Götterdämmerung and Aftermath

At first, the men on the submarine thought it was a trick. 

The radio message from the German High Command told them the war was over; they were to surrender to the nearest Allied authorities.

The U-234, 294 feet long and 22,000 tons fully loaded, was one of the titans of the German undersea fleet;

It had surfaced briefly somewhere in the mid Atlantic at this pivotal moment in its history -10 May 1945- to receive radio messages and find out what was happening in the European war.

No trick: The war in Europe was over

The mystery of U-234 and its cargo had just begun, however.

The boat was en-route to Japan on a secret mission, carrying enough Uranium to make two atomic bombs. 

She would end her journey at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard instead.

The radio message was so stark, so shocking, Lt. Johann Heinrich Fehler, captain of U-234, wasn't about to take it on face value. He would have to test it out, make sure it was authentic, before deciding what his response would be.

The message, issued under the auspices of Admiral Karl Dönitz, former German U-boat chief elevated to supreme commander after the death of Adolf Hitler, praised all U-Boat crews for "fighting like lions" for more than six years and then informed them that the enemy's material superiority had driven Germany to defeat.

"We proudly remember our fallen comrades," Dönitz consoled. "Long live Germany!" He ordered surrender.

U-234 immediately submerged. "They are trying to trick us", Fehler speculated, "they" being the enemy -- Britain, Canada, the United States.

Fehler knew all about tricks. As an officer aboard the German raider 'Atlantis', he'd become familiar with the ship's somewhat infamous means of surface deception.

The 'Atlantis' would disguise itself as a friendly ship and lure enemy ships to within range of its camouflaged guns before opening fire. The 'Atlantis' had thus bagged 22 Allied ships before it was sunk by the British cruiser, 'Devonshire'; in November 1941.

U-234 sent out a message of its own to a nearby U-Boat, in a special code that only captains could send and decipher.

"We have received a very funny message," Fehler radioed. "Have we surrendered? Is it true?"

The reply convinced him the message was no trick. His orders were to surface, to hoist a black flag on U-234's periscope, and to report his position to the Allies.

Not Yet

Fehler was a German officer which meant when he gave orders everybody snapped to But, for whatever reasons, the man who had earned the nick name "Dynamite" for his job of scuttling captured vessels decided to exercise some democracy that day.

Uranium Oxide

He asked for opinions from some of his colleagues in the converted minelayer whose cargo contained enough Uranium oxide to blow up two American cities - 1,235 pounds of it, possibly destined for a Japanese atomic bomb program. But it is likely that nobody knew about the cargo except Fehler.

The officers and crew therefore were not thinking of Uranium when they replied. "We have enough food to last us for years," remarked the boyish second officer, Lt. Karl Ernst Pfaff. "I think we should go to the South Sea and find a deserted island with beautiful girls".

It had momentarily slipped Pfaff’s mind that he was engaged to Fehler's sister-in-law. Fehler laughed. "That is wishful thinking," he told the 22-year-old Berliner who would never be his brother-in-law.

A pattern of responses emerged, the younger men tending to share Pfaff’s compulsion to run from it all while the older ones just wanted to go home to their families and forget the war.

Geography was a major factor in that U-234's position lay at the convergence of four Allied zones established for U-Boat surrenders. Fehler could have surrendered to the enemy port of his choice. Britain, Gibraltar, Canada or the United States; or he could have attempted to return to Germany.

The latter would have been risky, Fehler knew, because the Russians -no admirers of Hitlerite fighting men- had been expanding naval operations in German waters. Neither he nor anybody on board wished to become a Soviet prisoner.

Picked U.S.

Fehler surmised that if they surrendered to Canada or Great Britain, they would be taken prisoner, first in Canada, then England and eventually France and it could be many years before the men returned to their homes.

Fehler perceived Americans as "not war faring people, not very military". At worst, he predicted they could be paraded through the streets, showcased so to speak as proof that real, live U Boat crew members had been captured , and then sent home.

Fehler decided to turn U-234 into the gentle Americans. But he had to make sure the Canadians didn't get to him first.

U-234 radioed authorities in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that it was headed northwest, toward Halifax, at 8 knots [8 nautical miles an hour]. In reality, U-234 was barreling across the Atlantic at 16 knots on a more or less southwest course, to the port of Newport News, Va.

Japanese Passengers

The depressed atmosphere inside the black-flag-flying U-Boat was disrupted by an incident involving two passengers, Imperial Japanese Navy Lieutenant Commander Hideo Tomonaga, a leading Japanese submarine designer, and Lieutenant Commander Genzo Shoji, an aircraft expert, who had come along to study German weaponry.

[Whether they also knew of the atomic cargo remains one of the unsolved mysteries of U-234].

Fehler explained to the Japanese that he had to surrender because he had to obey his high command just as they would have to follow theirs.

An officer later recalled: "They returned to their bunks where they took Luminol, a very powerful barbiturate, lay down and pulled the curtains and we knew they were killing themselves, and that was their right. They took more than 36 hours to die. Then we buried them at sea, as we would do for any one of our own".

Ulrich Kessler

The passenger list also included German Luftwaffe Lieutenant General Ulrich Kessler, former commander of special bombing and attack wings based in Norway. He was returning to active duty as Chief of the Luftwaffe-Liaison-Staff Tokyo and Air-Attache at the German Embassy in Tokyo. Submarine officers may not have become familiar with him on the trip as he and they had little in common.

Kessler, with a monocle over one eye and a perpetual air of arrogance, passed his time reading books and, upon arrival in Portsmouth, would surrender with a smart salute to the highest-ranking U.S. officer on hand. 

The U-234 arrived at the lower harbor or Portsmouth at 7:30 in the morning. Ulrich Kessler was described as "a typical Hollywood version of a German general".

"He wore a long leather greatcoat," the WHEB evening news report continued, "which reached to his ankles, highly polished leather boots and an Iron Cross [a Knight's Cross, actually] which hung tightly about his neck. He posed for newsreel cameramen and seemed to be enjoying the publicity he was receiving. He was tall and wore white gloves".

He later bragged to reporters that he'd learned how to accept defeat in style after World War I and expected he might have to do so even a third time.

But, displaying another, more practical side, Kessler admitted during interrogation that he had intended all along to get off the sub at Argentina - not an unbelievable story in light of the fact that many top-ranking Germans already had fled to that South American country.

Whether Kessler knew of the atomic cargo remains a mystery today. Researchers find it more likely Kessler, knowing the war was about to be lost, had boarded the sub as a means of escape.

The discrepancy between Fehler's reported and actual course was soon recognized by U.S. authorities who dispatched two destroyers to intercept U-234, wherever it was.

One evening as it plowed the seas south of Newfoundland Banks, U-234 spotted a huge searchlight on the horizon.

The destroyer 'Sutton' approached and asked U-234 to identify itself. Crew members of the 'Sutton' boarded and took charge, redirecting it to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard where three other U-Boats, U-805, U-873 and U-1228, had surrendered within the last few days. 

News of the surrender of the giant sub with its high-ranking Luftwaffe passengers turned the surrender into a major news event. Reporters swarmed over the Navy Yard and went to sea in a small boat for an earlier view of the prize.

But the big story -the more than half a ton of Uuranium oxide on board-- was promptly covered up.
 

"Germany's largest U-Boat, the 1,700 ton Type XB minelayer U-234, was at sea when the war ended, and surrendered in mid-ocean to an American destroyer escort.

"Her original destination had been Japan; her cargo included two complete ME-262 jet fighters [disassembled in crates, but with complete technical data] and 550 kilograms of Uranium 235 [or Uranium oxide -- sources differ], packed in lead containers.

"The reason the Uranium was being sent to Japan has never been determined – or, at least, revealed".

-- Captain Brayton Harris, USN [Retired] 
Author, "The Navy Times Book of Submarines: A Political, Social and Military History"

The United States military, in collaboration with worried officials of the top-secret Manhattan Project, had its own atomic program that would culminate in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August.

Even after the war ended, documents reporting the Uranium cargo on U-234 remained classified for the duration of the Cold War as America guarded all its atomic secrets from the new enemy: The Soviet Union.

Researchers Fascinated

Velma Hunt, a retired Penn State University environmental health professor who has spent years researching health issues as they pertain to Uranium and tracking Uranium shipments during the 1940s,  and assisted in the investigation of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, is writing a book. 

She is fascinated with the U-234. Uranium taken by U.S. authorities from a German U-Boat at the Portsmouth Naval Yard in 1945.

Hunt says she does not rule out the possibility that the Uranium wound up in one of the bombs that landed on Nagasaki or Hiroshima but doubts that could have happened because of the time that would have been required to move the material through the very complex atomic manufacturing process.

Her attempts over the years to find out what happened to U-234's nuclear cargo led to no definitive answers.

"If it did not get into the August bombs it was certainly used in the subsequent bombs," Hunt said in an interview. "There is no question that it was used and put into subsequent devices that we continued to use for testing, possibly at the Bikini Atoll or in Nevada". 
 

That captured German Uranium taken from U-Boat 134 in May of 1945 ended up in the 'Little Boy' bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima is contradicted by General Leslie R. Groves' Appointment Book of 13 August 1945 [a week after Hiroshima] where in a telephone call a Navy admiral asks if the material from the German submarine was of any use to the program.

General Groves "advised it wasn't as yet but it will be utilized".

John Lansdale Jr., was the head of security for the Manhattan Project who helped lead American forces to Germany's atomic bomb project before Soviet forces could reach it.

In 1995, Mr. Lansdale added a surprising twist to the surrender of the Nazi submarine U-234 to American forces in May 1945. Bound for Tokyo, the submarine was carrying 10 containers filled with Uranium oxide. For years, historians had wondered what the American military did with it.

In an interview with "The New York Times" in 1995, Mr. Lansdale said the material, originally intended for Japan's atomic program, instead ended up in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"It went to the Manhattan District," he said. "It certainly went into the Manhattan District supply of Uranium".

Hunt's interest in U-234 was piqued by a number of still unanswered questions in addition to the mystery of the missing Uranium:

How did the Uranium on U-234 escape the Uranium investigative activity of U.S. Gen. Leslie Groves' "Alsos" teams which probed uranium movements in Europe and Asia during World War II?

What part of the German military establishment had the knowledge, power and administrative clout to completely refit a submarine [from minelayer to giant underwater cargo vessel] and fill it with Uranium and advanced weapons technology?

The Uranium would have come from the Belgian Congo, Hunt believes. But by what paths did the Uranium move from there to the sub which was carrying it when it slid into the Baltic Sea on 25 March 1945?

What was the connection, if any, between the high-ranking Luftwaffe Gen. Ulrich Kessler on board U-234, and the Uranium oxide cargo?

When he told U.S. interrogators he had planned all along to leave the ship in Argentina, was it also his plan to take the Uranium ashore with him and use it as a bargaining chip with the Argentineans? Or was he unaware of the Uranium?

Her main question was, and still is, how did U.S. authorities manage to keep the Uranium a secret for so many years?

The cargo was not officially revealed. But even if it had been, few Americans would have understood its significance.

This was three months before the United States would drop the world's first two atomic bombs, unlocking the secrets of atomic fission to an incredulous world.

Wilcox cited the story of the U-234 as evidence that the Japanese may have been close to developing their own atom bomb and would not have hesitated to use it.

Another researcher and author, Robert K. Wilcox, who has written about World War II, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War, believes the uranium was snapped up by the Manhattan project [the top-secret American effort that concluded in the development of the atom bomb] but hasn't a clue to its ultimate use.

Wilcox wrote that the listing of 560 kilograms of Uranium oxide for the "Jap Army" on U-234's manifest had elicited such concern with the War Department that it was kept from the public and subsequently became a classified document.

The submarine, U-234, was en-route to Japan with its cargo of Uranium oxide -enough, he says, to fuel two Japanese atom bomb attacks on the United States- when it surrendered on 19 May 1945.

Wilcox believes Japan had its own secret atom bomb project and cites evidence that Japan may even have exploded a test device in northern Korea.

In his book,  Wilcox argues that had Germany not surrendered on 6 May, ordering its ships and submarines to turn themselves in to the Allies, the first cities to be destroyed by atomic bombs could have been American. Rather than Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, which were bombed by the United States in August of that year. That is, if the Japanese had time to assemble them, he says.

In any event, Wilcox claims, the Japanese were closer to achieving the bomb than the American people knew - or American authorities since may have wanted them to know.

Wilcox is in the process of updating his 1985 book for a reprinting in August by Marlowe & Company [New York].

The capture of U-234, one of the biggest U-Boats of the Third Reich fleet, and its illustrious passengers -German scientists and high Luftwaffe officers- made vivid headlines, but not a word of the secret Uranium leaked out, Wilcox notes.

Official papers documenting the existence of the Uranium were not declassified for many years, and when Wilcox drew attention to the Uranium cargo in his book, in the context of Japan's effort to build its own atomic bomb in World War II, nobody seemed to take much notice either.

Perhaps Americans didn't find credible his reports that Japan had relocated atomic bomb production facilities to Japanese occupied North Korea in 1945, Wilcox suggests.

But now, with growing U.S. anxiety over the nuclear weapons development program in communist North Korea, Americans may be more willing to take his earlier revelations seriously, he says.

In his book Wilcox traces Japan's determined development effort from its earliest days through possible testing. Wilcox speaks of a network of Spanish spies working in North America, U-234's aborted attempt to deliver 1,235 pounds of valuable, 77 percent pure Uranium oxide to Japan, and atomic research centers operating in North Korea.

Wilcox, said in an interview that his book was ahead of its time. "In 1985 the country wasn't ready for the story".

"Japan has always been looked at as the victim of the bomb. And so a lot of people didn't like the book. To be very base about it, there is a whole liberal element that does not want Japan to look like anything but the victim. But the fact is the Japanese tried very hard to make the bomb and would have dropped it".

The main thrust of the book is the Japanese did have an atomic bomb program, Wilcox said.

The Japanese knew an atomic bomb was feasible but their problem was Uranium.

In his reprinted book, WiIcox will introduce information that Japan near the very end of the war appropriated 25 million yen [about $100 million on today's scale] to find Uranium. Much of the money was spent buying up all the Uranium in Shanghai and around Japanese-occupied China in factories where it had been used for years in pottery-making.

"Their program did not get going until the end of the war," Wilcox said, "when they were searching for a miracle weapon. We were getting ready to invade Japan, they knew that, and they were going to do all they could to stop it.

"They would have dropped it on us if they had been able to", Wilcox said. "U-234 was one of their last-ditch attempts to get the Uranium they needed, although I don't think it would have made that much difference because they had already found it in Shanghai".
 

U-234 and U²³⁵

"The traditional history denies, however, that the uranium on board U-234 was enriched and therefore easily usable in an atomic bomb. The accepted theory asserts there is no evidence that the uranium stocks of U-234 were transferred into the Manhattan Project... And the traditional history asserts that the bomb components on board [the] U-234 arrived too late to be included in the atomic bombs that were dropped on Jepan.

"The documentation indicates quite differently on all accounts".

-- Carter Hydrick, "Critical Mass: the Real Story of the Atomic Bomb and the Birth of the Nuclear Age"

In December of 1944, an unhappy report is made to some unhappy people: 

"A study of the shipment of [bomb grade Uranium] for the past three months shows the following....: At present rate we will have 10 kilos about 7 February and 15 kilos about 1 May". 

This was bad news indeed, for a Uranium based atom bomb required between 10-100 kilograms by the earliest estimates [ca. 1942], and, by the time this memo was written, about 50 kilos, the more accurate calculation of critical mass needed to make an atom bomb from uranium.

One may imagine the consternation this memo must have caused at headquarters. The was, perhaps, a considerable degree of yelling and screaming and finger pointing and other histrionics, interlarded with desperate orders to re-double efforts amid the fire-tinged skies of the war's Wagnerian Gotterdämmerung.

The problem, however, is that the memo is not German at all.

It originates within the Manhattan Project on 28 December 1944 from Eric Jette, the chief metallurgist at Los Alamos. One may imagine the desperation it must have triggered, however, since the Manhattan Project had consumed two billion dollars all in the pursuit of Plutonium and Uranium atom bombs.

By this time it was of course apparent that there were significant and seemingly insurmountable problems in designing a Plutonium bomb, for the fuses available to the Allies were simply far too slow to achieve the uniform compression of a Plutonium core within the very short span of time needed to initiate uncontrolled nuclear fission.

That left the Uranium bomb as the more immediately feasible alternative -as the Germans had discovered years earlier- to the acquisition of a functioning weapon within the projected span of the war.

Yet, after a veritable hemorrhage of dollars in pursuit of the latter objective, the Manhattan Project was far short of the necessary critical mass for a Uranium bomb. And with the inevitability of an invasion of Japan looming, the pressure on General Leslie Groves to produce results was immense.

The lack of a sufficient stockpile, after years of concentrated all-out effort, was in part explainable, for two years earlier Fermi had been successful in construction of the first functioning atomic reactor. That success had spurred the American project to commit more seriously to the pursuit of a Plutonium bomb.

Accordingly, some of the precious and scarce refined and enriched Uranium 235 coming out of Oak Ridge and Lawrence's beta calutrons was being siphoned off as feedstock for enrichment and transmutation into Plutonium in the breeder reactors constructed at Handford, Washington for the purpose. Thus, some of the fissionable Uranium stockpile had been deliberately diverted for Plutonium production.

The decision was a logical one and the Manhattan Project decision-makers cannot be faulted to taking it.

The reason is simple. Pound for weapons grade pound, a Pound of plutonium will produce more bombs than a pound of Uranium. It thus made economic sense to convert enriched Uranium to Plutonium, for more bombs would be possible with the same amount of material.

But in December of 1944, having pursued both options, General Leslie Groves now stood on the verge of losing both gambles. And let us not forget what had just happened in Europe to sour the mood of "those in the know" in the United States even further.

There, six months after the Allied landings in Normandy and the headlong dash across France, Allied armies had stalled on the borders of the Reich. Allied Intelligence analysts confidently reassured the generals that no further significant German military offensive was possible, and their optimism was reflected in the general mood of the citizenry in France, Britain, and the United States.

The mood was brutally shattered when, on 16 December 1944, the German Army and Luftwaffe mounted one last, desperate offensive with secretly husbanded reserves in the Ardennes forest, scene of their 1940 triumph against France.

Within a matter of hours, the offensive had broken through American lines, surrounded, captured, or otherwise decimated the entire 116th American infantry division, and days later, surrounded the 101st Airborne division at Bastogne, and appeared well on the way to crossing the Meuse River at Namur.

On 28 December 1944, when the memo was written, the German offensive had been stalled, but not stopped.

For the Allied officers privy to intelligence reports and "in the loop" on the Manhattan Project, the offensive was possibly seen as confirmation of their worst fears: The Germans were close to a bomb, and were trying to buy time.

The horrible thought in the back of every Allied scientist's and engineer's head must have been that after all the Allied military successes of the previous years, the race for the bomb could still be won by the Germans. And if they were able to produce enough of them to put unbearable pressure on any one of the Western Allies, the outcome of the war itself was still in doubt.

If, for example, the Germans had A-bombed British and French cities, it is unlikely that a continuance of the would have been politically feasible for Churchill's wartime coalition government. In all likelihood it would have collapsed. A similar result would have likely occurred in France. And without British and French bases available for supply and forward deployment, the American military situation on the continent would have become untenable, if not disastrous.

In any case, word of the Manhattan Project's difficulties apparently leaked in the Washington DC political community, for United States Senator James F. Byrnes got in on the act, writing a memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and confirming that the Manhattan Project was perceived -at least by some in the know- as being in danger of failure:

SECRET March 3, 1945

MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT

FROM: JAMES F. BYRNES

I understand that the expenditures for the Manhattan project are approaching 2 billion dollars with no definite assurance yet of production.

We have succeeded to date in obtaining the cooperation of Congressional Committees in secret meetings. Perhaps we can continue to do so while the war lasts.

However, if the project proves a failure, it will be subjected to relentless criticism.

-- Memorandum of US Senator James F. Byrnes to President Frankliin D. Roosevelt, 3 March 1945 cited in Harald Fath, "Geheime Kommandosache - S III Jonastal und die Siegeswaffenproduktion: Weitere Spurensuche nach Thüringens Manhattan Project" [Schleusingen: Amun Verlag, 2000]

Senator Brynes' memorandum highlights the real problem in the Manhattan Project, and the real, though certainly not publicly known, military situation of the Allies ca. late 1944 and early 1945:

That in spite of tremendous conventional military success against the Third Reich, the Western Allies and Soviet Russia could conceivably still be forced to a "draw" if Germany deployed and used atom bombs in sufficient numbers to affect the political situation of the Western Allies.

With its stockpile of enriched Uranium already depleted by the decision to develop more Plutonium for a bomb [which as it turned out was undetonatable with existing British and American fuse technology anyway] and far below that needed for a Uranium-based atom bomb, "the entire enterprise appeared destined for defeat".

Not only defeat, but for "those in the know" in late 1944 and early 1945, the possibility was one of ignominious defeat and horrible carnage.

If the stocks of weapons grade Uranium ca. late 1944 - early 1945 were about half of what they needed to be after two years of research and production, and if this in turn was the cause of Senator Byrnes' concern, how then did the Manhattan Project acquire the large remaining amount or uranium 235 needed in the few months from March to the dropping of the 'Little Boy' bomb on Hiroshima in August, only five months away?

How did it accomplish this feat, if in fact, after some three years of production it had only produced less than half of the needed supply of critical mass weapons grade uranium? Where did its missing uranium 235 come from? And how did it solve the pressing problem of the fuses for a plutonium bomb?

Of course the answer if that if the Manhattan Project was incapable of producing enough enriched Uranium in that short amount of time -months rather than years- then its stocks had to have been supplemented from external sources, and there is only one viable place with the necessary technology to enrich Uranium on that scale.

That source was Nazi Germany. But the Manhattan Project is not the only atom bomb project with some missing Uranium.

Germany too appears to have suffered the "missing Uranium syndrome" in the final days prior to and immediately after the end of the war. But the problem in Germany's case is that the missing uranium it not a few tens of kilos, but several hundred tons. At this juncture, it is worth citing Carter Hydrick's excellent research at length, in order to exhibit the full ramifications of this problem:

"From June of 1940 to the end of the war, Germany seized 3,500 tons of Uranium compounds from Belgium - almost three times the amount Groves had purchased.... and stored it in salt mines in Strassfurt, Germany.

Groves brags that on 17 April 1945, as the war was winding down, Alsos recovered some 1,100 tons of Uranium ore from Strassfurt and an additional 31 tons in Toulouse, France ..... And he claims that the amount recovered was all that Germany had ever held, asserting, therefore, that Germany had never had enough raw material to process the uranium either for a Plutonium reactor pile or through magnetic separation techniques.

"Obviously, if Strassfurt once held 3,500 tons and only 1,130 were recovered, some 2,370 tons of Uranium ore was unaccounted for - still twice the amount the Manhattan Project possessed and is assumed to have used throughout its entire wartime effort.... The material has not been accounted for to this day...."

As early as the summer of 1941, according to historian Margaret Gowing, Germany had already refined 600 tons of Uranium to its oxide form, the form required for ionizing the material into a gas, in which form the uranium isotopes could then be magnetically or thermally separated or the oxide could be reduced to a metal for a reactor pile.

In fact, Professor Dr. Riehl, who was responsible for all Uranium throughout Germany during the course of the war, says the figure was actually much higher.

To create either a Uranium or Plutonium bomb, at some point Uranium must be reduced to metal. In the case of Plutonium, U238 is metalicized; for a Uranium bomb, U235.

Because of Uranium's difficult characteristics, however, this metallurgical process is a tricky one. The United States struggled with the problem early and still was not successful reducing Uranium to its metallic form in large production wuantities until late in 1942. The German technicians, however,... by the end of 1940, had already processed 280.6 kilograms into metal, over a quarter of a ton.

These observations require some additional commentary.

First, it is to be noted that Nazi Germany, by the best available evidence, was missing approximately two thousand tons of unrefined uranium ore by the war's end. Where did this ore go?

Second, it is clear that Nazi Germany was enriching Uranium on a massive scale, having refined 600 tons to oxide form for potential metalicization as early as 1940.

This would require a large and dedicated effort, with thousands of technicians, and a commensurately large facility or facilities to accomplish the enrichment.

The figures, in other words, tend to corroborate the hypothesis that the I.G. Farben 'Buna' factory at Auschwitz was not a Buna factory at all, but a huge Uranium enrichment facility. However, the date would imply another such facility, located elsewhere, since the Auschwitz facility did not really begin production until sometime in 1942.

Finally, it also seems clear that the Germans possessed an enormous stock of metallic Uranium. But what was the isotope? Was it U238 for further enrichment and separation into U235, was it intended perhaps as feedstock for a reactor to be transmuted into Plutonium, or was it already U235, the necessary material for a Uranium atom bomb? .

In any case, these figures strongly suggest that the Germans, ca. 1940-1942 were significantly ahead of the Allies in one very important aspect of atom bomb production: the enrichment of Uranium, and therefore, this suggests also that they were demonstrably ahead in the race for an actual functioning atom bomb during this period.

But the figures also raise another disturbing question: where did this Uranium go?

One answer lies in the mysterious case of a U-boat, the U-234, captured by the Americans in 1945.

Los Alamos laboratory indicates the stock of fissile U235 is far short of the needed critical mass, and would remain so for several months.

The conclusion is therefore simple, but frightening: the missing uranium used in the Manhattan Project was German, and that means that Nazi Germany's atom bomb project was much further along that the post-war Allied Legend would have us believe.

But what of the other two items in the U-234's strange cargo manifest, the fuses and their inventor, Dr. Heinz Schlicke? We have already noted that by late 1944 and early 1945, the American Plutonium bomb project had run afoul of some nasty mathematics: the critical mass of a Plutonium bomb, "imploded" or compressed by surrounding conventional explosives, would have to be assembled within 1/3000th of a second, otherwise the bomb would fail, and only produce a kind of "atomic fizzling firecracker", a "radiological" bomb producing very little explosion but a great deal of deadly radiation.

This was a speed far in excess of the capabilities of conventional wire cabling and the ordinary fuses available to the Allied engineers.

It is known that late in the timetable of events leading to the Trinity test of the Plutonium bomb in New Mexico that a design modification was introduced to the implosion device that incorporated "radiation venting channels", allowing radiation from the plutonium core to escape and reflect off the surrounding reflectors as the detonator was fired, within billionths of a second after the beginning of compression.

There is no possible way to explain this modification other than by the incorporation of Dr. Schlicke's infrared proximity fuses into the final design of the American bomb, since they enabled the fuses to react and fire are the speed of light.

In support of this historical reconstruction, there is a communication from 25 May 1945 from the chief of Naval Operations, to Portsmouth where the U-234 was brought after its surrender, indicating that Dr. Schlicke, now a prisoner of war, would be accompanied by three naval officers, to secure the fuses and bring them to Washington.

There Dr. Schlicke was apparently to give a lecture on the fuses under the auspices of a "Mr. Alvarez," who would appear to be none other than well-known Manhattan Project scientist Dr. Luis Alvarez, the very man who, according to the Allied Legend, "solved" the fusing problem for the plutonium bomb! 

So it would appear that the surrender of the U-234 to the Americans in 1945 solved the Manhattan Project's two biggest outstanding problems: lack of sufficient supplies of weapons grade Uranium, and lack of adequate fusing technology to make a Plutonium bomb work.

And this means that in the final analysis the Allied Legend about the Germans having been "far behind" the Allies in the race for the atom bomb is simply a incorrect in the extreme in the best case, or a deliberate lie in the worst. But the fuses raise another frightening specter: What were the Germans developing such highly sophisticated fuses for? Infrared heat-seeking rockets, which they had developed, would be one answer.

Dr. Luis Alvarez also had some other strange distinctions to his credit, being one of the scientists allegedly involved with the alleged Roswell "UFO" crash, the CIA’s subsequent 'Robertson Panel' in the 1950s on UFOs and government policy, and subsequent cosmic ray experiments inside the 2nd Pyramid at Giza and of course an implosion device to compress critical mass would be another.

But what about the other missing German uranium mentioned previously? The mission of the U-234 and its precious cargo thus raises certain other questions, and highlights other possibilities in this regard. It is a fact that throughout the war Germany and Japan both conducted long-range exchanges of officers and technology via aircraft and submarine - the exchange of technology being mostly a one-sided affair from Germany to Japan.

It is conceivable that many of these voyages -just as with the U-234- would have included similar transfers of uranium stocks and high technology to Japan. Some of the missing uranium must therefore surely be looked for in the Far East, in the Japanese atom bomb program. 

Robert Wilcox in his "Japan's Secret War", presents evidence that the Japanese successfully tested a bomb shortly after the bombing of Nagasaki. An infusion of actual bomb designs to the Japanese by the Germans late in the war might account for their relatively quick ability to develop and test a weapon under such difficult circumstances as the Japanese economy and military were in at the end of the war.

However, it should also be noted that the Japanese had independently designed their own workable bomb along similar lines as existing German designs, as well as along the lines employed in the "Little Boy" Hiroshima bomb.

On 3 October 1946 the "Atlanta Constitution" published a story by reporter David Snell, a former investigator with the 24th Criminal Investigation Detachment in Korea after the war. 

It alleged that the Japanese had successfully tested a nuclear weapon near Hungnam [Konan] before being captured by the Soviets.

Snell said  he had received his information at Seoul in September 1945 from a Japanese officer to whom he gave the pseudonym of Captain Wakabayashi, who had been in charge of counter-Intelligence at Hungnam.

SCAP officials, who were responsible for strict censorship of all information about Japan's wartime interest in nuclear physics, were dismissive of Snell's report.

Actual Test was a Success

Japan developed and successfully tested an atomic bomb three days prior to the end of the war.

She destroyed unfinished atomic bombs, secret papers and her atomic bomb plans only hours before advance units of the Russian Army moved into Konan, Korea, site of the project.

Japanese scientists who developed the bomb are now in Moscow, prisoners of the Russians.

They were tortured by their captors seeking atomic "know-how".

The Konan area is under rigid Russian control.

They permit no American to visit the area.

The War Department is withholding much of the information. 

The story may throw light on Stalin's recent statement that America will have a monopoly on atomic weapons for long.  

Perhaps, it will help explain the heretofore unaccountable stalling of the Japanese in accepting our surrender terms as the Allies agreed to allow Hirohito to continue as puppet emperor.

And perhaps it will throw light new light on the shooting down by the Russians of our B-29 on 29 August 1945, in the Konan area.

When told this story, I was an agent with the Twenty-Fourth Criminal Investigation Department, operating in Korea.

I was able to interview Capt. Wakabayashi, not as an investigator or as a member of the armed forces, but as a newspaperman.

He was advised and understood thoroughly, that he was speaking for publication.

He was in Seoul, en route to Japan as a repatriate. The interview took place in a former Shinto temple on a mount overlooking Korea's capital city. The shrine had been converted into an hotel for transient Japanese en route to their homeland.

Since V-J Day wisps of information have drifted into the hands of U.S. Army Intelligence of the existence of a gigantic and mystery-shrouded industrial project operated during the closing months of the war in a mountain vastness near the Northern Korean coastal city of Konan. It was near here that Japan's Uranium supply was said to exist.

This, the most complete account of activities at Konan to reach American ears, is believed to be the first time Japanese silence has been broken on the subject.

In a cave in a mountain near Konan, men worked against time, in final assembly of "Genzai Bakuden", Japan's name for the atomic bomb. It was 10 August 1945 [Japanese time], only four days after an atomic bomb flashed in the sky over Hiroshima, and five days before Japan surrendered.

To the north, Russian hordes were spilling into Manchuria.

Shortly after midnight of that day a convey of Japanese trucks moved from the mouth of the cave, past watchful sentries. The trucks wound through valleys, past sleeping farm villages.

It was August, and frogs in the mud of terraced rice paddies sang in a still night. In the cool predawn Japanese scientists and engineers loaded genzai bakudan aboard a ship in Konan.

Off the coast near an inlet in the Sea of Japan more frantic preparations were under way. All that day and night ancient ships, junks and fishing vessels moved into the anchorage.

Before dawn on 12 August a robot launch chugged through the ships at anchor and beached itself on the inlet. Its passenger was genzai bakudan. A clock ticked.

The observers were 20 miles away. This waiting was difficult and strange to men who had worked relentlessly so long who knew their job had been completed too late.

Observers Blind by Flash

The light in the east where Japan lay grew brighter. The moment the sun peeped over the sea there was a burst of light at the anchorage blinding the observers who wore welders' glasses. The ball of fire was estimated to be 1,000 yards in diameter. A mult--colored cloud of vapors boiled toward the heavens then mushroomed in the stratosphere.

The churn of water and vapor obscured the vessels directly under the burst. Ships and junks on the fringe burned fiercely at anchor. When the atmosphere cleared slightly the observers could detect several vessels had vanished.

Genzai bakudun in that moment had matched the brilliance of the rising sun in the east.

Japan had perfected and successfully tested an atomic bomb as cataclysmic as those that withered Hiroshimo and Nagasaki.

The time was short. The war was roaring to its climax. The advancing Russians would arrive at Konan before the weapon could be mounted in the ready Kamikaze planes to be thrown against any attempted landing by American troops on Japan's shores.

It was a difficult decision. But it had to be made.

The observers sped across the water, back to Konan. With the advance units of the Russian Army only hours away, the final scene of this Gotterdämmerung began. The scientists and engineers smashed machines, and destroyed partially completed genzai bakudans.

Before Russian columns reached Konan, dynamite sealed the secrets of the cave. But the Russians had come so quickly that the scientists could not escape.

This is the story told me by Capt. Wakabayashi.

Japan's struggle to produce and atomic weapon began in 1938, when German and Japanese scientists met to discuss a possible military use of energy locked in the atom.

No technical information was exchanged, only theories.

In 1940 the Nisina Laboratory of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Tokyo had built one of the largest cyclotrons in the world. [Cyclotrons found in Tokyo by the invading Yanks were destroyed].

Thought Arom Bomb Risky

The scientists continued to study atomic theory during the early days of the war, but it was not until the Unites States began to carry the war to Japan that they were able to interest the Government in a full-scale atomic project.

Heretofore, the Government had considered such a venture too risky and too expensive. During the years following Pearl Harbor, Japan's militarists believed the Unites States could be defeated without the use of atomic weapons.

When task forces and invasion spearheads brought the war ever closer to the Japanese mainland, the Japanese Navy undertook the production of the atomic bomb as defense against amphibious operations. Atomic bombs were to be flown against Allied ships in Kamikaze suicide planes.

 

Capt. Wakabayashi estimated the area of total destruction of the bomb at one square mile.

The project was started at Nagoya, but its removal to Korea was necessitated when the B-29's began to lash industrial cities on the mainland of Japan.

"I consider the B-29 the primary weapon in the defeat of Japan" Capt. Wakabayashi declared. "The B-29 caused our project to be moved to Korea. We lost three months in the transfer. 

Fictional Aircraft

After receiving V2 rocket plans from Germany, the Imperial Japanese applied their new technology to the pre-existing Cherry Blossom Kamikaze plane. This new jet was to function as a human piloted atomic bomb to be deployed from bombers during the defense of Japan.

 Large detonation hammer ensures the bomb explodes upon impact in case the air burst mechanisms fail.

 40mm guns fixed to main fuselage after brave Allied pilots began trying to detonate the Blossoms prior to their goal by flying their planes straight into
the Blossom's path.

 Rotationally adjustable vents allow the plane a slight degree of directional correction after being launched from a heavy bomber.

 The canopy and tail are the only recognizable parts left of the Blossom's fuselage which has been adapted from the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter aircraft.

 The canopy is welded shut after the pilot has entered the cockpit.

"The B-29 caused our project to be moved to Korea. We lost three months in the transfer. We would have had Genza Bakudan three months earlier if it had not been for the B-29".

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress is a four-engine propeller-driven heavy bomber designed by Boeing which was flown primarily by the United States during World War II and the Korean War.

It was one of the largest aircraft operational during World War II and featured state of the art technology.

It was the single most expensive weapons project undertaken by the United States in World War II, exceeding the cost of the Manhattan Project by between
1 and 1.7 Billion dollars.

Innovations introduced included a pressurized cabin, dual-wheeled, tricycle landing gear, and a remote, computer-controlled fire-control system that directed four machine gun turrets that could be operated by a single gunner and a fire-control officer.
A manned tail gun installation
was semi-remote.

The name 'Superfortress' continued the pattern Boeing started with its well-known predecessor, the B-17 'Flying Fortress'. Designed for the high-altitude strategic bomber role, the B-29 also excelled in low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing missions.
One of the B-29's final roles during
World War II was carrying out
the atomic bomb attacks on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Korean project was staffed by about 40,000 Japanese workers, of whom approximately 25,000 were trained engineers and scientists. The organization of the plant was set up so that the workers were restricted to their areas. The inner sanctum of the plant was deep in a cave. Here only 400 specialists worked.

Kept in Dark on Each Other's Fate
 
One scientist was master director of the entire project. Six others, all eminent Japanese scientists were in charge of six phases of the bomb's production. Each of these six men were kept in ignorance of the work of the other five. [Names of these scientists are withheld by Army censorship].

The Russian's took most of the trained personnel prisoner, including the seven key men. One of the seven escaped in June, 1946, and fled to the American zone of occupation in Korea. U.S. Army Intelligence interrogated this man.

Capt. Wakabayashi talked to him in Seoul. The scientist told of having been tortured by the Russians. He said all seven were tortured.

Capt. Wakabayashi said he learned from this scientist that the other six had been removed to Moscow.

"The Russians thrust burning splinters under the fingertips of these men. They poured water into their nasal passages. Our Japanese scientists will suffer death before they disclose their secrets to the Russians," he declared.

Capt. Wakabayashi said the Russians are making and extensive study of the Konan region.

When Edwin Pauley of the War Reparations Committee, inspected Northern Korea, he was allowed to see only certain areas, and was kept under rigid Russian supervision.

On 29 August 1945, an American B-29 headed for Konan with a cargo of food and medical supplies, to be dropped over an Allied prisoner of war camp there. Four Russian Yak fighters from nearby Hammung Airfield circled the B-29 and signaled the pilot to land on the Hammung strip.

Pilot Refuses: Reds Fire

Lt. Jose H. Queen of Ashland, KY., pilot, refused to do so because the field was small, and headed back toward the Saipon base, to return "when things got straightened out with the Russians". Ten miles off the coast the Yak fighters opened fire and shot the B-29 down. None of the crew of 12 men were injured, although a Russian fighter strafed but missed Radio Operator Douglas Arthur.

The Russian later told Lt. Queen they saw the American markings but "weren't sure" because sometimes the Germans used American markings and they thought the Japs might too. This was nearly two weeks after the war ended.

Capt. Wakabayashi said the Japanese Counter Intelligence Corps at least a year before the atom bombing of Hiroshima learned there was a vast and mysterious project in the mountains of the eastern part of the United States. [Presumably the Manhattan project at Oak Ridge, Tenn] They believed, but were not sure, that atomic weapons were being produced there.

On the hand, he said, Allied Intelligence must have know of the atomic project at Konan, because of the perfect timing of the Hiroshimo bombing only six days before the long-scheduled Japanese naval test.

Perhaps here is the answer to moralists who question the decision of the United States to drop an atomic bomb.

The Japanese office, the interpreter and I sipped aromatic green tea as Capt. Wakabayashi unfolded his great and perhaps world-shaking story. His eyes flashed with pride behind the black-rimmed glassed. When the interview ended, he ushered us to the door and bowed very low.

-- David Snell
 

Under the 1947-48 investigation, comments were sought from Japanese scientists who would or should have known about such a project. Further doubt is cast on Snell's story by the lack of evidence of large numbers of Japanese scientists leaving Japan for Korea and never returning.

Snell's statements were repeated by Robert K. Wilcox in his 1985 book "Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb".

The book also included what Wilcox stated was new evidence from Intelligence material which indicated the Japanese might have had an atomic program at Hungnam.

These specific reports were dismissed in a review of the book by Department of Energy employee Roger M. Anders which was published in the journal "Military Affairs", an article written by two historians of science in the journal "Isis" and another article in the journal "Intelligence and National Security".

During the war both Germany and Italy undertook long-range flights to Japan, the Germans using their special long-range heavy lift transport aircraft such as the Ju-290 for polar flights. It is conceivable that these flights and their Italian counterparts also involved the exchange of officers and technology, if not a small amount of raw material as well.

Some of the missing Uranium probably also fell into the hands of the Soviets as the Russian armies steamrollered into Eastern Europe and finally into what would become the Soviet "Eastern" zone of occupation in Germany.

But why, after traveling under radio silence from Germany, did the U-234 finally surrender its precious Uranium, fuses, and military materiel cargo, when its obvious destination was Japan? This is an intriguing question, and one that unfortunately cannot be answered here except briefly.

Carter Hydrick's superb research ["How Germany Surrendered Enriched Uranium for the United States' Atomic Bomb"] elaborates one highly probable hypothesis: 

The surrender of the U-234 and its precious cargo of enriched Uranium and infrared proximity fuses to the United States was on the orders of none other than Martin Bormann, in a maneuver designed to secure his and others' freedom after the war, and as part of a deliberate plan to continue Nazism and its agendas and research underground.

It is thus, the first visible, and crucial, element of the emerging Operation Paperclip, the transfer of technology and scientists from the collapsing Third Reich to the United States.

There, the German scientists and engineers could, would, and did continue their lines of esoteric research and development of high technology and sophisticated weaponry, with a similar moral and ideological effect on the culture at large as occurred in Nazi Germany. 
 

It was evident to Bormann, as other high-ranking Nazis,  after the disaster of Stalingrad in early 1943, it was only a matter of time before the military collapse of the Reich if its secret weapons projects did not bear fruit in time.

Bormann and other top Nazis, representatives from the agencies of armaments of the Reich, from industry, and of course, from the SS gathered in secret meetings to establish the pipelines for the transference out of Germany of enormous amounts of liquid assets, personnel skilled in scientific research or covert InItelligence operations, and of blueprints of weapons and other technologies. 

As regards scientific matters, there is an interesting fact presented in Linda Hunt’s book "The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990" [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991] . 

In that book, Hunt gives the following account of how the United States was so quickly able to find and acquire the German scientists and technologies it sought in connection with "Project Paperclip": 

"One of Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency [JIOA] Director Colonel E. W. Gruhn’s first actions as overall administrator of the project was to compile a hiring list of the best qualified German and Austrian scientists that was used by both the United States and Great Britain as a recruitment tool for decades.

"Although this list has been mentioned in the past by journalists and historians, no one ever noted that it was partially compiled by Werner Osenberg, the notorious wartime commander of the Gestapo’s scientific section. The decision to use Osenberg was made by U.S. Navy Captain Ransom Davis after consultation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.   

"During the war, Osenberg was in charge of a special SS research council directly subordinate to Reichsmarschal Herman Göring. Osenberg sent his Gestapo agents to investigate work in progress at scientific institutes and report back on each scientist’s political reliability.

"From those reports and the Gestapo’s files, Osenberg compiled a list of fifteen thousand names of scientists in the Third Reich. He wrote comments next to the scientists’ names regarding their political affiliations, such as SS membership, and his opinion of their scientific abilities. Of course, those scientists who held fanatic Nazi views and SS membership were also those whom Osenberg considered best qualified. 

"Osenberg had been captured in 1945 by the Alsos team and interned in a camp in Germany. Soon after the JIOA expressed an interest in him, intelligence officers whisked him out of Germany to Versailles, France, where he set up business as usual, sifting through his files to suggest names of those he considered the best scientists in the Third Reich".

As a member of the Gestapo and SS, Osenberg’s files, via Heinrich "Gestapo" Müller, would have surely been known to Bormann, thus giving Bormann extensive knowledge not only over what was being researched, but who was doing it.

Thus, while Himmler may have, at one time, tried to keep Bormann out of the loop on the extent of Nazi secret weapons research being conducted by the SS, he would have known about it via other private channels available to him.

Bormann was thus faultlessly well-informed not only of the state and extent of these projects — and therefore, not only knew of Germany’s atom bomb project and its actual state, but of the more exotic areas of research represented by the Bell — but also of the political reliability of the scientists conducting the research.

With such a list in hand, Bormann and his allies in the strategic evacuation operation would have known exactly who, and what, was to go where, and, via their knowledge of each individual person’s political views and loyalty, could have limited the risks to any planned continued independent development of the projects already begun, as well as of any planned infiltration of any host country’s military and intelligence agencies.

With such a list in hand, they could have ensured at least a partial continuance of these projects, provided a network of co-ordination could be established to do so. Establishment of co-ordination would have taken advantage of each host country’s own "compartmentalization" of security and research, exercising a hidden center of direction. 

The "Network" in question most likely would have included, but was not limited to, General Reinhard Gehlen’s organization or SS Major Otto Skorzeny’s "Fascista Internacionale". Finally, the Osenberg list and evident American interest in it seems to corroborate another speculation, namely, that American knowledge and the nature of its specificity, as reflected in General Patton’s unerring military drives to the nerve centers of Kammler’s secret research departments, could only have come from inside Nazi Germany itself.

Since Carter Hydrick has argued a convincing case that it was Bormann himself who directed the surrender of Germany’s atom bomb secrets to the United States, it may be reasonably asserted that it was Bormann ultimately co-ordinating the flow of other sensitive information concerning the Kammlerstab to American intelligence, since he, clearly, is in the position to be the best informed about the nature, extent, and personnel involved with all of Germany’s black projects.

With this knowledge at his disposal, the thesis of Carter Hydrick, that Bormann helped engineer not only the transference of the enriched Uranium of the U-boat 234 to the United States, but also that he may have engineered the transference of a functioning bomb to the United States as well, gains credibility.
 

The Kammler Group or Kammler Staff owes its name to Hans Kammler, who was a Doctor of Engineering, and specialized in the very rapid construction of bombproof underground facilities.

His ability to work ahead of schedule impressed all those around him and caused his rapid rise within the military-engineering world and from the Luftwaffe to the SS. 

Parallelling Kammler's meteoric rise was the rise of the SS itself. The SS increasingly usurped power from the military but it also usurped industrial and scientific research and development, as well as economic functions which had previously been in civilian hands.

This transfer of power exploded following the August, 1944 attempted assassination of Hitler. From that moment on, Hitler seems to have relied on the SS primarily.

Meanwhile, Kammler's SS Works Division C was busy burrowing into German soil and burying and hiding its industry there. He built countless underground installations, some of which remain unknown and unexplored today. To do this, Kammler had at his disposal, a slave-labor force which could have been as high as 14 million.

Eventually, Kammler became the number three man in the SS, behind Heinreich Himmler and SS General Oswald Pohl. 

Besides overseeing construction projects Kammler was also given responsibility for missile production in Germany as well as jet aircraft production.

At this point Kammler began sucking in projects and responsibility far beyond the alleged scope of his duties. Eventually, virtually every priority or secret technology and weapons system fell under his control. This was a big responsibility, even for Kammler, but Kammler solved or perhaps controlled this problem as he had solved all his other challenges, by organization. Kammler put together a think-tank.

This involved finding and organizing a technical staff who could take potential war-winning ideas and research these ideas, develop them to the point of practicality, coordinate their production with an appropriate industrial firm, and deliver them to the field, usually to the Reich's soldiers of choice, the Waffen SS. This means that by war's end, the Kammler Group ending up sitting on a huge library:

A nest-egg of German research secrets. 

The Kammler Group needed a secure home in which to operate. They needed the use of technical laboratories and machine tools. Kammler found the environment he was looking for in the Skoda Works at Pilsen in what is now the Czech Republic.

During World War Two, this region had been annexed by Germany and was part of the Greater German Reich. For a period of time Reinhard Heydrich administered the region with an iron fist resulting in a relatively stable occupied population. The population contained Czechs and also Germans.

The Skoda Works relied on German supervisors or German-trained Czech supervisors and a skilled work force of Czechs. Skoda did many things and must be thought of like one of the major technical industrial manufacturing firms in the USA today.

Examples of these are Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, Lochkeed or perhaps even General Motors. Skoda was not, however, considered as a core "German" company by the German military since it was outside Germany proper and had a history going back to Austro-Hungarian times. This was perfect for Kammler. Kammler spoke Czech. 

Skoda had countless sub-facilities in the area. Skoda, technically, had everything Kammler needed. Security was the last piece in the puzzle. It is a puzzle today because Kammler's security was never breached. It was not breached by the U.S., British Intelligence or even Soviet Intelligence which thought they knew everything.

Kammler was able to pull Albrich's Cloak of Obscurity over himself and his staff using a triple wall of counter-Intelligence.

There were three counter-Intelligence divisions at work in the Kammler Group. These were the military counterintelligence unit, the political counterintelligence unit and the industrial counte-Intelligence unit. This security arrangement was so successful that when the Allies began advancing into Germany in the early spring of 1945, nobody asked the local population anything about Kammler or the Kammler Group.

Neither side knew anything about it. By the time the "boots on the ground" realized who Dr. Kammler and his organization really were, his very name became a forbidden subject.

This was probably so lest the other Allied Powers, especially the Soviets, learn of any potential treasure-trove of scientific secrets. Remember, Kammler administrated up to 14 million slave-laborers. I think we can all agree that this was probably illegal and this led to the deaths of some, if not many, conscripts.

Yet Kammler was not charged with war crimes at the Nuremberg hearings. Kammler's name only came up twice and nobody, none of the Allied Powers conducting these hearings, bothered with follow-up questions about Kammler.

What is going on here? 

Source: Agoston, Tom, "Blunder How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia", Dodd, Mead and Company, New York 1985
 

These are two statements made by Professor Osenberg in a Combined Intellegence Objectives sub-Committee report, number 51, dated 2 June 1945.
Osenberg was head of the Reichs Research Council, a very influential scientist and one who steered the course of scientific research and development within Nazi Germany.
In this report, Osenberg actually says the name 'Kammler', which is one of the very few times Kammler's name was allowed to be reproduced in official documentation.
 

Recent research by Nick Cook would tend to corroborate Bormann's role in, and therefore probable accurate knowledge of, the full scope and extent of Kammler's secret black projects empire.

Bormann's position as controller of Nazi Party finances as well as of Hitler 's estate would have given him control over a source of funding for these projects, a source completely independent of the state.

Bormann's 1945 establishment of a special SS evacuation Kommando, was an act that placed jurisdiction over the Ju 290 four engine and Ju 390 six engine heavy-lift ultra long range air transport of Luftwaffe Kampfgeschwader 200 under the direct control of none other than SS General Hans Kammler.

The intention is clear:

As much of the actual research files and equipment of the Kammlerstab as could be evacuated from Germany for destinations unknown was to be handled by Kammler personally. This special evacuation command held these aircraft in readiness near Lower Silesia in late 1945.

By this point, Kammler's power, backed by the Reichsleiter himself, was so great that he could refuse a request by Reichsführer SS Himmler for the use of one of these aircraft.

Kammler, "with such aircraft at his disposal" would have been able to fly a large cargo of "documents, personnel and technology pretty much anywhere" that he wanted to. Spain, South America - Argentina even -would have represented no problem to such a long-range platform".

Cook himself quips, "What was the point of chasing Kammler, if he'd already shipped everything out?" 

Clearly, Bormann meant to preserve and continue the research already under way in the Reich by transplanting the technology and continuing its development elsewhere, under independent Nazi control - as the various 'survival' myths maintain.

If Carter Hydrick is correct that it was Bormann's intention to surrender the bulk of this technology to the United States this puts Himmler's last ditch and clumsy efforts to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies via Sweden into a new light.

Himmler was perhaps offering them the vast cache of secrets he thought he controlled through Kammler's "think tank".

It is very possible that the American intelligence community already knew of this treasure trove via their SS contacts through Allen Dulles and SS General Wolff, and had made "other arrangements" that included neither Himmler nor the British.

Thus, by the time of Kammler's refusal to his SS boss to allow him the use of a Ju 290 or Ju 390, effective control and disposition of the SS black projects had slipped from Himmler's hands and into Bormann's.

Himmler could neither surrender nor even barter for his life, because he had nothing left with which to bargain. Kammler, and Bormann, however, had a great deal to offer the Americans in exchange for their lives. 

According to Nick Cook, "Operation Paperclip", the covert project to bring former Nazi scientists and engineers to the United States to work on America's own aerospace and military black projects after the war, was the primary beneficiary of the Kammlerstab's think tank secrets, blueprints, and patents.

"The state within a state had been transported four thousand miles".
 

Operation Paperclip  was the Office of Strategic Services [OSS] program in which more than 1,500 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States from Nazi Germany and other countries for employment in the aftermath of World War II.

It was conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency [JIOA] and in the context of the burgeoning Cold War.

One purpose of Operation Paperclip was to deny German scientific expertise and knowledge to the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, as well as to inhibit post-war Germany from redeveloping its military research capabilities. The Soviet Union had competing extraction programs known as 'trophy brigades' and 'Operation Osoaviakhim'.

The JIOA's recruitment of German scientists began after the Allied victory in Europe on 8 May 1945, but U.S. President Harry Truman did not formally order the execution of Operation Paperclip until August 1945.

Truman's order expressly excluded anyone found "to have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism".

However, those restrictions would have rendered ineligible most of the leading scientists whom the JIOA had identified for recruitment, among them rocket scientists Wernher von Braun, Kurt H. Debus, and Arthur Rudolph, as well as physician Hubertus Strughold, each earlier classified as a "menace to the security of the Allied Forces".

The JIOA worked independently to circumvent President Truman's anti-Nazi order and the Allied Potsdam and Yalta agreements, creating false employment and political biographies for the scientists. The JIOA also expunged the scientists' Nazi Party memberships and regime affiliations from the public record.

Once "bleached" of their Nazism, the scientists were granted security clearances by the U.S. government to work in the United States. The project's operational name of Paperclip was derived from the paperclips used to attach the scientists' new political personae to their "US Government Scientist" JIOA personnel files.

Osenberg List

Nazi Germany found itself at a logistical disadvantage, having failed to conquer the USSR with "Operation Barbarossa" [June–December 1941], the Siege of Leningrad [September 1941 – January 1944], "Operation Nordlicht" [Northern Light, August–October 1942], and the Battle of Stalingrad [July 1942 – February 1943].

The failed conquests had depleted German resources, and its military-industrial complex was unprepared to defend the Großdeutsches Reich [Greater German Reich] against the Red Army's westward counter-attack.

By early 1943, the German government began recalling from combat a number of scientists, engineers, and technicians; they returned to work in research and development to bolster German defense for a protracted war with the USSR. The recall from frontline combat included 4,000 rocketeers returned to Peenemünde, in northeast coastal Germany.

"Overnight, Ph.D.s were liberated from KP duty, masters of science were recalled from orderly service, mathematicians were hauled out of bakeries, and precision mechanics ceased to be truck drivers".

— Dieter K. Huzel, "Peenemünde to Canaveral"

The Nazi government's recall of their now-useful intellectuals for scientific work first required identifying and locating the scientists, engineers, and technicians, then ascertaining their political and ideological reliability.

Werner Osenberg, the engineer-scientist heading the "Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft" [Military Research Association], recorded the names of the politically cleared men to the Osenberg List, thus reinstating them to scientific work.

In March 1945, at Bonn University, a Polish laboratory technician found pieces of the Osenberg List stuffed in a toilet; the list subsequently reached MI6, who transmitted it to U.S. Intelligence.

Then U.S. Army Major Robert B. Staver, Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, used the Osenberg List to compile his list of German scientists to be captured and interrogated; Wernher von Braun, Nazi Germany's premier rocket scientist, headed Major Staver's list.

Identification

In "Operation Overcast", Major Staver's original intent was only to interview the scientists, but what he learned changed the operation's purpose. On 22 May 1945, he transmitted to U.S. Pentagon headquarters Colonel Joel Holmes's telegram urging the evacuation of German scientists and their families, as most "important for [the] Pacific war" effort.

Most of the Osenberg List engineers worked at the Baltic coast German Army Research Center Peenemünde, developing the V-2 rocket. After capturing them, the Allies initially housed them and their families in Landshut, Bavaria, in southern Germany.

Beginning on 19 July 1945, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS] managed the captured ARC rocketeers under Operation Overcast.

However, when the Camp Overcast name of the scientists' quarters became locally-known, the program was renamed "Operation Paperclip" in November 1945. Despite these attempts at secrecy, later that year the press interviewed several of the scientists.[10][11][13]

Regarding "Operation Alsos", Allied Intelligence described nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg, the German nuclear energy project principal, as "worth more to us than ten divisions of Germans." In addition to rocketeers and nuclear physicists, the Allies also sought chemists, physicians, and naval weaponeers.

Meanwhile, the Technical Director of the German Army Rocket Center, Wernher von Braun, was jailed at P.O. Box 1142, a military-Intelligence black site in Fort Hunt, Virginia, in the United States.

Since the prison was unknown to the international community, its operation by the US was in violation of the Geneva Convention of 1929, which the United States had ratified. Although von Braun's interrogators pressured him, he was not tortured.

Capture and detention

Early on, the United States created the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee [CIOS]. This provided the information on targets for the T-Forces that went in and targeted scientific, military and industrial installations [and their employees] for their know-how.

Initial priorities were advanced technology, such as infrared, that could be used in the war against Japan; finding out what technology had been passed on to Japan; and finally to halt the research.

A project to halt the research was codenamed "Project Safehaven", and it was not initially targeted against the Soviet Union; rather the concern was that German scientists might emigrate and continue their research in countries such as Spain, Argentina or Egypt, all of which had sympathized with Nazi Germany.

In order to avoid the complications involved with the emigration of German scientists, the CIOS was responsible for scouting and kidnapping high profile individuals for the deprivation of technological advancements in nations outside of the US.

Much U.S. effort was focused on Saxony and Thuringia, which by 1 July 1945, would become part of the Soviet Occupation zone.

Many German research facilities and personnel had been evacuated to these states, particularly from the Berlin area. Fearing that the Soviet takeover would limit U.S. ability to exploit German scientific and technical expertise, and not wanting the Soviet Union to benefit from said expertise, the United States instigated an "evacuation operation" of scientific personnel from Saxony and Thuringia, issuing orders such as:

"On orders of Military Government you are to report with your family and baggage as much as you can carry tomorrow noon at 1300 hours [Friday, 22 June 1945] at the town square in Bitterfeld. There is no need to bring winter clothing. Easily carried possessions, such as family documents, jewelry, and the like should be taken along.

"You will be transported by motor vehicle to the nearest railway station. From there you will travel on to the West. Please tell the bearer of this letter how large your family is".

By 1947 this evacuation operation had netted an estimated 1,800 technicians and scientists, along with 3,700 family members. Those with special skills or knowledge were taken to detention and interrogation centers, such as one code-named 'Dustbin' to be held and interrogated, in some cases for months.

A few of the scientists were gathered up in "Operation Overcast", but most were transported to villages in the countryside where there were neither research facilities nor work; they were provided stipends and forced to report twice weekly to police headquarters to prevent them from leaving.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff directive on research and teaching stated that technicians and scientists should be released "only after all interested agencies were satisfied that all desired intelligence information had been obtained from them".

On 5 November 1947, the Office of Military Government of the United States [OMGUS], which had jurisdiction over the western part of occupied Germany, held a conference to consider the status of the evacuees, the monetary claims that the evacuees had filed against the United States, and the "possible violation by the US of laws of war or Rules of Land Warfare".

The OMGUS director of Intelligence R. L. Walsh initiated a program to resettle the evacuees in the Third World, which the Germans referred to as General Walsh's "Urwald-Programm" [jungle program], however this program never matured.

In 1948, the evacuees received settlements of 69.5 million Reichsmarks from the U.S., a settlement that soon became severely devalued during the currency reform that introduced the Deutsche Mark as the official currency of western Germany.

John Gimbel concludes that the United States put some of Germany's best minds on ice for three years, therefore depriving the German recovery of their expertise.

Scientists

In May 1945, the U.S. Navy "received in custody" Dr. Herbert A. Wagner, the inventor of the Hs 293 missile; for two years, he first worked at the Special Devices Center, at Castle Gould and at Hempstead House, Long Island, New York; in 1947, he moved to the Naval Air Station Point Mugu.

In August 1945, Colonel Holger Toftoy, head of the Rocket Branch of the Research and Development Division of the U.S. Army's Ordnance Corps, offered initial one-year contracts to the rocket scientists; 127 of them accepted.

In September 1945, the first group of seven rocket scientists [aerospace engineers] arrived at Fort Strong, located on Long Island in Boston harbor: Wernher von Braun, Erich W. Neubert, Theodor A. Poppel, August Schulze, Eberhard Rees, Wilhelm Jungert, and Walter Schwidetzky.

Beginning in late 1945, three rocket-scientist groups arrived in the United States for duty at Fort Bliss, Texas, and at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as "War Department Special Employees".

In 1946, the United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists at a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri.

In early 1950, legal U.S. residency for some of the 'Project Paperclip' specialists was effected through the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico; thus, Nazi scientists legally entered the United States from Latin America.

Eighty-six aeronautical engineers were transferred to Wright Field, where the United States had Luftwaffe aircraft and equipment captured under 'Operation Lusty' [Luftwaffe Secret Technology].

The United States Army Signal Corps employed 24 specialists – including the physicists Georg Goubau, Gunter Guttwein, Georg Hass, Horst Kedesdy, and Kurt Lehovec; the physical chemists Rudolf Brill, Ernst Baars, and Eberhard Both; the geophysicist Helmut Weickmann; the optician Gerhard Schwesinger; and the engineers Eduard Gerber, Richard Günther, and Hans Ziegler.

In 1959, 94 'Operation Paperclip' men went to the United States, including Friedwardt Winterberg and Friedrich Wigand. Throughout its operations to 1990, 'Operation Paperclip' imported 1,600 men, as part of the intellectual reparations owed to the United States and the UK, some $10 billion in patents and industrial processes.

During the decades after they were included in 'Operation Paperclip', some scientists were investigated because of their activities during World War II.

Arthur Rudolph was deported in 1984, but not prosecuted, and West Germany granted him citizenship.

Similarly, Georg Rickhey, who came to the United States under "Operation Paperclip" in 1946, was returned to Germany to stand trial at the Dora Trial in 1947; he was acquitted, and returned to the United States in 1948, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen.

The aeromedical library at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, had been named after Hubertus Strughold in 1977. However, it was later renamed because documents from the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal linked Strughold to medical experiments in which inmates from Dachau were tortured and killed.

Key figures

Rocketry: Rudi Beichel, Magnus von Braun, Wernher von Braun, Werner Dahm, Konrad Dannenberg, Kurt H. Debus, Walter Dornberger, Ernst R. G. Eckert, Krafft Arnold Ehricke, Otto Hirschler, Hermann H. Kurzweg, Fritz Müller, Eberhard Rees, Gerhard Reisig, Georg Rickhey, Werner Rosinski, Ludwig Roth, Arthur Rudolph, Ernst Steinhoff, Ernst Stuhlinger, Bernhard Tessmann, and Georg von Tiesenhausen
Aeronautics: Sighard F. Hoerner, Siegfried Knemeyer, Alexander Martin Lippisch, Hans Multhopp, Hans von Ohain, and Kurt Tank
Medicine – biological weapons, chemical weapons, human experimentation, human factors in space medicine: Hans Amtmann, Kurt Blome, Erich Traub, Walter Schreiber, Richard Lindenberg and Hubertus Strughold
Electronics: Hans Hollmann, Kurt Lehovec, Johannes Plendl, Heinz Schlicke and Hans K. Ziegler
Intelligence: Reinhard Gehlen, Otto von Bolschwing
 

The United States was in a unique position among all the powers involved in World War Two. For the last time in its history, it was able to undertake military operations on a global scale relatively free of the fear of enemy reprisal.

Its cities and factories were beyond the reach of any known enemy bomber. Moreover, much of its industrial capacity was located in its interior, far from the northeastern Atlantic States or the Pacific coast.

According to conventional wisdom that has been reiterated countless times in numerous standard histories of the war, there was absolutely nothing the United States had to fear from Nazi Germany with its "tactical mission-oriented Luftwaffe" or its puny navy.

Germany had no aircraft even capable of reaching the United States and returning to Europe, much less of carrying a heavy enough payload, or being available in sufficient numbers, to be of any military significance.

The minimum range from German occupied territory to the United States at any one time during the war was 5,300 kms from Brest to New York.

Although it was possible for a couple of the designs to make the round trip with a light bomb load, it was never planned because there was no allowance for a minimum 15% fuel reserve insisted upon by Göring.

The only plan to bomb New York which received the approval of Fieldmarshal Erhard Milch was drawn up in 1943. Here a BV 222 flying boat would have rendezvoused with a U-Boat in mid-Atlantic on two occasions to bomb-up and refuel. The docks and Jewish quarter of New York were the target. The project was no longer feasible in 1944.

In 1933, Erhard Milch became State Secretary of the newly formed Reichsluftfahrtministerium [Reich Aviation Ministry – RLM], answering directly to Hermann Göring. In this capacity, he was instrumental in establishing the Luftwaffe.

Following the defeat of France, Milch was promoted to Generalfeldmarschall and given the title Air Inspector General. As such, Milch was in charge of aircraft production.

The lack of a long-term strategy, and a divisive military command structure, led to many mistakes in the operational and technical ability of the Luftwaffe, and were key to the continued loss of German air superiority as the war progressed.

The frequent, and often conflicting, changes in operational requirements led to numerous changes in aircraft specification and designs so that manufacturers like Messerschmitt were unable to focus outright on a few aircraft types and, most importantly, production output.

The Germans failed to put their production on a war footing, continued to run factories only eight hours a day, and failed to include women in the workforce.

German aircraft production output did not rise as steeply as Allied output - especially Soviet production, which exceeded Germany's in 1942 and 1943.

By the summer of 1943, Germany's lack of a truly "four-engined" heavy bomber to retaliate against Great Britain was finally addressed by Milch in his 10 August 1943 endorsement for Arado Flugzeugwerke to be the subcontractor for the Heinkel He 177B separately engined heavy bomber design. Only three flyable prototypes were completed by early 1944.

Submarine launched missiles are perhaps the strongest pillar of the "nuclear triad" that made the United States the dominant superpower at the start of the 21st Century.

A mobile underwater launch platform requires vast resources to build and operate but it is difficult to detect, and a fleet of them ensures that the enemy mainland is within quick striking distance at all times. The submarine launched missile, which played such an important role in the Cold War, can be traced to a 1942 experiment conducted by the Kriegsmarine.

America's entry into WW2 prompted a discussion among German strategists seeking ways to strike the American mainland. To send weapons from one continent to another, they needed some way to circumvent the limitations on the range of bomber aircraft and the capabilities of the German surface fleet.

Various methods were available at that time, the most practical of which was inserting saboteurs by U-Boat. While at least three groups of saboteurs were successfully landed [U-202, 13 June 1942; U-584, 16 June 1942; U-1230, 30 November 1944] the plan ultimately failed due to the unreliability and ineptitude of the German agents.

Another possibility was to fly bombers to New York City, and ditch them near a waiting U-Boat in the Atlantic before the fuel ran out. Due to an understandable lack of enthusiasm by both the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine, the project never proceeded.

So long range was the abilities of the Ju-390 one was been reported to have left Europe coming in over Canada crossing into U.S. airspace to photograph defense plants in Michigan only to exit out over the Atlantic sometime after noon on 28 August 1943 by coming in behind any east-facing aircraft detection systems and passing directly over New York above the Empire State Building.

Albert Speer in his memoirs wrote of a Ju-390 flight from Bardufoss Norway to Tokyo via the 'Polar Route' in 1945, flown by civilian test pilots. Two wartime test pilots who flew the giant Junkers Ju-390 also referred after the war to the Ju-390's Polar flight to Japan [Ju-390 Chief test pilot Hans Joachim Pancherz in 1969 and Hans Werner Lerche in his memoirs].

Yet another method became apparent during a conversation between Dr. Ernst Steinhoff, an engineer at the Peenemünde rocket development acility, and his brother, Korvettenkapitan Fritz Steinhoff, Kommandant of U-511. They surmised that it would be possible to fire an artillery rocket from the deck of a sumbmerged submarine.

Tests were conducted in May/June of 1942 using a standard army issue Wurfgerät 41 launcher and rockets from 21 to 30cm. The tests proved that it was not only feasable, but that the rockets could be fired from depths up to 15 meters below the surface, without affecting the normal flight path.

In principle, Admiral Dönitz approved of the idea of launching against harbors on the American mainland, specifically the sprawling facilities in New York City. However, the plan was delayed by technical concerns.

The Kriegsmarine wanted to fit specialized launchers instead of using modified army equipment, but they did not pursue the idea with urgency. Eventually, steadily improving Allied capability prevented U-Boats from approaching within range and the New York bombardment was cancelled.

The project was not entirely scrapped.

In the summer of 1944, three U-Boats of the Black Sea 30th flotilla were secretly equipped with rocket launchers. These were mounted midships below the waterline of U-24 and U-9 and on the deck of U-19.

The weapons were allegedly deployed against Soviet harbor facilities and moored ships during the German retreat. Although the records do not mention damage sustained in the attacks, this first combat use of a submarine launched missile was an historic event.  

Later experiments code named "Ursel" attempted to utilize the submarine launched rocket against a pursuing surface vessel. The accuracy required by this weapon exceeded practical technological limits and efforts were concentrated on more promising sound-guided torpedoes instead.

Other research included rocket powered torpedoes, several of which were tested. Despite their unnerving tendency to explode, they showed some promise.

The post-war superpowers continued this research; the Soviet Navy is alleged to have developed an operational model.

Germany's superb military engineers had greatly contributed to a rapid victory over France in 1940, and so as the war situation deteriorated, much hope and emphasis was placed on new technologies desperately needed to turn the tide.

From guided missiles to night vision and jet fighters, engineers and scientists sought new ways to capitalize on technology that might give Germany a war-winning advantage over the Allies.

One significant attack took place on 2 November 1942. U-518, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Wissman, attacked two ore carriers at Bell Island, Newfoundland.

The attack began at 3:30 a.m. and the S.S. Rosecastle and P.L.M 27 were sunk with the loss of 69 lives. However, one of the most dramatic incidents of the attack occurred after the sinkings when the submarine fired a torpedo at the loading pier.

Bell Island became the only location in North America to be subject to direct attack by German forces in World War II.

 

U-133's mission to destroy the Hoover Dam

According to an article from 1996, U-133's last mission was to travel up the Colorado River from Baja California and destroy the Hoover Dam.

The article is from the "USS Shaw's Newsletter".

The article states that U-133, piloted by Captain Peter Pfau along with 54 sailors made it to as far as Laughlin, Nevada before sandbars made them abort their mission and scuttle the sub.

This is only an Internet story:

U-133 could never have made it that far [the map shows, what would have been its approximate path from St. Nazaire, a suitable base, to the target] as its fuel supply would never have allowed this.

The Typ VIIC could only make it to the US east coast by filling up part of its water tanks with fuel; there were also several of dams on the river, before it would have ever got to Hoover Dam.

There was also no U-Boat commander named Pfau.

In a sort of epilogue to this Internet story, nearly all of the articles only go on to explain why the so-called mission could not have been accomplished the way it is written.

None of them mention the fact that at 17:00hrs on 14 March 1942 U-133 left her base at Salamis, Greece.

Only 2 hours later she hit a mine, broke in two and sank immediately with all hands - and that the loss of the U-133 was fully substantiated in 1994 by a diving team that managed to locate and confirm the identity of the wreck.

So said, there is absolutely no way the U-133 could have been involved in any way shape or form regarding Hoover Dam or any sort of an attack against it. 

Not one thing regarding the alleged attack by the U-133 or any other submarine has been discovered in official German records nor has anything shown up on the American side. As for the Internet source, nobody  has been able to run down a copy of the 1996 "USS Shaw Newsletter" that supposedly ran the original article.
 

To overcome the trans-continental barrier that prevented Germany from attacking the United States at home, an official of the German Labor Front, Direktor Bodo Lafferenz, suggested that a watertight container be constructed, in which a V-2 ballistic missile could be brought within range of the American coast.

Discussion of this novel idea reached the highest levels of the Peenemünde research facility. 

As it developed, the plan was to send three 500 ton displacement containers towed by a single Schnorchel equipped submarine. Each container, trimmed to neutral buoyancy, concealed a V2. Upon reaching the start location, the containers would be trimmed to a vertical position, and the rockets launched.

The idea was filed away until 1944, when it was given the code name Prüfstand XII and Vulkanwerft secretly began work on three containers. While the records indicate that at least one such submarine launch container was completed, it was never tested with a live firing.

The concept was proven sound by the Soviets in the 1950s. Using captured plans and German engineering assistance they produced the "Golem" submarine towed missile launcher. American engineers took the next step with the "Regulus" and "Polaris" programs, placing the missile and launcher into the submarine.

The 1942 experiments may have appeared nothing more than a stunt to an observer without the foresight to recognize the potential of such a weapon.

However, in much the same way that Eugene Ely's stunts foreshadowed the Aircraft Carrier when on 14 November 1910, he took off from the 'USS Birmingham' in his 'Curtiss Pusher Model D' and on 18 January 1911, landed it aboard the 'USS Pennsylvania', these experiments were the genesis of the missile launching submarine.

Weapons reseach and development in the Third Reich pointed ultimately towards a devastating confluence of advanced weapons systems. Experiments with nuclear fission proceeded along with new generations of stealth submarines, inteprcontinental jet bombers and missiles.

Destroying Eastern Seaboard cities was exactly the sort of capability the increasingly desperate Führer sought in order to win a surrender from the Allies.
 

On 13 January 1942, U-Boats commenced "Operation Paukenschlag"  [roll of the kettle drums] on the east coast of America, sinking 87 ships between January and July 1942. 

U-Boats would cruise off shore of coastal cities that did not turn off their lights and target ships that became silhouetted against the coast.

The cumulative effect of this campaign was severe; a quarter of all wartime sinkings - 3.1 million tons.

It rates as the worst defeat by the United States Navy.

 

The intent to do exactly that was made clear by documents found after the war, such as a Luftwaffe map of Manhattan showing blast damage anticipated by a rocket borne nuclear/atomic weapon.

For years reports have surfaced that sometime around 17-19 September 1944, a large six engine aircraft, painted very dark green and black, crashed in the sea off Owls Head Lighthouse, Maine.

A resident of Burlington, Vermont, Ruben Paul Whittemore, has reported he had relatives who witnessed the recovery of three bodies found in the Penobscot river estuary on 28 September 1944 and taken by the U.S. Coast Guard to Rockland Maine Station.

One of the witnesses states he saw one body in a uniform later identified as a German Luftwaffe Signal Corps Uniform, [grey-blue with yellow/brown collar tabs].

Sometime in the mid to late 1990s a scuba diver came across what appeared to be a radial aircraft engine laying on the seabed some distance off the cliffs from the Owls Head lighthouse and traced it along with other pieces of wreckage strewn across the sand back to the main body of the craft the engine and pieces apparently came from.

She recovered what has been said to be a constructor's plate with raised lettering, albeit somewhat eroded but still readable, with the following: 

RMZ WERKE Nb 135?34 [Allgemeine]
JUNKERSMOTORENWERKE [Agts: Haan]
FWU WERKE Nb 135?34 [Gbs: Fliegeroberstkommando Rdt]

Most people who ascribe credibility to the downed craft said to be laying in the water off the coast of Maine agree its mission was not recon like the 28 August 1943 flight, but to bomb New York. Evidence has surfaced in some quarters the attack would not have been conventional in nature either but possibly nuclear.

It should be noted that even though New York, is usually thought of as being the target of choice for the Germans, there was as well, the major metropolitan area of London, England, which they had been bombing all along with not only conventional bombs but V-2 rockets as well - London being much closer and strategically more convenient.

However England was prepared and that late in the war Germany was finding it harder and harder to penetrate England's defenses, while New York had none.

Pearl Harbor was but the first of many attacks on U.S. homeland during World War II

Midway was shelled by two Japanese destroyers simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941. Bad weather saved Midway from being pounded by planes of the retiring Japanese strike fleet. 

Midway is the western most of the chain of volcanic islands that form the Hawaii chain. The largest Japanese fleet ever assembled, set out to attack the island in May 1942.

The intent was to draw the American fleet into combat where it would be mauled. From intercepted messages, the US fleet knew to wait in ambush and destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers, with the loss of 'Yorktown'. This battle changed the balance of sea power in the Pacific.

Guam, an American outpost in the Mariana Islands, was air raided on 7 December by bombers from Saipan. Guam's defensive force of 365 Marines was captured on 10 December 1942 by a force of 5,400 Japanese from neighbouring Saipan.

Guam was recaptured in the battle for the Marianas [Siapan, Tinian] from 21 July - 8 August 1944. 

On 15 December 1941, a Japanese submarine shelled Kahului, Maui, Hawaii.

On 30 December Submarine I-1 shells, Hilo, Hawaii, and on 31 December, submarines shell Kauai, Maui, and Hawaii.

The Japanese struck Dutch Harbor at the base of the Aleutian Islands,  on 3 June 1942, with planes from two carriers in support of an invasion and occupation of Attu [13 June], at the tip of the Aleutian chain, and Kiska [21 June] with 1,800 troops.

Partially a diversion to cover the attack on Midway, partly geo-political, and only partly military. The capture of Alaskan islands forced the US to establish a northern defence.

Having broken the Japanese military codes, however, the U.S. knew it was a diversion and did not expend large amounts of effort defending the islands. Although most of the civilian population had been moved to camps on the Alaska Panhandle, some Americans were captured and taken to Japan as prisoners of war.

US troops retook Attu in furious fighting,  11-30 May 1943.

Thirty-four thousand US and Canadian troops landed to retake Kiska on 15 August, but found the island had been evacuated.

Both sides had discovered that bad weather prevented further major attacks on the other's mainland from a northern route.
 

The Germans, assuming that they had succeeded in their mission to conquer the Soviet Union, might have attempted to conquer Alaska, based on their ability to control Siberia and the Arctic regions of Russia.

From there, they would have rolled over poorly defended Canada, from which they would have launched a massive invasion from the sparsely populated North-Western U.S.

In response to the United States' success at the Battle of Midway, the invasion alert for San Francisco was canceled on 8 June.

The U.S. mainland also suffered Japanese attacks

On 23 February 1942 the first Japanese attack on the U.S. mainland occurs when I-17 submarine fires 13 shells at the Ellwood oil production facilities at Goleta, near Santa Barbara, California. Although only a catwalk and pump house were damaged, I-17 captain Nishino Kozo radioed Tokyo that he had left Santa Barbara in flames.

No casualties were reported and the total cost of the damage was estimated at approximately $500.

It was not clear why this target was chosen until much later, when it was found that the commander of this particular submarine had visited the site in the 1930s and stumbled into a field of prickly pear cactus. Captain Nishino never forgave the ridicule he received from his American hosts that day. 

On 20 June the radio station on Estevan Point, Vancouver Island was fired on by a Japanese submarine I-26, and on 21 June I-25 shells Fort Stevens, Oregon.

Japanese commanders also sought to ignite forest fires through incendiary bombing a strategy they believed would cause panic and mayhem behind U.S. lines. 

On 9 September Phosphorus bombs were dropped on Mt. Emily, ten miles northeast of Brookings, Oregon, to start forest fires. It was a Yokosuka E14Y1 "Glen" reconnaissance seaplane piloted by Lt. Nubuo Fujita who had been catapulted from submarine I-25,  specially equipped with a watertight hangar on deck.

The Phosphorus bombings were repeated on the southern coast of Oregon on 29 September. 

Taking advantage of the jet stream that circles the globe and crosses over both northern Japan and the northern United States, 9,000 balloons, each equipped with four incendiary and one anti-personnel bombs, were released to start forest fires and create terror in the western United States as far east as Michigan. Six people were killed in Oregon.

The project was called 'Fugo' [windship] and headed by Major General Sueki Kusaba.
 

Japanese land based long-range bombers

The Japanese Navy ordered the construction of Nakajima G10N1 'Fugaku' [Mount Fuji], an ultra-long range heavy bomber, for bombing the United States mainland.

The bomb-load capability of the bomber was 20,000 kg for short-range sorties; 5,000 kg for sorties against targets in the U.S. 

It was conceived as a method for mounting aerial attacks from Japan against industrial targets along the West Coast [e.g., San Diego], Midwest [e.g., Detroit, Chicago, and Wichita] and Northeast [e.g, New York and Norfolk] of the United States.

Japan's worsening war situation resulted in the project's cancellation in 1944 and no prototype was ever built.

Another similar project with a similar purpose was the four engined bomber Nakajima G8N 'Renzan' [Mountain Range], Allied code name 'Rita'.

The Japanese Army ordered the design of Tachikawa Ki-74, an ultra long-range reconnaissance bomber originally intended to be used against the Soviets in Siberian lands.

Later, it was ordered for development for bombing missions against the United States.

The bomb charge was 500Kg-1,000Kg.

This bomber was also known as the "Japanese Siberian Bomber".

A twin-engine, mid-wing monoplane, it did not see operational service.

Nevertheless, the Allies knew of its existence and assigned the type the codename 'Patsy' after it was discovered that it was a bomber, not a fighter. 

Kinoaki Matsuo, a high-ranking officer of the Black Dragon Society, wrote the Book "The Three Power Alliance And The United States-Japanese War", which is purported to detail the Japanese war plans for the simultaneous invasions of the Panama Canal Zone, Alaska, California and Washington.

Japanese heavy seaplane bombing raids
 

He wanted six of the flying boats were to be equipped with 26,445 pounds of high explosives, to rendezvous with three submarine tankers 50 miles off the southern coast of California.

Once refueled, they would take off at dawn to fly to downtown Los Angeles and drop their bombs.

Then the seaplanes would fly 4,000 miles west to a second refueling from I-Boats near Japanese-controlled waters.

The plan was evaluated by Admiral Chuichi Nagumo.

A trial operation against the Hawaiian Islands using a trio of H8Ks caused no significant damage and their bombs only fell in uninhabited areas.

Kinsei persisted in his idea. He envisioned a rendezvous of the H8Ks with I-Boats off the Baja California peninsula, south of southern California, from where they could take off and bomb Texas oilfields and then fly to the Gulf of Mexico.

They were to operate in conjunction with German U-Boat tankers.

This Axis Powers co-operation was planned for air raids up and down the North American eastern seaboard, with special "Propaganda Raids" on Boston, New York and Washington D.C..

The plan was approved by the Japanese naval high command and German U-Boat Chief Admiral Karl Dönitz, who authorized the use of the first pair of "Milch Kuh" [Milk Cow] German U-Boat tankers for the operation. Vice Admiral Kinsei ordered the manufacture of 30 H8Ks from the Kawanishi Company for completion in September 1942.

However, by the autumn of 1942 Japan's defensive posture compelled their navy's high command to confine all long-range aircraft to more conventional missions nearby in the South Pacific. 

Fascist Italy planned to damage dock facilities and sink ships moored in New York Harbor using Maiale Midget submarines

In 1943 preparations were well underway to deploy these weapons against the United States.

The Regia Aeronautica [Italian Air Force], working in conjunction with the Regia Marina [Italian Navy], prepared two long-range Cantieri Zappata CANT Z.511 flying boats for the operation.

The CANT Z.511 was powered by four 1,500 hp Piaggio P.XII RC 35 radial engines giving it a maximum range of 2,796 miles.

This seaplane also had extremely good stability in waters with up to 7-foot waves. It could carry two or four Maiales.

The operation was to commence as follows:

CANTs flying the Atlantic would fly low under enemy radar to a point from which the midget submarines could be launched.

The crews of the submarines were special volunteers, who after completing their mission, were authorized to surrender. No plans were made for returning them to the seaplanes.

By May 1943 co-operation with supply U-Boats was obtained. The CANTs had been successfully tested with Maiales man-guided torpedos and special volunteers for one-way missions.

The raid was scheduled to take place under ideal weather conditions in mid-June of the same year. However, only three weeks before, both the seaplanes and their specially fitted launch racks were partially damaged by British fighters when the CANT's base in Lake Trasimento was strafed.

The following July Marschal Pietro Badoglio declared an Italian armistice and the project was abandoned.

The planned attack against New York might have scored a success paralleling the Italian attack in Alexandria Bay, Egypt during the Axis Powers' North African campaign.

 

The Amerika-Bomber project was an initiative of the German Reichsluftfahrtministerium to obtain a long-range strategic bomber for the Luftwaffe that would be capable of striking the contiguous United States from Germany, a distance of about 5,800 km [3,600 mi].

The concept was raised as early as 1938, but advanced, cogent plans for such a long-range strategic bomber design did not begin to appear in Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring's offices until early 1942.

Various proposals were put forward, including using it to deliver an atomic bomb [which Germany ultimately never developed], but they were all eventually abandoned as too expensive, and potentially consuming far too much of Germany's rapidly diminishing aviation production capacity after 1942.

According to Albert Speer's book, "Spandau: The Secret Diaries", Adolf Hitler was fascinated with the idea of New York City in flames.

Adolf Hitler’s apocalyptic vision of New York as sketched by an artist. 
For years, he worked to see to the materialization of his dream.
But, all his plans were unsuccessful.

In 1937, Willy Messerschmitt hoped to win a lucrative contract by showing Hitler a proto-type of the Messerschmitt Me 264 that was being designed to reach North America from Europe.

On 8 July 1938,  the Luftwaffe's commander-in-chief Hermann Göring gave a speech saying:

"I completely lack the bombers capable of round-trip flights to New York with a 4.5-tonne bomb load.

"I would be extremely happy to possess such a bomber, which would at last stuff the mouth of arrogance across the sea".

Historian Holger H. Herwig claims the plan started as a result of discussions by Hitler in November 1940 and May 1941:

He stated his need to "deploy long-range bombers against American cities from the Azores". 

He thought the Portuguese Azores islands were Germany's "only possibility of carrying out aerial attacks from a land base against the United States."

At the time, Portuguese Prime Minister Salazar had allowed German U-Boats and navy ships to refuel there, but from 1943 onwards, he leased bases in the Azores to the British, allowing the Allies to provide aerial coverage in the middle of the Atlantic.

The Führer’s dream had to be postponed given the limitations of technology and aerodynamics during the Nazi era.

It had only been 34 years since the inception of the first flying machine by the Wright brothers. The plan to create a fast giant plane that could reach the U.S. in the shortest possible time and stay in the air for the longest possible time was far too ambitious to be achieved during the period.

It would be years after the Nazi rule before scientists and engineers would be able to create a plane that could carry 4.5-ton bombs and that was capable of flying non-stop to New York and back to German sanctuary.

Successful long-range, multi-engine bombers with ideal payloads were hard to come by for the German Luftwaffe during World War 2.

Much of their production efforts had always been placed into their fighter lines and this became ever more important as the war turned into a defensive fight for the Vaterland.

As such, development of a heavy-hitter comparable to the what the Allies were fielding in their Avro 'Lancasters' and Consolidated B-24 'Liberators' proved quite elusive to the most powerful military in the world.

Yet, Messerschmitt was undeterred and the finest engineers of Germany worked to realize the plan by conducting experiments of wing loads, engine power and weight ratios.

While the engineers were scampering to complete the plane, Nazi rule spread like wild fire all over Europe. In 1941, Germany had already defeated France, England was isolated into the corner and he thought that the Soviet Union was neutralized. The inevitable clash between the U.S. and Germany was almost beginning.
 

Operation Barbarossa, the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, was alleged by some to be a testing ground for an invasion of America.

Another alleged German invasion plan was "Operation Felix", in conjunction with Spain, which called for obtaining control of Atlantic islands and seas to launch long-range strikes and an eventual invasion of America.....

Before the winter of 1941, Germany appeared to be moving toward a swift victory over the Soviet Union.

Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Kommisar for Eastern Affairs, was ordered to print the motto "Deutschland Welt Reich" [German World Empire] and Hitler made known his intention of further conquest following victory over Russia. These plans appeared to include an invasion of the United States.

In Autumn of 1940, the attack on the US was fixed for the long-term future.

This appears in Luftwaffe documents, one of which dated 29 Octiober 1940 mentions the "...extraordinary interest of Mein Führer in the occupation of the Atlantic Islands.

"In line with this interest...with the co-operation of Spain is the seizure of Gibraltar and Spanish and Portuguese islands, along other operations in the North Atlantic".

"Felix", the proposed German/Spanish seizure of Gibraltar, was scheduled for 10 January 1941 but never executed.

In July 1941, the Führer ordered that planning an attack against the United States be continued. Five months later, on 11 December 1941 Germany declared war on the United States.

In "The New Dealers' War", Thomas Fleming, goes into reasons for the German war declaration in detail.

Fleming claims that President Roosevelt manipulated Germany into declaring war on the U.S., which Germany did, three days after the U.S. declared war on Japan. 

Fleming lays out the scenario:

"The situation was that Hitler had his hands full with Russia and did not want to force the U.S. into  the war.

"But Japan urged Germany to join in, and Winston Churchill also wanted the U.S. in to take pressure off Great Britain, who by then was all alone on the western front since France had surrendered in 1940". 

Fleming writes:

"On 9 December 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt made a radio address to the nation that is seldom mentioned in the history books.

"It accused Hitler of urging Japan to attack the United States:

'We know that Germany and Japan are conducting their military and naval operations with a joint plan|', Roosevelt declared. 'Germany and Italy consider themselves at war with the United States without even bothering about a formal declaration'.

"This was anything but the case, and Roosevelt knew it.

"He was trying to bait Hitler into declaring war, or, failing that, persuade the American people to support an American declaration of war on the two European fascist powers".
 

In the factory, the engineers were facing a dilemma. They had to build a plane, the Me 264, light enough to travel at great speeds across the Atlantic unhampered by enemy planes, but tough enough to carry the bombs and men necessary. And they never found the correct equation to completely perfect the plane as planned.

One solution they thought of was to establish pit-stops for the plane to refuel and make the necessary check-ups and repairs. With this plan, the Führer would command his naval forces to seize Iceland where the German plane could make a quick stop half-way between Europe and America.

In  mid-1941, the U.S. saw through Hitler’s plan and took a preemptive move. Though the U.S. was still neutral at that time, it established military presence in Iceland denying the Germans control over the strategic region.

Messerschmitt’s engineers had no choice but to complete the Me 264 as originally intended — to go through the full distance and back.

During the later part of 1941, the United States joined the Allies after Japan attacked the American base in Pearl Harbor. The plane had to be completed as soon as possible.

A prototype of the Me 264 was finally taken out for test flights. But, the plane proved to be very unstable in the air. The engines were reported to fall off and the pilots complained of difficulty in flying the plane. The plane, which Hitler relied upon to see his dream of destruction to reality, just couldn’t be completed.
 

The Messerschmitt Me 264 was a long-range strategic bomber developed during World War II for the German Luftwaffe.

It was intended to serve as Germany's main strategic bomber.

The design was later selected as Messerschmitt's competitor in the Reichsluftfahrtministerium's [German Air Ministry] "Amerika Bomber" programme, which intended to develop a strategic bomber capable of attacking New York City from bases in France or the Azores. Three prototypes were built, but production was abandoned to allow Messerschmitt to concentrate on fighter production while another design, the Junkers Ju 390, had been selected in its place as a maritime reconnaissance aircraft.

Development

The origin of the Me 264 design came from Messerschmitt's long-range reconnaissance aircraft project, the P.1061, of the late 1930s.

A variant on the P.1061 was the P.1062 of which three prototypes were built, with only two "engines" to the P.1061's four, but they were, in fact, the more powerful Daimler-Benz DB 606 "power systems", each comprising a pair of DB 601 inverted V-12 engines, successfully used in the long-range Messerschmitt Me 261, itself originating as the Messerschmitt P.1064 design of 1937.

The DB 606's later use, and badly designed engine installations in the Heinkel He 177A's airframe design managed to get them derided by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring as "welded-together engines" in August 1942. In early 1941, six P.1061 prototypes were ordered from Messerschmitt, under the designation Me 264. This was later reduced to three prototypes.

The progress of these projects was initially slow, but after Germany had declared war on the United States, the Reichsluftfahrtministerium [RLM] started a more serious programme in the spring of 1942 for a very long range bomber, with the result that a larger, six-engine aircraft with a greater bomb load was called for.

To meet this demand, proposals were put forward for the Junkers Ju 390, Focke-Wulf Ta 400, a redesign of the unfinalized and unbuilt Heinkel He 277 design — itself only receiving its RLM airframe number by the February 1943 time frame — to give the Heinkel firm an entry in the Amerika Bomber program later in 1943, and a design study for a six-engine Messerschmitt Me 264B, prompted by the ongoing inability for Germany's aviation power plant designers to create reliable powerplants of 1,500 kW [2,000 PS] and above power output levels that thwarted efforts to do the same with just four engines instead.

As the Junkers Ju 390 could use components already in use for the Ju 290 this design was chosen.

The Me 264 was not abandoned however as the Kriegsmarine [German navy] separately demanded a long-range maritime patrol and attack aircraft to replace the converted Fw 200 Condor in this role.

This was reinforced by an opinion given by then-Generalmajor Eccard Freiherr von Gablenz of the Wehrmacht Heer [German Army] in May 1942, as von Gablenz had been recruited by Generalfeldmarschall Erhard Milch at the time to give his opinion on the suitability of the Me 264 for the Amerika Bomber mission, with von Gablenz echoing the Kriegsmarine's later opinion. As a result, the two pending prototypes were ordered to be completed as development prototypes for the Me 264A ultra long-range reconnaissance aircraft.

Design

The Me 264 was an all-metal, high-wing, four-engine heavy bomber of classic construction.

The fuselage was round in cross-section and had a cabin in a glazed nose, comprising a "stepless cockpit" with no separate windscreen section for the pilots, which was common for most later German bomber designs. A strikingly similar design was used for the B-29, of slightly earlier origin. The wing had a slightly swept leading edge and a straight trailing edge. The empennage had double tail fins. The undercarriage was a retractable tricycle gear with large-diameter wheels on the wing-mounted main gear.
 

The planned armament consisted of guns in remotely operated turrets and in positions on the sides of the fuselage. Overall, it carried very little armour and few guns as a means of increasing fuel capacity and range.

The Me 264's first prototype was originally fitted with four Junkers Jumo 211 inverted V12 engines using the then-new Kraftei [or "power-egg"] unitized powerplant installation as standardized for the earlier Ju 88A 'Schnellbomber', but inadequate power from the Jumo 211 engines led to their replacement on the Me 264 V1 first prototype with four similarly unitized 1,700 PS [1,250 kW] BMW 801G engines. In order to provide comfort on the proposed long-range missions, the Me 264 featured bunk beds and a small galley complete with hot plates.

Operational history

The first prototype, the Me 264 V1, bearing the Stammkennzeichen factory code of RE+EN, was flown on 23 December 1942. It was powered at first by four Jumo 211J inline engines of 990 kW [1,340 hp] each. In late 1943, these were changed to the BMW 801G radials which delivered 1,290 kW [1,750 hp]. Trials showed numerous minor faults, and handling was found to be difficult.

One of the drawbacks was the very high wing loading of the Me 264 in fully loaded conditions at some 356 kg/m2 [73 lb/sq ft]; comparable aircraft, such as the Boeing B-29 Superfortress at 337 kg/m2 [69 lb/sq ft] wing loading, both the redesign of the He 277 for its intended production priority to fulfill the Amerika Bomber role at 334.6 kg/m2 [68.5 lb/sq ft], and Ju 390 at 209 kg/m2 [43 lb/sq ft], had less.

The high wing loading led to performance problems across the whole flight envelope, in particular bad climb performance, loss of maneuverability, and in-flight stability, and the need for high take-off and landing speeds.

This first prototype was not fitted with weapons or armour, but of the following two prototypes, the Me 264 V2 had armour for the engines, crew and gun positions, although it was decided to complete the Me 264 V2 without defensive armament and vital equipment and the Me 264 V3 was to be armed and have the same mentioned armoured parts.

In 1943, the Kriegsmarine withdrew their interest in the Me 264 in favour of the existing Ju 290 and the planned Ju 390, with the Luftwaffe preferring the unbuilt Ta 400 and the Heinkel He 277 as Amerika-Bomber candidates in May 1943, based on their own performance estimates, stopping any further payment for development work to Messerschmitt AG concerning its trans-Atlantic bomber design.

As a consequence, in October 1943, Erhard Milch ordered the cancellation of further Me 264 development to concentrate on the development and production of the Me 262 jet fighter-bomber.

Late in 1943, the second prototype, Me 264 V2, was destroyed in a bombing attack. On 18 July 1944, the first prototype, which had entered service with Transportstaffel 5, was damaged during an Allied bombing raid and was not repaired. The third prototype, which had not been fully completed, was destroyed during the same raid.

Following the cancellation of the competing He 277 in April 1944, on 23 September 1944, work on the Me 264 project was officially cancelled.
 

In August 1943 Hitler ordered production of the He-177 V8 later known as the He-277B based on the He-177 with a twin tail fin and four separate engines driving four propellers. This aircraft reached early production about April 1944. It could reach an altitude of 49,500 feet fully loaded which made it invulnerable to British fighters.

Mysteriously, although eight He-277B airframes were converted from He-177 A6 prototype aircraft at the Rechlin factory, for some obscure reason Hitler cancelled production in April 1944. About the same time the Americans flew a sole B-29 pre-production bomber around the UK on a publicity and evaluation tour and it is believed to have been sighted over Austria in April 1944 too.

Various threats were conveyed to Hitler of nuclear and biological warfare retaliation if the deployed nuclear weapons against the UK.

 

Col. Viktor von Lossberg proposed an alternative plan, in 1943. A BV 222 flying boat would have rendezvoused with a U-Boat in mid-Atlantic on two occasions to bomb-up and refuel. The docks and Jewish quarter of New York were the target. The move was also intended to spread terror and weaken the morale of the Allies.

The plan was approved. However, it proved to be very difficult. The mission was to be conducted in spring of 1944 since it would be very difficult for the submarine to travel through icy waters in the winter.

By spring, the U.S. navy nearly had full control of the Atlantic, and most of the German submarines were chased out of the ocean. Thus, Lossberg’s mission simply could not be carried out.

Hitler then turned his focus into creating rockets that could reach America. Scientists including Wernher von Braun were developing missiles at the Peenemünde Arms Research Center on the Baltic coast. The weapons developed were short-ranged but the scientists were enthusiastic that they could build one with longer range.

The Allies tried to prevent the Germans from seeing through their rockets by bombing Peenemünde. The rocket research was transferred to a new facility deep under a mountain at Ebensee in Austria. A 60ft high intercontinental missile assembly plant was constructed using slave labor.

However, Hitler’s desire for global domination was being met by strong resistance from east and west. From mid-1944, the Third Reich was shrinking fast. The military encountered problems left and right. Their biggest logistical dilemma was fuel shortage greatly immobilizing German air and ground forces.

These problems did not stop the Führer from making attempts at New York. This time, he planned on using the 'Condor' passenger plane which was readily available and capable of reaching American soil.
 

In 1938, the FW 200 'Condor', built by Focke-Wulf, was the first land-based passenger plane to fly non-stop from Berlin to New York. The flight took 25 hours. If the plane was to be used, it would not be able to refuel, making the return flight to Berlin a major issue.

The Fw 200 Condor was assigned to work alongside the Kriegsmarine, becoming active across the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean as Germany's territory expanded.

The Fw 200 proved a vital component in disrupting the Allied shipping lanes during the "'Battle of the Atlantic" to the point that Winston Churchill himself tagged the German aircraft as the "Scourge of the Atlantic".

However, the limited numbers of the Condors would soon restrict their direct combat activities as the war began progressing in favor of the Allies. By the end of 1943, the aircraft was relegated almost exclusively to the transport role. 

Dr. Fritz Nallinger of Daimler-Benz, who in 1941 was appointed a member of the 'Deutschen Akademie der Luftfahrtforschung' [German Academy of aircraft research], suggested to use the plane. His idea was to load explosives on the plane and crash it into New York. The pilot would parachute out of the plane once the 'Condor' has been set on an unmanned course.

However, the Germans were not the only ones who have thought of the idea. The Allies have secretly been using "drone" bombers loaded with explosives and crashed into targets particularly underground sites in France and Holland that have been bombing England with rockets and flying bombs. Allied pilots would parachute out of the plane at the last minute.

The Allied air force were unsuccessful in its missions. Reportedly, 19 missions were launched but not a single target was destroyed. Four pilots, including Lt. Joe Kennedy, the older brother of future president John F. Kennedy, were killed during the missions. The idea was abandoned.
 

In early 1945 the U.S. carried out from England six robot missions of B-17s, each loaded with 10 tons of explosives.

The planes were "war weary" craft that had been stripped of armor and armament. Pilots got the drone bombers airborne and pointed toward their German targets, then bailed out. None had been successful in hitting specific targets, and the project was scrapped due to British objections. Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal had expressed fears that the Germans, with a great number of planes but few surviving pilots, would be tempted to reply in kind.

The Germans also found the idea too good to be true. The 'Condor' was too slow to be used for the mission. It would become an easy target for the fast fighter planes of the U.S.

The Allied invasion of France further removed the Condor from any type of maritime operations. In the reconnaissance role, the Fw 200 was ultimately replaced by the newer Junkers Ju 290, this coming late in the war.
 

Toward the end of World War II, with most of the German military establishment convinced that the war was already lost, an increasingly desperate Adolf Hitler ordered his engineers to begin an intense campaign to develop new types of unconventional weapons— Wunderwaffen , or "miracle weapons", as they came to be called.

The program also included plans, now largely forgotten, for what was called 'Projekt A'' a huge plane intended to fly repeat missions over the Atlantic, where it would release a smaller bomber that would continue on to carry out an attack against a target along the eastern coast of the United States. Hitler and his close associates referred to the plane as the "Amerikabomber".

A technical drawing of the Amerikabomber, was prepared in the spring of 1944 by Fritz Nallinger, an aeronautics engineer working for Daimler-Benz. Drawings of the plane appeared in "Die Deutschen Flugzeuge 1933-1945", an obscure single-volume encyclopedia, long out of print, devoted to airplanes of the Nazi period.

Recently brought back to light by Ulrich Albrecht, a professor of political science at the Free University in Berlin, the drawings show prototypes for a large, multi-engine mother aircraft with a smaller plane attached to its underbelly.

The plans for this smaller plane, which was designed to fly almost at the speed of sound, clearly lack landing gear and weapons systems. Accompanying technical descriptions note that the plane was not expected to be "'recovered"—strongly suggesting that it was intended to be used as a bomb.

In 1943, instructed by Göring to design and produce long-range bombers capable of attacking targets in the U.S.A. and Soviet industrial plants far beyond Germany.

Daimler-Benz combined with Focke-Wulf to form a joint study group for the development of ultra long-ange aircraft. 

Sstrikes were to be carried out in non-stop flight and without recourse to aerial refuelling.

The designs were to have been built in 1944.

In late 1944, a number of odd events occurred.

German aircraft designers were told to tender designs for a bomber capable of flying to New York and back, without refueling.

The bomb load was to be 4,000 Kilograms; surprisingly light for an attack that could have any real effect.

The Horton firm was given the assignment, with the beautiful Ho XVIII B flying wing bomber being the only design that could achieve the required specifications.

They were told to begin construction as soon as possible.

Work was restarted on a submarine towed pod, code named "Prüf [Test] Stand XII", to transport and launch the V-2 [A-4] missile

Up to three of these could be towed by a Type XXI submarine. The work was given high priority, and one of the pods, minus its internal equipment, was finished by the war's end.

The German rocket team at Peenemünde were told to dust off the plans for the A-9/A-10 project, a two stage ICBM capable of reaching New York. This seemed an awfully big project to start this late in the war.

Jonastal S-3 would have been the production center for all of Germany's best secret weapons with emphasis being placed on the ICBMs, German atom bomb, and an equally devastating plasma weapon that was authorized in March 1945 but not completed.

This was a mix of 60/40 fine coal dust powder and LOX mixed with a secret reagent developed by the SS Technical Branch. The result was both a fire and electrical storm at ground level. Testing of small bombs near the Baltic produced spectacular results.

The Arado E.555 was a strategic bomber proposed  in response to the Amerika Bomber project.

There were several different configurations of the design considered, the most striking being the E.555-1. 

This was a six-jet, angular flying wing design, with remotely operated turrets, and capable of carrying a large payload.

All of these projects were deemed too expensive and ambitious and were abandoned in late 1944.

So, advanced aircraft like the Sänger 'Silver Bird' Orbital Bomber, Ho XVIIIB, and Ar E.555 could have carried these

 

 

 

 

However, these would not have been needed as a Ju-390 could have done the job, and NYC would have been the first target.

That's why all those "Amerika Bomber" projects were authorized in early 1945, but time ran out.

Even when the Russians stormed Berlin, Hitler was still fuming with anger and revenge over the Americans.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister, revealed that the Führer was shouting orders in his Bunker in Berlin to be shown films of London and Warsaw being consumed by the fire and bombs that were raining from Nazi bombers.

Hitler was said to be craving to see the same scene in New York.

The "Daily Mail" reports that Speer, in his diary, wrote how Hitler yearned to see New York "going down in a sea of flames, the skyscrapers transformed into gigantic burning torches and collapsing on each other and the exploding city reflecting against the night sky".over US cities on the eastern seaboard.
 

As the fall of Germany approached, the Nazi Leaders reverted to an ambitious project created by Gauleiter Franz Hofer who had become high commissioner for the Italian Tyrol and the Southern Alps.

The project foresaw setting up an incredible fortress in the mountains, including parts of Italy, Austria and Bavaria. Hofer submitted his plan to Hitler's aide, Martin Bormann in November 1944, but he had prepared for this moment back in 1938 when Nazi agents carefully mapped all mountain passes, caves, bridges, highways, and located sights for underground factories, munitions dumps, arms and food caches.

To complete work on this fortress, Hofer demanded a slave labor force of a quarter of a million, 70% Austrian workers and 30% men of the Tyrolese home guard. So-called U-Plants were to be set up underground as gigantic workshops and launching pads for the secret weapons which were to turn the tide of the war in favor of the Nazis.

Among these were some 74 tunnels along Lake Garda, in Northern Italy, which were to be adapted and transformed into a vast assembly plant by FIAT of Turin in close collaboration with the department of Minister Albert Speer. Seven other tunnels along Lake Garda, near Limone, were to produce several weapons tested at the Hermann Göring Institute of Riva del Garda. 

According to the archives of the German High Command and of the Allied Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, other plants in vital areas of Central Germany, code named M-Werke, were to produce powerful missiles such as the giant A.9/A.10 destined to destroy New York and Washington.

But most important was the Alpine area, for it was from there that the supreme weapons were to come. 

While we know that one of Hitler's Doppelgängers died in the Berlin Chancellery Bunker, an elaborate suicide cover-up would have been required for an important reason: To hide the true whereabouts of the Southern Redoubt, which was never found by the Allies and which, according to some observers, was the secret site of Nazi nuclear weapons research.

To conceal its location, it would have been necessary to spread a new propaganda  myth that there never was a hidden Mountain Redoubt, no Nazi nuclear weapons site, and the Führer directed the war from his Berlin Bunker, where he finally committed suicide.

Franz W. Seidler, the author of "Phantom Alpenfestung? Die geheimen Baupläne der Organisation Todt" discovered plans and maps from the Organization Todt, for a real Alpenfestung, the National Redoubt that many of the Allies feared, but was more hype than real. 

The author shows that, given six months or a year more, this Alpenfestung would surely have been a reality. There were plans for tunnel installations, including FHQs and HQs for all the armed forces, all over the place in the Berchtesgaden/Salzburg areas [and elsewhere]. Many of these were started, but got little beyond the initial excavation phase. 

If the war had gone on, almost all the critical German industry and command/control centers would have been in underground bomb-proof facilities ... facilties made by slave laborers from concentration camps. 

As it was, by 1945, Thüringen already had a massive underground installation making V-1s, V-2s, and jet engines [Mittelwerk/Mittelbau/Dora site, near Nordhausen]. Another underground site near Jena made Me-262 jets. Work had started on what was apparently a secret underground Führer HQ and command/control center in the Jonas Valley, near Erfurt. 

Another underground site east of Salzburg had a functioning petroleum refinery. Underground installations in the Berchtesgaden area were equipped with enough supplies to last several months, if not years. These underground facilties were certainly no myth, but the war ended before most of them amounted to much. 

Work on the German "Feuerball", or fireball, had been speeded up during the fall of 1944 at a Luftwaffe experimental center near Oberammergau, Bavaria. There, and at the aeronautical establishment at Wiener Neustadt, the first fireballs were produced. Later, when the Russians moved closer to Austria, the workshops producing the fireballs were moved to Black Forest. 

Efforts were accelerated to perfect the craft in 1944, but work seemed to have been shifted to the development of the Kugelblitz [Round Lightning], a round, symmetrical airplane, quite unlike any previous flying object known in terrestrial aviation history.
 

In the fall of 1944 work was hurriedly carried out by the SS Technical Branch on a radical disc craft that had absolutely nothing in common with any aircraft ever produced up to that time.

The unmanned interceptor VTO disc was to be the product of the Wiener Neustadter Flugzeugwerk [WNF] under SS control. The project was started in 1941 but stalled by technical difficulties with both the propulsion system and the development of a primitive field weapon.

The craft was being developed by the SS Technical Branch awaiting an experimental electrostatic field weapon being developed at Messerschmitt's secret Oberammergau facility in Bavaria with help from the O.B.F. [Oberbayerische Forschungsanstalt].

The aeronautical establishment at Wiener Neustadt [with help from the F.F.O.] developed the first of what WNF named the "Feuerball" [Fireball] in total secrecy.

The very first primitive Feuerball weapons were simple, small silver jet-powered discs launched off catapults and remote-controlled from the ground. These were psychological test weapons to gauge the Allied bomber crews response to the strange machines that defied explanation and which could out-maneuver the Allied aircraft at will. If they were destroyed it was no loss, yet most of them were brought back down to earth for retrieval and re-use.

The USAAF never gave an explanation for these "Foo Fighters" which seems hard to believe given the hundreds of documented encounters and sightings of this weapon which were launched from the ground by all three Axis nations.

To hide the fact that the "Fireballs" were German weapons, US Intel designated them in official military documents as "PHOO BOMBS" starting in December 1944.

This has foiled FOIA document researchers for decades until a declassifed 1944 document concerning possible German Capabilities in 1945 revealed the code words and matching precise description. Perhaps they labeled them bombs as many believed this was a flying Flak weapon, or aerial mine... which later proved to be a false assumption.

An "Intelligence Digest"' document, with a February, 1945 date, addresses German military capacities, listing "Phoo Bombs" as a weapon in the German arsenal. It was obtained in a 'Freedom Of Information Act' request asking for more information after learning the government's code word for foo fighters [Phoo Bombs].

-- United States Air Force, 1944, 'An Evaluation Of German Capabilities In 1945', Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, USA, this and other information related to Phoo Bombs can be found on microfilm rolls A-1007-1652, A-5729-2040; Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee Report Number156, 'Report On Flugfunk Forschungsinstitut Oberpfaffenhofen F.F.O. Establishments'.

Work to enlarge the Feuerball considerably and test out various new systems that would make it lethal, had already begun in 1943 but it was not deployed until 1945, shortly before collapse.

This was the Zeppelin Werk "Kugelblitz" [Ball Lightning] which was larger than a Feuerball and powered by a total reaction engine burning a gelatinous, metallic fuel, and now with added an experimental ejector gun that could spray a concentrated gaseous explosive first tested in Austria in 1936. Guidance was improved with the addition of an infra-red sensor to the plume sensor and some early television guidance equipment.

One Kugelblitz [the lone constructed one] destroyed a small group of B-24 bombers over Garda Lake using the aerosol ejector gun, which Allied Intelligence quickly reported as German "use of anti-aircraft bombs of Firedamp used against the bombers over Garda Lake".

While this was inaccurate, the Germans did develop the first aerosol bombs, known then as vacuum bombs, and what we call today "fuel-air explosives“ or FAE. The British found several bomb casings that contained aerosol dispersion canisters, but none were filled in 1945.

Official References to the German Vacuum Bomb:

Headquarters United States Strategic Air Forces In Europe Office of the Director of Intelligence: 'An Evaluation Of German Capabilities In 1945'; CIOS Report: Interrogation of Dr. Hans Friedrich Gold

The first concept of using Firedamp rockets against the Allied bomber streams was illustrated in the October 1943 issue of the German magazine "Signal" launched by a pair of Me Bf 110 heavy fighters.

As the Russians advanced towards Austria, the Zeppelin Werk workshops were moved into the Schwarzwald for the last use of these weapons. In April 1945 on order from Berlin the SS destroyed all of the remaining weapons.

Dr. Giuseppe Belluzzo of Italy worked closely with the SS on the Schriever disc re-design as well as his own jet-powered flying bomb - the Turbo Proietti.

The operation and turbine engine design of Belluzzo for the Turbo Proietti is very similar to a Feuerball in appearance.

It may well be that the Italians had a part in developing the early Kugelwaffen and Feuerball.

Is it just coincidence that the lone Kugelblitz attack recorded came from the Riva Del Garda area?

Dr. Mario Zippermayr, an eccentric Austrian inventor working at an experimental establishment at Lofer in the Tyrol, designed and built a series of highly unorthodox anti-aircraft weapons that were observed very closely by the Reichsluftfahrtamt [Office of Aeronautics] in Berlin.

Due to the overwhelming numerical air superiority of the Allies every effort was made during the last year of the war to find ways of exploiting any known phenomenon that could bring down the heavy bombers of the USAAF and RAF.

Dr. Zippermayr constructed both a huge Wirbelwind Kanone [Whirlwind Cannon] and Turbulenz Kanone [Vortex Cannon].

Both had the same goal - to knock down enemy bombers through clever manipulation of air.

To achieve this, the Wind Cannon used a detonation of hydrogen and oxygen to form a highly compressed plug of air that was channeled through a long tube that was bent at an angle and fired like a shell towards enemy aircraft. Impossible as this may seem the Wind Cannon did particularly well on the ground - breaking one inch thick wooden boards from a range of 200 yards.

This promising development, however, meant nothing against the Allied bombers that were flying at 20,000 ft! Nevertheless, taken from the Hillersleben Proving Grounds the Wind Cannon was used in defense of a bridge over the Elbe River in 1945. Either there were no aircraft present or the cannon had no effect because it was still intact where it was found.
 
The Turbulenz Kanone, by comparison, was a large caliber mortar sunk into the ground with fired coal dust and slow burning explosive shells to create an artificial vortex. This also worked well on the ground but again the problem was the same - how to generate a large enough effect to reach the aircraft. Zippermayr did not know if the pressure changes of this device would be sufficient to cause structural damage to an aircraft but the vortex would definitely have an effect on the wing loading as even clear air turbulence had brought down civilian airliners.

In an U.S. government post-war interview, on 8 March 1949,  Dr. Zippermayr explained to the U.S. officials the test conclusions he reached during the war blowing coal dust out of hollow pipes. This test method led to a cover story that Dr. Zippermayr had invented a "Vortex cannon" by which enemy aircraft would be swept from the sky.

This myth still persists to this day and has even been repeated by a prominent and respected historian in a recent British TV documentary.

The initial explosion scattering and vaporizing the coal dust must be slow enough to allow a long billowing explosion over a wide area. For this a mathematician was included to verify Dr. Zippermayr's work. Other than this math, the method was so simple and direct that a cover story was needed lest this cheap rival to the atomic bomb fall into the wrong hands. This cover story and strategy worked for decades.

Even though Zippermayr could not make either of these weapons any more potent, Major Rudolf Lusar, who was involved with German disc development with Schriever’s Flugkreisel Projekt had seen the test footage of both the Wind Cannon and Vortex Cannon in action.

He was especially interested in the vortex effect and destructive power of coal dust. Many late-war German fighter projects were to be powered by coal-fired ramjets including Dr. Alexander Lippisch’s Lp-13b and Skoda-Kauba P.14-01.

Major Lusar investigated the coal dust produced vortex as a means of exotic propulsion and considered if it might be applied to one of the Flugscheiben [Flight Discs].
 
A virtually unknown engineer working on the "Flugkreisel Projekt" named Gerhard Faulker came up with an idea that could have revolutionized aerial warfare in 1945. He proposed that a giant 100 meter diameter disc be constructed that would not only use Zippermayr coal dust vortex as the main power plant but also to produce a giant fire cloud through the bomber streams by ejecting coal dust explosive propellant through vents in the spinning external ring and then igniting the mixture with ring-tip burners.
 
Ing. Faulker named his design the "Feuersturm" [Firestorm]. It was proposed in late 1944 but abandoned by the spring of 1945 during the collapse and thus could not be constructed.

The design was also nicknamed the "Zyclope" [Cyclops] due to the heavily shielded gyroscopic ball cockpit "eye" that would rotate as the craft literally flew in a widening arc to create the long burning cloud trail that would engulf the enemy bombers.
 
The Feuersturm is also unique due to its landing gear. The disc would have stood on a central coil stand made up of a series of hydraulically-retractable concentric metal rings with various diameters up to 50 meters. When extended, these formed the huge Turbulenzrohr [vortex pipe] with a huge blast plate/exhaust orifice at the bottom.

When the craft went into attack, the entire collapsible hydraulic ring system retracted up into the belly of the disc with the blast plate protecting the bottom of the disc as the vortex effect generated inside the disc now drove the spinning external fire ring. For defense in the VTOL role the Feuersturm would carry four internal launch tubes that would vertically fire coal dust explosive shells. They were to be pre-loaded before launch.

The Feuersturm would have been a point-defense interceptor disc designed to quickly climb vertically to the altitude of the approaching bomber stream and then arc sideways creating an immense burning fire cloud into the path of the bombers.
 
One disadvantage to this proposal was the desired result. If the Feuersturm worked and all 1,000 bombers plus 500 escorts plunged to the ground on fire the devastating effect on the locals could have been actually worse than the bombing run.

Postwar, Ing. Faulker was not heard of again. He was captured by the Russians in the advance and taken to the USSR. The Russians had considered the development of coal dust explosives too but decided against it and developed their own "thermobaric" weapons which ultimately were tested in Chechnya.

No Russian flight disc development seems to have resulted from Faulkner’s capture.

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.
 

History has it that not only were the Germans at war, which required much in the way of manpower, but they took on incredible projects such as constructing huge underground complexes at Nordhausen in the Harz mountains, Pennemünde and others.

They also had their naval vessels provide support for a very detailed study of the Antartic in which they were alleged to have been building underground bases as well.

Peenemünde was a hive of activity in its heyday, before a major RAF bombing raid in 1943, the biggest British mission of the war, destroyed large sections of the facility. 

Alarmed by progress on the V-2 rockets, Britain’s Bomber Command sent 597 bombers on the night of 16-17 August 1943, to raid Peenemünde - Germany’s top-secret rocket facility built on an island at the mouth of the Oder River near the border of Germany and Poland. Because of a navigation "blunder", much of the underground and well-camouflaged Peenemünde site was left undamaged.

British author Brian Ford described the results:

"Even so, over 800 of the people on the island were killed.... After this, it was realized that some of the facility had better be dispersed throughout Germany; thus the theoretical development facility was moved to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, development went to Nordhausen and Bleicherode, and the main wind-tunnel and ancillary equipment went down to Kochel, some 24 miles south of Munich.

"This was christened Wasserbau Versuchsanstalt Kochelsee - experimental waterworks project - and gave rise to the most thorough research center for long-range rocket development that, at the time, could have been envisioned".

Mary Bennett and David S. Percy, authors of "Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistleblowers", speculated that the British air raid on Peenemünde was designed not to knock out the V-rocket site but to force it to move to safer environs, to ensure the safety of the rocket program.

They showed how the raid bombed the site’s northern peninsula rather than the main facility, due to misplaced target indicators. These authors noted that of the eight hundred personnel who died in the air raid, about half were mostly Russians from the prisoner labor force and the other half were technicians and their families.

After this raid, the irreplaceable Hermann Oberth was transferred to the safety of the Reinsdorf works near Wittenberg, to continue his work.

"Instructions from the highest level, it seems, had been to target personnel and certainly not the V-2 rocket production facilities. It was clearly crucial that these rockets, plans and parts were spared", they stated.

Someone with high authority wanted this Nazi technology available to them after the war.

General Electric in particular funded the Mittelwerke underground V-2 factory and owned EMW the company which ran Peenemünde, through it's subsidiary AEG. Indeed by late 1944 General Electric International had struck a deal for the surrender of Penemünde scientists and engineers to US forces. 

So important was upholding that deal that when 450 rocket engineers were imprisoned at military barracks in Oberammergau, SS Lt General Dr Hans Kammler led an armed party of SS to free them and drive them to the American lines near Oberjoch on 27 April 1945.
 

Rockets were tested there until 1945 and fired at Britain from launch pads on the French coast.

Researchers have found evidence that tests were carried out to fire rockets from submarines.

A chilling speech by the camp commandant, Walter Dornberger, shows where the rockets were headed next. 

"The crowning of our work will be the Amerika machine, a two-stage rocket which will cover the distance between Germany and the United States in around 30 minutes".

During the summer of 1943, the Peenemünde research centre was seized by the SS. Brigadeführer Hans Kammler, Himmler's most trusted aide. 
 
Himmler wanted underground  factories for the production of war materials in natural caves and underground tunnels "completely impervious to Allied bombs":

Kammler succeeded in creating underground workshops and living quarters from a cave system in the Hartz mountains in central Germany.

 Albert Speer, writing to congratulate him, called "an almost impossibly short period of two months" a feat, he continued, "unsurpassable even by American standards".

Allied Intelligence knew that the Germans were working on a "'New York Rocket". At least twenty of these large rockets were built at the SS underground base at Nordhausen. What happened to them is one of the enduring mysteries of World War II.

During the close of WWII, General Patton's army came upon a very unusual find at a captured German facility in France [near the V1 and V2 launch sites].

This finding was described in Patton's biography, which included specific data and photos, and also in an official document known as the "Patton memo". In fact, General Patton specifically warned the U.S. military of unbelievable facilities being found. 

General Patton described coming upon a huge runway that was 200 feet wide, 11,300 feet long, and was made of concrete which was 14 feet thick. The memo stated that the runway was built by the Germans using thousands of slave laborers, and took several years to complete.

It was his written opinion that the construction materials and labor force surpassed that of the great pyramids [his words]. The runway incorporated a unique feature at the far end. An upward turned "ski slope" was built into the runway to allow larger aircraft with heavy cargo loads to take off more easily. This "ski slope" feature was later incorporated into the designs of British and Russian aircraft carriers.
 

In October 1944 at Artois near St Omer in France, General Patton discovered a concrete ramp for catapult-launching a winged A-9 rocket 3200 miles to New York. A sketch was provided. Nothing has ever appear in Allied archives about this interesting find. 

SOURCE: "Daily Mail" 30 October 1944, G Ward-Price: 'Fly-bombs were meant for US - Huge ramp found'.

The U.S. constructed such a runway in 1972 for incoming and outgoing secret horizontal take off and landing spacecraft at Hunter Army Airfield Savannah GA, which was never officially closed.

In March and April of 1945, General George S. Patton and his Third Army were not racing towards Berlin, but across southern Bavaria. 

They were, claims author Joseph P. Farrell, in his book, "Reich of the Black Sun", making haste towards 

(1) the huge Skoda munitions works at Pilsen; 
(2) Prague; and 
(3) a region of the Harz Mountains in Thuringia

One is informed by countless history books that this maneuver was thought to be necessary by the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force [SHEAF] because of reports that the Nazis were planning to make a last stand in the "'Alpine National Redoubt" a network of fortified mountains stretching from the Alps to the Harz Mountains.

The Third Army's movements, so the story goes, were designed to cut off the "escape route" of Nazis fleeing the carnage of Berlin. Maps are produced in old history books, accompanied in some cases by de-classified German plans -some dating from the Weimar Republic- for just such a Redoubt. Case settled. 

However, there is a problem with that explanation.

Allied aerial reconnaissance would likely have told Eisenhower and SHAEF that there were precious few fortified strong points in the "National Redoubt".

Indeed, it would have told them that the "Redoubt" was no redoubt at all. General Patton and his divisional commanders would most certainly have been privy to at least some of this information. So why the extraordinary and almost reckless speed of his advance, an advance the post-war Allied Legend would have us believe was to cut off the escape route of Nazis fleeing Berlin, who it turns out weren't fleeing, to a Redoubt that didn't exist? 

Hitler, during a conference with his generals in the Bunker in 1945, made the wild pronouncement, when questioned by one of them as to why the strongest and best formations left to the Wehrmacht were deployed, not in defence of Berlin, but of Prague, that Prague was the key to winning the war.

Allied military Intelligence also confirmed that the strongest SS Panzer formations were deployed in the vicinity of Prague, an order of battle that, on the plain face of things, made no military sense to them, other than, as the Allies' own estimates of the situation concluded, that Berlin had ceased to be an important economic and military target.
 

Generaloberst [Colonel General, the equivalent of a four-star American general] Gotthard Heinrici, commander of the vastly outnumbered Army Group Vistula that faced the massed armies of Marshal Zhukov poised less than sixty miles from Berlin,  pleaded with his leader for more troops.

The general is questioning the disposition of the forces he sees displayed on the battle map, for it is clear to him that some of Germany's finest and few remaining battle worthy formations are far south, facing Marshal Koniev's forces in Silesia. These forces were thus, incomprehensibly, poised to make a stiff defense of Breslau and Prague, not Berlin.

The general pleads for Hitler to release some of these forces and transfer them north, but to no avail. "Prague," the Führer responds stubbornly, almost mystically, "is the key to winning the war." Generaloberst Heinrici's hard-pressed troops must "do without." [They did in fact "do without" and yet managed to put up a fierce resistance against overwhelming odds in the initial stages of Zhukov's final offensive on Berlin].

One may also perhaps imagine Heinrici and the other assembled generals perhaps casting a doleful glance at Norway on the situation map, where thousands of German troops are still stationed, occupying a country that had long since ceased to be of any strategic or operational value to the defense of the Reich.

Why indeed did Hitler maintain so many German troops in Norway up to the very end of the war? [The standard versions, of course, are that he wished to maintain the supply line of iron ore from Sweden to Germany, and that he wished to continue to use the country as a base to interdict the lend-lease supply route to Russia. But by late 1944, with the huge losses of the German Kriegsmarine, these explanations no longer were militarily feasible, and hence do not make military sense]. 

These paradoxical German troops deployments, were pondered by both Allied and German generals after the war. What possibly could Hitler have been thinking? Prague? Norway? There were no standard or conventional military reasons for the deployments. On more than one occasion during these end-of-the-war conferences with his generals in the Führerbunker, he boasted that Germany would soon be in the possession of weapons that would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat at "five minutes past midnight".

All the Wehrmacht had to do was hold out a bit longer. And above all, it must hold Prague and lower Silesia.

Of course, the standard historical interpretation of these and similar utterances by the Nazi leadership near the end of the war explains them -or rather, explains them away- by one of two standard techniques. One school understands them to refer to the more advanced versions of the V-1 and V-2, and on rare occasions, the intercontinental A-9/10 rockets, the jet fighters, anti-aircraft heat-seeking missiles, and so on that the Germans were developing. 

Sir Roy Fedden, one of the British Specialists sent to Germany to investigate Nazi secret weapons research after the war, left no doubt as to the deadly potential these developments held:

"In these respects [the Nazis] were not entirely lying. In the course of two recent visits to Germany, as leader of a technical mission of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realize that if they had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare."

-- "The Nazis' V-Weapons Matured Too Late" [London: 1945], cited in Renato Vesco and David Hatcher Childress, "Man-Made UFOs: 1944-1994".

"After watching the V-1 and V-2 firing trials at Blizna and Cracow, Poland, in April, 1944, Hitler is reported to have stated that German secret weapons were not the product of dreamers and that England and the whole world would soon feel their effect.

"It wasn’t until allied technicians examined German developments in this field that we fully realized the tremendous achievements of German scientists, and how near they were to achieving the boasts of their leader.

"The Germans were preparing rocket surprises for the whole world in general and England in particular which would have, it is believed, changed the course of the war if the invasion had been postponed for so short a time as half a year". 

-- Lt. Col. Donald Leander Putt, Dep. Cmmd. Gen., AAF Intelligence, Air Technical Services Command

"To the German scientists, the V-2 was just a toy. The V-1, V-2 and Me 262 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

The other standard school of interpretation explains such remarks of the Nazi leadership as the utterances of madmen desperate to prolong the war, and hence their lives, by stiffening the resistance of their exhausted armies.

For example, to make the insanity gripping the Reich government complete, Hitler's ever-faithful toady and propaganda minister, Dr. Josef Göbbels also boasted in a speech near the end of the war that he had seen "weapons so frightening it would make your heart stand still".

There is a prevailing, Intelligence sponsored myth, claiming the Germans were so completely disorganized by internal rivalries, they managed to derail most of their important weapons projects.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, German counte-Intelligence was so effective, many of the projects disclosed to the Allies after the surrender were unsuspected or beyond the understanding of most Allied technical teams. These projects became what the Americans have termed "deep black", never to be revealed at any cost, nor subject to budgetary scrutiny by Congress, or Parliament.
 

One of the many Third Reich construction projects that was started but never finished was a series of underground complexes in central Thüringen, southeast of the city of Gotha [near the concentration camp at Ohrdruf, the first such camp found by the Americans on German soil].

This project had several code names, depending on what part was meant, and the names also changed over time - the following names were used for all or part of this complex - "Siegfried", "Olga", "Burg", "Jasmin"; the designation S/III was sometimes used for the entire project.

The main works were dug into a hill forming the north side of the Jonas Valley, between Crawinkel and Arnstadt. This part of the project was reportedly intended as a last-ditch headquarters facility for Hitler and his staff, should they fall back from Berlin into the interior of Germany [some reports say Hitler actually spent the end of March 1945 in this or another nearby underground Führer Headquarters].

Other theories say this or a nearby site were intended for production of the intercontinental "Amerika" rocket, and even testing and production of a Nazi atomic bomb. Most of the complex never advanced much further than the tunnel digging stage, and the Soviets blasted most of the tunnel entrances after the war.

The exact purpose of this facility remains in doubt, as does its code-names "'Siegfried" and "Olga" may actually have been names of other sites.

Deep within his embattled Führerbunker in Berlin Hitler had boasted that Germany was on the verge of using weapons that would win the war for them at "five minutes past midnight". The desperate ravings of a lunatic" is history's too pat answer to Hitler's intriguing claim.

Yet Joseph P. Farrell, Nick Cook [author of "The Hunt For Zero Point"], and others have argued that the Nazis indeed had developed amazing technologies. Not only did General Patton and his Third Army stop an atomic nightmare, they also secured the evidence of Germany's secret scientific advances based upon bizarre physics. And that, suggests Farrell, may be why Patton soon died thereafter

The factual circumstances of Patton's death are plain enough.

On 9 December 1945, General Patton and Major General Hobart Gray were being driven by twenty-three old Private Horace Woodring in a 1939 Cadillac for an afternoon of pheasant shooting on the estate of a German friend.

At 11.45am they were passing through the outskirts of Mannheim when a US Army truck turned left in front of the Cadillac to enter the Quartermaster Corps camp. Patton's driver, attention momentarily diverted away from the road by a remark that Patton himself had made, belatedly noticed the truck in front of them, and swerved the General's car to avoid a head-on collision. 

None of the others involved in the accident were hurt, and all were able to walk away from the accident. Not so General Patton. He had suffered a broken neck, and the prognosis was paralysis from the neck down. From this point the General recovered rapidly at a military hospital, making such good progress that until the afternoon of 19 December, his doctors were seriously considering moving him to Boston.

But that afternoon his breathing difficulties increased dramatically and suddenly. On 20 December he suffered breathlessness and pallor, and Patton, who had had a prior history of embolism, died in his sleep on 21 December at 5:50 P.M.

The fact that Patton alone of all the victims of the automobile accident suffered serious injuries, plus the fact of his recovery and then sudden decline in a military hospital, have fueled various conspiracy theories.

One of these, that Patton knew of the Soviet shooting of American, Canadian, and British prisoners of war and threatened to expose the Allied knowledge and cover-up of the affair, was revealed by a Ukrainian defector with close ties to the Soviet KGB, who alleged that Patton's accident was no accident, and that the KGB had been behind it. Another version is similar, but has the OSS or other Allied entity performing the "accident" and subsequent "medical complications". 

If there is any truth in the idea of a conspiracy behind the ironic death of America's most decorated and celebrated general officer of the Second World War, then the explanation is likely to lie in the more esoteric and arcane secrets he and his Intelligence officers uncovered in Thuringia and at the Skoda Works in Pilsen.

Having performed a preliminary assessment of the second and third generation weaponry Kammler's scientists had begun to research, the OSS specialists who arrived at these sites must have immediately realized the material would require the tightest security and highest classification then possible, beyond that even of the Manhattan Project, not least because what was uncovered would give lie to the emerging Allied Legend of nuclear technological superiority.

Patton was a potential threat to the security of this operation and a risk to the continued secret American development of Kammler's technology in conjunction with Operation Paperclip. 

If there is truth to the conspiracy theories of Patton's incongruous death, then of all the theories, this would seem to be the most plausible motivation and explanation for the murder of America's famous general. Patton, and his famous mouth, had to be silenced. 

It is significant in this respect that on 17 April 1945, the United States Atomic Energy Commission inspected various underground workings at Ohrdruf, and removed technical equipment before dynamiting surface entrances.

The US authorities have classified all 1945 documents relating to Ohrdruf for a minimum period of 100 years.