Hans Kammler

Anybody familiar with Nazi Germany will be familiar with Himmler, Speer, Bormann and such but few have ever heard of Hans Kammler.

Kammler was a General in the SS, rather an accomplishment any way you look at it, and "was regarded by many in the Nazi hierarchy as the most powerful man in Germany outside the Cabinet".

-- "Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia", by Tom Agoston, Dodd, Mead & Co.

Kammler, whose position of authority was directly under Himmler, was in charge of Hitler's most secret projects, specifically projects such as the world's first jet engines and rockets.

He had over 14 million people working for him, mostly building underground factories.

Agoston said his projects were equivalent to being in charge of building the Great Pyramids or the Coliseum in Rome.

Speer said that he believed that Kammler was being considered to take his [Speer's] position.

Albert Speer, in his book "Spandau, The Secret Diaries" brags that it was he who ordered Werner Heisenberg to stop building an atomic bomb and concentrate on a "Uranium motor" for aircraft.

Towards the end of the war, Hitler even made Göring and Speer subordinate to Kammler.

Eisenhower admits in "Crusade In Europe" that the Nazis were within 6 months of developing advanced weapons that would have changed the outcome of the war.

Seneral Dr Hans Friedrich Karl Franz Kammler was an engineer and high-ranking officer of the SS.

He oversaw SS construction projects, and towards the end of World War II was put in charge of the V-2 missile programme.

He was the last SS officer in Nazi Germany to receive a promotion to the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer with date of rank from 1 March 1945.

Kammler was Oswald Pohl's Deputy at the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt [WVHA], overseeing Amtsgruppe D, the Administration of the concentration camp system.

He was also Chief of Amt C, which designed and constructed all concentration and extermination camps.

In this latter capacity, Kammler oversaw the installation of cremation facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau, as part of the camp's conversion to an extermination camp.

What results were reached by Hans Kammler when extermination facilities were concerned?

Doctor of Engineering Kammler became a total moron, making the inventors of the German delousing gas chambers look like geniuses.

The alleged gassing methods, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, are amateurish and ridiculous:

Pellets sprinkled over the victims heads, through an opening in a side wall, or lowered down in a little metal cage through the roof.

He found nothing more efficient than small individual crematory ovens similar to the ones found in civilian cemeteries.

On 26 October 1942, the engineer Fritz Sander, applied for a patent for what he called a "continuous operation corpse incineration oven for mass use".

This was a four-storey oven designed for Auschwitz-Birkenau

The bodies would be loaded by a type of conveyor belt and the heat of the bodies already in the oven would ignite them.

Thus, after an initial heating period, it would remain in continuous operation without the need for any further fuel - the heat of burning corpses would keep the apparatus running.

It was never built.

According to Sander, the patent was classified as confidential and therefore not processed by the Reich Patent Office.

The historian Annegret Schüle also considers it possible that it had not come to a patent, because the invention was contrary to applicable law, according to which the ashes of various bodies were no allowed to be mixed.

Kammler, who was able to lead programmes resulting in never seen before inventive weapons, was unable to conceive efficient gas chambers and crematories.

Between 18 January and 10 March 1972, two architects responsible for the design and construction of the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Walter Dejaco and Fritz Ertl, were put on trial in Vienna, Austria.

An expert report on the possible interpretation of the blue-prints of the alleged gas chambers of the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematoria was presented to the court.

It concluded that the rooms in question could not have been gas chambers, nor could they have been converted into gas chambers.

Thanks to this first methodologically sound expert report on Auschwitz, the defendants were acquitted.

Following the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, Heinrich Himmler assigned Kammler to oversee the demolition of the ghetto in retaliation.

Kammler was also charged with constructing facilities for various secret weapons projects, including manufacturing plants and test stands for the Messerschmitt Me 262 and V-2.

Following the Allied bombing raids on Peenemünde in "Operation Hydra" on 17 August 1943, Kammler was assigned to moving these production facilities underground.

This resulted in the Mittelwerk facility and its attendant concentration camp complex, Mittelbau-Dora.

17 August 1943
Peenemünde attacked by RAF

The Royal Air Force attacked Germany's Peenemünde Rocket Research Center, causing heavy damage and delaying V-weapon program by months.

With the V-2 development program already in crisis, the Allies launch a massive bombing raid against Peenemünde.

On that evening test pilot Hanna Reitsch was visiting the launch site.

At 23:30 the air raid siren sounded. 600 British bombers drop 1,500 tonnes of ordnance on the launch centre.

However many bombs fell in the ocean around the peninsula, or buried themselves harmlessly in sand dunes.

The resident area was hardest hit, while the Luftwaffe station at Peenemünde West was not touched.

47 British bombers were shot down - they were told before the raid that this was the most important mission of the war, and that their commanders would accept a 50% loss rate.

735 people were killed in the raid on the ground, including 178 of the 4000 inhabitants of the residential area.

A large number of the foreign slave workers in the Trassenheide concentration camp barracks were also killed.

Thiel and Walther -the two leading rocket engineers in Germany- were killed in the raid, and virtually all major facilities were damaged.

The saving grace was that the soft sand of Peenemünde attenuated the blast of many bombs.

Nine bombs hit the main assembly hall, but while there was splinter damage to some of the machine tools, there was no decisive hit that would prevent production from continuing.

It was estimated that operations could resume in 4 to 6 weeks.

The raid was not unexpected.

The high altitude contrails of the V-2 test launches were called "frozen lightning" and could be seen from Sweden on clear days.

The location and purpose of Peenemünde appeared in a crossword puzzle in an illustrated magazine published in central Germany in early 1943.

British reconnaissance flights to locate the launch facilities had been recognised for what they were.

This raid, and the bombing of V-2 production lines at the Zeppelinwerke in Friedrichshafen and the Raxwerke in Wiener Neustadt convinced Saur to reduce the V-2 production rate goal to 900 per month.

Most people killed in the RAF Bomber Command raid on Peenemünde in August 1943 were prisoners of war and forced labourers, but Walter Thiel specialized in hyperbolic combinations of rocket propellants and in the design of combustion chambers.

Thiel joined the staff at Peenemünde in 1936, where he designed, developed, tested, and perfected a rocket motor producing 56,000 pounds of thrust.

Rocket motors at the time could only produce 3,000 pounds of thrust.

RAF Bomber Command was a huge mass [the infamous bomber stream] and was easily detected by German air defence radars, so that its attacks were preceded by air raid warnings a couple of hours in advance, and they could not make a surprise.

The huge underground plant to where the production of V-2 rockets was transferred later was never seriously bombed.

To Germany the loss was much greater than the Allies realized at that time.

Gen. Hans Jeschonek, the chief of staff of the German air force, the Luftwaffe that should have prevented the bombing, committed suicide and left a note that read: "I hate Göring. Heil Hitler":

Some historians believe that the incredible airborne Market-Garden operation that was supposed to secure bridges on the Rhine and seize Arnhem was greatly accelerated by two events. First, Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery's promotion to Field Marshall, and second, the V-2 explosion in Chiswick two days earlier.

If successful, the three airborne divisions and one Polish brigade were also to wipe out the launchers of the V-2 menace.

Tragically the operation failed miserably, even though in his memoirs Marshall Montgomery remained its unrepentant advocate.

Geeral Fritz Krämer rushed his V-2 rockets to the center of the Hague, Netherlands, as soon as the Market-Garden operation was halted by German forces, and the V-2s exploded again, some in London and some in Antwerp.

But the attacks did not last long, for they were the last convulsions of a dying Germany.

The last V-2 exploded in London on 27 March 2945, killing 127 people.

Kammler was involved in the attempt to finish the Blockhaus d'Éperlecques, known also as the Watten Bunker, a rather unsuccessful project to create a fortified V-2 launch base.

He was also assigned to the construction of facilities at Jonastal and Riesengebirge for nuclear weapons research and at Ebensee to develop a V-2 derived ICBM.

In 1944, Himmler convinced Hitler to put the V-2 project directly under SS control, and on 6 August replaced Walter Dornberger with Kammler as its director.

From January 1945, he was placed as head of all missile projects and just a month later was given charge of all German aerospace programs as these came under SS authority as well.

Disappearance

In April 1945, Kammler disappeared.

Some reports suggest that he was assassinated by a member of his staff, acting on orders from Himmler not to allow personnel with detailed knowledge of the rocket programme to fall into Allied hands.

Others indicate that he may have been killed in action or committed suicide somewhere around Prague.

The fact that his exact fate is unknown and that his body was never recovered led to some speculation that he continued his work in the United States after the war, where it is alleged he worked on anti-gravity and other advanced devices.

Agostan's book details all FOUR of the supposed death scenarios of Hans Kammler. These may well have been simply misdirection.

Nick Cook in, "The Hunt for Zero Point" investigates the possibility that Kammler was brought to the United States along with many other German scientists as part of the program known as "Operation Paperclip".

- Christopher Simpson, "Blowback".

There are no known facts that support this theory.

There have been no "Kammler sightings" since the end of the war, contrary to the cases of other Nazi war criminals such as Bormann and Mengele.

In addition, Kammler was not a physicist or rocket engineer. He was primarily an administrator and as such would have few skills of value to the Americans.

There is a trail of evidence that indicates in the closing days of the Reich that Kammler used a long-range multi-engined aircraft to ship a large body of research material and prototypes out of the Reich. The book documents much of this evidence.

There are no references to Kammler in the official literature relating to the Nuremberg trials..

In fact, despite the knowledge that Kammler was, in many ways, number three in the Nazi hierarchy in 1945, his name only comes up once -in an indirect reference by Speer during the war crimes trials- including the trial of his subordinates in December 1957 in Arnsberg, Westphalia.

In Witkowski, Igor; "Pravda o Wunderwaffe", Warsaw 2000, it is stated that there are Polish depositions extant in the proceedings against Gruppenführer Jakob Sporrenberg which indicate that "Cronos/Laternenträger" was a project in plasma physics.

The experiments involved counter-rotating at very high speeds containers of mercury and other heavy metals, gases, etc within a ceramic cover 2.5-metres tall x 1.5 metres diameter base known as "the Bell".

In "Nazi Bariloche", the Argentinian author Abel Basti states that he has been shown a certain Argentine Intelligence document.

This declassified paper from 1945 reported that a German six-engined transport aircraft landed "at the war's end" on a German ranch at [Puntas de] Gualeguay in Paysandu province, Uruguay and had aboard items of highly secret technological equipment including a device known as "The Bell".

It is stated that the latter then came into Argentina and finished up at a German lakeside laboratory near Bariloche whose ruins are still visible and where AEG made further experiments post-war.

It is possible that a Ju 390 with assisted take-off, and mid-air refuelling from a Ju 290 or BV 222, could have made the flight from Norway to Uruguay without a stop.

SS-General Hans Kammler might have been aboard the Ju 390 referred to.

It is known that as Head of the V-Weapons project, Kammler oversaw this project.

He was frequently at Gross-Rosen concentration camp which supplied labour for an immense underground construction in the Eulengebirge Mountains and was linked by a long subterranean tunnel to the underground galleries at Waldenburg where "Cronos/Laternenträger" experiments were run.

The existence of this complex is confirmed in a document dated Warsaw 6 May 1947 "Action for De-Arming Oder Line" which speaks of the removal of huge quantities of machinery from the interior of the location before it was destroyed by explosives.

The last communication from Kammler is a cable timed at 1100 on 17 April 1945 addressed to SS-Führungshauptamt/Org. Abt.ROEM1 which reads:

"Betr: LKW Junkers

Gemäss Führerbefehl gehen Massnahmen Strahlflugzeug Militärischen voraus. Bin deshalb nicht in der Lage gewesen, gewünschten LKW freizustellen.

Bau-Insp. des Waffen-SS Reich Süd, Gez. Kammler"

It must have been a truly unique Junkers "truck" to have been at the heart of so much interest.

The SS began simply as Hitler's body guard.

From humble beginnings it was transformed into the most powerful entity within the Third Reich after Hitler himself.

The military arm of the SS, the Waffen SS, became the most elite military force in Germany.

The SS also took over many research, development and production facilities from the Army and Air Force. The SS took over control of civilian research and development facilities.

The SS began taking facilities and power away from Albert Speer's Ministry of Arms and the RLM headed by Hermann Göring.

As the war progressed, the SS organized, built and ran many underground manufacturing facilities.

They even appropriated the huge industrial firm, the Skoda Works, its subsidiaries and related firms, centered near Prague, for their in-house projects.

The SS became an empire within an empire answerable only to Adolf Hitler.

The SS also set up special research facilities for politically unreliable scientists.

Research projects arose within these facilities which were in part staffed by technical people drawn from the prisoner pool.

Such facilities were set up at Oranieburg, Nordhausen, Mechlenburg and Mauthausen.

As the SS rose within Germany, so did the fortunes of Doctor of Engineering, General Hans Kammler. Kammler seems to come into prominence through his talent at designing and building massive underground facilities.

Soon Kammler was placed, by Hitler, in charge of V-weapons [Vergeltungswaffen]

This means Kammler was in charge of the facilities at Peenemünde and Nordhausen.

He was Dr. and General Walther Dornberger's boss who, in turn was Dr. Wernher von Braun's boss.

Further, Kammler headed up an advanced research and development group, associated with the Skoda Works, called the Kammler Group.

This group held the most advanced technical secrets of the Third Reich.

During post-war questioning, when asked for details concerning V-weaponry, Albert Speer told Allied interrogators to ask Kammler these questions.

- Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee Evaluation Report Number 53(b].

Not one single follow-up question was put to Speer about Kammler.

Neither did they ever ask Kammler, because he had disappeared. Kammler was no fool.

Wherever he went he undoubtedly took copies, microfilmed in the final days, of the most advanced German technology. Numerous countries would have dealt with Kammler, regardless of his past. This includes the U.S.A.

Dr. Arthur Rudolf [Wernher von Braun's combustion chamber expert] was persecuted for his alleged use of slave labor at Nordhausen when, in fact, he was not in charge of slave labor.

No search was ever made for General Kammler, although he was in charge of all SS slave labor in the Reich, which he extensively employed in his projects.

alt Did Kammler do a secret deal with an Allied government, exchanging information for a new identity?

Or did Kammler escape Allied clutches to some safe haven such as South America?

It is known that the Nazis set up shop in large, secure tracts of land between Chile and Argentina.

Many post-war stories involve German scientists relocating in South American countries formerly friendly to the Nazis and there building and flying German saucers.

Several prominent Nazi aeronautical specialists were invited to the nation to pursue continued aircraft development including such famous German designers as Reiimar Horten and Kurt Tank of Focke-Wulf.

There, Horten worked on a flying wing and several Delta aircrafts while Tank worked on the Pulqui II jet fighter that resembled to some degree the Fw Ta 183 Huckebein while designing several other aircraft.

"Sightings" began in the skies over Argentina and in Argentine waters right after World War II - sightings of strange aerial discs and mystery subs that looked a lot like the last German Type XXVI that were laid down before the war ended.

These sightings were pre-Kenneth Arnold and pre-Roswell.

The "Maquina de la Metanza" [Machine of Killing/Slaughter] as it became nown was first spotted in the late 1950s.

It is reported as being much larger than any German disc type ever built in the Third Reich and resembles a floating stepped-pyramid fortress.

It was nicknamed “Disco Metanza” after a supposed test of the immense craft’s defense armament in Patagonia where it slaughtered hundreds of cattle in an "Experimento de la Vaca“ [Bovine Experiment].

Apparently the moving fortress turned the earth red with blood and shook it at low level with such intensity that it felt like a small magnitude earthquake.

The Argentine villagers were terrified of this giant menace, but this is the only detailed account ever given.

Metanza Data:

Type: Reported Haunebu-Vril configuration
Diameter: 240 meters [approx. estimate]
Height: 60 meters [approx. estimate]
Configuration details: Floating pyramid-shape layered armored fortress
Location: Andes Mountains, Argentina

The failed attempt to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944 caused a violent purge of the German Army officers, including the head of Army armaments Friedrich Fromm, who had the misfortune of being the commanding officer of Lt. Col. Klaus Von Stauffenberg, the man who left the briefcase bomb in the conference room.

Himmler assumed the imprisoned Fromm's duties, and the leadership of the Rocket program soon passed from the best of Germany's Prussian military tradition, represented by Walter Dornberger, to its worst.

Himmler soon appointed a favorite "rising star" in the organization, SS Major Hans Kammler, to run the rocket program.

On 1 March 1945 Kammler placed a volunteer Luftwaffe test pilot, Lieutenant Lothar Sieber, inside a Bachem Ba 349 'Natter.

This was a small piloted missile.

alt

Sieber was the first man to take off vertically from the ground under pure rocket power, some 16 years before Yuri Gagarin's 'Vostok 1' pioneering, orbital flight.

The honor was a brief one.

Around 11:00 am, the 'Natter' was ready for take-off. Low stratus clouds lay over the Ocksenkopf.

The Walter HWK 109-509 A1 motor built up to full thrust and Sieber pushed the button to ignite the four solid boosters.

With a roar, the piloted missile rose out of a cloud of steam and rocket smoke straight up, displaying its camouflage paintwork.

At an altitude of about 100 to 150 m [330 to 490 ft], the Natter suddenly pitched backwards into an inverted curve.

Initially it climbed at about 30° to the vertical.

At about 500 m [1,600 ft] the cockpit canopy was seen to fly off.

The Natter continued to climb at high speed at an angle of 15° from the horizontal and disappeared into the clouds. The Walter motor stalled about 15 seconds after take-off.

It is estimated the Natter reached 1,500 m [4,900 ft], at which point it nose-dived and hit the ground with great force about 32 seconds later, some kilometres from the launch site.

Bachem surmised Sieber had involuntarily pulled back on the control column under the effect of the 3g acceleration.

Examination of the canopy, which fell near the launch site, showed the tip of the latch was bent, suggesting it may not have been in the fully closed position at launch.

The pilot's headrest had been attached to the underside of the canopy.

As the canopy flew off the pilot's head would have snapped back suddenly about 25 cm [9.8 in], hitting the solid wooden rear upper cockpit bulkhead, and either knocking Sieber unconscious or breaking his neck, ending this inglorious debut for manned vertical rocket flight.

This tragedy reinforced Bachem's long held belief that the take-off and flight in the vicinity of the target bombers should be fully automated.

From Tom Agoston, "Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia"

SS Obergruppenführer Dr. Ing. [Doctor of Engineering] Hans Kammler, now little known to popular history, architect of the infamous Auschwitz death camps, responsible for the demolition of the Warsaw ghetto, and by the end of the war, the Third Reich's plenipotentiary for all secret weapons research, answered directly to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and to Adolf Hitler himself…….....

Heinrich Himmler, who was responsible for the new racial order in Hitler’s conquered territories, showed signs of uncertainty about the development of events.

"In a report to Hitler of May 1940 he totally ruled out the 'Bolshevistic method of physical annihilation of a people and that such a policy could not even be imagined, because it is completely un-Germanic.

"Hitler noted on the document’s border: 'Absolutely right', and told Himmler he could show it to the other Nazi leaders as being congruent with his 'line of thinking'.

-- Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies and Director of the Holocaust Museum of Yad Vashem [Jerusalem] in his book "Buying Jews Freedom?" Jewish Publishing House, Frankfurt 1996

"The Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942, where, it was claimed for over a third of a century, the decision to "exterminate" European Jews, disappeared from 1984 on from the writings of even the most ferocious enemies of the 'revisionists'.

On this point, they too had to 'revise' their history: Iit was at the Stuttgart Congress of May 1984, where that "interpretation" was dropped.

Source: Eberhard Jäckel and Jürgen Rohwer."Der Mord an der Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg" [The murder of Jews during the Second World War] Source : DVA. 1985

"In thousands of newspaper articles, books, textbooks, radio broadcasts, memorial speeches and television shows, the claim has been advanced that the mass murder of the Jews was decided on at the Wannsee Conference, or at the least, that the plan to carry out Adolf Hitler's order in this respect had been worked out there.

"As well, it is claimed, the means of killing had been discussed and the establishment of extermination camps was decided on.

"This is not in the protocol, and leading Holocaust historians are now repudiating it".

-- Eberhard Jäckel, "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", 22 June 1992

The most recent spokesman for the orthodox anti-Revisionist historians, the chemist Claude Pressac, confirmed this new revision of orthodoxy.

He wrote in his book, "Les crematoires d'Auschwitz" [CNRS editions, 1993]::

"The Wannsee conference was held in Berlin on 20 January.

"An action of 'driving back' the Jews towards the East was planned, with the evocation of a 'natural' elimination through work'; nobody then spoke of liquidation on an industrial scale.

"During the days and the weeks that followed, the Auschwitz Bauleitung received neither a call, a telegram or a letter demanding the study of an installation adapted to that end".

And even, in his "recapitulative chronology", he indicates on 20 January, 1942: "Wannsee Conference on the driving back of the Jews towards the East".

The "extermination" was revised: It was a question of 'driving back'.

It is equally remarkable that, in this book setting itself the goal of "proving" the thesis of extermination, there was no question either of the document which, after that of Wannsee, was supposedly the most decisive:

Hermann Göring's letter to Reinhard Heydrich of 31 July 1941, in which it was asserted that the "final solution" meant "extermination", and not the transfer out of Europe.

Göring protested against the English translation of the German word "Gesamtlösung", meaning general solution, as "Final Solution", which is "Endlösung"

Tthis led Chief US Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, at the Nuremberg Trials, to acknowledge the falsification and to reestablish the true meaning.

Charles Bewley, in "Hermann Göring" [Göttingen, 1956] has pointed out that no evidence was found at Nuremberg to substantiate the charge that Göring was involved in the extermination program.

Kammler boasted almost the perfect "corporate resume" and a documentable record of "whole person management" as a "team player":

A modern day management consultant who was talent hunting for a "total professional with total involvement" would certainly have been fascinated by the bizarre curriculum vitae Kammler could have submitted.

He could demonstrate a "track record" in "very senior appointments," with skill in putting across "aggressive growth plans"

In the Third Reich, within a span of a few years, the number of positions he had held in turn was phenomenal.

Among these "senior appointments" Kammler once commanded were:

Operational control of the V-l and V-2 terror bombardments of London, Liege, Brussels, Antwerp and Paris;
Operational control of all missile production and research, including the V-2 and the intercontinental ballistic missile. the A9/10;
Design and construction oversight of the world's "first bombproof underground aircraft and missile factory sites", including sites for the production of jet engines and the Messerschmitt 262;
Command of the SS Building and Words Division, the department which handled all large construction projects for the Reich, including death camps, "Buna factories," and supply roads for invading German legions in Russia;
Design and construction of the world's first underground testing and proving range for missiles;
Command, control and coordination of all of the Third Reich's secret weapons research by the war's end.

This warped and twisted administrative genius first came to the attention of Himmler and Hitler "with a brilliant hand-colored design for the Auschwitz concentration camp, which he subsequently built. Later he was called in to advice on the modalities for boosting the daily output of its gas chambers from 10,000 to 60,000".

All this is to say that not only was Kammler a butcher, but that by the war's end, Hitler had "concentrated more power in Kammler's hands than he had ever entrusted to a single person".

If one were to compare Kammler's position to a similar hypothetical position in the former Soviet Union, such a position would mean that the general who [commanded] the SS-20 rockets in Europe and Asia [the Commander in Chief of Strategic Rocket Forces] would also head research, development, and production of missiles.

In addition, he would be in charge of producing all modern aircraft for the Red Air Force and have overall command of the mammoth civil engineering projects or the production centers in Siberia's sub-zero climate.

Last, but very much not least, he would lead the national grid of Gulags.

To match Kammler's position in the SS, the Soviet general holding all these variegated commands would also be third in the KGB pecking order.

Indeed, one would have to add to Agoston's list, for such a Soviet general would also have had to be in charge of the coordination of all the most post-nuclear and super secret advanced scientific research and black projects in the entire Soviet Union

It is thus in the person of SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler that all the lines meet:

The Buna factory and slave labor of the camps, exploited for grizzly medical experimentation and labor in the secret underground laboratories and production facilities, the atom bomb project, and even more horrendous and monstrous aircraft and weapons development.

If there was a gold mine of information, then it was available in the blueprints and files that were locked in Kammler's vaults, or even more securely in his brain.

It is this fact and Kammler's extraordinary dossier that make his post-war fate even more problematical.

The Four Deaths of SS Obergruppenführer Dr. Ing. Hans Kammler

He of all the high-ranking Nazis indicted and tried at Nuremberg either post-humously or in absentia, was never formally indicted, much less brought to trial.

He is altogether missing from the docket, and altogether just simply missing.

Kammler has yet another distinction.

He appears to have been not only a very accomplished messenger of death for others, but also appears to have achieved the astonishing feat of having died himself no less than four times, each under different circumstances.

Agoston commented at length on the odd assortment of "facts" surrounding Kammler's fate: Brainchild of none other than Martin Bormann.

The purpose of this special command was to evacuate... something. Cook reports that one of the enormous Ju 390s simply went missing at the end of the war.

Analysis of the voluminous documentation as has accrued, shows crude discrepancies, the inconsistencies of which grow with almost every addition to the mosaic of information that enters the picture Basically three major facts stand out:

Thus, in spite of "the proliferation of unsubstantiated evidence that permeates all four versions of Kammler's death, the shell of the case contains sufficient facts to suggest a more than coincidental pattern of seemingly targeted and organized disinformation".

The origin of this disinformation, according to Agoston, was probably within the SS itself, a program necessitated by Kammler's disappearance and likely treason to one of the victorious Allied powers.

As Agoston quips, "even the most ardent worshipper of Teutonic creed could not possibly suggest that elitist SS loyalty can be demonstrated three times, in three locations, and all on the same day.".

The second version of the story, related to Agoston by Kammler's "civilian" aide Dr. Wilhelm Voss, was that the general took cyanide somewhere "on the road between Pilsen and Prague on 9 May"

According to von Braun, Kammler and Starck discussed the possibility of "going underground" before the Americans arrived, disguising themselves as monks in a nearby abbey.

This report, if true, is perhaps the most interesting, since it indicates that Kammler had no intentions of surrendering himself to any of the Allied powers, but rather, intended to survive, perhaps independently continuing his oversight of secret weapons development.

The suggestion has been frequently made that the UFOs first reported in the late 1940s were the products of experimental aircraft designs that were developed towards the end of the Second World War.

Most [if not all] serious historians would throw up their hands in horror at the very mention of such a seemingly ludicrous idea, particularly when one considers the associated claims:

That, since sightings of UFOs are still reported today by thousands of people around the world, these radical aircraft designs must have been captured, copied and further developed by the victorious powers; and, what is more, that some UFOs may even be piloted by escaped Nazis operating out of one or more hidden bases.

If the Germans did succeed in producing a piloted flying disc, what became of it?

As several researchers have noted, the answer may lie with SS Obergruppenführer Dr Hans Kammler, who towards the end of the war had access to all areas of secret air-armaments projects.

Kammler worked on the V-2 rocket project, along with Wernher von Braun [who would later head NASA’s Apollo Moon programme] and Luftwaffe Major General Walter Dornberger [who would later become vice-president of the Bell Aircraft Company in the United States].

Heinrich Himmler planned to separate the SS from Nazi Party and state control through the establishment of a number of business and industrial fronts, making it independent of the state budget. Hitler approved this proposal early in 1944. [As Jim Marrs notes, this strategy would subsequently be copied by the CIA in America]

By the end of the war, Hans Kammler had decided to use V-2 rocket technology and scientists as bargaining chips with the Allies.

On 2 April 1945, 500 technicians and engineers were placed on a train along with 100 SS troops and sent to a secret Alpine location in Bavaria.

Two days later, von Braun requested permission from Kammler to resume rocket research, to which Kammler replied that he was about to disappear for an indefinite length of time.

This was the last anyone saw of Hans Kammler.

In view of the undoubted advantage he held when it came to negotiating for his life with the Allies, Kammler’s disappearance is something of a puzzle, until we pause to consider the possibility that he possessed plans for a technology even more advanced than the V-2.

Did the Reich, or an extension of it, have the capability to produce a UFO or the clout to deal from a position of strength with one of the Allied nations?

Although it is assumed that Kammler committed suicide when about to be apprehended by the Czech resistance in Prague, there is no proof of this.

What really happened to Kammler?

-- Alan Baker, "Invisible Eagle"

And lastly, there is a version of Kammler's death that has him dying a typical SS hero's death, fighting and going down in a blaze of "glory" in the face of rebelling and revolting Czechs.

What emerges from all this is that no one, no where can advance anything like a consistent account of the date, location, time, or even method of Kammler's death.

Now it is suicide by poison, then suicide by gunshot, suicide by ordering an aide to shoot him, a fighting death, or disappearance into a Roman Catholic monastery.

Now he is in Prague, now he isn't; now he's with people, now he isn't; now he's suffering mental and emotional collapse, now he isn't.

In all likelihood, therefore, Kammler did not die at all: He disappeared.

The important question is, where?

In March 1945, as US forces were advancing through Germany, the slave workers housed in the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp were to be executed as security risks.

It is believed that the order for their murder was received by Kammler, but he did not comply with it.

On 1 April 1945, Kammler ordered the evacuation of 500 missile technicians to the Alps.

Since the last V-2 on the western front had been launched in late March, on 5 April Kammler was charged by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht to command the defence of the Nordhausen area.

However, rather than defend the missile construction works, he immediately ordered the destruction of all the "special V-1 equipment" at the Syke storage site.

What exactly this order implied is unclear.

Preuk statement

On 9 July 1945, Kammler's widow petitioned to have him declared dead as of 9 May 1945.

She provided a statement by Kammler's driver, Kurt Preuk, according to which Preuk had personally seen "the corpse of Kammler and been present at his burial" on 9 May 1945.

The District Court of Berlin-Charlottenburg ruled on 7 September 1948 that his death was officially established as 9 May 1945.

In a later sworn statement on 16 October 1959, Preuk stated that Kammler's date of death was "about 10 May 1945", but that he did not know the cause of death.

On 7 September 1965, Heinz Zeuner [a wartime aide of Kammler's], stated that Kammler had died on 7 May 1945 and that his corpse had been observed by Zeuner, Preuk and others.

All the eyewitnesses consulted were certain that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning.

In their accounts of Kammler's movements Preuk and Zeuner claimed that he left Linderhof near Oberammergau on 28 April 1945 for a tank conference at Salzburg and then went to Ebensee [where tank tracks were manufactured].

According to Preuk and Zeuner he then travelled back from Ebensee to visit his wife in the Tyrol region, when he gave her two cyanide tablets.

The next day, 5 May, at around 4 am, he is said to have departed Tyrol for Prague.

Wernher von Braun, also at the time at Oberammergau, later reported having overheard a discussion between Kammler and his aide-de-camp in which Kammler said he planned to hide in nearby Ettal Abbey.

Kammler and his followers then left town, according to Braun.

Further evidence of Kammler's activities is a telegraph from Kammler to Speer, Himmler and Göring of 16 April, informing them of the creation of a "message centre" at Munich and the appointment of a chief representative for the construction of the Messerschmitt Me 262.

On 20 April, he reportedly arrived with a group of technicians at Himmler’s Kommandostelle near Salzburg.

On 23 April, Kammler sent a radio message to his office manager at Berlin, ordering him to organize the immediate destruction of the "V-1 equipment near Berlin" and then to go to Munich.

In late April/early May, Kammler was reportedly at the Villa Mendelssohn at Ebensee, site of one of the projects assigned to him.

On 4 May, he ordered the immediate transfer of the Ebensee office to Prague.

Preuk and Zeuner maintained their version of events through the 1990s, when interviewed by the journalist Kristian Knaack.

Some support for this version of events came from letters written by Ingeborg Alix Prinzessin zu Schaumburg-Lippe, a female member of the SS-Helferinnenkorps to Kammler’s wife in 1951 and 1955.

In these, she affirmed that Kammler had said goodbye to her on 7 May 1945 in Prague, stating that the Americans were after him, had made him offers but that he had refused and that they would not "get him alive".

On the surface, the sworn testimony provided by SS Oberscharführer Kurt Preuk in 1948 certainly seems confirm that Kammler committed suicide on 9 May 1945.

Preuk was a driver in Kammler’s entourage and knew him well.

When he produced his sworn statement in 1948 Preuk claimed that he had been present on 9 May 1945 when Kammler shot himself during a break in the journey from Prague.

However, in another sworn statement by Preuk made in 1959 as part of a death benefits case, he claimed that Kammler’s death had occurred “on or around 10 May 1945” and that he was not sure of the cause of death.

The situation was made even less clear when in 1965 Heinz Zeuner, a former SS SS Obersturmführer and another driver in the Kammler entourage, claimed to have been present when Kammler died and stated that his death occurred on 7th May 1945 and that Kammler killed himself by taking cyanide.

In 2012, German researchers using government records uncovered further fascinating information about Kammler, his alleged death and the drivers in his entourage.

It appears that in the Kammler group there was a third driver and one of Kammler’s longest serving aides, thirty-five year-old Oberscharführer Friedrich Baum.

However, Baum had been badly wounded while driving one of Kammler’s staff cars when the partisan uprising in Prague erupted on 6 May 1945.

Interviewed after the war, Heinz Zeuner claimed that he was present when the car was attacked [though Kammler was not] and described how Baum was shot in the left knee while driving, meaning that he was unable to use the accelerator.

Zeuner was able to reach over with his own left leg and operate the accelerator while Baum steered the car to safety.

Zeuner went to explain that Baum was taken to hospital in Prague but was later killed by partisans when the hospital was over-run a few days later.

However, records show that on 23 May 1945 a thirty-five year old Army Oberfeldwebel [Sergeant] Friedrich Baum from the Berlin Motor Pool was admitted to a makeshift hospital in the lakeside town of Gmunden in Lower Austria.

Hospital records show that Baum had been wounded in the knee in Prague on 4 May, but that his leg had become infected during the long journey to Austria.

His leg was amputated in hospital but he died there on 29 May and was buried in grave No. 112 at the nearby military cemetery.

There are a number of problems with this story.

First, Oberfeldwebel Friedrich Baum of the Berlin Motor Pool does not exist according to German Army records.

Given the reported date and location of Baum’s wound, it seems very likely that this was actually Oberscharführer Friedrich Baum of the SS.

It was certainly very common for SS troops at the end of the war to adopt army identification in order to avoid arrest, imprisonment and retribution.

However, the wound to Baum’s leg is also a problem.

Accounts from Prague are very clear that Baum was wounded in the left knee. But hospital records from Gmunden state that Oberfeldwebel Baum’s right knee was injured and that his right leg was subsequently amputated.

Things got even more confused in 1967 when the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge [German War Graves Commission] reviewed the military cemetery in Gmunden as part of a national review and consolidation of war graves.

The plan was to erect uniform markers on graves and to consolidate the many small cemeteries into larger plots.

When grave No. 112 was opened to exhume Baum’s body, it was found to be empty.

When the cemetery was re-dedicated in 1987 the marker over grave 112 read “I.M. FELDW. FRIEDRICH BAUM, 06.21.1906 – 29.5.1945”.

The “I. M.” Stands for “In Memorium” and is generally used on a grave which is intended as a memorial but in which the body is not actually present.

The mystery surrounding the identity and death of Friedrich Baum has generated speculation that Kammler had adopted the papers and identity of his dead driver, that hospital records of his wound and death were falsified and that he escaped from Gmunden by adopting yet another false identity.

There have also been reports of sightings of Kammler in Argentina after the war and suggestions that he actually surrendered to American forces much later than the date of his supposed death, though none of these have ever been confirmed.

Author Bernd Ruland, in his 1969 book "Wernher von Braun: Mein Leben für die Raumfahrt", reports an altogether different account of Kammler's death.

According to Ruland, Kammler arrived in Prague by aircraft on 4 May 1945, following which he and 21 SS men defended a Bunker against an attack by more than 500 Czech resistance fighters on 9 May.

During the attack, Kammler's aide-de-camp Sturmbannführer Starck shot Kammler to prevent him from falling into enemy hands.

This version can reportedly be traced to Walter Dornberger, who in turn is said to have heard it from eyewitnesses.

Post-war search for Kammler

US occupation forces conducted various inquiries into Kammler’s whereabouts, beginning with the headquarters of 12th Army ordering a complete inventory of all personnel involved in missile production on 21 May 1945.

This resulted in the creation of a file for Kammler, stating that he was possibly in Munich. The CIC noted that he had been seen shortly prior to the arrival of US troops in Oberjoch.

The Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee [CIOS] in London ordered a search for him in early July 1945.

12th Army replied that he was last seen on 8 or 9 April in the Harz region. In August, Kammler's name made "List 13" of the UN for Nazi war criminals.

Only in 1948 did the CIOS receive the information that Kammler reportedly fled to Prague and had committed suicide.

Original blueprints of Kammler’s major projects were later found in the personal property of Samuel Goudsmit, the scientific leader of the Alsos Mission.

In 1949 a report written by one Oskar Packe on Kammler was filed by the US Denazification office in Hesse.

The report stated that Kammler had been arrested by US troops on 9 May 1945 at the Messerschmitt works at Oberammergau.

However, Kammler and some other senior SS personnel had managed to escape in the direction of Austria or Italy.

Packe disbelieved the reports about a suicide, as these were "refuted by the detailed information from the CIC" about arrest and escape.

A CIC report from April 1946 listed Kammler among SS officers known to be outside Germany and considered to be of special interest to the CIC.

In mid-July 1945, the head of the Gmunden CIC office, Major Morrisson interviewed an unnamed German on the issue of a numbered account associated with construction sites for plane and missile production formerly run by the SS.

A report published years later, in late 1947 or early 1948, stated that only Kammler and two other persons had access to the account.

The report also said that "shortly after the occupation, Hans Kammler appeared at CIC Gmunden and gave a statement on operations at Ebensee".

The CIC notes on the interview give no name, but the interviewee must have been one of the three people with access to the account.

Aside from Kammler, one was known to have left Austria in May 1945, the other was in a POW camp during July.

Finally, Donald W. Richardson, a former OSS special agent involved in the Alsos Mission, claimed to be "the man who brought Kammler to the US".

Shortly before he died, Richardson reportedly told his sons about his experience during and after the war, including Operation Paperclip.

According to them, Richardson claimed to have supervised Kammler until 1947.

Kammler was supposedly "interned at a place of maximum security, with no hope, no mercy and without seeing the light of day until he hanged himself".

Possible last documented independent testimonies

A purported section of a wartime diary, relating to the surrender of the mountain resort town Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Allied troops, mentions Kammler and his staff.

According to this account, Kammler and what the author refers to as his staff of some 600 people, with "good quality" cars and trucks arrived in Oberammergau [north of Garmisch-Partenkirchen] on 22 April 1945.

This arrival had been badly received and the local authorities had several arguments with Kammler himself.

These conflicts are mentioned in the entries for 23 and 25 April.

The last reference, implicating only Kammler's "staff", comes on the night of 28 April – an Oberleutnant Burger reports that they had gone on the same night that American forces began storming Oberammergau, forcing their way to Garmisch and Austria.

Agoston had established what no other researcher has managed to before or since

The unique information Agoston had came directly from SS Colonel Wilhelm Voss who had become "Kammler's alter ego in the administration of the special projects group".

As Kammler was in charge of all the secret weapons operations, Voss was certainly in position to know deep secrets known only to the Nazi elite in the highly compartmentalized military system.

Agoston, who worked as an air photo interpreter and foreign correspondent during wartime, "ran into Voss" when he was in Germany to cover the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Voss then took shelter in Agoston's house, where he would tell the reporter everything.

From those interviews conducted in 1949, Agoston learned of the deep black projects, the secrecy of which was beyond any other secret military project.

This was the "most advanced high-technology research and development center within the Third Reich":

While Kammler [in charge of Nazi secret weapons projects] carried out his job to the letter, churning out the rockets and jet aircraft that Hitler hoped would turn the tide against the Allies in the closing weeks of the war, he also set up, unbeknownst to anyone connected with those projects, a top secret research center tasked with the development of follow-on technology, a place where work on "second-generation" secret weapons was already well advanced.

What Kammler had established was a "special projects office" a forerunner of the entity that had been run by the bright young colonels of the USAF's stealth program in the 1970s and 1980s: A place of vision, where imagination could run free, unfettered by the restraints of accountability.

Exactly the kind of place, in fact, you'd expect to find anti-gravity technology, if such an impossible thing existed.

Voss described the activities of the scientists [in this secret operation] as beyond any technology that had appeared by the end of the war - working on weapon systems that made the V-1 and the V-2 look pedestrian.

On 23 March 1942, Heinrich Himmler issued a letter which approved the establishment of a research and development center of the Waffen SS at the Skoda Works and the weapons plants Brno according to Hitler's orders.

This was the beginning of the activities of the so-called SS-think tank, also called the Kammler Group.

There, it developed a variety of activities and secret projects, many of which have remained largely unknown.

It is well known, however, that one of the tasks of the Kammler Group included a missile test program in an SS-led research center in Pilsen.

Some of these activities were related to the order from Hitler to Kammler, to accomplish the construction of an underground launch site for testing a smaller long-range rocket, which was intended as a prototype of an intercontinental ballistic weapon.

This missile, may have been the V-101.

Under this designation Dr. Büdewald and Dr. Teichmann 1944 began in Branch Příbram of the Skoda company with the development of a solid-propellant rocket.

This three-stage rocket had a length of 30 m and 2.8 m diameter and weighed 140 tons. It is known that the first-stage powder engine was designed for a thrust of 100 tons and its theoretical range was 1,800 km at a maximum altitude of 200 km. to ensure that all European destinations would fall within the range of V-101.

Apparently, this performance was much greater than specified in Fritz Hahn's book "Weapons and Secret Weapons of the German Army".

We know virtually nothing about the true performance of this V-101 solid rocket because the project documents for this development were seized by the Americans, and have not shown up to date, and there are no documents or pictures of the V-101, although in a document from the former GDR, it is stated that the V-101 has been fully developed in the Skoda plant in Pribran, and tested successfully in Rudisleben, on 16 March 1945 in a launch towards northern Norway.

With a 12-kilogram homing system from Siemens, the target was missed by only 6 meters, at a distance of over 2000 kilometers. Due to its solid drive, the V-101 was also better suitable, as opposed to the V2, for use in launching silos. ,

Further proof of the V-101's existence is an American secret report of 19 January 1945 dealing with an estimate of the expected German weapons development in that year. Among other things, it is mentioned, that it was known that there were larger rockets than the V2, and that these might show up in smaller numbers during the following year.

They would, however, have a much larger warhead than the V2. The size of the new rocket was estimated as 68 feet [compared to 45 feet for the V2] indicated, however, the A-a9/A-10 also can not have been indicated.

The "Amerika" rocket could only carry the same 1 ton explosive charge as the V2 and had a length of 84.7 feet [25.8 m].

It must therefore be asked whether besides the A-9 / A-10 "'Amerika" rocket, at EMW Peenemünde there was also the V-101 "Europa" rocket, at the SS Skoda works in Pilsen.

Czech Episode of Nazi Rocket Science Uncovered by Historian
Chris Johnstoner
Radio Praha
29 June 2015

Germany’s use of long range rockets towards the end of WWII in a desperate but vain attempt to turn around the tide of the war, is a well known episode in history.
So is the fact that many of the German experts were drafted in by the victors to help with the United States and Soviet rocket programmes.
But a late Czech chapter in the attempt to develop new super weapons and rockets is little known and still shrouded with questions.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nazi Germany could congratulate itself when it marched into what remained of the Czech Republic in March 1939.

As well as a large booty of arms and munitions from what was regarded as one of the best prepared armies in Europe, the Nazis also took possession of some impressive weapons producers, notably Škoda Plzeň and Zbrojovka Brno.

But while using the arms production capacity now on hand for the new wars on the horizon, the Nazis appeared slow to take advantage of the technical knowledge and research facilities that had been developed in Bohemia and Moravia.

But as WWII began to turn against the Nazis in the key year of 1943, they decided to try and get the most out of the Czech researchers, technicians, and scientists at their disposal and decided to group them together in a new research facility that would be set up at Příbram in buildings that had been used by the national mining authority.

Michal Plavec, curator of the aviation collection at the National Technical Museum in Prague, has scoured archives in several countries to piece together the history of the research facility.

He takes up the story:

“The Germans decided that it could be very bad to leave unused the capacity of Czech technicians and scientists and that is why they tried to renew the research institute which was under Škoda Plzeň.

"And that is why this was such a conglomerate of three factories Škoda Plzeň, and Zbrojovka Brno Explosia Semtín.

"And they were involved in mainly rocket research, artillery, and the production of armoured vehicles".

Co-operation

How willing the Czech co-operation was in this small part of the vast Hermann Göring armaments empire is difficult to tell.

It appears likely that Czech technicians and researchers were given small parts of larger projects to work on so that they did not have a full picture of the development work that they were working on.

One prominent Czech mathematician, František Čuřík, committed suicide in June 1944, according to some reports because he had been asked to work at the new institute on the ballistic computation of the V-2 missiles for the Nazi war effort.

Čuřík’s friends and colleagues said he saw no other way out to prevent himself from taking part in what he regarded as treason.

Others have questioned this interpretations of Čuřík’s death saying it was unlikely that he would be trusted by the Germans with such sensitive work and that they already had sufficient German experts of their own.

In any case, the real change in the Waffen-Union Skoda-Brunn establishment, as it was know in German, did not come until August 1944 when a 38-strong team of German rocket scientists and researchers were evacuated from West Prussia to Příbram to prevent their capture from the advancing Red Army.

They joined the existing staff which numbered just over 300.

The head of the German team was one of Germany’s top rocket scientists, Rolf Engel, an enthusiastic Nazi who also had the SS rank of Hauptsturmführer.

Engel, together with a young and eventually more famous Wernher Von Braun, had been among a small group to develop German rocket science in the early 1930s.

One of his top assistants was the Swede Nils Werner Larsson.

The end of the war was fast approaching and by the Russians had already overrun the Germans’ main rocket research facilities at Peenemünde in early 1945 and most of their fixed launch sites.

But the research in Příbram continued.

Michal Plavec continues:

"It was really at the end of the war and a lot of projects were left only on paper.

"But the significance was that when the war would be ended later then some of the projects on paper could be put into practice.

"I think that one of the most influential projects was the so-called V-101 rocket..

"It was a long distance rocket - its weight was 140 tons of which 100 tons were fuel.

"Its velocity was around 2,000 kilometers per hour with an altitude of some 200 kilometres and range of 1,800 kilometers".

Cutting edge

However megalomaniac the projects seemed in the background of the crumbling and shrinking Third Reich, Germany had invested massive resources in rocket science.

It is estimated that the sums far exceeded the US spending on developing the atomic bomb.

And the scientists had become world leaders in a domain whose strategic significance was to become all too clear with the dawning of the nuclear era.

The Soviets and Allies by the end of the war were frantically seeking to grab all the documents and research and rocket equipment they could.

Most of the German scientists faced the question of whom they should surrender to and divulge their secrets.

One worry widely shared was that fanatic Nazis might order all the scientists to be killed so that their secrets would die with them.

Michal Plavec says many questions still remain unanswered.

"I suppose that much is still left. But we know for sure about two leading people in Versuchsamstalt Pribrams.

"Rolf Engel, who co-operated with the German professor Hermann Oberth who was the pioneer of German rocket science. Rolf Engel was involved in rocket science after WWII in France and then Egypt.

"And his Deputy Nils Werner Larsson, a Swede by nationality. He was probably involved in Soviet space rocket development and his life is still largely unknown for us".

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Rolf Engel enjoyed a colourful career after the war.

He went on to become a consultant for the French national office for aeronautic studies and research from 1946 to 1952.

There followed a five year stint as a consultant with the Egyptian Airforce. He then went to work in Rome to help develop guided missile systems.

And after 15 years abroad he returned to West Germany to head up the new space division of MBB, a company formed in part from the remains of the Messerschmitt plane maker.

He authored a book on the history of rockets and missiles and was an outspoken critic of détente.

He frequently warned of Soviet plans to take over the whole of Europe and specifically to get a lead in space from the construction of an orbiting battle station.

Nils Werner Larsson appears to be like a character from a Graham Greene novel.

He was arrested by Swedish police when he returned to the country he quit in 1943.

He was put on trial for first offering Swedish secrets to the Nazis, apparently the designs of a machine pistol, to gain credibility with them.

And he was also charged with handing over Nazi secrets to the Allies at the end of the war.

Larsson popped up again in 1960 at a press conference in Hamburg, Germany, sayng he had worked with Soviet and Warsaw Pact rocket science specialists between 1953 and 1959.

He claimed to have been a double agent for the West. He appeared to disappear soon afterwards.

And the Czech scientists who co-operated on the original German programmes, however reluctantly?

Plavec says that none of them appeared before the courts after the war whatever might have been the questions about their collaboration and they do not appear to have been tracked down to help with the US or Soviet rocket race either.

They were probably happy to get back to their past work and close the painful chapter on their Pribram war service.

During the final phase of the war, Kammler was reportedly scheming to make a deal with the Americans, using his advanced weapons and specialists as leverage.

By 18 April 1945, Kammler had disappeared without trace.

Did Kammler negotiate successfully with the U.S. to realize his escape from justice?

The fact that the U.S. official documents had virtually nothing on this central figure in the technological world of the Reich certainly hinted conversely that Kammler was very important to the U.S. and that the latter had something to hide about him.

Adding to this suspicion was what Voss said about his interview with the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps.

When Voss told the agents about Kammler's secret weapons program, he saw that the Americans were not surprised by it and therefore had to conclude that they somehow already had this information.

Voss also noted that the agents were simply not interested in finding Kammler.

Additionally, it was found that "there were dozens of high-ranking former SS or Party members that had never been called to account. They had simply disappeared. Many of them shared the distinction of having had access to highly advanced technology".

Kammler was a ruthless and powerful SS officer who had committed numerous war crimes. Even Operation Paperclip would have had great trouble importing him into the United States.

It probably could have been done under extreme secrecy, but the operation would have been too risky and extensive to appear manageable to U.S. agents - unless, Kammler had something so spectacular that the Americans just had to have, perhaps some exotic technology developed in one of his top-secret projects.

Dr-Ing Hans Kammler had a bargaining chip with the Allies in "Operation Sunrise", the secret surrender negotiated by the OSS with elements of the SS.

Generalleutnant Walter Dornberger stated to General Johannes Fink that Kammler had been ordered by the Führer not to let Braun, Dornberger and the 450 scientists and technicians at Peenemünde fall into Anglo-American hands but to liquidate them all beforehand.

It was a huge risk to Kammler's own personal safety to evacuate all the Peenemünde staff in April 1945 to Oberammergau, Bavaria, contrary to Hitler's orders.

Why else would Kammler do so unless it was a bargaining chip for negotiations with the OSS [Operation Sunrise].

Members of Kammler's staff claimed he was still alive at Jacin in Czechoslovakia late in April 1945.

Enter into the picture a Junkers Ju-290 A-5 aircraft with constructor's number 110178.

This aircraft was withdrawn from Luftwaffe service and rebuilt at Tempelhof into a civil aircraft in September 1944. It was given Deutsche Lufthansa markings and civil serial as D-AITR "Bayern". Conversion was completed October 1944.

Flughauptman Paul Sluzalek flew this aircraft from Prag to exile in Barcelona on 26 April 1945. It had a number of SS personnel aboard whom the Spanish have always refused to identify.

Was Kammler a passenger with the blessings of the OSS?

Both SS Lt Gen Hans Kammler and Adolf Eichmann were close to Prag about this same time and both disappeared.

Although Eichmann is supposed to have escaped overland to Genoa, there is a very clear possibility that Kammler could have flown out of Prague and just maybe Eichman was with him on that Ju-290.

While everybody has speculated on the fate of Martin Bormann, the real scandal must be OSS dealings with Kammler.

Extract from:
"The Hunt For Zero Point: One Man's Journey To Discover The Biggest Secret Since The Invention Of The Atom Bomb" by Nick Cook

The key man was a German engineer and administrator, Hans Kammler, who began as a civil servant with the Reich Air Ministry but whose ambition led him to the SS, where he became head of the Building and Works divisions that masterminded the concentration camps.

Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister for Armaments, noted that Kammler was "blond, blue-eyed, long-headed, always neatly dressed and well bred ... capable of unexpected decisions at any minute".'

the SS, not the Luftwaffe, controlled Hitler's secret weapons programme and Kammler, a qualified engineer, soon became deeply involved.

He was clever and cruel:

20,000 slave workers died creating the vast galleried complex hacked out under the Harz Mountains in Germany, where Kammler oversaw production of V1 rockets.

One day in March 1945, the guards hanged 52 people in Gallery 41, tying a dozen at a time to a beam, which was then pulled up by a crane.

Those next in line were forced to watch. These were Kammler's hallmarks.

Kammler rose to the rank of SS General, in charge not only of all aircraft and missile programmes but also his own high powered research and development thinktank.

He set up his secret operation in the vast Skoda industrial complex in Czechoslovakia, a country the SS regarded as its own private domain.

Scientists there were working on weapons systems so futuristic that they made Germany's V1 and V2 rocket bombs look pedestrian.

Among these were nuclear power plants for rockets and aircraft, highly sophisticated guided weapons and anti-aircraft lasers.

But there was more.

A Polish source told me the extraordinary story of "The Bell"'.

experiments had been taking place in a mine close to the Czech border.

They involved feeding large doses of electricity into an underground chamber where a bell-shaped device emitted a pale blue light.

Five scientists exposed to the device had died of side-effects. Word had it that they were investigating some kind of anti-gravitational effect.

The Bell, which was about the height of a man and glowed during testing, was made of hard, heavy metal, filled with a violet mercury-like substance.

This metallic liquid was stored in a flask, encased in lead three centimeters thick.

Experiments always took place under a thick ceramic cover and involved the rapid spinning of two cylinders in opposite directions.

The chamber in which the experiments took place was deep below ground.

Only The Bell itself was preserved after a series of tests, each lasting about one minute. Even the room was destroyed and rebuilt.

Various plants, and animals such as frogs, mice and rats, were exposed to The Bell's sphere of influence.

Rapid decay set in and people who helped conduct the experiments suffered from sleep problems, memory loss and muscle spasms.

One of the terms used was "vortex compression". Another was "magnetic fields separation". Both were associated with anti-gravity.

These secrets were undoubtedly Kammler's ticket to safety once war had ended. By mid April of 1945 Kammler had dropped off the map.

He was a leading Nazi, implicated in the Final Solution yet protracted searches in the US National Archives yielded not a single mention. Even the archives at the Imperial War Museum [in London] were of little help, much to the concern of the librarian, who believed that he could have been "red lined" (as in, his files had been removed).

How could this monster, the most powerful individual outside Hitler's inner circle, be so easily forgotten?

It was only as I gazed at the single wartime picture that exists of Kammler in his General's uniform, striding for the camera, his cap with death's head badge enough to one side to betray more than a hint of vanity - that I began to understand. Kammler was fair.

Take away the uniform, and he could have been any 40 year old European male. In the chaos of the collapsing Reich, Kammler could have gone anywhere, assumed any persona, and no one would have noticed.

More Pictures of Hans Kammler

Kammler, who had moved his HQ to Munich, told Albert Speer he would offer the Americans "jet planes and rockets". He also let slip he had "other developments" up his sleeve.

He probably went east, back to his "'special projects group" in Czechoslovakia, rather than simply wait for the Americans to arrive in Munich.

He had a twofold purpose in making his dangerous journey. First, to retrieve the mother lode of documentation and blueprints. And second, to hide it prior to setting up the deal, which would buy his freedom.

Although the Skoda Works were in, the Soviet zone of occupation, US forces had the run of the place for six days before the Red Army turned up.

Plenty of time to remove something you want if you know it is there. Or ignore it, if you have it already.

The Americans appeared indifferent to any pointers towards Kammler. Had he already done a deal with the Americans? The answer must be yes.

The Bell was removed by a special SS evacuation team just before the Russians arrived.

More than 60 Scientists working on the experiment were then ruthlessly killed to preserve the secrets of the mine. The Bell was shipped out but to where?

One possibility was using one of the northern Adriatic ports that remained in German hands.

A U-Boat commander could conceivably have run the gauntlet of the Allies to evacuate cargo and personnel by sea. Another possibility was a heavy transport plane used by a special German air force wing and flown under an enemy or neutral flag.

Either way, Kammler had the means to move thousands of tons of documentation, equipment and personnel pretty much where he wanted.

June 1945: American forces enter the huge underground complexes at Nordhausen in the Alps.

They capture V-1, V-2 and prototype V-4 rockets. Many experimental aircraft are discovered, including disc, and triangular craft.

All featured either piston or jet powered forms of propulsion. Allegations have been made about the discovery of blueprints and documents describing an anti-gravity propulsion unit as well as plans for the peace-time exploration of space.

At the same time, over 200 of the newest model XXI submarines are missing from their pens.

The entire German Bank was missing [Guinness book of world records lists this as the largest unsolved bank heist in history] Over 2,000 Nazi scientists were missing and almost 200,00 people from the general population were never found. This figure did not include war dead, POW’s and MIA’s already accurately recorded.

At the end of the Second World War, via captured technology from Germany that has never seen the light of day, America acquired knowledge of the most dangerous kind.

Whatever the secrets, of The Bell and other technology, the German secret weapons programme had yielded the ability to design a radically different form of aircraft.

A craft that was "circular or elliptical", made no sound and could turn on a sixpence.

And one involving a process, which could also be harnessed to create a weapon more destructive than the hydrogen bomb.

With the help of German-derived science, America's technological lead over the rest of the world accelerated after the war. Kammler's secrets from the Skoda Works had moved 4,000 miles to the west and Kammler had come with it.

The extensive US recruitment programme would have bent over backwards to accommodate Kammler, keeper of the Third Reich's most exotic military secrets.

There is evidence that the Americans did produce such technology.

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

Twining went on to write that it was possible "within the present US knowledge provided extensive detailed development is undertaken to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the object above which would be capable of an approximate range of 7,000 miles..."

His memo was written just three months after the supposed crash of a UFO at Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947 - the period many people tout as the real start of the modern UFO sightings.

Reports of an alien spacecraft being struck by lightning and crashing late at night in early July 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico, were the beginnings of the most compelling event in all UFO lore.

Originally reported in the "Fort Worth Star-Telegram" and confirmed by military officials as authentic, the report was later refuted by the military and the crash remains were claimed to be nothing more than a weather balloon.

Area 51 has come to be associated with UFO's.

There are stories that the flying saucer that allegedly crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, had been brought to the Nellis Complex where it was under study.

Not all attempts to produce disc technology were successful.

It emerged, during the 1959 hearings of the Space Committee of the US Congress, that the US Department of Defense had been working with the Avro Canada company to develop a "flying saucer".

The Avrocar, as it was called, was the brainchild of gifted British engineer John Frost, who had moved to Canada after the war.

News leaked as early as 1953, when a Canadian newspaper revealed plans for it to take off and land vertically, and fly at 1,500 mph.

It was easy to see why Avro played down reports of the Avrocar. One look at the prototype, underpowered and unstable, was enough to confirm it would never achieve supersonic flight.

It became an aviation joke, which drifted into obscurity. Yet, that may have been the intention.

Recently declassified papers show that Avro was working on a range of flying saucers capable of eclipsing existing jet-fighters.

And the US air force had bought Avro's disc-shaped designs for craft called Project Silverbug, capable of almost instant high-speed turns in any direction.

Were the Americans using the Canadians to perfect the aerodynamics of a flying saucer?

Or had the disastrous Avro programme been hushed up to avoid embarrassment?

Either way, it showed that man-made flying saucers existed.

There was no golden age, as 'The G-Engines Are Coming!' had predicted.

At least, not in the open.

But I discovered evidence of mysterious aircraft which chimed with reduced gravity systems.

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

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

Although never officially confirmed, "Aurora" was developed by the Lockheed Skunk Works during the 1980s.

The space plane was designed to operate either in a manned or unmanned mode.

Its Cold War mission was to penetrate the anti-missile defenses surrounding Moscow at Mach 8+ speeds and deliver nuclear bombs onto multiple targets.

Aurora was described as a very large diamond-shaped vehicle and most likely powered by a hybrid jet-rocket engine technology.

he craft could attain speeds in excess of 8,000 miles an hour and fly at altitudes of over 50 miles. was armed with over a dozen nuclear warheads.

It was developed to be both manned and unmanned, because of its dual missions - peacetime reconnaissance and wartime nuclear strike vehicle.

During times of peace, the Aurora carried manned crews to supervise surveillance.

During wartime, the very powerful Aurora accelerated and changed directions at speeds that would crush a human under the high G forces.

Aurora's nuclear strike mission was intended to be without a pilot because a human simply would not survive the ride.

However, Aurora had two great drawbacks: its price tag and its mission.

Aurora reportedly was retired from service in the late 1990s due to budget constraints. Each vehicle reportedly cost over $2 billion. The price of Aurora operations could not be justified when the Cold War ended.

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

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

I also discovered evidence of the Pentagon's enormous "black budgets"', which finance deeply classified defence programmes.

To those who spend their time scanning reams of dry defense-spending documents, the Black Budget is a well-known bit of excitement.

It is the discrepancy that is left when all the known weapons procurements, research programs, and technical developments are added up. This year, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the U.S. military's black budget will rise to levels not seen since the 1980s, from $16.2 billion last year [2001] to $20.3 billion.

Huge amounts of money have been spent, often in areas of the US where UFO reports are most common. What happened to Kammler's secrets, and was anti-gravity among them?

Obergruppenführer Dr.Ing. Hans Kammler and General George S. Patton

Pilsen and the Skoda Works were captured by Combat Command B Third Armored Division, the same unit that captured Kammler's unique metropolis, with its treasure trove of missiles and jet engines, at Nordhausen in Saxony on 11 April, 1945.

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

World War Two ended in Europe with the armored divisions of U.S. General George S. Patton's Third Army lunging deep into the tottering Third Reich, toward Arnstadt in Thuringia and toward the immense Skoda munitions works at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia.

This little appreciated fact links together two of the war's most famous and powerful generals and perhaps affords a basis to speculate on the real reasons for the mysterious death of the one, and the equally mysterious "death" of the other.

The generals in question are General Patton, well-known to military history and America's most famous and capable field commander during the war in Europe, and SS Obergruppenführer Dr. Ing. [Doctor of Engineering] Hans Kammler, little known to popular history, by the end of the war, the Third Reich's plenipotentiary for all secret weapons research, responsible directly to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and to Adolf Hitler himself.

There is some entity within the Third Reich that appears to have co-ordinated extremely sensitive and secret weapons research projects, including possible oversight of Germany's apparently large Uranium enrichment program.

This entity first came to public light in the aftermath of World War Two, in the 1950s, in a series of publications in West Germany, and in a book by former German major Rudolf Lusar.

These publications alleged that Nazi Germany had created and successfully tested "unusual" aircraft, including flying disks or saucers.

Thus was born the "Nazi Legend" of the "real origin" of UFOs. The Nazi Legend maintained that this secretive development occurred under the direct auspices of the SS.

The allegations of an ultra-top secret entity co-ordinating and controlling the Nazi secret weapons research in the final years of the war tended to be discounted, along with its more sensational component, the "Flying Saucers" themselves.

Moreover, discounting these allegations was easy to do, since they rested upon the isolated testimony of a disenchanted German major with definite Nazi sympathies [Lusar] and the "eye witness" statements of one or two others who came forward to corroborate the story, each with their own shady associations.

All that gradually began to change, however, by a sequence of events ranging from the publication of a book by a former British Intelligence officer, Tom Agoston, in 1985, by the German reunification itself in 1989, which made a host of archives of the former East Germany available to researchers.

A number of books have appeared in Germany since the reunification made these archives accessible, and moreover, the formerly inaccessible SS secret underground facilities and complexes finally became accessible to the public.

ided and abetted in their efforts by the declassification of several documents by the Clinton administration in the United States, German researchers began to probe the new information, reconnecting the dots, and presenting a chilling picture of the actual state of Nazi wartime research and its enormous discrepancy with the post-war Allied Legend.

This body of work has been almost entirely ignored in North America.

Agoston's work was the first indication from the "mainstream" that there may have been something behind the Nazi Legend.

Agoston revealed his story for the first time after his source, none other than close Kammler associate at the famous Skoda Works, Dr. Wilhelm Voss, died. The story that Voss told Agoston at the end of the war was, according to Agoston, in confidence.

As Agoston notes rather sarcastically, Kammler boasted almost the perfect "corporate resume" and a documentable record of "whole person management" as a "team player":

A modern day management consultant who was talent hunting for a "total professional with total involvement" would certainly have been fascinated by the bizarre curriculum vitae Kammler could have submitted. He could demonstrate a "track record" in "very senior appointments," with skill in putting across "aggressive growth plans."...

The most prominent post-reunification German sources for this story are

Friedrich Georg's series on secret weapons, "Hitler's Siegeswaffen" series in three volumes
The studies of Edgar Mayer and Thomas Mehner, "Das Geheimnis der Deutschen Atombombe"; "Die Atombombe und das Dritte Reich"; "Hitler und die 'Bombe"
Harald Fath's "1945 -Thüringens Manhattan Projekt and Geheime Kommandosache - S III Jonastal und die Siegeswaffenproduktion".

Also not to be neglected is Robert K. Wilcox's "Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race against Time to Build its Own Atomic Bomb", for the latter book raises the question of where Japan acquired its enrichment capability and stocks of Uranium in no uncertain terms.

Also important is Karl Heinz Zunneck's "Geheimtechnologien, Wunderwaffen und die irdischen Facetten des UFO-Phanomens".

In the the Third Reich, within a span of a few years, the number of positions Kammler had held in turn was phenomenal.

Among these "senior appointments" he once commanded were:

Operational control of the V-l and V-2 terror bombardments of London, Liege, Brussels, Antwerp and Paris;
Operational control of all missile production and research, including the V-2 and the intercontinental ballistic missile. the A9/10;
Design and construction oversight of the world's "first bombproof underground aircraft and missile factory sites," including sites for the production of jet engines and the Messerschmitt 262;
Command of the SS Building and Words Division, the department which handled all large construction projects for the Reich, including death camps, "Buna factories," and supply roads for invading German legions in Russia;
Design and construction of the world's first underground testing and proving range for missiles;
Command, control and coordination of all of the Third Reich's secret weapons research by the war's end. 4

This warped and twisted administrative genius first came to the attention of Himmler and Hitler "with a brilliant hand-colored design for the Auschwitz concentration camp, which he subsequently built. Later he was called in to advise on the modalities for boosting the daily output of its gas chambers from 10,000 to 60,000".

All this is to say that not only was Kammler a butcher, but that by the war's end, Hitler had "concentrated more power in Kammler's hands than he had ever entrusted to a single person", bar none.

If one were to compare Kammler's position to a similar hypothetical position in the former Soviet Union, such a position would mean that the general who [commanded] the SS rockets in Europe and Asia [the Commander in Chief of Strategic Rocket Forces] would also head research, development, and production of missiles.

In addition, he would be in charge of producing all modern aircraft for the Red Air Force and have overall command of the mammoth civil engineering projects or the production centers in Siberia's sub-zero climate. Last, but very much not least, he would lead the national grid of Gulags.

To match Kammler's position in the SS, the Soviet general holding all these variegated commands would also be third in the KGB pecking order.

Indeed, one would have to add to Agoston's list, for such a Soviet general would also have had to be in charge of the co-ordination of all the most post-nuclear and super secret advanced scientific research and black projects in the entire Soviet Union.

It is thus in the person of SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler that all the lines of investigation meet: the Buna factory and slave labor of the camps, exploited for grizzly medical experimentation and labor in the secret underground laboratories and production facilities, the atom bomb project, and as even more horrendous and monstrous aircraft and weapons development.

If there was a gold mine of information, then it was available in the blueprints and files that were locked in Kammler's vaults, or even more securely in his brain. It is this fact and Kammler's extraordinary dossier that make his post-war fate even more problematical.

But what of Kammler's "Special SS Command" [Sonderkommando] structure itself? What was it that was so revolutionary that Dr. Voss would have required Agoston to maintain confidentiality until after his death?

Voss had joined Skoda in 1938, when the plant was ceded to the Reich under the Munich Pact - Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and Daladier, allotting the Sudeten German areas of Czechoslovakia to Germany and became an affiliate of Hitler's principle arms maker Krupp.

With his flair for quiet diplomacy, Voss was immensely popular with the Czech executives, who had remained in leading positions at the time of the German takeover of Skoda.

Voss even saw to it that Czech workers, paid on the local and not Reich wages, were paid more money.

Also important to the Skoda-SS relationship is the fact that all of Bohemian Czechoslovakia became a "Reich Protectorate," in effect turning total political, administrative, and military control of Bohemia over to the SS. It is in this context that the special relationship between Voss and Kammler developed.

By quirk of fate, the careers of Kammler and Voss overlapped at Skoda, where they jointly set up and operated what was generally regarded by insiders as the Reich's most advanced high-technology military research center.

Working as a totally independent undercover operation for the SS, the center was under the special auspices of Hitler and Himmler.

Going outside the scope and field of Skoda's internationally coveted general research and development division, it worked closely with Krupp and was primarily concerned with analysis of captured equipment, including aircraft, and copying or improving the latest technical features. In so doing the SS group was to go beyond the first generation of secret weapons.

Thus one has the first component of this Special SS Command: the analysis, duplication, and improvement of all recovered foreign and enemy technology. This in itself is not surprising, since all major combatants during the war maintained such research facilities.

The second thing one must note is the careful and deliberate camouflaging of the SS Special Command inside the normal engineering division of the Skoda works. But the real operational goals of this Special command were far more than the mere analysis of captured enemy equipment, as Voss detailed to Agoston.

Its purpose was to pave the way for building nuclear-powered aircraft, working on the application of nuclear energy for propelling missiles and aircraft; laser beams, then still referred to as "death rays"; a variety of homing rockets and to seek other potential areas for high- technology breakthrough.

In modem high-tech jargon, the operation would probably be referred to as an "SS research think tank." Some work on second-generation secret weapons, including the application of nuclear propulsion for aircraft and missiles, was already well advanced.

Nuclear powered aircraft would require the development and miniaturization of functioning atomic reactors, something the Germans were not, according to the Allied Legend, supposed to have achieved. And though the mention of lasers seems to stretch one's credulity beyond all reason, there is credible evidence that the Germans were up to just that, and more besides.

But the most remarkable thing about this "SS think tank" was that it was established entirely without the knowledge of Göring, Speer, or any of the other big-wigs or research centers in the Reich. This would not only explain Speer's puzzlement at Jackson's question, but would also explain the apparent lack of information on the part of the Farm Hall scientists interred in England after the war.

The claim that the Germans experimented with an atomic bomb recalls one of the more bizarre moments from the main Nuremberg trial, 21 June 1946 - the American prosecutor's cross-examination of Albert Speer, the former Munitions Minister:

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And certain experiments were also conducted and certain researches conducted in atomic energy, were they not?

SPEER: We had not got as far as that, unfortunately, because the finest experts we had in atomic research had emigrated to America, and this had thrown us back a great deal in our research, so that we still needed another year or two in order to achieve any results in the splitting of the atom.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: The policy of driving people out who didn't agree with Germany hadn't produced very good dividends, had it?

SPEER: Especially in this sphere it was a great disadvantage to us.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Now, I have certain information, which was placed in my hands, of an experiment which was carried out near Auschwitz and I would like to ask you if you heard about it or knew about it.

The purpose of the experiment was to find a quick and complete way of destroying people without the delay and trouble of shooting and gassing and burning, as it had been carried out, and this is the experiment, as I am advised.

A village, a small village was provisionally erected, with temporary structures, and in it approximately 20,000 Jews were put.

By means of this newly invented weapon of destruction, these 20,000 people were eradicated almost instantaneously, and in such a way that there was no trace left of them; that it developed, the explosive developed, temperatures of from 400 to 500 [degrees] centigrade and destroyed them without leaving any trace at all.

Do you know about that experiment?

SPEER: No, and I consider it utterly improbable. If we had had such a weapon under preparation, I should have known about it. But we did not have such a weapon.

It is clear that in chemical warfare attempts were made on both sides to carry out research on all the weapons one could think of, because one did not know which party would start chemical warfare first.

These two facts alone indicate that the SS Special Command headquartered at the Skoda Works in Pilsen was more than just a secret weapons project being run through ordinary channels.

Unlike even its Manhattan Project counterpart, it had no connection to the standard branches of the German military, the German state, or even the Nazi Party; it was entirely off the books. It is, in every sense that we have come to know it, a Black Project, coordinating all black projects in Nazi Germany. So extensive was the mandate given to this group that if there was a large uranium enrichment program underway in Germany for the production of atom bombs, then this is the entity most likely coordinating it.

Agoston alludes to the existence and connection of the Uranium enrichment program to the Kammler Staff when he states

"Even fissile Uranium-235 was reportedly made available to Berlin's prime Axis Ally".

While the enormous implications of this statement are obvious, Agoston does not pursue the atom bomb component of the Kammler Staff in his book, though he surely would have suspected it.

The link of the Auschwitz "Buna plant" to the SS via the death camp there already provides one link to Kammler, since the "Buna plant" fell under SS jurisdiction via the camp itself, and thus the connection to Kammler is direct.

Moreover, not only did Skoda's "overtly operating research and development division" work closely with the SS on some less sensitive projects, it "provided a convenient cover for the Kammler Staff specialists, culled in great secrecy from Germany's research institutes to supplement the in-house experts.

All were picked for their know-how and not for their Party records, Voss said.

All had to have the ability to tackle visionary projects.

"The Kammler Staff Special Command even circulated top secret scientific paper and memos to the various scientists within the group itself via a central office of scientific reports.

"Some of these reports were then used as a basis of recruitment of top scientists".

So what was the Kammler Staff, or Kammlerstab, as outlined by Voss and Agoston?

First, it was the continuation of "normal" science, free of the constraints of Nazi party ideology, but under the control of the SS! But it was much more.

Not only was it a "think tank," but it was also a central clearing house for ideas, for mapping out precise technology trees for the acquisition of second and third generation weapons.

But it was more, it was also a fully-funded research Black Programs coordinating office with its own "inexhaustible" and expendable labor pool.

All of it was co-ordinated by SS General Hans Kammler. All of it was headquartered at the Skoda Works in Pilsen.

And one more thing.

By the war's end, Kammler also had control of the Reich's heavy-lift long range transport aircraft, consisting of several Ju 290s and the two enormous Ju 390s, one of which, according to Agoston, made a polar flight to Japan on 28 March 1945.

This fact is merely reported by Agoston without substantiation, leading one to the conclusion that the source of the information must have been Dr. Voss.

It is worth noting that Nick Cook reports that Kammler had control of the Ju 390s as part of another SS Special Evacuation Command, which was the brainchild of none other than Martin Bormann.

The purpose of this special command was to evacuate.... something. Cook reports that one of these enormous Ju 390s simply went missing at the end of the war.

If ever there was a reason for the Allied High Command to by-pass Berlin and head south to central Germany [Thuringia] and for Patton's Third Army to make a beeline for Pilsen and Prague, this was it.

Thus, only in the recently revealed context of the existence of the Kammlerstab do any of the Allied or German military deployments or operations at the end of the war make any genuine military sense.

The "National Redoubt" story was likely just that, a story put out by the American OSS to force the Allied commanders to change objectives, without disclosing the real nature of their concerns, priorities, and intelligence objectives.

General Kammler, in addition to his "accomplishments" in streamlining death camp efficiency, his methodical and efficient leveling of the ruined Warsaw Ghetto and meticulous accounting of every last brick and stone removed, his co-ordination of the most arcane, and perhaps the biggest, secret weapons black projects program in human history, has also another odd distinction to his credit.

He of all the high-ranking Nazis indicted and tried at Nuremberg either posthumously or in absentia, was never formally indicted, much less brought to trial.

He is altogether missing from the docket, and altogether just simply missing. Kammler has yet another distinction.

He appears to have been not only a very accomplished messenger of death for others, but also appears to have achieved the astonishing feat of having died himself no less than four times, each under different circumstances.

Agoston commented at length on the odd assortment of "facts" surrounding Kammler's fate:

The "first death of General Hans Kammler" is recounted by Albert Speer himself, in his last book.

In this most simple version, Kammler ordered his adjutant to shoot him. The "suicide" allegedly took place in Prague as Kammler realized the war was lost and, according to Speer, "acted in elitist SS loyalty".

As Agoston quips, "even the most ardent worshipper of Teutonic creed could not possibly suggest that elitist SS loyalty can be demonstrated three times, in three locations, and all on the same day.."

The second version of the story, related to Agoston by Kammler's "civilian" aide Dr. Wilhelm Voss, was that the general took cyanide somewhere "on the road between Pilsen and Prague on May 9."

The third version of Kammler's death was doled out by V-2 rocket expert, General Walter Dornberger, subsequently employed by the American firm of Bell Aerospace.

According to Dornberger, Kammler's mental and emotional state had quickly deteriorated in the final days of the war, and the general overheard Kammler ordering his aide to shoot him if things became "hopeless".

But this does not square with Dornberger's close associate, Dr. Werner von Braun's own recollection of a conversation he overheard between Kammler and his aide Starck fully two weeks later.

According to von Braun, Kammler and Starck discussed the possibility of "going underground" before the Americans arrived, disguising themselves as monks in a nearby abbey.

This report, if true, is perhaps the most interesting, since it indicates that Kammler had no intentions of surrendering himself to any of the Allied powers, but rather, intended to survive, perhaps independently continuing his oversight of secret weapons development.

Another version of Kammler's death has him giving a speech to his assembled aides in Prague in early May 1945, dismissing them from their duties and advising them to return home, and then walking into a woods where he then shot himself.

And lastly, there is a version of Kammler's death that has him dying a typical SS hero's death, fighting and going down in a blaze of "glory" in the face of rebelling and revolting Czechs.

Death

There are different accounts of Kammler's death:

• That he committed suicide with a cyanide capsule on 7 May 1945.
• That he shot himself in the head on 9 May 1945.
• That he asked his aide Zeuner to shoot him.
• That he was shot by his aide-de-camp in Prague.
• That the Soviets executed Kammler along with 200 other SS soldiers
• That he died in the USA many years after the war.

Preuk statement

On 9 July 1945 Kammler's widow petitioned to have him declared dead as of 9 May 1945, adducing a sworn statement by Kammler's driver, Kurt Preuk, according to which Preuk had personally seen "the corpse of Kammler and been present at his burial" on 9 May 1945. The District Court of Berlin-Charlottenburg ruled on 7 September 1948 that his death was officially established as 9 May 1945.

In a later sworn statement on 16 October 1959, Preuk stated that Kammler's date of death was "about 10 May 1945", but that he did not know the cause of death. However, it must be recognised that many ex Nazis made many sworn statements, to suit many ends.

On 7 September 1965, Heinz Zeuner [a wartime aide of Kammler's], stated that Kammler had died on 7 May 1945 and that his corpse had been observed by Zeuner, Preuk and others.

All the eyewitnesses consulted were certain that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning.

In addition to testifying to Kammler's suicide by cyanide, Zeuner also claimed earlier that Kammler had asked Zeuner to shoot him. However, doubt has been cast on Zeuner's evidence since he is reported to have told an earlier denazification hearing in February 1948 that he was already in US custody on 2 May 1945.

Zeuner's evidence in several sworn statements has subsequently been shown to conflict directly with declassified records.

In their accounts of Kammler's movements Preuk and Zeuner claimed that he left Linderhof near Oberammergau on 28 April 1945 for a tank conference at Salzburg and then went to Ebensee [where tank tracks were manufactured].

According to Preuk and Zeuner he then travelled back from Ebensee to visit his wife in the Tyrol region, when he gave her two cyanide tablets. The next day, 5 May, he is said to have departed Tyrol for Prague

However, Preuk and Zeuner's testimony clashes with the known movements of US Divisions throughout Austria in May 1945.

By 4 May 1945 the US 103rd Infantry was already at Innsbruck, preventing Kammler from travelling from Ebensee to Tyrol.

The US 88th Infantry division had arrived from Italy cutting off any route to the Tyrol from the south while the US 44th Infantry Division established a command post at Imst in Tyrol on 4 May 1945 and together with the 103rd entirely controlled the Tyrol region preventing Kammler from visiting his wife.

Preuk is quite clear that they drove everywhere so that it would have been impossible to bypass US checkpoints.

A further complication is that the 80th Infantry Division reached Ebensee on 4 May 1945, and the concentration camp itself was liberated by two M-18 tank destroyers of the US 80th Division at 2.50pm on 5 May 1945.

This would have made it highly likely that Kammler would have been apprehended by US forces.

Prague

Author Bernd Ruland, in his 1969 book "Wernher von Braun: Mein Leben für die Raumfahrt", reports an altogether different account of Kammler's death.

According to Ruland, Kammler arrived in Prague by aircraft on 4 May 1945, following which he and 21 SS men defended a Bunker against an attack by more than 500 Czech resistance fighters on 9 May.

During the attack, Kammler's aide-de-camp Sturmbannführer Starck shot Kammler to avoid him falling into enemy hands. This version can reportedly be traced to Walter Dornberger, who in turn is said to have heard it from eyewitnesses.

Controversy

In recent years Kammler has become associated with apocryphal Nazi super weapons such as "Die Glocke".

The first suggestion along these lines came from author Nick Cook, who in his "The Hunt for Zero Point" [2001] raised the possibility that Kammler was brought to the United States along with other German scientists as part of Operation Paperclip as a result of his supposed involvement in secret German projects.

Joseph P. Farrell's "Reich of the Black Sun" [2005] casts further doubt upon the facts surrounding his death, however Farrell's only source is the book "Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia" [1985] by self-identified "British Intelligence agent" Tom Agoston.

Post-war search for Kammler

US occupation forces conducted various inquiries into Kammler’s whereabouts, beginning with the headquarters of 12th Army ordering a complete inventory of all personnel involved in missile production on 21 May 1945.

This resulted in the creation of a file for Kammler, stating that he was possibly in Munich. The CIC noted that he had been seen shortly prior to the arrival of US troops in Oberjoch.

Rumours about Kammler's death either did not reach the US authorities or were disbelieved.

The Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee [CIOS] in London ordered a search for him in early July 1945.

In response, 12th Army replied on 14 July that he was last seen on 8/9 April in the Harz region. In August, Kammler's name made "List 13" of the UN for Nazi war criminals. Only in 1948 did the CIOS receive the information that Kammler reportedly fled to Prague and had committed suicide. The informant also claimed that Kammler had always carried his blueprints with him and that there was a rumour among his former close associates that Kammler was by now working in the Soviet Union.

Original blueprints of Kammler’s major projects were later found in the personal property of Samuel Goudsmit, the scientific leader of the Alsos Mission.

In June 1949, the denazification office of the US authorities in Hesse launched an inquiry into Kammler's political actions before the end of the war, not on his whereabouts.

The reason for this inquiry is not documented. However, a report written by one Oskar Packe on Kammler was subsequently filed.

The very thorough report stated on Kammler's whereabouts that he had been arrested by US troops on 9 May 1945 at the Messerschmitt works at Oberammergau.

However, Kammler and some other senior SS personnel had managed to escape in the direction of Austria or Italy. Packe disbelieved the reports about a suicide, as these were "refuted by the detailed information from the CIC" about arrest and escape.

More recently, additional material has come to light.

A CIC report from April 1946 listed SS officers known to be outside Germany that were considered to be of special interest to the CIC. That list included Kammler.

Moreover, in May 1945 the US authorities in Austria had ordered an inventory of German public property there.

These included construction sites for plane and missile production formerly run by the SS.

In mid-July 1945, the head of the Gmunden CIC office, Major Morrisson interviewed an unnamed German on the issue of a numbered account associated with these construction sites formerly overseen by Kammler. A report published years later, in late 1947/early 1948, stated that only Kammler and two other persons had access to the account.

The report also said that "shortly after the occupation, Hans Kammler appeared at CIC Gmunden and gave a statement on operations at Ebensee".

The CIC notes on the interview give no name, but the interviewee must have been one of the three people with access to the account. Aside from Kammler, one was known to have left Austria in May 1945, the other was in a POW camp during July.

Finally, Donald W. Richardson, a former special agent of the OSS, involved in the work of the Alsos Mission, claimed to be "the man who brought Kammler to the US".

Shortly before he died, Richardson reportedly told his sons about his experience during and after the war, including "Operation Paperclip".
According to them, Richardson claimed to have supervised Kammler until 1947. Kammler was supposedly "interned at a place of maximum security, with no hope, no mercy and without seeing the light of day until he hanged himself".

Possible last documented independent testimonies

A purported section of a wartime diary, relating to the surrender of Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Allied troops, mentions Kammler and his staff.

According to this account, Kammler and what the author refers to as his staff arrived in Oberammergau [north of Garmisch-Partenkirchen] on 22 April 1945.

The diary refers to a "staff" of some 600 people, with "good quality" cars and trucks.

This arrival seems to have been badly received and the local authorities had several arguments with Kammler himself.

These conflicts are mentioned in the entries for 23 and 25 April. The last reference to Kammler, not implicating him directly but his "staff", comes on the night of 28 April – an Oberleutnant Burger reports that they had gone, on the same night that American forces began storming Oberammergau, forcing their way to Garmisch and Austria.

This departure is backed up by a history of Oberammergau which notes that Kammler's "staff" moved just before the American offensive over the Tirol.

What precisely happened to Kammler at the end of World War Two is still not clear.

On 4 April 1945 British troops occupied an underground nuclear Bunker at Espelkamp, 10km north of Lübeck in Germany, according to Montgomery's HQ war diary found in PRO files at Kew Gardens.

There they discovered a number of staff cars, including five which appeared to have been used by Kammler and his staff. According to some accounts, they also found Kammler’s decomposing body in a water tank in the Bunker.

However, this seems to be an error as there is good evidence that Kammler had an extended meeting with Albert Speer on 13 April in Berlin, and ordered von Braun and his associates to be freed from Oberammergau on 27 April.

Walter Dornberger was also freed and mentions this in his memoirs.

This incurred Hitler's wrath and sparked orders to arrest and execute Kammler on that date.

Hitler had ordered such scientists to be held and executed to prevent their falling into Soviet hands.

In another account, Kammler was said to have been killed in a Bunker in Prague in May 1945 when it was over-run by Czech partisans, possibly when he was shot by his own adjutant on Kammler’s orders to stop him falling into the hands of Partisans, possibly during combat, accounts differ.

In yet another version, Kammler left Prague in a convoy heading south on 9 May [World War Two in Europe officially ended on 8 May with the unconditional surrender of all German armed forces], but killed himself by taking cyanide [or by shooting himself] en-route to Pisek in southern Czecoslovakia where the rest of the group surrendered to American troops.

In 1948 Kammler’s widow, Jutta Kammlerm, petitioned a court in Berlin to have her husband declared dead as of 9 May 1945.

She included a sworn statement provided by Kammler’s driver, SS-Oberscharführer Kurt Preuk, who claimed that he had driven the car in which Kammler had left Prague and that he had been present on 9 May 1945 when Kammler ordered the car to pull off the road in a forested area to the south of Prague before shooting himself.

Preuk said that he and other members of the entourage then buried Kammler’s body in a shallow grave before continuing on their way.

By a ruling of the District Court of Berlin-Charlottenburg on 7 September 1948 [file 14.I] 344/48), Kammler’s death on 9 May 1945 was officially established.

The Central War Crimes Office for Nordrhein-Westfalen conducted an inquiry into Kammler's involvement with Sachsenhausen concentration camp, issuing the following statement to the Senior Public Prosecutor in Köln on 3 October 1963:

"...the death of the accused [as documented by the District Court of Berlin-Charlottenburg] has completed the execution of this case..."

The most popular theory about Hans Kammler is that he did not die at the end of World War Two, but that he was spirited away by the Allies as part of Operation Paperclip.

Operation Paperclip was a real operation in which prominent Nazi scientists and engineers were selected by US and British Intelligence services for their potential contribution to post-war projects.

Probably the most well-known people involved in Paperclip were Dr Wernher Von Braun and Dr Walter Robert Dornberger, both involved in the Nazi V2 development programme.

After the end of the war, both were taken to America to continue their work on rocketry.

Dornberger eventually became Vice President of the Bell Aircraft Corporation and von Braun ended his career as Deputy Associate Administrator for Planning at NASA.

Von Braun was also a Sturmbannführer [Major] in the SS which proved no impediment to his subsequent career in the US.

Towards the end of World War Two, Hitler ordered that a number of top German scientists should be executed to avoid their falling into the hands of the Aallies.

In April 1945 von Braun and Dornberger were nervously awaiting their fate in the Garmisch area of Germany when they were unexpectedly rescued by Hans Kammler.

Many people like to imagine that Kammler was captured by the Allies and given a new identity under Operation Paperclip.

They also suggest that this is the reason Kammler’s name disappeared from most-wanted lists so quickly and why he doesn’t appear in post-war paperwork, but this doesn’t really make any practical sense.

The people targeted under Paperclip were scientists and engineers with theoretical and practical knowledge of new technologies.

Kammler was simply a brutally efficient project manager with knowledge and experience of civil engineering and it’s very difficult to see why this would have been of sufficient value in the post-war world to overlook his involvement in large numbers of deaths and executions.

Even his involvement in the mysterious Projekt Riese and Projekt Kronos would only have been as an administrator, not as a scientist.

However, it has also been suggested that Kammler had access to documents relating to secret SS research and that he may have traded these to the Allies for his freedom.

However, once the Allies had the documents, Kammler would have been of no further value to them. The idea that Kammler had at least some dealings with the Allies has been the subject of numerous claims, counter claims and “astounding revelations”.

But so far, no-one has produced anything convincing that Kammler was part of Operation Paperclip or any similar operation which led to him working for or even negotiating directly with the Allies.

On the surface, the sworn testimony provided by SS Oberscharführer Kurt Preuk in 1948 certainly seems confirm that Kammler committed suicide on 9 May 1945.

reuk was a driver in Kammler’s entourage and knew him well. When he produced his sworn statement in 1948 Preuk claimed that he had been present on 9 May 1945 when Kammler shot himself during a break in the journey from Prague.

However, in another sworn statement by Preuk made in 1959 as part of a death benefits case, he claimed that Kammler’s death had occurred "on or around 10 May 1945" and that he was not sure of the cause of death.

The situation was made even less clear when in 1965 Heinz Zeuner, a former SS SS Obersturmführer and another driver in the Kammler entourage, claimed to have been present when Kammler died and stated that his death occurred on 7 May 1945, south of Daffle/Moldavia, and that he, along with Preuk and others of Kammler's staff, observed the SS General's corpse.

All eyewitnesses consulted on the matter asserted their certainty that cause of death was cyanide poisoning.

In 2012, German researchers using government records uncovered further fascinating information about Kammler, his alleged death and the drivers in his entourage.

It appears that in the Kammler group there was a third driver and one of Kammler’s longest serving aides, thirty-five year-old Oberscharführer Friedrich Baum. However, Baum had been badly wounded while driving one of Kammler’s staff cars when the partisan uprising in Prague erupted on 6 May 1945.

Interviewed after the war, Heinz Zeuner claimed that he was present when the car was attacked [though Kammler was not] and described how Baum was shot in the left knee while driving, meaning that he was unable to use the accelerator. Zeuner was able to reach over with his own left leg and operate the accelerator while Baum steered the car to safety.

Zeuner went to explain that Baum was taken to hospital in Prague but was later killed by Partisans when the hospital was over-run a few days later.

However, on 23 May 1945 a thirty-five year old Army Oberfeldwebel [Sergeant] Friedrich Baum from the Berlin Motor Pool was admitted to a makeshift hospital in the lakeside town of Gmunden in Lower Austria.

Hospital records show that Baum had been wounded in the knee in Prague on 4 May, but that his leg had become infected during the long journey to Austria.

His leg was amputated in hospital but he died there on 29 May and was buried in grave No. 112 at the nearby military cemetery.

There are a number of problems with this story.

First, Oberfeldwebel Friedrich Baum of the Berlin Motor Pool does not exist according to German Army records. Given the reported date and location of Baum’s wound, it seems very likely that this was actually Oberscharführer Friedrich Baum of the SS.

It was certainly very common for SS troops at the end of the war to adopt army identification in order to avoid arrest, imprisonment and retribution. However, the wound to Baum’s leg is also a problem.

Accounts from Prague are very clear that Baum was wounded in the left knee. But hospital records from Gmunden state that Oberfeldwebel Baum’s right knee was injured and that his right leg was subsequently amputated.

Things got even more confused in 1967 when the "Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge" [German War Graves Commission] reviewed the military cemetery in Gmunden as part of a national review and consolidation of war graves. The plan was to erect uniform markers on graves and to consolidate the many small cemeteries into larger plots.

When grave No. 112 was opened to exhume Baum’s body, it was found to be empty. When the cemetery was re-dedicated in 1987 the marker over grave 112 read “I.M. FELDW. FRIEDRICH BAUM, 21.6.1906 – 29.5.1945”.

The “I. M.” Stands for "In Memorium" and is generally used on a grave which is intended as a memorial but in which the body is not actually present.

There have also been reports of sightings of Kammler in Argentina after the war and suggestions that he actually surrendered to American forces much later than the date of his supposed death, though none of these have ever been confirmed.

Projekt Riese

This is one of the most mysterious projects undertaken by the Nazis during World War Two mainly because, although we know a fair amount about what was done, we have no idea why it was done.

The project began in September 1943 under the control of Albert Speer, Minster for Armaments and Production.

However, in April 1944 Hitler expressed his disappointment at the slow progress of the project and control was handed to the SS and Hans Kammler, undoubtedly due to his previous success in constructing giant underground factories.

The project involved at least seven vast, linked underground complexes in the Sowie [Owl] Mountains in what was then Lower Silesia in Germany but which became Polish territory after World War Two.

We have now no idea of the full scale of Projekt Riese because many tunnels are blocked by rubble or inaccessible due to flooding and many of the original records were destroyed during the war.

surviving 1944 message from Hitler to Albert Speer certainly seems to imply that the complex was much larger than the areas that have been discovered so far.

However, it is known that the project involved many thousands of metres of tunnels and a number of large open areas of over 6,000m3.

Some of the construction work reads like something out of a science fiction novel.

At Schloss Fürstenstein in the city of Waldenburg [now Książ Castle in Wałbrzych] at least two levels of underground chambers and tunnels were constructed.

The first level was 15m underground and accessed from a hidden lift shaft in the castle.

The second level was 53m underground and accessed by another lift shaft hidden 15m under the castle courtyard.

There are thought to be other, deeper levels, but access is blocked by rubble and flooding and these have not been fully explored.

Seventy-five percent of all the underground areas are reinforced by concrete and work was so extensive that a concentration camp was set up adjacent to the castle in 1944 just to provide slave workers for this construction.

And this was just one of seven underground sites, most located within an area of around twenty square Kilometres.

One of the largest, at Wolfsberg [now Włodarz] had over three kilometres of tunnels that we know of, and probably many more as this complex is now largely flooded.

By April 1944, when Kammler took over responsibility for Projekt Riese, it was clear to most people that Germany could not win the war.

The Russians were advancing inexorably in the east, the Allies had invaded North Africa and Sicily and were advancing through Italy,

Italy had surrendered to the Allies and British and American bombers were destroying German cities and industrial capacity.

The Bell project was originally sited in Berlin before being moved to Breslau in 1943 and then to Schloss Fürstenstein in November 1944.

December 1944, the Bell was moved to Komplex Milkow within the enlarged Wenceslas Mine workings.

As the war came to an end and the Russians closed in on the mine, the Bell and some of the scientists involved in the project were allegedly flown to Argentina [where there have also been alleged post-war sightings of Kammler] on a six-engined Junkers 390 heavy transport aircraft.

This seemed confirmed when a 1945 Argentine Economic Ministry report, declassified in 1993, referred to a piece of equipment which might have been the Bell being unloaded in Argentina from a multi-engined German aircraft in May 1945.

The information uncovered by Witkowski was interesting, but he made a number of deductions based on his research which seemed to stretch credibility.

Most pressing, an Allied invasion of France was expected imminently. Germany had a desperate need for concrete and steel reinforcement to build defences on the French coast and elsewhere and to create air-raid shelters in Germany.

The Junkers 390 was designed for long-range maritime patrol
but it was also used as a heavy-lift transport aircraft.
With a range of almost 10,000km, it would certainly have been
capable of reaching Argentina from Germany

And yet, a large proportion of this precious steel and concrete was diverted to build these underground complexes – some estimates suggest that as much of 40% of the total German production of concrete and reinforcing steel in 1944 was used at Projekt Riese.

Why? What was the purpose of Projekt Riese that made it more important than building defences to prevent the expected Allied invasion of France?

The answer is that we simply don’t know.

Some German records survive which relate to the construction of this project, but none that identify its intended purpose.

It has been suggested that this was planned to be a huge command complex from where Hitler and the German military could safely direct the war.

Or that these were to be underground armament factories safe from Allied bombing.

It may have been both. Or neither. We will never know for certain and Projekt Riese was over-run by Russian forces in 1945 before it was completed and before it could become operational.

Inevitably there has been a huge amount of speculation as to the intended purpose of Projekt Riese.

This has included the suggestions that it was to be the location for the research and development of German "Wonder Weapons", including chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, developments of the V2 programme and a production facility for very advanced aircraft.

It has also been suggested that the complex was to be used in part to store art and treasures looted by the Nazis from museums, private collections, banks and archives in Europe.

There are persistent rumours that the legendary Amber Room, stolen by the Germans from the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg during World War Two and never recovered, was hidden somewhere in the complex.

There are also local stories that a train laden with Nazi gold disappeared somewhere in the Owl Mountains in May 1945 and that presumably this was also hidden within the complex.

In August 2015 two treasure hunters, Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, claimed to have located a train in a previously undiscovered tunnel within the Projekt Riese complex. However, Polish authorities were quick to close off the site and so far, no attempt has been made to excavate to discover if the train really exists and to find out what it contains.

But if we have no formal evidence on the purpose of Projekt Riese, we do have some tantalising clues about a nearby complex which did become operational during World War Two.

The Wenceslas Mine complex near the village of Ludwidsdorf in Lower Silesia, Germany [now Ludwikowice in Poland] was close to the various Projekt Riese complexes.

The mine itself had been abandoned before 1939 but during the war Nobel Dynamit AG operated an ammunition manufacturing plant near the railhead originally installed to service the mine. However, during the war the underground tunnels of the mine were re-opened and extended to form part of Komplex Milkow, one of the Projekt Riese sites.

Just as for the rest of Projekt Riese, we don’t know the purpose of Komplex Milkow but in 1997 Igor Witkowski, a Polish researcher and historian, claimed to have found evidence that this was the final location for a mysterious Nazi research project known variously as "Die Glocke" [The Bell] and "Projekt Kronos".

Witkowski initially used documents from the interrogation of former SS Obergruppenführer Jakob Sporrenberg after the war to find out more about these experiments which involved a fourteen foot high device shaped like a Bell which used very large amounts of electrical power and glowed violet-blue when operated for short periods.

Sporrenberg wasn’t a scientist and he seemed unclear about the ultimate purpose of the Bell, but it was claimed that technicians became unwell [or died] in the vicinity of the device when it was activated.

The scientific leader for the project was said to be Professor Walther Gerlach, who was also involved in the Nazi nuclear programme which has led to speculation that the Bell was some form of nuclear device.

From surviving documents we do know that this project was classified as "Kriegsentscheidend" [Decisive for the outcome of the war] in 1942, the highest classification for secrecy and funding priority in Nazi Germany. From July 1944, administration of this project became one of the key responsibilities for Hans Kammler.

Witkowski claimed that some of the structures remaining at the Wenceslas Mine site in the late 1990s provided evidence that research there had been working towards the development of a circular aircraft using some form of anti-gravity drive – in effect, a Nazi flying saucer.

Then he went on to suggest that the Bell was an attempt to manufacture some sort of time-travel machine [mainly deduced from the name Projekt Kronos]

Kronos [or Cronus] is a Greek God and father to Zeus. In Roman mythology he became Saturn and the God of time.

The flying saucer idea was taken up by British author and aviation journalist Nick Cook in his book "The Hunt for Zero Point" in 2002.

He visited the Wenceslas Mine with Witkowski and concluded somewhat bizarrely that an odd circular concrete structure referred to as the “Henge” or the “Flytrap” was part of some sort of test rig for a circular flying craft.

There is just enough hard evidence to suggest that something very interesting was going on at the Wenceslas Mine complex during World War Two.

We don’t know precisely what this was, but it does seem to have been a research project which was given a very high priority.

Was this typical of other parts of Projekt Riese?

Was this whole construction project actually intended as a secure base for high level, secret Nazi research?

Did Hans Kammler’s involvement and knowledge of this research give him something he could use to bargain with the Allies at the end of the war?

In the confusion of the period at the end of World War Two it is probably unsurprising that we have conflicting accounts of what may have happened to Hans Kammler. However, what is very surprising is that the allies seemed to readily accept the fact of his death despite the differing accounts of where, when and how it happened.

Kammler was a very senior Nazi and one of the most wanted men in Europe.

Does it really seem credible that Allied Intelligence services would simply cross him off their list without some form of hard evidence, or at least a credible, first-hand eyewitness statement about his death?

And yet, that is what appeared to happen.

There was no search for Kammler’s body and no attempt to verify the facts and circumstances of his death [the evidence of Preuk, his driver, wasn’t known until 1948]..

At the first Nuremberg Trial which ran from November 1945 to October 1946 there was virtually no mention of Kammler in 35,000 pages of evidence and testimony.

A search for "Kammler" in the digitised Nuremberg Trial project at the Harvard Law School Library brings up just 26 hits, and most of these are passing references to Kammler’s involvement in various construction projects.

This makes Kammler unique amongst senior Nazis and SS officers.

Mention of Kammler was also absent from the subsequent Nuremberg trials of lesser war criminals which continued to 1948.

In fact, the first war crime trial in which Kammler’s role is specifically mentioned did not take place until 1958 and then he was only mentioned because the defendants [Wolfgang Wetzling and Ernst Klönne] offered as a defence that Kammler had directly ordered them to shoot a number of Polish slave workers.

At first glance it appears that there is a large, Kammler-shaped hole in most accounts of World War Two and the subsequent war crime trials which leads to suspicions of some sort of deliberate conspiracy.

Kammler was very senior, part of the immediate circle round Himmler, involved in critical and top-secret projects and directly implicated in the deaths of large numbers of prisoners of war and slave labourers.

Why haven’t we heard of him?

It’s tempting to conclude that the Allies somehow induced Kammler to work for them, and that this is what lies behind the apparent suppression of his name after the war.

Kammler’s disappearance from the history of World War Two has more to do with what he did [and more notably, what he did not do] than with any deliberate attempt to suppress his name.

Kammler was not an important combat soldier whose name was likely to crop-up in military histories, he did not achieve infamy by commanding a concentration camp or a death squad, he was not a scientist with valuable knowledge and he was not sufficiently politicized or influential to take part in high-level decision making within the Third Reich.

Kammler was the ultimate faceless bureaucrat [albeit one who was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of thousands of innocent people] who, in the immediate aftermath of the war, simply wasn’t significant enough to register on the radar of most people or organisations.

It’s only now, with the benefit of hindsight and access to a plethora of official records, that we can see how significant Kammler really was. Back then, he just did not seem terribly important.

The stories of Kammler’s death or suicide are not convincing. The accounts vary too much and are too vague to be satisfactory.

The information about Friedrich Baum unearthed recently by German researchers is very interesting. It is based on solid research and backed by the use of original source material.

The idea of Kammler disguising himself as an army sergeant also has echoes of Himmler’s attempts to escape justice.

During the time when the wounded Baum was supposedly travelling from Prague to Gmunden, Himmler was on the run, using forged papers to identify himself as Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger of the German Army.

A large part of Kammler’s career as a project manager involved long-term planning.

He was clearly an intelligent, resourceful, determined and ruthless man and there can be little doubt that he saw the approaching end of the Third Reich well before it happened.

It is likely that he planned carefully his own escape at the war’s end and used the resources available to him to set this up.

Using a new identity, he most probably took up a new life in 1945, perhaps in another country, perhaps even on another continent.

And what about Der Riese, Die Glocke and the Wenceslas Mine?

It is unlikely the underground complexes in Silesia were intended as factories – they were simply too far from sources of steel and other raw materials whose transport would have been subject to interruption by Allied bombing.

Nor were they to be a new Führer Headquarters for some last stand of the Nazi regime.

It is, thus, not certain what they were intended to be.

However, though Kammler and Projekt Riese were virtually unknown at the end of the war, both are now much better known and have even entered popular culture.

The "Wolfenstein" series of computer games, with castles and hidden underground Bunkers filled with Nazi scientists undertaking sinister research are clearly strongly influenced by Schloss Fürstenstein and Projekt Riese.

The 2012 movie "Iron Sky" features advanced Nazi technology and references Hans Kammler.

In 2015 German director Andreas Sulzer released the documentary "The Search for Hitler’s Bomb" which cites Kammler as the leading figure in the development of a Nazi nuclear weapon, and later in 2016 a short science fiction movie called "The Kammler Code" and featuring a Nazi designed time machine will be released.

In addition, countless books and articles have been written which feature Kammler, Projekt Riese or both.

One can only hope that the growing awareness of these topics may mean that some researcher will one day stumble across evidence that will tell us precisely what happened to Hans Kammler and what was really going on in Lower Silesia in 1944/45.

Basically three major facts stand out:

1. In almost four decades, official records show no positive confirmation of Kammler's death.

No court of law, no media editor would accept the uncorroborated statement of "unknown comrades," still so referred to in official records as conclusive evidence of death,
   especially if the death was alleged to have taken place in the chaos of collapsing Germany.

2. The record shows no subsequent sworn corroborative statement Such a statement would automatically have been entered in the Red Cross and other dossiers on Kammler.

3. None of the persons reporting any of the four versions of the general's death had conformed with the prescribed duty of all servicemen to detach one-half of a dead man's soldier's paybook or officer's identity document, to the nearest unit, relevant records office, Red Cross, or holding power, if the surviving serviceman had become a prisoner of   war, to help notification of next of kin.
  Germans are traditionally meticulous and, to say the least, most sentimental in such matters.

Thus, in spite of "the proliferation of unsubstantiated evidence that permeates all four versions of Kammler's death, the shell of the case contains sufficient facts to suggest a more than coincidental pattern of seemingly targeted and organized disinformation.

The origin of this disinformation, according to Agoston, was probably within the SS itself, a program necessitated by Kammler's disappearance and likely treason to one of the victorious Allied powers.

What emerges from all this is that no one, no where can advance anything like a consistent account of the date, location, time, or even method of Kammler's death.

Now it is suicide by poison, then suicide by gunshot, suicide by ordering an aide to shoot him, a fighting death, or disappearance into a Roman Catholic monastery.

Now he is in Prague, now he isn't; now he's with people, now he isn't; now he's suffering mental and emotional collapse, now he isn't.

In all likelihood, therefore, Kammler did not die at all; he disappeared.
The important question is, where?

A possibility is that Kammler arranged to turn over his secret weapons treasure trove to the OSS in exchange for his life.

It could have been arranged by fellow SS General Wolff, already in negotiation with Allen Dulles, OSS station chief in Zürich.

If so, then the sudden shift of Allied objectives to south central Germany may have originated from Intelligence originating within the Kammlerstab itself.

This Intelligence would have been easily verifiable by Allies who would naturally have wanted to check its veracity by means of aerial reconnaissance of the installation sites presumably leaked to them by someone in the Kammlerstab.

Hans Kammler was said to have committed suicide near the end of the Second World War.
Now, he is the subject of a similar theory to that which states Adolf Hitler’s suicide was faked.

In this theory, actually moved to America with the full knowledge of the United States.

The reasoning for this alleged relocation revolves around the general’s area of expertise, which is centered on Hitler’s programs for the development of secret weapons.

It is already known that Nazi scientists were recruited by the Allies for the betterment of various technologies.

His knowledge would have been valuable to the stateside advancement of weaponry given his knowledge about the V1 and V2 rockets, retaliatory missiles that could have changed the face of the war if developed earlier.

The apparent falsification of his suicide was necessitated by his work on concentration camps such as Auschwitz, for which he helped to design their incinerators.

Given the number of deaths to which he contributed, the name Hans Kammler made for himself would not have justified his acquisition by the United States in many people’s eyes, even following the German surrender.

It would have appeared that the Allies were taking advantage of the same cumbrance on freedoms that they were actively fighting against.

If the theory on the alleged fake suicide holds true, then the captured Nazi general may have lent a hand in the modernization of numerous American weapons.

His V2 rockets were known for devastating attacks against Britain. Hans Kammler may have gone on to bring similarly deadly rockets to the United States. Approaching the Cold War, America was in a rush to get the general onto their soil before he could be acquired by the Soviet Union.

The veracity of the claims that he lived and died in the United States following the war have not been confirmed, but the reasoning behind the claim appears to be logical. If Hans Kammler truly lived in America, it is possible that numerous advancements in weaponry during and after the Cold War were technically manufactured by Nazis.

While Obergruppenführer Kammler was busy dying four times in various locations by various means, another general was busy lunging his troops with the precision of a surgeon into the nerve centers of Kammler's black projects empire: General George S. Patton.

His troops formed the spearhead of the Allied lance that, much to the surprise of the Nazi, Soviet, and Allied field commanders themselves, suddenly turned from its victorious drive on Berlin to a militarily questionable operation designed to take the alleged "Nazi Redoubt".

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 defense 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.

General Patton's US Third Army literally raced through Bavaria into Bohemia, making a beeline for the famous Skoda armaments works at Pilsen, all but blown off the map by Allied bombing raids.

Hitler boasted that Germany would deploy horrendous new weapons that would snatch victory from defeat at "five minutes past midnight".

By the spring of 1945, the Redoubt had ballooned to become a major military concern to the Allied High command, "despite the caveats from British and US military Iintelligence".

Agoston traces the origin of the "Redoubt" theme of the postwar Allied Legend to the USA's Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the precursor to the modern day CIA.

The OSS had apparently not bothered, according to Agoston, to check out the sources of its Intelligence or the truthfulness of the "Redoubt".

The final decision to abandon Berlin as a military objective and drive south toward Thuringia was made by Eisenhower on 11 April 1945.

The date of General Eisenhower's decision is crucial, for it means that the military objective shifted from Berlin toward south central Germany after the alleged atom bomb test at Ohrdruf on 4 March 1945.

It is therefore possible that the OSS was in receipt of extremely secret Intelligence concerning this weapons program and its centers of production, for Patton drives his troops with unerring accuracy right toward this super-secret installations, many of them underground and carefully camouflaged.

Given the sensitivity of the Manhattan Project within the structure of the Allied command, it is also plausible that the OSS decided not to share this information with the Supreme Allied Command, and proffered the "Redoubt" and "fleeing Nazis" and a transferred German war archives as a cover story to sell the Allied command on a shitf of objectives away from Berlin.

If indeed the OSS "Redoubt" reports were a component of an OSS psychological operation designed against the Allies' own military command structure, designed to divert Allied military operations to a gold mine of military technology and research, then one and only one general was in a position to know the real, and the whole story about the Redoubt, and what was actually recovered in Thuringia, Pilsen, and Prague, and that was General George S Patton.

Patton, as his troops entered the Skoda works at Pilsen and the underground factories and laboratories at the Three Corners region in Thuringia would have been privy to the top secret reports of his divisional commanders entering these super-secret Reich facilities.

Patton would thus have a thorough first hand knowledge of the complete inventory of the Reich's most sensitive black programs.

As Agoston himself notes, without seeming to realize the importance of his own observations in the light of post-war events:

"the sudden switch in Allied planning.... brought at least one bonanza. The rapid eastward drive of the US Third Army brought to Kammler's secret metropolis well ahead of the Russians in whose designated zone it lay".

The holy grail of all this research were the files and blueprints in the central co-ordination office of Kammler's black programs think tank inside the Skoda Works at Pilsen. And it is likely that General Patton therefore knew much of the general outlines of this treasure trove and what it portended for future secret weapons development.

There is thus a direct and immediate link between General George S. Patton, General Hans Kammler, and the little-known world of top secret weapons research that Kammler headed.

And this in turn may lend some credence to those who view General Patton's ironic death after the war as being something more than an ironic accident.

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

While on an inspection tour with his driver and Major General Hobart Gray on 9 December 1945, Patton's car swerved to avoid hitting a heavy US Army transport truck that had turned in front of them.

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 the military hospital in Frankfurt, 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.

This fact is adequately appreciated by Mayer and Mehner, "Das Geheimnis" and Ladislas Farago, "Patton: Ordeal and Triumph"

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 another Allied entity performing the "accident" and subsequent "medical complications".

General George S. Patton was assassinated to silence his criticism of Allied war leaders claims new book
America's greatest combat general of the Second World War, was assassinated after the conflict with the connivance of US leaders, according to a new book.

By Tim Shipman in Washington
The Telegraph
20 December 2008

The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services [OSS], the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives.

The death of General Patton in December 1945, is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in Manheim, he was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home.

But after a decade-long investigation, military historian Robert Wilcox claims that OSS head General 'Wild Bill' Donovan ordered a highly decorated marksman called Douglas Bazata to silence Patton, who gloried in the nickname 'Old Blood and Guts'.

His book, "Target Patton", contains interviews with Mr Bazata, who died in 1999, and extracts from his diaries, detailing how he staged the car crash by getting a troop truck to plough into Patton's Cadillac and then shot the general with a low-velocity projectile, which broke his neck while his fellow passengers escaped without a scratch.

Mr Bazata also suggested that when Patton began to recover from his injuries, US officials turned a blind eye as agents of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, poisoned the general.

Mr Wilcox told "The Sunday Telegraph" that when he spoke to Mr Bazata:

"He was struggling with himself, all these killings he had done. He confessed to me that he had caused the accident, that he was ordered to do so by Wild Bill Donovan.

"Donovan told him:

"We've got a terrible situation with this great patriot, he's out of control and we must save him from himself and from ruining everything the Allies have done".

I believe Douglas Bazata. He's a sterling guy".

Bazata led an extraordinary life. He was a member of the Jedburghs, the elite unit who parachuted into France to help organise the Resistance in the run up to D-Day in 1944.

He earned four purple hearts, a Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre three times over for his efforts.

After the war he became a celebrated artist who enjoyed the patronage of Princess Grace of Monaco and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

He was friends with Salvador Dali, who painted a portrait of Bazata as Don Quixote.

He ended his career as an aide to President Ronald Reagan's Navy Secretary John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission and adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign.

Mr Wilcox also tracked down and interviewed Stephen Skubik, an officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the US Army, who said he learnt that Patton was on Stalin's death list. Skubik repeatedly alerted Donovan, who simply had him sent back to the US.

"You have two strong witnesses here," Mr Wilcox said. "The evidence is that the Russians finished the job".

The scenario sounds far fetched but Mr Wilcox has assembled a compelling case that US officials had something to hide. At least five documents relating to the car accident have been removed from US archives.

The driver of the truck was whisked away to London before he could be questioned and no autopsy was performed on Patton's body.

With the help of a Cadillac expert from Detroit, Mr Wilcox has proved that the car on display in the Patton museum at Fort Knox is not the one Patton was driving.

"That is a cover-up," Mr Wilcox said.

George Patton, a dynamic controversialist who wore ivory-handled revolvers on each hip and was the subject of an Oscar winning film starring George C. Scott, commanded the US 3rd Army, which cut a swathe through France after D-Day.

But his ambition to get to Berlin before Soviet forces was thwarted by supreme allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, who gave Patton's petrol supplies to the more cautious British General Bernard Montgomery.

Patton, who distrusted the Russians, believed Eisenhower wrongly prevented him closing the so-called Falaise Gap in the autumn of 1944, allowing hundreds of thousands of German troops to escape to fight again,. This led to the deaths of thousands of Americans during their winter counter-offensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

In order to placate Stalin, the 3rd Army was also ordered to a halt as it reached the German border and was prevented from seizing either Berlin or Prague, moves that could have prevented Soviet domination of Eastern Europe after the war.

Mr Wilcox told "The Sunday Telegraph":

"Patton was going to resign from the Army. He wanted to go to war with the Russians.

"The administration thought he was nuts.

"He also knew secrets of the war which would have ruined careers".

"I don't think Dwight Eisenhower would ever have been elected president if Patton had lived to say the things he wanted to say."

Mr Wilcox added: "I think there's enough evidence here that if I were to go to a grand jury I could probably get an indictment, but perhaps not a conviction".

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 Mayer and Mehner report in "Das Geheimnis", that all of the documents of Patton's troops in Ohrdruf are still sealed and classified.

Located near Ohrdruf, Thuringia was located the S-III Führer headquarters.

Constructed by approximately 15 - to 18,000 inmates of the nearby Ohrdruf, Espenfeld and Crawinkel concentration camps, from autumn 1944 to spring 1945, was a tunnel system over 1.5 miles in length.

Ohrdruf was reached by General Patton about 11 April 1945.

Colonel Robert S. Allen accompanying him described the installations extensively in his book, "Lucky Forward: The History of Patton's 3rd US Army", Vanguard Press, New York, 1947:

"The underground installations were amazing.

"They were literally subterranean towns....There were four in and around Ohrdruf...others were reported in near-by villages. None were natural caves or mines. All were man-made military installations.

"Over 50 feet underground, the installations consisted of two and three stories several miles in length and extending like the spokes of a wheel.

"The entire hull structure was of massive reinforced concrete.

"Purpose of the installations was to house the High Command after it was bombed out of Berlin.

"These places also had paneled and carpeted offices, scores of large work and store rooms, tiled bathrooms with bath tubs and showers, flush toilets, electrically equipped kitchens, decorated dining rooms and mess halls, giant refrigerators, extensive sleeping quarters, recreation rooms, separate bars for officers and enlisted men".

The 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.

The fact that Ohrdruf was the location of the last Redoubt, was concealed absolutely.

The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht [OKW, High Command] and Luftwaffe war diaries and all copies for the period March 1945 have disappeared and are suspected to be in American custody.

Were the secrets of Kammler's SS empire worth changing the entire Allied operational plan at the end of the war, and were they worth the possible deliberate assassination of one of the war's most famous generals?

"Pilsen and the Skoda Works were captured by Combat Command B, Third Armored Division, the same unit that captured Kammler's unique metropolis, with its treasure-trove of missiles and jet engines, at Nordhausen in Saxony on April 11".

Agoston presents evidence that Allied Intelligence, at least from the British point of view, had little to no knowledge of the Kammler Group.

British Lieutenant Colonel James Brierley, commanding the first British Intelligence group to arrive in Pilsen after its capture, stated that the Skoda plant workers and engineers themselves reported that everything was microfilmed, that the buildings which housed their blueprints and development projects had been demolished, and also that the files had been stored outside Pilsen.

Destroyed by whom? And stored outside Pilsen by whom? Presumably by the SS itself. It is perhaps pertinent to this idea that many of the reports of Kammler's death place him in the area, not to die, but to remove the most sensitive data and to vouchsafe it for security.

At this point it is necessary to say something about Agoston's own thesis concerning the disappearance of the Kammler Staff's files.

The whole thesis of Agoston's book is obvious from its title, i.e., that in the confusion of the transfer of the Skoda Works from American to Russian military occupation, the Kammler Group's entire secret inventory was handed over to the Soviet Union.

This much is recounted to Agoston by Voss.

However, if Kammler had previously removed, or even duplicated, the most sensitive items, blueprints, and papers and secreted them somewhere, as would seem to be indicated by the Czech reports to British Intelligence, then it is likely that all the Soviets received were the table scraps.

Kammler had previously removed the most sensitive items, and Patton's men, and presumably the OSS, would have thoroughly scoured the remaining material.

Another possibility thus emerges in the "conspiracy" view of Patton's death.

Could he have been assassinated because he himself was the point man to bring Kammler and his secrets and technicians and scientists into the emerging Operation Paperclip?

While we will probably never know for sure, it is interesting to note that when Dr. Voss gave "the full story of the secrets leakage at Pilsen and Kammler's disappearance to US Intelligence in West Germany," he was informed "at the highest level to keep the matter under wraps, along with the briefings he than gave US Intelligence of he areas covered by the SS research at Pilsen

"Who was it that debriefed Voss for US military Intelligence? None other than fellow general officer Lieutenant General Lucius D. Clay, a man well known to Patton.

What happened to Dr. Voss after the war?

Perhaps not unusually, he became involved in a joint CIA-West German BND [Bundesnachrichtendienst, West Germany's version of the CIA] effort to build armaments plants for Egypt's Gamel Abdul Nasser, and to train its army.

Voss became the overall co-ordinator of an effort to supply Egypt with former Wehrmacht officers and the latest in missile technology.

Also involved was former Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, father-in-law to famous SS commando, and later co-ordinator of the notorious ODESSA [Organization der Ehemalige SS Angehdriger or Organization of Former SS Members], Otto Skorzeny.

This effort was part of a much broader post-war effort on the part of the West German government to expand its markets for high technology military equipment to the Arab-Muslim world, a drive that has continuing political repercussions down to our own day. There is more than meets the eye in this post-war SS-Arab connection.

Agoston notes that this secrecy order to Voss kept him from disclosing the story until after Voss' death.

In any case, taken together the picture of the post-war behavior and associations of Dr. Wilhelm Voss, the multiple "deaths" of Obergruppenführer Kammler, his more likely disappearance into another black programs empire, and the ironic if not suspicious death of General George Patton are further corroboration that the Nazi Reich was up to far more than V-ls and V-2s.

It was in the possession of prototypical technologies and military capabilities of such extreme power and sophistication that many of these secrets remain classified.

Suspiciously, Agoston's Freedom of Information Act request for the war diaries of Patton's armored units that captured the SS facilities in Pilsen and Prague could not be located in he US National Archives.

One of the most strange objects the Germans were experimenting on was a device that was known simply as "The Bell."

So sensitive and secret was this device, that when it was evacuated from its underground secret laboratory in Lower Silesia prior to the Russian occupation of the area, the SS shot the approximately 60 scientists -doubtless on Kammler's orders- that were involved with this strange object.

The Bell consisted apparently of two counter-rotating cylinders, and resembled a Bell in its general shape. It stood approximately 12 to 15 feet high, and was approximately 9 to 12 feet in diameter.

Into this device, an unknown purplish metallic-liquid looking substance known only as "Xerum 525" or "Serum 525" was poured, apparently to be mechanically rotated at high speed, and possibly electrically rotated as well, by the device.

The result was that organic objects placed within the field of the Bell swiftly decayed without putrefaction, decomposing into a black goo, and then finally, into dust, within a matter of hours, and not several weeks. So strong was the field that resulted from the Bell, that on its first test the technicians and scientists involved were all killed.

Subsequently, the Bell was operated only for one or two minutes at a time, and housed below ground in a room bricked and tiled with ceramic tiles, which were then covered in thick rubber mats. After each test, the mats were burned, and the room washed down by concentration camp inmates with brine. When Nick Cook was shown the installation in which the Bell was housed, he was also informed of its high electrical consumption.

What was the mysterious "Xerum 525?"

Recently, allegations have surfaced concerning the neutron emitting properties of so-called "red mercury" or mercury antimonate oxide, supposedly a source for detonating thermo=nuclear warheads without the necessity for detonating an atom bomb, and a powerful conventional explosive in its own right.

Whatever the mysterious substance was, it seems clear that it was highly radioactive, and that the Germans were subjecting it to extremely high mechanical and electrical rotations to study the resulting field effects, effects that Cook's advisors could only qualify as "torsion" fields.

These fields are thought by some contemporary physicists to have direct relevance to the study of gravity, and of time. Close to the Bell's underground testing bunker the Germans had built a large concrete Henge-like structure, in the pillars of which were high grade steel hooks, an obvious testing frame for what must have been an extremely powerful propulsion device.

What happened to the Bell? No one knows. Like Kammler, it goes completely missing at the end of the war, and its scientists, as already stated, were murdered to a man by the SS to keep whatever precious secrets it, and they, had uncovered.

-- from Joseph P. Farrell, "Reich of the Black Sun"

Did US fake top Nazi's WWII suicide and spirit him away to get hands on Hitler's secret weapons programme?
By Allan Hall In Berlin
DailyMailOnline
10 June 201

• He planned forced labour factories at Auschwitz and secret V-2 rocket plants
• Officially he committed suicide near Prague on 9 May 1945
• But a new documentary has suggested his suicide was faked by the Americans who wanted his secrets of Hitler's weapon programme

The blood of thousands on his hands, SS General Hans Kammler killed himself in 1945 in the dying days of Hitler’s Germany.

That, at least, was his official fate. The man steeped in the horrors of the death camps had met his just deserts.

However, it is now claimed that Kammler survived the war, spirited away to America and given a new identity by the US authorities.

S.S. General Hans Kammler who was said to have killed himself at the end of the war may have escaped to America, in order to pass on the Nazis' secret weapons programme, claims a new documentary.

For the general wasn’t just an expert in the technicalities of industrial scale slavery and slaughter, he was also deeply involved in the Nazis’ secret weapons programme. The Americans, according to a TV documentary, were determined to have his know-how and not let him fall into the hands of the Russians.

Both the US and the Soviet Union tried to recruit Hitler’s scientists after the war to help with their own space and military programmes. But it is claimed that Kammler’s record was so monstrous that his death had to be faked and he had to have a new identity.

"The whole history of suicide is staged," said Berlin historian Rainer Karlsch.

"There are several documents that clearly demonstrate that Kammler was captured by the Americans".

Another expert, Matthias Uhl of the 'German Historical Institute' in Moscow, said:

"The reports from America are more credible than those given about the alleged suicide by Kammler’s associates".

Born in 1901, by the end of the Second World War Kammler was almost as powerful as SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and armaments Minister Albert Speer. He had access to the Nazi’s most advanced technology including the ‘weapons of retaliation’ – the V1 and V2 rockets that caused death and destruction in Britain, but came too late to turn the tide of the conflict.

Kammler designed and built the crematoria at Auschwitz which incinerated most of the bodies of the estimated 1.2 million people murdered at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland

The history books say that, one day after the Third Reich surrendered on 9 May 1945, he either shot himself or took poison in the former German city of Stettin, now Szcecin in Poland. His body was never found.

‘This whole story of suicide was staged by two of his closest aides who were committed to him", Karlsch tells "ZDF TV" in Germany.

At the war’s end America, while taking part in the punishment of many top Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, also launched the covert 'Operation Paperclip' – the secret exit of top Nazi scientists.

"ZDF" says in the documentary:

"Sources say that Kammler was captured by the Americans and interrogated by the US Counterintelligence CIC. The secret service man responsible was Donald Richardson, a personal confidant of allied supreme commander General Dwight D Eisenhower".

The sons of the secret service man told the programme makers that their father was in charge of the German weapons expert after 1945.

One of them, John Richardson, said:

"This engineer brought a special treasure from the Third Reich into the United States. He offered modern weapons for us.

"It was put to my father that he should bring this 'useful' German into the United States to prevent him from falling into the hands of the Russian intelligence service".

It is not revealed under what name Kammler lived or when he died, though some archival material speaks of a "special guest" living under Richardson’s wing.

New testimony and documents say that Nazi leader Hans Kammler, the SS general in charge of the Nazi secret weapons, helped the Americans fabricate the atomic bomb that the United States launched against Hiroshima in August 1945.

Participating in the operation was Don Richardson who accompanied Kammler to North America, carrying 60 kilos of enriched Uranium manufactured by the Nazis.

This hypothesis -the Nazis and the Americans working together to attack Japan- is gaining support among German historians.

Kammler disappeared in 1945 and his body was never found. One version claims that, seeing the war was lost, it contacted the Americans and passed them information as well as material related to Nazi nuclear research.

Another hypothesis asserts that Kammler did not act alone, but counted on Hitler's permission, within the framework of a secret agreement between Nazis and Americans, reached before the end of the war.

Hans Kammler was the general to whom Hitler ordered the projects of secret weapons and that, in spite of being responsible for war crimes, was barely mentioned in the Nuremberg trials.

Among those who claim that the Nazi leader worked to produce the American atomic bomb is the son of Donald Richardson, the agent who played a major role in the controversial missions of the US secret services during the final months of World War II.

In that sense, it should be noted that in the operations known as 'Paperclip' and 'Alsos', the Americans recruited Nazi scientists and secretly took them to the United States to take advantage of them and so that their knowledge did not fall into the hands of the Soviets.

Don Richardson's son, John, says his father was the agent in charge of picking up the Nazi general and 60 kilos of Uranium for the American bomb.

Kammler thought that if he surrendered and collaborated with the Americans, he would not fall into Soviet hands and thus save his life.

The secret mission fell to Don Richardson, a senior US agent. But Kammler did not fare well.

Richardson's son tells him that his father, after arriving with the Uranium and helping with the making of the bomb, questioned Kammler constantly, at his home, and that Kammler died there, a risoner, in 1947.

Several years later, Don Richardson revealed the details of this mission to his children, John and Doug, on his deathbed.

This shocking information is endorsed by a document of the Counterintelligence Corps [ICC] declassified in the United States in 1978 where it is said that "shortly after the occupation [of Germany] Hans Kammler appeared before the ICC men in Gmunden [Austrian municipality] and made a detailed statement".

Journalist Frank Döbert reconstructed the general's last weeks in Austria and claims that Kammler "traveled on a B-29 with a little more than 60 kilos of Uranium, bound for the United States and landed at the base of the Wendover Air Force. Preparations were underway for the launch of the atomic bomb on Japan".

The German historian Rainer Karlsch also holds the same view because this version would explain another mystery: why was there hardly a mention of Kammler at the Nuremberg trials? - responsible for the deaths of thousands of prisoners in the Gusen camp's subterranean galleries, where nuclear experiments were carried out.

The Americans moved more than 700 German scientists and their families to the United States.

Yet the Paperclip and Alsos operations remain absolute top secret and still stir up controversy, as many of those "rescued" scientists had collaborated with their work on Nazi atrocities. The purpose of one of these operations, the Alsos, was to seize the Nazi nuclear secrets.

If anyone knew them, it was Kammler, who also commissioned the B8 Bergkristall underground tunnel complex in Austria, excavated at the expense of the lives of tens of thousands of deportees and where the Messerschmitt aircraft were built.

A German public television program ZDF has reported two atomic tests carried out in the region of Thuringia, before the end of the war, which have been known thanks to reports made in 1945 by the Soviet secret military service [GRU].

The Americans called the powerful nuclear bomb loaded with 64 kilos of Uranium that exploded on Hiroshima at 8:15 am on 6 August 1945, Little Boy.

On August 9 they launched another bomb, this time of Plutonium, on Nagasaki. Three days later, on the 15th of that month, Japan announced its surrender, which ended the Second World War.

-- Article by Fátima Uribarri

Unsettled History: The Nazi Bell Aircraft in American Skies
By Paul Darin
Epoch Times
8 February 2014

The Nazi Bell, an aircraft involving anti-gravity technology, disappeared after World War II, but crafts with the same design have allegedly been sighted across the United States, leading some to believe that the U.S. government has the Nazi Bell and is experimenting with it.

It is said that during the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Nazis—specifically Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun and SS General Hans Kammler—were working on a craft that used electromagnetism as its propulsion.

The craft was known as "Die Glocke" or "The Bell."

Some sketches of the craft have survived, according to the "History Channel", and they specify dimensions of 10 feet high and 5 feet in diameter.

There is no evidence to support the project’s use during World War II, but there is evidence of its development.

As Germany was being invaded by the Allies, the entire Bell project—along with project leader Kammler—disappeared.

Conspiracy theorists suggest that the Nazi Bell was taken to the United States—as were many German scientists—and that the United States has continued research on the technology.

Both von Braun and Kammler were developers of advanced German weapons and rocketry, including the V–2 rocket.

Von Braun surrendered to Allied forces during Germany’s fall and was enlisted in the U.S. government for advanced propulsion and rocket development.

Von Braun headed up the Saturn rocket development for NASA and played a significant role in putting Americans on the moon with the successful Saturn V rocket used in Apollo 11, according to PBS.

"UFO supporters believe the German Bell craft is related to the UFO crash in Kecksburg, Pa., on 9 December 1965.

"Perhaps the most famous UFO incident second to Roswell, the Kecksburg incident involved many eye witnesses who saw a fiery streak overhead and a crash.

"There were civilian responders to the crash before the Army, National Security Agency, Department of Defense, and NASA showed up to claim the object, according to UFO Evidence.

Allegedly, first responders included Kecksburg volunteer firefighters, who saw an acorn-shaped object half-buried where it went down in the woods.

Other residents claim to have made it to the site before authorities.

They reported seeing a golden-bronze colored, acorn-shaped craft large enough to fit just one occupant and marked with strange hieroglyphic writing.

The object appeared to be one solid piece of metal with no rivets or seams, according to UFO Evidence.

Hundreds of witnesses were near the crash site but were reportedly turned away by military personnel.

Some witnesses saw the object leaving on a flatbed truck.

In 2005, NASA revealed that the object was a downed Soviet satellite, contrary to their earlier claims, according to "Today in History".

NASA also claimed that all records of the incident were misplaced sometime in the 1990s..

Perhaps the origin of these bell-shaped objects—be it Nazi-designed, American reverse-engineered, or extra-terrestrial—will never be known, even though these objects continue to be seen throughout America and abroad.

The incident remains unexplained to this day and there have been several attempts to reveal the identity of the object that crashed in the woods near Kecksburg.

Among them is a particularly interesting theory stating the craft was in fact Die Glocke, commonly referred to as the Nazi Bell, a technological device developed during World War 2 [based on alien technology?]].

Supposedly, the craft was able to travel through time and had been used by Nazi SS officer Hans Kammler to escape the Allied Forces in the final days of the war.

1945: Flight of the stara?

On 8 January 1945, a flock of reporters, pencils and note pads at the ready, hovered around Admiral Jonas Ingram, commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier, in his wardroom aboard a warship in New York harbour.

The scribes had come for what Ingram's public-relations staff had promised would be 'a historic press conference.'

Ingram, a heavyset, flat-nosed old salt who had gained national recognition as football coach at the U.S. Naval Academy [in Annapolis, Maryland], was one of the Navy's colourful characters - and most outspoken.

Seated behind a long table, Ingram said:

"Gentlemen, I have reason to assume that the Nazis are getting ready to launch a strategic attack on New York and Washington by robot bombs".

There was a gasp of astonishment from the reporters.

"I am here to tell you that these attacks are not only possible, but probable as well.

The East Coast is likely to be buzz-bombed within the next thirty or sixty days".

Ingram eyed his listeners, then added grimly:

"But we're ready for them.

"The thing to do is not to get excited about it.

"The buzz-bombs might knock out a high building or two, might create a fire hazard, and most certainly would cause casualties.

"But they can not seriously affect the progress of the war".

The hard-nosed Ingram added that:

"it may be only ten or twelve buzz-bombs, but they may come before we can stop them".

"At any rate," the admiral concluded, "I'm springing the cat from the bag to let the Huns know that we are ready for them!"

Coach Ingram's announcement triggered a media sensation.

The following day, 9 January 1945, the "New York Times" ran the story with the headline:

ROBOT BOMB ATTACKS HERE HELD POSSIBLE

But the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, and no Nazi rocket came plummeting out of orbit to crash in Manhattan.

Was Coach Ingram given to flights of fancy?

Not at all.

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.

In his 1952 book, "V2--Der Schuss ins Weltall", Major General Walter Dornberger, commander of the Peenemünde Rocket Research Institute, described the "New York Rocket" in detail.

He wrote:

"Thus the A-9 came into being...the missile was planned to reach at a height of about 20 kilometres [12 miles], a maximum speed of 4,400 kilometres per hour [2,800 miles per hour] and then go into a shallow curving glide with a peak of nearly 30 kilometres [18 miles].

On arrival over the target at a height of 5 kilometres [3 miles], it was planned to dive vertically, like the "V-1, a primitive rocket-powered cruise missile, best known in World War II as "the buzz bomb".

"A better plan, however, and one which greatly improved range, was to construct the A-10, weighing 87 tons and with a total propellant capacity of 62 tons, as the first step of the combined A-9/A-10.

"The A-9 was placed on top of the A-10. The latter had a thrust of 200 tons for 50 to 60 seconds and gave the rocket a speed of 4,400 kilometres per hour. After the exhaustion of the first step [stage or A-10], the A-9 would be ignited and lift out of the A-10.

"Once we reached this stage [in the blueprints], the horses fairly bolted with us. With our big rocket motors and step [multi-stage] rockets, we could build space ships which would circle the earth like moonsat a height of 500 kilometres [300 miles] and at speeds of 30,000 kilometres per hour [18,000 miles per hour]. An expedition to the moon was a popular topic, too.

"Then we dreamed of atomic energy, which would at last give us the necessary drive for flight into the infinity of space, to the very stars"."

Amazingly, the scientists at Peenemünde drew up these blue-prints during 1942 and 1943.

This original plan in 1944
is the earliest concept of a manned A-9 as both a reconnaissance plane and intercontinental manned missile
meant to strike
New York City in late 1945

German Rocket-Powered Aircraft

German rocket-powered aircraft were under development as early as 1937, but saw limited action during World War II.

The first of these, the He-176, was powered by a 1,300-pound thrust engine but never left the testing phase.

The rocket design work of the Wernher von Braun group at Peenemünde originally included the development of rocket-powered aircraft, but these efforts were canceled in their early stages by the German Air Ministry.

The von Braun group was, however, able to successfully develop a jet-assisted take-off [JATO] unit that was employed during the war.

The JATO unit burned a combination of liquid oxygen and water-diluted alcohol and could produce a thrust of 2,200 pounds.

Two JATO units fired in tandem could allow He-111 or Ju-88 aircraft to take off with heavy payloads from a short strip.

An experimental aircraft called the Me-163A underwent extensive unpowered tow tests without an engine, and was able to achieve a maximum speed of 640 m.p.h. when a liquid-fueled engine was installed.

Me-163A tests led to the development of the Me-163B

In his book, Gen. Dornberger, a child of the Nineteenth Century, admits to being a little "disconcerted" by off-duty bull sessions, in which Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, Klaus Reidel and Hitler's favourite aviatrix, Hanna Reitsch, "chatted with such easy familiarity about outer space, the moon, the planets and what forms extra-terrestrial life might take..

The question remains: did the A-9/A-10 combo ever make it into space?

There are a handful of clues that it did.

In 1968, "Ballantine" published a photo on the back cover of their paperback book on German secret weapons of World War II.

It shows a swept-winged A-9 on top of a cluster of rocket boosters. Flames pour out of five nozzles on the array. It has the hazy appearance of being shot with a long telephoto lens.

This photo is similar to the Soviet rockets then being launched from Baikonur.

Unfortunately, with nothing in the photo's background to offer a size comparison, there is no telling whether the Nazi rocket is full-sized or merely a much smaller test model.

On 10 October 1952, the Swedish newspaper "Aftonbladet" reported a space rocket had been launched from an SS facility near Prague in February 1945.

The vehicle sounds suspiciously like an A-9/A-10. And the launch came about a month after Admiral Ingram's press conference in New York City.

During the summer of 1943, the Peenemünde research centre was seized by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

German rocketry became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the SS.

During a trip to Berlin on 6 September 1943, Gen. Dornberger met his new boss, 42-year-old SS-Brigadeführer Hans Kammler.

Dornberger wrote:

"Dr. Kammler had the slim figure of a cavalryman, neither tall nor short.

"In his early forties, broad-shouldered and narrow in the hips, with bronzed, clear-cut features, and a high forehead under dark hair slightly streaked with grey and brushed straight back.

"He had piercing and restless brown eyes, a lean curved beak of a nose, and a strong mouth, the underlip thrust forward as though in defiance.

"That mouth indicated brutality, derision, disdain and overweening pride.

"The chin was well-moulded and prominent.

"One's first impression was of a virile, handsome and captivating personality.

"He looked like some hero of the Renaissance, a condotierre of the period of the civil wars in northern Italy".

Kammler was Himmler's most trusted aide.

He had a reputation of being the man who could get things done.

Now Himmler had new work for him.

The Reichsführer-SS wanted an underground factory "completely impervious to Allied bombs" to build all of the contraptions in the Peenemünde scientists' "blue sky" blue-prints.

It is not known if Hitler approved of this or not -it is part of what Colonel-General Erich von Manstein once called "the hermetically-sealed SS-Reich"- but Himmler was determined to build a workable spacecraft.

Kammler in created underground workshops and living quarters from a cave system in the Hartz mountains in central Germany, in what Speer, called "an almost impossibly short period of two months".

A feat, "unsurpassable even by American standards".

With Kammler at the helm, production of V-1 and V-2 weapons went into high gear.

In his book "V-1, V-2: Hitler's Vengeance on London", David Johnson noted that:

"During the [V-1] Flying Bomb assault, from mid-June to early September 1944, 2,419 of the pilotless aircraft crash-dived into London.

Rail and transportation networks were seriously disrupted. War production fell off".

Between 8 September 1944 and 27 March 1945, 517 V-2 rockets struck London, with another 378 falling short of their target and impacting in Essex.

Throughout southern England, a grand total of 1,054 came down.

In London alone over 2,700 civilians were dead from the rockets.

On 27 March 1945, the last V-2 to hit Britain came down on Orpington, Kent, about 20 miles [32 kilometres] south-east of London.

On the night of 17 December 1944 a V-2 crashed into the Rex cinema in Antwerp [Belgium] during a crowded show.

When Hitler was informed that 1,100 people, including 700 Allied soldiers had been killed, by a characteristic irony he was reluctant to credit the report.

"That would finally be the first successful launch," he observed sarcastically.

"But it is so fairy tale that my scepticism keeps me from believing it. Who is the informer? Is he paid by the launch crew?"

If Hitler had little faith in the V-2, the same cannot be said of Himmler and Kammler. Himmler gave his aide everything he needed to keep the rocket program going.

Kammler still believed that he alone, with his Army Corps and the weapons over which he had absolute authority, could prevent the imminent collapse, postpone a decision and even turn the scales.

The V-] transports still moved without respite to the "operational area" in the Netherlands,

Dornberger wrote.

"Convoys of motor vehicles bridged the gaps in the railways. Kammler's supply columns, equipped with infra-red devices that enabled them to see in the dark, rumbled along the Dutch highways".

Himmler's interest in space flight grew out of his personal commitment to the occult.

When he had been appointed leader of the Schutzstaffel in 1929, the group had been a small unit within the larger Sturmabteilung or Brownshirt militia, a kind of Secret Service devoted to the protection of Hitler and the Nazi leadership.

By 1945, however, Himmler had transformed the SS into "a state within a state".

Under his direction, the SS had become the Schwarze Sonne [Black Sun], an order of mystics that numbered in the low millions.

In his book "Hitler's Flying Saucers", author Henry Stevens pointed out:

"The Black Sun to these initiated individuals was a physical body like our visible sun except that the Black Sun was not visible to the naked eye...

"The Black Sun is sometimes represented symbolically as a black sphere out of which eight arms extend.

"Such is its most famous rendition on the mosaic floor at Wewelsburg Castle which served as the spiritual home of the SS".

Himmler's scientists were influenced by some ideas originating in Asia.

UFOs have been reported over Mongolia, Tibet and India for centuries. The ancient Indians even claimed to have constructed aircraft which resembled flying saucers. These saucers are called Vimanas.

Since his days in the mystical group Artamen in the early 1920s, Himmler had been fascinated with the scriptures of ancient India.

As a reader of the "Rig-Veda" and the "Mahabharata", he would have been familiar with the tales of Rishis [Hindu wizards] visiting other worlds in outer space.

So perhaps it is no surprise that he sent the German SS-Ahnenerbe, an organization whose purpose was associated with researching German ancestry, on expeditions to the East with the express purpose of acquiring ancient, hidden knowledge.

Kammler transferred Gen. Dornberger and Wernher von Braun into the Wasserfall anti-aircraft rocket program in late 1944.

Meanwhile, work continued on the Schriever-Miethe V-7 flying disc.

With help from another mystical group, the Thule Gesellschaft, the project developed a craft called the Haunebu-1.

This saucer had a 25-meter diameter, a speed of 4,800 kilometers per hour [3,000 miles per hour] and carried a crew of nine men.

In November 1943, a second saucer, the Haunebu-2, was built, slightly larger and could travel 6,000 kilometres per hour [3.600 miles per hour] .

A year later, in early December 1944, Gruppe Kammler unveiled its showpiece, the Haunebu-3, which "had a diameter of 71 meters [234 feet], and could reach a speed of 40,000 kilometers per hour [25,000 miles per hour]" and remain in space "for up to eight weeks, carrying a crew of 32 men.

Unaware of the progress of the Schriever-Miethe team, Gen. Dornberger proposed to suspend work on the A-9/A-10 "New York Rocket".

The order was immediately countermanded. "But now, at the end of 1944, Kammler demanded its resumption",  the general wrote, "I had no idea why".

In retrospect, it appears that it was planned to use the A-9/A-10 as a booster to get the Haunebu-3, now referred to as the Ostara [ancient German goddess of the dawn], into orbit.

On 8 January 1945, the first version of the A-9 took off.

The control failed about 30 meters [100 feet] above the firing table [launch pad].

Dornberger wrote:

"A few days later, we were unable to launch another missile because the alcohol tank had developed a leak. At last, on 24 January we had our first success.

"The rocket, climbing vertically, reached a peak height of nearly 80 kilometres [50 miles] at a maximum speed of 4,300 kilometres per hour [2,700 miles per hour]".

This may have been the rocket in the wartime photo that appeared on the back cover of Ballantine's book.

All that needed to be done now was to strap two or three A-9/A-10 boosters together, with the Ostara as payload, and launch from the new SS base near Prague.

The same day the A-9/A-10 had its successful launch, 24 January 1945, Soviet troops of Marshal Ivan Konev's First Ukrainian Front entered Auschwitz.

"On 3 April 1945, I had orders from Kammler to evacuate my staff of four hundred and fifty old Peenemünde hands to the Lower Alps near Oberammergau.

"We moved on 6 April, as the American tanks advanced through Bleicherode toward Bad Sachsa", Dornberger wrote.

"I parted from Kammler and spent the last month of the war at Oberjoch near Hindelang with my staff and Professor von Braun, who had been injured in an automobile accident".

On 7 April 1945, Hans Kammler pulled a disappearing act worthy of Houdini.

"There are five different versions of his death", Henry Stevens wrote, "And they all read like pulp fiction".

Did Kammler head for outer space aboard the Ostara?

See the books:

V2--Der Schuss ins Weltall by Walter Dornberger, Bechtle Vertag, Esslingen, Germany, 1952
Hitler's Undercover War by William Breuer, St. Martin's Press, New York, N.Y., 1989
V-1,V-2, Hitler's Vengeance on London by David Johnson, Stein & Day Publishers, Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.,1981
Flying Saucers Uncensored by Harold T. Wilkins, The Citadel Press, New York, N.Y., 1955
Himmler by Peter Padfield, MJF Books, New York, N.Y., 1990
Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945 by Max Hastings, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004
Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, New York University Press, New York, N.Y.
Hitler's Flying Saucers by Henry Stevens, Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois, 2003

Nazi spaceship film sparks UFO debate
New Sci-fi film has reignited a debate in Germany about Hitler's development of UFOs
By Allan Hall in Berlin
The Telegraph
17 November 2010

The Finnish sci-fi comedy "Iron Sky" centres on real-life SS officer Hans Kammler, said to have made a significant break0through in anti-gravity experiments towards the end of WW2.

The film relates how, from a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late 1945 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne -Black Sun- on the dark side of the Moon.

This base was to to be used to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right, in this case 2018.

But a new report out this week in Germany in the magazine "PM" purports that there is "strong evidence" that a Nazi UFO programme was well advanced.

Hitler ordered Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring to develop the super weapon that would change the war.

The PM report quotes eyewitnesses who believe they saw a flying saucer marked with the Iron Cross of the German military flying low over the Thames in 1944.

At the time the "New York Times" wrote about a "mysterious flying disc" with photos of the device seen travelling at extremely high speeds over the high-rise buildings.

The best known of the Nazi UFO projects was the Schriever-Habermohl scheme, named for Rudolf Schriever and Otto Habermohl.

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

Eyewitnesses, captured by the Allies, after the war claimed to have seen the saucer produced in Prague, fly on several occasions in early 1945.

Nazi Germany built at least four "Bells" during WW2

The first was captured at Burggrub near Bayreuth on 14 April 1945 by Patton's third Army.

The next at Dr Walter Dallenbach's research centre in Bisingen where Company B of the US 1269th Engineers Battalion dismantled it from 22-28 April 1945.

They spun a false story to the French of heavy fighting at Bisingen to keep the Free French away.

The third was captured by Col Borris Pash with his 44th Armoured Division at Roggendorf, Austria about 7 May 1945.

It was code named Quartz II and used by the SS with a team of scientists from Vienna to transmute Uranium 238 into Neptunium from which it would decay into Plutonium.

The fourth machine was was originally installed below ground from 1 November 1943 under Gandau airfield on the outskirts of Breslau [now Wroclaw] beside Neumakt.

It was part of Heeres Versuchanstalt No.10 and Prof Walther Gerlach led the project then known as Thor. It was first operated in May 1944.

In November 1944 it was shifted to an especially built complex under Fürstenstein Castle. where it operated.

It wasl finally shifted on 18 December 1944 to Wenceslas mine at Lyudvikovitse.

After the war Professor Manfred von Ardenne led two Soviet scientists Nicolai Flyerov [aka N.I. Frolov] and Igor Kurchatov to the Wenceslas mine and gave them a description of installing what he called a cyclotron in the mine.

This mine was abandoned before the war.

Above ground there was a power station with two steam cooling towers.

The bases of these have become known by various names like the "Henge" after Stonehenge, or the Fly Trap.

Bizarre claims are made by some that these are related to Nazi UFOs.

Near the mine entrance Nobel Dynamit AG operated a bullet manufacturing plant.

Wenceslas mine was also known by its codename Komplex Milkow. A short distance away was Ludwikowice.

The area in wartime had been part of Germany's Silesia region, but after the war most Germans were forced into East Germany and their homes were turned over to Polish refugees.

In German the village was called Ludwigsdorf.

Lost Nazi underground weapons testing Bunker unearthed in Austria
Chemical and atomic weapons were tested at the secret site during World War II
By Thomas Wyke
International Business Times
28 December 2014

A secret underground weapons stronghold, built by the Nazis to test new advanced weaponry has been uncovered in Austria.

The surprise finding was discovered underground near the town of Sankt Georgen an der Gusen, Austria, near the Bergkristall factory where the Messerschmitt Me 262 – the first operational jet-powered fighter – was invented.

The discovery of the site came after Andreas Sulzer, an Austrian documentary maker noticed a reference to the Bunkers in the diary of Austrian physicist who was recruited by the Nazis.

Sulzer, alongside a team of historians, began to investigate the idea of the Bunkers, receiving funding from several German broadcasters to document his discoveries.

Sulzer, one of the excavations' coordinators, spoke proudly of the discovery: "This was a gigantic industrial complex and most likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich."

He acquired aerial photographs from RAF plane that showed outlines of the complex's concrete structure.

Prior to their downfall, the Nazis went to great lengths to conceal the weapons facility, covering the entrances with thick layers of earth and slabs of granite.

It is believed that an estimated 320,000 inmates died building the labyrinth of concrete tunnels and shafts.

The "Encyclopaedia Britannica" in its 1963 edition states that:

"At Mauthausen, one of the extermination camps in Austria, close to 2,000,000 people, mostly Jews, were exterminated between 1941 and 1945"

Now, the death toll has been revised:

"An estimated 197,464 prisoners passed through the Mauthausen camp system between August 1938 and May 1945.

"At least 95,000 died there. More than 14,000 were Jewish"

--United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

An exaggeration of 1,905,000!

This camp is no longer considered by official sources as an “extermination camp,” nor is it still claimed that any camps on German soil were either.

It is believed to be the location of a secret weapons programme, led by SS General Hans Kammler. Kammler is thought to have lived on the site during the war.

Rumours continue to surround his death, with some suggesting he was given a new identity by the US government in exchange for details on Nazi weapons research.

The deadly V-2 rocket which struck at London during the final months of the World War II was tested at the complex. It is also thought that scientists experimented with the use of radioactive material and chemical gas.

The new excavations have had a setback, after local authorities ordered them to be halted until Sulzer obtains a proper permit for the research of historical sites.

Hans Kammler and Nuclear Weapons

Nazi Nuclear Programme

It remains a phantom that has been dismissed by scholars for decades as producing nothing. That common view, however, may be changing.

The story line for the past 70 years has been that the Germans during World War II made only a few preliminary gestures toward the basic science underpinning nuclear power.

They did not get very far after Albert Einstein in March 1933 and other top researchers became émigrés working for the United States government.

In addition, targeted Allied interventions such as at Vemork Norsk Hydro plant in the town of Rjukan in the county of Telemark, Norway, where a barge full of heavy water supposedly was sunk and ended the Nazis' nuclear program, were said to have played a key role in stopping the research.

Because of Kammler's association with top-secret, cutting edge projects and his apparently clean get-away, he remains the subject of conspiracy theories about what the Germans were really up to with their advanced weapons programs.

These theories get quite fantastic, but the evidence for them is non-existent. Still, people love conspiracies and ecrets, so the stories likely never will die.

Hans Kammler, shrouded in mystery and with his hands deep in the most advanced research of his day, invariably turns up as the protagonist in such activities, perhaps pulling off his disappearing act by riding to another century or dimension in "Die Glocke" [the Bell], a mythical advanced transportation device.

That is the basic story, and it hasn't changed since the war.

Until recently, that is.

Simply repeating these stories makes you appear to be on the fringe, but one must understand the theories to discount them - and see if there indeed is any grain of truth to them.

And, in this field, there are lots of such grains that taken together are fascinating, but do not add up to much.

Researchers are still trying to piece everything together, but the picture is becoming clearer and a bit more elaborate than the common sketchy [and satisfying] tale of Nazi bungling failure.

This is a story of a shadowy program which still isn't completely understood, led by that even shadowier figure, Dr. Hans Kammler.

Background

This is a story of a major war criminal who got away.

General Dr Ing. Hans Friedrich Karl Franz Kammler was one of the chief architects of Nazi "special projects".

He was in charge of the ballistic missile and jet aircraft programs. More chillingly, he was in charge of the concentration camps.

The infamous gas chambers and crematoria at the camps were as much his doing as anybody's. He was in charge of designing and building the camps across Europe.

Many Nazis gained notoriety after the war when their crimes were exposed, but Kammler remains largely unknown to this day.

And, from some perspectives, Kammler was the biggest fish of them all.

Had he been brought to trial, he almost certainly would have received the death sentence at the first Nuremberg tribunal, and it would have been carried out

A project that could have been the true origin of the Nazi UFO myth, is "Die Glocke" or in English, "The Bell", believed to have been Nazi Germany’s famed "Wunderwaffe" or Wonder Weapon.

The project at the end of the war disappeared from the scene, along with SS General Hans Kammler, in charge of the secret projects of the Third Reich, and the last Ju-390.

Whether they disappeared together, remains speculation.

It was the culmination of Nazi Germany’s brightest scientific minds.

The same people who created the V1 and V2 rockets [the V2 being the first man-made object to leave our atmosphere and plunge into the cold depths of space] are also thought to have been involved in the development of a weapon so terrible that some accounts describe factions of these scientists refusing to release technical plans to Nazi leaders for fear of what might be done with the technology.

The Bell, however, is a complete mystery, though there is no shortage of conspiracy surrounding it.

For the record, no one really knows what "Wunderwaffe" actually was, or even if Nazi Germany was really developing anything other than conventional weaponry.

Most mainstream science and historical experts are adamant that the V series rockets were the pinnacle of German technology at the time, and that the Bell is a simple urban legend.

Some German scientists have gone on record stating that the machine was designed to warp space-time and to allow the SS to travel backward through time.

So, did Nazi scientists develop and build a time machine?

There are reports that several top SS Officers and scientists disappeared without a trace just prior to the end of the war.

May 1945 was a chaotic time in Germany, giving anyone with a place to go ample opportunities to get there without being apprehended.

And Hans Kammler still had the means even at that late date to get wherever he wanted to go in complete secrecy.

Kammler did manage to disappear at the end of the war, which is a bit more difficult to achieve than it sounds, especially for someone as prominent as him.

Some perfunctory searches were made for him, but people said he went here, others said he went there:

He was supposed to attend a conference in this city or that on certain dates and never showed up - none of which made any sense at all and led nowhere.

It was almost as if there were a deliberate, organized campaign to obscure his trail. Kammler simply was there one day and gone the next.

He went somewhere - his body never was found and there was absolutely no evidence from any source that he perished.

They've been able to ascertain the end of Martin Bormann and Dr. Mengele, but not Kammler.

Now, at last, there may be a slender clue as to exactly where he went and what he was worried about in those last frantic days.

A place he never would have been found - that was his destination.

What is of interest is that Kammler was in charge of the underground facilities where Nazi war production moved at the end of the war.

He was given this authority by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Armaments Minister Albert Speer. Almost all of those underground facilities are well-known and now empty.

However, there also have been what can best be called "legends" of vast underground facilities that never were found and may, in addition, have served as a sort of shelter for certain Nazis and their SS guards at the end of the war.

There is no use pointing to sources for these tales, as any sources for this are without sources themselves and just uncorroborated stories.

The typical location for these "redoubts" are usually placed deep in Poland, which is a convenient location for such tales because western researchers haven't been able to examine them until recently and the area is vast and often desolate.

The stories are often embellished by the presence of skeletons of SS guards at the entrances, still holding their rifles.....

To return to known reality, the main work of producing planes and other armament was done at the Mittelwerk facility in the Kohnstein, which is fairly well known.

However, there were many other underground facilities, developed as the Allied bombardment made surface production hazardous.

One of these underground facilities was located in the Bergkristall [literally, "rock crystal"] site in Austria, which is near the mountain town St Georgen an der Gusen.

It is a fairly typical small Austrian mountain town, however, it has quite a history.

Adolf Hitler, of course, was from Austria. St. Georgen an der Gusen is not far from where he grew up.

Hitler's bizarre strategy during late 1944 and 1945 of allocating huge forces desperately needed elsewhere to guard that region often has been questioned.

Now, researchers may be uncovering a very dark strategic reason for him to switch Panzer Armies in that direction when the Soviets only were 60 miles from Berlin.

There is no evidence yet of anything happening in these mountains of any relevance to the last days of the war.

However, the possibility does exist that researchers may uncover something important.

The New Discovery

It always has been known that the Nazis had a major underground weapons production facility at B8 Bergkristall. It churned out the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter plane, which was operational by late 1944 and proved better in various performance categories than any Allied fighter.

It could not turn the tide of the war, but the Me 262 was cutting edge technology and a giant leap beyond what the Allies were fielding at the time [the Allies did have some jets of their own such as the British Gloster Meteor, but no Allied jet saw any action beyond patrolling against V-1 buzz bombs].

There was a lot going on just behind the surface of the placid alpine town named Sankt Georgen an der Gusen.

B8 Bergkristall is near the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. Mauthausen provided the slave labor that kept the Bergkristall factory humming along.

There were a lot of slave laborers -up to 320,000- and many were killed in various ways.

The nearby town was the site of the Gusen 2 sub-camp which supplied the factory laborers.

The B8 Bergkristall - Esche II program was located in a series of caves [some 40 square miles are known] carved out of the mountains near Sankt Georgen an der Gusen.

That is a very small town in the middle of the mountains. The census gave it a population of 1,429 in 1939. Even today, it only has a few thousand inhabitants.

It remained under Nazi control until the final surrender.

The underground plants were so extensive that it was difficult to uncover all of them. The Nazis certainly were not forthcoming about them during or after the war.

The Soviets were in charge of the area for the decade after the war, until 1955, but they did not seem particularly interested in exploring dusty old caves.

They examined what they found, made sure it was harmless, and moved on. They do not appear to have launched any major expeditions to search for caves that weren't already disclosed to them.

There are unexplained radioactive readings in the area that may be natural phenomena, but also could be man-made.

If the latter, they could only come from a Nazi programme, as no [other] nuclear research has been performed in the area.

If so, this would not be the first time that suspected radioactive material from Germany was found,.

Iin June 2011, there was atomic waste -126,000 barrels of it- found in an abandoned salt mine near Hanover.

In his book "Der letzte Zeuge" ["The Last Witness" subtitled "I was Hitler’s switchboard operator, messenger and bodyguard"] Rochus Misch wrote regarding the German atomic bomb:

"I remember, for example, reading a message on the state of our atomic bomb development.

"It said that research by the Americans was three quarters of a year behind our German program.

"But I knew Hitler’s attitude towards the nuclear bomb: 'With that weapon we will not win the war.'

"Of that he was convinced.

"The Western Allies had threatened to gather 15,000 aircraft, in case we used the atomic bomb, down in North Africa and from there they would bombard Germany with poison gas.

"Gas attacks were something that Hitler had experienced in the First World War and they terrified him. For such devastation he emphasized that he could not take responsibility.

"And so the use of a [German] atomic bomb [against the Allies] was something that he ruled out completely".

The Allies had already demonstrated a total willingness to use vicious tactics and to violate the Hague Rules of War which they solemnly had signed.

They had already killed one million German civilians by deliberate terror bombing, designed to cause civilian mass misery and terror.

The purpose of the area bombardment of cities was laid out in a British Air Staff paper, dated 23 September 1941:

"The ultimate aim of an attack on a town area is to break the morale of the population which occupies it.

"To ensure this, we must achieve two things: first, we must make the town physically uninhabitable and, secondly, we must make the people conscious of constant personal danger.

"The immediate aim, is therefore, two-fold, namely, to produce (i) destruction and (ii) fear of death“.

In October 1943 [Bomber] Harris [the British Air Marshal] urged the government to be honest with the public regarding the purpose of the bombing campaign.

To Harris, his complete success at Hamburg [35,000 civilians killed] confirmed the validity and necessity of his methods,

He urged that “the aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive…should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany.....the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy".

Did Germany "Have" "The Bomb" but not use it?

That is exactly what this book in German by engineer Peter Brüchmann, the son of an German wartime engineer who worked on the German A-Bomb, says.

"Top Secret: America’s Triumph Kept Secret: The capture of German Atomic Bombs in 1945. Memories and Revelations of a Witness] states two German A-bombs were captured in Thuringia by General George Patton’s troops, and they are what the Americans dropped in August 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki/

The first truly US-built A-bomb was in 1947.

The book also claims that both the German and the American Manhattan Project scientists were fearful for years that an atomic reaction could ignite the earth’s atmosphere and burn up the whole planet in a gigantic fire.!

It also states the Germans successfully ignited atomic bombs over the Baltic Sea.

All this confirms what Joseph Farrell, has stated in his many books, such as: "Reich Of The Black Sun: Nazi Secret Weapons and The Cold War Allied Legend" [March 2005] and "The SS Brotherhood of the Bell: Nasa’s Nazis, JFK, and Majic-12" [August 2006].

The German bomb had too much radioactivity and not enough blast, but it was good for destroying wooden Japanese houses.

It did not destroy steel-reinforced buildings.

Only wooden Japanese houses with internal walls, literally made of paper, were destroyed in Hiroshima after the German bomb.

The Reich survived by offering these primitive atomic bombs [= low-blast] to the Americans because Truman wanted to 1) scare the Soviets with some weapon that seemed big and 2) he wanted to end the war with Japan quickly.

The US expected one million American dead and wounded in vicious house-to-house fighting on the main island of Honshu against a foe who was determined to fight like a Samurai to the death for his emperor.

Review: "The Search for Hitler’s Bomb"
Stephen Z. Nemo
29 May 2017

“The Search for Hitler’s Bomb” a fascinating German documentary now streaming on Netflix, suggests the Nazi regime may have been further along in its nuclear weapons program
han originally thought.
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By way of background, before his death in 1989, CIA Director William Casey wrote a memoir of his exploits running covert operations while a member of the Organization of Strategic Services [OSS] against Nazi Germany during World War II

In “The Secret War Against Hitler” Casey noted:

“In April 1945, a dismantled high-concentrate plant was found in Bavaria, together with Uranium and heavy water –on the brink of going critical– lacking about seven hundred liters of additional heavy water”.

He failed to mention whether or not his team got the partially submerged atomic pile under control before it went critical.

It was a problem of his own making.

OSS operations designed to deny Nazi Germany a reliable supply of heavy water, used to stabilize weapons-grade Uranium, were very successful.

But spymaster Casey made it seem as though Hitler’s atomic scientists never advanced beyond the research phase.

Between the world wars, German Nobel Prize-winning physicist Philip Lenard was among those spearheading a movement within Germany’s scientific community to dismiss the theoretical ideas of Albert Einstein as "Jewish physics".

The adherents of “Aryan physics” believed Einstein’s hypotheses could not be tested in a laboratory or observed in nature.

Lucky for the Aryans, Germany surrendered soon after Hitler’s suicide in April of 1945.

Three months later, Einstein’s 1905 theory – E=mc2 – was made manifest for the Japanese citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At Einstein’s urging, the United States had figured out how to harness the internal, thermo-nuclear dynamics of a star and use it as a weapon.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, one Nazi in particular saw the promise of so-called Jewish physics and its potential to produce war-winning weapons for Hitler’s Germany: Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel [SS], Heinrich Himmler.

After an Allied bombing raid destroyed the German weapons test facility at Peenemünde in 1943, Himmler chose SS engineer Hans Kammler to oversee the construction of underground factories and research facilities for the production of superweapons, which included the V-2 rocket.

According to the documentary, a month before the war’s end, a spy inside one such facility informed Igor Kurchativ, head of the Soviet Union’s nuclear program, that the Germans “carried out two explosions in Thuringia with huge force.

"Trees were felled in a distance of up to 600 meters. The prisoners at the epicenter of the explosion have died, many of them without a trace.

"A strong radio-active effect was also observed".

Since we know the Soviets had spies inside America’s Manhattan Project, it isn’t all that far fetched to believe they had infiltrated the Third Reich’s nuclear program as well.

And when U.S. forces inspected a facility in Hillersleben, a Col. Keck reported back to Washington:

“I saw that the Germans had progressed far in developing an atomic bomb. The progress was remarkable and indicates that they were very close to a solution".

The man who built these underground facilities, SS engineer Hans Kammler –who Heinrich Himmler charged with creating superweapons, who ruthlessly worked and starved slave laborers and whose efforts to build a Nazi nuclear weapon came so close to fruition– simply disappeared from history.

Some, like Kammler’s driver, say he committed suicide the day Germany surrendered to the Allies.

Others speculate he was smuggled out of Europe and taken to America to advance the U.S. rocket and nuclear programs.