Following the landings in France in 1944, the Combined Chiefs of Staff set up a number of military-civilian teams, termed the Joint Intelligence Objectives Committee, to follow the invading Allied armies into Germany with a view to seizing all Hitler’s military, scientific and industrial secrets for early use against Japan.
The teams worked against the clock to obtain the most vital information before it was destroyed. The result was the biggest collect of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled.
One Washington official called it “the greatest single source of this type of material in the world, the first orderly exploitation of an entire country’s brain-power”.
The Office of Technical Services, the Washington government agency originally formed to handle the collection, reported that tens of thousands of tons of material was involved.
It was estimated that over a million separate items had to be handled and they most likely represented practically all the scientific, military and industrial secrets of Nazi Germany
In "A Brief History of Air Force Scientific and Technical Intelligence", published by NAIC, the National Air Intelligence Centre, it was recorded that in 1946 at Wright Field alone, three hundred people processed over 1,500 tons of documents, adding 10,000 new technical terms to the English language.
The technical knowledge from these documents revolutionized American industry.
In the summer of 1944, at about the time the JIOC was set in motion, the German High Command began to contemplate the eventuality of defeat:
In September that year a General Plan was elaborated to evacuate Nazis, Third Reich capital and highly advanced technical and scientific knowledge to places selected by Hitler himself, of which Argentina was the principal destination.
The strategist of the General Plan was Hitler’s personal ADC, Martin Bormann.
The so-called “Rat Run” to Argentina was operated through the consulates of that country in Italy and Rome and facilitated the escape of wanted war criminals.
But the Rat Run, known to the Germans with the code name "Regentröpfchen" was a fronting operation concealing a much vaster programme aimed at retaining for Nazism the scientific, political and military elite of the Third Reich and certain hyper-secret specialized knowledge.
This latter was of a level above and beyond the million or so secret inventions and patents to be abandoned to the Allies. Code-named "Aktion Wiking".
This section of the overall plan was begun in September 1944 by Maximilian Erth with the assistance of Philip Bouhler [Chief of Adolf Hitler’s Chancellery] and the Gauleiter of Lower Silesia, Karl Hanke.
The Nazis were particularly anxious to protect documents containing the highest classifications of secret knowledge designated "Geheime Reichssache" relating to the development of arms, aircraft and submarines.
The most important of all these, files relating to super aviation fuel and advanced aircraft, went by long-range Junkers Ju 390 transport aircraft directly to Argentina.
From the point of view of the US Government, the 260 tons of strategic material aboard the German U-Boat U-234 escorted into Portsmouth Navy Yard, New Hampshire on 19 May 1945 ,is so absurdly secret that the fact that it is classified as top secret is a secret:
As are the documents pertaining to Dr Heinz Schlicke and the nature of the assistance he afforded the Manhattan Project in the three months after his capture.
The most secret item of cargo aboard U-234 remains the eighty small cases of Uranium powder which have never appeared on any USN Unloading Manifest and which will have been the fissile material for a rudimentary atomic explosive.
But as far as the German High command was concerned, the voyage of this U-Boat with its extra-ordinary cargo of war materials and passengers did not rate so highly as to fall within the ambit of the General Plan of Evacuation.
With the military disaster of Stalingrad, Martin Bormann and other top Nazi leaders began the quiet flight of capital from Nazi Germany to safe havens abroad, an operation code named Aktion Feuerland, Operation Fireland.
The treasure consisted of hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks; boxes and boxes of gold and platinum, pearls and diamonds; crates full of the priceless art of Europe; and billionaire bundles of stocks and other securities.
The loot was amassed in a series of bank safes and underground vaults throughout the Reich – until Martin Bormann was made aware of its existence by one of his many internal Intelligence conduits.
In late 1943, he took control of much, though not all, of this booty and informed Hitler of its existence and a plan he had formulated for its conservation.
“Bury your treasure, for you will need it to begin a Fourth Reich", Hitler had responded.
With this blessing, Bormann took control of as many as six U-Boats, some of them unmarked, from Gross Admiral Karl Dönitz, and garnered the support of Generalissimo Francisco Franco to headquarter the U-Boats in the Spanish port cities of Cadiz and Vigo.
Some 1,154 U-boats were in operation during the war. A total of 450 were lost to Allied action or accidents.
Of the 50 boats that were unaccounted for, paperwork reveals the areas they were officially assigned to but there is no way to know if they ever reached those areas or went elsewhere later.
No records of “off the books” secret missions have been found.
The U-Boats for the next two years, supplied by cargo planes from Germany that transported the treasures to the coastal towns on the Atlantic, began a non-stop circuit transporting the treasure to the far southern reaches of Argentina – the region known as Tierra del Fuego, or Land of Fire.
The flight capital plans were variously known as Aktion Regentröpfchen and Aktion Adlerflug, Operations Raindrop and Eagle Flight, respectively.
In the 1950s two crewmen of the former pocket battleship 'Admiral Graf Spee', Rudolf Walter Dettelmann and Alfred Schultz, interned in Argentina, swore statements to an Argentinian commission of enquiry to the effect that on 28 and 29 July 1945 they carried out naval duties in connection with the arrival on the Patagonian coast of two U-Boats of an alleged six which escaped from Europe loaded with gold bullion and passengers.
Extensive sonar sweeps along the inshore coast of Patagonia in March 2002 have resulted in a contact which, pending visual confirmation, will probably be a U-Boat believed scuttled in these co-ordinates in July 1945.
As it is neither of those mentioned by the two 'Graf Spee' crewmen, it is clear that the General Plan was put into effect.
A leftist correspondent of a leading Neuquen daily newspaper active in exposing Nazi war criminals in the Bariloche area of Argentina and who prefers anonymity for that reason has stated in writing that he inspected official documents confirming that the German anti-gravity experiments SS-E-IV and SS-U-13 together with the notorious "Bell", arrived aboard a Junkers Ju 390 long-range transport aircraft which flew non-stop from Norway to Gualeguay aerodrome in Entre Rios province, Argentina, at the war’s end.
If true, this might be seen by some as suggestive that the SS anti-gravity aircraft project was the post-war utmost priority for the National Socialist scientific elite.
Just a few days after the Nagasaki bombing in August 1945 the US authorities interrogated a German Flak rocket expert Hans Zinsser, a trained observer of aerial explosions.
The interview document has a high reliability rating.
Zinsser described certain characteristics of an A-Bomb test he claimed to have observed over Germany in 1944 which he could not possibly have known about unless he had actually witnessed such an explosion.
A small, possibly one- kiloton, device was being described, although the signs to look for were buried in the text and would elude the casual, unscientific reader of the document, which is the reason why its significance has been overlooked until now.
Unlikely as it may seem, therefore, on 11 October 1944, off Rügen Island in the western Baltic, German scientists successfully obtained a small atomic reaction from, for want of a better description, a rudimentary bomb within a lead jacket to suppress fallout.
In a letter from Robert Oppenheimer to James B. Conant dated 30 November 1942 it was stated that in the opinion of General Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, a successful bomb was one “which had a 50% chance of exceeding a 1,000-ton TNT equivalent” and, as the German device seems to have fallen within this, Hitler’s scientists won the race for the atom bomb.
The V-4 is what catches the imagination. It was described by Hitler as being a weapon “of such potent effect that all human life would be exterminated within a radius of three to four kilometres of the point of impact”.
This terminology could describe equally well an atomic weapon, a 250kg bomb of Sarin nerve gas or even radiological material.
The looseness of Hitler’s description was intended to mislead his guest at the table, Marshal Antonescu of Rumania, as to the nature of this “weapon of frightfulness” and how it was to be deployed, facts which have correspondingly remained a mystery ever since.
Iin the most important areas of history, particularly the Second World War, many governments intend that the truth of certain affairs is to be suppressed for ever.
This may be done for a variety of reasons, both honourable and not. Thus, deep in national archives the papers which contain the true history will lie in darkness for decades and perhaps never see the light of day.
Aged servants of the former Third Reich in Germany and Austria often have useful files and documents which they are fearful to disclose lest their State pensions and those of their dependants should become forfeit on some unfortunate “technicality”.
A file of correspondence between an Austrian Gauleiter and Hitler pertaining to the successful development of an efficient implosion fuse capable of detonating a Plutonium bomb is in "Sicherheit", which means in the custody of a lawyer until the death of the rightful holder, when it is to be released to a named researcher for publication.
All this official secrecy made has led to the creation of lobbies.
One of them believes passionately in an SS atom bomb built in some deep catacomb in the Tyrol or Harz Mountains. Another thinks that Professor Heisenberg must have been behind everything.
An opposing lobby is tied to revealed documentation which dictates that National Socialist Germany not only had no atom bomb project and no nuclear reactor, but could not possibly have had one even if they wanted because their best scientists had all emigrated.
In fact, given the right implosion fuse, a couple of rudimentary zero-energy nuclear reactors in an underground factory beside the Danube, two years and a chemical separation plant, a low-grade Plutonium bomb would not have been beyond Germany’s capabilities in the Second World War, and from September 1941 they knew it.
Simply to dismiss as a flight of fancy the V-4 explosive mentioned by Hitler, as academics and historians have done over the last half-century, seems too easy a solution.
There is no proof that the Third Reich scientists developed a full-size atom bomb, as many Germans insist, but the Wagnerian monstrosity below Haigerloch church, the cave with its chain of dangling Uranium cubes above a well of heavy water in the gloom, is German humour at its best.
Many suspect that the standard history we have been fed is bogus and that the Third Reich must have come up with something better than this abject, dismal failure.
Re-examining all the wartime German nuclear documents in the hope of discovering some inconsistency, suspicion soon falls on certain experimental work at Leipzig performed by Professor Werner Heisenberg.
It was pointed out that, whether he knew it or not, what he was doing was more useful fieldwork for making a bomb than designing a nuclear reactor.
If intended as the warhead in a V-2 rocket it was ingenious.
Recently released official documents allow the deduction that in April 1945 the submarine U-234 sailed for Tokyo with enough treated Uranium for two small, laboratory-built atom bombs, a scientific passenger who specialized in fuse technology, and heavy water, essential ingredients in the manufacture of Heisenberg’s bomb.
Thus at last we may have the solution to the mystery surrounding this German submarine.
The path of the V-4 project, which was not one weapon but two, is tortuous, unlike the well known V-1 and V-2.
The V-3 High Pressure Pump was used operationally by the Germans to bombard Luxemburg City during the Battle of the Ardennes and merits attention for that reason.
The Motorstoppmittel, Feuerkugel, known popularly as the Foo Fighter, and the other side of the same coin, the Kugelblitz were all exotic ideas connected with the SS electro-magnetic anti-gravity project.
Some claim that the concept originated in the workshops of some other world’s air force.
Official documents prove the existence of all three developments, but fifty-five years afterwards, beyond a grudging admission that their airmen were not hallucinating with respect to the foo-fighter, the authorities have still revealed nothing about how the machines worked.
Initially aircrew abstained from reporting what they had seen for fear of being grounded and hospitalized for psychiatric examination.
Certainly on the evidence it is strange how the Germans, whose warships’ radar needed a vast steel mattress twelve yards square at the fore top, can have made such giant strides in propulsion, aerodynamics and radar in a few months that they were able to menace enemy bomber formations at 10,000 feet with luminous aerobatic discs capable of making over 400 knots.
It is said that these aerial vehicles, if one can call them that, had been developed by –and one hopes that they were developed by– clever SS scientists at Wiener Neustadt.
They seemed to be an ingenious though harmless anti-aircraft device.
The purpose of building such vehicles so close to the cessation of hostilities, particularly in view of the unholy alliance of Allied Governments with former German military and political leaders to continue tjheir existence ever since, gives rise to the conviction that one should not altogether discount the possibility of a connection between the loss of the war by Hitler and the upsurge in UFO sightings from 1947 onwards.
There is no evidence for a German flying saucer excepting claims made by German aeronautical engineers post-war that they had worked on the design or construction of the project.
Nevertheless, in 1947 the USAF was absolutely certain that flying saucers existed, flew in our airspace and they suspected a German origin for them.
For that reason it is worthwhile to examine the evidence and to form a hypothesis for their creation in line with National Socialist ideology.
Mention must be made of the officer entrusted with running the V-weapons project from its inception.
Probably the most extra-ordinary and enigmatic figure among the latter-day Nazi hierarchy, SS-General Dr [Ing] Hans Kammler was a grey career man who had seen no fighting at the front.
As engineer in charge of Building and Construction Works at WVHA, the SS-Chief Economic and Administrative Office, in 1942 Kammler had had responsibility for the planning and design of a number of death camps and had personally supervised the construction of the Auschwitz satellite camp at Birkenau.
On 7 July 1943, at FHQ Rastenburg, Hitler informed Wernher von Braun and Oberst Dr [Ing] Walter Dornberger, senior rocket scientists at the Peenemünde research establishment, that the V-2 project had been given the highest priority rating.
On 22 July of that year, after the destruction by bombing of the rocket component plant at Friedrichshafen, the SS had begun looking for an underground factory and had found a suitable location at Niedersachswerfen near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains, the largest subterranean factory in the world.
Burrowed into the chalky rock of the Kohnstein mountain, and originally designed as a chemical storage facility, Nordhausen comprised of two parallel tunnels 2½ kilometres long, 200 metres apart and wide enough for a double railway track in each, with 46 connecting chambers.
A third tunnel at the level of the eighteenth chamber ran at a right angle to the main corridors. Floor area amounted to 125,000 square metres.
The available space was million cubic metres. Heating was maintained at 17°C with low humidity. All corridors and chambers were equipped with strong electric lighting.
On 17 August a large force of British aircraft bombed Peenemünde.
The material damage was not extensive and more than 80 per cent of the bombs fell on open land and in the nearby woods.
Even the effective patterns had damaged mostly non-industrial or easily repairable facilities. Dornberger reviewed the damage at first light and concluded that the site would be operational again within six weeks, but the following day Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of SS Security Police, arrived in order to enquire personally into an alleged security leak.
The intervention provided Heinrich Himmler with the opportunity to approach Hitler with a convincing argument for transferring the entire V-weapons project from the Army to the SS.
The satisfactory continuation of the programme could be guaranteed only by placing it under SS supervision, he argued, ensuring secrecy by using concentration camp inmates for the work force. Hitler concurred.
On 1 September 1943 Hans Kammler was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer and appointed Special Commissioner for the V-2 project.
He recruited 2,000 engineers and drew 15,000 concentration camp inmates from Buchenwald and Natzweiler for the conversion work at the former Wifo factory now renamed Nordhausen Central Works and also SS Mittelwerk, the latter by reason of its geographical position at the centre of Germany.
During the first week of March 1944 Kammler was given overall responsibility for Underground Constructions and now had 175,000 concentration camp inmates under his control.
An SS Special Staff known as Baubüro under Kammler became directly answerable to Himmler not only for the production, completion, storage and supply of V-weapon armaments but also for building a number of massive underground weapons factories the size of a small metropolis such a s Quarz at Melk, Austria, and Zement I and II at Ebensee.
On 8 August 1944 Himmler appointed Kammler as General Plenipotentiary for V-2 Assembly and C-in-C V-2 Operations, which had previously been under the jurisdiction of LXV Army Corps. His Lehr-und Versuchsbatterie 444 got off to an inauspicious start when the first two V-2 rockets of the campaign aimed at Paris on 6 September both failed through fuel blockage. After shifting location but with the same target, a successful launch was achieved on 8 September.
The same day Artillery Detachment 485 obtained a hit at Chiswick, London, from the Hague. From August 1944 until the conclusion of the Ardennes Offensive, in addition to the V-1 and V-2, Kammler oversaw the operational deployment of the V-3 High Pressure Pump and was present to observe the first rounds being fired on Luxemburg City on 30 December 1944.
On 26 January 1945 Kammler was made commanding general of the 5th Flak Division at Rotterdam, a very remarkable appointment for a man with no battle experience, and on 14 February he took over Army Korps zbV [zbV = for special purposes]. On 31 January he came straight from the V-3 installation at Lampaden to organize the placing of two detachments of his Division’s Flak on the eastern banks of the Rhine.
All this was satisfactorily accomplished by late February and in early March Kammler was confirmed as General Plenipotentiary to Halt the Terror Bombing.
One of the driving forces behind the secret weapons’ creation, was Hitler’s fury at the firestorms unleashed by Allied planes across German cities, from early 1942 until war’s end.
These British and American war crimes are seldom mentioned in Western mainstream historical analysis.
For example, during the Allies’ ten day raid over Hamburg in July 1943, deliberately targeting German civilians, over 40,000 people were killed. In the Luftwaffe’s eight month Blitz of Britain, from September 1940 to May 1941, virtually the same number of civilians were killed.
This meant that he was now responsible to the Führer directly for all anti-aircraft measures, which would have included the supremely secret versions, as well as the conventional anti-aircraft rockets produced at Peenemünde, Wasserfall, Hs 117 Schmetterling, Enzian, Taifun and the remote controlled Hs 298 and X-4 Ruhrstahl.
It appears that he had had powers as plenipotentiary before his appointment, since on 6 February 1945 he had signed the order to discontinue work on Schmetterling and Enzian.
In either February or March 1945, or at any rate by the time Kammler had achieved the rank of SS Obergruppenführer and General der SS, he was given complete jurisdiction for the turbo-jet fighter.
Another objective which does not seem so well documented involved transferring Dr Dornberger and his work staff in February of that year from Schwedt on the Oder to Bad Sachsa where Dornerberger was to be responsible for the development and testing of “anti-aircraft measures” and for that purpose was to set up “Development Team Mittelbau” under Dr Alfred Buch, a scientist.
Kammler ordered a large number of firms to be co-opted to concentrate on “special equipment”. At the beginning of April 1945, for the defence of the central Harz, Kammler cobbled together an infantry corps from retreating Army units and V-1/V-2 firing commandos.
He also made a determined attempt to swell SS numbers at Niedersachswerfen by recruiting Mittelwerk technicians and engineers but this does not seem to have been too successful.
In any case, 500 or so of these personnel, the major part of he former Peenemünde team, had been ordered by Kammler to relocate in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen area of southern Germany, and most of them made the six-day journey by the special train sardonically known as the “Vergeltungs-Express”.
Dr Wernher von Braun was told by Kammler that he, Kammler, had been made Head of the Fighter Plane Staff and “had to report to another place”.
On 7 April 1945 Kammler was seen leaving Mittelwerk towards the western Harz with a section of his General Staff and, apart from a cable to Himmler, sent from a village called Deggendorf, confirming his continuing loyalty to Hitler ten days later, that was the last heard of any of them.
Kammler knew virtually everything about the V-Weapons operational programme. His whereabouts after early April 1945 are unknown.
There are reports of his death in action defending the Czech Front against the Soviet Army, and the latter gave short shrift to captured SS men.
A recent book by Nick Cook 4 proposes that Kammler negotiated a deal for himself with the United States in exchange for Germany’s anti-gravity technology.
What evidence there is suggests that this was not the case.
Nick Cook: "The Hunt for Zero Point: One Man’s Journey to Discover the Biggest Secret Since the Invention of the Atom Bomb", Century Books, 2001.
The author, a leading writer for Britain’s most authoritative military journal, "Jane’s Defence Weekly", advances the theory that Kammler gave the Americans “Nazi anti-gravity technology” in exchange for his own security.
Cook invokes this line of reasoning to explain “the thousands of sightings of UFOs that have occurred since the Second World War".
There are no UFOs but American UFOs.
Sightings of flying saucers and so forth are not a modern phenomenon and go back to at least the time of the Ancient Greeks.
Bormann’s 1944 General Plan of Evacuation was drawn up to safeguard the more advanced technological knowledge by having people like Kammler brought out of Europe before the capitulation.
One must not lose sight of the fact that at the end of the war there was a huge influx of Reich money and scientific personnel into Argentina and Chile:
Deep below ground perhaps some of the more important work was continued.
The equipment at FHQ Waldenburg was evacuated in April and May 1945, probably to South America, by SS Obergruppenführer Jakob Sporrenberg.
It would be in South America that Kammler might have felt more comfortable for his own peace of mind than in relying on a deal with the United States.
One would also think it safe to assume that if the USAF had been able to make head or tail of German anti-gravity, they would not have bothered with the same old rocket propulsion methods at Cape Kennedy three decades afterwards.
An underlying thread of argument runs along the lines that far more lay behind National Socialism than a mad racialist warlord wanting to conquer the world for no good reason.
Conceivably this will not find much of a welcome amongst those whose vision, being fixed on purely material causes, allows no possibility of a supra-physical impetus in history.
The facts do bear investigation.
At the beginning of 1934, when Rudolf Hess swore in the entire NSDAP to Hitler in a mass spectacle bringing millions of Germans to the microphones, he said to them:
“By this oath we again bind our lives to a man through whom –this is our belief– superior forces act in fulfilment of Destiny".
- Konrad Heiden: "The Führer", first published London, 1944: reprinted H. Pordes, London 1967
Whatever Hess meant by this we have never been able to discover, but it might have been the reason why he spent all his life after 1941 imprisoned in solitary confinement.
The former Gauleiter of Danzig, Hermann Rauschning recalled that in the early years of the regime during the course of his discussions with Hitler [whom he described as the Master Enchanter and High Priest of the Religious Mysteries of Nazism],
Hitler spoke openly about his innermost ideas – a programme to be kept secret from the masses. Rauschning continued:
“One cannot help thinking of him as a medium. For most of the time mediums are ordinary, insignificant people.
"Suddenly they are endowed with what seems to be supernatural powers which set them apart from the rest of humanity. These powers are something that is outside their true personality – visitors, as it were, from another planet. The medium is possessed. Once the crisis is past, they fall back again into mediocrity.
"It was in this way, beyond any doubt, that Hitler was possessed by forces outside himself".
Rauschning's Phony 'Conversations With Hitler'
The supposed memoir of Hermann Rauschning, the National Socialist President of the Danzig Senate in 1933-1934 who was ousted from the Hitler movement a short time later and then made a new life for himself as a professional anti-Nazi, is one of the most widely quoted sources of information about Hitler's personality and secret intentions.
In the book known in German as "Gespräche mit Hitler", first published in the U.S. in 1940 as "The Voice of Destruction", Rauschning presents page after page of what are purported to be Hitler's most intimate views and plans for the future, allegedly based on dozens of private conversations between 1932 and 1934.
After the war the memoir was introduced as Allied prosecution exhibit USSR-378 at the main Nuremberg "war crimes" trial.
Among the damning quotations attributed to Hitler by Rauschning is this memorable statement:
"We must be brutal. We must regain a clear conscience about brutality. Only then can we drive out the tenderness from our people ... Do I propose to exterminate entire nationalities? Yes, it will add up to that ... I naturally have the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin ... Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians. It is an honorable title".
Hitler is also supposed to have confided to Rauschning, an almost unknown provincial official, fantastic plans for a German world empire that would include Africa, South America, Mexico and, eventually, the United States.
Many prestigious historians, inculding Leon Poliakov, Gerhard Weinberg, Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest, Nora Levin and Robert Payne, used choice quotations from Rauschning's memoir in their works of history.
Poliakov, one of the most prominent Holocaust writers, specifically praised Rauschning for his "exceptional accuracy", while Levin, another widely-read Holocaust historian, called him "one of the most penetrating analysts of the Nazi period".
But not everyone has been so credulous.
In his biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw wrote:
"I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning's "Hitler Speaks", a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether".
Swiss historian Wolfgang Hänel spent five years diligently investigating the memoir before announcing his findings in 1983 at a revisionist history conference in West Germany.
The renowned "Conversations with Hitler", he declared are a total fraud. The book has no value "except as a document of Allied war propaganda".
Hänel was able to conclusively establish that Rausching's claim to have met with Hitler "more than a hundred times is a lie. The two actually met only four times, and never alone.
The words attributed to Hitler, he showed, were simply invented or lifted from many different sources, including writings by Ernst Jünger and Friedrich Nietzsche.
An account of Hitler hearing voices, waking at night with convulsive shrieks and pointing in terror at an empty corner while shouting "There, there, in the corner!" was taken from a short story by French writer Guy de Maupassant [Le Horia].
The phony memoir was designed to incite public opinion in democratic countries, especially in the United States, in favor of war against Germany.
The project was the brainchild of the Hungarian-born journalist Imre Revesz [Emery Reeves], who ran an influential anti-German press and propaganda agency in Paris during the 1930s. published the book in 1940.
It led to furious secret investigations by the top Nazis who established that Rauschning had spoken with Hitler but once, and briefly, at a diplomatic cocktail party.
Hänel has also found evidence that a prominent British journalist named Henry Wickham-Steele helped to produce the memoir. Wickham-Steele was a right-hand man of Sir Robert Vansittart, perhaps the most vehemently anti-German figure in Britain.
West Germany's most influential weekly periodicals, "Die Zeit", and "Der Spiegel" [7 September 1985], have run lengthy articles about historical hoax. "Der Spiegel" concluded that Rauschning's Conversations with Hitler "are a falsification, an historical distortion from the first to the last page .....
Hänel not only proves the falsification, he also shows how the impressive surrogate was quickly compiled and which ingredients were mixed together".
There are some valuable lessons to be learned from the story of this sordid hoax, which took more than 40 years to finally unmask:
It shows that even the most brazen historical fraud can have a tremendous impact if it serves important interests, that it's easier to invent a great historical lie than to expose one and finally, that everyone should be extremely wary of even the "authoritative" portrayals of the emotionally-charged Hitler era.
Readers interested in an authentic record of Hitler's personality and private views should look into the fascinating and wide-ranging memoir of Otto Wagener, published in August 1985 by Yale University Press under the title "Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant".
Otto Wagener was a German major general and, for a period, Adolf Hitler's economic advisor and confidant.
The Dodecanese.are a group of 15 larger plus 150 smaller Greek islands in the southeastern Aegean Sea, off the coast of Asia Minor [Turkey], of which 26 are inhabited.
The most historically important and well-known island, Rhodes, has been the area's dominant island since antiquity.
During World War II, Italy joined the Axis Powers, which used the Dodecanese as a naval staging area for their invasion of Crete in 1941.
After the surrender of Italy in September 1943, the islands briefly became a battle ground between the Germans and Allied forces, including the Italians.
The Germans prevailed in the Dodecanese Campaign, and although they were driven out of mainland Greece in 1944, the Dodecanese remained occupied until the end of the war in 1945
On 8 May 1945 the German garrison commander Otto Wagener surrendered the islands to the British on Rhodes handing over 5,000 German and 600 Italian military personnel.
After the war, Wagener found himself first in British and later, from 1947 to 1952, Italian prisoner of war camps.
In 1946, while being held by the British, Wagener wrote his memoirs about Hitler and the Nazi Party's early history, entitled "Hitler aus nächster Nähe. Aufzeichnungen eines Vertrauten 1929−1932" [known in English as Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant].
His work was not published until seven years after his death, in 1978. His memoirs are used, to some degree, by Nazi Germany historians.
Otto Wagener was the first Chief of Staff of the SA [Stormtroopers] and Director of the Economic-Political Department of the National Socialist Party. He spent hundreds of hours with Hitler between 1929 and 1932, many of them alone.
During Mussolini’s visit to Munich in September 1937 the great psychologist C. J. Jung observed that, compared to the Duce:
“Hitler presents the appearance of a robot.
"One would have said a double, in whose interior the man Hitler was hiding as an appendix, careful not to interfere with the mechanism".
Jung’s final conclusion of Hitler was that:
“He belongs in the category of authentic wizards.
"His body does not suggest strength. He has in his eyes the expression of a prophet. His power is not absolutely political, it is magical.
"Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is always one who is well led".
The idea is confirmed by the word Mahdi, the Islamic Messiah, which translates to "‘He who is well led"”.
What man would have wanted such a responsibility foisted upon him? The extra-ordinary allegation being made here is that Adolf Hitler and the Führer were different entities inhabiting the same body.
What strikes one particularly in this context is Hitler’s intuition vis-àvis the motives of Stalin and the Soviet Union. It is not necessary to enlarge on this subject.
What is required is for the British authorities to declassify all the papers relating to the interrogations of Rudolf Hess for the period 1941– 1942.