual advantage out of it".

This was a drastic turnabout since the earlier days when Germany hounded out its world-class Jewish scientists.


Pulled both ways

In February 1942 Heisenberg gave a popular lecture to an influential audience of politicians, bureaucrats, military officers and industrialists. At the time, the future of Germany's Uranium project was in doubt because the Army was only interested in weapons that could be delivered in time to influence the outcome of the war.

As we know from a transcript of the talk, which was discovered by the historian David Irving in the 1960s, Heisenberg emphasized both the potential of nuclear weapons and how difficult it would be to make them. His conclusion was clear:

1) Energy generation from Uranium fission is undoubtedly possible, provided the enrichment of isotope Uranium-235 is successful. Isolating Uranium-235 would lead to an explosive of unimaginable potency. 
2) Common Uranium can also be exploited to generate energy when layered with heavy water. In a layered arrangement these materials can transfer their great energy reserves over a period of time to a heat-engine. It thus provides a means of storing very large amounts of energy that are technically measurable in relatively small quantities of substances. Once in operation, the machine can also lead to the production of an incredibly powerful explosive.

However, by the summer of 1942, the Uranium project had been transferred from the German Army to the civilian Reich Research Council and the German uranium-project scientists once again enjoyed secure institutional support. In June of that year Heisenberg gave a lecture at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Berlin before Speer and other military and industrial leaders of the Nazi state.

The lecture has become famous because of the story that Heisenberg responded to a question about the size of an atomic bomb by saying that it would be about as big as a pineapple.

This anecdote was first reported in Irving's 1968 book "The Virus House", but a transcript of the talk had never been found.

However, it has now been discovered in the new Russian documents. The text of the June lecture -entitled 'The work on Uranium Problems'- differs significantly from the February talk. Heisenberg begins by mentioning the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939, noting that interest in this new development had been "exceptionally great", especially in the US.

"A few days after the discovery," he notes, "American radio provided extensive reports and half a year later a large number of scientific papers had appeared on this subject".

Heisenberg continues by describing Germany's work on isotope separation and nuclear reactors since the start of the war, cautioning that "naturally a series of scientific and practical problems will have to be cleared up before the technical goals can be realized".

Mid-way through the talk, Heisenberg makes his only mention of nuclear weapons in a rather understated way.

"Given the positive results achieved up until now," he says, "it does not appear impossible that, once an Uranium burner has been constructed, we will one day be able to follow the path revealed by von Weizsäcker to explosives that are more than a million times more effective that those currently available."

But even if that did not happen, the nuclear reactor would have an "almost unlimited field of technical applications". These include boats and even planes that could travel long distances on small amounts of fuel, as well as new radioactive substances that could be useful for many scientific and technical problems.

Heisenberg concludes by saying that new discoveries of "the greatest significance for technology" will be made "in the next few years".

Since the Germans knew that "many of the best laboratories" in America were working on this problem, they could hardly afford "not to follow these questions", Heisenberg points out.

Even if "most such developments take a long time", they had to reckon with the possibility that - if the "war with America lasted for several years" - the "technical realization of atomic nuclear energies" might "play a decisive role in the war".

Heisenberg was right about that, of course. But fortunately for him and his countrymen, the first atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead of Frankfurt and Berlin.

The Nazi Nuclear Program – How Close Were the Nazis to Developing an Atomic Bomb?

Mark Walker
25 August 2009

How close were the Nazis to developing an atomic bomb? The truth is that National Socialist Germany could not possibly have built a weapon like the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. This was not because the country lacked the scientists, resources, or will, but rather because its leaders did not really try.

They were certainly trying to win the war. And they were willing to devote huge amounts of resources to building rockets, jet planes, and other forms of deadly and sometimes exotic forms of military technology. So why not the atomic bomb? Nazi Germany, it turns out, made other choices and simply ran out of time.

A nuclear program is born

In January of 1939, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, published the results of an historic experiment: After bombarding Uranium with neutrons—neutrally charged particles—they found Barium, an element roughly half the size of Uranium. Their former colleague Lise Meitner, who a few months before had been forced to flee Germany and seek refuge in Sweden, and her nephew Otto Frisch realized that the Uranium nucleus had split in two. These revelations touched off a frenzy of scientific work on fission around the world.

Three months later, a secret German War Office report stated that "the newest developments in nuclear physics....will probably make it possible to produce an explosive many orders of magnitude more powerful than the conventional ones...That country which first makes use of it has an unsurpassable advantage over the others".

The German "Uranium project" began in earnest shortly after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, when German Army Ordnance established a research program led by the Army physicist Kurt Diebner to investigate the military applications of fission. By the end of the year the physicist Werner Heisenberg had calculated that nuclear fission chain reactions might be possible.

When slowed down and controlled in a "Uranium machine” [nuclear reactor], these chain reactions could generate energy; when uncontrolled, they would be a “nuclear explosive” many times more powerful than conventional explosives.

Whereas scientists could only use natural Uranium in a Uranium machine, Heisenberg noted that they could use pure Uranium 235, a rare isotope, as an explosive.

In the summer of 1940, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, a younger colleague and friend of Heisenberg’s, drew upon publications by scholars working in Britain, Denmark, France, and the United States to conclude that if a Uranium machine could sustain a chain reaction, then some of the more common Uranium 238 would be transmuted into “element 94", now called Plutonium. Like Uranium 235, element 94 would be an incredibly powerful explosive.

In 1941, von Weizsäcker went so far as to submit a patent application for using a Uranium machine to manufacture this new radioactive element.

Researchers knew that they could manufacture significant amounts of Uranium 235 only by means of isotope separation.

At first German scientists led by the physical chemist Paul Harteck tried thermal diffusion in a separation column. In this process, a liquid compound rises as it heats, falls as it cools, and tends to separate into its lighter and heavier components as it cycles around the column. But by 1941 they gave up on this method and started building centrifuges.

These devices use centripetal force to accumulate the heavier isotopes on the outside of the tube, where they can be separated out. Although the war hampered their work, by the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 they had achieved a significant enrichment in small samples of Uranium.

Not enough for an atomic bomb, but Uranium 235 enrichment nonetheless.....

Nearing a Nazi bomb

Uranium machines needed a moderator, a substance that would slow down the neutrons liberated by chain reactions. In the end, the project decided to use heavy water—oxygen combined with the rare heavy isotope of hydrogen—instead of water or graphite. This was not [as one of the many myths associated with the German nuclear weapons effort had it] because of a mistake the physicist Walther Bothe made when he measured the neutron absorption of graphite.

Rather, it appeared that the Norsk Hydro plant in occupied Norway could provide the amounts of heavy water they needed in the first stage of development at a relatively low cost.

The Norwegian resistance and Allied bombers eventually put a stop to Norwegian production of heavy water. But by that time it was not possible to begin the production of either pure graphite or pure heavy water in Germany.

In the end, the German scientists had only enough heavy water to conduct one or two large-scale nuclear reactor experiments at a time.
 

Nazi Germany was not solely reliant on the Vermork plant in Norway. There was a sister plant at Saheim and a similar Montecanteni Plant in the Italian Alps.

The Germans also had the Linde plant near Munich, the IG Farben Leuna plant at Mersberg, the Geib Sulfide plant near Kiel. The Nazis were swimming in Deuterium [Heavy Water] by late 1944, but allowed the Allies and even their own people to believe the 'Hydro' sinking had ended their chances to mislead their enemy and conceal that the nuclear project was still in progress.

According to a wartime report held on microfilm file at Maxwell AFB, Alabama, S.R.A.4394, the US 9th Army captured a working German Atomic bomb on 26 April 1945 near Goslar.

The device known as 76-Zentner weighed 3.8 tons and the document notes it was flown back to the United States by Col Charles Lindbergh who in addition to being a qualified B-24 pilot was also a consultant to the US Navy Technical Mission Europe.

During 1945 Allied advances overran underground factories housing at least 60+ Anschutz Mark IIIB Uranium centrifuges each capable of enriching 250 grams of Uranium by 7% per 24 hours. During each 12 day cycle these could produce 15 kg of HEU enriched to 80% U235. At this rate Germany was capable during the second half of 1944 of producing enough HEU for one Hiroshima type bomb every 7 weeks.

Sources:

- NARA G-344 [9 April 1946] Jesse W. Beams, 'Report on the use of the centrifuge method for the concentration of U235 by the Germans'. 
- Correspondence with Dirk Finkemeier and Keith Sanders about Underground nuclear factory at Espekamp captured 4 April 1945
- March 1946 interrogation of Konrad Beyerle, Chief Engineer Anschutz & Co.

By the very end of the war, the Germans had progressed from horizontal and spherical layer designs to three-dimensional lattices of Uranium cubes immersed in heavy water.

They had also developed a nuclear reactor design that almost, but not quite, achieved a controlled and sustained nuclear fission chain reaction. During the last months of the war, a small group of scientists working in secret under Diebner and with the strong support of the physicist Walther Gerlach, who was by that time head of the uranium project, built and tested a nuclear device.

At best this would have been far less destructive than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Rather it is an example of scientists trying to make any sort of weapon they could in order to help stave off defeat.

No one knows the exact form of the device tested. But apparently the German scientists had designed it to use chemical high explosives configured in a hollow shell in order to provoke both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion reactions. It is not clear whether this test generated nuclear reactions, but it does appear as if this is what the scientists had intended to occur.

Time runs out

All of this begs the question, why did they not get further? Why did they not beat the Americans in the race for atomic bombs? The short answer is that whereas the Americans tried to create atomic bombs, and succeeded, the Germans did not succeed, but also did not really try.

This can best be explained by focusing on the winter of 1941-1942. From the start of the war until the late fall of 1941, the German "lightning war" had marched from one victory to another, subjugating most of Europe. During this period, the Germans needed no wonder weapons. After the Soviet counterattack, Pearl Harbor, and the German declaration of war against the United States, the war had become one of attrition.

For the first time, German Army Ordnance asked its scientists when it could expect nuclear weapons. The German scientists were cautious: While it was clear that they could build atomic bombs in principle, they would require a great deal of resources to do so and could not realize such weapons any time soon.

Army Ordnance came to the reasonable conclusion that the Uranium work was important enough to continue at the laboratory scale, but that a massive shift to the industrial scale, something required in any serious attempt to build an atomic bomb, would not be done.

This contrasts with the commitment the German leadership made throughout the war to the effort to build a rocket.

They sunk enormous resources into this project, indeed, on the scale of what the Americans invested in the Manhattan Project.

 

Whether Germany would launch its own Manhattan Project was not up to Heisenberg or the other German scientists, but the Reich’s armaments minister, Albert Speer.

Speer needed to know whether the scientists could deliver a workable weapon before the war ended. Heisenberg met with Speer in 1942 during the course of a conference on the potentialities of nuclear power put on for various officials from the Army and the SS.

What exactly was said during the conference and during Speer’s more private discussions with Heisenberg is not known, but evidently Heisenberg did not encourage Speer as to the short-term possibilities of producing Uranium-based atomic weapons or a practical reactor engine for ships or submarines. Heisenberg did not request a dramatic increase in funding for the German project.

Speer concluded that the German atom scientists could make little contribution to the war effort and concentrated the Reich’s experimental energies on the more promising rocket and jet projects that would materialize before the end of the war.

Clearly, the German scientists did not believe they could extract sufficient U-235 to make a bomb and so did not urge Speer to commit German industry to an isotope separation project, as was then being done in the United States at the Manhattan Project’s huge Oak Ridge, Tenn., facility.

Thus Heisenberg and his colleagues did not slow down or divert their research; they did not resist Hitler by denying him nuclear weapons. With the exception of the scientists working on Diebner’s nuclear device, however, they also clearly did not push as hard as they could have to make atomic bombs.

They were neither heroes nor villains, just scientists working on weapons of mass destruction for Hitler’s Germany.

Not until  a quarter of a century after the Second World War did official documents make it known to the general public that Nazism abounded in magical rites and  occult rituals.

Years after the release of such information, most writers of history still try to paint a simple picture of Hitler's Reich leaders performing  supernatural ceremonies on one hand, and conducting a calculating war on the other. No connection is made between the two contrary activities.

"Their [the Freemasons] hierarchical organization and the initiation through symbolic rites, that is to say without bothering the brains but by working on the imagination through magic and the symbols of a cult - all this is the dangerous element and the element I have taken over. Don't you see that our party must be of this character?

".An Order, that is what it has to be - an Order, the hierarchical Order of a secular priesthood". 

-- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" 

Germany's discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 literally fulfilled one of alchemy's greatest goals: the transmutation of elements. 

New forms of matter [Plutonium] could suddenly be created out of others [Uranium]. This marked a grand turning point for the magical fraternities which for ages sought to transform base metal into gold. The writings of modern occultists like Aleister Crowley took on a new tolerable meaning and could be used by Reich leaders to form the renewed code of Illuminati brotherhoods based on magical transmutations.

There was still another advantage of using an  occult system of words and phrases to control the Nazi nuclear effort: it offered a  great degree of security. For as far as the Allies were concerned, only a person of unstable mental condition could take occult elements of speech seriously.

Hence, the  German nuclear scheme was never really penetrated by the Allies. It remained mostly a secret until the end of the 20th century. But in the 1990s a few noteworthy events shed light on this intriguing situation. 

The first breakthrough was the declassification of the Farm Hall transcripts. At the end of the war, the Anglo-American Allies rounded up Hitler's top nuclear scientists and secretly transferred them to a country house in Cambridge known as Farm Hall. In what was called  Operation Epsilon, the German scientists remained under house arrest for six months where their conversations were recorded, transcribed, and translated.

From those recordings we learned that Hitler was not particularly interested in developing an atomic bomb. Instead, the Nazis were secretly working on a Uranium engine or "super weapon" reactor for military purposes.

But because Werner Heisenberg who headed the German nuclear research group was not a supporter of Hitler, a security screen or buffer had to be set up by the Nazis.

Heisenberg's team was required to produce mathematical formulae and small working models of the proposed Uranium engine. Then all construction work was transferred to loyal Nazi, Abraham Esau, head of the German Bureau of Standards, who supervised the building of large-scale atomic projects under Albert Speer and was in charge of Reich Uranium and heavy water [Deuterium].

The large-scale military nuclear designs of Esau were not explained in detail by the Allies. Various independent branches of secret Nazi atomic experimentation were concealed in part by the research bureau of the Reich Post Office. It should also be mentioned that perhaps only ten percent of the Farm Hall conversations were released in manuscript form.

"Some of the German transcriptions are not available in the British or American files and are apparently lost".

But according to the recordings, the German scientists seemed to be more interested in high-energy "rays" than in atomic explosions. At one point they openly discussed the possibility of Farm Hall being bugged with microphones.

Germany was not interested in making an atomic bomb. They could not use such a weapon in the European warfront. Too close to home. What were they making, then? -  A "Death Ray" of binary fission.

More terrible than any modern US laser weapon; the neutron beam invented by Sir James Chadwick in the 1930s. When a neutron source collides with a Uranium or fissile target, you have a nuclear reaction, which can be controlled. A-bombs are uncontrolled reactions.

Hitler may have intended to activate his nuclear death ray engine when he ordered the destruction of Paris. But the sabotage of a key pipeline bridge postponed such action. 

The Allies landed in Europe before the Uranium engine could be functional again. It was forced to shut down in 1945, but its location was never disclosed. To play down their wartime incompetence, US Intelligence agencies continue to insist that German scientists did not try to develop an atomic weapon, but worked instead on a nuclear power plant.

Half a century later, the American pretense is obvious: For where is that  Nazi power plant,  the nuclear factory built by the greatest slave force the world has ever known?

This popular fallacy suggests that while America was secretly constructing the first atomic bomb, German experts were developing "peaceful uses" of nuclear fission, for mankind's most destructive war.

A persistently critical question raised by the Farm Hall operation which some war historians continue to ask is: "Where, if at all, are the large-scale Nazi nuclear projects of Abraham Esau and Albert Speer?" A favorite answer always advanced by many polemical enthusiasts is the myth of the German National Redoubt:

"When the Reich was crumbling under the final onslaughts from West and East, Nazi Propaganda labored to create a vision of the Southern Redoubt, an inner fortress from which in a few months Germany would strike back with terrible weapons which would snatch victory at one minute past twelve".

"Here, defended by nature and by the most efficient secret weapons yet invented, the powers that have hitherto guided Germany will survive to reorganize her resurrection; here armaments will be manufactured in bombproof factories, food and equipment will be stored in vast underground caverns and a specially selected corpus of young men will be trained in guerrilla warfare, so that a whole underground army can be fitted and directed to liberate Germany from occupying forces".

Frustrated by their failure to discover  Hitler's enormous nuclear reactor, the Allies were also unable to locate a remote hidden fortress rumored to be the German National Redoubt.

But critics with extreme views loudly argued that the Nazi reactor was obviously well-concealed inside Hitler's secret fortress. And since the Alsos Mission search-party was not able to find its location, the Allies were instead merely trying  to explain it all away.

A Nazi reactor and mountain fortress never really existed, according to the Allied Command. But rumors and eye-witness reports persisted. Even some of the death camp survivors clearly described being transported on trains without windows into what appeared to be vast underground caverns. There, they were forced to do construction labor and work near V2 rocket platforms before being moved to other Nazi camps.

The confusing story that finally emerged portrayed the German Redoubt as an underground stronghold connected by rail to Fortress Europe. It was either located near Southern Germany [at Hitler's mountain-top "Eagle's Nest"] in the Austrian Alps, or perhaps as far away as the Balkans.

Even General Eisenhower took it all very seriously. "The Redoubt idea produced in the mindset of the Allied Command the sense that if -and when- Hitler was found it would be in the south". On the eve of the Normandy invasion an Allied Command wartime report concluded that:

"It seems reasonably certain that some of the most important ministries and personalities of the Nazi regime are already established in the Redoubt area. Göring, Himmler, Hitler are said to be in the process of withdrawing to their respective personal mountain strongholds".

But as Germany began to crumble, Nazi propaganda experts, led by Dr. Göbbels, who had blatantly spread the rumor of a National Redoubt were now the first to categorically deny its existence. Hitler was never in a Redoubt mountain fortress, but always in Berlin, they insisted. It was all a hoax, they said, and should be disregarded. An Allied officer later wrote: 

"The Redoubt existed largely in the imagination of a few fanatical Nazis. It grew into so exaggerated a scheme that I am astonished we could have believed it as innocently as we did."

Yet for a few German observers, the Nazi nuclear reactor [perhaps the largest ever made] still awaits the quiet push of reawakening, somewhere in a mountain base. In mint condition, it was forced to shutdown in 1945.  "Why hand it over to the destroyers of Hiroshima," quarreled one Bavarian. "If they can't find it themselves?" 

Recently released war records reveal the use of a "political decoy" [Doppelgänger or body-double] – a look-alike trained to impersonate Hitler in order to draw attention away from him and deal with risks on his behalf.

It is documented that the Nazi Führer vetted at least four doubles. 

When "Newsweek" magazine published an article named 'Adolf Hitler's Double', in its 13 March 1939 issue, the editors were only repeating an opinion that was already widely acknowledged by the Allies.

TIME Magazine
GERMANY: Double Hitler
Monday, 8 July 1935

"Adolf Hitler last week became the first Dictator frankly to employ a double. Impersonating the Realmleader, a pudgy-fingered, smudge-mustached person officially opened the new motor highway from Holzkirchen to Munich. Suddenly the crowd recognized Dictator Hitler standing unobtrusively a few yards from his double and good-natured German cheers were given first for one, then for the other".

According to a recent Russian story, "Göbbels had engaged six doubles to impersonate Hitler for purposes of security and public appearances. After the capitulation of the Third Reich, Hitler had to die for the sake of vindication. There could be no doubt of his death".

Zarah Leander, a favorite friend and singer of the Führer, told Leni Riefensthal that: "Yes, Hitler had doubles, even Eva Braun had her counterpart, there are no doubts about it".

Despite the Intelligence reports, many Western historians continued to maintain that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin underground Bunker on 30 April 1945.

Ironically, it was not the evidence provided by Russia that convinced them, but the testimony of the obsessively devoted Nazis who were also present in the Chancellery Bunker when Hitler allegedly killed himself. Here is where their futile pretence became a matter of imprudence: For they were primarily the very same historians who insisted that the body shown in the annoying Russian photos was a Doppelgänger killed by those Nazis in the Berlin Bunker who wanted to thwart Allied investigators.

Behind the Soviet troops rolling bloody battles for each Berlin street, SMERSH's special troops advanced.  This counter-Intelligence name created in 1943 was short for "spier smiert" or "death to spies".  In Berlin, SMERSH was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Klimenko.  His task was to find out what happened to Hitler and Eva Braun. 

Klimenko arranged his quarters in the Plötzensee Prison, where prisoners captured in the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery were brought. From them, he learned about Hitler's death.

This was also testified to by Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss: On 30 April, Voss was among the group of officers whom Hitler informed that he had decided to commit suicide rather than attempt to escape from Berlin, which was surrounded by the Red Army. 

Johann Rattenhuber, later testified:

"In Hitler's reception room at 10 o'clock in the morning there assembled Generals Burgdorf and Krebs, Admiral Voss, Hitler's personal pilot General Hans Baur, Standartenführer Georg Beetz, Obersturmbannführer Peter Högl, his personal servant Sturmbannführer Heinz Linge, Otto Günsche and myself.

"He came out to us and said: 'I have decided to abandon this life. Thank you for your good and honest service. Try to escape from Berlin with the troops. I am staying here'. Saying goodbye he shook hands with each of us".

Voss also stated, "I left Berlin with Führer's adjutant [Günsche], telling me Hitler committed suicide, and his corpse was buried in the garden of the Reich's Chancellery".  

Klimenko drove to the Bunker later: "We went down into the Bunker, inside it was dark".

Voss was acting strangely nervous, muttering something under his breath, and they went out to the surface to the garden near the emergency exit.

Voss shouted, "There is Hitler!" pointing to a large empty fire hydrant tank, filled with human corpses, and they came closer. Voss leaned over one corpse. "This is Hitler," he said.

After a moment, Voss hesitated, "I can not say that this is Hitler sure".

Gustav Weler was a political decoy [Doppelgänger or Body-double] of Adolf Hitler. [1] At the end of the Second World War, he was executed by a gunshot to the forehead in an attempt to confuse the Allied troops when Berlin was taken. He was also used "as a decoy for security reasons". [2] When his corpse was discovered in the Reichs Chancellery garden by Soviet troops, it was mistakenly believed to be that of Hitler because of his identical moustache and haircut. The corpse was also photographed and filmed by the Soviets.

One servant from the Bunker declared that the dead man was one of Hitler's cooks. He also believed this man "had been assassinated because of his startling likeness to Hitler, while the latter had escaped from the ruins of Berlin". [3]

It wasn’t until days after that the Russian’s found out that they had been fooled by a ruse. Weler was wearing socks with holes in them and his dental records, obviously, did not match Hitler’s teeth. 

According to Klimenko, "We do not know what he was doing in the Bunker, why he was wearing Hitler's jacket and why he was killed".

Weler's body was brought to Moscow for investigations and buried in the yard at Lefortovo prison. [4]

However, British surgeon and author W. Hugh Thomas reported in his 1996 book "Doppelgängers: The Truth About the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker" that Gustav Weler was found alive after the war and was interviewed by an Allied commission to establish Adolf Hitler's fate. So that corpse found by the Russians was a further double.

Reports now circulate in Russia that an actor, Andreas Kronstädt, was the impersonator who had volunteered to die in Hitler’s place.

This was the theme of the 1996 film, "Conversation with the Beast", directed by one of Fassbinder’s followers, Armin Müller-Stahl. 

References

1. Petrova, Peter Watson. "The Death of Hitler". W. W. Norton & Company. 
2. The Houston Chronicle 17 September 1992 
3. The New York Times, 9 May 1945 
4. The Times. London [UK]: 20 September 1992.

We were therefore expected to believe that after committing the outright murder of a double for the purpose of obstructing  justice, our Nazi Bunker guests were nonetheless quite frank and honest in their eye-witness accounts of what really became of Adolf Hitler.

Hence, one witness reported seeing a gunshot wound in Hitler's mouth, while others claimed it was near the corner of his eye [some even hinted that Hitler's butler strangled him and forced a cyanide capsule into his mouth].

Pick a card, any card.

One witness described finding the body of Hitler perched limp next to a dead Eva Braun on an elongated, upholstered sofa. But another found Hitler's corpse sitting alone near a corner, on a chair by himself.

Mix and match.

Hitler's one-day marriage to Eva Braun was another sentimental enticement, orchestrated to win our naïve confidence. For only a worm could marry a lovely woman, just to poison her a few hours later, and then escape with a Doppelgänger's charred corpse left in his place. The unhappy couple, together at last.

The fact that a maid admitted seeing a Hitler look-alike confined to the butler's pantry area was not considered to be of great consequence. A question mark near the water pipes? And the murder of the Doppelgänger was just another war technicality.

Who did it? No doubt it was one -or all- of our Bunker guests. They would not stop even at murder to perpetrate their Führer's cover-up.  But by now, the world was totally convinced of their honest integrity and humble desire to satisfy our secret wish that Hitler should not have escaped justice.

Establishment historians assured us that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin Bunker, shortly after exchanging marriage vows with Eva Braun. No bullet was ever found. But that does not matter. The blood stains on the sofa were reportedly of the wrong blood-type. But such details need not concern us. Hitler's entire body apparently vanished into thin air. But at least we found his teeth, in the garden.

Dental assistants apparently identified them from X-Rays made public in 1968. And what was the actual point of murdering the Doppelgänger on the floor?

What was that cover-up about if Hitler had already left a legally written will; a historical document, stating that his body was to be "immediately destroyed" by fire?

We never thought of that.

But since we must believe in something, our Chancellery Bunker guests were ingenious enough to embellish us with such an entwined mass of information and confused additions that we could now produce our own personal interpretations of history; our own special views of faith.  Indeed, an entire library of books may be filled with eye-witness accounts and so-called proofs of Hitler's suicide.

Most of the new printed works were merely rehashed Berlin Bunker testimonies, smoothed out to make a bit more sense, and hopefully convince us by their sheer size of whatever we seriously hope is true. But as Col. W. F. Heimlich, former Chief of U.S. Intelligence, commented: "Upon reviewing the actual facts, not a single insurance company would ever pay out a cent to similar claims based on such scant, non-conclusive evidence".

With certainty, the world was lied to about Hitler's death. 

What sort of cover-up was the actual purpose behind the murder of Hitler's double? 

The most prevalent opinion is that the true motive was for Hitler to escape: According to the "Washington Post",  the US Office of Censorship intercepted a letter in July 1945 written from someone in Washington. Addressed to a Chicago newspaper, the letter claimed that Hitler was living in a German-owned Hacienda 450 miles from Buenos Aires. The US government gave this report enough credibility to act on it, sending a classified telegram to the American embassy in Argentina requesting help in following up the inquiry.

In his 1995 book "The Greatest Illusion: The Death [?] of Adolf Hitler," Australian historian Fred C. McKenzie summarizes how Stalin was adamant in his conviction that Adolf Hitler still lived. In August of 1945, Stalin personally accused the British of "concealing the real, living Adolf Hitler in their sector of Berlin".

A similar inquiry currently being published by Oberbaum Verlag in Germany is "Hitler's Double" by Walter Laufenberg, an award winning German author who has written and published several novels. 

The noted  British surgeon Hugh Thomas is chief spokesman for the growing opinion that not only Adolf Hitler had a Doppelgänger, but also Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler.

Perhaps all of the top Reich leaders kept look-alikes as part of a master contingency plan to escape unnoticed should the need arise.  Dr. Thomas' Doppelgänger theory was finally investigated by Scotland Yard and the final report now remains hidden from the public. A hundred-year ban has been imposed on key facts concerning the so-called deaths of certain Reich leaders. 

Surprisingly, the tell-tale fingerprint issue was not such a serious problem in the early days of Nazism. Although various anthropologists and novelists had toyed with the idea of fingerprints as a form of identification in the 1800s, it was not until 1924 that an act of congress established the Identification Division of the FBI. But by then, Hitler already led the Nazi party. And later of course, the Reich maintained  full control over all fingerprints kept in Germany's files. Hitler's burnt corpse had no surface skin to yield fingerprints.
 
In the end, only Hitler's false teeth, found with the Chancellery garden corpse fragments, provided some evidence to satisfy the strict terms imposed by most modern insurance companies.

And that was still highly questionable, because a patient's bridgework could easily be reproduced by an experienced dentist and deliberately placed almost anywhere.

Elena Revskaia, who served as a translator for one of the SMERSH units, responsible for finding Hitler, alive or dead, was present at the discovery of the Hitler and Eva Braun corpses, in the Imperial Chancellery court.  Only Josef Stalin had been informed.  He had been given a detailed report on 16 June 1945, of all the actions of SMERSH, related to the discovery of Hitler alive or dead. 

But the Soviet leadership did not issue a communiqué on this issue, leaving its army and secret services to search for Hitler, who had already been rumored to have been seen throughout Latin America. 

The main reason why the identification of the body was not recognized was precisely the uncertainty that they discovered the real Hitler.  Hitler's golden dental work does did not provide a guarantee, because it is known that when a leader chooses a double, he must suffer all of the "original" surgery.

The key suspects of a possible cover-up in the Berlin Bunker were Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, Otto Günsche, Hitler's Adjutant, Hans Baur, his personal pilot and Johann Rattenhuber, the Chief of Bodyguards.

They were all vigorously trained to guard Hitler's personal secrets, even under the threat of torture and death. And they would not hesitate to kill a Doppelgänger to complete their Chancellery cover-up. However there was still one entity they could not easily deceive or trick: the polygraph or lie-detector test.

An instrument capable of continuously recording blood pressure, respiration, and pulse rate was devised by John Larson in 1921, followed by the polygraph [1926] of Leonarde Keeler, and the psychogalvanometer [1936] of Walter Summers, which measured electrical changes on the skin. Because instruments were able to record bodily changes resulting from the telling of a lie,

it is likely that certain testimonies, as witnessed by those in the Bunker, were absolutely true. 

Perhaps for this reason, no one actually saw Adolf Hitler shoot himself.  They could only be called upon to describe what they did to dispose of the dead body. Whose corpse they actually burned in the garden was a matter of recognition, especially if Hitler's double was an exact look-alike. In this way, even a lie-detector test could be beaten. 

Certainly, some of the Bunker guests presumably could not establish the difference between Hitler and his Doppelgänger. 

During the first weeks of the year 2000, a Russian news broadcast sparked fresh interest in Adolf Hitler's Bunker suicide.

The broadcast, following reports by former Soviet Intelligence agents who claim to have buried the remains of Hitler and his wife Eva Braun in Magdeburg, Germany, said that much evidence was officially ignored at the time, and that the buried remains may not be of the German leader after all.

The Russian autopsy report said that  the male body had only one testicle. Aides reportedly had doused the corpse with gasoline and burned it to prevent the body from falling into Soviet hands. Its disappearance prompted reports that Hitler may have escaped. The Soviet autopsy report, first published in 1968, reads in part:

"[T]he genital member is scorched. In the scrotum, which was singed but not preserved, only the right testicle was found".

The fact that over half a century had passed without an authorized inquiry or official explanation as to why the male body had only one testicle finally persuaded Russian investigators of a post-war cover-up. 

The broadcast suggested that the burnt remains may not be of the Nazi dictator.

 

What Happened to Hitler’s Body?

On the final day of April 1945, with the Third Reich rapidly collapsing under a two-pronged military onslaught, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler holed up in a secret Bunker in central Berlin and prepared to carry out his own macabre exit strategy.

Hitler knew the war was lost, and reportedly did not want to befall the same ignominious fate as his Axis ally Benito Mussolini, whose executed corpse had been trucked to Milan two days before and hung on a meathook in a public square so onlookers could defile it.

Hitler planned to stave off such post-humous abuse at the hands of the rapidly approaching Soviet Army. By various accounts, at 3:30 p.m. that day, the Führer swallowed cyanide and then, for good measure, put a gun to his right temple and pulled the trigger. Then, his body vanished.

But what happened after that became perhaps World War II’s most peculiar mystery, one that inspired decades of conspiracy theories and wild fantasies, ranging from the 1978 Hollywood thriller "The Boys From Brazil", which imagined fugitive Nazi scientists cloning Hitler’s DNA in an attempt to create a master race, to the more recent appearance of a few Hitler autopsy photos of dubious authenticity on the Web, and Russian officials’ claim that they still possess fragments of the hated dictator’s skull.

But the story of Hitler’s post-humous odyssey still remains murky, despite the advent of forensic technology that didn’t exist back in 1945.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, when he learned of Hitler’s death the next day, had one question. "Where is his corpse?" he demanded.

Stalin was obsessed with making sure that his former ally-turned-bitter adversary was indeed gone, and ordered an exhaustive secret investigation. The result is reproduced in "The Hitler Book", a 2006 translation of a file prepared for Stalin in the late 1940s, based upon captured Nazi officials’ eyewitness accounts of what happened in the wake of Hitler’s suicide.

According to the file, Martin Bormann and another aide wrapped the dead dictator’s still-warm corpse in a blanket and carried him outside. Because of the bombardment, they couldn’t take the body into the garden, as originally planned, so they laid it down about six feet from the entrance and doused it with 200 liters of Benzene.

Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun, who also had committed suicide, got similar treatment. Then the bodies were ignited with a burning piece of paper, and the door to the Bunker was slammed shut because of the heat. Then the aides set about hastily removing the blood-soaked carpet, Hitler’s personal possessions and papers, and whatever other traces of his presence and demise remained, in order to throw Soviet trophy hunters off the trail.

Nevertheless, on 4 May, members of the Soviet military counter-Intelligence agency SMERSH found two badly burned bodies outside the Führerbunker.

Not immediately realizing that they were Hitler and his mistress, the soldiers buried them in a bomb crater. The next day, however, after a search of the Bunker turned up nothing, the SMERSH officials remembered the two bodies and hastily disinterred them and moved them to their new working HQ in Berlin. They imposed tight secrecy, perhaps fearful of arousing Stalin’s wrath if it turned out that they didn’t have Hitler after all.

On 8 May, an autopsy reportedly was performed, and finally, on 11 May, a dentist reportedly verified that the bodies belonged to Hitler and Braun.

The Soviets long kept those results a secret from their Western Allies. So what did they do with Hitler’s supposed remains?

In 2009, according to a CNN story, Gen. Vasily Khristoforov, head archivist of Russia’s Federal Security Service, said that long-secret Soviet documents revealed the official version of events. In June 1945, a month after Hitler’s suicide, SMERSH supposedly moved his corpse and buried it in a forest near the German town of Rathenau.

Eight months later, they exhumed the dead dictator and re-buried his remains, along with those of Eva Braun and Hitler’s propaganda chief Josef Göbbels and his family, in the Soviet Army garrison in Magdeburg.

The body remained in that grave until 1970, when the Kremlin decided to close the military outpost and turn it over to the East German government. The Soviets still feared that Hitler’s grave site might somehow be discovered by neo-Nazis and turned into a shrine.

KGB head Yuri Andropov [who later would briefly become head of state] ordered his agents to dispose of the USSR’s most hated enemy, this time for good.

Two protocols were compiled after the operation was carried out on 4 April 1970, the general said.

The first documented the opening of a grave that contained the remains of the Nazi leaders and their family members, and the other one detailed their physical destruction. "he remains were burnt on a bonfire outside the town of Schönebeck, 11 kilometers away from Magdeburg, then ground into ashes, collected and thrown into the Biederitz River," the second document reads, according to Khristoforov.

But as the official story goes, the Soviets couldn’t resist keeping a few pieces of Hitler for posterity, though their existence wasn’t revealed to the world until after the USSR’s own demise.

In 1993, the Russian state archive revealed that it had found what officials believed to be a piece of the Nazi dictator’s skull, complete with damage from a gunshot wound, and other bone fragments, in a cardboard box marked "Blue Ink for Pens".

Investigators from other countries, however, were skeptical of the skull’s authenticity. "New Scientist" reported at the time that French forensic dental experts concluded that the grisly trophy actually came from another corpse, one they believed that SMERSH officials may have shipped to Moscow in 1945 and passed off as Hitler’s remains, in an attempt to placate Stalin’s blood lust.

Finally, in 2009, as a "Spiegel" article details, a DNA analysis by University of Connecticut researchers revealed the skull actually was that of a woman between the ages of 20 and 40, who had died in Hitler’s Bunker. [It was not Eva Braun’s, since she reportedly died from cyanide poisoning, not a bullet].

That revelation, however, raises scores of other questions.

If the skull that the Russians presented as Hitler’s is clearly not his, how reliable was SMERSH’s original dental identification of Hitler’s remains? Was the account given by captured aides of Hitler’s suicide and the subsequent attempt to cremate him really truthful, or was it a clever hoax? Did Hitler really die in the Bunker, or could he possibly have escaped? Unless scientists invent a time machine, we may never know the complete story.

 

In the 1990s,  a 3D computer game called  "Wolfenstein" appeared on the cyber-scene and quickly became a trend-setter which led to the popular sequels of  "Doom" and  "Quake".

Wolfenstein  [Rock of the Wolf] was an imaginary assault into a Nazi mountain fortress characteristic of the German National Redoubt myth. An object of the computer game was to pass through steel doors and move within cavernous tunnels in order to locate lost occult artifacts and hidden treasures. 

But in the real world of the 1990s, another "Rock of the Wolf" was reported in some newspapers from the Balkan Peninsula, an area of South-East Europe consisting of present-day Greece.

The occasion was Athens' official recognition of the Embassy of Israel. To set in motion the opening of new diplomatic relations, Greece allowed the public to view an historical site: a Nazi underground prison which had been built by German architects near the foot of Athens' Lycabettus hill just before the Second World War.

Originally planned as a large underground bomb shelter, the double basement Bunker was quickly transformed into a harsh place of captivity, torture, and death when  Germany invaded and occupied Greece.

A unique feature of this two-storeyed underground prison was that it remained a very well-kept secret [although Nazi Intelligence officers like Kurt Waldheim knew of atrocities committed by German army units in Greece]. The prison was concealed under a downtown movie theatre guilelessly located opposite the prestigious Athens Academy.

Apparently, targeted Gestapo suspects were lured into the cinema, seized under the cover of indoor darkness and dragged to the hidden Bunker basement of the theater, never to be seen again. The method of punishment used there was also unique. According to cell graffiti, prisoners were not starved to death as in  numerous death camps. Instead, they were forced to die of thirst. In the absence of drinking water, death usually occurs after ten days.

Objects found in the prison included iron handcuffs and hole-riddled cups to tempt those dying of thirst.
 
Not by chance, just a short walk away, below the hill of Lycabettus [Rock of the Wolf], on a street called "Merlin" was the Balkan administrative center of the Gestapo. In fact, most of the stylish Lycabettus Kolonaki  district  was under strict Nazi control during the war period. [The name Lycabettus is actually related to the word lucid, based on  luc meaning "light" [i.e. luci-fero hill]. Lyka also means she-wolf].

When drilling for the new Athens Metro Subway began in that area in 1997, workers were surprised to discover underground water containments that were not marked on any municipal charts or maps.

The mysterious water stores may have been part of the hidden infrastructure installed in Athens by Nazi architects before the war began. Remaining stocks of Norwegian heavy water [produced by electrolysis] for Germany's nuclear energy program have not been found. As Berlin prepared for the 1936 Olympic Games, the city of Athens was being modernized with underground public water and electricity mostly by Bavarian firms using the Stavridis Committee blueprints of German architect Leo von Klenze.

Pro-Nazi planners in those decades were not unwilling to use forced labor and, it seems, may have had a hidden agenda of their own.  A self-governing, masonic street-building society called "ETMOA" was placed in charge of the Athens subway system and given custody of public parks, including the Acropolis, independent of the mayor or district councils. [A park is called Alsos in Greek].

On the sides of Lycabettus hill, tourists and visitors are sometimes astonished to encounter large steel military doors in the rock, reminiscent of scenes from  "The Guns of Navarone".

Accessed above and across a Kolonaki street named "Navarinou", it is more than evident that parts of Lycabettus hill are hollow within and contain cannons and mounted guns that command the key sea channel of Piraeus. The huge caverns, corridors and rooms inside the raised mass of earth were obviously used for the Nazi war machine. When asked "What's in there today?"

Greek military officials have a standard answer:

"The Germans emptied out the caves before they retreated. Any German war machinery or technical equipment is no longer there. Some of the cavern access-points were permanently damaged with explosives so the exact entrances cannot be located. Most of them are sealed shut. Today the military features of Lycabettus hill belong to NATO, which uses it simply as a storehouse".

A funicular track of steel rails, drawing small railway carriages by cable through the base of the mountain and up to its top, offers a convincing demonstration that Lycabettus is indeed hollow within. A series of complex Bunkers deep inside the mountain of Lycabettus, designed by Bavarian city-planners, with a subterranean engine that provides power to run the cabled hoisting machine, uncannily resembles Hitler's mysterious Eagle's Nest,  or his rumored Southern Redoubt.

Had Hitler hidden his Southern Redoubt in the Alpine mountain area, it would have been subjected to relentless air-raids and assaults, if ever traced by the Allies.  But the bombing of a subterranean fortress in Athens - secretly built by Nazi slaves transported with underground trains, containing priceless ancient monuments and relics of Western civilization- would have quickly produced the world's utmost condemnation.

Lycabettus, a hollow slope covered with ancient myths, may have been a natural choice for pompous German leaders wanting to hide their Southern Redoubt and conduct secret atomic research in "the land of Democritu".

In June of 1941, the Führer made an official visit to Lycabettus.

Was it a mere photo opportunity or his program to inaugurate the Nazi nuclear effort in his fabled Southern Redoubt? 

The  Philadelphia Experiment  was alleged to be a 1943 secret experiment conducted by the U.S. Navy at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in which the U.S. naval destroyer 'USS Eldridge' was briefly rendered invisible to human observers. 

Although the invisibility claim has been debunked, it has also been suggested by some experts that the destroyer was perhaps  a nautical nuclear reactor, as part of a naval back-up system to the  Manhattan Project [Russia has recently produced its own  floating nuclear reactors].

A reactor's core often emits a bright burst of photons, sometimes giving the eerie illusion [Cerenkov effect] of a semi-transparent glow. More recently,  "cloaking" experiments have been conducted in some US labs, by curving or changing the direction of electromagnetic waves, to produce an illusion of invisibility.

Whatever occurred in the Philadelphia shipyard was  only an experiment. The  real  war-time mission of the 'Eldridge' took place shortly thereafter, in the southern  Mediterranean Sea. The Athens port of Piraeus was the largest Allied harbor in the area. 

A failed mutiny disrupted the Greek Navy just around that time and stoked a bitter civil war, an event which some say helped mark the beginning of the Cold War era.

Carlos Miguel Allende, [Carl Meredith Allen] wrote a series of letters in 1955 to Morris K. Jessup, a paranormal researcher. Allende claimed to have witnessed a ship made invisible with electromagnetic fields when he was a sailor in 1943.

The Office of Naval Research asked Jessup to travel to Washington D.C. to discuss the strange letters with its naval officers. In 1959 Jessup was found dead in his car from carbon monoxide poisoning.

The book, "The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility," by William Moore and Charles Berlitz came out in 1979. Crew member Alfred Bielek later said it was actually a space-time experiment [transportation in time between the 1940s and 1980s] and that one of the backers of the project was none other than English occultist Aliester Crowley.

While Crowley was an infamous pro-German propagandist and hidden supporter of Nazism, he was a prominent symbol of London fringe-masonry and in contact with British intelligence. Since the real war-time mission of the 'Eldridge' took place in the southern Mediterranean Sea, one can only wonder if Crowley used his spy connections to somehow take advantage of US nuclear technology during the chaotic Greek naval mutiny. 
  
Another possibility is that top US military commanders actually wanted the Nazis to discover they had the world's first floating nuclear reactor. By demonstrating its utility in an Allied Mediterranean port and allowing Reich leaders to believe it would soon fall into their hands, native German attempts to produce a "Uranium engine" were put on hold. The ploy continued long enough to leave Germany without a military-grade reactor by the war's end, as the 'Eldridge' deftly slipped through the fingers of misinformed Gestapo moles and sailed back to America.

 A modern urban myth implies that the 'SS Eldridge' was part of an experiment to  "turn back time".

The 'Eldridge' became the official property of the  Greek Navy in  1951 and was renamed the 'HS Leon'. She was reported to have been sold as scrap after the year 2000.

Another curious fact -and possible cover for the peddling of  nuclear matιriel- emerged after the Greek colonel George Papadopoulos enforced a right-wing  dictatorship in 1967.

Perhaps lacking good sense, American contractors built for him the small Democritus Nuclear Reactor in a suburb of Athens. The   colonel's  dictatorship collapsed after the 1973 Polytechnic University demonstrations. 
    
An engineering mystery of Lycabettus hill is its large, horse-shoe shaped drainage canal. Observers wonder why the canal encircling a few miles of central Athens leaves the [Kolonaki] Parliament-Embassy area entirely vulnerable to flooding. There is no canal there, the only way to the top of the hill. What may seem to be a vast rainwater drainage system could serve better as a "moat" to make access to the hill difficult for siege weapons.

How was the mount of Lycabettus actually used by the Germans during the Second World War? What kind of tunnel system connected its many secret doors and caverns to the streets below and to nearby buildings, like the Nazi prison cells discovered beneath a movie theatre.

alt

A Book from Berlin
Joseph P. Farrell
28 February 2011

I just received a book from Berlin, from my German publisher Thomas Kirschner of Mosquito Verlag.

This one has me mightily intrigued, for it's titled "Für und Wider 'Hitlers Bombe': Studien zur Atomforschung" in Deutschland,

One can guess at the nature of the book with the words "Hitler's Bomb" but the bland subtitle, "Studies in Atomic Research in Germany" does not quite say everything that is in the book.

Having just received the book I obviously haven't started to read it, but I have, of course, glanced at the table of contents, and...the cover, which is depicted on the right.

At first I thought, "Gee, what's a badly-executed 'eye of Horus' doing on the cover of a book about the Nazi A-bomb?"

Well, sure, the Eye of Horus is also sometimes the Eye of Ra, and Ra is a sun-god, and ...well, you get the nuclear connection. But why was the eye all blood-shot? I looked closer, and suddenly realized I wasn't looking at the eye of Horus/Ra at all, but at the simplified schematic of an implosion detonator for an atomic bomb! 

And the bloodshot eye? The wave-fronts driving the clearly depicted core inward upon itself into supercriticality.

But the real surprises came when I opened the book.

One of the first things I always do is to read the table of contents as it lets me see the general shape of the book's argument.

Well, if the actual text of the book is anything like the hints dropped in the table of contents, this one is going to be a doozy.

The book itself is a collection of short papers edited by Prof. Rainer Karlsch, divided up into topics raised by post-reunification German researchers concerning the actual state of Nazi atomic bomb research during the war. 

As anyone who has read my book "Reich of the Black Sun" will recall, I mentioned two possible Nazi atomic tests...one in October 1944 in the Baltic near the Island of Rügen, and the other in March 1945 near the troop parade ground of Ohrdruf.

This last test posed special problems, not the least of which was the very low critical mass allegedly used for the device, a mass so low that it inevitably implied -if it was successful and an actual atomic test- that the Nazis had pressed the enrichment of isotopes to very extreme degrees, and that they had also pressed the concept of "boosting" to a high degree as well.

A mere glance at the book's table of contents has me salivating:

Karlsch himself begins the collection of papers with one entitled "Was gesschah in März 1945? Dokumente and Zeugenaussagen zu den Tests auf dem Truppenübungsplatz Ohrdruf" [What Was Seen in March, 1945? Documents and Witness Testimony Concerning the Tests on the Troop Parade Ground at Ohrdruf].

This is followed in chapter three by a paper from Vladimir Mineev and Alexander Funtikov entitled "Physikalische Analysen zur Energiefreisetzung bei den deutschen Atomtests von 1945" [Physical Analysis of the Liberation of Energy during the German Atomic Tests of 1945]. Y

et another caught my eye: Heiko Petermann's "Unvergleichbar? Die Luftbildanalysen von White Sands und Ohrdruff" [No Comparison? The Analysis of Aerial Pictures from White Sands and Ohrdruf]. And finally, one that literally leaped off the page was Wolfgang Ebsen's paper "The Interrogation Report of Rudolf [sic] Zinsser: Why didn't the American President Fly to London at the End of 1944?"

Clearly the Germans are taking the story of wartime atomic research very seriously, and are continuing to raise disturbing questions about the postwar Allied Legend.

One might even go so far as to say that this is a kind of "history" or "culture" war, a war over telling the truth -no matter how unpleasant it may be- concerning the strange end of the war in Europe. There will, of course, be a deafening silence to this book on this side of the Atlantic... but such wars are not won with silence or ever-more-studied repetitions of the same old legend.

While scholars on this side of the Atlantic are writing books on whether Heisenberg did, or did not, sabotage the Nazi atom bomb, the Germans, Poles, and Russians are unearthing new documents, aerial reconnaissance photographs, and numerous other types of data to recount - to their satisfaction - what was really happening in, and to, their countries during World War Two at the hands of the Nazi regime.

This is not a story that will go away, try as people on this side of the Atlantic may to make it do so....

A declassified USN Intelligence file “Investigations, Research, Developments and Practical Use of the German Atomic Bomb” dated 19 August 1945, NARA/RG 38, Box 9-13 Entry 98c issued by COMNAVEU London on 25 January 1946, has an affidavit of Captain RF Hickey USN recounting testimony given to him during investigations by Penemünde observer pilot Hans Zinsser concerning atomic bomb tests at Rügen, October 1944. 

The report was given a rating of “B-1” USN Intelligence on a scale defines B-1 to mean: B= “usually reliable" and 1= "Report confirmed by other sources".

47. A man named ZINSSER, a Flak rocket expert, mentioned what he noticed one day::

In the beginning of October 1944 I flew from Ludwigslust [south of Lübeck], about 12 to 15 km from an atomic bomb test station, when I noticed a strong, bright illumination of the whole atmosphere, lasting about 2 seconds.

48. The clearly visible pressure wave escaped the approaching and following cloud formed by the explosion.

This wave had a diameter of about 1 km when it became visible and the color of the cloud changed frequently.

It became dotted after a short period of darkness with all sorts of light spots, which were, in contrast to normal explosions, of a pale blue color.

49. After about 10 seconds the sharp outlines of the explosion cloud disappeared, then the cloud began to take on a lighter color against the sky covered with a gray overcast.

The diameter of the still visible pressure wave was at least 9000 meters while remaining visible for at least 15 seconds.

50. Personal observations of the colors of the explosion cloud found an almost blue-violet shade.

During this manifestation reddish-colored rims were to be seen, changing to a dirty-like shade in very rapid succession.

51. The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing.

52. About one hour later I started with an He-111 from the A/D [probably "aerodrome"] at Ludwigslust and flew in an easterly direction.

Shortly after the start I passed through the almost complete overcast [between 3000 and 4000 meter altitude].

A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections [at about 7000 meter altitude] stood, without any seeming connections, over the spot where the explosion took place.

Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lightning, turned up.

53. Because of the P-38s operating in the area Wittenberg-Mersburg I had to turn to the north but observed a better visibility at the bottom of the cloud where the explosion occured [sic].

Note: It does not seem very clear to me why those experiments took place in such crowded areas.

 

There were no P-38 night fighters operating over Europe in October 1944.

'Lightnings' were withdrawn from service from almost every fighter group in Europe between July and September 1944.

he only P-38 'Lightnings' which continued operating in the ETO after September 1944 were either F5 single seat reconnaissance aircraft or single day fighter P-38s of 474th Fighter Group. This group does not appear to have ever used them as night fighters. 

The P-38 was only used as a night fighter in the Pacific theatre. 

It is reasonable to assume therefore that Zinsser was wrongly informed of P-38s. These may have been other aircraft obviously, but they may even have been Luftwaffe aircraft.

Zinsser's affidavit does not say he personally saw, or engaged with a P-38. 

Wittenberg and Merseberg are both approximately 50 nautical miles south of Berlin, 150 nm south of Rügen, and way beyond visible range. 

It is reasonable to assume he was advised of P-38's by radio and the mis-identification was by a Luftwaffe nightfighter pilot 150 miles to the south:

In all likelyhood a twin boom P-61 'Black Widow' operating in the area.

If there was a sighting by an Allied aircraft of the same thing Zinsser saw, it may have been classified "Top Secret" and could some day be found in an obscure file.

There was another curiosity in Zinsser's statement, one that his American interrogators either did not pursue, or, if they did pursue it, the results remain classified still::

How did Zinsser know it was a test?

The answer is obvious: Zinsser knew, because he was somehow involved.

The real problem with the report is in determining what location Zinsser is describing.

 Where did this test take place? 

In the published version, Zinsser gives the location of the "Atomic Bomb Test Station" as being 10-12 kilometres away from the Ludwigslust airfield.

In a later observation he said that the place in question was "further east" from there. 

At this point, it needs to be taken into account that the Zinsser report is only available as an Allied abstract, in English translation. The original statements, of the putative prisoner-of-war Zinsser, can thus not be directly compared, to see whether they agree.

 The details of the location, in the available version, may have been concealed for reasons of security. Subsequently, it may have made it more difficult for the test area to be found.

As likely locations, researchers who have worked on the Zinsser report, suggest the troop exercise areas at Peenemünde, and an exercise area near the island of Rügen.

Others are of the opinion that the suggested direction "east" has been deliberately confused with "west", so that perhaps the troop exercise area at Kummersdorf is a likely location.

Near to that exercise area was the Gottow nuclear laboratory of Dr Diebner. American aerial photographs, taken in 1945, also show in Kummersdorf a large unusual looking round explosion area. That may have been the test site. 

To date, there has been no conclusive success in establishing the definitive location of the October 1944 atomic test. If that test involved an atomic explosion set off at great height, it would be futile to look for a crater or anything like one.

ln any case, it would certainly have to be possible, even today, to establish by ground tests, that a nuclear explosion took place there in 1944. Further research is needed.

lf the further statements in Zinsser’s reports are to be believed, then there also must have been American eye-witnesses of the nuclear explosion.

Zinsser’s He 111 would have had to avoid American P 38 fighters that were operating in the area. Such a fantastic sight as a nuclear explosion could scarcely have escaped the crews of those P 38s. Therefore their observations should be able to be found in American operational reports.

Certainly Zinsser’s report, in the form in which it has reached us from the Allies, contains an important key that could indicate the actual location of the nuclear test.

The key concems Zinsser’s actual activity, and his aircraft. Zinsser maintains in the report that he had happened to pass the area because he had to make a courier flight. 

It is believed that he went up again, a second time, a little later. Most importantly, it is not known who could have given him permission. Therefore the question is what did an anti-aircraft missile expert want with a He 111 at a nuclear test? 

Many converted Heinkel He 111s were used by the Karlshagen test centre near Peenemünde for testing new types of rockets. At Karlshagen, as at Peenemünde, the aircraft were a fixed element of the complement and were used by both test centres, until they were evacuated in the spring of 1945.

The reliable Heinkel aircraft were used there as launch, survey or photographic aircraft. Every individual rocket flight had to be documented to the last detail. That suggests the conclusion that the anti-aircraft missile expert Zinsser had actually taken off in his special He 111 from Peenemünde, and not from Ludwigslust. There is thus added weight to statements that place the nuclear test in the Peenemünde area . 

The question as to whether Zinsser "happened"’ to come across the test area at the time must, on closer exarnination, be discounted.

In actual fact, he had probably been given the task of documenting the individual stages of the nuclear test, from a special Heinkel He 111 that was otherwise used for anti-aircraft missile tests. In a test as secret as a nuclear explosion, he could perhaps have "happened", to fly close to the test area, but he could never have made a second flight within an hour. He must then have been given the task of continuing his test observations by a second flight.

Of course, the information given in the Zinsser report is not yet final proof. Interestingly, in addition to Zinsser’s report there also exists a statement from an Italian officer, who attended the same test as an observer for Mussolini. That officer states precisely that the nuclear test was carried out on 12 October 1944 in the area of the island of Rügen, i.e. close to Peenemünde.

-- Friedrich Georg, "Hitler's Miracle Weapons"

Did Hitler have a Nuclear Bomb?

A book published in Italy, on 30 September 2005 is set to reignite a smouldering controversy over how close the Nazis came to manufacturing a nuclear device in the closing stages of the second world war.

The 88 year-old author, Luigi Romersa, in his book "Hitler's Secret Weapon", claims to be the last living witness to an experimental detonation of a Nazi weapon he says was the world's first atom bomb. 

Some historians believe was the experimental detonation of a rudimentary weapon on an island in the Baltic in 1944, and that Hitler was preparing to unleash a nuclear bomb on the Allies in the last days of the Second World War.

Hitler's nuclear programme has become a subject of intense dispute in recent months, particularly in Germany.

An independent historian, Rainer Karlsch, met with a barrage of hostility when he published a study containing evidence that the Nazis had got much further than previously believed, suggesting that the Nazis conducted three nuclear weapons tests in 1944 and 1945, killing 700 people.

His claims have been ridiculed by other historians, who pointed out that only a few dozen German physicists were involved in developing nuclear devices. In comparison, it took 125,000 Americans, including six future Nobel Prize winners, to develop the atomic bombs that exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. .

Romersa's story suggests the Nazis were much further advanced in their nuclear ambitions than has previously been thought. It has reignites a dispute over how close Hitler came to having nuclear weapons.

Romersa, a supporter of Mr Karlsch's thesis, lives today in an elegant flat in the Parioli district of Rome. His study walls are covered with photographs from a career during which he interviewed many of the major figures of the 20th century, from Chiang Kai-shek to Lyndon Johnson. Though he suffers from some ill-health these days, he is still lucid and articulate.

He told the "Guardian" how, in September 1944, Italy's wartime dictator, Benito Mussolini, had summoned him to the town of Salo to entrust him with a special, secret mission. Mussolini was then leader of the Nazi-installed government of northern Italy and Mr Romersa was a 27 year-old war correspondent for "Corriere della Sera".

Mr Romersa said that when Mussolini had met Hitler earlier in the conflict, the Nazi dictator had alluded to Germany's development of weapons capable of reversing the course of the war. "Mussolini said to me: 'I want to know more about these weapons. I asked Hitler but he was unforthcoming'.

Mussolini provided him with letters of introduction to both Josef Göbbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, and Hitler himself. After meeting both men in Germany, 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 Peenemünde, on the Baltic coast. 

Romersa said how he saw weapons "streets ahead of any conventional weapons the allies had at the time" :

"They were developing a missile which they said they intended to launch from Europe across the Atlantic to bomb America. Hitler and Nazi Germany had a very, very developed weapons programme and were certainly capable of creating an atomic bomb".

On the morning of 12 October 1944, Romersa was taken to what is now the holiday island of Rügen, just off the German coast, where he watched the detonation of what his hosts called a "disintegration bomb".

"They took me to a concrete Bunker with an aperture of exceptionally thick glass. At a certain moment, the news came through that detonation was imminent," he said.

"We were handed special glasses, there was a slight tremor in the Bunker; and when the bomb detonated there was a sudden, blinding flash of light so bright that it penetrated the glasses we were given and lit up the room, and then a thick cloud of smoke. It took the shape of a column and then that of a big flower.

"The officials there told me we had to remain in the Bunker for several hours because of the effects of the bomb. When we eventually left, they made us put on a sort of coat and trousers which seemed to me to be made of asbestos and we went to the scene of the explosion, which was about one and a half kilometres away.

"The effects were tragic. The trees around had been turned to carbon. No leaves. Nothing alive. There were some animals - sheep - in the area and they too had been burnt to cinders". 

Stralsund resident Elisabeth Mestlin saw explosion and a large purple mushroom shaped cloud hovering over Bug peninsula from the island of Vitte Hiddensee on 12 October 1944.

Manhattan Project scientist Philip Morrison in "Time" magazine 27 November 1944 notes reading interrogation reports of two German officers [captured], near Peenemünde who disclosed that Germany already had the bomb...Morrison stated:  

"I read a report on the interrogation of German officers [captured], near Peenemünde who had seen the purple mushroom-shaped cloud. We thought this to be very reliable, but they upset us.

"I sent a memorandum to safety advisers, in which I informed that President Roosevelt should not be meeting with Churchill in London, because it was feared London would be attacked by use of the atomic bomb. Every evening and morning I listened BBC radio to see if London still existed. V2 rocket would be enough to move a small atomic bomb". 

Werner Grothmann [Himmler's adjutant] mentions this test.

At the location on Bug Isthmus on which the Rügen nuclear tests occurred in October 1944, there are two craters filled with water contaminated by Cobalt 60 and Caesium 137, an artificial radionuclide created in nuclear explosions. 

There are no similar coastal ponds or lagoons along the Baltic coast similarly contaminated to the same levels thus it is not radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. 

German testing of nuclear weapons is also mentioned in OSS Report A-44 136/5985, 7 November 1944

On his return to Italy, Mr Romersa briefed Mussolini on his visit.

Benito Mussolini, by the end of the war reduced to a mere puppet of Hitler and governing a "Fascist republic" in German-controlled northern Italy, spoke often of the German "Wonder Weapons":

"The wonder weapons are the hope. It is laughable and senseless for us to threaten at this moment, without a basis in reality for these threats. 

"The well-known mass destruction bombs are nearly ready. In only a few days, with the utmost meticulous intelligence, Hitler will probably execute this fearful blow, because he will have full confidence....

" It appears, that there are three bombs - and each has an astonishing operation. The construction of each unit is fearfully complex and of a lengthy time of completion".

-- Benito Mussolini, 'Political Testament' 22 April 1945, cited in Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, "Hitler und die 'Bombe': Welchen Stand erreichte die deutsche Atomforschung und Geheimwaffenentwicklung wirklich?" [Rottenburg: Kopp Verlag, 2002] 

It would be easy to dismiss Mussolini's statements as the delusional and insane ravings of a fascist dictator facing defeat, clinging desperately to forlorn hopes and tattered dreams, were it not for the weird corroboration supplied by one Piotr Ivanovitch Titarenko, a former military translator on the staff of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, who handled the Japanese capitulation to Russia at the end of the war.

As reported in the German magazine "Der Spiegel" in 1992, Titarenko wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In it, he reported that there were actually three bombs dropped on Japan, one of which, dropped on Nagasaki prior to its actual bombing, did not explode. This bomb was handed over by Japan to the Soviet Union.

-- Edgar Mayer and Thomas Mehner, "Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe: Gewann Hitlers Wissenschaftler den nuklearen Wettlauf doch? Die Geheimprojekte bei Innsbruck, im Raum Jonastal bei Arnstadt und in Prag". [Rottenburg: Kopp Verlag, 2001] 

Mussolini and a Soviet marshal's military translator are not the only ones corroborating the strange number of "three bombs", for yet a fourth bomb may actually have been in play at one point, being transported to the Far East on board the US heavy cruiser 'Indianapolis' [CA 35], when the latter sank in 1945.
 

Near the end of World War II, the principal Allied war powers each made plans for exploitation of German science.

In light of the implications of nuclear weapons, German nuclear fission and related technologies were singled out for special attention.

In addition to exploitation, denial of these technologies, their personnel, and related materials to rival Allies was a driving force of their efforts.

This typically meant getting to these resources first, which to some extent put the Soviets at a disadvantage in some geographic locations easily reached by the Western Allies, even if the area was destined to be in the Soviet zone of occupation by the Potsdam Conference. At times all parties were heavy-handed in their pursuit and denial to others.

The best known US denial and exploitation effort was Operation Paperclip, a broad dragnet that encompassed a wide range of advanced fields, including jet and rocket propulsion, nuclear physics, and other developments with military applications such as infrared technology.

Operations directed specifically towards German nuclear fission were "Operation Alsos" and "Operation Epsilon", the latter being done in collaboration with the British. In lieu of the codename for the Soviet operation it is referred to as the Russian Alsos.

Berlin had been a location of many German scientific research facilities. To limit casualties and loss of equipment, many of these facilities were dispersed to other locations in the latter years of the war.

Unfortunately for the Soviets, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik [KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics] had mostly been moved in 1943 and 1944 to Hechingen and its neighboring town of Haigerloch, on the edge of the Black Forest, which eventually became the French occupation zone.

This move allowed the Americans to take into custody a large number of German scientists associated with nuclear research.

The only section of the institute which remained in Berlin was the low-temperature physics section, headed by Ludwig Bewilogua, who was in charge of the exponential Uranium pile.

American Alsos teams carrying out Operation BIG raced through Baden-Württemburg near war's end in the spring of 1945, uncovering, collecting, and selectively destroying Uranverein elements, including capturing a prototype reactor at Haigerloch and records, heavy water, and Uranium ingots at Tailfingen.

These were all shipped back to the United States for study and utilization in the U.S. atomic program.

Nine of the prominent German scientists who published reports in "Kernphysikalische Forschungsberichte" as members of the Uranverein were picked up by Operation Alsos and incarcerated in England under Operation Epsilon.

On 6 August 1945, a B-29 bomber, the 'Enola Gay', dropped an estimated 12 kilotons of TNT in a Uranium bomb termed "Little Boy" on Hiroshima.

Charles Sweeney published his memoirs as  "War's End: An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission" [Avon, 1997]. During the party following the successful Hiroshima drop, he recalled that Paul Tibbets took him aside and told him that he was to command the second atomic mission, with Kokura as the primary and Nagasaki as the secondary target. Timing was important, Tibbets said.

"It was vital that [the Japanese] believed we had an unlimited supply of atomic bombs and that we would continue to use them. Of course, the truth was that we only had one more bomb on Tinian. Delivery of the third bomb was several weeks away".

Just three days another B-29, 'Bock's Car', took off for Kokura carrying a second and more deadly Plutonium bomb called "Fat Man," estimated to be between as powerful as 20 kilotons of TNT.
It seems inclement weather forced the aircrew to abandon their original plans to attack Kokura and go to Nagasaki instead. Weather was so bad there that the crew had even considered violating their orders to drop the bomb via radar before finding a small gap in the clouds to deliver their deadly cargo.

Archivists now suggest the attack on Nagasaki was a shock to Truman, as Kokura was meant to be the primary target, with Nagasaki a secondary option.

Archival records show a third bomb was under assembly at Tinian in the Mariana Islands where the 'Enola Gay' and 'Bock's Car' had flown from, with the main Plutonium core about to be shipped from the U.S.

A declassified transcript of a top-level call between General John E. Hull and Colonel L. E. Seeman on 13 August, reveals details of this "third bomb" which according to Seeman,  would be ready for use on 19 August. It also confirmed that a vast production line of about 12 other atomic bombs was being readied for additional continuous strikes throughout September and October against other key targets.
 
Although some aircrew saw "Tokyo Joe" chalked on the bomb's casing, it was said to be destined for Kokura, the original target for the second bomb, and named "Fat Boy".

On 15 August, however, just as the Plutonium was about to be sent to Tinian, news of the Japanese surrender came through and its loading was stopped.

Chuck Hansen's book  "U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History" notes that at the end of 1945 the U.S. owned a total of two atomic bombs, both Fat Man Plutonium bombs. [This design became the standard U.S. nuclear weapon until into the 1950s].

He also notes that the weapons were short-lived, so it is possible that a) there were more than two bombs in the inventory when the war ended and that b) the bombs on hand on 31 December had been assembled after 15 August.

 

Documents exist showing that America’s secret development of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project in late 1944 and early 1945 faced critical shortages of weapons grade Uranium, and had yet to solve the fusing problem for the plutonium bomb. So the question is, if these reports are true, where did the extra bomb[s] come from? That three, and possibly four, bombs were ready for use on Japan so quickly would seem to stretch credulity, unless these bombs were war booty, brought from Europe.

In the 1960s, the East German state security service, the Stasi, became aware of rumors circulating in the former East German state of Thuringia that there had been a nuclear detonation in 1945.

Gerhard Rundnagel, a plumber to the Stasi, told the security service that he had been in contact with the research team working with Diebner. He said one of the physicists in the group had told him that there were "two atomic bombs in a safe". Rundnagel later said the two bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If the Nazis had operational atomic weapons, is it possible they were transferred to the United States?  

Since only a plutonium bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, researchers have wondered where America acquired the Uranium bombs dropped on Japan less than a month later. 

Some have speculated that the United States used a Nazi bomb or used Nazi enriched Uranium to manufacture its bombs.

Also, since the "Trinity" bomb exploded near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, was a Plutonium bomb. Why then would the United States first drop the Little Boy, an untested Uranium bomb, on Japan on 6 August 1945? 

"A rational explanation is [that] ‘Little Boy’ was not tested by the Americans because... [t]he Americans did not need to test it, because its German designers already had", surmised Farrell.

This idea is supported by the statement of German authors Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb", maintained that the bomb dropped on Japan was of "German provenance". 

Of course, this idea would fly in the face of the long- accepted Allied Legend that Germany simply couldn’t manufacture an atomic bomb by the war’s end.

Where could the Nazis have obtained enriched Uranium for such a bomb?

One potential source was the secure underground laboratory of Baron Manfred von Ardenne, built in Lichterfelde outside Berlin, which contained a 2-million-volt electrostatic generator and a cyclotron. In 1941, von Ardenne, along with Fritz Houtermans, had calculated the critical mass needed to create U-235. It should be noted that Hitler visited the laboratory toward the end of the war, at a time when he spoke enthusiastically of a new wonder weapon that would turn the tide in Germany’s favor.

It is also stated, that 1,200 tons of finished ore concentrate of Uranium oxide produced in Belgium were at the disposal of the Germans. However, it seems that the Germans never used it. According to the reports from the U.S. and Soviet military, nearly the same amount of material was diverted to the U.S. and the USSR after the defeat of Germany, and it was the same Belgian Uranium.

Some researchers contend that the Nazi development of a Uranium bomb was kept secret because the work was not part of the German military- industrial system but hidden within the German Postal Service.

In the 1950s, Romersapublished a fuller account of his experiences in the magazine "Oggi". But, he said, "everyone said I was mad".

By then, it was universally accepted that Hitler's scientists had been years away from testing a nuclear device. Allied interrogators who questioned the German researchers concluded that there were vast gaps in their understanding of nuclear fission. In any case, the US had needed 125,000 people to develop the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, whereas Germany's programme involved no more than a few dozen physicists, led by the Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg.

But the documents published  by Mr Karlsch and an American scholar, Mark Walker of Union College, Schenectady, have punctured this consensus.

Russian archives have shown that one of the German scientists lodged a patent claim for a plutonium bomb as early as 1941 and, in June, the two historians published an article in the British monthly, "Physics World", that included what they claimed was the first diagram of one of the bombs Hitler's scientists were trying to build - a device that exploited both fission and fusion.

Could Mr Romersa have seen the detonation of an early prototype? He is not the only person to have claimed to have witnessed similar explosions. 

Former East German archives have produced this account by Cläre Werner: On the evening of 3 March 1945, she claimed, she was near the town of Ohrdruf when she saw a "big, slim column" rise into the air, "so bright that one could have read a newspaper".

Ohrdruf had a concentration camp, part of the Buchenwald complex. Heinz Wachsmut, who worked for a local excavating company, told officials that the day after Ms Werner claimed to have seen an explosion he was ordered to help the SS build wooden platforms for the cremation of the corpses of prisoners. He said their bodies were covered with horrific burns.

After the war, the scientists engaged in the Nazi project were interned. Gerlach, whose research in other fields won him praise from the likes of Albert Einstein, returned to academic life and died a revered figure. Diebner eventually got a job in West Germany's defence ministry. Neither man ever alluded to their work on what would have been the world's first tactical nuclear weapon.

"Diebner and Gerlach said nothing about this," said Prof Walker. "They took it to their graves".

· Le armi segrete di Hitler, by Luigi Romersa, is published by Ugo Mursia Editore.

-- "The Guardian" 30 September 2005 and "The Times of India" 2 October 2005
 

Did Hitler have a Nuclear Bomb? 
Mushroom cloud sighting in declassified US documents suggests the Nazis successfully tested a nuke before the end of World War Two 
By Allan Hall In Berlin for MailOnline
23 February 2017

Documents unearthed in an American archive suggest that Nazi Germany may have tested an operational nuclear bomb before the end of the Second World War.

Recently declassified file APO 696 from the National Archives in Washington, obtained by the popular daily newspaper "Bild", is a detailed survey of how far Third Reich scientists got in the development of an atomic bomb - something Hitler craved.

In the file, the task of the academics who prepared the paper between 1944 and 1947 was the "investigations, research, developments and practical use of the German atomic bomb".

The report was prepared by countless American and British Intelligence officers and also includes the testimony of four German experts - two chemical physicists, a chemist and a missile expert.

It concurs that Hitler's scientists 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 statement of the German test pilot Hans Zinsser in the file is considered evidence: The missile expert says he observed in 1944 a mushroom cloud in the sky during a test flight near Ludwigslust.

According to other archival documents, the Italian correspondent Luigi Romersa observed on the ground the same explosion.

He had been sent by dictator Benito Mussolini to watch the test of a "new weapon" of the Germans. He was ordered to report his impressions back to Mussolini.

It is known that Hitler pursued the goal of nuclear technology and wanted his V-2 rockets to be able to carry them to destroy the UK.

The testimony of the four German scientists in the declassified American report mentions a top secret meeting held in Berlin in 1943 at which armaments minister and Hitler favourite Albert Speer was present for the discussion called a "Nuclear Summit".

In the end the report states that the Allies believe the Germans fell short of triggering the nuclear chain reaction necessary to trigger a nuclear blast - but none could come up with an explanation for what occurred in the skies over Ludwigslust in 1944.
 

Nazi nuclear waste from Hitler's secret A-bomb programme found in mine
By Allan Hall for MailOnline 
13 July 2011 

More than 126,000 barrels of nuclear material that Hitler planned to use in an atom bomb programme now lies rotting over 2,000 feet below ground in an old salt mine.

126,000 barrels of German nuclear waste is exceptional [55 gallon drum x 10lbs* per gallon of mixed waste = 34,650 tons of material] for a project which was little more than a 'laboratory effort to invent nuclear power'.

* Since Uranium weighs 158.9lbs per gallon, this is a quite conservative estimate.

German nuclear experts believe they have found nuclear waste from Hitler’s secret atom bomb programme in a crumbling mine near Hanover.

Rumour has it that the remains of nuclear scientists who worked on the Nazi programme are also there, their irradiated bodies burned in secret by S.S. men sworn to secrecy.

A statement by a boss of the Asse II nuclear fuel dump, just discovered in an archive, said how in 1967 "our association sank radioactive wastes from the last war, uranium waste, from the preparation of the German atom bomb".

This has sent shock waves through historians who thought that the German atomic programme was nowhere near advanced enough in WW2 to have produced nuclear waste in any quantities.

It has also triggered a firestorm of uncertainty among locals, especially given Germany’s paranoia post-Fukushima.

Germany was the first western nation to announce the closure of all its atomic power plants following the disaster at the Japanese facility following the catastrophic earthquake and Tsunami in March.

There are calls to remove all the nuclear material stored within the sealed site but this would cost billions of pounds.

Yet the thought of Nazi atomic bomb material stored underground has made headlines across Germany - and the country’s Greenpeace movement has backed a call for secret documents relating to the dump to be released to the state parliament from sealed archives in Berlin.

It was in January of 1939, nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War, that German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published the results of an historic experiment about nuclear fission.

The German "Uranium Project" began in earnest shortly after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September.

Army physicist Kurt Diebner led a team tasked to investigate the military applications of fission. By the end of the year the physicist Werner Heisenberg had calculated that nuclear fission chain reactions might be possible.

Although the war hampered their work, by the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 Nazi scientists had achieved a significant enrichment in samples of uranium.

Mark Walker, a US expert on the Nazi programme said: 

"Because we still don’t know about these projects, which remain cloaked in WW2 secrecy, it isn’t safe to say the Nazis fell short of enriching enough uranium for a bomb. Some documents remain top secret to this day.

"Claims that a nuclear weapon was tested at Rügen in October 1944 and again at Ohrdruf in March 1945 leave open a question, did they or didn’t they?'

Rügen is a Baltic island and Ohrdruf a top-secret Bunker complex in Thuringia where local legend has it that an A-bomb was tested by the Nazis in the dying days of the war.
 

German Nuclear Energy Project
 
The German nuclear energy project was an endeavor by scientists during World War II in Nazi Germany to develop nuclear energy and an atomic bomb for practical use. Unlike the competing Allied effort to develop a nuclear weapon the German effort resulted in two rival teams, one working for the military, the second, a civilian effort co-ordinated by the Reichspost.        

Overview

The nuclear research effort most widely discussed was that of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute team led by the physicist Werner Heisenberg.

The second was a military team under the scientific leadership of Prof. Kurt Diebner. This military team was also associated with Dr. Paul Harteck who helped to develop the gaseous Uranium centrifuge invented by Dr. Erich Bagge.

The intentions of Heisenberg's team are a matter of historical controversy, centering on whether or not the scientists involved were genuinely attempting to build an atomic bomb for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. The project was not a military success by any measure.       

A heavy water nuclear test reactor was built in a cave in Haigerloch. This reactor never reached critical condition, because the amount of Uranium was never sufficient. The cave is now a museum. [1]

Effectiveness and implications

Nuclear fission was discovered in Germany in 1938-1939 through the work of Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman, Lise Meitner, and Otto Robert Frisch [following up on work done by Enrico Fermi]. By the beginning of World War II the scientific community was well aware of the early German lead in this area of nuclear physics.     

The threat of a Nazi atomic bomb was one of the primary driving forces behind the creation of the "British Tube Alloys" project which would eventually lead to the Allied nuclear weapons effort: the Manhattan Project.

Several European exiles from Germany, Italy, Hungary and other nations eventually would make significant contributions to the Allied nuclear effort. The German government never did finance a full crash program to develop weapons, as they estimated it could not be completed in time for use in the war, thus the German program was much more limited in capacity and ability when compared to the eventual size and priority of the Manhattan Project. 

In 1945, a U.S. investigation called "Operation Alsos" determined that German scientists under Heisenberg were close, but still short, of the point that Allied scientists had reached in 1942, the creation of a sustained nuclear chain reaction, a crucial step for creating a nuclear reactor [which in turn could be used for either peaceful purposes, or for creating plutonium, needed for nuclear weapons].

The U-234 submarine tried to deliver Uranium and advanced weapons technology to Japan, but after the German capitulation, it surrendered to the U.S. before reaching Japan..     

There has been a historical debate, however, as to whether the German scientists purposefully sabotaged the project by under-representing their chances at success, or whether their estimates were based in either error or inadequacy.

Post war

After the war, ten German scientists: Erich Bagge, Kurt Diebner, Walther Gerlach, Paul Harteck, Horst Korsching, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Karl Wirtz, Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn [who had co-discovered nuclear fission], and Max von Laue [an ardent anti-Nazi], were taken captive by Allied forces and put under secret watch at Farm Hall, England, as part of Operation Epsilon.

Their conversations were recorded as Allied analysts attempted to discover the extent of German knowledge about nuclear weapons. The results were inconclusive, but they allowed them to hear the results of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which sent Hahn into a near-suicidal despair.

By the next morning, Heisenberg claimed to have worked out exactly how the American atomic bomb must have worked, judging from reports of the damage and explosive size, and gave a lecture to the rest of the captive scientists on the effort.   

While it is clear that Heisenberg had a firm understanding of the principles involved, he, either conciously or erroneously, greatly overestimated the amount of fissionable material required by several orders of magnitude,  yet in 1941 a paper by Fritz Houtermanns was circulated to Heisenberg and other key Nazi scientists calculating the critical mass for Uranium and Plutonium with more accuracy than calculations by the Manhattan Project.  

At a Harnak Haus conference in July 1942, Heisenberg was trying to promote development of a nuclear bomb to Speer and German Chiefs of staff. Erhard Milch in his unpublished memoirs recalled that he stood up and asked Heisenberg how big a wahead would need to be to level a whole city. Heisenberg replied no bigger than a pineapple. 

Heisenberg's 1941 meeting with Bohr

In September of 1941, Werner Heisenberg met with his former mentor Niels Bohr in occupied Denmark and had a conversation outside of any other witnesses. The exact content of their conversation has, since the 1950s, been a matter of some controversy. The meeting and its controversy was the subject of a Tony Award-winning play from 1998 by Michael Frayn, "Copenhagen".    

There is considerable speculation on what occurred at the real-life meeting, and the actual accounts of it from the parties involved differ. The pro-Bohr version of the story asserts that Heisenberg was seeking to recruit Bohr to the Nazi nuclear effort, and offering him academic advancement in return.

The pro-Heisenberg version asserts that Heisenberg was attempting to give Bohr information about the state of the German atomic programme, in the hope that he might pass it to the Allies through clandestine contacts. At that point the German atomic programme was not progressing well [the Nazi government had decided not to undertake the investment required to develop a weapon during the war];

Heisenberg may have suspected that the Allies had a viable atomic program, and hoped that by disabusing them of the idea that the German program was also successful he could dissuade the Allies from using an atom bomb on Germany.

Much of the initial "controversy" resulted from a 1956 letter Heisenberg sent to the journalist Robert Jungk after reading the German edition of Jungk's book "Brighter than a Thousand Suns" [1956].

In the letter, Heisenberg described his role in the German bomb project. Jungk published an excerpt from the letter in the Danish edition of the book in 1956 which, out of context, made it look as if Heisenberg was claiming to have purposely derailed the German bomb project on moral grounds. [The letter's whole text shows Heisenberg was careful not to claim this].

Bohr was outraged after reading this excerpt in his copy of the book, feeling that this was false and that the 1941 meeting had proven to him that Heisenberg was quite happy with producing nuclear weapons for Germany. 

After the play inspired numerous scholarly and media debates over the 1941 meeting, the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen released to the public all heretofore sealed documents related to the meeting, a move intended mostly to settle historical arguments over what they contained.

Among the documents were the original drafts of letters Bohr wrote to Heisenberg in 1957 about Jungk's book and other topics. The documents added little to the historical record but were interpreted by the media as supporting the "Bohr" version of the events. According to the archivists, the letters were released "to avoid undue speculation about the contents of the draft letter", which had been known about but not been open to historians previously.

Although the motives of the meeting will continue to be debated, several aspects of the meeting cannot be denied. By September of 1941, Germany had been at war for two years, and as Heisenberg was the head of the secret German atomic bomb project, he was risking severe punishment by just speaking to Bohr.

Since Bohr was half-Jewish he would never have been allowed to participate in the project. Also, since Bohr was a famous physicist, it would have been fairly easy to conclude that Bohr would be attempting to escape to the West soon, making Heisenberg's meeting with him an even more serious breach of security.

Battle of Berlin

According to the military historian Antony Beevor possession of as much of the German nuclear energy project was a primary motive for Stalin authorising the launching of the Battle for Berlin. [2] The pre-emptive destruction of as much of this infrastructure as possible, so that it would not fall into Soviet hands, was the motive behind the raid on 15 March 1945 by the USAAF Eighth Air Force on the German atomic energy research facility in Oranienburg, a suburb of Berlin. [3] 

Degusa was chemically refining Uranium from Thorium at their refinery at Oranienburg according to an OSS interrogation of Dr Ing Ernst Naggelstein in Switzerland in November 1944 

Since the Oranienburg plant was to be in the future Soviet zone of occupation and the Russian troops would get there before the Allies, General Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project, recommended to General George Marshall that the plant be destroyed by aerial bombardment, in order to deny its uranium production equipment to the Russians.

On 15 March 1945, 612 B-17 Flying Fortress bombers of the Eighth Air Force dropped 1,506 tons of high-explosive and 178 tons of incendiary bombs on the plant. 

Nikolaus Riehl visited the site with the Russians and said that the facility was mostly destroyed. Riehl also recalled long after the war that the Russians knew precisely why the Americans had bombed the facility – the attack had been directed at them rather than the Germans.

When a Soviet search team arrived at the Auergesellschaft facility in Oranienburg, they had, however, found nearly 100 tons of fairly pure Uranium oxide. The Soviet Union took this Uranium as reparations, which amounted to between 25% and 40% of the Uranium taken from Germany and Czechoslovakia at the end of the war, which saved the Soviet Union a year on its atomic bomb project

Sources: 

David Holloway, "Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956"  [Yale, 1994]
Norman M. Naimark, "The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949" [Belknap,1995]  
Nikolaus Riehl, "The Soviet Race for the Bomb" [American Chemical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundations, 1996]

Analysis

There have been numerous other cited factors for the failure of the German program. One is that the repressive policies under Hitler encouraged many top scientists to flee Europe, including many who worked on the Allied project [Heisenberg himself was a target of party propaganda for some time during the Deutsche Physik movement].

Another, put forth by Alsos scientific head Samuel Goudsmit, was that the stifling, utilitarian political atmosphere adversely affected the quality of the science done. Another is that the German homeland was nowhere as secure from air attack as was the USA. Had the many massive centralized factories and production facilities constructed for the US bomb project been built in Germany, they would have been prime targets for Allied bombing raids.  

In 2005, Berlin historian Rainer Karlsch published a book, "Hitlers Bombe" [in German], which was reported in the press as claiming to provide evidence that Nazi Germany had tested crude nuclear weapons on Rügen island and near Ohrdruf, Thuringia, killing many war prisoners under the supervision of the SS.

Some press reports, however, have reported the book as only having claimed to provide evidence that the Nazis have been successful with a radiological weapon [a "dirty bomb"], not a "true" nuclear weapon powered by nuclear fission. Karlsch's primary evidence, according to his publisher's reports, are "vouchers" for the "tests" and a patent for a plutonium weapon from 1941.

Karlsch cites a witness to the Ohrdruf blast and another to the scorched bodies of victims afterwards. He also claims to have radioactive samples of soil from the sites. At the Nuremberg trials in 1946 Nazi munitions minister Albert Speer was questioned by prosecutors about the Ordruf blast, in an attempt to hold Speer accountable for its victims.         

Mainstream American historians have expressed skepticism towards any claims that Nazi Germany was in any way close to success at producing a true nuclear weapon, citing the copious amounts of evidence which seem to indicate the contrary. Others counter that Prof. Kurt Diebner had a project which was far more advanced than that of Dr. Werner Heisenberg.

A recent article in "Physics Today" by the respected American historian Mark Walker has presented some of Karlsch's less controversial claims—that the Germans had done research on fusion, that they were aware that a bomb could potentially be made with plutonium, that they had engaged in some sort of test of some sort of device, that a patent on a plutonium device [of unspecified detail] had been filed and found—as substantiated. 

The Germans’ only source of heavy water, a necessary component of some of their bomb research, was Norsk Hydro's plant in Vemork, Norway. In February 1943, a Norwegian Commando unit sabotaged the plant. The plant was later bombed from the air and a shipment of heavy water was destroyed in transit. Whether this affected the German program is not clear.   

It is kind of a myth that Germany lacked heavy water. It is a historical fact that Nazi Germany operated more than one Heavy Water distillation plant. These were the plants they operated: 

1) Leuna plant south of Mersberg near Berlin [Harteck/Süss process - codename Stalin Organ]
2) Kiel Plant 4 km outside Kiel, wooded area [Dr K Geib’s hydrogen sulphide exchange process]
3) Hamburg Plant [possibly near Zeven, Harteck low pressure distilation process]
4) Munich Plant [Clusius-Linde, Nernst Distribution Process] 
5) Vemork (Haber-Bosch process) Norway [The Vermork plant was only out of commission for a month. It was   dismantled in 1944 and reassembled in Germany]
6) Saheim [Haber-Bosch process] Norway
7) Montecantini plant at Merano, Italy  [near Bolzano] 

In addition Prof Kurt Diebner revealed to Dr Karl Wirtz six weeks after the sinking of the ferry 'SF Hydro' on Lake Tinso that they were pre-warned of an attack on the ferry and sent a dummy cargo of lightly distilled water on the ferry. Diebner boasted that the real cargo went by truck and took six weeks to reach Germany.  

The Nazis used the codeword SH.200 for heavy water and SH.220 for Trittium. They built a plant for Trittium after September 1944 in Austria near Melk. There was no other use for Trittium except to provide a Fusion boost for a fissile atomic bomb.

An important footnote to the German nuclear effort is that as part of the Paris Treaties of 1955 and Adenauer's "non-nuclear pledge", Germany has perpetually forsworn nuclear [(as well as chemical and biological] weapons. It was this pledge that ultimately cleared the way for West Germany's entry into NATO.

References

Walker M. [2002]. 'Amerikas Einschätzung der deutschen Atomforschung'. "Physik in unserer Zeit" 33.

Footnotes

1. Folberth O. G. [2001]. 'Haigerloch cave survived the war'. "Physics Today" 54. 
2. Antony Beevor. "Berlin: The Downfall 1945", Penguin Books, 2002
3. Richard G. Davis. "Bombing the European Axis Powers. A Historical Digest of the Combined Bomber Offensive 1939–1945" Alabama: Air University Press
 

Transport Submarine Carried Uranium for Japan's Atomic Program

U-234. One of the eight large mine-laying submarines built by Germany, a type XB or type VIIC, the largest class of German U-Boat ever constructed at 1,650 tons and 294 feet; only U-234 and U-219 survived. U-234 was damaged by bombing in construction, her forward end was rebuilt, and commissioned 3 March 1944. She exercised as a mine-layer until refit as a transport.

Cargo.  Cargo containers were built to fit in the original mine shafts forward, midships and astern. Four cargo containers were carried topside. 240 tons of cargo were loaded for departure 25 March 1945.

Cargo included three crated Messershmitt aircraft [two Me-262 jet fighters, ME-163 rocket-propelled fighter], Henschel HS-293 glider-bomb, extra Junkers jet engines, 10 canisters of Uranium oxide, a ton of diplomatic mail, and over 3 tons of technical drawings, plus other technology [torpedo, fuses, armor piercing shells, etc.] Passengers were 9 high technical officers [one general] and civilian scientists. Destination: Japan.

Two returning Japanese Navy Lt. Commanders, one air and one submarine, were returning, having observed Nazi technology and techniques.

Voyage.  U-234 collided with another U-Boat while both were on Schnorchel. After minor repairs and topping off with food and oil, she set sail again 15 April 1945, proceeding slowly underwater 22 hours a day on Schnorchel.

The Nazi order fell on 7 May while U-234 was out of reliable radio contact; she surfaced 10 May to receive surrender orders and to confirm them with other submarines.

Told to preceed toward Halifax, the skipper actually made for Newport News, Virgina, anticipating less militant treatment for his crew. The Japanese officers committed suicide [sleeping pills] and were buried at sea. U-234 was intercepted 14 May 1945 by 'USS Sutton' [DE-771], a short time later by Coast Guard cutter 'Forsyth', and arrived Portsmouth, NH, on 17 May.

U-234 departed Kristiansand, Norway on 16 April 1945, commanded by K L Fehler, bound for Kobe, Japan. It carried 10 German and two Japanese passengers. Cargo was loaded at Kiel in January-February 1945 and the boat sailed. The U-234 entered Plymouth Navy Yard, New Hampshire on 17 May 1945, with 560 kgs of Uranium oxide in gold lined containers.

Specific handling instructions were given to Falck and a Lt Pfaff was responsible for loading the boat. On 24 May 1945, when the Navy began unloading the U-234, there had been no decision to use the atom bomb. On 30 May  both the Secretary of State, Stimson, and President Truman were agreed no alternative existed but to do so.

Lt Col John Lansdale, Chief of Security for the Manhattan Project, wrote in 1996 that he "personally handled the disposal of the 10 cases from the U-234". He stated the American military authorities "reacted with panic when they learned what the containers contained".

In Pfaff’s interrogation report he stated that the cylinders could be safely handled like TNT, but if opened the material became sensitive and dangerous if exposed to air. No nuclear physicist has been able to deliver an opinion as to what the substance in the cylinders was and why it required such extraordinary precautions.

-- British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee Final Report [142g]

The Uranium carried by U-234 was enough to make two atomic bombs, to blow up two American cities -1,235 pounds of 77 percent pure Uranium oxide- unusable by the destroyed Nazi hopes, it was destined for the Japanese atomic bomb program. 

The U-234 executive officer supervised the opening of the containers in Washington, DC, and reports he was told that one of the Americans was Oppenheimer.

It is generally believed the the Uranium was taken over by the Manhattan project, but its ultimate use, if any, is lost in secrecy. It was most certainly sent to Oak Ridge, but there was probably not enough time for it to have been processed and used in the two WW2 weapons. It certainly would have been in followup weapons and probably was expended at Bikini Atoll or in Nevada.

The German A-bomb laboratory was destroyed by the Hamburg bombing raids in July 1943 and was shifted after this. The Germans developed a gas centrifuge technology to refine bomb grade uranium in 1942 that did not require heavy water reactors.

Magic decrypts of signals to the Japanese embassy in Berlin discovered requests for Uranium from the Japanese A-bomb project in July 1943. The Nazis may have transferred this technology to Japan during 1943-44. 

Japanese Intentions were clear, Japan was searching for a miracle weapon from all sources, including atomic research centers operating in North Korea.   It would have been justice if the Nazi material intended to let Japan win the war, had helped fuel the bombs that did end the war.

Germany had begun a joint nuclear research programme with Japan some time in 1942, establishing a research facility in North Korea on the Hungnam River.

According to an American researcher writing in "Science" magazine in 1978:

"Japan's nuclear efforts were disrupted in April 1945 when a B-29 raid damaged Nishina's thermal diffusion separation apparatus. Some reports claim the Japanese subsequently moved their atomic operations to Konan [Hungnam, now part of North Korea]. The Japanese may have used this facility for making small quantities of heavy water.

"The Japanese plant was captured by Soviet troops at war's end, and some reports claim that the output of the Hungnam plant was collected every other month by Soviet submarines".

Other Trips. There were at least 98 different U-Boat or I-Boat attempts to travel between Germany and Japan. Some German and Italian boats made it and were commissioned into the Japanese Navy. Several I-boat suceeded in the round trip. Most subs, and their cargos, were lost..

The Italian sub "Amiraglio Cagni" capitulated at Cape Town South Africa on 8 September 1943 with a load of "Mercury" aka Uranium-oxide.

U-219 departed Bordeaux on 23 August 1944 with U-195 and U-180, carrying two Japanese officers, and cargo which included Uranium oxide, blueprints for advanced weapons and part of a consignment of twelve dismantled V-2 rockets for Japan shared with U-195.

A wartime USN Intelligence report asserts that Japan had not only acquired nuclear weapons technology from Germany in 1944 but also that it had commenced manufacture of the V-2 rocket at the Mukden Arsenal [Shenyang] in Manchuria. 

-- 'German Technical Aid to Japan a Survey', Division of Naval Intelligence, dated 31 August 1945
 
"This document contains technical information concerning German techniques, devices, and weapons whose use by the Japanese would have a bearing on the war in the Pacific. Includes radio, artillery, weapons, underwater ordnance, submarines, surface craft, aircraft, vehicles, and miscellaneous".

Digitized by the Combined Arms Research Library Digital Library, US Army Combined Arms Center,  Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, USA.

 


German film makers draw on Russian and American reports to investigate a mystery involving UFO sightings, devastating explosions and secret SS work camps
By Stephen White 
The Mirror
30 Jul 2015  alt

Nazi Germany may have perfected an atom bomb and a "flying saucer" to deliver it in the dying days of WW2.

Test were carried out in which Russian prisoners of war were sacrificed to test the bomb’s efficiency, a German TV documentary claims.

Had it been put into production, a Nazi bomb could have altered the outcome of the war.

"The Search for Hitler’s Atom Bomb" on the ZDF channel quotes from sealed  Russian and American records prove secret and frenzied research brought the Third Reich close to a weapon of mass destruction.

The programme quotes interrogation reports of Nazi scientists, eyewitness accounts and records left behind by researchers, many of who were shipped to America after the war.

Historian Matthias Uhl said the race to develop a Nazi A-bomb went into overdrive in the last year of the war as Germany was being defeated on every front.

The program focuses on Hans Kammler:

An S.S. general given 175,000 concentration camp inmates for slave labour in the V-weapons factories, tank and aircraft production lines and building secret Bunkers.

Kammler was one of a very few Nazis who answered only to Hitler, who put him in charge of the race for nuclear fission.


altOne of his main projects –still classified by the Americans– was the Jonas Valley in Thuringia, supposed site of Hitler’s nuclear and space programmes.

One test was said to have been carried out at the beginning of March 1945.

The US has placed a 100-year secrecy order on the files concerning the valley and what went on in the secret tunnels the Nazis carved into it.

Now sealed off, authorities play a cat-and-mouse game with conspiracy theorists every weekend at the site who believe the Americans found two things in the tunnels - a primitive nuclear bomb and a flying saucer meant to deliver it.

Throughout the latter stages of the war there were reported sightings of flying saucer type craft - nicknamed "Foo Fighters".

Allied Intelligence and commanders suspected that foo fighters reported in Europe were advanced German aircraft.

Project Sign, the first U.S. Air Force UFO investigation group, noted that the advanced flying wing designs of the German scientists were similar to some UFO reports.

In 1959, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the first head of "Project Blue Book" [Project Sign's follow-up investigation] wrote: 

"When WWII ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority were in the most preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of objects reported by UFO observers".

ZDF quoted Soviet documents from Russian military Intelligence agents who speak of two nuclear tests in Thuringia.

"The Germans are in the throes of making and testing a new secret weapon, which has a large destructive force,” said the Soviets. "The available bomb has a diameter of 1.5 meters. It consists of interlocking hollow balls".

Another Russian report said: "Communicated by our reliable source from Germany: the Germans have conducted two explosions in Thuringia with great force".

Trees in the Jonas Valley were reportedly felled almost two thousand from the epicentre of the blast.

The secret reports also claimed Russian prisoners of war “in the centre of the explosion were killed and often no trace remained of them. Also a strong radioactive effect has been observed".

Declassified American Intelligence reports showed that America’s supreme commander in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, ordered reconnaissance flights over the valley but they proved inconclusive.

But the programme was unable to find where the weaponised Uranium the Nazi scientists would have needed for the bomb came from, and admits many pieces of the Nazi atomic puzzle are still missing.

"To the German scientists, the V-2 was just a toy. The V-1, V-2 and Me 262 were certainly high technology for the British and Americans, but compared with the Sänger bomber, the A9/A10 rocket [both ready or almost ready in 1945] or the flying discs, they were only toys". 

-- Lt. Col. John A. Keck, 28 June 1945

If this technology did exist in the past, where is it now? And better yet, what kind of technology did the Nazi use to create a flying saucer? Is it possible that the Nazi did possess otherworldly technology as many Ufologists have suggested in the past? And if Nazi Germany was able to create “flying saucers” wouldn’t Russia or the United States have similar technology?

The truth is obscured by numerous enigmas of the past, there are so many questions regarding "lost technology" that was in possession of Nazi Germany that today, people are not sure what to believe.

If there is any truth in the documentary, "The Search for Hitler’s Atom Bomb", then we should ask ourselves, where did this technology come from, and is it possible that many other countries had, or still have, similar top-secret projects going on, and ultimately what is their purpose

 

 

The Mystery of the Nazi Saucers
by Joseph P. Farrell 
31 January 2011

I just received this week an interesting book in the mail, one I had ordered for some other research I am conducting on the history of the atomic and hydrogen bombs.

The book is Jungck's classic study "Brigher Than a Thousand Suns: The Story of the Men Who Made the Bomb".

Jungck's study is interesting for the fact that, unlike many histories of the bomb, he goes not only into the contributions made by the usual cast of characters -Nils Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer, Luis Alverez- and so on, but also into the conceptual contributions and roles of the Axis scientists, the Japanese physicist Fukuda, and of course, the Germans Heisenberg, Korsching, and so on.

So needless to say, I anxiously sat down and started reading...and then I ran into this completely unexpected footnote on page 87, that, occurring as it does in the middle of a classic and well-known study of the history of the atom bomb, left me speechless, pondering the implications.

Speaking of the German research, the footnote states:

""The only exception to the lack of interest shown by authority [in the atom-bomb] was constituted by the Air Ministry [Reichsluftministerium]. The Air Force [Luftwaffe] research workers were in a peculiar position. They produced interesting new types of aircraft such as the Delta [triangular] and 'flying discs'.

" The first of these 'flying saucers' as they were later called -circular in shape, with a diameter of some 45 yards- were built by the specialists Schriever, Habermohl and Miethe.

"They were first airborne on 14 February 1945, over Prague and reached in three minutes a height of nearly eight miles. They had a flying speed of 1,250 m.p.h. which was doubled in subsequent tests. It is believed that after the war Habermohl fell into the hands of the Russians. Miethe developed at a later date similar 'flying saucers' at A.V. Roe and Company for the United States".

Of course, Jungck's book appeared long before the German reunification, and the evidence that has emerged since then that the Nazi atom bomb program may not have been nearly as incompetent as the post-war Allied Legend made it out to be.

And of course, as I argued in "Reich of the Black Sun", the Nazi program appears to have been, at its deepest level, conducted  away from the big-name Nazi scientists -Heisenberg, Weizsäcker, Hahn, et al- precisely as a security measure against potential Allied kidnapping or assassination attempts against them.

Hence, the "Nazi distinterest" in the atom bomb, the view promoted by standard histories, is just that: A cover deliberately created by the Nazi government, and apparently a successful one, for it is still a component of the Allied Legend, while the reality, as my own research has suggested, is anything but that. And this leads us to the Nazi flying saucers...

While I have always been extraordinarily suspicious of the stories of the alleged Nazi saucers "Hanuebu" and "Vril", in fact, consigning them to the bin of "Neo-Nazi hoaxes", I have always had to place the Schriever, Habermohl, and Miethe story -in all its endless variations- in a gray basket, and for a very simple reason: As I detail in "Roswell and the Reich", one of their colleagues, Richard Fleissner, actually took out, and was awarded, a US patent for just such a craft, based on work he claims he did for the Nazis at Peenemünde.

Fleissner's patent, by his own statements, was essentially a reconstruction of work he says he did in Germany, and notably, his patent application was delayed for the unheard of time of five years, while the USA quietly and secretly developed its own "Project Silverbug", which looks needless to say like a pirated version of Fleissner's design in some respects.

 

Very little information has survived concerning this disc, but according to the "Augsburger Neue Presse" dated 2 May 1980, Ing. Heinrich Fleissner is the "Father of the Flying Disc" having designed at Peenemünde a strange disc machine known as the "Düsenscheibe" that took to the air shortly before Germany capitulated, on 24 April 1945 from Berlin-Lichtenfeld.

The strange disc was on an official Luftwaffe mission.

Ing. Fleissner, an Augsburger himself and hydrolic engineer at Peenemünde, worked directly under Hermann Göring on the only known Luftwaffe disc project which was officially sanctioned by Hitler, which makes its last flight from Berlin all the more baffling.

Göring’s direct involvement in the project was due to the fact that the disc was secretly intended as his personal courier craft, so work on building components for the disc was ordered throughout the Reich. Once the sections of the disc began to arrive at Peenemünde a specialist team led by Ing. Fleissner assembled the disc and flight tested it.

There it remained until it was summoned to Berlin.

Ing. Fleissner maintains that his Düsenscheibe flew in April 1945 and also that he personally witnessed four other German discs take off from Tempelhof before the collapse.

In the news article Ing. Fleissner states that the Düsenscheibe could be reconstructed at any time suggesting that the original had been destroyed after its last [and perhaps only] flight mission.

After the war, Ing. Fleissner filed for another disc aircraft patent on 28 March 1955 which was granted on 7 June 1960 [# 2,939,648]. but never built.

altThe Düsenscheibe is described as a huge machine with a central non-rotating dome structure surrounded by a large jet rotor fed by radial fuel tanks contained in the central body.

The number of jets [Jumo 004s perhaps] is a staggering twenty around the rotor. In addition to those jets, other propulsion systems are buried in the disc body below the disc rotor.

As a hydrolic engineer Ing. Fleissner had proposed a multi-fueled combination of engines to power the Düsenscheibe.

The reason behind this was for the flight performance of the machine, concentrating on maximum speed, range, and altitude.

The logic behind the proposal is that to achieve these maximums required different types of engines fed by different fuels to accomplish each level of flight performance.

For the take-off and landing the external rotor jets were sufficient and even necessary up to a certain speed and altitude.

To achieve greater speed and heights required the internal engines which could have been burning any number of fuels including: kerosene, liquid oxygen, gelatinous metallic fuel, or liquid rocket fuels.

The number and type of aux. engines is not known but a cut-away on the illustration shown, reveals at least two huge engines inside.

It has been stated that the Düsenscheibe could reach up to 3,000 km/hr.

The large dome with many windows suggests a rather large crew and ample space to accommodate many “passengers” should the need arise.

With Hitler and his staff remaining in the Bunker during the final days of the Reich the mystery mission of the Düsenscheibe is unclear.

This single giant disc built at Peenemünde would certainly not have come to Berlin in the heat of battle if not to remove sensitive documents and high-ranking Nazi officials to another secure area either within the Reich [Thuringia] or outside of it [South America or Antarctica].

With Göring arrested for treason Hitler might have ordered that his personal courier disc be brought to Berlin for immediate use or to be taken to some remote area and destroyed.

Either way, the machine was destroyed and there are no known photos of it.

-- Rob Arndt

So encountering the old story of Miethe, Habermohl, and Schriever in Jungck's work was a little disconcerting.

One wonders if, after all these years, there will ever be any more details emerging that can move the whole story from the gray basket, into one of two resolutions of the story.

That said, the whole story of the jet-based flying saucers of Miethe, Habermohl, and Schriever does get rather odd corroboration in the post-war American Intelligence memoranda of Generals Schulgen and Twining, as I detail in "Roswell and the Reich":

Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, head of US Army Air Forces' Air Material Command, a Brigadier in USAAF Intelligence in September 1947, stated that objects "approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to be as large as a man-made aircraft, were neither "visionary nor fictitious".

Twining went on to write that it was possible "within the present US knowledge provided extensive detailed development is undertaken to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the object above which would be capable of an approximate range of 7,000 miles..."    
 
His memo was written just three months after the supposed crash of a UFO at Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947; the period many people tout as the real start of the modern UFO sightings.

"While there remains a possibility of Russian manufacture, based on the perspective thinking and actual accomplishments of the Germans, it is the considered opinion of some elements that the object may in fact represent an inter-planetary craft of some kind". 

-- General George F. Schulgen,  Air Intelligence Requirements Division 
28 October 1947

 

altAs for the reference in Jungck's footnote about "delta-shaped" triangular aircraft, it is important not to identify this with the delta-shaped UFOs seen so often in the last two decades.

For one thing, most of the German designs were by Kurt Tank or Walter Lippisch, and were for high altitude super-sonic ram-jet aircraft, and in all of those designs there is nothing to damp the noise such aircraft would have made, whereas the modern "triangle UFO" sightings are usually and typically of very quiet craft with the ability to hover.

Ram-jets, of course, are neither quiet nor, by the nature of the case, are they capable of hovering since they require a forward thrust even to keep the jet active.

So it is important not to confuse the two, unless one wished to maintain that the Zeppelinwerke was constructing triangular shaped rigid-body dirigibles and combining them with novel forms of propulsion that rendered them silent.

But that leads to a whole other area of post-war stories...

Since the Eighties, there has been speculation about the existence of a mythical plane called 'Aurora' that supposedly flew on the edges of space.

In 1992, there was a detailed sighting of a massive triangular-shaped aircraft spotted flying in formation with US air force bombers above the North Sea.

In Belgium, in 1989 and again a year later, hundreds of people reported seeing silent triangular shaped craft all over the country.

They were tracked by Belgian radar and pulled turns of about 20G-40G enough to kill a human pilot. The Belgian air force confirmed their existence in a government report.

alt

Roswell was not aliens - it was the Nazis, according to a German documentary
A German TV documentary claims the mysterious UFO "Roswell Incident" in the USA nearly 70 years ago was the result of experiments with ultra-secret Nazi rocket technology.
By Allan Hall in Berlin
Express, UK
14 October 2014  

A German documentary on the 'Discovery Channel', claims the "Roswell Incident" was the result of Nazi rocket technology.

The Roswell Incident was reported on 8 July 1947 in the town of the same name in New Mexico.

Initially thought to be the crash landing of a flying saucer, military authorities later said it was a downed weather balloon, but conspiracy theorists down the years have always insisted that the military was covering up an alien visitation.

But now a documentary entitled "UFOs in the Third Reich" claims the incident was linked to testing of the "Bell", a copper coloured aircraft three metres in diameter, the core of which was a futuristic propulsion unit using electric particles.

The documentary screened on the N24 channel claims the craft was the fore-runner of the Stealth fighter of today.

It was crafted by scores of V2 rocket experts who were spirited to America at the end of the war to give the USA the edge over the Soviet Union in rocket technology.

One of them was S.S. General Dr. Hans Kammler, who was head of construction and defence projectsin the Third Reich and as such planned the forced labour factories at Auschwitz and the secret V-2 rocket plants inside Germany.

The German documentary draws on a vast wealth of archival material.

One of the experts is Igor Witkowski, a Polish former journalist and historian of military and aerospace technology.


In his book, "Prawda O Wunderwaffe" in 2000, he wrote extensively of the "bell-shaped craft" that was being created by the Nazis, and that Hitler wanted the best scientists and engineers at his disposal.

German engineer Georg Klein claimed that such designs had been developed during the Third Reich.

Klein, who went on to have a distinguished postwar career as an aeronautical engineer, said:

"I don't consider myself a crackpot or eccentric or someone given to fantasies. This is what I saw, with my own eyes: A Nazi UFO".

altBritish and American bomber crews, ranging free in the skies over Germany towards the end of the war to deliver their lethal cargoes, also reported strange sightings over enemy territory when debriefed back at their bases - now thought to have been test flights of the Bell. 

From the Office of Director of Intelligence for the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe [USSTAF] comes a new name for foo-fighters. 

In a Top Secret document dated 19 January 1945 entitled 'An Evaluation of German Capabilities in 1945', under paragraph 2e 'Other Weapons' it states:

"German capabilities with already proved weapons as V-1 and V-2 and untried weapons, such as the "Phoo" Bomb, Magnetic Waves and gases applicable to aircraft, are considered to offer no new threat of really serious proportions....

"Occasionally reports by pilots and the testimony of prisoners of war and escapees describe this weapon as a radio-controlled, jet-propelled, still-nosed, short-range, high performance ramming weapon, for use against bombing formations.

"Its speed is estimated at 525 mph".

The program explores the possibility that the Roswell Incident may have been the crash of another Nazi-era flying saucer known as the Schriever-Habermohl model.

Rudolf Schriever was an engineer and test pilot, Otto Habermohl an engineer
.

Klaus [Otto] Habermohl, was a BMW engineer who worked as part of the Flugzeug Special Projects Group in Prague. 

He developed the radial-flow jet engine in the 1930s, described in various articles as a system of "adjustable" nozzles, of great significance just ten years later. [Radial-flow allowed for VTOL performance and used the little-known "Coanda" effect].

He was captured by the Russians in Prague on or about 11 May 1945. He undoubtedly helped in the construction of a Soviet disc.

This project was centred in Prague between 1941 and 1943, but the plans for it were taken to America at war's end.

Initially a Luftwaffe project, it eventually fell under the auspices of armaments minister Albert Speer before being taken over once again in 1944 by Kammler.

Foo Fighters

Etymology

The term Foo Fighter was used by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II to describe various UFOs or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over Europe and the Pacific theatre.

Contemporary witnesses often assumed that the foo fighters were secret weapons employed by the enemy, and it was not until after the war that it was discovered neither side had anything to do with them. Despite these fears, foo fighters [whatever they might have been] were apparently never reported to have harmed or tried to harm anyone.

Though usually thought of as blobs of light or fire, several different types of reported phenomena were classed as "foo fighters".

There were several other terms used to describe these objects [such as "Kraut fireballs"], but "foo fighter" seems to have been the most popular.

The term is generally thought to have been borrowed from the often surrealist comic strip "Smokey Stover". Smokey, a firefighter, was fond of saying "Where there's foo there's fire". 

[This "foo" may have come from "feu", the French word for "fire", or from Smokey's pronunciation of the word "fuel"]. 

A Big Little Book titled "Smokey Stover the Foo Fighter" was published in 1938. Foo may have also come from the French word faux meaning, in this case, "fake".

In the same vein, "Foo" could be derived from the French "Fou," or "mad." 

"Foo fighter" was supposedly used as a semi-derogatory reference to Japanese fighter pilots [known for erratic flying and extreme maneuvering], it became a catch-all term for fast moving, erratically flying objects [such as UFOs]. 

altFOO

1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. [very common] Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything.

When "foo" is used in connection with "bar" it has generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR ["Fucked Up Beyond All Repair"], later modified to foobar.

This change used to be interpreted as a post-war bowdlerization, but it now seems more likely that FUBAR was itself a derivative of "foo" perhaps influenced by German "furchtbar" [terrible] - "foobar" may actually have been the original form.

It seems, the word "foo" itself had an immediate pre-war history in comic strips and cartoons.

The earliest documented uses were in the "Smokey Stover" comic strip published from about 1930 to about 1952.

Bill Holman, the author of the strip, filled it with odd jokes and personal contrivances, including other nonsense phrases such as "Notary Sojac", and Holman had Smokey say "Where there's foo, there's fire". 

One place "foo" is known to have remained live is in the U.S.military during the WWII years.

In 1944-45, the term "foo fighters" was in use by radar operators for the kind of mysterious or spurious trace that would later be called a UFO [the older term resurfaced in popular American usage in 1995 via the name of a rock band.

Because informants connected the term directly to the "Smokey Stover" strip, the folk etymology that connects it to French "feu" [fire] can be gently dismissed.

 

History

Foo fighters were reported on many occasions from around the world.

A nighttime sighting from September, 1941 in the Indian Ocean was similar to some later foo fighter reports.

From the deck of the 'S.S. Pu&aski', [a Polish merchant vessel transporting British troops], two sailors reported a "strange globe glowing with greenish light, about half the size of the full moon as it appears to us".

They alerted a British officer, who watched the object's movements with them for over an hour. 

On 28 February 1942, just prior to its participation in the Battle of the Java Sea, the 'USS Houston' reportedly saw a large number of strange, unexplained yellow flares and lights which illuminated the sea for miles around.  

A report was made from the Solomon Islands in 1942 by United States Marine Stephen J. Brickner.

Following an air raid alarm, Brickner and others witnessed about 150 objects grouped in lines of 10 or 12 objects each.

Seeming to "wobble" as they moved, Brickner reported that the objects resembled polished silver and seemed to move a little faster than common Japanese aircraft.

He described the sighting, saying: 

"All in all, it was the most awe-inspiring and yet frightening spectacle I have seen in my life". 

Foo fighters were formally reported and named from November 1944 onward, by the U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron.

On 13 December 1944, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in Paris issued a press release, which was featured in the "New York Times" the next day, officially describing the phenomenon as a "new German weapon".

Follow-up stories, using the term "Foo Fighters", appeared in the "New York Herald Tribune" and the "British Daily Telegraph". 

On 31 December 1944, Bob Wilson, an "Associated Press" corps correspondent, visited and interviewed members of the 415th NFS at their base in Dijon, France.

On  2 January 1945, the AP syndicate article hit all of the major U.S. newspapers. The "Chicago Tribune" ran the story as, 'Mystery Flares Tag Along with U.S. Night Pilots; Yanks call Nazi Weapon a 'Foo Fighter'. The "St. Louis Post Dispatch" ran it as, 'Mysterious 'Foo Fighters,' Balls of Fire, Trail U.S. Night Flyers'.   

The "New York Times" ran the story as 'Balls of Fire Stalk U.S. Fighters in Night Assaults Over Germany',  and in it was  US Air Force Lieutenant Donald Meiers' description of the "Mysterious" foo fighters:

"A foo fighter picked me up at 700 feet and chased me 20 miles down the Rhine Valley," Meiers said.

"I turned to starboard and two balls of fire turned with me. We were going 260 miles an hour and the balls were keeping right up with us. On another occasion when a foo fighter picked us up, I dived at 360 miles an hour. It kept right off our wing tips for awhile and then zoomed into the sky. When I first saw the things, I had the horrible thought that a German on the ground was ready to press a button and explode them. But they didn't explode or attack us. They just seem to follow us like the Will-o'-the-wisp".

Explanations and theories

  • The phenomenon could be based on the misinterpretation of the Luftwaffe's standard operating procedure of having selected anti-aircraft batteries near German airfields fire colored flare patterns in regular intervals to aid Luftwaffe night fighters with visual navigation.
  • Proponents of the extra-terrestrial hypothesis [commonly shortened to ETH] have suggested that foo fighters are evidence of extraterrestrials visiting Earth.
  • It has also been suggested that the foo fighter was a secret disk-shaped Luftwaffe aircraft nicknamed the "Feuerfighter" by the Germans, but as this hypothetical name is a mix of German and English, and as no such craft has been found, this explanation is likely an urban legend.
  • Likewise, the suggestion that some sightings of foo fighters may have been night-sightings of the German Messerschmitt Me 163 'Komet' rocket-plane makes no sense: the Me 163 was completely unsuitable for nocturnal operations since it had only a few minutes of fuel, totally insufficient to make contact with an enemy at night, carried no airborne interception radar, and lacked all night-flying equipment which would have been vital to make its characteristic engine-out glider-style dead-stick landing at night.
  • A type of electrical discharge from airplanes' wings [St. Elmo's Fire] has been suggested as an explanation.
  • Another theory suggests that pilots may have seen ball lightning.
  • Reports of strange lights in the night are common throughout history, with explanations ranging from elves and Wild Hunt to UFO. It seems to be another example of the common, although still not fully explained, phenomenon.
  • Multiple internal reflections of bright ground objects from the curved plastic canopy of an aircraft can be perceived as images above the horizon, a phenomenon that has been identified with some UFO sightings from aircraft.

When the "Foo Fighter" controversy stopped in April 1945 with Germany's collapse it amazingly started all over again in the PTO over Japan August 1945 with the 20th and 21st BGs. Coincidence? No, German submarine technology transfer [along with the jet engines, missiles, Uranium for the Japanese atomic bomb project, etc].

The Japanese, however, lacked all the documentation for this weapon and only launched a few after fueling them and igniting them. It is said that the Japanese were frightened by this "demonic thing" and destroyed the remaining Feuerballs by dynamiting them together in a large pit after VJ-Day. 

Jim Wilson of "Popular Mechanics" magazine through FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] documents discovered that the USAF finally admitted by 1995 that the Germans had disc aircraft prototypes but stated that they were "highly unstable".

The USAF, however, failed to give any details, identifications, photos, nor flight footage because the discs are still largely classified until 2020 - which makes you wonder what technology in 1945 would be considered that sensitive to receive a 75 year classification well into the 21st century?

The Jonastal S-III complex where the discs were to be manufactured is classified until 2045 - 100 years.

alt

A 1950 article by a German émigré in Chile, Eduard Ludwig, submitted to a Chilean magazine but never published, was titled "The Mystery of 'flying discs' - A contribution to its possible explanation".

It recounted Dr. Ludwig's wartime work at a Junkers research facility, where he helped to develop a "one-piece metal wing" - a "speedily rotating top" capable of vertical take-off and high speeds.

"The experiments turned out to be extremely difficult and involved many casualties",  Dr. Ludwig observed, clearly rueful that the spinning-top experiments had not come to fruition before the arrival of the Red Army.

He concluded: 

"The future will show whether the 'flying discs' are only the products of imagination or whether they are the results of a far-advanced German science which possibly, as well as the nearly finished atomic bombs, may have fallen into the hands of the Russians".

alt

Nazis Are Making News Again
May/June 2011 - #87

Late in 2010 headlines in several European newspapers, including Britain’s "Mail and Telegraph" screamed that Hitler’s last attempt to win the war could have been a surprise assault on London and New York carried out with giant anti-gravity flying discs—an attack thwarted only by the end of WWII.

Long circulated in the UFO underground, the story received a new lease on life when German science magazine "PM" reported evidence for the existence of such an advanced and secret program in the German military during the last days of the war.

Now "Iron Sky" a new movie suggests that the Nazis not only had the technology to carry out such attacks but that, before the war’s end, they successfully transfered operations to the far side of the moon where development has continued to this day.

In the film, the Nazis attack again in 2018, but this time with enormous flying discs.

Could there be any truth behind such fantastic allegations?
Reporter C.C. von Werklaäg investigates for "Atlantis Rising"—Editor
_____________________________________________________________________

Did the Nazis produce a UFO-style craft toward the end of WWII, which they called "Die Glocke" [The Bell], intended to be the war-winning ace up Hitler’s sleeve?

Researchers Igor Witkowski, Joseph P. Farrell, William Lyne and others think so.

In "Twentieth Century: History of the World 1901 to 2000", J. M. Roberts quotes Winston Churchill’s speech con­cerning the Nazis’ insatiable conquest of Europe.

"If the Allied forces "fail, then the whole world . . . [will] sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister . . . by the lights of perverted science".

Roberts points out that the Nazis did not act insanely as historians maintain.

The crimes of Nazism were carried out not in a fit of barbaric intoxication with conquest, but in a systematic, scientific way about which there was little that was irrational ex­cept the appalling end that it sought and the lunatic mythologies which fed it. 

These "lunatic" ideals refer to more than the Nazis’ desire for race purity, they include their quest to prove connections to their presumed Teutonic heri­tage and their obsession with occult symbolism and the powers it might unleash.

Scientifically, the Nazis utilized their mechanical skills to develop a sophisticated array of technology and weaponry. Many historians equate the successful invention of the V series rockets with the much-touted Wunderwaffe [won­der weapon] Hitler, in his efforts to curb catastrophic losses, was anxious to possess.

However, Witkowski argues that the V-1 and V-2 were largely ineffective, thus not the "wonder" of modern weaponry many perceive them to be. Witkowski’s "The Truth About the Wunderwaffe" [translated into English, 2003] is a detailed examinations of Die Glocke—a major inspiration for many later works on the subject.

Die Glocke was built in a facility near Breslau known as Der Riese [the Giant].

It was constructed of a metallic or ceramic material, approximately 9 feet in diameter and some 12 to 15 feet in height. In keeping with their penchant for occult iconography, Nazi scientists embellished Die Glocke with a band of Runic symbols near its base, meant to amplify the intensity of the awesome machine.

The device was powered by massive electrical generators but could only be engaged for several minutes. It emitted high amounts of electromagnetic radiation [which, in early tests, killed many slave laborers and scientists working on the project].

Witkowski’s research indicates that Die Glocke was tested at a secret base in Ludwigsdorf, near the Czech border. Witkowski photographed a strange amphitheater-sized construction, which many researchers have dubbed “the Henge”.

Anti-gravity

Die Glocke was powered by a radioactive compound labeled Xerum 525—a “red mercury” which Farrell claims the Nazis might have used to create an atomic bomb ["The SS Brotherhood of the Bell"], and which scientists Drs. David Clarke and Steve Young associate with "Vril power".

Dr. Clarke notes a connection between the inner circle of Nazi political power and the Thule Society, a group obsessed with Vril, while Dr. Young points out how seriously Vril was examined by Nazi scientists for its potential in the manufacture of weapons.

Die Glocke’s complex system of opposing turbines was purported to generate a field of anti-gravity so powerful it wreaked havoc on all life in its vicinity and may even have teleported matter over vast distances.

Some speculate that Die Glocke functioned as a time machine, a theory often associated with UFO conjecture and corroborated by former U. S. Army remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle who claimed in "Atlantis Rising" #18 [1999] that "UFOs are real vehicles—possibly time machines".

The deleterious effects described above sound like the pivotal weapon the Nazis were searching for except their interest in anti-gravity had a more logical origin. With their Luftwaffe’s runways destroyed by Allied bombing raids, the need for aircraft that could take off and land vertically [VTOL] became vitally important.

The most sensible assumption indicates Die Glocke’s capabilities for propulsion rather than its use as a weapon. The Nazis’ desperation to create such technology may have prompted their scientists to sidestep conventional maths. 

William Lyne’s "Occult Ether Physics: Tesla’s Hidden Space Propulsion System and the Conspiracy to Conceal It" [2003] details the use of Nikola Tesla’s scaler physics in “German flying saucer[s]".

Farrell agrees that the Nazis es­chewed “Jewish physics” in favor of those devised by non-Jewish scientists. This egregious anti-Semitism is corrobo­rated by biographer Walter Isaacson. He describes how German scientists received Einstein’s theories.

Arnold Sommerfield . . . was among the first to suggest there was something Jewish about Einstein’s theoretical approach" . . . . ..

It lacked due respect for the notion of order and absolutes . . . As remarkable as Einstein’s papers are, . . . it still seems to me that something almost unhealthy lies in the unconstruable [sic] and impossible to visualize dogma. An Englishman would hardly have given us this theory. . . . It might be [that] here too . . . the abstract con­ceptual character of the Semite expresses itself”. ["Einstein: His Life and Universe"].

Lyne proposes that the public’s acceptance of the “[r]elativistic bromides” described by curved space-time, serve only to cover up Tesla’s “Occult Ether Physics” employed by the Nazis to power their UFOs.

Max B. Miller’s article 'Field Theory and Gravity Drive' ["Fate Magazine", Vol. 11, No. 5, May 1958] notes Dr. Hermann Oberth’s conclusion that the “behavior of the UFO . . . discounts any means of propulsion—including the reaction rocket—known to us,” and that the “principle of an ‘anti-gravity device’ might be expected.” An interesting conclusion since, as Farrell points out, Oberth was directly involved with Die Glocke and the creation of Nazi UFOs.

Analyzing Oberth’s pronouncement from the perspective of contemporary physics, mathematician Ward Locke combined Einstein’s gravitational theorems with a later tensor model developed by Hermann Weyl. The math re­vealed the potential for the generation of an anti-gravity field when the equation begets a negative number.

Professor Locke confides that sustaining such a system requires a continued energy input of at least 900 kiloamperes [or the transfer of 1020 electrons] per second.

Without an effective heat-sink, the temperature will instantly rise to 28,000º Kelvin [nearly equivalent to the surface temperature of the sun]. Although dubious that the Nazis harnessed such a force, Professor Locke concedes that, if true, this may have been the reason behind the short intervals sustained dur­ing Die Glocke’s early tests. The scientists simply couldn’t generate enough power to keep it going.

It Takes a Rocket Scientist to Understand It

Discussing the wave of UFO sightings occurring in the decade after WWII, Frank Edwards detailed another inter­esting connection between this phenomenon and the seemingly omnipresent Hermann Oberth.

West Germany . . . the scene of so many visits by the UFO’s, including some reported landings, named the world-famous rocket and space-travel scientist, Professor Hermann Oberth, to head their probe . . . . The outspoken Oberth said . . . in 1954: "There is no doubt in my mind that . . . [UFO’s] are interplanetary craft of some sort. . . . It is also our conclusion that they are propelled by distorting or converting the gravitational field” ["Strange World"].

Was similar technology channeled into experiments conducted by the U. S. government? Farrell notes the prob­ability that Wernher von Braun, along with other German rocket scientists brought over during Project Paperclip, most likely contributed to research which fueled UFO sightings from the late 1940s to now. Several failures required cover-ups like those at Roswell, NM and Kecksburg, PA.

The involvement of von Braun and Oberth with UFO phenomenon pales in comparison to the identities of those who oversaw Die Glocke.

Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, who was obsessed with the occult, in 1942, Himmler chose SS Obergruppenführer Dr. Hans Kammler, formerly a high-level Air Ministry officer in charge of engineering, to take over the rocketry program.

In his memoir "Inside the Third Reich", Albert Speer claims that at first he “liked [Kammler’s] objective coolness” but later understood how Kammler’s “zeal” made him dangerous. Speer states that “SS Grupenführer Kammler, already responsible for the rocket weapons, was to be in charge of the development and production of all modern aircraft” [emphasis added] forcing him out of this position.

Speer notes the incredible number of workers [both skilled and slave labor] commandeered by Kammler for his endeavors. The creation of “All modern aircraft” would have provided Kammler free reign to pursue the elusive wunderwaffe sought by Hitler. The displacement of “half a million workers a year,” noted by Speer, would have provided Kammler the means to achieve this goal.

As WWII ground to a grim close for Germany, Kammler disappeared. While his driver, Kurt Preuk, swore in court he had witnessed Kammler’s dead body, Farrell believes Kammler made a deal with either the American or Argentine government in exchange for safe passage and sanctuary from war crimes. Kammler’s greatest bargaining chip may well have been Die Glocke.

The Kecksburg/Die Glocke Connection

During the early evening of 9 December 1965, reports of a fireball in the skies over Canada and the Midwestern United States flooded meteorological centers and police bureaus. Newspapers commented on the amazing meteor that appeared to break apart over northern Ohio before veering east as it descended into rural Pennsylvania, just southeast of Pittsburgh. What interests ufologists about the Kecksburg incident [apart from the alteration in trajec­tory] is the unusual manner in which the presumed meteor broke up.

Some witnesses reported details one associates with large meteors hitting the atmosphere and splitting into pieces. Others saw what appeared to be a craft spewing a fiery rain of burning debris. Several pieces of the burning material fell into a field in Elyria, Ohio, starting small fires. Firemen easily put out the blaze, yet found nothing to cause it.

The bulk of the material landed in the woods outside Kecksburg, PA. Several witnesses reported the incident to the local radio station and to police. Within the hour, people from the area, policemen, firemen, and news reporters arrived on the scene—so too did the U. S. Army.

Captain Kevin D. Randle’s article “The Kecksburg UFO Crash” ["UFO Universe", Vol. 1, No. 3, 1991] examines the incident from the perspective of those who presume the object an alien spacecraft tested by the military, resulting in less-than-spectacular results. Randle writes that, the radio report[ed] . . . something . . . landed . . . . and . . . the State Police . . . cordoned off a section of the woods. News media . . . were broadcasting from . . . the site. A number of them were talking about an unidentified flying object crash in West­moreland County. None of the reporters were allowed to enter the woods.

Although no reporter made it into the ravine where the object had partially buried itself, Randle reports that “Stan Gordon, of the Pennsylvania Association for the Study of the Unexplained [PASU], said that he’d interviewed a fire fighter who had gotten deep into the woods before the military sealed off the area . . . [A]ccording to Gordon . . . the object [was] not a meteor!”

Where the Kecksburg incident overlaps with Die Glocke is in its physical description. The man who found the Kecksburg object described it as "acorn shaped, nine to twelve feet in diameter, [with] a gold band around it with writing on it. 

The writing was described as like "ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics". But then, more importantly, he said that there were characters of broken and straight lines, dots, rectangles and circles.

A craft approximately "nine to twelve feet in diameter," shaped like an "acorn" [or sometimes described as "bell-shaped"] with a band of hieroglyphs around the base?

The mystery deepens into conspiracy when one includes other reports of NASA personnel working alongside Army troops to load the craft onto a flatbed truck. The item was spirited away to the nearest base [presumably Wright-Patterson in Dayton, Ohio, associated with the mysterious “Hangar 18”]. Several witnesses stated seeing a man who looked like von Braun at the scene, but no photographic evidence corroborates such claims.

Whether or not one believes in visitations by aliens, the description of the Kecksburg craft and that of Die Glocke seem too similar for coincidence. Several researchers propose that Kammler’s Die Glocke technology ended up in the hands of the American military where it was obviously tested [if unsuccessfully], generating incidents like Keck­sburg in 1965 and perhaps others throughout the years.

From Antarctica to the Moon [and Back Again]

"Iron Sky" [2011], a soon-to-be-released Finnish film, presents an alternative view of history. While the Allies dug through the rubble after WWII, the Nazis built a secret facility in Antarctica where they developed UFO technology. They soon moved to a base on the dark side of the moon and continued, throughout the decades, to construct an ar­mada of flying saucers. The Nazis plan to invade the world anew in 2018.

While not exactly a “new” idea [see Philip K. Dick’s "The Man in the High Castle", 1962, and W. A. Harbinson’s "Projekt Saucer" series, 1991], the movie’s premise seems like much Hollywood-inspired science fic­tion. However, there is the possibility that "Iron Sky" comes close to the truth.

The German magazine "Faktor-X" [issue 11, 1997] reported Apollo 14 astronauts’ description of strange objects visi­ble on the surface of the moon.

Astronaut Gordon Cooper claimed to have seen UFOs and Neil Armstrong said that NASA was not the first to reach the moon. Ham radio operators, bypassing frequencies used by TV and radio during the 1969 moon landing, heard an exchange between NASA and Armstrong describing other spacecraft lining the cra­ter rim in which the Eagle module had landed.

Those who believe in visitations by E. T. cite such encounters as evidence of alien presences. Yet what if the an­swer is less prosaic? What if the first man to set foot on the moon was not Neil Armstrong, but a Nazi Stormtrooper?

If Die Glocke experiments produced anti-gravity technology, what was to stop Nazi engineers and rocket scientists from taking the next step, beyond ballistic missiles and into the cold reaches of outer space? If the Nazis made it to the moon, might they not lurk there still, waiting for an opportunity to continue where they left off with Hitler’s master plan or start a new Reich for a new millennium?