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Götterdämmerung and Aftermath

Hitler's Vergeltungswaffen


After the decisive German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad on 2 February 1943, Germany was forced onto the defensive. 

Between February and August of 1943 the military fate of Adolf Hitler’s Thousand Year Third Reich was sealed in a series of military operations that almost boggle the imagination. 

After the surrender of the encircled German Sixth Army at Stalingrad on 2 February, STAVKA, the Soviet High Command, gambled everything in a massive counter-offensive designed no less than to drive four massive columns westward, and then sweep south to the Black Sea, cutting off and encircling the entire German Army Group South.

Four Soviet armies and massive armored formations were committed to the effort. 

Unfortunately for the Soviets, Hitler had entrusted the command of Army Group South to Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the man whose unorthodox plan had led to the quick Nazi victory over France in 1940, and whose Eleventh Army had pulverized the Russian fortress of Sevastopol on the Black Sea in 1942. 

Von Manstein’s carefully orchestrated withdrawal and counter-offensive eliminated all four Soviet armies and sent the Red Army reeling back to essentially the same lines as those from which the Germans had started their 1942 offensive.

There was one problem:

An enormous bulge or salient stretched into German lines centered around Kursk, with the Germans occupying Orel to the north and Belgorad to the south. 


The Russians quickly began to fortify the salient, committing the bulk of their artillery and armored reserves to the area, and the Germans responded in kind, building up a massive pool of armor, artillery, and aircraft for an offensive to encircle the Russians.

Hitler opened his offensive on 5 July 1943. 

When it was all over, the Germans had lost almost 50,000 men, 300 tanks, and 200 aircraft. The Soviets fared much worse, losing almost ten times as many men, three times as many tanks, and an unknown amount of aircraft in the largest land, tank and air battle in history. 

However, numbers do not tell the whole story, for the Germans, the offensive broke the back of the Wehrmacht’s offensive capability for good; for the Soviets, massive though their losses were, were able to shift to the offensive, never to let up until their tanks rolled into Berlin in 1945.

The mood in Berlin as these events from Stalingrad to Kursk unfolded was indeed somber, and one who watched them all with a cool eye to the future was Adolf Hitler’s personal secretary and chosen leader of the Nazi Party, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann.

Following the failure of the 1943 summer offensive to regain the territories lost to the Soviets earlier that year, the Wehrmacht was no longer able to mount an effective large-scale counter-attack on the Eastern Front.

In a discussion with Josef Göbbels on 26 October 1943 Hitler opined that Germany should conclude a temporary armistice with the Soviet Union and return to its 1941 border in the east.

This would then give Germany the opportunity to defeat the British forces in the west first [no mention was made of United States's part in the Allied alliance] before resuming a new war for Lebensraum against the Soviet Union at a later point in time. 

Hitler thought that his future successor might have to carry out this later war, as he believed himself to be too old by then.

Late in the war, after the failure of the final Ardennes offensive and the Allied crossing of the Rhine into Germany itself, Hitler hoped that a decisive victory on the Eastern Front might still preserve the Nazi regime, resulting in "Operation Spring Awakening". 

He believed that, with the conclusion of a separate peace-treaty with the Soviet Union, a division of Poland might still be realized and leave Hungary and Croatia [the former still under German occupation at the time, the latter a Croatian fascist puppet-state] under German control. 

B.H. Liddell Hart in "History of the Second World War" states there seem to have been three peace offers from the Soviets: December 1942, June 1943 and finally September 1943.

The June 1943 offer involved a face to face meeting between German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov at Kirovograd.

Ribbentrop offered that the future frontier between the two empires "should run along the Dnieper", while Molotov wouldn’t accept anything less than the restoration of their original frontier: That is, the Curzon Line bisecting Poland.

Hitler only acknowledged Germany's imminent defeat mere days prior to his suicide.
 

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-B
oats, 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.
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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. 

Vergeltungswaffen: V-1 to V-4

In a talk with Marshall Antonescu of Rumania at Führer HQ Wolfsschanze on 5 August 1944 Hitler spoke of four V-Weapons which Germany was in the process of introducing into the conflict. The source of this information is Henry Picker who between 1942 and 1944 was Martin Bormann’s ADC and stenographer.

- Henry Picker: "Hitlers Tischgespräche im FHQ" Seewald Verlag, Stuttgart, 1976.

The German noun "Vergeltung" has a dictionary meaning of "retribution", "retaliation" or "reprisal", but its National Socialist meaning was broader, for the concept of retaliation as such merely contemplates the taking of revenge.

In the case of the United Kingdom, for example, this would simply imply taking measures to inflict more damage on British cities than the RAF and American air raids had inflicted on German cities, a militarily purposeless enterprise.

It was by no means the object of the V-weapons programme to exchange "rubble for rubble":

Vergeltung meant the use of retaliation to terrorize the enemy’s civilian population as a political tool to co-erce their Government into seeking an armistice.

It was not intended to punish Londoners, therefore, but to extract Britain’s agreement to withdraw from the war and to expel from her soil the American presence there.

The V-1

The first of Hitler’s V-Weapons was the Fieseler Fi 103 unpiloted flying bomb.

It was launched either from a short ramp under its own jet power or from a low-flying Heinkel bomber. The warhead was 1 ton of high explosive. Its maximum speed was 650 kms per hour and its range 370 kms.

At the nose was a small log consisting of a propellor connected to a revolution counter preset with the number of turns of the propellor imparted at a particular speed and height in reaching a known distance. As soon as the preset revolutions were reached, the counter cut out the engine and the bomb then dropped.

The weapon was grossly inaccurate and indiscriminate. London and southern England were always its intended target but in May 1943 preliminary discussions were held on the feasibility of firing the V-1 from a submarine such as the large Type XIV replenishment U-Boat. After Field Marshal Erhard Milch had expressed his scepticism the idea of using the flying bomb against New York was shelved.


- Erich Gröner: "Die deutschen Kriegsschiffe 1815–1945" Band III, Bernard & Graefe, 1985

The bombardment of London began on the morning of 13 June 1944. Ten days later Göbbels explained the intended effect of the campaign:

“Of course, a 1,000-tonne raid has a different effect. But the effect of the German bombardment lies in its persistency.

"It’s like a toothache. Finally you have to do what you should have done all along. You go to the dentist.

"The V-weapons bombardment will be continued come what may and will be increase each month until  Britain come to her senses, that is to say, until the English inner circle sweeps aside those responsible for this insane British policy and clears the way for an understanding with us".


- Wilfred von Oven: "Finale Furioso, Mit Göbbels bis zum Ende", Tübingen, 1974.

This outlook summarizes the philosophy behind the V-weapons campaign. Rather than use the weapon against troop formations on the various fronts rapidly compressing the territory remaining in German hands, the Third Reich leadership resolved to rely entirely on the psychological effect of the terror bombardment of London and the Home Counties with the objective of forcing the British Government to the negotiating table.

An unspoken hope existed that, if that were not to be the case, then perhaps the British Government might in desperation resort to some act so escalating the slaughter of German civilians that Hitler could justifiably respond with his ultimate weapons of terror.

As the bombardment entered its third week the intermittent attacks continued day and night, imposing a severe strain psychologically on the inhabitants of London. The flying bombs had already killed nearly 2,000 Londoners, although this was not a large casualty figure compared with any single great raid on a German city at that time.

By 6 July 1944 the V-1 provoked a response.

In a Most Secret minute to the Chiefs of Staff on that day, Churchill wrote:

“If the bombardment of London really becomes a serious nuisance and great rockets with far reaching and devastating effect fall on many centres of Government and labour, I should be prepared to do anything that would hit the enemy in a murderous place…. It may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it 100 per cent …”

 Public Record Office, PREM 3/89

The Joint Planning Staff considered the proposal but advised that “if the Allies initiated chemical warfare, the Germans would immediately retaliate both in the field and against the United Kingdom. London would be the primary under the circumstances; the JPS was not prepared to recommend the use of chemical or biological weapons.

Germany had huge stocks of battlefield gases, together with nerve gases which were unique to the Third Reich, but a gas war with the British was not what the V-1 campaign was intended to achieve. The Luftwaffe could have launched a full-scale surprise attack at any time when it happened to suit their purposes.

The Army and Luftwaffe had discussed at Münster gas depot the possibility of loading the V-1 with phosgene for use in the event of a gas war and subsequently experiments with a 1-tonne warhead of phosgene were found satisfactory. No tests were carried out with the V-2 but a payload of 2½ tonnes is mentioned in documents.

The Germans had at their disposal in the west at least 12,000 tonnes of the nerve gas Tabun and vastly more of the nerve gas Sarin, which is four times more potent.

Most of this material was kept in semi readiness in 250-kg bombs. A Sarin bomb of this size was thought likely to destroy all life within several square kilometres of the exposure point.


- Günther Gellermann: "Der Krieg der nicht stattfand", Bernard & Graefe, Koblenz, 1986. 

Over the period from 13 June to 5 September 1944 10,632 V-1 flying bombs were launched from Northern France of which 5,602 [52.7%] exploded in the area intended.

Fighters and AA batteries accounted for 3,230 projectiles, collisions with barrage balloons brought down 231 and 1015 were failures.

From 16 September 1944 to 14 January 1945 about 1,400 V-1s were fired from the North Sea coast of which 301 [21.5%] found their target area successfully.

During March 1945 a success rate of 47 hits [17%] was achieved with the 275 flying bombs despatched from western Holland.

During the defence of the Rhine in 1944/1945 11,988 V-1s were fired at Antwerp, Brussels and Liège. 2,448 hits were obtained [20.4%].

In England the final death toll from the V-1 was put at 6,860 dead and 17,981 wounded.

The best system of defence involved

{i} anti-V1 fighter patrols over the Channel
(ii)  massed AA batteries along the coast
(iii) a second line of fighter patrols between the AA guns and London 
(iv) a deep concentration of barrage balloons at the approaches to London.

The defence expenditure was nearly four times greater than the operational cost of the offensive.  

 - Jürgen Michels: "Peenemünde und seine Erben in Ost und West": Bernard & Graefe 1997

The main problem for the attackers was to obtain precise information regarding the fall of the projectiles, and attempts were made to improve accuracy by the installation of a remote control gear.

At a meeting in November 1944 at Reichsführer-SS HQ Höhenlychen, Hauptsturmführer Otto Skorzeny argued energetically for the immediate implementation of the V-1 project against New York.  

  Otto Skorzeny: "Wir kämpften, wir verloren", Helmut Cramer, 1973

Himmler promised to speak on the matter to Hitler and Grossadmiral Dönitz remarked, “I see here a new and big chance of bringing about a change in the course of the war”. 

He could hardly have been speaking of half-a-dozen conventional V-1 flying bombs and must have meant using them with a poison gas payload.

According to the German historian Gellermann, in February 1945, after deciding on that course of action as a reprisal for Dresden, Hitler was talked out of the idea by Keitel and Jodl. The Americans were well informed of these proposals through their Enigma decryption operation and spies and were concerned that even a Type VII U-Boat fitted with a hangar on the foredeck could carry four V-1s and launch them with impunity within a few minutes at night or in fog. They need approach no closer than 300 kilometres from the coast.

It was not quite so simple as it seemed, however.

By the end of 1944 all Type XIV boats had been sunk and the US offshore anti-submarine defences were such that the Kriegsmarine considered only the new Type XXI Elektro-boote capable of carrying out the operation with a prospect of surviving it. Another material drawback was the inaccuracy of the V-1. It was not remote-controlled at that stage and this factor, compounded with the pitch and roll of the boat at launch while firing on a compass bearing at a city 300 kilometres away, made the planners wonder if the target could ever be hit.

In order to overcome these problems a remote control system was tried, a version of the ZSG Radieschen, a passive radar which was fitted to the BV 246 glider bomb and homed in on enemy radar and Loran transmitters. This 15 kg target-seeker was found successful.

A similar idea was in effect for the A9/10 rocket. The remaining technical problems to be surmounted were the relatively poor quality transmitters available and the need to have somebody put the set in place and turn it on at the right time at the target end. This meant that a number of agents would have to be landed in the United States for the task.

A special version of the sea-launched V-1 was ready for use in November 1944 [
OSS Report A44 316 Report 5958 7 November 1944
probably the Fi-103E, but the OKL development contract awarded to the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug for the V-1 Radieschen, which resulted in the Ewald II homing device and the Sauerkirsch II radio remote control system, did not bear fruit until April 1945, by which time hopes for the V-1 campaign were dead.

The V-2

The V-2 was the A-4 giant rocket 14 metres in length, 1.6 metres at the widest point of the fuselage and 3.5 metres across the tail assembly.

Take-off weight was 12 tonnes incl on the detachable starting platform for firing.

The fuel was a grain alcohol/liquid oxygen mixture which burned for about a minute before the rocket fell to earth in a ballistic trajectory.

Maximum altitude was 80 kilometres and the range was up to 305 kilometres.

During powered flight the projectile was remote controlled from the ground or regulated by an onboard gyro-compass.

The impact of an A-4 was equivalent to fifty 100-ton steam locomotives hitting the ground simultaneously at 70 mph.

Even without its warhead the rocket would excavate a crater thirty feet deep and 75 feet in diameter. ]

The London correspondent of a Swedish national daily reported:

“I have personally seen great craters made by the V-2. In urban areas a single projectile can ruin 600 houses.

"It is not the explosion or blast that does the damage, but the tremendous earthquake effect”.

Accuracy was poor, however, and only 50% fell within 10 kilometres of the aiming point.

The V-2 offensive against London opened from The Hague on 8 September 1944, the first missile falling in Chiswick; the last fell on 27 March 1945.

The despatch rate began at four per day and climbed to twenty-five units per day. Of 1,269 launches against England, 1,115 rockets [87%] arrived.

The death toll from these was 2,724 persons. 1,739 A-4 missiles were fired at cities in France, Belgium and Holland, plus ten at Remagen, of which 1,265 [73%] arrived, causing 7,000 fatalities. 271 [0.8%] rockets of the total fired were designated failures.

 Jüngen Michels, op cit

Whereas General Dwight Eisenhower was of the opinion in his memoirs that if the A-4 had been operational six months earlier it would have made the invasion “extremely difficult if not impossible”,

Albert Speer took the view that “the enormous scientific and technical effort, together with the bottleneck caused in raw materials and fuels, prevented a large number of jet fighters being built instead”.

In the autumn of 1943 Otto Lafferenz, a director of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, suggested to Peenemünde Weapons Testing Centre the building of a number of submersible containers, each holding a V-2 rocket.

A U-Boat would tow three of these 500-tonne barges, each 37 metres in length and 5.5 metres in diameter, underwater to the coast of the United States and, when within 300 kilometres of the target, flood the ballast tanks of the barge to bring it to an upright position projecting about 5 metres above the surface. This would allow the rocket to be fired from a gyroscopically stabilized platform.

- Jürgen Michels, op. cit. 17

Trials were carried out with U-1063 and apparently similar experiments were conducted later at Lake Töplitz in the Austrian Alps when manned midget submarines practised firing rockets which resembled small-scale V-2s.

- Rudolf Luhser: "Die deutschen Waffen und Geheimwaffen des Zweiten Weltkrieges", Lehmanns Verlag, Munich, 1958

A Kriegsmarine naval experimental station [CPVA] was located on the shore. The Lafferenz project was code-named Teststand XII and Projekt Schwimmweste, and orders for the barges were placed with Stettiner Vulkanwerft and Schichau Werft Elbing in early December 1944.

It had been found in October 1943  that a U-Boat towing a submerged barge had to maintain at least 4.1 knots through the water at periscope depth, for at 3.9 knots the barge lost the dynamic force necessary to hold it under.


- Günther Hessler: "The U-Boat War in the Atlantic 1939–1945", HMSO


Various ideas were tried out unsuccessfully to reduce the minimum towing speed. As battery propelled U-Boats had insufficient capacity to proceed submerged at 4 knots for any length of time, and it was already dangerous enough in 1944 to voyage at normal speeds without also towing three barges, the Type XXI Elektro-boot was elected for the operation which involved a 30-day tow across the Atlantic at 12 knots. The time required on the surface for the operation does not seem to have been disclosed.

When the campaign began in earenest, scientists at Peenemünde had found out the hard way that a successful launch of the V2 was virtually impossible four days or so after manufacture and a procedure known as heisse Semmel [hot buns] was in force on land whereby any V-2 to be used operationally was fired within three days of manufacture.

. Philip Henshall: "Vengeance", Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1995

Clearly a V-2 could not be fired after thirty days in a damp transatlantic barge and so the US idea was shelved. In early December 1944 orders were placed with Stettiner Vulkanwerft and Schichau Werft Elbing. It seems self-evident that there must have been a plan to use these barges to bring Britain under V-2 fire from the North Sea.

In 1946, the Deputy Commanding General of Army Air Force Intelligence, Lt-Gen Donald Leander Putt, told the Society of Aeronautical Engineers:

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

Putt was also quoted in an aside as having stated that “the Germans had V-2s with atomic explosive warheads”. A surprise is a surprise and hitherto ordinary rocket warfare had proved unproductive. The December 1944 assaults had therefore been to drive the German forces in Europe beyond this limit.

The objective of the Ardennes campaign was the Belgian port of Antwerp, 200 miles from London. It was served by a short rail connection from Germany and its recapture was essential for a renewed V-2 offensive. Furthermore it was immediately available as a U-Boat and Lafferenz barge base.

The A-9 “winged V-2” project was resurrected in 1944/45. German testimonies allege that at least one successful test launch was made from the Harz in March 1945, and in mass production this rocket could have hit London from central Germany.

The V-3

Few commentators seem to be in any doubt but that the V-3 was the “High Pressure Pump” or “England Gun”. Paul Brickhill recorded in "The Dam Busters": “the greatest nightmare of all was the great underworld being burrowed under a 20- foot-thick slab of ferro-concrete near Mimoyecques [between Calais and Boulogne]. Here Hitler was preparing his V-3.

Little has been told about the V-3, probably because we never found out much about it. The V-3 was the most secret and sinister of all – long-range guns with barrels 500 feet long!”

The V-3 was probably based on the 1885 unsuccessful ballistic principle of the Americans Lymann and Haskell and Baron von Pirquet’s concept of sequential, electrically activated, angled side chambers to provide additional velocity to a shell during its passage of an immensely long tube.

In mid-1942 August Cönders, chief engineer of the Röchling Iron and Steel Works, Leipzig, rediscovered the principle while reading through technical dossiers captured by the Germans in France in 1940. He worked out an improved design and approached Armaments Minister Speer with the idea. Hitler was enthusiastic and demanded that the development should proceed immediately.

The design was for a gun consisting of numerous lengths of smooth-bore metal tubing bolted together to form a barrel up to 124 metres long. Every 3.65 metres along its length was a lateral combustion chamber set at from 45° to a right angle. The shell and main propellant were loaded into an sFH18 heavy field howitzer breech.

When the gun was fired, the projectile would be impelled forward by pressure from a gas cartridge, and on passing each chamber it triggered electrically another cartridge positioned there which gave the shell further velocity. This was repeated throughout its transit of the barrel.

The electrical activation solved a detonation problem which had been caused by expanding gases detonating the auxiliary chambers before the arrival of the shell. The muzzle velocity was around 1,500 metres/sec which was significantly greater than that of standard artillery and provided a range of about 160 kilometres.

The original 10-inch calibre projectile was over nine feet in length and weighed 140 kilos with a 25-kilo warhead. Six wings opened in flight for stability. Twenty-five guns were projected which at full output would have enabled London, 150 kilometres distant, to be subjected to a persistent rain of up to 200 ten-inch calibre shells per hour. For this reason the project was nicknamed fleissiges Lieschen, Busy Lizzie.

The Heereswaffenamt, or German Army Weapons Office, contracted with firms such as Skoda, Krupp, Röchling, Witkowitz Iron and Steel, Faserstoff, Fürstenberg and Bochumer Verein for various calibres of ammunition. Towards mid 1944 20,000 shells were completed or under production.

Even before the gun trials had begun, work was started in the late summer of 1943 on a vast, well camouflaged underground gun battery to house twenty-five barrels of the HPP on the Channel coast at Mimoyecques. The barrels were to be sunk in shafts at a 50° angle 150 feet down into the ground. A slave labour force of 10,000 persons was involved in the construction and information was soon passed to London about a new mammoth “underground V-1 site”.

The initial tests were carried out using barrel lengths between 50 and 130 metres, first at Hillersleben and then from a range at Misdroy near Peenemünde at the beginning of 1944.

Various permutations of barrels and chambers were tried without much success. Shells were supplied by numerous manufacturers. In tests between 21 and 23 March 1944 it was found that at muzzle velocities above 1,100 metres/sec the tubes lost stability and developed metal stresses. General Emil Leeb recommended that the project be stopped for investigations.

By May 1944 the gun had an acceptable range of 95 kilometres and experiments were stepped up to find ways of increasing muzzle velocity.

Before any guns were delivered, the Mimoyecques emplacement was destroyed on 6 July 1944 by RAF aircraft using a 12,000-pound Tallboy bomb. This signalled the end of the project for the long-range bombardment of London and put the entire V-3 project in question.

Nevertheless further trials with the HPP with shorter barrels were undertaken at Misdroy and eventually the whole project was placed in the hands of SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler, head of the Vweapons project.

Under his supervision the V-3 project was accelerated for an operation in the late autumn of 1944 and, with the help of General Dr [Ing] Walter Dornberger, military commander at Peenemünde, a battery of two 50-metre long 15-cm [5.9-inch] calibre barrels with twelve right-angled side chambers was completed.

An emplacement had been excavated at Bürderheidermühle on a wooded slope of the Ruwer at Lampaden, about 13 kilometres south-east of Trier, where the battery was installed under the supervision of Hauptmann Patzig and his 550-strong Army Artillery Detachment 705.

The two HPP barrels rested on thirteen steel girders anchored to buried wooden foundations and were laid to the west with a 34° elevation. 43 kilometres along the firing line was target number 305, Luxemburg City. Calculations showed that the two guns had a maximum range of 65 kilometres with a shell dispersion radius of from 2.5 to 5 kilometres. Between the two barrels were three Bunkers for the gun crews plus either side of the barrels ten smaller Bunkers which served as shell and powder magazines.

The Lampaden emplacement was part of the plan for the Ardennes offensive. Ammunition supply was poor because of disruption to the railways and in view of the critical time factor it was decided to use a 95-kilo shell of 15- cm calibre with a warhead of 7 to 9 kilos. The propellant was a 5-kilo main cartridge and twenty-four additional chamber charges, a total of 73 kilos of Ammon powder per shell. Neither gun was operational when the Ardennes offensive began on 16 December 1944.

Hurried preparations were being made to support the German offensive from Lampaden. Luxemburg City, liberated by the Americans in September 1944, was finally chosen as the target for diversionary fire.

Operationally 183 rounds were fired from Lampaden towards Luxemburg of which 143 [78%] exploded within the territory or very close to it.  The V-3 suffered from lack of development due to the pressure of time. Had the Mimoyecques battery been operational against London in 1943, delivering 200 6-inch shells per hour, Paul Brickhill’s fears might easily have been justified.

 

V-4 Uraniumbombe and the Doomsday Bomb

Hitler was pinning all his hopes on the Uraniumbombe. This laboratory-produced nuclear explosive was to be the warhead in the large V2 or A9/10 rockets. The V2 had a range of 200 miles while the A9/10 could hit New York. There was no rocket of the same species for the intermediate ranges and this omission was fatal.

By December 1944 when the Uraniumbombe was ready for use in numbers for the definitive V-2 campaign, the Low Countries and France had been lost and now the range was too long.

After the failure of the Ardennes campaign, in March 1945 Hitler decided on a last desperate gamble. On his last appearance at the front, he exhorted his troops to hold out until the miracle weapon should be ready, which would bring about the change in Germany’s fortunes.

We have invisible aircraft, submarines, colossal tanks and cannon, unbelievably powerful rockets, and a bomb with a working that will astonish the whole world.

The enemy knows this, and besieges and attempts to destroy us.

But we will answer this destruction with a storm and that without unleashing a bacteriological war, for which we are also prepared....

All my words are the purest truth. That you will see. We still have things that need to be finished, and when they are finished, they will turn the tide.  

--Adolf Hitler, 13 March 1945, addressing officers of the German Ninth Army

Posterity has been left few traces of the former flak weapon based on firedamp. In principle it generated a ferocious pressure wave at ground level, killing principally by blast and suffocation, but it had a knock-on effect which threatened a structural change to the atmosphere.

The mysterious loss of Luftwaffe and OKW War Diaries for the month or so in question may have been connected with the execution of Luftwaffe General Barber [?] and several hundred pilots and airfield commanders for refusing to implement orders to use it at the end of March 1945.

The so-called "Fighter Pilots Revolt" was a minor insurrection of a small group of high-ranking Luftwaffe pilots in early 1945, when they confronted Reich Marshal and chief of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring with their demands on the conduct of the air war.

Following the incident some officers were relieved of their positions or were reassigned. This event is poorly documented and there are few reliable sources.[citation needed]

The incident originated in the contentious relationship between Adolf Galland, the General of Fighters [in charge of the Luftwaffe's fighter force], and Reich Marshal Hermann Göring.

The arguments—mainly over aircraft procurement and armament for the defence of Germany from Allied bombing—began a growing personal rift between Göring and Galland.

Galland arranged for a meeting with Göring.[when?] However, the former was not invited to this meeting. Instead, he was kept informed of the proceedings by Hannes Trautloft.

The group, led by spokesman Günther Lützow, confronted Göring with a list of demands regarding the conduct of the air war.

Their main concern was Göring's lack of understanding and unwillingness to support his pilots against accusations of cowardice and treason. The pilots protested against the perceived squandering of the fighter aircraft and pilots in high-loss operations like Operation Bodenplatte,

Galland was relieved of his command. Günther Lützow was sent to Italy. Similar penalties were imposed upon others in the so-called "mutiny". 

When captured in May that year, Hermann Göring exclaimed that he had “declined to deploy a weapon which might have destroyed all civilisation", the inference being perhaps that the use of the explosive threatened to so destabilize the climate as to bring about the cataclysm, but that Hitler had nevertheless ordered its use against the Allies on the Western Front regardless.  

Briitish Intelligence knew about the dual project of atom bomb and heavy-air bomb.

In BIOS Final Report No 142(g) it was said that: “as the research on the atomic bomb under Graf von Ardenne and others was not proceeding as rapidly as had been hoped in 1944, it was decided to proceed with the development of a liquid air bomb"..

The Fuel-Air Explosive [FAE] belongs today in the arsenal of all the major powers. It is made up of liquid ethyl oxide and certain secret aluminium compounds. The substance is released as a cloud of gas and ignited, resulting in a fearful explosion with an enormously strong pressure wave. The weapon was developed by Dr [Ing] Mario Zippermayr, an Austrian born in Milan in 1899 who had been an Assistant Professor at the Karlsruhe Technical University.

Taking up his work, the Ballistics Institute of the TAL [Technische Akademie der Luftwaffe] began to research the physics of rarified media explosions.

When in mid 1944 a series of devastating explosions caused by the accidental escape of ethylene gas flattened the synthetic gasoline refineries at Ludwigshafen, a small special TAL team sat on the commission of enquiry. TAL’s huge factory in the Bavarian Alps co-operated with the nearby Heereswaffenamt experimental centre at Garmisch-Partenkirchen and developed small cylinders charged with both gaseous and liquid ethylene. This was the forerunner of the modern FAE bomb.

Dr Zippermayr’s original intention had been for an anti-aircraft explosive having coal-dust as its principal ingredient. When ignited it exploded, creating, as was hoped, a huge shock wave which could destroy a group of enemy bombers.

Zippermayr’s laboratory was at Lofer in the Austrian Tyrol. His preliminary experiments there confirmed that an aircraft in flight could be brought down by having a violent, fiery gust fracture its wings or rudder, but difficulties in determining the correct charge, and problems timing the ignition phase, led his technical staff to consider changing the combustible from solid to gas.

The Tornado Bomb

A special catalyst had been developed by the SS in 1943 and the following year Zippermayr turned his energies to a heavy air [Schwere Luft] bomb. Encouraging results were obtained from a mixture consisting of 60% finely powdered dry brown coal and 40% liquid air. The first trials were carried out on the Döberitz grounds near Berlin using a charge of about 8 kg powder in a tin of thin plate. The liquid air was poured on to the powder and the two were mixed together with a long wooden stirrer.

The team then retired and after ignition everything living and trees within a radius of 500 to 600 metres were destroyed. Beyond that radius the explosion started to rise and only the tops of trees were affected, although the explosion was intense over a radius of 2 kilometres. Zippermayr then conceived the idea that the effect might be improved if the powder was spread out in the form of a cloud before ignition, and trials were run using an impregnated paper container. This involved the use of a waxy substance.

A metal cylinder was attached to the lower end of the paper container and hit the ground first, dispersing the powder. After 0.25 seconds a small charge in the metal cylinder exploded, igniting the funnel-shaped cloud of coal dust and liquid air. The ordnance had to be filled immediately prior to the delivery aircraft taking off.

Bombs of 25 kgs and 50 kgs were dropped on the Starbergersee and photographs taken.

SS Standartenführer Otto Klumm showed these to Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s personal adviser. The intensive explosion covered a radius of 4 kilometres and the explosion was felt at a radius of 12.5 kilometres. When the bomb was dropped on an airfield, destruction was caused as far as 12 kilometres away, although only the tops of trees were destroyed at that distance, but the blast flattened trees on a hillside 5 kilometres away.

These findings appear in the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee Final Report No 142 "Information Obtained From Targets of Opportunity in the Sonthofen Area".

Although one suspects initially that the radius of the area allegedly affected as described in this report had been worked upon by the Propaganda Ministry, the fact is that this bomb is never heard of today. Furthermore British Intelligence published the report without comment and what tends to give the description weight is the fact that the Luftwaffe wanted aircrews flying operationally with the bomb to have knowingly volunteered for suicide missions.

The idea that the bomb had unusual effects was hinted at not only by the head of the SS-weapons test establishment but also possibly by Göring and Renato Vesco.

- Renato Vesco: "Intercept UFO", Pinnacle Books, 1976.

Vesco held a doctorate in aeronautical engineering and aerospace development.

He was a Professor at the University of Rome and in the 1930s studied aeronautics at the German Institute.

When war broke out he worked for the Germans in their secret subterranean Fiat factory near Lake Garda in Italy. In the 1960s his experiences had qualified him for a post with the Italian Ministry of Defence as a technical agent investigating the UFO phenomenon, which he considered to be of terrestrial origins.

He wrote several books about his wartime collaboration with his country’s Ally and from these emerges a picture of a strange technology which had veered in a direction far from that anticipated by Allied Intelligence.

On 7 May 1945 in American custody, Göring told his captors, “I declined to use a weapon which might have destroyed all civilization”. Since nobody knew what he meant, it was reported quite openly at the time. The atom bomb was not under his control, although the Zippermayr bomb was. Vesco reported that the supreme explosive was “a blue cloud based on firedamp” which had initially been thought of “in the anti-aircraft role”.

On the Allied side, Sir William Stephenson, the head of the British Security Coordination Iintelligence mission stated:

“One of our agents brought out for BSC a report, sealed and stamped This is of Particular Secrecy telling of liquid air bombs being developed in Germany of terrific destructive powe”.

-Wlilliam Stevenson [also Stephenson]: "A Man Called Intrepid", Sphere Books, 1977

A 50 kg bomb was said to create a massive pressure wave and tornado effect over a radius of 4 kms from the impact point, a 250 kg bomb for up to ten kms.

A sequential disturbance in climate for a period after the explosion was reported. Radioactive material added to the explosive mixture was possibly to give it even better penetration and distribution.

The bomb would have been the equivalent of a tornado but covering a far wider diameter, sucking up in its path everything but the most solid structures and scattering radioactive particles over the wide area devastated by the initial explosion. The survivors of the explosion would be suffocated by the lightning effect at ground level burning up the surrounding air.

The head of the SS Weapons Testing Establishment attached to the Skoda Works was involved in the destruction of the catalyst at the war’s end. He had personally witnessed it being tested at Kiesgrube near Stechowitz on the Czech-Austrian border. These must have been the first tests, since he describes the astonishment of the observers at the force of the blast and tornado effect. Various other smaller tests were carried out at Fellhorn, Eggenalm and Ausslandsalm in the Alps.

After these a larger experiment was made at Grafenwöhr in Bavaria described by ane SS General in the following terms:

“We were in well constructed shelters two kilometres from the test material. Not a large amount, but what power - equal to 560 tonnes of dynamite. Within a radius of 1,200 metres dogs, cats and goats had been put in the open or below the ground in dug-outs. I have seen many explosions, the biggest in 1917 when we blew up a French trench complex with 300,000 tonnes of dynamite, but what I experienced from this small quantity was fearsome.

"It was a roaring, thundering, screaming monster with lightning flashes in waves. Borne on something like a hurricane there came heat so fierce that it threatened to suffocate us. All the animals both above and below ground were dead. The ground trembled, a tremendous wind swept through our shelter, there was a great rumbling, everywhere a screeching chaos.

The ground was black and charred. Once the explosive effects were gone I felt the heat within my body and a strange numbness overcame me. My throat seemed sealed off and I thought I was going to suffocate. My eyes were flickering, there was a thundering and a roaring in my ears, I tried to open my eyes but the lids were too heavy. I wanted to get up but languor prevented me”.

An area of 2 kilometres was utterly devastated. Several observers on the perimeter were seriously affected by the shock wave and appeared to suffer from a kind of intoxication effect which lasted for about four weeks. That the weapon failed to make its debut on the battlefield in 1943 arouses the suspicion that very real fears existed regarding its knock-on effect on the climate. Within sight of Gernany’s defeat, it was tested again at Ohrdruf in the Harz in early March 1945.

The Decision not to Drop the German Bomb

Hitler had set himself, or been set, specific guidelines for the introduction and use of new weapons. In 1940 he had given Wilhelm Ohnesorge the impression that he was not interested in having an atom bomb. Two years later, within a few weeks of taking office, Armaments Minister Speer accepted that Hitler “did not want the bomb for doctrinal reasons”.

During a conversation with Field Marshall Keitel, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and the Rumanian Head of State Marshal Antonescu on 5 August 1944,  only a fortnight after the 20 July attempt on his life, Hitler spoke of the latest German work on new explosives “whose development to the experimental stage has been completed”.

He added that, to his own way of thinking, “the leap from the explosives in common use to these new types of explosive material is greater than that from gunpowder to the explosives in use at the outbreak of war”.

When Marshal Antonescu replied that he hoped personally not to be alive when this new substance came into use, which might perhaps bring about the end of the world, Hitler recalled reading a German writer who had predicted just that: Ultimately it would lead to a point where matter as such would disintegrate, bringing about the final catastrophe. Hitler expressed the hope that the scientists and weapons designers working on this new explosive would not attempt to use it until they were quite sure that they understood what they were dealing with.

 

There can be little doubt that the subject under discussion was fissionable weapons material and, if that is so, then Hitler confirmed that the Germans had the weapon and that it was ready for testing in August 1944.

The actual test took place two months later. The difficulty with all these new weapons was the same, Hitler said. In general, he had ruled that a weapon should be brought into use immediately if it was guaranteed to bring the war to a victorious conclusion forthwith. This rule held good even if no counter-measure had yet been devised. In the majority of cases, however, the probability existed that the enemy would eventually obtain the same substance for himself, so the counter-measure was essential.

Accordingly he had ordered that no weapon should be deployed by Germany first until Germany had developed the counter-measure to it. SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny stated that when he saw Hitler in November 1944 their conversation came round to the atom bomb.

Hitler said:

 “Of course! But even if the radioactivity could be controlled, and you used fission as a weapon, then the effects would be terrible … it would be the Apocalypse. And how would one keep such a thing a secret? Impossible! No! No nation, no group of civilised people could take on such a responsibility. The first bomb would be answered by a second and then humanity would be forced down the road to extinction. Only tribes in the Amazon and the primeval forests of Sumatra would have a chance of survival”.

We must now place ourselves in the shoes of the 20 July plotters determined at some stage to overthrow Hitler. The U-Boat offensive in the Atlantic had been defeated. German cities and industry were being pounded day and night by bomber fleets which roamed across Reich airspace with impunity. The Army and Waffen-SS were close to exhaustion, defending the ever shrinking perimeter of Greater Germany.

The situation was not completely hopeless, but it would not be long before it was. Ernst von Weizsäcker, the father of Heisenberg’s close colleague, was Under-Secretary of State at the German Foreign Office, where he was one of the opponents of the Nazi regime.

In 1938 he had informed the British Foreign Office of the existence of a group of civilian and military leaders ready to overthrow the Nazi Government if Hitler should go to war over Czechoslovakia, and was himself a major conspirator in what appears to have been the best prepared coup ever planned against Hitler. But Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, who had been asked to provide a strong demonstration of their determination not to tolerate the assimilation of the Czech state, disregarded the request, believing that an accord with Hitler was still possible.

The German plotters were dismissed as Jacobites. The elder von Weizsäcker remained a focus of resistance in the Nazi State at war but was ultimately convicted at Nuremberg for alleged war crimes on the basis of his signature to certain documents.

According to Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC Nikolaus von Below, the SS interrogations of the July 1944 plotters reported wide scale treason by military leaders throughout the preceding four years: the preparations for the French campaign, the dates of the attack and the objectives of the first operations: even the beginning of the Russian campaign had been betrayed.

Long before the attempt on Hitler’s life the plotters had approached the Allied camp to establish terms for peace. Unconditional surrender was obviously not acceptable, yet, beyond that, all they got was encouragement to carry through their plans to overthrow Hitler. The Soviet author and former ambassador to Bonn, Valentin Falin, demonstrated by reference to Russian secret archives that the resistance movement penetrated to the highest military level in Germany and had contributed substantially to the success of the Allied invasion of occupied France in June 1944.

 -. Valentin Falin: "Die zweite Front – Die Interessenkonflikt der Anti-Hitler Koalition", Knaur 1997

Professor Heisenberg, who in June 1944 had turned down an invitation by a Professor of History of his acquaintance, Adolf Reichwein, to participate in a plot against Hitler, frequented a social group known as the Mittwochgesellschaf [Wednesday Club].

This was an intellectual forum of conservative opposition to Hitler composed of academics, civil servants and industrialists. Its members included the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell: General Ludwig Beck, the nominal head of the military conspiracy against Hitler; the philosopher Spranger; the Prussian Finance Minister Popitz; Ferdinand Sauerbruch, the Chief Surgeon of the German Army, and Rudolf Diels, the founder of the Gestapo. Reunions were held at the Harnack House in BerlinDahlem, the headquarters of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

At the meeting of 12 July 1944 Heisenberg addressed the forum with a talk entitled “What are the Stars?” which appears to have been a cover for a discussion about nuclear fission.

- Thomas Powers: "Heisenberg’s War", 1996

Spranger observed that these scientific developments promised to change the way men thought about the world, General Beck was more explicit and said that if atomic energy could be used for bombs then “all the old military ideas would have to be changed”. This implies that the question of the atom bomb must have been discussed. Just before leaving Berlin for his home at Urfeld on 19 July, Heisenberg delivered minutes of the meeting to Popitz. The attempt on Hitler’s life was made the next day.

Dr Kurt Diebner and ten assistants had set up an atomic laboratory in the cellar of a school at Stadtilm in the Harz, about thirteen kilometres from Ohrdruf, where Oberst Graf von Stauffenberg, the ringleader of the conspiracy, stayed regularly on the Wachsenberg, which was a favourite meeting place for officers and scientists working in the Ohrdruf area. Frau Cläre Werner, a watchtower lookout who resided on the mountain, recalled Stauffenberg visiting on a number of occasions and she still had possession of items of property he had left with her on his final visit.

- Edgar Mayer: "Die Hochtechnologie-Lüge", Amun Verlag, 2001

Why should Stauffenberg have come so often to Ohrdruf when he worked in Berlin? Did the German resistance movement have more than a passing interest in what was going on at Stadtilm and its subterranean environs?

The German author Harald Fäth reported that in the 1960s Gerhard Rundnagel, a master plumber who worked in the Stadtilm atomic research laboratory, gave evidence to a DDR judicial enquiry about the wartime activities there.

- Harald Fäth: 1945 "Thüringens Manhattan Projekt", CTT Verlag, Suhl, 1998

In the depositions Rundnagel made a statement that the Stadtilm Research Institute had not been properly plumbed in and so was not really up and running.

As far as he could see the scientists there were not actually working on anything. This left a lot of time for talk and Rundnagel described conversations he had had at the beginning of July 1944 with Dr Rehbein, a scientist at Stadtilm. Rehbein is alleged to have told Rundnagel that what was under development there was a type of bomb which had a greater explosive power than anything that an old weapons engineer such as himself could possibly envisage.

Rehbein then went on to say, “Within a few days you will hear a decisive announcement on which will depend the outcome of the war.

On 20 July 1944 the unsuccessful attempt was made on Hitler’s life. When Rundnagel asked Dr Rehbein later if that was what he had meant, the scientist laughed and replied, “Now it will never be used. The war is lost”. There are two ways of looking at this statement. Rehbein may have been suggesting that once Germany could make the official announcement that an atom bomb had been successfully tested, Hitler would be in a strong position to negotiate with at least one of his enemies.

Because of the conspiracy against him, however, the evidence of disunity and betrayal perceived by foreign governments abroad would reduce figuratively the bomb’s impact. But there is an alternative interpretation.

Along with other scientists in Dr Diebner’s entourage, Dr Rehbein may have been an associate of the anti-Hitler faction who wanted the Führer out of the way so that the German military could use the bombs physically to negotiate peace on terms more favourable than unconditional surrender. 

If it had become known to the resistance that, once tested, Hitler was resolved not to deploy the small atom bombs operationally, this would explain not only why the plotters struck when they did, but would justify Rehbein’s remark that the war was lost, for with Hitler remaining as leader the atom bombs would never be used, or at least would be used only in response to the enemy’s first use; yet the atom bomb, used in quantities, was, in the view of the plotters, Germany’s last hope.

The sense of the words attributed to Dr Rehbein seem to favour the latter interpretation.

The V-4 Doomsday Bomb was not ready for use operationally until March 1945 and according to Julius Schaub,  chief aide and adjutant to Hitler, was under SS control. Probably the plotters had no knowledge of its existence at that stage.

The fantastic idea current in 1944 of the effect of even a small atomic explosion is conveyed by an article in the Swedish newspaper "Stockholms Tidningen" in August 1944, and reported in Germany by the "TranSozean Innendienst" news agency:

“In the United States scientific experiments are being carried out with a new bomb. Its explosive substance is Uranium, and when the elements within its structure are liberated, a force of hitherto undreamed-of violence is generated. A 5-kilo bomb could create a crater one kilometre deep and of forty kilometres radius".. 

In all the foregoing we have a possible explanation for Professor Heisenberg’s activities. Throughout the Hitler period he was opposed to the regime. He had remained in Germany in 1939 in order to sabotage the atom bomb and radiological warfare projects. In September 1941 he had taken a philosophical standpoint that a regime is to be considered evil by reference to the means it uses to impose its policies, and the atomic bomb was evil.

In 1943 the United States had begun work on its atomic arsenal, a fact of which he would probably have been aware.

In Germany a strong military resistance was developing of which Heisenberg had knowledge. He knew from von Weizsäcker that terms for an honourable conclusion to hostilities other than unconditional surrender were not available to Germany if that resistance succeeded in overthrowing Hitler.

Heisenberg was a patriot. War was war, and, with Hitler removed, what German wanted Stalin or Roosevelt running the country?

Therefore the idea of building a bomb of some description had been forced on him, for there had to be some sort of bomb, a bomb inevitably designed and built during the chancellorship of Hitler as Führer, but intended for use in diplomacy by those who would succeed him. This pre-supposed, of course, that Hitler actually could be got rid of. The suggestion has been made in various quarters that he was in some way under the protection of higher powers determined that he should see his mission through.

cf. Ward Price: "I Know These Dictators" Harrap, 1937 quoting Hitler:

“I was messing in the trench with some comrades. Suddenly I had the impression that a voice was saying to me 'Get up and go over there'. The voice was so clear and distinct that I obeyed mechanically as if it were a military order”.

A short while afterwards a shell landed where he had been sitting and his comrades were all killed

No assassination attempt could ever succeed because there would always be the hand to re-position the offending attaché case with its bomb, or Hitler would change his schedule unexpectedly and leave the building minutes before a bomb went off. 

If the plotters had succeeded on 20 July 1944, and the SS had not taken over the running of the country in the aftermath, the death camps would presumably have been abolished, but one sees no easy way how a continuation of the war against the Western Powers could have been avoided.

Probably Germany would have found Stalin willing to realign the Soviet Union in some manner with the new Reich and possibly Japan, particularly if a demonstration of the new explosives or the nerve gases could have been arranged. Whether that was something which the supporters of the plot against Hitler would have found acceptable as the price of removing him we have no means of knowing.

Brighter than a Thousand Suns – for Two Seconds

The 114-strong Allied Intelligence Mission code named Alsos was under the overall control of the head of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves. It had arrived in France in August 1944. Its scientific head was a physicist, Professor Samuel Goudsmit, a Dutch émigré.

His selection had been approved by the Office of Scientific Research and Development and by General Groves personally. Although a physicist, he was not connected with the US nuclear weapons project in any way, having spent most of the war working on radar. He may have had limited access to technical information, but probably not enough really to get him to grips with the task he had been given.

Whereas the scope of the Intelligence activity extended beyond the German Uranium project, Goudsmit’s group of scientists were concentrating their investigation into all aspects of Uranium research. From the outset Goudsmit was dogmatic: “No one but Professor Heisenberg could be the brains of a German Uranium project and every physicist throughout the world knew that".

When American military realists suggested dryly that possibly other scientists of whom Goudsmit had never heard might be secretly working on some form of Uranium weapon, Goudsmit derided the idea as an impossibility: it had to be Heisenberg.

And, in the end, he was probably right.

The Logic of Professor Goudsmit In common with many modern academic writers, Professor Goudsmit had difficulty in establishing exactl what Heisenberg had been working on and there was nothing unusual in that; but then he went one step farther and got confused, or so he would have us believe.

In July 1942 Heisenberg had realized that his next reactor experiment was likely to approach uncomfortably close to the critical point.

Hhe was apparently labouring under the mistaken belief that a power reactor could not be controlled and would explode at criticality. This false belief was founded in an error in mathematical theory regarding the Period of the Reactor.

In his paper G-161 "Observations on the Planned Intermediate Experiment with 12 tons of Heavy Water and 3 tons of Uranium Metal" he wrote:

“We need to understand about reactor stability. Our foremost fear is that the entire fission process at criticality will occur explosively in a fraction of a second while the heavy water is still practically cold. Whether the reactor stabilizes or explodes rests solely on the behaviour of the energy bands.

If the width of the energy bands is insufficient for stability, then it would seem that there is no other factor which can prevent the chain reaction cascade. This event would take place in a large reactor in -400 secs-1 and the neutron count would suddenly reach 1028, enough for instantaneous energization of the fuel".

Because he was working on the stable Period of the Reactor being less than a second, Heisenberg contended that it was impossible to harness energy in any reactor producing heat, or too dangerous to find out, which amounted to the same thing. Until the end of the war Heisenberg and Diebner practised interesting sub-critical reactor geometry, but no attempt was made to get a reactor going. 

This explains the perplexity of Karl Wirtz, his experimentalist, who confirmed that “enough heavy water was available, in principle, to achieve a critical reactor”, and that if in 1944 Heisenberg’s group and Diebner’s group had combined their heavy water resources in a single experiment, there would have been sufficient to moderate a working pile.

Rift there might have been, but if either had really wanted to go ahead with the definitive experiment, a word in the right quarters would surely have been sufficient.

If Goudsmit did not understand the mathematics of reactor stability, his ignorance of what was being said by Heisenberg in the report could have led him to draw an unwarranted conclusion. After the liberation of Strasbourg on 29 November 1944, while evaluating dossiers found in a filing store at the University,

Professor Goudsmit said he found a scientific paper by an unnamed author which described a German “reactor bomb”. This report, if it ever existed, has not yet been declassified by the US authorities and all there is to go on is Goudsmit’s vague sketch of the so called reactor-bomb, which is actually nothing more than a copy of Heisenberg’s BIII experiment.

It seemed pretty obvious to Goudsmit that, if Heisenberg believed his nuclear reactor would blow up, then surely that would amount to a sort of reactor bomb.

This would be, in fact, the German atom bomb! He is supposed to have informed Groves at once that the Germans had not been working on the fast fission Uranium bomb and were thinking they could drop a nuclear reactor instead.

Unlikely as it may seem, Groves accepted all this and included it in his own book. The whole thing is set out in black and white, but of course makes no sense if Heisenberg knew the principle of the fast fission atom bomb, which he obviously did. That was why Groves lied about that aspect of Heisenberg’s knowledge.

Groves knew they would both be dead by the time the transcripts were declassified. But what was the point of the subterfuge?

The answer must be that American Intelligence knew Heisenberg had designed, or at least had a hand in planning, a viable rudimentary German atomic bomb, and it was not convenient politically, then or now, to admit that embarrassing fact.

This meant that atomic history had to be re-designed in some manner. Justifiably it leads us to theorize that the Heisenberg bomb actually did look like experiment B-III, and by labelling it the “reactor bomb” for the contingency that someone might blab, Groves and Goudsmit conjured up a falsified theory to explain it away.

The German Atom Bomb

The probable amount of Plutonium-enriched Uranium powder used in the bomb would have been in the region of 750 kilos.

The sphere, resembling Heisenberg’s B-III subcritical reactor, had a diameter of no more than a couple of feet. Paraffin and Uranium would have been arranged in alternate layers no wider than an inch each.

Paraffin is an excellent absorber of radiation, but its primary purpose here was to stop the Pu240 emissions causing premature fission. It is on account of Pu240 being so radioactive that there is a risk of predetonation. This is the reason why an implosion fuse working at the speed of light is required in order to set off a Plutonium bomb.

Did Germany have such a fuse? According to the CIOSBIOS/FIAT 20 report, in May 1945 Germany had every kind of fuse known to the United States in October 1946 – radio, radar, wire, continuous wave, acoustic, infra-red, light beams and magnetics “to name just some”.

Nuclear physicist Pat Flannen commented:

“The Plutonium-enriched Uranium would have to be kept atomically isolated until the moment of detonation. Shielding, capable of stopping the Pu240 from undergoing premature fission, would have to be provided, that would have to remove itself at the moment of nuclear assembly so quickly that the Pu240 would have no time to react before the Pu239 did.

For this bomb to work, three things would be required:

A. – An excellent radiation-absorbing substance such as paraffin to block the emissions of the Pu240 but which would nevertheless disperse quickly on impact, being a liquid.
B. – The closest proximity of the Plutonium-enriched Uranium sub-critical masses, so that fast assembly could be assured. No more than a couple of inches.
C. – The highest assembly speed possible, more than Mach 3.5. If imploded at the speed of light, the cutaway sketch meets all of these criteria”.

An English scientist who delivered a written opinion about the feasibility of the German test stated that the fallout would still be detectable today if the device had been tested “and large parts of Europe would still be uninhabitable”. This question of fallout is commonly misunderstood by non-nuclear scientists.

When an atom bomb is detonated, neutrons react against a surrounding jacket of material such as U-238 or beryllium to enhance the blast, which has the secondary effect of increasing fallout. If the purpose of the German test was only to prove the reaction and the correctness of the theory, and the blast effect was not required, the structural parts of the bomb would have been layered with zirconium or bismuth within a tamper of lead. Fallout in this case would have been negligible.

The Atomic Bomb Testing Station

In June 1945, before the first American atomic test in New Mexico, former inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp, which supplied labour for Ohrdruf, reported that the Russians had discovered two German "atom bombs" on a Baltic island.

- Jacques Caval: "L’Intransigeant", Paris Presse, 1955

This would probably have been Bornholm, which was occupied in a surprise move by Russian forces at the end of the war. The "London Evening Standard" and the Danish "Politiken" published communiques from Washington that there had been a secret atomic laboratory on the island and this had been the reason for its sudden liberation’ by the Soviets.

The team of German scientists on Bornholm, which included a Yugoslav, were all said to have been taken off to Moscow with their equipment and documentation.

Peenemünde, on the Usedom Peninsula, was a development and test centre for various V weapons.

Allen W. Dulles, who eventually became head of the US Secret Service, was attached to OSS Zürich during the war and on 19 June 1943 sent a cable to his superior in Washington, William Donovan, stating that heavy water was being shipped from Norway to Peenemünde where a German atomic laboratory had been identified. The report was passed to David Bruce, head of British Military Intelligence, in London and resulted in the devastating air raid on Peenemünde on 17 August 1943.

Thus the most serious reports indicated activities in the Baltic, and in particular Bornholm and Peenemünde. Following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two English newspapers, the "Daily Telegraph" and "Daily Express" reported on 9 August 1945 that a senior “Nazi atom scientist” had been killed at Peenemünde during the raid although his identity was not revealed. What use such a report has for the newspaper-reader is difficult to fathom.
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Two days later, on 11 August, the "Daily Telegraph" at page five under a heading Nazis’ Atom Bomb Plans referred to defensive measures being taken in Britain in August the previous year on the basis of a “highly secret memorandum which was sent that summer to the chiefs of Scotland Yard”.

The article went on: “Reports received from our agents on the Continent early last year indicated that German scientists were experimenting with an atomic bomb in Norway. According to these reports, the bomb had an explosive radius of more than two miles and was launched by catapult”.

Disappointingly the "Daily Telegraph" supplied no further details either of bomb or its unique means of delivery and later: “reliable agents in Germany reported that the bomb had been tested and proved a failure". 

A one kiloton device within a lead tamper sprays lethal neutrons over an area two kilometres in diameter. When testing such a device, it might have been interpreted by agents as a failure if a mammoth explosion had been expected. The German observer Zinsser mentioned having observed several "atom bomb" tests, and this may have been one of them.

In the train of the two nuclear attacks on Japan on 6 and 9 August 1945, the US Intelligence services began questioning all Germans in captivity who might possess information respecting possible German nuclear tests.

An official paper was forwarded by COMNAVEU London on 24 January 1946 respecting the interrogation of a German prisoner on 19 August 1945.

- APW/U [Ninth Air Force] 96/1945, 373.2 of 19 August 1945, Pkt 47 to 53, released COMNAVEU 1946: Nat Archive RG 38, Entry 98C, box 9-13.

The layout of the first page is as follows:

INTELLIGENCE REPORT

Subject: Germany Aviation. Evaluation, Scale A1 to E0: B1. Subject: Investigations, Research, Developments and Practical Use of German Atomic Bomb.  

Enclosure will be of interest to BuAer [E-32] and BuOrd [Re8].  Enclosure is a discussion of the developments of the German atomic bomb. [Only one page declassifed] 

Prepared by: R.F.Hickey, Captain, US Navy. Tulley Shelley, Commodore, US Navy, Intelligence Officer.

The accompanying page reads as follows:

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

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

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

This wave had a diameter of about 1 km when it became visible and the colour of the cloud changed frequently. It became dotted after a short period of darkness with all sorts of light spots, which were, in contrast to normal explosions, of a pale blue colour.

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

The diameter of the still visible pressure wave was at least 9,000 meters while remaining visible for at least 15 seconds.

50. Personal observations of the colours of the explosion cloud found an almost blue-violet shade. During this manifestation reddish-coloured rims were to be seen, changing to a dirty-like shade in very rapid succession.

51. The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing. The appearance of atmospheric disturbance lasted about 10 seconds without noticeable climax.

52. About one hour later I started with an He 111 from the aerodrome at Ludwigslust and flew in an easterly direction.

Shortly after the start I passed through the almost complete overcast [between 3,000 and 4,000 metre altitude].

A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections [at about 7,000 metres altitude] stood, without any seeming connections, over the spot where the explosion took place. Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lightning, turned up.

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

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

For the Commanding Officer Helenes T. Freiberger, AC. Captain Distribution List: 248 copies in all.

Friedrich Georg:

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

Where did this test take place? In the published version, 

Zinsser gives the location of the "Atomic Bomb Test Station" as being 10-12 kilometres away from the Ludwigslust airfield. In a later observation he added that the place in question was "further eas"' from there. 

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

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

As likely locations, researchers who have worked on the Zinsser report, suggest the troop exercise areas at , Ltibtheen, Garz, i.e. Peenemünde, and an area nearby - the island of Rügen.

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

Near to that exercise area was the Gottow nuclear laboratory of Dr Kurt Diebner.

American aerial photographs, taken in 1945, also show in Kummersdorf a large unusual looking round explosion area. That may have been the test site.


To  date, there has been no conclusive success in establishing the definitive location of the October 1944 atomic test. 

If that test involved an atomic explosion set off at great height, it would be futile to look for a crater or anything like one.

 

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The flash visibility of a Trinity size bomb explosion during daytime, partly cloudy weather, 30 meters above the ground
 

ln any case, it would certainly have to be possible, even today, to establish by ground tests, that a nuclear explosion took place there in1944.

Further research is needed.

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

Zinsser’s He 111 would have had to avoid American P 38 fighters that were operating in the area. 

Such a fantastic sight as a nuclear explosion could scarcely have escaped the crews of those P 38s. Therefore their observations should be able to be found in American operational reports.

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

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

lt is believed that he went up again, a second time, a little later. Most importantly, it is not known who could have given him permission.

Therefore the question is what did an anti-aircraft missile expert want with a He 111 at a nuclear test? 

Many converted Heinkel He 111s were used by the Karlshagen test centre near Peenemiinde for testing new types of rocket.

At Karlshagen, as at Peenemüinde, the aircraft were a fixed element of the complement and were used by both test centres, until they were evacuated in the spring of 1945. 

The reliable Heinkel aircraft were used there as launch, survey or photographic aircraft. Every individual rocket flight had to be documented to the last detail. 

That suggests the conclusion that the anti-aircraft missile expert Zinsser had actually taken off in his special He 111 from Peenemüinde, and not from Ludwigslust.

There is thus added weight to statements that place the nuclear test in the Peeneünde area.
.
The question as to whether Zinsser "happened" to come across the test area at the time must, on closer exarnination, be discounted. 

In actual fact, he had probably been given the task of documenting the individual stages of the nuclear test, from a special Heinkel He 111 that was other-wise used for anti-aircraft missile tests. 

In a test as secret as a nuclear explosion, he could perhaps have "'happened", to fly close to the test area, but he could never have made a second flight within an hour.

He must then have been given the task of continuing his test observations by a second flight.

Of course, the information given in the Zinsser report is not yet final proof. 

Interestingly, in addition to Zinsser’s report there also exists a statement from an Italian officer, who attended the same test as an observer for Mussolini.

That officer states precisely that the nuclear test was carried out on ll October 1944 in the area of the island of Rügen, i.e. close to Peenemünde.


An Italian emissary representing the exiled former Italian dictator Mussolini stated that on 11 October 1944 he attended the test of a "small-scale atom bomb” at the Baltic island of Rügen, not far from Peenemünde.

A two second illumination of the entire atmosphere during a nuclear explosion indicates a device equivalent to 1000-tons TNT.

Luigi Romersa, quoted in "Defensa", July/August 1984 reproducing an article from the 19.11.1955 edition of "L’Intransigeance" under the title 'J’ai vu exploser la bombe atomique de Hitler'.

The location seems to have been an artificial offshore platform near Rügen island. 

The only possible explanation for the foregoing is that Zinsser, whoever he was, saw the test of a 1-kiloton lead jacketed German atom bomb and so, if there ever was such a thing, Hitler’s scientists won the race to the atom bomb.

The Sands of Time Run Out

“The Germans were preparing rocket surprises for England in particular, which would have, it is believed, changed the course of the war if the invasion had been postponed for so short a time as half a year", LtGen Donald Leander Putt, Deputy Commanding General, US Army Air Force Intelligence, told the Society of Aeronautical Engineers in a speech in 1946.

Since he was speaking here of rockets, Lt-Gen Putt was implying that forcing the Germans back to their own frontier by December 1944 was critical to the Allies not losing the war.

In December 1944 the Germans launched a military operation, the purpose of which no historian has explained satisfactorily:

The Ardennes offensive, which began on the 16th of that month. Hitler’s motorized forces were to bear down on Antwerp with the intention of recapturing the port.

For the purpose he had released huge quantities of fuel and ammunition and transferred the bulk of his Panzers from the East.

Two full divisions –one SS and one Wehrmacht– were deployed. Secrecy was absolute. Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC Nicolas von Below remarked in his 1982 memoirs that even he could not understand why Hitler wanted to go to Antwerp – “a place that led nowhere”.

And at the same time orders were placed with naval shipyards at Stettin and Elbing in the Baltic for twenty-four 500- ton submersible barges able to transport and launch V-2 rockets.

Antwerp was a sea port. Antwerp was 200 miles from London. The maximum range of a V-2 was 200 miles. Launched from a submersible barge, a V-2 could hit London from the River Scheldt on which Antwerp stood. Here we begin to see the logic.

But the V-2 campaign had been a failure. Hitler knew that. There had to be something extra to make all this worthwhile. In an aside to accredited journalists Kurowski and Romersa it is alleged that Lt-Gen Putt had added, “The Germans had V-2s with atomic explosive warheads”.

Hitler told Otto Skorzeny that the whole point was to introduce “a new and really revolutionary weapon which would take them utterly by surprise” – the same expression as used by US Lt-Gen Putt in his speech.

- Otto Skorzeny, "Meine Kommandounternehmen" Universitas, 1993. quotes Lt-Gen Putt:

 “Only a few more weeks and, in the V-2 armed with nuclear weapons, the Germans would have had the decisive weapon”.

In the August/September 1984 edition of "Defensa" under the subtitle 'Hitler’s Secret Weapons, Something More Than Fantasy', Luigi Romersa stated:

“Only a few weeks more and the Germany would have used a weapon to decide the war, a V-2 carrying an atomic bomb …”.

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Even if a small atom bomb with all the HE required to detonate it had been crammed into a V-2, the payload of which was only one ton, there was still the necessity for a proximity fuse able to set off the implosion fuse in the last quarter-second before the rocket hit the ground.

It is not thought that such a proximity fuse existed in that epoch.

The only logical atomic explosive for the V-2 was Heisenberg’s Sphere which detonated on impact.

If the Uraniumbombe was ready, and he now had the deadly warhead mass-produced to fit into his V-2s, then the picture makes some kind of sense at last.

In this new campaign every V-2 arriving from the heavens on London at Mach 3.5 would crush into a critical mass on impact a sphere in its nose or waist filled with half a tonne or so of plutonium-enriched uranium powder.

The assembling of the material, though instantaneous, lacked symmetry, and so a full chain reaction would not develop, but there would certainly be a “fizzle” equivalent to up to 50 tons of TNT, meltdown and fallout.

And every V-2 would bring the same punishment until Britain pulled out of the war and all troops of the western Alliance departed from the European mainland. It was a bold plan.

Once it was obvious that the Ardennes offensive had failed, Hitler admitted defeat to his Luftwaffe ADC: 

“I know the war is lost. The enemy superiority is too great”.

Horten Ho XVIII bomber

Before the war the first Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff, Walther Wever, had demanded a fast, four engined bomber. The initial designs, the Ju 89 and Do 19, had flown but were either scrapped or relegated to other duties, and Göring had abandoned the four-engined series subsequently in favour of the Ju 88. This was due partly to the raw materials situation but also to the fact that double the number of two-engined machines could be manufactured, which looked good in the production figures.

Göring was therefore the party responsible for the decision not to have a long-range bomber fleet, and in the upshot it was probably fatal for Hitler.

At the end of 1944 the development of new types of bombs for use against the United States from Germany and possibly from bases in Japan kick started a bomber-building programme into life.

An aircraft specifically built as an atomic-type bomb carrier was the Horten XVIII, although its designers were not made aware of that fact until after the war, its purpose being camouflaged by the Luftwaffe as the maritime anti-convoy role.

The RLM requirement drawn up in mid-1944 stipulated a radius of action of 9,000 kms, enabling the aircraft to make the round trip from Germany to New York without refuelling, carrying an outward bomb load of 4 tonnes. This payload would be about right for a German "atomic-type’ bomb with a 500-kilo core, most of the rest being casing and the conventional explosive needed to implode the device.

At a conference of aircraft  manufacturers in the autumn of 1944, Messerschmitt, Focke-Wulf, Blohm & Voss, Junkers, Arado and Heinkel were invited to tender designs, but when submitted none were able to meet the radius of action, particularly after the figure of 9,000 kms had been increased to 11,000 kms. |

Reimar and Walter Horten were not in the mainstream of aircraft manufacture.

Before the war their specialist field had been gliders of very high aspect wing ratio. Their design with a glide ratio of 45:1 was greater than an albatross, and this best performance by a flying wing stood until at least the early 1970s.

When war came the brothers’ interest widened and designs for powered versions of the flying wing began to flow from the drawing board. The Hortens were told of the disappointing progress made by the major manufacturers and in November 1944 the Luftwaffe asked them to submit a design for a long- range bomber. They worked on the project full out through the Christmas period and came up with ten variations for a "flying wing" bomber, basically a wooden boomerang driven by a permutation of from four to eight turbo-jets.

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The final version tagged Ho XVIIIA had six Junkers Jumo 004B turbo-jets at the rear of the fuselage fed by air intakes in the wing’s leading edge. A rocket boosted skate would be jettisoned at take-off and landing effected on a skid. Construction was predominantly wood held together with a carbon-based glue. This gave the aircraft a low radar profile.

According to Speer, Hitler was very taken with the whole project, but when between 20 and 23 February 1945 Göring chaired a further design conference at Dessau, the lobbyists got their way and a few days later Göring told the Horten brothers to work in collaboration with Junkers engineers.

As these had quietly co-opted some Messerschmitt people to their team, the project was now run by committee.

The MesserschmittJunkers idea was to fit a huge vertical fin and rudder aft and relocate the engines below the wing. These changes increased drag and thus reduced the range but again they got their way, and the final design had two large vertical fins with a cockpit at the leading edge.

The six Jumo jets were to be slung in two nacelles one to each side of the central fuselage. Between these was the bomb bay which also housed a tricycle landing gear.

This variation did not find favour with the Horten brothers and they designed their own improvement, Ho XVIIIB, a flying wing with a crew of three seated in a plexiglass blister in the nose, propulsion being provided by four Heinkel Hirth SO11 turbo-jets each developing 1,200 kgs thrust and housed below the wing in gondolas insisted upon by the development authority for safety reasons.

This arrangement resulted in a weight saving of about a ton enabling the replacement of the skid by a fixed 8-wheel undercarriage streamlined in flight by doors to reduce drag.

The aircraft would have a speed of about 850 kms/hr, an operational ceiling of 16 kms and could remain aloft for 27 hours.

Although armament was considered unnecessary by the Luftwaffe, the Hortens suggested two Mk 108 3.-cm cannon directly below the cockpit. A special carbon-based paint and a honeycomb dielectric material pasted over the outer skin were used to suppress the reflection of radar beams.

On 23 March 1945 the design was approved by Göring and the Hortens were told to approach Karl Saur, Speer’s deputy, to find a suitably protected production facility. Kahla in the Harz mountains was considered suitable. It had two recently completed hangars with concrete roofs 5.6 metres thick which were virtually bomb-proof.

Two airstrips were available for test flights, and a workforce of 2,000 persons was on hand. The first prototype was expected to fly in the summer of 1945 and work was started on 1 April.

German Intelligence of the Manhattan Project

During the war Germany had been relatively well informed on the progress of the Manhattan Project. Most of the signals transmitted to Moscow by Klaus Fuchs’ spy ring were decrypted by the SS- RSHA109, as were those of a Canadian communist ring in Ottawa, and passed to SS atomic research groups.

 - Gregory Douglas: "Geheimakte Gestapo Müller", Band II, Druffel, 1996

The information was withheld from other sections of the German project for security reasons. The Spanish spy Alazar de Velasco reported to both Germany and Japan on the American work from 1943 until mid-1944, operating from Mexico.

 - Robert Wilcox: "Japan’s Secret War", Marlowe, 1995

Velasco mentioned the difficulties the Americans were having in developing an implosion fuse for their Plutonium bomb design, which had already been solved by the Germans.

On 30 November 1944 U1230 put Erich Gimpel ashore on an American beach.

On Christmas Day, a week before his capture by the FBI, Gimpel discovered from his contact that the American A-bomb would be ready by the summer of 1945.

Apparently they had only two or three bombs. Gimpel transmitted this information to Berlin.

Gimpel’s mission is described by Günther Gellermann:

"Der andere Auftrag – Agenteinsätze Deutscher U-Boote im Zweiten Weltkrieg", Bernard & Gräfe, 1997: also see Erich Gimpel: "Spion für Deutschland", Süddeutscher Verlag, 1956.


Gimpel was sentenced to death for espionage but was reprieved three days before the date set for his execution, 15 April 1945, benefiting from the traditional amnesty granted the condemned following the death of a President. He served ten years in Fort Leavenworth before his release. 

In the autumn of 1944, when he found Hitler planning the Ardennes offensive with freshly formed Panzer and fighter units, his Luftwaffe ADC von Below asked him why he did not concentrate all his forces against the Russians and received the answer that he could attack them later, provided that the Americans were not in Berlin.

First of all he must have space on his western border.

Von Below remarked that everybody thought it preferable to allow the Americans to take the Reich so that the Russians could be held off as far as possible from the eastern frontier.

Hitler did not share this view because he feared the power of the American Jews more than the Bolshevists.

It seems certain that a Doomsday Bomb test was carried out at Ohrdruf in the Harz on the night of 4 March 1945.

Witness Frau Cläre Werner related:

“"At that time I knew Hans Ritterman, who was Plenipotentiary for Reichspost and OKW Special Projects.

"He worked in the Arnstadt Building Department and was involved in secret Reichspost work in Thuringia. He was a good friend of the family and often came for coffee on Sundays.

"On 4 March 1945 Hans visited and said we should go to the tower and watch in the direction of Röhrensee village. He didn’t know what the new thing would go like.

"About nine-thirty that evening behind Röhrensee it suddenly lit up just like hundreds of bolts of lightning. The explosion glowed red inside and yellow outside and you could read a newspaper by it. It lasted only a short time, fell dark again and then came a hurricane, after which it went quiet.

"Next day, like many residents of Röhrensee, Holzhausen, Mühlberg, Wechmar and Bittstedt, I had nose-bleeds, headache and pressure on my eardrums. That afternoon about two o’clock, between 100 and 150 SS came to the mountain and asked where the bodies were and where they had to take them. They had been misdirected and a motor cyclist put them right. I watched them making for the Ohrdruf Army Training Ground" 

Wachsenberg Document, Arnstadt Municipal Archives, Report of Committee of Enquiry to Establish Local History, DDR Department of Culture District Committee Depositions of 16 May 1962 of witnesses who in March 1945 had been

(1) Wachsenburg watchtower keeper
(2) a rocket technician
(3) a fuel storage tank builder
(4) an inmate of Ohrdruf concentration camp.


Another witness, a former concentration camp inmate at Ohrdruf, described how he was forced to help in the cremation of several hundred charred bodies on 5 March 1945, the inference being that they had died as the result of the weapons test the previous evening.

V-4: The Doomsday Bomb Ready to Enter Service

Ashen with the pallor of the Berlin Bunker, all that kept Hitler’s spirit alive in the closing months was the desperate hope that, even at the last, circumstances might yet permit him to use his weapons of frightfulness in a last throw. Accordingly, at Schloss Ferienwalde/Oder on 11 March 1945, his last visit to troops at the front, he implored General Theodor Busse and officers of the Ninth Army to stave off the Russians for as long as it might take for his new "wonder-weapons" to be ready. He was honest in promising them that “every day and every hour are precious for the completion of the weapons of frightfulness which will bring the turn in our fortune!”

Frau Werner continued:

“The following night, 12 March, the second test took place about ten-fifteen.The air raid sirens went off at nine.The glow wasn’t so bright as the first test and we didn’t get nose-bleeds and so on. Hans spent all night on the tower with his people. He told us we mustn’t ever mention about the bolts of lightning. All the people knew Hans so I suppose they were all Reichspost and Reich Research Council. None of them was in uniform and only a few wore the Party badge in the lapel".

The only rocket in Hitler’s armoury able to reach London from Germany carrying a one-tonne payload was the winged A9/10. It was eighty feet long and could hit New York. The series was not yet in mass production, the project having only been resurrected in December 1944. A test launch seems to have been carried through near Ohrdruf on 16 March 1945.

All four witnesses gave evidence that on 16 March 1945 an “Amerika” rocket was launched successfully from “Polte II” MUNA Rudisleben [an underground munitions factory site]. Witnesses (2) and (3) testified to having worked at Rudisleben on a rocket “thirty metres in length” which was launched at Rudisleben on the date in question. Witness (4) testified to having worked with a party of prisoners erecting the staging for the rocket.

- Karsten Porezag: "Geheime Kommandosache, Geschichte der V-Waffen und der geheimen Militäraktionen des Zweiten Weltkrieges an Lahn, Dill und im Westerwald", Verlag Wetzlardruck, 1996

Cläre Werner stated:

“At about nine on the night of 16 March 1945 there was an air raid warning. My friend Hans Rittermann was visiting the tower with some friends. They had binoculars and were looking towards LIchtershausen [Polte II lay between Wachsenberg Tower and LIchtershausen]. At about eleven it got very bright, something went up into the sky with a huge tail fire, it kept going up, it was heading to the north. Hans Rittermann told us we must never speak of what we had seen, just that we had been witnesses to something unique which would be written about in every history book".

This seems to confirm the launch of an A9/10 rocket, but the war was beyond recall.

Luftwaffe Mutiny?

Senior Engineer August Cönders, who had designed the V-3 England Gun, reported in February 1945 that the new decisive weapons would not be ready for use before April 1945, and in the last days of March 1945 the Luftwaffe dropped leaflets across the Lower Rhine advising the population to evacuate the area, since from the beginning of April new decisive weapons were to be deployed there.

A cordon sanitaire 50 kms wide was required.

From a military point of view the period towards the end of March offered the last opportunity to shut down the Western Front by driving back the first crossings to the western side of the Rhine.

US forces crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim on 23 March 1945 and at Wesel on the 24th. The Ruhr area was brought under threat within the next few days.

Rumours were rife that near Münster a number of Me 109 fighters were being converted for Kamikaze operations [SO = Selbstopfereinsätze, self sacrificial operations] using a special 250 kg bomb; even an Me 262 jet could not outfly the bomb’s pressure wave.

There are indications that this proposed operation was in some way sabotaged by Luftwaffe personnel. On 31 March 1945 General Barber and 202 Luftwaffe servicemen including sixteen airfield commanders and eighty-five officers and pilots were executed for “refusing to obey orders”.

-Vajda and Dancey: "German Aircraft Industry and Production 1933–1945", Airlife, 1998

It can hardly be a coincidence that the Luftwaffe War Diary for the period ([19-30 March 1945] and the Wehrmacht High Command War Diary for a much longer period [1 March-20 April 1945] are missing, suggesting that there must have been a serious mutiny during the period and possibly at the instigation of Göring who in May 1945 spoke of a mysterious weapon which he had declined to use “because it might have destroyed all civilization”. 

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On 30 March 1945,  one of two Me 262A2a/U2 prototypes, became a write-off after crash landing at Schröck airfield near Marburg/Lahn and subsequently fell into American hands.

This aircraft, completed in January 1945, had been flown in twenty-two test flights operating from Rechlin.

It was fitted with a bomb-aimer’s position in the nose, and along both sides of this cockpit were long, feeler-like aerials, almost certainly intended as a manually operated proximity fuse for the bombs.

Alsos Hot On The Trail

On 22 April 1945 Dr Edward O. Salant of the American Intelligence Mission Alsos addressed to all former American Air Intelligence field teams an urgent circular requesting a search for Luftwaffe 50 kg and 150 kg bombs having an aerial in the tail section.

Agents were to report the names of scientists, factories or laboratories linked to these bombs.

The aerials were aluminium and resembled car aerials, about 40 cms long, as thick as a finger at the base where they screwed into the tail section.

The bomb was 40 or 70 cms long, cylindrical and 22cms wide.

There were probably brackets on the main casing. Internally were to be found radio components, metal vacuum tubes, condensers, resistors, etc. Areas of special interest were thought to be Rechlin, Celle and Stade.

On 26 April 1945 a supplementary notice widened the search to other bombs which had a 25-cm long aerial in the nose. An accompanying sketch showed a ball with small, wire-meshed covered holes at the head of the aerial.

It may be recalled that during the initial experiments with the explosive in 1944, Zippermayr had had the idea that a better effect might be obtained if the powder was spread out in the form of a cloud before the explosion. A metal cylinder had been attached to the lower end of the container and hit the ground first, dispersing the powder. A quarter of a second later a small charge in the cylinder exploded and ignited the cloud. This may explain the real purpose of the "aerial and bal" fitted to the nose of the bomb.

The bombs were actually stored in Austria at a massive underground SS-weapons factory code named Quarz at Melk. On 18 March 1945 the airfield commander of a fighter group at Münster, probably JG27 or JG28, received orders to accept delivery in Austria of the contents of thirty railway wagons consigned by the Office of Luftwaffe Supply.

The orders were long and complicated and explained how the Me 109 fighter-bomber was to be converted to carry a new type of bomb.

It was of 250 kg and would be slung under the bomb bay and kept in position by unusually long bolts which gave a clearance of 16 cms above the runway. A few days later another order arrived in which it was stated that the bomb had a destructive radius of 16 kms and would destroy the aircraft dropping it.Therefore the mission was to be flown only by unmarried volunteers.

Next came telephone orders for the airfield commander to collect two heavy tractor trucks at Linz and proceed to Amstetten railway goods yard. On this occasion he was advised that the new bomb would be suspended from a parachute when dropped, thus allowing the pilot a chance of escape. An altitude of 7,000 metres was allowed.

The airfield commander’s ADC, a Luftwaffe Hauptmann, was sent to Amstetten railway yard and found a train of thirty sealed wagons each bearing the words “Caution. New Explosive Type!” painted on the panelling in large white characters.

A Waffen-SS Hauptsturmführer in charge of the security detachment refused to release the contents of the wagons to him, citing a Führerbefehl which required the release order to bear Hitler’s personal signature. The Luftwaffe ADC had no document of this nature and the train remained at Amstetten until the arrival of the Americans. The Waffen-SS and Americans Meet Up at Melk on 12 April 1945

Grossadmiral Dönitz had spent 24 hours in Berne, Switzerland, and then returned to Berlin where he spoke to Hitler. 

 USS National Archive, Box RG 260 Entry 121, Box 136: cable 20.4.1945

In mid-April the Soviet Army had dug in at St Pöllen, only 3 kms from Merkersdorf airfield which served Melk, from where they regularly broadcast over loudspeakers in German warning of the “the greatest treachery in world history” and inviting German troops, in alluring terms describing the unsurpassable treatment they would receive, to “come over and surrender”. Melk was being defended by the 6th SS Panzer Army with fifteen Jagdtiger tanks.

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When Amstetten fell on 8 May 1945 citizens recall that the Waffen-SS were waiting quite unconcernedly in the market square to meet the American forces when they arrived. During the day when there was a Russian air raid American and SS troops sought shelter together. Later the two groups collaborated. The thirty railroad cars were taken westwards across the Enns demarcation line, while a mixed group proceeded to Melk to arrange the ceasefire.

The same day the Russians moved forward and encountered American troops near Melk, where a brief exchange of fire ensued before the Americans withdrew. The US forces had examined the contents of the thirty goods trucks and satisfied themselves that the bombs were not primed with the catalyst, which was required by standing orders to be added to the bomb by the SS immediately before the fuse was set prior to take-off.

In April 1945 Otto Skorzeny’s special Waffen-SS Intelligence unit was ordered to provide the escort for the transport of 540 crates of documents from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin to the Austrian frontier.

All Germany’s atomic and biochemical weapons projects were included in these archives. Eventually, on 21 April 1945, the convoy reached Stechowitz, 30 miles from Prague. A rendezvous was made with the commanding general of the SS Weapons Engineering School, the crates were separated into lots and, together with other material, were interred, the entrances being dynamited.

In American custody, the SS-General described how he and another SS-officer were the only survivors after concentration camp inmates and then their SS guards had been murdered by a regular Wehrmacht execution squad. During his own interrogation the general “came clean” and spoke about a pressure bomb based on firedamp which “was absolutely devastating for everything”. The SS destroyed the catalyst and formula shortly before the Americans arrived.

Did Göring “save civilization” by refusing Hitler’s orders to deploy these bombs?

Aside from doctrinal grounds, Hitler’s objection to a full nuclear blast was that it might go on to ignite the hydrogen atoms in the atmosphere.

Presumably it was thought this bomb presented the same sort of threat. The orders for its use flowed down through Luftwaffe channels. The SS refused to release the bombs because there was no order signed personally by Hitler. If it became known that Hitler had forbidden the bombs to be used and Göring was disobeying him, one can see how that might have given rise to a Luftwaffe officers’ mutiny. Unfortunately Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC, von Below, is silent on the matter in his memoirs and so we shall never know.

The First and Last Voyage of the German Submarine U-234 

Hideo Tomonaga, a Samurai, held the rank of captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy and was credited with the invention of an automatic depth keeping device for submarines. 

On 27 April 1943, southeast of Madagascar, he transferred from the Japanese submarine 1-29 under Captain Yoichi to Korvettenkapitän Musenberg’s U-Boat U-180.

He brought with him a few items of luggage – three one-man torpedoes, a 3-cm gas-pressure self loading cannon and, in a large number of smaller cases, a quantity of gold ingots destined for the Japanese Embassy in Berlin and said to be payment for German technology. There was in fact so much gold, probably several tonnes of it, that the U-Boat chief engineer found it useful to help trim the submarine. In June 1943 U-180 arrived safely at the French Biscay base of Bordeaux, and Captain Tomonaga went off to do whatever it was that he had come for. 

J- Jochen Brennecke: "Haie im Paradies: der deutsche U-Bootkrieg in Asiens Gewässern, 1943–1945"

"U-180 sailed from Bordeaux for Japan in August 1943 with a cargo including mercury, radar equipment, dismantled V-weapons, blueprints and technical personnel and was mined and sunk off the mouth of the Gironde Estuary on the 22nd". 

He would reappear in the story twenty months later on the U-Boat quay at Kiel.

The Preparation and Loading of U-234

The seven U-Boats of Type XB were the largest in the Kriegsmarine, displacing 2,700 tonnes full load submerged. They had been designed as mine layers, and for this purpose were equipped with thirty mine shafts capable of carrying sixty-six mines, but in general were used as ocean replenishment boats, the so-called Milchkühe.

294 feet long and 30 feet in the beam, the class had Diesel-electric propulsion providing a maximum surfaced speed of 17 knots and 7 knots submerged. The most economic cruising speed was 10 knots which gave them a range of 21,000 miles and made them ideal for long distance cargo missions to Japan, which could be reached from Germany without refuelling. U-234 had been damaged by bomb hits in 1942 and May 1943 while under construction and was not launched until 23 December 1943.

The boat was commissioned by Kapitänleutnant Johann Heinrich Fehler on 3 March 1944 and spent the next five months either in the builders’ yard or working-up in the Baltic.

Once the training period had been completed successfully, she put into Germania Werft at Kiel on 30 August 1944 for a major refit and conversion from a minelayer into a transport submarine. The important changes were the installation of a snorkel, an air intake mast enabling submerged travel under Diesel propulsion and the removal of the twenty-four lateral mineshafts to create cargo stowage compartments. The outer keel plates were removed and the keel duct remodelled to receive a cargo of mercury and optical glass.

U-234 emerged from the yards on 22 December 1944 for trials. The commander had meanwhile been summoned to OKM in Berlin to be informed that U-234 was to take important war material and twenty-seven passengers to Tokyo. Fehler argued that this number was unreasonable. They would take the place of eighteen crew members and endanger the mission. After some negotiation a compromise was struck in which twelve passengers would travel, one acting as No 1 watch-keeping officer. These would replace eight crew members.

It appears from American declassified papers that a special commission, Marinesonderzweigstelle Heimat under Korvettenkapitän Becker, decided in December 1944 what cargo was to be carried. The OKM Liaison officer for Japan, Kapitän zur See Souchon, discussed the cargo with Japanese Military Attaché Kigoishi. In January 1945 the final preparations were begun for the voyage to Tokyo. A Hohentwiel radar was installed which gave the boat the priceless advantage of detecting an approaching aircraft before the latter could get a fix on the submarine, but it could heat up severely if left working too long.

Dr Heinz Schlicke, a former Director of the Telecommunications Testing Station at Kiel Arsenal, a passenger who had shipped aboard early, arranged in Berlin a two for-one swap to eliminate the radar-overheating problem. The cargo was loaded under conditions of the strictest secrecy. Over 100 tonnes of mercury in 50-lb iron bottles went into the keel ducts. Elsewhere engineering and weapons blueprints, cameras, lenses, fuses, barrels and bales, secret documents in sealed containers, even an Me 262 jet aircraft in its component parts were stowed in the holds amidships. 

The US authorities have never admitted the presence of this Me 262 jet fighter aboard U-234 and it was not included on any of their Loading Lists.

The Japanese television network company NHK Tokyo, which produced a documentary in tribute to Hideo Tomonaga, showed film extracts originating from the US Archive in which U-234 passenger August Bringewald, the Messerschmitt aeronautical engineer, was shown examining an Me 262 jet in apparently good condition at Wright Field air force base in May 1945.

In the 
 bio
graphical account of his career "The Warring Seas". A. V. Sellwood: White Horse Publishers, 1955], Fehler stated that there was a dismantled Me 262 jet aircraft aboard U-234.


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Tokyo knew of German research due to Japanese observers who witnessed early tests of the legendary German Me-262 jet fighter in 1942.

It was not till summer of 1944, when U.S. B-29 bombers began to pound Japan, that the Japanese Navy asked for the Kokoku Heiki No. 2, or Kikka [Orange B
lossom].

That the Kikka resembled an Me-262 is no coincidence—nor was it a matter of simple imitation.

japan's jet program was heavily derived from German research 

In July 1944, Hermann Göring ordered that Japan be provided with blueprints for the Me-262, the Junkers Jumo 004 and BMW 003 turbojet engines, and even an actual Me-262 aircraft.

Some of the six forward upright tubes through the foredeck were packed with anti-tank and small Flak rockets, and Panzerfäuste. The most important witness to all this activity was Oberfunkmeister Wolfgang Hirschfeld, the senior radio operator of U234. A good observer of detail, who kept an illicit diary later published as a book, he described how from a perch on the conning tower he saw an SS-lorry draw up on the quayside alongside the U-Boat at Kiel one February morning in 1945 and unload the most important and secret item of cargo, a large number of small and immensely heavy metal cases of uniform size which looked about nine inches along each each side.

"Feindfahrten", Neff Verlag, Vienna, 1983 and in various reprints.

An abbreviated English language version by this author appeared under the title "Hirschfeld – The Story of a U-Boat NCO 1940–1946" Leo Cooper and USNIP, 1997, also in Orion paperback and Cassells Military.

He saw a military officer whom he later knew to be Japanese Military Attaché Kigoishi looking on. After a few moments he noticed something which struck him as distinctly odd, for among the small knot of German crewmen working on the foredeck there were two Japanese officers who appeared to be supervising the loading.They were seated on a crate, occupied in painting a description in black characters including the formula "U-235" on the brown paper wrapping gummed around each of the small, heavy containers.

They were so numerous that he couldn’t count them, but certainly there seemed to him to be well over fifty little cases. 

Reported in Geoffrey Brooks :"Hitler’s Nuclear Weapons", Leo Cooper, 1992, after correspondence with Wolfgang Hirschfeld, 21.1.1991. Since the US Unloading Manifest shows only ten containers, he was pressed  on this matter and it was suggested his memory was at fault:

“I know what I saw,” he said, “and there were definitely more than fifty of those little heavy cases”. 

The total weight of all material aboard U-234 was 260 tonnes. 

These two Japanese, who were to travel aboard U-234 on the voyage to Tokyo, were Air Force Colonel Genzo Shosi, an aeronautical engineer, and Hideo Tomonaga, who had arrived in France aboard U-180 nearly two years before.

Once finished, each case would be carried individually to the German officer supervising the loading, third watchkeeping officer Leutnant zur See Carl Ernst Pfaff, assisted by a bosun, Peter Schölch, for stowage in one of the six vertical loading tubes in the foredeck.

They were pressure-resistant steel loading containers about 25 feet in length and six feet in diameter resembling a large cigar tube, designed to fit into each of the six vertical mine shafts set in a line down the centre line of the fore-deck. These were held in place by the original mine-retention mechanism and could have been jettisoned at any time by the pulling of a lever by the commander.

Hirschfeld asked Tomonaga what the cases contained and was told, “It is the cargo from U-235. That boat is no longer going to Japan”. When he enquired at the 5th Flotilla Office, they told him that U-235 was Type VII training boat never intended for operations beyond the Baltic, and so he knew that Tomonaga had lied.

He spoke to the commander privately a little later and was told, “For God’s sake, Oberfunkmeister, I must swear you to total secrecy and ask you not to raise the matter again with the Japanese. I will explain everything to you in Tokyo”.

Only five persons aboard U-234 knew that the small cases contained Uranium: Fehler the captain, Ernst the chief engineer, Pfaff the third watchkeeper and the two Japanese. The commander of the 5th U-Flotilla arranged a reception for Tomonaga and Shosi, and in a ceremony aboard the hulk of the liner 'St Louis' Ambassador Oshima placed Tomonaga’s 300- year-old Samurai sword into Fehler’s care for the voyage.

The other passengers boarding in Germany were: Kapitänleutnant Richard Bulla, first watchkeeper, Staff Officer to Luftwaffe Attaché. Oberst Fritz Sandrath [Luftwaffe], chief of Bremen Flak defences. Oberst Erich Menzel [Luftwaffe, technical aide to Air Attaché, communications. KKpt Heinrich Hellendorn [Navy], naval Flak gunnery. Dr [Ing] Heinz Schlicke, radar, D/F and infra-red scientist. Oberstlt Kai Nieschling [Luftwaffe], squadron judge.

FKpt Gerhard Falck, buildings and naval architecture. August Bringewald, senior Messerschmitt engineer, Me 262, Me 163 and rocketry. Franz Ruf, Messerschmitt procurement specialist. The last passenger was to board in Norway.

Nieschling, the Judge, was travelling to Japan to investigate allegations against Embassy personnel implicated in the Sorge spy scandal and to keep an eye on other passengers during the voyage. Tomonaga, Shosi, Nieschling and Falck slept in the deck below the NCO’s quarters, while all remaining passengers would sleep where they could.

Early on 26 March 1945, in convoy with three other U-Boats and under heavy escort , U-234 sailed for Horten in Norway and arrived there next day after surviving an air attack off Frederikshavn. There now followed a period of idleness while Fehler awaited orders to sail. During exercises at Christiansand U-234 was rammed and damaged. Repairs had to be effected with shipboard tools in a quiet backwater. The last of the passengers, General Ulrich Kessler, the new Luftwaffe attaché to Tokyo, came aboard.

Hirschfeld went every morning to the signals station to collect messages for the boat and on 15 April he took possession of a signal which read: “U-234. Only sail on the orders of the highest level. Führer HQ”. A short while afterwards he was summoned to fetch an urgent signal which stated: “U-234. Sail only on my order. Sail at once on your own initiative. Dönitz”.

t is interesting to conjecture whether the visit of Grossadmiral Dönitz to Berne, Switzerland, on 12 April 1945 was connected with diplomatic moves following the death of US President Roosvelt that day.

In order to provide a leader for Germany should the Reich be divided into two halves, north and south, on 15 April Hitler issued a decree vesting leadership in Dönitz and Albert Kesselring respectively, and the order to U-234 to sail was probably the first important decision in Dönitz’ new role.

On the afternoon of 16 April, U-234 sailed after a brief farewell address from the Regional Commander of U-Boats North [FdU)]Kapitän zur See Rösing. According to Hirschfeld, Fehler had decided to take the Cape Horn route into the south Pacific because of enemy air and sea superiority in the Indian Ocean. Use of the snorkel was abandoned at the entrance to the Iceland Faroes Channel because of a heavy swell and on 30 April the North Atlantic was reached sailing surfaced.

On the evening of 4 May 1945 Hirschfeld copied down the order of U-Boat Command that all German submarines were to observe a ceasefire with effect from 0800 hrs German time the next morning. All attack U-Boats were to return to Norway.

In accordance with his secret orders, Fehler could ignore this instruction since he was not commanding an attack U-Boat. Once the last long-wave transmitter Goliath shut down, naval telegraphists had to rely on short-wave senders, but when instructed to tune in to the Distel wavelength, Hirschfeld found that he had been supplied with a table of false frequencies.

On 6 May an American news broadcast was heard reporting the official declaration of Japanese Foreign Minister Togo that Japan considered herself free from all contracts and treaties concluded with the German Reich and would fight on alone; on the evening of 8 May Reuters issued a communiqué to the effect that Japan had severed relations with Germany and that, as a consequence, German citizens in Japan were being interned.

Taking the two reports together, Fehler took the view that the purpose of his voyage was frustrated and that he should accept the capitulation. His immediate problem was the two Japanese officers. He assumed they would try to prevent the cargo from falling into the hands of Japan’s enemies, and Fehler, after informing them of the political developments, placed them under arrest.

Tomonaga and Shosi expressed understanding for his dilemma and wished him an honourable solution. In asking him to reconsider, Shosi gave his personal undertaking that the crew of U-234 would not be interned on completion of the voyage but would receive especially favourable treatment. Fehler had no confidence in the Japanese Government, however, and, having heard out the plea of the Japanese officers, shook his head with a smile.

Fehler’s assumption was uncharitable. On 15 May 1945, when the diplomatic missions and Party organs of the Third Reich in East Asia were finally closed down, German citizens were interned for the remainder of the conflict under the most hospitable and generous conditions. 

Hirschfeld discovered that, a short while after, Tomonaga and Shosi had made their way through the boat taking their leave of the crew, Tomonaga distributing among them the watches he had bought in Switzerland. That same day, Kapitän zur See Rösing, FdU North, signalled Fehler in the Japan cypher:

“U-234. Continue your voyage or return to Bergen. FdU”.

When shown the signal log, Fehler shook his head and said that he was definitely not going back. Fehler considered that the Allied directive requiring all U-Boats at sea to wear a black flag at the periscope head designated them as pirates and he decided to think about the legal position. This suited him because his surrender port based on his current position was Halifax, Nova Scotia, and he was not keen to surrender to the Canadians.

altThe boat continued to head south while long debates between officers and passengers were held on the question of heading for Argentina or the South Seas.

On 13 May Fehler signalled Halifax for surrender instructions.

The Canadian station responded immediately by requesting the position of U-234, and once this had been supplied a course was given to steer for Nova Scotia.

Fehler had not the least intention of going there and U-234 now headed at full speed to the south-west in order to cross into the American sea area.

At about 2300 hrs, when a Canadian patrol aircraft determined that U-234 was not on the correct course, Halifax sent out more orders to the submarine by radio.

Towards midnight Judge Nieschling reported that Tomonaga and Shosi were lying in adjacent bunks, their arms linked, breathing stertorously and could not be woken.

An empty bottle which had contained Luminal sleeping tablets was found on the deck plating nearby.

A suicide note addressed to the commander was found during a search of their belongings requesting Fehler “should he find us here alive to leave us alone, please, and let us die”. They had taken their action so as to avoid captivity. In closing they requested that their bodies should not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Americans, and that their diplomatic bag should be weighted and sunk, as it held secret papers useful to the enemy. There was a will confirming the assignment of certain property to members of the crew, and for the captain a sum of money in Swiss francs to be used to inform their relatives that they were dead, but not dishonoured. Fehler merely said that he would do as they had asked.

The game of cat-and-mouse with the Canadians continued over the next day until the signals of the latter were suppressed by American jamming. Because he thought he would get a better deal from the Americans, Fehler had made up his mind to surrender to them, and the Americans were so determined to get their hands on U-234 that they sent their destroyer 'USS Sutton' into the Canadian zone in direct contravention of Allied protocol.

The American military authorities were in possession of a passenger manifest for U-234 which they had obtained on occupying the Kiel naval base. The fact that there were two Japanese officers aboard U-234 probably accounted for their unusual interest in the submarine: the first question by the American prize officer on boarding U-234 on 17 May 1945 was not “Where is the Uranium?” but “Where are the Japs?”

In fact, not long after the stern lookouts reported the approach of the American destroyer, Fehler sent for the U-Boat’s medical officer and said, “Tonight we must get the Japanese overboard. If the Americans get to them, they will do everything they can to bring them round. See to it that they die peacefully”. Dr Walter descended to the lower deck without comment and a few hours later reported the death of Tomonaga and Shosi. Each corpse was sewn into a weighted hammock while the diplomatic pouch and the Samurai sword were bound to the body of Tomonaga after which the bodies were committed to the deep with full military honours.

On 19 May 1945 'USS Sutton' and U-234 dropped anchor outside the naval port of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and, after all had disembarked, the ten specialist passengers were driven off to a secret destination, the remainder to Boston Jail. Later a few members of the U-234 crew, including Hirschfeld, were quartered in an old naval vessel and assigned to a submarine school in the yards where they were occasionally called upon to demonstrate shipboard equipment, although their principal task was to keep the U-Bboats in running order.

The Partial Unloading of U-234

During May much of the weapons material, the Me 262 jet and containers of documents had been unshipped and taken off to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

On 24 July 1945 Hirschfeld was standing on the conning tower of U-234 with Captain Hatten, a US Navy Intelligence Officer, watching the six steel loading tubes being lifted by crane from the forward mine shafts and deposited on the quayside. The bosun, Schölch, was put in charge of the unloading because the Americans feared that the containers might be booby-trapped.

Hirschfeld saw four men approach the steel tubes carrying small hand appliances and when he asked Captain Hatten for an explanation he was told, “They are scientists. They are testing for the Uranium with Geiger counters”. Apparently the scientists discovered that all six steel tubes were contaminated to such an extent with radiation that they could not determine in which of the tubes the ten cases of Uranium oxide listed in the loading manifest had been stowed. Schölch knew, but did not inform the Americans of this.

Eventually Lt Pfaff was brought from Fort Mead camp and unloaded the ten cases of Uranium oxide in exchange for some sort of inducement. Shortly afterwards he was repatriated and then returned to the United States as an immigrant, as did Schölch. Neither has ever spoken about the Uranium shipments, although recently Pfaff is reported to have said that he discussed the U-234 cargo with the US atom physicist Robert Oppenheimer in the Portsmouth Navy Yard. Shortly afterwards, the war with Japan ended and Hirschfeld spent the ensuing months at Fort Edward camp in Massachusetts until his release in April 1946.

Only one man who sailed on the first and last voyage of U234 failed to make it home. Fregattenkapitän Gerhard Falck knew everything about the Uranium consignment and probably he knew too much for his own good.

The documents relating to the U-234 affair at the US National Archive are located in Box RG38, Box 13, Documents OP-20-3-G1-A dated May 1945 [Unloading Manifests] and 373/3679/B0x 22/folder OP-16-Z, Day file 1.1.1945 which includes the Nieschling Memorandum dated 24 May 1945.

Judge Nieschling was interviewed by Lt Best.

Under a heading Regarding “Uranium Oxide” and other cargo aboard U-234 the material part of the report reads:

“PoW does not know anything in particular about this ore, but only heard that it was valuable and that it was to be exchanged for some other valuable ore that the Germans needed. The meaning behind the ore would, according to PoW, be known by the technician FKpt Falck. He took some secret courses before he boarded the U-Boat. He was to be chief technician on all naval matter under Admiral Wennecker”.

The German justice authorities dealing with the repatriation of Wehrmacht prisoners has no record of his return....

 Letter from Staatsanwalt Wacker of the Zentral Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen, Ludwigsburg dated 2 September 1998

...and the US Government has so far been unable to account for his whereabouts in their custody after May 1945. He was a legitimate prisoner of war, having been captured while travelling as a passenger on an enemy warship at the time of it surrender. From there he was taken to Fort Hunt outside Washington DC and the declassified portion of his interrogation report indicates that he was co-operative. In international law the Unites States as captor has a duty to account for all prisoners taken under Article 118 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of 27 July 1929, to which the Unites States is a signatory, and to date in this case they have declined to do so.

If the suspicion exists that Falck met his death unlawfully in their hands, it is not unjustified in the circumstances.

The mysterious disappearance of Gerhard Falck is the first of the many secrets pertaining to the cargo aboard the German submarine U-234.

“In the Interests of National Defense or Foreign Policy …” 

 It is curious that, after more than fifty-five years, despite the rules respecting automatic declassification of documents, much of the archive material relating to the cargo of the German submarine U-234 still has not been made public.

In 1985 American journalist Robert K. Wilcox wrote: “Inquiries to government agencies have produced nothing. It is as if the incident never occurred, as if U-234, its important passengers and cargo, never arrived”.

British rocket engineer Philip Henshall wrote in 1995: “Despite requests made to the US naval authorities, the reply has always been that matters relating to nuclear affairs are still subject to official secrecy”.

Anybody who thinks this is legal should examine American law itself.

Opinion of Alaskan lawyer Sidney Trevethan, title 552 section (a) sub-sections (3) and (6)(A) USCA, in The Controversial Cargo of U-234, Revision 13, January 1999

In the United States, a request to a Government agency must be answered within ten days, and if denied a reason given. The courts have ruled that the Freedom of Information Act is to be broadly construed in favour of disclosure, and its exemptions are to be “narrowly construed”. Where a matter is to be “kept secret in the interests of national defense or foreign policy” pursuant to an Executive Order, then the section relating to disclosure does not apply.

If this exemption is being used secretly after 55 years, there must have been something extra-ordinary indeed about the heavy little cases of Uranium on board the German submarine U-234. There is no blanket exemption by which nuclear matters generally are still subject to secrecy, and many formerly Top Secret documents in the matter have been declassified

The Japanese Interest in Nuclear Materials

The interest of the Japanese Government in an atom bomb had waned in 1942 once it was realized that the separation of the U235 isotope for the purpose of making the bomb would require an enormous labour force, stupendous investment, one-tenth of Japan’s annual electricity requirement and half the nation’s copper output for a year.

Professor Yoshio Nishina was the senior atomic scientist and headed the Army project. In 1943, when a link was established with Germany, Nishina asked for a cover story so that the Germans would not be suspicious of a request for Uranium.

 Kunihiko Kigoshi, letter of 7.8.1998 reported in The Controversial Cargo of U-234, op. cit.

The need for Uranium as a catalyst was the excuse apparently adopted. It is firmly established that Japan did subsequently request Uranium from Germany for experimental purposes in 1943.....

 - Yomiuri Shimbunsha, "Showashi no Tenno" [The Emperor and Showa History], Tokyo, 1968, vol 4: John W Dover, "Japan in War and Peace", New Press, 1993

 and probably received a few tons. Japan had several hundred tons of Uranium ore and had been prospecting successfully in Korea and Burma for more.

Unless all this has a double meaning, one infers that Japanese physicists had worked unsuccessfully on an atom bomb project since 1941 and had not progressed beyond the early laboratory stage. The German naval historian Professor Jürgen Rohwer has confirmed from the first Magic decrypts for 1943 and 1944/45 that Japan requested from Germany a “quantity of Uranium oxide” in connection with their atomic research into the fissile isotopes including Plutonium.

Accounting for the U-234 Cargo: the Primary Documents

The initial US Navy Unloading Manifest of U-234 was a translation carried out by the Office of Naval Intelligence and issued on 23 May 1945. The only item of Uranium mentioned was ten cases of Uranium oxide. Revised manifests, such as that of 16 June 1945, omit the Uranium oxide. No mention was made of any Uuranium material in the long memorandum to C-in-C Atlantic Fleet of 6 June 1945 describing the U-234 voyage and cargo arrangements in close detail.

The first manifest showed “10 cases Uranium Oxide, 560 kilos” consigned to the Japanese Army. As the item is part of the overall weight of the cargo, 560 kilos means the combined weight of containers and contents. The next primary document is the copy of a secret cable #262151 dated 27 May 1945 from Commander Naval Operations to Portsmouth Navy Yard on the subject of “Mine Tubes, Unloading Of” . Distribution of the memorandum was to the commandant and various duty and orderly officers.

It reads:

“Interrogation Lt Pfaff second watch officer U234 discloses he was in charge of cargo and personally supervised loading all mine tubes. Pfaff prepared manifest list and knows kind documents and cargo in each tube. Pfaff stated long containers should be unpacked in horizontal position and short containers in vertical position. Uranium oxide loaded in gold lined cylinders and as long as cylinders not opened can be handled like crude TNT. These containers should not be opened as substance will become sensitive and dangerous. Pfaff is available and willing to aid unloading if RNEDT desires. Advise. CTM”

The third item is US Navy Secret Telephone Transcript 292045 between Commander Naval Operations, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Major Francis J. Smith, and Major Traynor at Portsmouth, NH Naval Yard. This recorded that on 30 May 1945, Lt-Cdr Karl B. Reese, Lt [j.g]) Edward P. McDermott [USNR] and Major John E. Vance, Corps of Engineers, US Army, arrived at Portsmouth Navy Yard in connection with the cargo o f U-234. Large quantities were unloaded and taken by ship to Brooklyn.

The following telephone conversation ensued on 14 June 1945 between Major Smith and Major Traynor: Smith:

“I have just got a shipment in of captured material and there were 39 drums and 70 wooden barrels, and all of that is liquid. What I need is a test to see what the concentration is and a set of recommendations as to disposal. I have just talked to Vance and they are taking it [i.e. the cargo] off the ship and putting it in the 73rd Street Warehouse. In addition to that I have about 80 cases of U powder in cases. Vance is handling all of that now. Can you do the testing and how quickly can it be done? All we know is that it ranges from 10% to 85% and we want to know which and what”.

Traynor: “Can you give me what was in those cases?” Smith: “U powder. Vance will take care of the testing of that.” Traynor: “The other stuff is something else?” Smith: “The other is water”.

The use of the letter “U” as an abbreviation for Uranium was widespread throughout the Manhattan Project. The Corps of Engineers to which Major Vance was attached was the parent organization of the Manhattan Project and Major Vance was part of the latter project.

The fourth document originates from the Manhattan Project Foreign Intelligence files and confirms that the remaining cargo was unloaded on 24 July 1945. This included the ten cases of Uranium oxide assayed as 77% pure Yellow Cake. The document confirms that the bulk of the U-234 cargo was held in the custody of Major Francis Smith at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

 Charles W. Stone: The cited material was illustrated in Lasuto U-boto Noshinjitsu, in Sekai Shuh [World Affairs Weekly], September 1997.

The unpublished English version entitled "U-233 U234 U235" contains a facsimile of the document attested by US attorney Sidney Trevethan in "The Controversial Cargo of U-234". 

Interpreting the Primary Documents

In the first manifest are listed ten bales of drums containing “confidential material” and fifty bales of barrels containing benzyl cellulose, which latter can be used for biological shielding purposes or as a coolant in a liquid reactor. The thirty-nine drums are said by Major Smith to contain “water” for which he needs a test done “to see what the concentration is",

He knows that it ranges from 10% to 85%. If this is heavy water, the percentage describes the degree to which a consignment of water had been depleted of its hydrogen molecules. It will be observed from the primary documents that Uranium oxide was unloaded from U-234 on 24 July 1945, while eighty cases of Uranium powder had already been unloaded and shipped to Brooklyn by 14 June 1945. Therefore aboard U-234 were two different Uranium consignments and one of them never appeared at any time in the manifests translated by the Americans.

We now observe that what seem to be discrepancies in the secondary eyewitness evidence of Wolfgang Hirschfeld who actually confirm the existence of two distinct shipments aboard U-234.

The Unloading Manifest states “10 cases Uranium Oxide” but on the quayside at Kiel Hirschfeld said he saw “at least fifty of the little cases”. Obviously, what he saw the Japanese loading at Kiel was not the ten cases of Uranium oxide, but the eighty little cases of Uranium powder. The little cases he saw were cubic in shape about nine inches along the sides, whereas the Uranium oxide described by Pfaff, and unloaded by him on 24 July 1945, was stowed in gold-lined cylinders, the dimensions of which are not known.

Hirschfeld did not witness the actual unloading by Pfaff. As to the eighty little cases of Uranium powder, besides the fact that it was shipped in what seemed to be lead radio-isotope shipping containers and that Major Vance of the Manhattan Project was going to testt, the American authorities have not been forthcoming.

The Ten Cases of Uranium Oxide

It will be recalled that the Magic decrypts for 1943 and 1944/45 show Japan requesting from Germany “a quantity of Uranium oxide” in connection with their atomic research into the fissile isotopes including Plutonium.

What is “Uranium oxide”? Generally speaking, after the ore is mined, the crude concentrate know as Yellow Cake is recovered by leaching followed by solvent extraction and roasting. The material assays at between 60%- 90% Uranium oxide. It is poisonous, but not radioactive. The German Army seized over 1,000 tonnes of Uranium oxide at Oolen in Belgium in May 1940. It was stored in wooden barrels each containing about 500 kilos. Where a barrel was damaged, the Uranium oxide was repacked in a stout paper bag secured at the neck by a knotted wire. To consign this sort of material in gold-lined cylinders makes no sense unless it is radioactive in some way and handlers need biological shielding from the effects.

Experiments can be performed on Uranium oxide in sub-critical reactors, and it had been Professor Harteck’s idea in 1940 to use about 30 tonnes of Uranium oxide to build a rudimentary low temperature nuclear reactor, and in either case some level of biological shielding would be required if the spent material was being shipped. Gold-lined containers would be used where it was necessary to absorb fission fragments, emissions of gamma radiation or neutron radiation, or a combination of all three. Alpha and beta radiation is easily stopped by a 7mm thickness of aluminium or perspex.

What sense can be made of the fact that the ten cases of Uranium oxide were stowed in a secure steel tube upright through the hull casing of the submarine and yet still leaked so much radioactivity that the forward part of the boat gave uniform Geiger counter readings over its entire surface?

Men lived for months in close proximity to this radioactive contamination, yet none complained of radiation sickness. How was this to be explained?

Lt Colonel Richard Thurston, a former member of the Manhattan Project radiological team, supplied the answer:

"The radiation could not have been gamma radiation. What occurred to him was that all the reported conditions could only be met if the substance detected was radon gas, which is notoriously difficult to contain. It would seep through the containers and steel tubes and adhere to exposed surfaces but not be particularly dangerous to humans. Radon gas would imply the presence within the containers of radium in some form.

A radium/beryllium source within a small sphere of heavy water at the centre of Uranium oxide in a gold lined cylinder would amount to a sub-reactor in miniature and meet the request of the Japanese for 'a quantity of Uranium oxide' in connection with their atomic research into the fissile isotopes including Plutonium".


Lt. Col Richard D. Thurston, USA [Ret.] was a contributor to "The Controversial Cargo of U-234", January 1999, a forum of scientists and writers researching the U-234 enigma

Pfaff's warning that the material must be handled like crude TNT indicates that the same precautions apply to the material as for the most unstable explosive. This is because the substance within the small cylinders becomes sensitive and dangerous on exposure to air. If these gold-lined cylinders were miniature sub-reactors, then the following dangers would present themselves when the cylinders were opened:

(1) Plutonium particles from the irradiated uranium oxide would rise into the atmosphere. The inhalation or ingestion of 1mg of plutonium will result in the lingering death of the victim within weeks and even a microgram results in a later high susceptibility to pulmonary cancer.
(2) Dangerous neutron radiation would be emitted from the reaction of the radium-beryllium source as would gamma and corpuscular radiation from the products of fission decay in the Uranium powder.

This was why it was so dangerous to open the cylinders. The use of a gold lining in addition to the lead shielding is the clearest possible indication that a reaction process was continuing in the cylinders, and Professor Nishina of the Imperial Japanese Army nuclear project would have received, on the arrival of U-234 in Tokyo, ten cases of Uranium oxide containing precisely what had been requested in the Magic signals. The cylinders though dangerous were basically nothing more than an elementary research material for the laboratory and would not have led the Americans to panic and suspect that Japan was on the verge of developing an atom bomb.

The Eighty Small Heavy Cases

To the exclusion of everything else aboard U-234, these eighty small containers in the custody of Major Vance, the tests performed on them by the Manhattan Project, and their ultimate disposal, are the obvious basis for further research. They were removed from their loading tube at the end of May. Aboard the submarine there was no mystery as to where they had been stowed for probably half the crew had worked on the loading that day in February and the contents excited interest by their unusual weight.

Portentous omens have been read into the meaning of the symbol “U-235” painted by Tomonaga on the wrapping of each of the small containers, but probably it served merely to identify the consignment as being Uranium. If the cases actually had contained  natural Uranium enriched with Plutonium isotopes, it is unlikely in the extreme that the fact would have been advertised to all and sundry on the quayside: The Japanese, past masters of deception, even disguised their initial interest in Uranium as being a sort of “catalyst”.

The New Hampshire evening paper "Portsmouth Herald" announced in the week following the capture o f U-234 hat the submarine had been “headed for Japan for the purpose of aiding Japan’s air war with rocket and jet planes and other German V-type bombs”. This is the first reference from a source well-connected to the US Navy to a “V-type bomb” and a “jet plane”, neither of which feature on the Unloading Manifest. And in June the same newspaper claimed that there had been sufficient Uranium aboard U-234 to produce an explosion to eradicate all of Portsmouth and its surrounding suburbs from the face of the earth.

Newspaper reports must, of course, not be awarded too much credence as historical documents, but they are nevertheless useful pointers.

The "Portsmouth Herald"  knew about a “jet plane” aboard U-234 which is claimed by the German crew to have been shipped, but as to which the official record on the American side is silent. And to what extent before the first Trinity test in July 1945 was the effect of fantastic explosives openly discussed, and where did the idea come from that such a substance was aboard the German submarine?

Lt-Col John Lansdale, chief of atomic security and Intelligence for the Manhattan Project, admitted that he handled the disposal of the small cases aboard U-234. 

 English newspaper "Mail on Sunday", 7 January 1996, and "Der Spiegel", February 1996, article entitled 'Heisse Ladung'

He recalled that the American military authorities reacted with panic when they discovered the cargo aboard the U-Boat. Lansdale went on to say that the German material was sent to Oak Ridge where the isotopes were separated and put into the pot of material used to make America’s first atom bombs. Obviously Lansdale did not mean U-235 isotopes here since they are the final result of the separation process. The only fissile isotopes which can be separated from irradiated Uranium are the range of Plutonium isotopes from fissioned material bred in a working reactor or sub-reactor assembly.

This would have made them panic, particularly if they knew how a small-scale German atom bomb was constructed. All that was needed for detonation would be an effective implosion fuse. Natural Uranium powder in its natural state is highly pyrophorous and ignites spontaneously on contact with air, but this would not require it to be packed in eighty small radio-isotope containers.

It is, however, the manner in which Plutonium-enriched Uranium powder would need to be transported. The thickness of lead required to reduce the initial intensity of gamma radiation by a factor of ten is 1.8 inches. The thickness of the walls, lid and base of the lead containers described by Hirschfeld would have provided an interior volume for each container sufficient for about 19 kilos of Uranium metal powder, multiply by eighty = 1,520 kilos: divide by 750 kilos = enough for two small-scale atom bombs.

The Implosion Fuses

A final twist to the U-234 story has been suggested. 

US Navy secret despatches #262151 of 27.5.1945 and #292045 of 30.5.1945 are filed at US Archive Nara II Box U-234. The transcript entitled 'Telephone Conversation between Major Smith WOL and Major Traynor of 14.6.1945' is filed at US Archive SE Region, East Point, Georgia. 

The German small-yield device could not have been properly detonated without an effective implosion fuse. For eighteen months the scientists at Los Alamos had failed to develop such a fuse.

In October 1944 Robert Oppenheimer created a three-man committee to look into the problem. Luis Alvarez was on this team and became one of the heroes of the American A-bomb story when he solved it in the final days before the Trinity test at Alamogordo in July 1945. The need was for a fusing system that could fire multiple detonators simultaneously.

Harlow Russ, who worked on the Plutonium bomb team, stated in his book "roject Alberta" that improvements were made to the detonator at the last moment. A new type of implosion fuse suddenly becoming available to the Manhattan Project gave a result four times better than expected at the Trinity A-test. But did the real impetus for this success come from Luis Alvarez or German technology?

Germany could not have detonated small-scale atom bombs without the most superior implosion fuse. According to the CI0S-BI0S/FIAT 20 report published by the US authorities in October 1946, by May 1945 Germany already had every kind of fuse known to the Americans – “and then some”. Professor Heinz Schlicke, one of the passengers aboard U-234, was an expert in fuse technology. Infra-red proximity fuses were discovered to be aboard U-234 on 24 May 1945, apparently as a result of the interrogation of Dr Schlicke in which he mentioned that he had fuses which worked on the principles that govern light.

A memorandum by Jack H. Alberti dated 24 May 1945 states:

“Dr Schlicke knows about the infra-red proximity fuses which are contained in some of these packages. Dr Schlicke knows how to handle them and is willing to do so”. Schlicke and two others were then flown to Portsmouth NH to retrieve the fuses".

It is not suggested that these were the fuses used to explode the American Plutonium bomb, but rather confirms that Schlicke knew more about fuses than the Manhattan Project did. From a transcript of a lecture given by Dr Schlicke to the Navy Department in July 1945, there seems to have been a close co-operation for some reason between Dr Schlicke and Luis Alvarez. And it is in the fact that the technological side of the Manhattan Project fa
iled them that the real weakness of the American project is exposed.
 

The Manhattan Project 

The Manhattan Project was founded in order that the United States should have a nuclear capability in the event that Hitler developed the atom bomb. By the end of hostilities in Europe in May 1945 the United States did not have a bomb which worked, and, as that was the Project’s raison d’être, it obviously failed. The American failure was in technology, for they were unable to devise an efficient implosion fuse.

How the Implosion Bomb Works

As any physicist will explain, the only economical way to detonate a Pu239 or Plutonium bomb is by the implosion method. The bomb core is made as a sub-critical sphere surrounded by a layer of non-fissile U-238. A uniform layer of high explosive surrounds the tamper. When the thirty-two fuses are triggered simultaneously, the explosive detonates, creating a massive uniform pressure of millions of pounds per square inch which compresses the core to a super-critical density, causing the implosion.

The implosion method is essential for Plutonium- type bombs because the radioisotope Pu240, being more fissile than Pu239, would otherwise cause a premature detonation of the material known as a "fizzle". The least speed required for assembly of the critical mass by implosion is in the region of 3,500 feet/sec. The U-235 bomb is more fissile than the Plutonium device and the speed of assembly of the critical mass can be as low as 1,000 feet/sec. For this reason an implosion fuse is not necessary for this type of bomb, but the amount of Uranium material required is vastly greater.

In order to conceal the failure of the Manhattan Project, General Groves and his associates wanted people to continue to believe that ideally a Plutonium bomb is detonated by an implosion fuse, while ideally the U-235 bomb is detonated by a "gun-type" device.

The "gun-type" detonator is, of course, what they say was used to detonate the so called "Thin Man" device used to devastate Hiroshima and which works in principle in the following manner: Since one cannot assemble a critical mass without there being a reaction from it, two sub-critical lumps of highly enriched U-235 are kept apart until detonation when they are fired together within a howitzer barrel with a breech at each end. The super-critical mass assembles at a reasonably fast speed in sub-atomic terms and so achieves the explosion.

The Development of the Manhattan Project without an Implosion Fuse

Since the Americans had no effective implosion fuse to hand before the end of May 1945, no question ever arose of detonating a Plutonium bomb in the preceding period.

The U-235 bomb was the only possibility. Although the actual information regarding the Hiroshima bomb is probably still classified half a century later, it is known that the critical mass in the most favourable configuration as calculated by Richard Feyman was 50 kilos of U-235. Robert Oppenheimer put it at double that.

This is an awful lot of U-235 to expend in one bomb. Of course, nobody in his right mind would dream of putting half a field gun into a bomb to set it off if he had an implosion fuse.To separate 50 to 100 kilos of U-235 is fantastically expensive and wasteful of resources and takes nearly three years to amass with [at today’s money] an investment of about 200,000 million dollars.

Depending on the factor by which the Uranium material is compressed, the U-235 rationally needed for an implosion bomb would have been, at the most, just over ten kilos.

Explaining the Delays in Producing the U-235 Bomb

Early in 1944, the head of the Manhattan Project, General Groves, had indicated that he would have “several” U-235 bombs ready, but it would be the end of 1945 before they were available for use. What this means is that if the United States had had an implosion fuse in early 1944, three or four bombs would have been available for use against Germany. He expected to have the material for three or four devices for implosion, but if no implosion fuse were forthcoming, then it would be fifteen months or so before there was enough material to set off one "gun-type" bomb.

This explains how it was possible for Groves to dictate to the Secretary for War, Stimson, on 23 April 1945 that the target was, and was always expected to be, Japan. Groves was not the maker of State policy; it was simply the fact that his scientists could not produce the goods within the time scale which determined the policy.

Since the autumn of 1943 the Los Alamos experts had been working without success on how to compress a sphere the size of an orange uniformly over its surface area using 32 detonators fired within the same three-thousandth of a second. They had not progressed beyond a thermo-electric fuse taking 0.5 micro-seconds, which was too slow. In the hope of finding a solution, in October 1944 Robert Oppenheimer set up a three-man committee headed by physicist Luis Alvarez.

The technical portfolio being taken to Japan by U-234 passenger Dr Heinz Schlicke was a substantial one. He was an expert in explosives, detonators and fuses, in very high technology radar and radio systems, in the field of high frequency light waves, guided missile development and the V-2 rocket. Before leaving Germany he had met with numerous scientists to receive instruction in their technologies for later dissemination in Japan where he would serve as a scientific advisory liaison officer.

A nuclear physicist with whom he had consulted was Professor Walter Gerlach, Reich Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Science. The fusing system to fire multiple detonators simultaneously was developed in the seven weeks between Schlicke arriving and the beginning of July. The solution was probably some kind of fuse in which a high-tension electrical impulse vaporized a wire to activate all 32 charges in 0.04-0.08 microseconds. The type of impulses involved, e.g. Thyratrons and Krytons, are produced in special high-tension and high-efficiency vacuum tubes notably in the field of HF radar in which Dr Heinz Schlicke was a specialist.

Three days after the Trinity test on 16 July 1945 Dr Schlicke delivered a lecture to the Navy Department on the subject of detonator fuses and afterwards shared the platform with Luis Alvarez for a question and answer session from the scientists present. The likelihood exists that the Hiroshima device was detonated by an implosion fuse. The first mock-up version of the U-235 bomb was so large that it would not have fitted into the bomb-bay of a B-29 Super Fortress, but the B-29, the 'Enola Gay', carrying the Hiroshima bomb had room in the bomb bay for several to fit in easily.

- Chuck Hansen: "US Nuclear Weapons – The Secret History", Aerofax, 1998. 

 


The Oak Ridge records show a large increase in enriched Uranium stocks occurring in the third week of June 1945, at about the time when the implosion fuse suddenly became available. As this could be used to detonate a U2-35 bomb with far less material, one assumes that the bomb was split down and the surplus returned to store, thus radically increasing the amount available.

This, and the smallness of the bomb, increases the probability that the Hiroshima device was imploded. The sudden increase in U-235 stock has led people to speculate that it must have been of German origin, leading to claims that “the bombs dropped on Japan came from German arsenals”, but that was not, and logically cannot have been, the case.

Did the U-234 Cargo Influence US Policy? T

The weight of evidence available suggeststhe decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan occurred as the result of some hitherto unexplained factor occurring between 16 and 30 May, 1945, which dictated the chief aim of American strategic atomic policy to be the military defeat of Japan at the earliest possible opportunity.

As at 16 May, no executive decision had been taken to use the bomb, and Secretary for War Stimson advised President Truman that the rule of sparing the civilian population “should be applied, as far as possible, to the use of any new weapons”. 


Henry L. Stimson "Diaries", Sterling Memorial Library, Yale.

On Saturday 19 May 1945 the German submarine U-234 berthed at Portsmouth New Hampshire: her specialist passengers were interrogated during the week beginning 24 May: Major Vance of the Manhattan Project arrived on 30 May to inspect the cargo and take away the heavy water and eighty little cases of “Uranium powder”.

At a meeting of the Interior Committee on the morning of 31 May 1945:

“Mr Byrnes recommended and the Committee agreed that the Secretary for War should be advised that, while recognizing that the final selection of the target was a military decision, the present view of the Committee was that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible, that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers’ houses, that it be used without prior warning”.

Arthur H. Compton of the scientific panel noted of that morning’s decision that “it seemed to be a foregone conclusion that the bomb would be used”, and when the meeting reconvened that afternoon the agenda had been amended so that consideration could be given to the question of the effect of the atom bomb on the Japanese and on their will to fight.

 -
A. H. Compton: "Atomic Quest – A Personal Narrative", New York, 1956

When President Truman learned of the decision on 1 June he admitted to Byrnes that he had been giving the matter serious thought for some days and that, after considering other plans, he had reluctantly come to the conclusion that there was no alternative. Although he did not give the order on 1 June, it appears that he had made the decision by then.

The political activity during the last two weeks in May 1945 was such that Stimson appears to have been a man overtaken by events. Somewhere in that period he ceased to treasure jealously the United States’ reputation for fair play and humanity. He never explained why satisfactorily. In retrospect he stated: “My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of the men in the armies which I helped to raise”;

- Henry Stimson: "The Decision to Use the Bomb", Harper’s Magazine, February 1947

It had ceased to be his rule to “spare the civilian population, as far as possible, to the new weapons” and worse, with his words, he justified the perpetration of any atrocity against civilians in order to save military lives.

If, and only if, the possibility existed that Japan might have been gifted a number of small-scale atom bombs by Germany would the American Government have had an arguable right to order the deployment of their atomic arsenal.

It is one of the great ironies of war that Korvettenkapitän Heinrich Fehler disobeyed his last order and surrendered his submarine to the United States in the hope of obtaining better treatment for his crew in captivity and presented Washington with the justification for the terrible action against Japan which was to follow, and with a weapon under whose shadow the world has existed ever since.
 

Why Did Japan Really Surrender in WW2

Could it really be possible that, all these decades later, after so many countless books, films, textbooks and TV documentaries, we’ve got the final days of World War Two all wrong?

That the truth about the fall of Japan has been obscured by the smoke and fire and fallout of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Some historians certainly think so. And it is their contention that the consensus on the end of World War Two completely ignores what really happened in 1945.

The Standard Narrative

To recap the conventionally accepted account of how the bloodiest conflict in the history of the world finally came to an end. In May 1945:

Tthe battle against the Nazis was done. Hitler was dead, his  regime had been smashed, and there had been cheering in the streets of the Allied nations.

But the celebrations were premature, because the war itself was very definitely not over.

Japan still stood firm, seemingly determined to fight to the bitter and bloody end. The question was, how to finally crush their seemingly unbending resolve?

he battle in the Pacific had already distinguished itself by its horror and brutality, and the prospect of a full-scale ground invasion of Japan – a new D-Day – was nerve-jangling for millions of Allied soldiers.

But there was one possible way to avoid the mass casualties of a ground assault, and that was to unleash the awesome, unprecedented power of a new weapon: the nuclear bomb, which had been developed in secret by the United States.

Fair warning was issued to the Japanese in the form of the “Potsdam Declaration” of July 1945, which demanded the “unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces”. As the Declaration bluntly put it, “the alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction”.

The promise was carried out. On 6 August, a mushroom cloud rose above Hiroshima, heralding the dawn of a new, apocalyptic age. The city was utterly obliterated, as was Nagasaki in a second nuclear attack just days later. Cowed by such a show of force, and facing their own complete demise, the Japanese finally surrendered.

This is the standard take on the fall of Japan. As US Secretary of War Harry Stimson put it, the nuclear attacks were “our least abhorrent choice” and “ended the ghastly spectre of a clash of great land armies.”

But what if Stimson was wrong? What if everything you’ve just read misses the point completely?

The Russian Invasion

“The Hiroshima bomb did not make the Japanese ruling elite feel as though their backs were to the wall. It inflicted a serious body blow, but it was hardly a knock-out punch.”

So says eminent historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa.

He and other dissenting voices believe that the real reason Japan surrendered was down to something far less titanic and earth-shattering than the nuclear bombs. One man, it seems, played a far more important part. And that man was Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Many people today don’t realise that, while the Soviets had been allied with Britain and the US in the fight against Hitler, they were not actually at war with Japan at the time of the Potsdam Declaration. The Soviet Union and Japan had in fact signed a neutrality pact back in 1941, which served both their interests nicely. The Soviets could focus on taking on the Nazis without worrying about being attacked on the other side by Japan, while the Japanese were free to concentrate on their brutal battles with the US.

Things only changed on 9 August, the very day of the second atomic attack on Nagasaki, when the Soviets suddenly broke the pact, mounting a massive invasion of Japan’s territories that decimated Japanese troops.

Hiroshima had happened days before, but it was only now that the Japanese leaders fell into a panic.

As historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa puts it:

“The Soviet entry into the war played a much greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender because it dashed any hope that Japan could terminate the war through Moscow's mediation.”

That’s the key point: the Japanese weren’t fighting to win.

They knew they’d have to give in eventually, but they wanted to surrender on the most favourable terms, in a way that would preserve their internal power structure, save their military leaders from war crimes trials, and avoid being a puppet state of the Allies.

Until 9 August, they held out hope that the Soviets, as a neutral party, could help them negotiate the best deal with the US.

During one meeting in June of that year, top Japanese military commander Torashirō Kawabe couldn’t have been clearer:

“The absolute maintenance of peace in our relations with the Soviet Union is imperative for the continuation of the war”.

As historian Terry Charman tells us:

“The Soviet attack changed all that. The leadership in Tokyo realized they had no hope now.”.

In fact, the situation was now completely reversed, with the Japanese fearing a Communist invasion which would overturn their rigid, imperial hierarchy and transform their nation forever. Immediate surrender was the only option.

But What About Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Historian Ward Wilson, who vigorously disputes the significance of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, says:

“It’s very hard to make people give up their myth”.

Indeed, in the case of the nuclear attacks, it borders on blasphemy.

For so many decades, the moral justification of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been passionately debated.

The standard argument in favour of US President Truman’s decision to drop the bombs has always been that, by unleashing such devastating force, the president avoided an even more devastating ground war that might have gone for many more months, taking untold numbers of Allied lives.

Not only that, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki have taken on an almost religious significance in the world’s consciousness – both because of the huge loss of civilian lives, and because of how these attacks signalled the beginning of a new and terrifying era in world history.

And yet, it can convincingly be argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not hugely important in the context of Japan in 1945.

What many people forget is that huge swathes of the country had already been utterly obliterated by the most extensive bombing raids the world had ever seen.

These were conventional bombs, but no less effective at slaughtering civilians.

Tokyo, for example, had been completely incinerated, with around 100,000 people killed. US bomber crews could smell charred flesh as they flew over the firestorms.

Dozens of other Japanese cities had been flattened under the never-ending barrage. Yet, despite this nationwide inferno, surrender wasn’t forthcoming. One politician, Kijūrō Shidehara, echoed the general sentiment when he suggested their “unity and resolve would grow stronger”, and that it was important to endure the attacks in order to negotiate the best outcome, further along the line.

So when President Truman, hinting at the nuclear attacks to come, said that the Japanese could “expect a rain of ruin from the air” if they didn’t surrender, it wasn’t really much of a threat.

There had already been a rain of ruin, and it hadn’t changed the Japanese game-plan. When Hiroshima happened, Japan realised a new kind of weapon had been unleashed, but the devastation was not significantly different to what they had seen in countless cities already. It’s only from our vantage point today that the mushroom clouds eclipse everything else.

Reclaiming the Truth

So if it really was the Soviet intervention that brought about the end of the war, why isn’t it more widely known?

The fact is, the complicated period between the fall of Hitler and the fall of Japan haven’t received as much mass media attention as it deserves.

While events like Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the D-Day landings, not to mention the controversial Allied attacks on Dresden, have all received plenty of media attention, the only thing most of us know about the end game in Japan is that it saw the beginning of the nuclear age.

Even major events like annihilation of Tokyo in March 1945 are still not common knowledge, while the decisive Soviet invasion of 9 August is completely overshadowed by the Nagasaki attack that same day.

On top of that, when people think of the Soviet Union in World War Two, it’s not the Pacific theatre that comes to mind, but the savage skirmishes against Hitler’s forces, the massacres meted out by the SS in Russian towns and villages, the hellish confrontation in Stalingrad and the pivotal Nazi defeats that eventually turned the war against Hitler. 

 

Gravity II 

Germany between the two World Wars was a fertile ground for research into UFOs and alternative technologies.

UFO sightings go back of course to the beginnings of recorded history. Research shows that celestial lights and flying saucer shapes have been reported since the days of the Ancient Greeks. In the more recent epoch of the last two hundred years or so, marine insurers at Lloyds of London have taken note of occurrences reported in the logs of registered vessels, the majority of which were written by the most serious minded and perhaps Godfearing ships’ masters and officers.

The reports go on, backward in time to the first records of true oceanic navigation, proving that there never was “a time in 1947 when flying saucer sightings really began”, [an expression much favoured by those striving to prove that all UFO sightings are of terrestrial US origin], but only that there was a great spate of reported sightings from that year.

There is an oriental influence behind Nazism, and one of the areas to which the SS directed their attentions was the Aryan scientific treatises of pre-Hindu India.

These Aryans of antiquity, far in advance of the rest of humanity in terms of scientific development, devised machines called Vimanas which “flew the skies like aircraft, utilizing a form of energy obtained directly from the atmosphere” and whose description resembles "flying saucers".

 


There are some authenticated Sanskrit texts which, being technological, are called Manusa and are said by the writers to explain how certain machines were constructed for aerial flight. The "Yantra Sarvasa" deals with machinery, for example; "Rukma Vimana" elucidates their construction, describing metal alloys, weights and heat-resistant metals. According to the "Samarangana Suradhara", the craft could fly “to great distances” and were “propelled by air”. 

- D. H. Childress,: "Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India and Atlantis – the Complete Vimanika Shastra Text", Stolle, Illinois, per Axel Stoll: "Hochtechnologie im Dritten Reich", CTT-Verlag, 2000.

The text devotes over 200 stanzas to building plans. As to propulsion, “four strong mercury containers must be built into the interior structure”. When these are heated, “the Vimana develops thunder-power through the mercury, and at once it becomes like a pearl in the sky”

- Ivan T. Sanderson:"Invisible Residents", Tandem, 1970

The Vimanas were equally at home in the air, on water or submerged, confirming that the Vimana could also be a submersible if so desired. Among the nontechnical works known as Daiva, there would appear to be suggestions, if not evidence, that such Vimanas could be put to the most gruesome and devastating use in wartime.

One might be suspicious that it was for this very purpose that the Third Reich built Vimanas, and not for the peaceful exploration of space, which was the supposedly secret reason why Wernher von Braun put so much effort into the V-2.

There is alleged to exist a terrible sidereal force known to the Aryan rishis or wise men in the treatise "Ashtar Vidya" and to the mediaeval hermeticists as the "sidereal light" or Milk of the Celestial Virgin and other such terms. It was the Vril of the coming races of mankind described in Bulwer-Lytton’s occult novel "The Coming Race" published in 1871, which influenced Hitler. The force is not doubted by the rishis, since it is mentioned in all their works.

It is a vibratory force which, when aimed at an army from an Agni Rath, or, for want of a better term, gun, fixed to a Vvimana or balloon according to the instructions in "Ahtar Vidya", reduced to ashes 100,000 men and elephants as easily as it would a dead rat. The force is allegorized in "Vshnu Purana",the "Ramayana" and other Hindu volumes.

The Vril would be the weapon par excellence and throughout the war a precise knowledge of its manufacture must have been earnestly sought by the Waffen-SS. By a curious coincidence, in the edition of the periodical "Science" of 3 January 1969, Schubert, Gerald and Whitehead reported that when a heat source was revolved slowly below a dish of mercury, the mercury began to revolve in the contrary direction and then gathered speed until it was circulating faster than the flame.

This is the projection of energy by an exceedingly simple process, and poses two interesting questions: Where does the mercury obtain its surplus energy if not from the atmosphere itself, and was this in some way connected with Aryan vimana flight?

Odd Goings-on at Führer-HQ Waldenburg

Near the town of Waldenburg in Lower Silesia was a coal mine turned by the SS in 1944 into a laboratory for V-weapons research.

Polish writer Igor Witkowski:  assimilated information from prosecution files and depositions in the war crimes trial of former SS Gruppenführer Jakb Sporrenberg, head of the SS Special Evacuation Commando subordinated to the Gauleiter of Lower Silesia, Karl Hanke. 

The entire site, Führer HQ Riese, was started in the spring of 1944 and consisted of six underground systems with a 30-square kilometre area plus tunnels housing the proposed Führer HQ below Schloss Fürstenstein 25 kilometres away. Each system was a design of mostly concreted cross tunnels on one or several levels. The most secure was Säuferhofen, whose entrances were protected by steel doors and machine-gun emplacements.

The research, which replicated a larger project at Ohrdruf in the Harz, took place between November 1944 and May 1945. It was code-named Laternenträger [Torch bearer]and Chronos. Professor Walther Gerlach, Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Science, co-ordinated the programme with Dr Ernst Grawitz, Chief of SS Medical Services.

The experiments were conducted within a 20-cm thick ceramic cover in the shape of a bell. The studies were aimed at analyzing the effects of contrarotating at very high speeds two cylinders containing about 250 kgs of mercury or a mercury amalgamate around a hard and heavy metal core.

Another experiment codenamed Leichtmetall [ight meta]) used thorium and beryllium peroxides. Thorium oxide is one of the most heat-resistant metals known and beryllium has a very high melting point. By 1944 Germany had cornered all available European stocks of thorium, but, on enquiring the reason, the U.S. Alsos Mission was unable to establish a satisfactory answer. The research room was 30 metres square with ceramic-tiled walls, the floor covered with rubber mats which were burned after three experiments. The entire contents of the room were destroyed after each ten experiments.

After each test the room would be doused with brine for up to 45 minutes. Each test lasted from 45 seconds to one minute when the apparatus emitted a strange, pale blue light.

Some members of the research team suffered health problems from exposure to this light. Despite the precautions employed, many personnel complained of insomnia, memory loss, imbalance, muscle spasms and a permanent unpleasant metallic taste in the mouth. The first scientific team in May-June 1944 had been disbanded after the death of five of its seven members. While the test was proceeding, all personnel stood back 200 metres from the epicentre and wore thick rubber protective suits and helmets with large red glass visors.

During the tests electrical equipment up to 150 metres from the bell would short-circuit or break down. The research involved tests on small animals, animal substances, plants such as mosses, ferns, ivies and fungi and possibly on humans as well. It was found that, during the spinning experiments, samples exposed inside the bell were completely destroyed by an alien crystalline matter which could not be described precisely, being unknown to science. The substance formed within the host and destroyed its tissues. Liquids such as blood gelled and separated. In plants, chlorophyll disappeared after 4-5 hours, followed by decay within 14 hours. However, there was no smell of decomposition and the plants transformed into matter of the consistency of axle grease.

Efforts were made to reduce the damage inflicted by the unknown substance and by 25 March 1945 this had been cut to no more than 3%. The menial work was carried out by prisoners from the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. These people, and some lower level German scientific workers, sixty-two in all, were murdered near Pattag at the beginning of May 1945 when the project closed down, indicating its high level of secrecy.

The interruption of electrical current is symptomatic of most close-contact UFO reports. It is an electro-magnetic effect and occurred at Waldenburg, where one assumes it was directly related to spinning containers of mercury at high speed in order to achieve some effect in the various indescribable materials being experimented upon. It was suggested in the Polish bulletin that there was reason to suspect that the subject was connected with the Waffen-SS Haunebu flying saucer research project under the SS-E-IV and SS-U-13 research teams, but nothing is known about the work of either.

According to a statement by an Argentinian journalist with access to confidential official papers,  the Bell and all documents pertaining thereto arrived safely at Gualeguay aerodrome in the province of Entre Rios aboard a Junkers 390 transport aircraft at the war’s end. From there it was transported first to San Carlos de Bariloche, then known as “Nazi Bariloche”, and onwards to a secret underground destination. 

The Motorstopmittel

The valley of Jonastal lies in the heart of Germany, south-west of Weimar in the Harz Mountains, at the centre of a ring of the towns of Erfurt, Waltershausen, Crawinkel and Stadtilm. Since Imperial times there had been a Military Training Area at Ohrdruf on a plateau in Jonastal. Organization Todt began work building a vast underground city in the limestone in 1937. The entrances were disguised as "weekend chalets"’. The actual size of the development is difficult to estimate since the entrances to the lower galleries were sealed off by the SS with explosives and, after exploring what remained accessible, the Americans closed down the rest.

A number of surface structures – five giant halls which can be seen in immediate post-war Allied aerial photos – were demolished in the DDR period and covered over below an unbelievably thick layer of industrial rubbish to make a hill. Exploration below ground is strictly prohibited. With a Land Rover in dry weather it takes several hours to tour the perimeter of the area. The Feldherren hill and Musketierberg are central elevations offering a good view over a plateau of grass and scrub extending for several kilometres in all directions. The terrain is dangerous and remains littered with shrapnel, unexploded bombs and shells.

In 1944 the SS took over at Ohrdruf, which had been established as a V-weapon centre some time previously, and soon strange things began to happen. Ohrdruf was the largest underground factory city of the Third Reich and the most impregnable place on earth. The mapped tunnel system is 1.5 miles in length, although that is definitely only the tip of the iceberg. Below ground there are thought to be four facilities consisting of many long galleries on as many as four levels designated Jasmin, Wolfsturm, Siegfried and Olga.

Huge ventilation shafts are still to be found at the surface. It is known that there are sufficient generators below ground to supply current to a city the size of Berlin. At least one underground power source there has been running without any maintenance since 1945.

The German writer Dieter Meinig reported that when the Bundeswehr reclaimed the territory on the reunification of Germany in 1989 they discovered a large thick electric cable which emerged from the ground directly above facility Olga.. On examination it was found to be of wartime manufacture and carrying a high voltage current. The cable was cut to see if a consumer complained, but nobody did.


- Dieter Meinig: 'X-Akte Jonastal – die Rätsel des letzten FHQ', article in "Wissenschaft ohne Grenzen', Jan-Mar edition, 1997.

This deep underground facility was sealed by the SS from the inside as well as at the surface. It has never been investigated and is probably the origin of the strange glow in the night sky occasionally reported even nowadays, leading one to assume that the power plant could not be shut down and is continuing to produce energy over 55 years later. After the war the US air force photographed the region from the air and saw the underground construction as being shaped like the spokes of a huge Celtic cross. 

A senior American officer who saw below ground wrote of it::

“The underground installations were amazing. They were literally subterranean towns. There were four in and around Ohrdruf: one near the horror camp, one under the Schloss, and two west of the town. Others were reported in nearby villages. None were natural caves or mines. All were man-made military installations.

"The horror camp had provided the labour. An interesting feature of the construction was the absence of any spoil. It had been carefully scattered in hills miles away. The only communication shelter which is known is a two floor deep shelter with the code Amt 10. Over fifty feet underground the installation consisted of two and three galleries 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.The place also had panelled and carpeted offices, scores of large work- and store rooms, tiled bathrooms and 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 personnel, a cinema and airconditioning and sewage systems".


-Col. R. Allen: "Lucky Forward: The History of Patton’s 3rd US Army", Vanguard, NY 1947.

According to witnesses, from 1943 on, Ohrdruf was a testing ground for new weapons systems above ground and new Panzer weapons, guns and remote control systems are well remembered..

And there is the Motorstopmittel, which could bring down aircraft by means of a strong electro-magnetic field.

While the machine was thought to be operating at Ohrdruf automobile and Panzer engines for miles around would cut out and refuse to function. 

The Allies do not appear to have photographed or bombed the area during the war, which suggests that the area was deliberately avoided by their aircraft. 

The Motorstopmittel was reported in 1944 by a member of the Technical Intelligence Division of the US Strategic Air Force: 

“We were getting reports from a number of overlapping sources: Planes returning from bombing missions kept experiencing engine troubles., suddenly becoming rough, cutting in and out. 

"As the stories accumulated, scattered spy and POW reports reinforced the suspicion that a secret ground installation was responsible for our engine trouble. 

There was considerable discussion among Intelligence people as to what should be done.

People near military compounds where alleged disc technology was being developed reported sightings of "ghost ships".

This was before the term UFO or flying saucer was used but many of the same events were happening in the late 30's and 40's in Germany.

Some reports were probably the V1 and V2 rockets while other reports were said to be more similar to UFO sightings.

In a 1981 book  Nigel Pennick, "Hitler's Secret Sciences",  describes events that were similar to what people would soon experience in South America and the United States in the 50's while encountering a UFO:

In 1938 on top of one of the peaks on the Hartz Mountains called the Broken a tower was erected.

Another was erected on top of the Feldberg peak near Frankfurt.

At times cars traveling along the mountain roads would suddenly have the engine stall and the electronics died.

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They would be approached by a Lutwaffe guard who would tell them it was no use trying to start the car but he would let them know soon when they could".

This has the evidence of experiments giving out intense EM [electro magnetic] pulses.

A declassified US Army foo-fighter report states that an American infantry unit camped near the Mannheim Autobahn by night saw a number of "large glowing balls" coming in to land "in a small wood".

Each appeared to be under independent control, wobbling rather like an aircraft. Beyond the small wood they disappeared from sight. 

Another incident predated the archive release of the US document:
 

On the Mannheim Autobahn, towards the end of the war, a car driver found that his engine cut out suddenly.

This also happened to all other car drivers on that stretch of the highway.

Black-uniformed Gestapo arrived and lined the side of the road.


If all engines have stopped dead how did the Gestapo "arrive"?

Several unidentified flying objects flew overhead, probably having taken off from the small airfield at Neu Ostheim hidden behind a small wood.

Shortly afterwards, the Gestapo warned occupants of all cars to say nothing of what they had seen, and after a few moments electrical transmission was restored.

The source was discovered and the true sequence of events was:

Gestapo [actually regular troops] arrive, block the road and ask the driver to turn off the engine.

This was because calibration radar tests were being done and they didn't want any extraneous electrical signals [from the car ignition] affecting the readings.

After some time the driver would be allowed to proceed once the tests were complete.

The "flying objects" are added embellishments by later writers
 

The general feeling – that some new German device was causing the electrical problems – presented one major difficulty:

The amount of electricity required to short out a B29 engine was calculated as greater than all the known electrical energy output of Europe. 


“A special plane was fitted out with monitoring equipment.

"A volunteer was found to fly the plane. He flew his mission and when he returned to base, he behaved like a madman. 


"He was angry and hysterical and raved about ‘How we could have subjected him to such things’.

""When we tried to debrief him he cursed and screamed. He was so wild that nobody could find out just what had happened to him. He was finally sedated and put to bed. 


“"But the strangest thing of all was that when he woke up next day, he acted as if nothing unusual had happened.

"He had completely forgotten the previous day’s insanity, with no memory of his anger or hysteria. He was feeling fine, ready to return to duty.

"Of course, the plane’s instruments showed nothing".


 An interesting account of what it was like to experience this from ground level is provided by Frau Cläre Werner, a watchtower lookout on the Wachsenburg, close to the Ohrdruf military testing centre.

An interesting account of what it was like to experience this from ground level is provided by Frau Cläre Werner who was a watchtower lookout on the Wachsenburg, close to the Ohrdruf military testing centre.

- Account of long interview in Edgar Mayer:

"Die deutsche Atombombe und andere Wunderwaffen des Dritten Reiches", Amun Verlag, 2001

She often observed a strange lightning effect across the territory lasting several minutes.

Iit up the whole horizon at night and was so bright that she could read a newspaper by it.

Frau Werner and two other witnesses reported that, after these phenomena, they would suffer a feeling of being completely drained and exhausted for the next three days.

Scientists explain the exhaustion as a form of shock caused by waves of energy from a gravitational field.

This development probably resulted from the observation that spinning experiments with mercury caused electrical equipment and motors to short-circuit and malfunction.

By stepping up the output of the device the gravitational field expanded over a far greater area.

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Questions about the authenticity of this photograph:

1) The rays of light which cause shadows are not parallel.

2) A driver and passenger are inside the car, why not outside?

3) The Disc is in level flight, why not tilted?

4) This photo exists only in low resolution.

Possibly the manufacture of the gelatinous organic-metallic serum was carried out on a larger scale at Ohrdruf for the flying saucer programme.
 

Most of those who had worked at Ohrdruf under the SS; concentration camp inmates from the Buchenwald satellite camp S-III nearby, local civilian workers or lower ranking German technical staff, disappeared on or before the arrival of American forces under General Patton on or about 11 April 1945. As many as 3,000 local people remain unaccounted for. 

Elite SS units murdered even Wehrmacht personnel who had seen the Ohrdruf technologies and therefore knew too much. 

- Harald Fäth: "1945– Thüringens Manhattan Project", Suhl 1998

In addition there are substantial rumours that large groups of SS men and their families were seen entering the tunnel system during the fighting for Jonastal just before the lower galleries were sealed while the mysterious electro-magnetic source was left operating. 

Whatever its purpose, the last Führer HQ at the centre of such a defence would have been impregnable so far as mechanical means of attack were concerned.

The “Foo Fighter”

There are no flying discoidal objects in Einstein’s time-space continuum.

So far as we know from declassified documents, for a great investment of time and money modern engineers could design a flying disc for subsonic speeds with a range of about 7,000 miles, but it would lack the advantages of modern aircraft. It is apparently a concept simply not worthwhile developing.

In Hitler’s Germany aeronautical designer Rudolf Schriever began design work on an unmanned flying disc on 15 July 1941. The model was completed on 2 June 1942 and made its maiden flight the following day, astonishing observers with its excellent flying qualities. It was remote controlled and propelled by a hydrogen peroxide engine. Apparently it could take off and land vertically, but nothing further is known.

Towards the end of 1942 the Waffen-SS laboratory at Wiener Neustadt began trials with a strange "anti-aircraft weapon’. This project, details of which remain a top secret in Allied archives, was known a s Feuerkugel and also Kugelblitz [ball of fire/ball-lightning] by the Germans.

The extremely scanty information which can be gleaned about this mysterious development links it to Rudolf Schriever’s unmanned flying saucer design.

The only known official US report about the Kugelblitz states it was an experimental anti-aircraft rocket designed by Richard Haass and developed by the Verwertungsgesellschaft Salzburg.

A 1946 document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Henry Schuren and reported in "UFO Focus" on 31.3.1991. The so called weapon was not ready to enter service until March 1945 by when it was too late. 

The object sought its target automatically and was expected to enter service in January 1945. This is all they will let us know and it is a pretty terse description for an obsolete Flak weapon.

 British reports reviewed various documents prepared by the SS and work centres of the Henschel and Zeppelin aircraft companies, the latter towards the end of the war installed in underground factories in the Black Forest.


BIOS Final Report No 61 [Weapons/Volkenrode]

These documents refer specifically to the propulsion unit built for the Kugelblitz by Professors Kamm and Ernst at the Kreislaufbetrieb Motor D.W. in 1943 for FFKF Stuttgart Untertürkheim.

The British investigators described the principle of the motor as a recycled oxygen system. It was later abandoned in favour of the Walter turbine using hydrogen peroxide, although the documents discuss the feasibility of using both systems in a composite unit. Therefore the sum total of knowledge about the system available from Allied archive sources is that the missile was a target seeker propelled by a Walter turbine.

The remaining information usually available regarding the configuration, length, diameter, warhead, speed of climb, operational altitude and so on remain highly classified.

Renato Vesco had not seen a Kugelblitz but he had pieced together sufficient information to know that it was stabilized gyroscopically, had a missile guidance system developed by the Flugfunkforschungsanstalt of the Reichspost at Oberpfaffenhofen and a homing system. It was unmanned and rose vertically at a very fast speed. It was rumoured that it might have obtained its effect by discharging and instantaneously igniting a blue plasma “based on the firedamp gas found in coal-mines”, and most sources said it had no offensive capability at all, which would be a strange thing for a Flak rocket.

It had first been tried out successfully against Allied bombers over Lake Garda. Vesco said it was known as die fliegende Schildkröte – the flying turtle – to German sources, who seem unanimous that its shape resembled a turtle-shell, but that was only when it was not in motion, for in flight by day it resembled “a luminous disc spinning round its own axis” and “looked like a burning balloon” by night. The word "flying saucer" did not come into use until the term was coined by headline writers in the United States after the war and so the description “turtle-shell” gives us a certain image.

On Christmas Eve 1944, over the Rhine Valley, RAF crew Flight-Lts Gibbin and Cleary were surprised by a flaming red ball that “suddenly turned into a sort of airplane whose upper half was built like a wing”.

The remainder is censored.

Now we begin to suspect a sinister reason for the reticence of Allied Governments to provide information about the Kugelblitz, for what sort of weapon is a fiery ball which not only has no firm shape but changes its configuration in motion?

Vesco did not seem very clear on what was the difference between the Flying Turtle and the Feuerkugel “ball of fire”, and from his attempt to describe how the former worked it is evident that one became the other in flight. Clearly he must have suspected that something extra-ordinary happened once the Flying Turtle was in the air and ascending, but, being a scientist whose book set out to prove that there is a terrestrial explanation for all UFOs, couldn’t quite go so far as to say so. By some mechanism which nobody appears able to explain, the unmanned, remote-controlled Kugelblitz changed its shape from turtle to sphere, developed a “bright halo” supposedly by ionization of the atmosphere, became invulnerable and acquired the unusual ability to hover motionless.

The Flying Turtle was alleged to have within its protective shell a number of Klystron tubes, the purpose of which must have been for them to home in on enemy aircraft radar.

Klystron is nowadays also used in microwave ovens to generate an intense and concentrated local microwave field for cooking purposes and, applied to a suitable surface at a particular frequency, it could excite the surrounding air sufficiently to generate the"‘halo"-like plasma, so at least the effect is possible. A classified enquiry was set up by Lt-General Massey in 1943 in Britain to investigate reports by Allied pilots of harassment from "balls of fire" during operations over Europe. It is believed that the objects were filmed for British Intelligence in high definition on several occasions, although no photos have ever been released.

In 1946 a team of British investigators, assisted by Dr Ernst Westermann, a director of Speyer at Saarbrücken, was appointed to report on the German "Foo-fighters", as they were nicknamed, but nothing was ever published.

It was suspected that the aerobatic fireballs were a German anti-aircraft weapon to foul ignitions and interfere with radar, but if so they appeared ineffective and in any case captured German pilots also reported being harassed by them. As the fireballs did not seem to do anything very hostile except manouevere close to an aircraft, it was assumed that they represented the experimental stage of a new weapon. After they peeled away and plunged into a steep dive, what did they do next?

From 1942 onwards German naval forces had large U-Boat and transport bases on the coasts of Malaya, Indonesia and Singapore as well as mainland Japan, which could explain the origin of various wartime sightings in the region.

How Did the Feuerkugel Work?

In the normal course of events the British authorities were due to release the Kugelblitz/Feuerkugel papers in 1975. The failure to declassify reports about strange enemy weapons developments at the thirty year mark is obviously a bad sign. The so-called "foo-fighter" was a small German aerial machine which appeared to do nothing except change its shape in flight, after which it was invisible to radar and could not be shot down.

This is a characteristic of UFOs, and as the existence of UFOs is denied by Governments in London and Washington, logically it should be perfectly harmless to release the papers.  

In some of the cases the presence of the UFO in question varied between being physical and paraphysical at differen, in others they were paraphysical throughout the encounter.

It may now be becoming clearer why London and Washington will not even hypothesize the existence of UFOs for discussion.

Late in 1942, at the stage of the conflict when the German leadership had accepted that the planned objectives of the war were no longer attainable, the Waffen SS began trying out aerial machines which acted like tha. Who in London would want to talk about the implications of that?

The Kugelblitz/Feuerkugel was an experimental stage of the German flying disc project. What must have been learned by chasing and homing-in on Allied aircraft across another dimension over Reich and Axis Pacific airspace during 1943 and 1944 was to be put into practice aboard the real thing at a later time. Meanwhile German aeronautical engineers had worked around the clock on the project for which the Foo Fighters were the preliminary stage and next came the search for the perfect aerodynamic shape.

Germany was the world pioneer in helicopter development and in 1942 the Flettner 282 Kolibri became the first helicopter anywhere to enter operational military service. It was the most advanced orthodox helicopter development of the war. 

Is this how the U.S.government got into the UFO Conspiracy business in the first place?


*** BEGIN TRANSCRIPT ***


altMy name is Hans Gobek, and I was a pilot in the Luftwaffe throughout the war.

I served in the western front, and for most of the war I was assigned to the Special Projects Group at Breslau, Germany.

You have asked me to explain how I came to this country, and the circumstances surrounding the capture and relocation of this group of special pilots and aircraft, to the best of my ability.

We operated from Western Germany, primarily against the bomber formations that flew ceaselessly overhead.

.A
s our best planes and pilots were shot down, the German High Command devised new ways to attack our enemy.

We developed a number of new Terror Weapons to use against them.

This included the suicidal [Bachem Ba349] 'Natter' jet rockets.

But one of the least effective was the desperate use of various saucer designs.

Early versions of this machine involved small, 6 to 8 meter silver disks, launched by hidden catapults along the flight path of the bombers.

These rapidly-moving saucers would approach the formations from the rear, then veer away suddenly because of internal gyroscopes.

They never seemed to hit anything, but could be retrieved and launched repeatedly.

Over time, we perfected this system, making the saucers larger and equipping them with jet propulsion and remote TV links, such as used on the Messerchmidt Me-163 'Komet'.
 

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Since these saucers were unmanned, they were able to maneuver in ways that would have killed a human pilot, and use of remote control gave them the illusion of being guided by human intelligence.

None of these unarmed versions was successful, but you must remember that we used them to strike terror in the minds of the bomber crews, and in that I believe they had some success.

They earned the nickname "Foo Fighters", and our Japanese allies even requested we ship a number of them to the far east, something our leaders were happy to do.

In the Pacific they could be launched from boats or small jungle islands, and were used frequently in the desperate last days of the war.

When the end came for us, it was the Americans that arrived at our facility, and they were eager to capture any secret weapons they could find.

Some of our officers, aware of the Führer's fascination with legends and the occult, decided to claim that these terror weapons were the "technology of the gods", recovered by us in crashed other world vehicles and applied through dedicated German engineering.

We were amazed that the gullible Americans believed us, but they gathered together our entire group and moved us to the United States.

Luckily, we had been ordered to destroy all working saucer systems before the Allies arrived, and thus all the Americans found were saucer shells and what they believed was the talent to build more of them.

I later learned this Operation Paperclip worked with the OSS and the CIA to bring many important Nazi officers into the service of secret American organizations.

Reinhard Gehlen moved his entire Eastern Front espionage organization over, in much the same way we were transplanted. I think that the CIA also captured vast sums of hidden German gold, for when we arrived, large facilities were constructed on our behalf.

These are, I believe, still operating US Navy and Air Force bases, parts of which were buried deep beneath the earth to keep our activities hidden.

Of course, we had no idea of how to create the type of technology the Americans expected, but with their support and secrecy, we began a long program of experimentation and testing in the vast deserts of this country.

I moved back and forth between Edwards Air Force Base in California and various airfields in Nevada repeatedly as I was asked to pilot the craft that my German associates constructed. I was one of the few fortunate pilots from the Fatherland who survived the ordeal.

There were other secrets about our activities that I was never told.

We understood that it was best if we knew as little as possible, and to this day I too am unsure why our officers kept this effort so secret, arresting and even killing intruders, reporters, and unlucky visitors.

I was moved here, to a small cabin along the Oregon coast, when my eyesight became too poor to continue with this secret program. Here I have remained for the last twenty-three years. This all that I know of this Nazi UFO program, and these facts I swear are true.

*** END TRANSCRIPT ***
 

Germany was the world pioneer in helicopter development and in 1942 the Flettner 282 Kolibri became the first helicopter anywhere to enter operational military service.

It was the most advanced orthodox helicopter development of the war.

 


The German supersonic helicopter had a system in which the fuel was piped to combustion chambers at the rotor bladetips where it exploded, whirling the blades around at a fantastic speed. Germany thus led the world in helicopter knowledge and design. Within thirty months from July 1942 German aeronautical engineers designed and built several giant circular aircraft which were basically sophisticated autogyros and first flew in early 1945.
 

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The Horten brothers transformed the living room of their parents’ house into a workshop and in 1933 test-flew their first glider, Ho I, at Bonn-Hagelar. All three brothers were Luftwaffe officers and Nazi Party members. During the Battle of Britain their Ho II and Ho III designs formed part of a special glider unit for Operation Sea Lion.

In 1942 at the request of the Luftwaffe they built a stronger and larger version of the Ho V to take a Schmitt-Argus pulse-jet.

The variant was designated Ho VII. At about the same time as Schriever’s autogyro blueprint, they were designing a strange crescent-shaped glider, the Ho VI Parabola.

Everything regarding this development was destroyed in a mysterious fire at Hellegenberg that year and we hear no more about it until 1947, when the USAF were most anxious to interview Reimar Horten, who by then had escaped to Argentina and was unfortunately incommunicado.

German Flying Crescents and Discs

The Flying Disc Project in Germany was one of three most secret research programmes and was classified Geheime Reichssache, the highest possible top secret.

Nowhere, in any academic history of the Second World War, nor in any memoir of a military or political leader of any of the nations involved, Allied or German, will the researcher find the mention of a German flying disc.

It is as if the project never existed. Here is the greatest mystery of the Second World War: Why a flying vehicle held in such low regard for modern commercial and military purposes should have merited not only Hitler’s but, postwar, the Allies’ highest secrecy rating for it.

Very recently the CIA archive has released documents full of accounts by German engineers of their work on circular aircraft capable of astonishing speeds, but useful information on the craft themselves remains elusive.

Had it not been for the spate of UFO sightings by US Air Force personnel over a twelve-day period in 1947 which led the US Army and Air Force to mount a combined project to investigate the phenomenon, the existence of the documentary evidence for the German project would have remained a secret in perpetuity.

The confirmatory paper was not declassified until 1969, and only then as an appendix to a fatuous report of 964 pages issued by a University of Colorado committee under the chairmanship of Dr Edward U. Condon, and under contract to the Office of Scientific and Technical Research of the US Air Force. This outfit spent two years and $600,000 of US Air Force appropriation to conduct an in-depth investigation of the UFO problem. The study was a total farce and, while having nothing useful to say about UFOs, it did, unintentionally one suspects, confirm the existence of a successful Nazi flying disc programme, and so was not a complete waste of time and money.

The official report prepared on 23 September 1947 remained classified until 8 January 1969 when it was published as Appendix R to the Condon Report. The matter enquired into had begun on the night of 28 June 1947 when two pilots and two intelligence officers at Maxwell Air Force base watched an illuminated UFO perform “impossible aerobatics”. On 29 June a naval rocketry expert watched a silvery disc above the White Sands Testing Grounds.

On 8 July three officers at the Muroc super secret USAF test centre in the Mojave Desert reported three silver-coloured objects heading westwards, and ten minutes later a pilot test flying the new XP-84 reported a yellowish-white spherical object resembling nothing being currently tested or flown heading west into the wind at a fantastic speed. Two hours later a crew of technicians filed a report regarding an object interfering with a seat ejection experiment at 20,000 feet. It appeared to be of white aluminium oval construction with two projections on the upper surface which might have been fins. These crossed each other at intervals suggesting slow rotation or oscillation. No obvious means of propulsion was seen.

The following day an F-51 pilot at 20,000 feet about 40 miles south of Munroc sighted a flat object of light-reflecting nature with no vertical fin or wings. He attempted to pursue but it outclimbed him. This investigation concluded that UFOs are real and not visionary or fictitious.

The objects reported on by USAF personnel were the shape of a disc and as large as a man-made aircraft. Reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb and manoeuvrability [particularly roll] lent possibility to the idea that some of the objects were controlled either manually, automatically or remotely. They had a metallic or light-reflecting surface, showed an absence of trail except in a few instances when the object was apparently operating under high performance conditions, were circular or elliptical in shape, flat on the bottom and domed on top, maintained formations in flights varying from three to nine objects, had no associated sound except in three instances when a rumbling roar was heard, and cruised at above 300 knots.

This is the US Air Force describing UFOs in flight, quite a contrast to the usual official type of opinion released to the public. The signatory to the report, Lt Gen Nathan Twining, Commanding General, Air Material Command, stated that:

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“It is possible within the present US knowledge – provided extensive detailed development is undertaken - to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the objects in the sub–paragraphs above, which would be capable of an approximate range of 7,000 miles at sub-sonic speeds.

"Any developments would be extremely expensive, time-consuming and at the considerable expense of current projects…”

Thus it seems that the USAF had no knowledge of domestic flying disc construction by the United States, nor was it particularly keen to get involved in it.

On the afternoon of 24 June 1947, while en route to Yakima, Washington, private pilot Kenneth Arnold saw a formation of nine bright objects flying south from Mount Baker towards Mount Rainier [about 130 miles apart].

The leader was higher than the rest and they were flying diagonally in an echelon with a larger gap between the first four and the last five.

Arnold assumed they were jets, but he could see no tail panes. He calculated their speed over a 50-mile distance between two elevations as 1,700 mph. They were next  “in a chain in the neighbourhood of five miles long, swerving in and out of the smaller peaks, flipping from side to side in unison, dipping and presenting their lateral surfaces”.

Eight of the objects looked like flat discs, the other, larger than the rest, resembled a crescent. 

The following day in a newspaper interview, Arnold likened the objects’ movements to “a flat rock bouncing up and down as it skipped across water”. He was subsequently misquoted and later asserted, “the objects were not sauce rshaped but flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across water. They were not circular but reporters misunderstood the term”.

Dr Jacqueline Mitton of the Royal Astronomical Society, a firm disbeliever in UFOs, agreed that  “Arnold’s original drawings were much more a kind of boomerang shape”.

Arnold’s description of the leader, the flying crescent, coincides very exactly with an object reported on many occasions by USAF pilots and scientists.

A secret Draft of a memorandum signed by Brig-Gen G. F. Schulgen for the Air Intelligence Requirements Division on 30 October 1947 stated that the flying saucer-type aircraft the USAF was interested in, approximated the shape of a disc and had been reported by many competent observers.

These included USAF rated officers, from widely scattered places such as the USA, Canada, Hungary, Guam and Japan, both from the ground and from the air.

The object had a relatively flat bottom with extreme light reflecting ability.

Its plan form approximated an oval or a disc with a dome shape on the top surface, about the size of a C-54 or Constellation aircraft.

It was silent except for an occasional roar when operating under super performance conditions. It left no exhaust except occasionally a bluish Diesel-type trail which persisted in the atmosphere for about an hour.

Other reports mentioned a brownish smoke trail which could be from a special catalyst for extra power. It had extreme manoeuvrability and the apparent ability to almost hover:

it could disappear quickly at high speed or dematerialize, and to suddenly appear without warning as if from extremely high altitude. Several of the craft formed a tight formation quickly and evasive tactics indicated possibly manual or remote control. Under certain power conditions, the craft seemed able to cut a half-mile-wide path through cloud, but this was only seen once. The draft continued by saying that the first sightings in the United States were reported midMay 1947 and the last over Toronto on 14 September that year.

The greatest activity over the United States was during the last week of June and first week of July. Arnold’s sighting occurred on 24 June. Brig-Gen Schulgen regarded the strange object, “in view of certain observations”, as “a long range aircraft capable of a high rate of climb, high cruising speed [possibly sub-sonic at all times], highly manoeuvrable and capable of being flown in tight formation.

For the purpose of evaluation and analysis of the so-called flying saucer phenomenon, the object sighted is being assumed to be a manned aircraft … based on the perspective thinking and actual accomplishments of the Germans”. The signatory was assuming at the time that the aircraft was built by the Soviets to German blueprints, but we know now that was not the case.

The craft described had “a high rate of climb”, but did not lift up vertically. It was “possibly sub-sonic at all times” but could dematerialize or appear suddenly without warning which, at sub-sonic speed, suggests it entered and left Gravity II at will. Supporting this hypothesis is the fact that the hull had “extreme light reflecting ability”. Brig-Gen Schulgen was by no means convinced that this craft was extraterrestrial:

“There is a possibility that the Horten brothers’ perspective thinking may have inspired it – particularly the Parabola, which has a crescent plan form. The Horten brothers’ latest trend of perspective thinking was definitely toward aircraft configurations of low aspect ratio. The younger brother, Reimar, stated that the Parabola configuration would have the least induced drag – which is a very significant statement…. What is known of the whereabouts of the entire Horten family? All should be contacted and interrogated regarding any contemplated plans or perspective thinking of the Horten brothers”.

These USAF sightings were of an aircraft at a much higher stage of development than anything the United States could have put into the air at the time,. It was admitted by the US authorities in the CIOS-BIOS/FIAT 20 report that in aeronautics and all methods of jet and rocket propulsion and guidance systems, at the war’s end the Germans were ahead of the US by at least ten years. By virtue of the quality of observers involved – rated USA officers, test pilots and aeronautical scientists – we can make a positive statement. Either the crescent-shaped aircraft was German-built and operating from some clandestine base. Or it came from the Beyond. One must choose, for there is no third plausible possibility.

German Flying Saucers – The Alleged Machines

The German tradition alleges that Spitzbergen was used for some of their test flights.

In early September 1943 the German Navy landed troops on Spitzbergen island, a large, wild, barren and remote windswept island in the Arctic Circle 500 miles north of North Cape.

A small weather station was set up in the interior in 1944 and remained there until relieved in 1946, but an actual occupation just to install a seven-man meteorological team seems improbable.

Its use as a proving ground for advanced VTOL aircraft types would have justified taking the island from the point of view of secrecy.

An account of the Norwegian discovery of German Flugkreisel wreckage in 1952 [which initially they thought was from a UFO since the Americans had not bothered to inform them otherwise] appears in Frank Edwards: "Flying Saucers – Serious Business"  NY, Lyle Stuart, 1966.

In a video recorded interview, Josef Andreas Epp, an aeronautics writer and one of the five principal engineers involved in the German project during the war, stated that a flying disc under remote control from Breslau crashed and was wrecked on Spitzbergen while attempting a landing.

In late August 1946 Air Force General James H. Doolittle arrived in Stockholm to investigate UFO sightings along with Swedish military intelligence but his first mission was to visit Spitzbergen, where he supervised the shipment aboard the battleship Alabama of the remains of “a crashed UFO”. According to former crew members of the warship, the bodies of “aliens” had been found, but the craft was thought to be “a shortrange reconnaissance saucer” because “no provisions were found aboard”.

Since Lt General Twining’s report also stated that there was: “lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash-recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these unidentified flying objects” this tends to confirm that the wreckage of the Spitzbergen flying saucer brought to the United States by sea in 1946 was of terrestrial origin and German, and that the craft, though remote controlled, had crew aboard, probably to handle the tricky landing procedure which led to their demise.

In the 25 April 1953 edition of the Hamburg quality newspaper "Welt am Sonntag" , scientific correspondent Dr Werner Keller interviewed Senior Engineer Georg Klein, former special adviser to Reich Minister Speer. Klein confirmed that prototypes had been built in Germany during the Second World War:

“On 14 February 1945 in Prague I witnessed personally the first start of a manned RFZ [circular aircraft]. This machine reached a height of 12.4 kms within three minutes and in level flight could maintain a speed of 2,200 kms/hr. The flying disc has a practically perfect aerodynamic form and speeds in excess of 4,000 kms/hr are feasible. These fantastic velocities require special metal alloys, for existing materials for aircraft construction would melt. We had a special alloy. The start in Prague was the culmination of research and development begun in 1941.

"By the end of 1944 there were three different models completed. Miethe had built a discus-type, non-rotating disc of 42 metres diameter. The designs of von Habermohl and Schriever had a broad surfaced outer ring which revolved about a fixed spherical cabin. This ring had adjustable vanes and could take off and land vertically. On the approach of the Red Army the prototypes in Prague were destroyed". 

The Miethe Legend

In Projekt UFO, W.A. Harbinson asserts that, of the"'rocket scientists" involved in flying disc development:

…at the close of the war, Walter Miethe went to the US with Wernher von Braun, Dornberger, and hundreds of other members of the Peenemünde rocket programme . . . Miethe, though initially working under Wernher von Braun for the United States' first rocket centre in the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, joined the A.V. Roe [AVRO-Canada] aircraft company in Malton, Ontario, reportedly to continue work on disc-shaped aircraft, or flying saucers just as Habermohl was thought to be doing with the Russians.
 

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These assertions, presumably based on Rudolf Lusar's, "German Secret Weapons of the Second World War", seem to have led to the development of an impressive, but entirely false, history for the elusive Miethe, covering many years.

Tim Matthews, in his book "UFO Revelation", refers to the

three years of painstaking research by UK astronomy, aviation and photographic specialist Bill Rose, which included on-site research in Germany, Canada and the USA . . he was able to discover that Dr Walter Miethe who all sources agree was involved with Schriever, Klaus Habermohl and Guiseppe Belluzzo [an Italian engineer] had been the director of the saucer programme at two facilities located outside Prague.

In May 1945, after testing of the prototype had taken place, both Miethe and Schriever were able to flee in the direction of Allied forces. 

Rose learned not only that test-flights had taken place but that there was film footage of them … Rose was shown some stills taken from the original 16mm film and, given his expert photo-technical background, concluded, after careful consideration, that this was probably real and historical footage … 

We know a little more about Dr Miethe. One of the important pieces of information came in the form of a rare group photograph showing various young German scientists in 1933.

The photograph shows Wernher von Braun and Walter Miethe [or Richard Miethe – different sources mention different first names]. It would seem that these two knew each other well. 

Rose and Matthews claimed that Miethe worked with von Braun in 1933, and that the photo provided by the person who responded to an advert Rose had placed showed them together with other rocket scientists in that year.

Fortunately, this is a well-researched and well-recorded period of history, and it should be no more difficult to find records of Miethe than it is that of von Braun.

Indeed, von Braun was born in 1912 and if Miethe was 40 in 1952, they should have been absolute contemporaries.

"The Rocket and the Reich" by Michael J Neufeld covers this period, and von Braun's activities, in detail, as well as detailing rocket and "secret weapon" development right through to the end of the war. Yet it makes no mention at all of Miethe [Walter or Richard], Habermohl, Schriever, or Belluzzo, Klein or Klaas.

Nor, for that matter, does Philip Henshall in "Vengeance - Hitler's Nuclear Weapon Fact or Fiction", which covers a similar range in rather less detail.


If Engineer Klein witnessed this flight personally he would not have seen much of it, for the Luftflotte VIII War Diary entry for the day in question records that Prague had low cloud cover down to 800 metres with complete overcast, rain, snow and poor visibility. This is excellent weather if one does not wish the neighbourhood to witness the miraculous attributes of your flying saucer. Klein does not state whether it was the Miethe discus-type or the Schriever VTOL design which ascended into the low cloud at Prague. Another unmentionable is the method of propulsion.

All German aeronautical engineers were contradictory or silent on these two points. The fantastic claim by Klein that the Prague flying disc could fly at 2,00 kms per hour justifies the heat resistant alloys used in the craft’s construction.

The German tradition states that the first proposed designs for a jet propelled circular aircraft [RFZ] were offered to the Luftwaffe in 1938 but declined. The USAF report in 1947 considered that even a subsonic flying saucer development “would require extensive detailed development, would be extremely expensive, time-consuming and at the considerable expense of other projects”.

All the more astonishing then that the entire German programme, from flying model to maiden manned flight, occupied less than three years between 1942 and 1945 in wartime Germany.


The project was concentrated in Prague, specifically Kbelský Airport. The actual construction of the project started somewhere between 1941 and 1943.It project was originally exclusively Luftwaffe, later received assistance from the Škoda Praha plant and the Škoda Letov division and perhaps somewhere else. Other companies include Junkers in Oscheben and Bemburg, and Wilhelm Gustloff in Weimarand Kieler Leichtbau and Neubrandeburg.

Although the project began to develop under the supervision of Luftwaffe, it eventually fell under the control of the Department of Weapons led by Speer, which was managed by engineer Goerg Klein. Eventually, probably during 1944, the project was under the control of SS and the influence of General Hans Kammler.

Following the successful flight of Rudolf Schriever’s model Flying Turtle on 3 June 1942, he teamed up at once with Klaus Habermohl to build the manned version.

Three or four types were produced, fitted with hydrogen peroxide engines, but were found unsatisfactory in one way or another and the Luftwaffe supposedly rejected all of them. Prototype MIIB, for example, was a broad surfaced outer ring with adjustable vanes revolving about a fixed spherical cabin, thus more helicopter than flying saucer.

This VTOL machine was allegedly also tried with a motor designed in the Kertl Factory, Vienna, by the Austrian inventor Viktor Schauberger, “the pioneer of anti-gravity”, it being claimed that the motor worked on the implosive principle. Whatever the method was it has never been revealed, but rapid declutching was hinted at. The energy process is supposed to have used a small electric motor of 20,000 revs.

Calculations showed that a 20-cm disc gyrating at this speed generated a tornado-like vortex sufficient to levitate a weight of 228 tonnes to an indefinite height. Nothing was ever patented, its like is not seen today and the Luftwaffe did not want it despite its fantastic vertical flight ability; therefore we look upon it with a jaundiced eye.

A separate group, Richard Miethe and Giuseppe Belluzzo, had been working on the V-7 turbojet disc, which had a definite UFO look about it, since 1942 and co-opted Schriever, Habermohl and occasionally Andreas Epp into the development team in 1943.

The design was developed to the stage of "operational readiness". The V-7 jet disc [also known as the V-3 Flying Disc Model III long range version] was 42 metres in diameter.

The outer shell, we are told, was a light metal alloy, mainly of titanium, while the inner hull was of heat-resistant duralium. A claim was made that a helium engine was used.

A way to use helium as a fuel had been devised by the Austrian physicist Dr Karl Nowak and registered at the German Patent Office on 16 March 1943 under number 905-847.

The patent describes a reciprocating engine using atmospheric oxygen to oxidize atmospheric nitrogen. This involved generating very high voltage sparks to produce temperatures exceeding 50,000°C within a combustion chamber.

The effect was similar to lightning. Lightning burns the surrounding air leaving a vacuum which suddenly collapses in on itself producing thunder. The engine did the same, but also injected super-cold liquid helium directly into the combustion chamber. Helium is an inert gas and does not burn. Dr Nowak’s idea was that the very cold liquid sprayed into the combustion chamber to cool it also caused a tremendous expansion as it heated, thus producing the motive force for the engine.

Dr Karl Nowak was also the inventor of the Molecular Bomb, which was never built.

So far as can be made out, his idea was that electrons within the nucleus would have been brought to a state of very low energy at a temperature of almost absolute zero and then returned to their normal velocities instantaneously.

This expansion force [1,015 electrons] would have enabled a bomb vastly more powerful than the hydrogen bomb to have been constructed. Official quantum physics dismisses the idea as an impossibility but recently the physicist Randall Mills has stated that Nowak’s concept can be proved theoretically and in practice. 

One concludes, looking at the short time-scale for this project, that it would assuredly have been a most laudable engineering feat if Nowak’s helium engine could have been brought to the stage of operational use within two years of registering the patent, and fitted, moreover, inside a flying saucer, the initial designs for which had been begun only the previous year.

An additional drawback would have been the embargo imposed on the sale of helium to Germany since before the war by the world’s only supplier, the United States.

Helium had been wanted at that stage to build safer airships than the 'Hindenburg', but the United States suspected the Germans might want it for work on developing a hydrogen-based weapon. For this reason it does not seem very likely that Germany would have had enough helium to realize helium engine development and use.

A V-7 variant on the drawing board had a V-2 rocket engine slung below the fuselage for a top speed of 4,000 kms/hr in level flight, but the burn would last only a minute or so and the advantage of bothering to build this variant is not obvious. The V-2 rocket engine was the only propulsion unit which might have required the disc to be constructed of special heat-resistant alloys, and the sketch of this variant probably came into existence precisely to explain that purpose.

Having disposed of the less likely prime movers, we are left with a reported engine plant consisting of five kerosene-fuelled turbines, three for lift and two for forward thrust which, though less exotic than the other ideas, satisfy the requirement for vertical and horizontal flight at fast sub-sonic velocities.

From their earlier work with helicopters it was not a particularly big step in the short period of time available to the idea of an advanced autogyro, its multi-bladed propellors forming a perfect circle and linked together by an outer ring. The blades rotated independent of the central fixed cabin and, unlike orthodox autogyros, there was no torsion factor.

At take-off blade rotation was accelerated and, after acquiring speed and tremendous inertia, the blade angle changed from - 3° to +3° and the machine would rise up suddenly.

There should have been no problem piloting the craft with five engines: authoritative sources such as Andreas Epp stated that in earlier proving flights the disc would have been remote-controlled but with crew aboard. When the blades were closed to 0° for a continuous surface, a high sub-sonic speed [0.8 Mach] would have been possible and at least 25 kilometres altitude.

Rudolf Schriever, who had been a Heinkel test pilot at Eger in the Sudentenland, worked on his design in a secluded hangar at Prague. BMW’s Design Bureau tested the engines.

Initially He 178 turbines had been intended for propulsion but were not powerful enough for a perpendicular take-off speed of 100 metres/sec.

The replacements caused vibration problems, but these had been overcome within a week.

There was a ring of reactors on board, one located bottom centre of the blade disc for vertical take-off.

Schriever made the claim that the Flugkreisel , which was first airborne in October 1944, had flown supersonic, “this being possible by virtue of its aerodynamic shape”, he said.

One suspects that what he really meant was that on flights from Norway to Spitzbergen, the 600-knot Flugkreisel achieved a ground speed in excess of Mach 1 when flying in the 175-knot west-east jet stream over Sweden at above 35,000 feet.

This description appears in work of aviation historian Justo Miranda: The account of Luigi Romersa appears in "Uomini, armi e segreti della seconda guerra mondiale", part 7, Storia Verita, 1992.

Physically this autogyro was not capable of supersonic speed. There was no call for it to be built of heat-resistant alloys, but it obviously was.

This is the big secret we are not supposed to know. Allied aircrew in very close proximity to the "fire-balls" reported scorching of the fuselage. Feuerkugeln, the glowing spheres which chased aircraft, were very hot.

If the same principle whereby the Flying Turtle changed into a ball of fire during its ascent applied to the German VTOL circular autogyro, that is to say that at some stage while climbing vertically it changed into a large glowing sphere, then it would need an outer and inner shell of heat-resistant alloys for when it was operating in that mode. Festung Norway Bases existed in Norway for the completion work on the Supreme V-Weapon.

Heavy water for the German atomic research project was produced at Vemork and the former Rjukan power house is now the Norwegian Industrial Workers’ Museum.

In correspondence the curator, Frode Saeland, referred to construction work begun by the Germans on the 5,700-feet Gaustad mountain peak about 50 miles from Oslo which he thought might be worth investigating. The Norwegian Government in exile had concluded at the time that it was a station for forecasting air activity over southern Norway, working in parallel with a similar station on a mountain top at Skavlen near Sauda.

Extracts from Norwegian books published in 1946 and 1980 respectively described the Gaustad installation as “the biggest and most expensive radio installation built by the Germans in Norway”, while Skavlen was a radar base.


 Per A. Boehn: "Norsk Innsats i Kampen om Atomkraften", Trondheim, 1946, and Sigmund Fjeldbu, "Et lite sted pa verden-skartetRjukan 1940–1950", Oslo 1980

The construction work on Gaustad peak began in early October 1944, probably in the same week the SS took over at Ohrdruf in the Harz. The mountain and surrounding district were sealed off and huge quantities of sand, cement and building materials were taken to the 5,700-foot peak by caravans of mules. A telephone line was laid from Gausta to the valley of West Fjord. Day and night German reconnaissance aircraft circled above the activity while from below machinery could be heard working at all hours.

The German regional commander was once overheard to use the expression “V-centre Gaustad Mountain Top”. The work progressed with such urgency that small platforms, large aerial masts and small huts could soon be made out. For the eventuality of air attack the Germans had brought in enormous Flak resources on the other side of the valley.

The area around the cable car terminus was an absolute confusion of gun emplacements, ammunition dumps and barracks.

The information from Frode Saeland ties in very precisely with a report by the Stockholm Special Correspondent of the English newspaper "The Daily Mail", Ralph Hewins, who in his article appearing in the 9 December 1944 edition 'Nazis Will Run V-War From Norway' spoke of reports from the Norwegian resistance that the Germans were rushing to complete new V-bases in Norway to make up for their lost sites in the west.

The main bases were on the peaks of southern Norway’s highest mountains, the 5,700-foot Gaustad, 50 miles west of Oslo, two 5,200-foot heights north of Bergen, and various other high points as far north as Trondheim. There was thought to be an important base on the wild, high and wind swept Hardanger Plateau.

Contrary to policy on the European continent where a slave labour force was used for large-scale construction work, Organization Todt was using only German labourers at Gaustad.

Up to a hundred square miles of the terrain was cordoned off and patrolled by battalions of mountain troops and SS. Building materials were being brought up not only manually but by light railway and cable-car systems slung across valleys and chasms. Mr Hevins then described the “firing positions”, which consisted of huge concrete halls embedded deep in rock, each with a semi-circular roof of reinforced concrete. At firing, the launching platform was extended through the hangar entrance along a runway.

The very salient point puzzling all experts, however, was why the bases were being built on the highest and most inaccessible peaks: Neither the V-1 nor V-2 required height for a successful launch.

Additionally one might add that neither was manufactured in Norway. These enormous rockets and flying bombs would have had to be transported in batches from Germany to Oslo by sea –a dangerous undertaking by 1944– then shipped overland to Gaustad and brought up the 5,700-foot mountain by mule or cable-car.

This enables us to rule out the V-1, V-2 and anything series produced, remote controlled or otherwise. Obviously, the monumental radio and radar system and the "firing" halls were all meant for a super-secret "aircraft" which operated from V-Centre Gaustad. That the neutral Swedes were highly indignant at German infringements of their airspace by what they alleged were remote controlled flying bombs is evident from the following newspaper cuttings of the time.

On 14 October 1944 "Sydsvenska Dagbladet Snallposten" of Malmö under a heading 'Boomerang-Bomb from the Hardanger High Plateau?' said that heavy construction work of a secret nature being carried out by the Germans on the sealed-off Hardanger Plateau north of Rjukan had reached such a stage as to lead one to suspect that it had to do with a secret weapon project and "it is not impossible that they are launch ramps for robot-bombs and that the flying bombs which crossed southern Sweden today were fired from there".

In a separate article 'Robot Aircraft over Skane' the same newspaper said that “a foreign robot aircraft – probably a flying bomb” crossed over Sweden that afternoon, flying from west to east or north-east at great velocity. The aircraft was at so high an altitude that it could not be seen even using binoculars. However, it left a very long white condensation trail which could be seen clearly.

The engine made a noise reminiscent of a four-engined bomber. The speed of the aircraft exceeded the velocity of the newest fighter aircraft. From all this we deduce that the aircraft was a multi-engined, possibly remote-controlled, compressed-air-launched missile resembling a boomerang which brings to mind various Horten brothers’ designs, including the cresent shaped Parabola.

The "Svenska Dagbladet" for 14 October 1944 reported another infringement of Sweden’s airspace by a flying bomb the previous morning.

On 28 October the "London Daily Telegraph" carried a report of an announcement of the Swedish Military Staff that a “small number of robot or rocket bombs were seen flying high over southern Sweden this afternoon”. It is not clear from this article if the objects were in formation or overflew singly.

On 15 January 1945 the "London Daily Express" reported an infringement of Swedish airspace by flying bombs the previous day. The objects came from the north-west and were believed to have originated from the Hardanger Plateau.

On 20 January 1945 Ralph Hewins of the "Daily Mail" reported that Swedish military authorities were compiling a dossier of infringements of their airspace by German flying bombs for a diplomatic protest to Berlin.

Quoting an expert writing in the Swedish journal "Expressen" , Mr Hewins reported that the new robot bomb was a hybrid of the V-1 and V-2. It could fly at very high altitude and was very fast. It could be steered better than the V-2, but did not fly as fast or as high as the V-2. It was a flying bomb of the rocket type and could be steered from the ground to a certain extent – “German experts have for long been interested in radio-steering instruments and have been carrying out research in this field”.

All very true, but of this advanced flying bomb, a cross of two different species of missile, no evidence exists.

In any case, none of this talk of robot flying bombs in Norway makes sense. Germany had impregnable mountain tops in the Harz, Tirol and other alpine areas. The logical place to try out a new remote control system, no matter how sophisticated, was Peenemünde. The manufacturing centres of the V-1 were in underground factories dotted around the Reich proper.

Supplying even a few dozen V-1 flying bombs by sea to Oslo, and thence by mule and cablecar, to remote mountain peaks in Norway for experimental flights in late 1944 seems ludicrous. As for tele-guidance systems, serious experiments were made using the Radieschen homing radar and Sauerkirsch radio remote for the V-1 in the last few months of the war.

The American peacetime project to build a pilotless bomber based on the V-1, the Martin B-61 Matador, probably with all the German preparatory design papers in front of them, still took a full five years from its inception in 1946.

Of several things we can be tolerably certain. The excavation of the emplacement on a remote mountain peak, and the stringent security measures in force, indicate a project of the highest secrecy, and the two great radio and radar masts in the vicinity suggest a remote-control system. The contents of the hangars could be concealed as easily at ground level as in the clouds: what altitude and cloud provided was secrecy for whatever emerged from the innards of the mountain and took off –either the form of the aircraft or something peculiar about its mode of ascent– which nobody alien to the project could be permitted to see.

The Germans were never going to manhandle their special aircraft even once up that huge mountain: obviously it would fly there under its own power and land on the small apron before the "firing hall". Accordingly, the aircraft can only have been a Fieseler Storch, a helicopter or a flying disc or crescent. Since neither a Storch nor an orthodox helicopter could fly at 40,000 feet and faster than the latest jet fighter, we are left with only one possibility, and all the claims made for it seem true.

Overflying Swedish airspace on a northeasterly heading would eventually bring the flying disc or saucer across the polar seas towards – Spitzbergen. As to whether the proposed Swedish diplomatic protest was ever made in Berlin we do not have the information. What we do know is that in the latter half of 1946 thousands of "ghost" flying bombs described as a cross between a V-1 and V-2 appeared in the skies over Sweden. Newspaper accounts of the time described them as "cigar-shaped" with orange flames issuing from the tail. They were generally seen at night, at low altitudes up to 1,000 metres, and estimates of their speed varied “from that of a slow airplane to 500 mph”.

Over the period 9 to 30 July 1946, for example, the Swedish military received more than 600 reports. The matter was taken extremely seriously.

It was concluded that it must be Germans working for the Russians at Peenemünde who were responsible and it was to help investigate the phenomenon with Swedish Intelligence that USAF General Doolittle arrived in the summer of 1946. His immediate interest was a visit to Spitzbergen, where it was rumoured that the wreckage of a flying disc was to be found, and actually was found. The ghostly V-1s over Sweden could sometimes be picked up on radar, were not meteors, weather balloons, Venus or any other such natural phenomena and half the Swedish population appears to have seen them.

The furore died down once it was clear that these “robot flying bombs” were not doing anything aggressive, they were merely interested in overflying Sweden’s airspace which of course was nothing new. Ten per cent of Sweden’s land surface is under fresh water, and it was not possible to get hold of a single ghostly rocket flying bomb because “all of them fell into the lakes”, although curiously nobody thought that was strange.

This is German humour, and the coincidence here is so great that if the apparitions were not UFOs we would immediately suspect that the Germans had put on the show for a laugh at the Swedes. If, in fact, the Germans were responsible for the UFO activity, the whole thing would become clear.

The German flying saucer assertion quoted earlier was made by Senior Engineer Klein, former special adviser to Reich Minister Speer. The curious fact that neither Speer nor Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC Nikolaus von Below, who was also Speer’s direct liaison officer to Hitler, nor General Karl Koller, last Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff, ever once mentioned in their copious memoirs the subject of helicopters, of which the German Reich was the world pioneer and had at least sixty operational models, or flying discs, underlines the fact that even on the German side the whole subject was for some reason still taboo decades later.

It requires no great stretch of the imagination to see that if a four-foot diameter remote-controlled turtle-shaped object can change into a glowing sphere visible but intangible at altitude, then the same must also be possible for a giant manned VTOL disc. The Germans might not have reached the stage of constructing interplanetary UFOs, but they did not need to go that far, any more than they needed to build supersonic flying saucers or work on anti-gravity fields for the craft. The objective was and is world conquest, and by early 1945 they had the vehicle they needed for their purpose. This was the miracle weapon for which the shrinking perimeter of the Third Reich had been defended so desperately for no obvious reason for so long.

 Geoffrey Brooks, "Hitler's Terror Weapons: From VI to Vimana" [Pen and Sword Books: Barnsley, South Korshire, 2002],

The publication of Lusar's book in 1957 not surprisingly provoked both military and intelligence interest. From the "New Britain Herald" for 14 March 1957 comes a media-friendly response to the publicity the book had been given

No Flying Saucer Built by Hitler

WASHINGTON [AP] James H Doolittle says it "just ain't so" that Nazi Germany developed a flying saucer and a bomber that could attack the United States and return without refuelling.

The veteran airman, chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, gave a House Appropriations subcommittee his estimate of reports published in Germany of great aviation accomplishments under Hitler. These were contained in a book by Rudolf Lusar, former German War Ministry special weapons chief.

Doolittle's testimony was published today, along with that of Hugh L Dryden, director of the advisory committee. Dryden said "there is no truth" in a statement that German engineers designed a flying saucer which attained a height of 40,000 feet and speed of 1,250 miles an hour.

"This is an advertisement for a book which includes material discovered by our groups who went into Germany after the war", he said.

Dryden said also the man supposed to have designed the bomber that could cross the Atlantic without refuelling had written a book of his own with no mention of any such invention.

Doolittle, asked about both the saucer and the bomber, said, "It just ain't so".

A report dated 29 March 1957, declassified in 1978, from Robert E O'Connor of the Air Technical Intelligence Center to the Director of Intelligence is considerably more specific.

It has become very common in the past few years to publish "Intelligence" documents on the pretext that they all have equal value, but this report records the outcome of genuine research by those competent to conduct it. 

Subject: [Unclassified] Review of Book by Rudolf Lusar

1. Reference is made to conversations between Colonel W O Farrier and Dr S T Possony on the above subject [Unclassified]

2. This office basically concurs with your review of the book 'The German Weapons and Secret Weapons of World War II and their subsequent development" [Unclassified]

3. There is no evidence in AFOIN-4 files of German development of "Flying Discs", nor is there any indication of Soviet development of such a vehicle.

A check of available biographical files reveals no information on "Miethe". 

The A V Roe engineering staff were contacted and they have no knowledge of Miethe in their organisation. 
 

Nazi UFOs Revealed: Hitler had flying saucers...and they may still be out there
Nazis were developing flying saucers – and conspiracy theorist are convinced Hitler stashed them in the Antarctic.
By David Trayner
The Star
26 March 2016

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Hitler's Nazi regime created an arsenal of super-advanced but unbelievably bizarre "Wunderwaffen" –or miracle weapons– in the death throes of World War 2.

The Luftwaffe were building increasingly wacky aircraft – some shaped like discs or with circular wings.

An US Air Force probe concluded these experimental flying machines may be to blame for UFO sightings.

UFO hunters go further – and insist they still lie hidden in an underground base at the South Pole.

This all may sound ridiculously far fetched – until you see the fantastic aircrafts Nazi Germany really were making towards the end of the war.

Nazi scientists created the world's first cruise missile, the first long-range ballistic missile, the first artificial object to reach space, one of the first military helicopters, a space shuttle – and started developing nuclear weapons.

Some of their lesser-known planes bear a striking resemblance to flying saucers.

Hitler's advanced and bizarre military technology from Nazi Germany

  • V2 rocket - was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile
  • V2 rocket - was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile
  • The Krummlauf [Curved barrel gun] 
  • The Horton HO 229
  • The German project codenamed “Silbervogel” was a theoretical design for a sub-orbital bomber aircraft that would have been able to attain 90 miles in height and bomb New York when launched from Germany
  • The Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe  - The first jet-powered aircraft to ever fly in combat 

Horten Ho 229

Reimar and Walter Horten built the world's first jet-powered "flying wing" – an aircraft without tail or fuselage.

The Horten Ho 229 was designed to answer  Hermann Göring's call for a bomber designs capable of meeting a "3×1000 requirement":

To carry 1,000kg of bombs a distance of 1,000km at a speed of 1,000kmph.

The US military seized the last Horten prototype as part of Operation Paperclip – a secret mission to captured advanced German weapons research to keep it out of Soviet hands.

The design mysteriously reappeared as the revolutionary B-2 "Stealth Bomber".

Engineer Arthur Sack spent the war trying to perfect an aeroplane with circular wings.

The Sack AS-6 finally became airborne in 1944 – just before the end of the war.

Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt designed the Silbervogel spaceplane for the 1942 "Amerika Bomber" mission to attack the mainland US.

The sub-orbital bomber – a precursor to the Space Shuttle – would be shot into space with a rocket booster and then "bounce" off the atmosphere.

The Arado E.555 was another "flying wing" design put forward for the Amerika Bomber mission.

But perhaps the most revolutionary – and most mystifying – Nazi UFO was Viktor Schauberger's "Repulsine" engine.

The Austrian inventor developed a round turbine engine that could create a vortex and rise straight upwards.

The SS captured Schauberger and made him try to turn the engine into a vertical takeoff aircraft – which looked exactly like a flying saucer.

The prototype crashed – but the research was said to be continued by a shadowy V2 rocket engineer called Dr Heinrich Richard Miethe.

Richard Miethe –whose existence has never been conclusively proved – was said to have worked on several "Flugscheiben" – or "flight disc" – designs during the early 1940s.

The most notorious of these designs was the fabled V7 – which supposedly harnessed high-intensity electrical charges to turn the oxygen in air into an endless fuel supply.

No photographs of the V7 survive, but after the war, German engineer Bruno Schwenteit patented a flying saucer design he claimed was actually constructed during the war.

The Soviets are said to have seized the V7 prototype when they marched into the Breslau air base in western Germany – now Wrocław, Poland.

In 1952, Miethe reportedly told French daily newspaper "France-Soir": "If flying saucers exist, it is the V7 which I built in 1944, the engines of which the Russians seized at Breslau".

Miethe is rumoured to have gone on to work for Avro Canada – which designed a real-life flying saucer for the US Air Force.

The VZ-9 Avrocar was a circular jet aircraft with an estimated speed of 1,500 mph.

Interestingly, when Avro Canada announced the project in 1953, German engineer Georg Klein came out and claimed almost exactly the same design was developed under the Third Reich.

He pointed to Miethe's work at Breslau and that of Rudolf Schriever and Klaus Habermohl at Prague – reportedly taken over by Miethe.

The Cold War Avrocar project was shelved in 1961 due to problems with the design.

But these are just the Nazi UFOs for which clear proof exists.

Rumours and even photographs [some clearly fakes] of many others – with fanciful "code names', such as "Rundflugzeug", "Feuerball", "Haunebu" and "Andromeda-Gerät" surfaced after the war.

UFOs were first connected with the Nazis during WW2 – when Allied pilots reported fast-moving round glowing objects following their aircraft.

Airmen believed the objects – dubbed "Foo Fighters" – were futuristic Nazi aircraft.

The only other explanation provided has been electrostatic phenomena – like St Elmo's Fire – or light reflecting off ice crystals.

The first widely-reported UFO sighting in the US was near Mount Rainier, Washington, on 24 June 1947, by Kenneth Arnold.

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The similarity of these nine "crescent-shaped" flying objects [wrongly reported as saucer-shaped] to the Horten Ho 229 "flying wing" was not lost on Project Sign – the first official US Air Force UFO investigation.

In 1959, Captain Edward Ruppelt, the first head of Project Blue Book – Project Sign's follow-up investigation – wrote:

"When WW2 ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and guided missiles under development.

"The majority were in the most preliminary stages but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of objects reported by UFO observers."

In 1952, Professor Giuseppe Belluzzo, an Italian scientist and former member of the Italian Fascist Mussolini regime –which was allied with Nazi Germay– revealed in a newspaper article that "types of flying discs were designed and studied in Germany and Italy as early as 1942".
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More and more reports of Nazi UFOs surfaced.

Perhaps the most intriguing – and far fetched – is the connection between "Die Glocke" – or "The Bell" – and the Kecksburg UFO Incident.

On 9 December 1965, a large, brilliant "fireball" was seen by thousands in at least six US states and Ontario, Canada.

It streaked over Michigan and Ontario – reportedly dropping "hot metal debris" – and caused sonic booms in Pittsburgh.

It was reported as a meteor – but a family claimed to have seen the object crash land in forest near the village of Kecksburg, near Pittsburgh.

Residents reported finding an acorn-shaped object the "size of a small car" in the woodland.

Almost immediately, the US military turned up, closed off the area and removed the mysterious object.

Polish journalist and author Igor Witkowski claims a contact in the Polish Intelligence surface showed him Polish government documents related to secret Nazi experimental weapons.

They described a device "made out of a hard, heavy metal" about 9ft wide, 12 to 15ft high and shaped like a large bell.

Die Glocke –reportedly developed in a giant underground SS facility known as "Der Riese"– contained two counter-rotating cylinders "filled with a mercury-like substance, violet in colour" called "Xerum 525".

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So, what happened to all these mysterious Nazi UFOs?

The US – under Operation Paperclip – and the USSR seized as much Nazi advanced weapons research as they could when they divided up German after the war.

The Yanks certainly got Horten Ho 229 and much of the V1 and V2 rocket research, while the Russkis apparently made off with the "Repulsine" engine.

Much of it was reborn in the nuclear missiles and advanced aircraft of the Cold War.

And secret trials of the newly acquired kit would certainly explain some of the alien sightings over the past 70 years.

The Nazi expedition to New Swabia

CLAIMED: The Germans planted Nazi flags, claiming New Swabia

But conspiracy theorists have come up with another theory – the Nazis stashed their Fascist flying machines in a subterranean air base at the South Pole.

Nazi Germany sent an expedition to the Antarctic in 1938 and claimed an area – which they named "New Swabia".

The official reasons for the mission were to seek locations for a new whaling station and naval base.

But UFO hunters are convinced they also established an secret HQ in deep underground caverns to continue developing their new "Wunderwaffe".

They claim the Nazis planned to launch lightning strikes from the base with their new toys.

The real tin hat brigade claim they used the flying saucers to establish a Nazi Moon base.

And some doom sayers even believe they are still there – waiting for the right time to launch a new bid for world domination.