Götterdämmerung and Aftermath

Joseph P. Farrell
 

"A comprehensive February 1942 [German] Army Ordnance report on the German Uranium enrichment program includes the statement that the critical mass of a nuclear weapon lay between 10 and 100 kilograms of either Uranium 235 or element 94.... In fact the German estimate of critical mass of 10 to 100 kilograms was comparable to the contemporary Allied estimate of 2 to 100.... The German scientists working on uranium neither withheld their figure for critical mass because of moral scruples nor did they provide an inaccurate estimate as the result of gross scientific error". 

-- Mark Walker, "Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb"

A Badly Written Finale

"In southern Germany, meanwhile, the American Third and Seventh and the French First Armies had been driving steadily eastward into the so-called 'National Redoubt'.... The American Third Army drove on into Czechoslovakia and by 6 May had captured Pilsen and Karlsbad and was approaching Prague". 

-- F. Lee Benns, "Europe Since 1914 In Its World Setting"   [New York: F.S. Crofts and Co., 1946]  

 

 

On a night in October 1944, a German pilot and rocket expert by the same of Hans Zinsser was flying his Heinkel 111 twin engine bomber in twilight over northern Germany, close to the Baltic coast in the province of Mecklenburg. He was flying at twilight to avoid the Allied fighter aircraft that at that time had all but undisputed mastery of the skies over Germany.

Little did he know that what he saw that night would be locked in the vaults of the highest classification of the United States government for several decades after the war.
 
And he certainly could not have been aware of the fact when his testimony finally was declassified near the end of the millennium, that what he saw would require the history of the Second World War to be rewritten, or at the very minimum, severely scrutinized.

His observations on that one night on that one flight resolve at a stroke some of the most pressing questions and mysteries concerning the end of the war.

By the same token, what he saw raises many more mysteries and questions, affording a brief and frightening glimpse into the labyrinthine world of Nazi secret weapons development.

His observations open a veritable Pandora's box of horrifying research the Third Reich was conducting, research far more horrendous in its scope and terrible promise than mere atomic bombs. More importantly, his observations also raise the disturbing question of why the Allied governments -America in particular- kept so much classified for so long.

What, really, did we recover from the Nazis at the end of the war?

But what precisely is that badly written finale? 

To appreciate how badly written a finale it truly is, it is best to begin at the logical place: in Berlin, far below ground, in the last weeks of the war.

There, in the bizarre and surreal world of the Führerbunker, the megalomaniac German dictator huddles with his generals, impervious to the rain of Allied and Soviet bombs that are reducing the once beautiful city of Berlin to piles of rubble. Adolf Hitler, Chancellor and Führer of the ever-diminishing Greater German Reich is in conference.

His left arm shakes uncontrollably and from time to time he must pause to daub the drool that occasionally oozes from his mouth. His complexion is gray and pallid; his health, a shambles from the drugs his doctors inject in him. His glasses are perched on his nose as he squints at the map before him. 

 

Contributing yet another nuance to the end of the war Legend of Hitler's delusional insanity, some have proposed that the German dictator's doctors had diagnosed him with heart disease and/or Parkinson's disease, and were keeping him drugged at the behest of  Bormann, Göbbels, Himmler et al. in a desperate attempt to keep him functioning.

---

On 7 May 1945, the "Baltimore Sun" stated that according to Major Erwin Giesing [Hitler's brain, ear, nose and throat specialist, who had seen him on 15 February 1945], Hitler had been "in unusually good physical condition for a man of his age" and had certainly not died of a brain haemorrhage, as claimed by  Walter Schellenberg.

Reports pouring cold water on the theory that Hitler had been ill and had probably died a natural death or had been euthanized continued to be published. 

[For example, Field Marshal Kesselring, who had last seen Hitler in mid-April when "he appeared in excellent health"; Howard Cowan, 'Kesselring Most Surprised Hitler Remained In Berlin' - "Hamilton Spectator"', 10 May 1945 

In 1985 Ernst Günther Schenk, a physician in charge of nutrition for the German Army who was present at Hitler's last medical consultation in April 1945 and later wrote a book ["Patient A"] about Hitler's relationship with his personal physician, was quoted in "American Medical News" to the effect that Hitler was neither clinically insane nor chemically dependent on drugs.

Schenk says that  Hitler's regular injections consisted of vitamins mixed with glucose and caffeine.

Hitler was not a regular user of any stronger drug, but was given them on occasion: codeine and cocaine for colds, strong painkillers and barbiturates for cramps and colitis [an intermittent condition in most people that suffer it]. By the end of his life, Hitler showed obvious symptoms of Parkinson's disease, and also had a heart problem that was treated with nitroglycerin and digitalis.

Schenk says that medically there was nothing unusual about Hitler. [AP, 10 October 1985]

In 2010 the book "War Hitler Krank?" by Henrik Eberle and Hans-Joachim Neumann [published in English in 2012 as "'Was Hitler Ill?"], offered generally the same assessment as Schenk.

They write that "at no time did Hitler suffer from pathological delusions," ["Eine Besessenheit im Sinne eines krankheitsbedingten Wahns gab es bei Hitler zu keinem Zeitpunkt".] and they find no indication that Dr. Theodor Morell was anything other than a competent and ethical physician.

There is some controversy about Hitler's alleged use of methamphetamine [also known as methyl-amphetamine], which had been available in Germany as an over-the-counter drug under the brand-name Pervitin since 1938.

The quantity of methamphetamine in the pills seems not to have been very great, because novelist Heinrich Böll, who used Pervitin during the war, has described the stimulation as equivalent to several cups of coffee. It is clear that Pervitin was not perceived as excessively dangerous at the time, 3 and even for several decades after the war, since it was only taken off the market in the 1970s.

The appeal of such drugs was not limited to Axis nations. In the United States, the use of Pervitin by German military men stimulated the U.S. Government's Office of Scientific Research and Development to work on an American equivalent [Alexander George, "Wide World Features", 22 August 1942).  The U.S. Army has contemplated the benefits of amphetamines at least as recently as 1988 (AP, 7 September 1988]. As of 2014 methamphetamine in the United States is a prescription-drug, used for treatment of ADHD and for weight-loss.

In any case, Morell records administering that over-the-counter stimulant on only one occasion.

[C. Gunkel, 'Hitlers Krankheiten: Therapie mit Rattengift' - "Der Spiegel" January 2010; there is also an abridged English translation].

To summarize, Hitler's physician gave him various strong drugs on occasion, but not on a regular basis, and there is no reason to believe that drugs adversely affected Hitler's judgment. The strongest drug that Hitler received on a regular basis was caffeine, taken with vitamins.

 

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

The general is questioning the disposition of the forces he sees displayed on the battle map, for it is clear to him that some of Germany's finest and few remaining battle worthy formations are far south, facing Marshal Koniev's forces in Silesia. These forces were thus, incomprehensibly, poised to make a stiff defense of Breslau and Prague, not Berlin. The general pleads for Hitler to release some of these forces and transfer them north, but to no avail.

"Prague", the Führer responds stubbornly, almost mystically, "is the key to winning the war" 

Generaloberst Heinrici's hard-pressed troops must "do without." [They did in fact "do without" and yet managed to put up a fierce resistance against overwhelming odds in the initial stages of Zhukov's final offensive on Berlin].

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

Why indeed did Hitler maintain so many German troops in Norway up to the very end of the war?

[The standard versions, of course, are that he wished to maintain the supply line of iron ore from Sweden to Germany, and that he wished to continue to use the country as a base to interdict the lend-lease supply route to Russia. But by late 1944, with the huge losses of the German Kriegsmarine, these explanations no longer were militarily feasible, and hence do not make military sense. One must look for other reasons, if indeed there are any beyond Adolf Hitler's delusions]. 

These paradoxical German troops deployments are the first mystery of the badly written finale of the war in Europe.

Both Allied and German generals would ponder it after the war, and both would write it off to Hitler's insanity, a conclusion that would become part of the "Allied Legend" of the end of the war. This interpretation does make sense, for if one assumed that Hitler were having a rare seizure of sanity when he ordered these deployments, what possibly could he have been thinking?

Prague? Norway?

There were no standard or conventional military reasons for the deployments. In other words, the deployments themselves attest his complete lack of touch with military reality.

e therefore had to have been quite insane. But apparently his "delusional insanity" did not stop there. On more than one occasion during these end-of-the-war conferences with his generals in the Führerbunker, he boasted that Germany would soon be in the possession of weapons that would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat at "five minutes past midnight".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example, to make the insanity gripping the Reich government complete, Hitler's ever-faithful toady and Propaganda minister, Dr. Josef Göbbels also boasted in a speech near the end of the war that he had seen "weapons so frightening it would make your heart stand still". More delusional ravings of a Nazi madman. But on the Allied side of the Allied Legend, things are equally peculiar.

In March and April of 1945, U.S. General George S. Patton's Third Army is literally racing across southern Bavaria, as fast as is operationally possible, making a beeline for: 

(1) the huge Skoda munitions works at Pilsen, a complex all but blown off the map by Allied bombers; 
(2) Prague; and 
(3) A region of the Harz Mountains in Thuringia known to Germans as the Dreiecks or Three Corners," a region encompassed by the old mediaeval towns and villages of Arnstadt, Jonastal, Wechmar, and Ohrdruf.

Arnstadt is where the great German composer and organist Johann Sebastian Bach first began his career.

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

The Third Army's movements, so the story goes, were designed to cut off the "escape route" of Nazis fleeing the carnage of Berlin.

Maps are produced in history books, accompanied by de-classified German plans -some dating from the Weimar Republic!- for just such a Redoubt.

The "National Redoubt" [Alpenfestung] 1945
adapted from a map in 
Seventh Army's  Report of Operations, France and Germany, 1944-1945 

Case settled. However.....

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

General Patton and his divisional commanders would most certainly have been privy to at least some of this information.

So why the extraordinary and almost reckless speed of his advance, an advance the post-war Allied Legend would have us believe was to cut off the escape route of Nazis fleeing Berlin, who it turns out weren't fleeing, to a redoubt that didn't exist? The mystery deepens. 

Then, in a strange twist of fate, General Patton himself, America's most celebrated general, dies suddenly, as a result of complications from injuries he sustained in a freak automobile accident soon after the end of the war and the beginning of the Allied military occupation.

For many, there is little doubt that Patton's death is suspicious.

But what of the explanations offered for it by those who do not think it was accidental? Some propose he was eliminated because of his remarks about turning the Germans "right back around" and letting them lead an Allied invasion of Russia. Others believe he was eliminated because he knew about the Allies' knowledge of the Soviets' execution of British, American, and French prisoners of war, and threatened to make it public.

In any case, while Patton's barbed tongue and occasional outbursts are well known, his sense of military duty and obligation were far too high for him to have entertained such notions. These theories play out best, perhaps, on the Internet or in the movies. And neither seems a sufficient motivation for the murder of America's most celebrated general.

But then, if he was murdered, what was sufficient motivation? Here too, the lone German pilot Hans Zinsser and his observations afford a speculative key as to the possibilities, if General Patton was murdered, of why he had to be silenced.

Let us return, for a moment, to a less-well publicized explanation for his end-of-the war lightening-like strikes into south central Germany and into Bohemia: In "Top Secret", Ralph Ingersoll, an American liaison officer at SHAEF., gives a version of the facts much more in line with German intentions:

"[General Omar] Bradley was complete master of the situation.... in full command of the three armies that had broken through the Rhine defenses and were free to exploit their victories. Analyzing the whole situation, Bradley felt that to take battered Berlin would be an empty military victory....

"The German War Department had long since moved out, leaving only a rear echelon. The main body of the German War Department, including its priceless archives, had been transferred to the Thuringian forest..." [Vesco and Childress, op. cit.]

But what exactly did Patton's divisions discover in Pilsen and the forests of Thuringia? Only with the recent German reunification and declassification of East German, British, and American documents are enough clues available to allow this fantastic story - and the reason for the post-war Allied Legend - to be outlined and its questions answered.

Thus, finally, one arrives at the main theme of the post-war Allied Legend.

As the Allied forces penetrated ever deeper into the German Fatherland itself, teams of scientists and experts and their Intelligence co-ordinators were sent in literally to scour the Reich for German patents, secret weapons research, and above all, to find out about the state of the German atomic bomb project. [9] Literally vacuuming the Reich of every conceivable technological development, this effort became the largest technology transfer in history.

Even at this late stage of the war, as Allied armies advanced across western Europe, there was fear on the Allied side that the Germans were perilously close to the A-bomb, and might actually use one on London or other Allied targets. And Dr. Göbbels and his speeches about fearsome heart-stopping weaponry were doing nothing to alleviate their fears.

It is here that the mystery of the Allied Legend only deepens. It is here that the badly written finale would be truly comical, were it not for the vast scale of human suffering involved with it, for the facts are clear enough if one examines them independently of the explanations we have become accustomed to apply to them.

One must wonder if we were not conditioned to think about them in a certain way, for as the Allied armies advanced deeper and deeper into the Reich, famous German scientists and engineers were either captured, or they surrendered themselves.

Among them were first-class physicists, many of them Nobel laureates. And most of them were involved, at some level, with the various atomic bomb projects of Nazi Germany.

["Alsos" was the code name of this effort. "Alsos" is a Greek word meaning "Grove", an obvious pun on General Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project. It is also the name of the book about the Manhattan Project by Dutch-Jewish physicist Samuel Goudsmit]

Among these scientists were Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Kurt Diebner, a nuclear physicist, Paul Hartek, a nuclear chemist, Otto Hahn himself, the chemist who actually discovered nuclear fission, and curiously, Walter Gerlach, whose specialty was not nuclear, but gravitational physics.

Gerlach had written esoteric papers before the war on such abstruse concepts as spin polarization and vorticular physics, hardly the basics of nuclear physics, and certainly not the sort of scientist one would expect to encounter working on atom bombs.

Nick Cook, "The Hunt for Zero Point", notes that these areas have little to do with nuclear physics, much less A-bomb design, but "much to do with the enigmatic properties of gravity.

A student of Gerlach's at Munich, O.C. Hilgenberg, published a paper in 1931 entitled "About Gravitation, Vortices and Waves in Rotating Media"....

And yet, after the war, Gerlach, who died in 1979, apparently never returned to these matters, nor did he make any references to them; almost as if he had been forbidden to do so. That, or something he had seen...had scared him beyond all reason.

Much to the Allies' puzzlement, their scientific teams found but crude attempts by Heisenberg to construct a functioning atomic reactor, attempts that were wholly unsatisfactory and unsuccessful, and almost unbelievably inept.

This "German ineptitude" in basic bomb physics became, and remains, a central component of the Allied Legend.

In the German scientific community’s defense of its conduct during the war, the military’s Erich Schumann- and Kurt Diebner-led aspects of the Uranverein were minimized, ridiculed, and ascribed to "Nichtskönner" [(incompetent scientists] and leadership that owed its positions to politics.

Additionally, the Heisenberg component of the project was made to appear as the leading and dominant element of the project

And yet, that itself raises yet another mystery of the badly written finale.

Top German scientists -Werner Heisenberg, Paul Hartek, Kurt Diebner, Erich Bagge, Otto Hahn, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Karl Wirtz, Horst Korsching, and Walter Gerlach- were carted off to Farm Hall, England, where they were kept in isolation, and their conversations recorded.

The  celebrated "Farm Hall Transcripts", were only declassified by the British government in 1992.

[It was Manhattan project chief General Leslie Groves who, in fact, revealed in his 1962 book about the bomb, "Now It Can Be Told", that the German scientists' conversations had been recorded by the British. Apparently, however, not everything could be told in 1962].

If the Germans were so far behind and so incompetent, why keep them classified for so long? Bureaucratic oversight and inertia? Or did they contain things the Allies did not wish to be known even at that late date?

What a surface reading of the transcripts reveals only deepens the mystery considerably. In them, Heisenberg and company, after hearing of the A-bombing of Hiroshima by the Americans on the BBC, debate the endless moral issues of their own involvement in the atomic bomb projects of Nazi Germany.

But that is not all.

In the transcripts, Heisenberg and company, who had suffered some inexplicable mathematical and scientific dyslexia during the whole six years' course of the war, the same Heisenberg and company who could not even design and build a successful atomic reactor to produce Plutonium for a bomb, suddenly become Nobel laureates and first rank physicists after the war.

Indeed, Heisenberg himself within a matter of a few days of Hiroshima, gave a lecture to the assembled German scientists on the basic design of the bomb.

In it, he defends his first assessment that the bomb would be about the size of a pineapple, and not the one or two ton monster he maintained throughout most of the war.

And r in the transcripts, nuclear chemist Paul Hartek is close -perilously close- to the correct critical mass of Uanium for the Hiroshima bomb.
 

According to Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg, in his 14 August 1945 "lecture" to the assembled German Farm Hall physicists, used a tone and phrasing that indicated that "he has only just now understood the solution" to a small critical mass for the bomb, since "others" reported a critical mass of about 4 kg.

- Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb project: A Study in German Culture" [Berkeley: 1998],

This too only deepens the mystery. For Rose, an adherent of the Legend -though now in its highly modified post-Farm Hall declassification mode- the "others" could be the Allied press reports themselves.

Thomas Powers, "Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb" (1993), notes of Heisenberg's lecture that "this was something of a scientific tour de force - to come up with a working theory of bomb design in so short a time, after years of laboring under fundamental misconceptions."

Samuel Goudsmit, used the transcripts to construct his version of the Allied Legend:

"That the German scientists were at odds with one another, that they didn't understand bomb physics, and that they concocted a false story of moral scruples to explain their scientific failures...."

The sources of Goudsmit's conclusions are all obvious in the transcripts, but what leaps out at the reader now are the many statements which Goudsmit failed to notice, forgot, or deliberately overlooked.

In the years immediately after the war, Samuel Goudsmit explained the whole mystery, alone with many others, as being simply due to the Allies having been "better" nuclear scientists and engineers than the very Germans who had invented the whole discipline of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.

In conjunction with Heisenberg's own sell-evidently clumsy attempts to construct a functioning reactor, served well enough until the transcripts were declassified.

With the appearance of the transcripts and their stunning revelations of Heisenberg's actual knowledge of atomic bomb design, and some of the other scientists' clear understanding of the means to enrich enough weapons grade Uranium without having to have a functioning reactor, the Legend had to be "touched up" a bit.

Thomas Powers' "Heisenberg's War" appeared, arguing somewhat persuasively that Heisenberg had actually sabotaged the German bomb program.

Almost as soon as it appeared, Lawrence Rose countered with "Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project", arguing even more persuasively that Heisenberg had remained a loyal German and had not sabotaged anything, but that he simply labored under massive misconceptions of the nature of nuclear fission, and consequently over-calculated the critical mass needed to make a bomb during the war.

The Germans never obtained the bomb, so the new version goes, because they never had a functioning reactor by which to enrich Uranium to Plutonium to make a bomb.

Besides, having grossly overestimated the critical mass, they had no real impetus to pursue it. Simple enough, case closed once again.

Neither Powers' nor Rose's books really go to the heart of the mystery, for the Legend still requires the belief that "brilliant nuclear physicists including Nobel prize winners before the war, apparently struck by some strange malady which turned them into incompetent bunglers during the...War",were suddenly and quite inexplicably cured of the malady within a few days of the bombing of Hiroshima.

 - Philip Henshall, "The Nuclear Axis: Germany, Japan, and the Atom Bomb Race 1939-45", 'Introduction' 

Moreover, two such widely diverging contemporary interpretations of the same material  only highlights the ambiguity of their contents in general, and Heisenberg's knowledge - or lack of it - in particular.

Matters are not helped by events on the other side of the world in the Pacific theater, for there American investigators would uncover similarly strange goings on after the war ended.

There, after Nagasaki, the Emperor Hirohito, overriding his ministers who wanted to continue the war, decided that Japan would surrender unconditionally.

But why would Hirohito's ministers urge continuance of the war in the face of overwhelming Allied conventional arms superiority, and, from their point of view, facing a potential rain of atomic bombs? After all, "two" bombs could just as easily have turned into twenty.

One could, of course, attribute the ministers' objections to the Emperor's intentions to "proud Samurai traditions" and the Japanese sense of "honor" and so on. And that would indeed be a plausible explanation.

But another explanation is that Hirohito's cabinet ministers knew something. 

What his ministers probably knew was what American Intelligence would soon discover: that the Japanese, "just prior to their surrender, had developed and successfully test fired an atomic bomb. The project had been housed in or near Konan [(Japanese name for Hungnam], Korea, in the peninsula's North".

- Robert K. Wilcox, "Japan's Secret War"

It was exploded, so the story goes, one day after the American Plutonium bomb, "Fat Man", exploded over Nagasaki, i.e., on 10 August 1945.

The war, in other words, depending on Hirohito's decision, could have "gone nuclear".

By that time, of course it would have done Japan no good to prolong it, with no viable means of delivery of an atomic weapon to any worthwhile strategic American targets.

The Emperor stood his ministers down.

 

The Japanese were, in fact, developing large cargo submarines to transport a bomb to West Coast American port cities to be detonated there, much like Einstein warned in his famous letter to President Roosevelt that initiated the Manhattan Project. Of course, Einstein was more worried about the Germans using such a method of ship-born delivery, than the Japanese.

These allegations constitute yet another difficulty for the Allied Legend, for where did Japan obtain the necessary Uranium for its [alleged] A-bomb?

And more importantly, the technology to enrich it? Where did it build and assemble such a weapon? Who was responsible for its development?

Yet even now, we have only begun to penetrate into the heart of this "badly written finale."

There are also the "odd little, and little known, details" to consider.

Why, for example, in 1944, did a lone Junkers 390 Bomber, a massive six engine heavy-lift ultra long-range transport aircraft capable of round trip inter-continental flight from Europe to North America, fly to within less than twenty miles of New York City, photograph the skyline of Manhattan, and return to Europe?

- Nick Cook, op. cit., Henshall, op. cit.

Germany launched several such top secret long-distance flights during the war, using these and other heavy-lift ultra-long range aircraft.

But what was their purpose, and more importantly, the purpose of this unique flight? [Italy, as well, launched long-range air missions to Japan] That such a flight was extremely risky goes without saying.

What were the Germans up to with this enormous aircraft, and why would they even risk such an operation just to take pictures, when they only ever had two of these enormous six engine monsters available?

Finally, and to round out the Legend, there are the odd details of the German surrender and the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals.

Why does former Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, mass murderer and one of human history's most notorious criminals, try to negotiate a surrender to the Western Allies?

Of course, one can dismiss this as delusion, and Himmler was certainly delusional. But what could he possibly have thought he had to offer the Allies in return for a surrender to the West, and the sparing of his own wretched life?
 

What of the strangeness around the Nuremberg Tribunals themselves?

The Legend is well known:

Obvious war criminals like

• Reichmarschall Hermann Göring,
• Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel
• Army Chief of Operations Staff Colonel-General Alfred Jodl

are sent swinging from the gallows, or, in Göring's case, cheating the hangman by swallowing cyanide.

Other Nazi bigwigs like

• Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, mastermind of Germany's devastating U-Boat campaign against Allied shipping,
• Minister of Armaments Albert Speer
• Finance Minister and Reichsbank President Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht

were imprisoned. 

Missing from the docket of the accused, were the Pennemünde rocket scientists headed by Dr. Wernher von Braun and General Walter Dornberger.

They were already headed to America to take charge of America's ballistic missile and space programs along with a host of scientists, engineers and technicians under the then super secret Project Paperclip.

The best sources on the overall outlines of Operation Paperclip are: 

• Mark Aaron's and John Loftus' "Unholy Trinity: the Vatican, Nazis, and Soviet Intelligence"
• New York: St Martin's Press. 1991,
• Christopher Simpson's "Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War"
• New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. 1988.

They, like their nuclear physics counterparts in Germany, had seemingly suffered a similar "Bungler's Malady":

Having produced the first successful V-1 and V-2 prototypes  early in the war, they suffered a similar lack of inspiration and ingenuity and [so the Legend goes] managed to produce only "paper rockets" and theoretical study projects after that. 

But perhaps most significantly, by joint agreement of the Allied and Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg, missing from evidence in the tribunal was the vast amount of documentary evidence implicating the Nazi regime in occult belief systems and practice, a fact that has given rise to a whole "mythology.

It has never been adequately explored in connection with its possible influence on the development of German secret weapons during the war.

• Jean-Michel Angebert, "The Occult and the Third Reich" [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974]
• Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, "The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology" [[New York: New York University Press. 1992] 
• Michael Howard, "The Occult Conspiracy: Secret Societies- Their Influence and Power in World History" [Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1989]
• Peter Levenda, "Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi involvement with the Occult" [New York: Avon Books, 1995]
• Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, "The Morning of the Magicians", trans from the French by Rollo Meyers [New York: Stein and Day, 1964];
• Dusty Sklar, "The Nazis and the Occult" [New York: Dorset Press, 1977]
•  James Webb, "The Occult Establishment and The Occult Underground" [LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court.1968].

It should be noted that the SS Ahnenerbedienst did come under the tribunal's scrutiny.

Finally, a curious fact, one of those obvious things that one lends to overlook unless attention is drawn to it 

The atomic bomb test that took place at the Trinity site in New Mexico was a test of America's implosion-Plutonium bomb, a test needed to see if the concept would actually work.

It did, and magnificently.

But what is immensely significant -a fact missing from almost all mainstream literature on the subject since the end of the war is that the Uranium bomb with its apparatus of a cannon shooting the critical mass of Uranium together, the bomb that was actually first used in war, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was never tested. 

As German author Friedrich Georg notes, this tears a rather gaping hole in the Allied Legend:

"Also another question is of great importance:

Why was the Uranium bomb of the USA, unlike the Plutonium bomb, not tested prior to being hurled on Japan?

Militarily this would appear to be extremely dangerous....

Did the Americans simply forget to test it, or did others already do it for them?"

- Friedrich Georg, "Hitlers Siegeswaffen: Band 1: Luftwaffe und Marine: Geheime Nuklearwaffen des Dritten Reiches und ihre Trägersysteme" [Schleusingen: Amun Verlag, 2001]

The Allied Legend accounts for this in various ways, some ingenious, some not so ingenious, but basically they boil down to the assertion that it was never tested because it did not need to be, so confident were Allied engineers that it would work.

So we have been asked to believe, by the post-war Allied spin, that the American military dropped an atomic bomb of untested design, based on concepts of physics that were very new and themselves very untested, on an enemy city, an enemy also known to be working on acquiring the atomic bomb as well!

It is indeed a badly written, truly incredible, finale to the world's most horrendous war.

So, what exactly did the German pilot Hans Zinsser see on that night of October, 1944, as he flew his Heinkel bomber over the twilight skies of northern Germany?

Something that, had he known it, would require the previous badly written Wagnerian libretto to be almost completely revised.

His affidavit is contained in a Military Intelligence report of 19 August 1945, roll number A1007, filmed in 1973 at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.

Zinsser's statement is found on the last page of the report:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections [[at about 7,000 meter altitud] stood, without any seeming connections, over the spot where the explosion took place.

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

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

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

The entire documentation of this report is as follows:

"Investigations, Research, Developments and Practical use of the German Atomic Bomb," [A.P.I.U. (Ninth Air Force) 96/1945 APO 696, U.S. Army, 19 August 1945]. 
The report is classified Secret.

Note that the report begins in no uncertain terms:

The following information was obtained from four German scientists:

A chemist, two physical chemists, and a rocket specialist.

All four men contributed a short story of what they knew of the atomic bomb development. 

Note also the suggestive title of the report

In other words, a German pilot had observed the test of a weapon, having all the signatures of a nuclear bomb:

Electro-magnetic pulse and resulting malfunction of his radio, mushroom cloud, continuing fire and combustion of nuclear material in the cloud and so on.

And all this on territory clearly under German control, in October of 1944, fully eight months before the first American A-bomb test in New Mexico! Note the curious fact that Zinsser maintains that the test took place in a populated area.

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

How did Zinsser know it was a test?

The answer is obvious: Zinsser knew, because he was somehow involved, for clearly the Allies would not have control over a test site deep in Nazi Germany.

Earlier in the same report, there are clues that unravel the mystery: 

14. When Germany was at this stage of the game, the war broke out in Europe.

At first investigations on this disintegrating of 235U [sic] were somewhat neglected because a practical application seemed too far off.

Later, however, this research continued, especially in finding methods of separating isotopes. Needless to say that the center of gravity of Germany's war effort at that time lay in other tasks.

15. Nevertheless the atomic bomb was expected to be ready toward the end of 1944, if it had not been for the effective air attacks on laboratories engaged in this Uranium research, especially on the one in Ryukon in Norway, where heavy water was produced.

It is mainly for this reason that Germany did not succeed in using the atomic bomb in this war.

These two paragraphs are quite revealing for several reasons.

First, what is the source for the assertion that the Germans expected the bomb to be ready in late 1944, well ahead of the Manhattan Project, and a statement in flat contradiction to the post-war Allied spin that the Germans were actually far behind?

Indeed, during the war, Manhattan Project estimates consistently placed the Germans ahead of the Allies, and project chief General Leslie Groves also thought they were. But after the war, everything suddenly changed. Not only was America ahead, but according to the Legend, it had been consistently far ahead throughout the war. 

Zinsser's account raises a disturbing possibility -besides completely contradicting the Allied Legend - and that is, did the Allies learn of a German A-bomb test during the war?

If so, then we may look for certain types of corroborating evidence, for the other statements of the post-war report containing Zinsser's affidavit would seem to indicate that the Allied Legend is already beginning to take tenuous shape.

The Intelligence report talks, for example, only of laboratories being the facilities conducting isotope enrichment and separation research. But mere laboratories would simply be incapable of development of an actual functioning atom bomb. So one component of the Legend emerges in this early report: the German effort was lackadaisical, being confined to laboratories.

Secondly, note the clear assertion that Germany did not succeed in "using the atomic bomb in this war..

The language of the report is very clear. Yet it would also appear to be designed to obfuscate in aid of the then emerging Allied Legend, for the statement does not say that the Germans never tested a bomb, only that they did not use one.

The language of the report is oddly careful, deliberate, and for that reason, all the more thought provoking.

Thirdly, note how much is actually -and inadvertently it would seem- revealed about German atomic bomb research and development, for the statements make it clear that the Germans were after a Uranium based A-bomb.

A Plutonium bomb is never mentioned.

The theory of Plutonium development and the possibility of a Plutonium based A-bomb were clearly known to the Germans, as a Top Secret memorandum to the Heereswaffenamt [Army Ordnance Bureau] in early 1942 makes abundantly clear.

 

This memorandum obviously constitutes another sore spot for the Allied Legend that emerged after the war, namely, that the Germans never knew the correct amount of the critical mass of a Uranium fission bomb, but that it had been grossly overestimated by several orders of magnitude, hence rendering the project "unfeasible" within the span of the war.

The problem of the HWA memorandum is that the Germans had a good ball-park estimate as early as January-February of 1942.

And if they knew it was so small, then the resulting "decision" of the German High Command as to the impracticality of its development becomes immensely problematical.

On the contrary, because of this memorandum -most likely prepared by Dr. Kurt Diebner or Dr. Fritz Houtermans - they knew that the undertaking was not only practical but feasible within the span of the war.

So it is the absence of Plutonium from this report that affords us a first significant clue into what was probably the real nature of German atom bomb research.

It is this absence that explains why the Germans never placed much emphasis on achieving a functioning reactor in order to enrich Uranium to make weapons grade Plutonium for an atom bomb: They did not need to do so, since there were other methods of enriching and separating enough U-235 to weapons grade purity and a stockpile of critical mass.

In a nutshell: the Allied Legend about the German failure to obtain the atom bomb because they never had a functioning reactor is simply utter scientific nonsense, because a reactor is needed only it one wants to produce Plutonium.

It is an unneeded, and expensive, development, if one only wants to make a Uranium A-bomb.

Thus, there is sufficient reason, due to the science of bomb- making and the political and military realities of the war after America's entry, that the Germans took the decision to develop only a Uranium bomb, since that afforded the best, most direct, and technologically least complicated route to acquisition of a bomb.
 

Let us pause a moment to put the indications of the German project in the context of the Manhattan Project taking place in the United States.

With a production capacity larger than Germany's, and an industrial base not being targeted by enemy bombing, the Americans decided to concentrate on development of all available means to production of working atom bombs.

Uranium and Plutonium bombs.

The production of Plutonium could only be achieved in the construction of a functioning reactor.

No reactor, no Plutonium bomb.

The giant Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee was constructed to enrich Uranium to weapons grade by gaseous diffusion and Lawrence's mass spectrometer processes.

It was a facility that at no stage of its operation relied upon a functioning reactor in order to enrich Uranium.

If the Germans were pursuing a similar approach to that employed at Oak Ridge, then  indicators to corroborate it must be found.

First, to enrich Uranium by the same or similar methods as employed in Tennessee, the Reich would have had to build a similarly huge facility, or smaller facilities scattered throughout Germany

The various levels of dangerous Uranium isotope had to be ytanspoted from one point to another as feedstock until the desired level of purity and enrichment was achieved.

The material would then have to be assembled in a bomb, and tested.

So one must first look for a facilities or facilities.

Given the Oak Ridge operation and its massive size, we know exactly what to look for: enormous size, close proximity to water, an adequate transportation infrastructure, enormous electrical power consumption, and finally, two other significant factors: an enormous labor pool, and enormous cost.

Secondly, in order to verify or corroborate Zinsser's astonishing affidavit, we must look for corroborating evidence.

We must look for indications that the Germans had stockpiled enough weapons grade Uranium to constitute a critical mass for an atom bomb.

And then we must hunt for the test site or sites and see if it [or they] bear(s) the signature[s] of an atomic blast.

Fortunately, the information is now slowly coming available with the recent declassification of documents by Great Britain, the United States, the former Soviet Union, and as the archives of the former East Germany are being opened by the German government itself.

This allows us to examine each of these aspects of the problem in a detail not possible until the last few years.

The answers are disturbing, and horrifying. 

"Assertions made by General Groves after the war... were probably designed to divert attention from the German isotope separation program.

"The idea being that if the existence of the German Uranium enrichment program could be hidden, then the cover story could be established that Germany's atomic bomb effort consisted only of failed attempts to create a reactor pile to breed plutonium"

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

Hydrick's research, in his Internet published manuscript, is painstaking and meticulous, and his speculative reconstructions of the detailed history of the war's end merit close attention.

It is earnestly hoped he will eventually publish this important work in book form..

"The men who interrogated Heisenberg and other German scientists, read their reports, and gaped at the primitive reactor vessel in a cave in southern Germany were hard put to explain what had gone wrong.

"Germany had begun the war with every advantage: able scientists, material resources, and the support and interest of the highest military officials.

" How could they have achieved so little?"

- Thomas Powers, "Heisenberg's War" 

These are the basic facts, and the central question, that have plagued every researcher into the subject of German secret weapons research since the end of World War Two.

How indeed could Germany have not obtained the atom bomb?

The thesis of this book, among many others, is radical, namely, that Germany did acquire atomic bombs during the war.

What must be explained, rather, is why Germany apparently did not use this and other dreadful weapons available to her, or, if she did, why we have not heard about it.

But of course, to maintain such a radical thesis, one must argue persuasively that Germany had the bomb to begin with. 

This implies a relatively easy set of corroborative evidence to search for. iff Germany had an Uranium based atom bomb, one must look for the following things:

• A method or methods of separating and enriching Uranium-235 isotope, the necessary isotope for an Uranium atom bomb, to weapons grade quality, and in sufficient quantity to stockpile enough material for the critical mass, without the use of a functioning atomic reactor. 
•  An actual facility or facilities where such technologies are used en masse.This implies in turn

This implies in turn

1. enormous electrical power consumption; 
2. adequate water and transportation supplies; 
3. an enormous labor pool; 
4. a physically large facility or facilities that are relatively shielded from Allied and/or Russian bombing;

• The necessary basic theory for the design of a Uranium bomb; 
• Available and adequate supplies of uranium for use in enrichment; 
• A site or sites to assemble and test the bomb

Fortunately, all these aspects of the investigation afford the researcher several clues, all of which corroborate the existence, at the minimum, of a very large and successful German Uranium refinement and enrichment program during the war.

We begin by looking in a very unlikely spot: Nuremberg. 

At the War Crimes Tribunal after the war, several formerly elegantly attired business executives and senior managers of the huge, enormously powerful, and quite notorious German chemicals cartel, I.G. Farben A.G., had their time in the dock.

They story of this early "global corporation", its bankrolling of the Nazi regime and its central role in its "military-industrial complex", as well as its role in producing the deadly Zyklon-B poison gas for the death camps has been chronicled elsewhere.

•  Joseph Borkin, "The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben" 
• Anthony C. Sutton, "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler"

I.G. Farben had been more than just complicit in Nazi atrocities by its construction of a large Buna, or synthetic rubber, production plant at Auschwitz in the Polish part of Silesia during the war, committing atrocities against the concentration camp victims during its construction and operation.

For Farben, the choice of Auschwitz as the site for the Buna plant was logical, and made for "sound business reasons".

The concentration camp nearby the site selected for the enormous facility guaranteed an endless supply of slave labor for its construction, and, conveniently, when the slaves had exhausted themselves in its secret construction and operation, they could be permanently "laid off".

Farben director Carl Krauch assigned one of its top Buna synthetic rubber experts, Otto Ambros, to investigate the sites for the proposed plant and make a recommendation.

The site eventually selected -Auschwitz- was "particularly suited for the installation" over a competing site in Norway for very important reason:

A coal mine was nearby and three rivers converged to provide a vital requirement, a large source of water.

Together with these three rivers, the Reich railroad and Autobahn afforded excellent transportation to and from the area.

These were not decisive advantages, however, over the Norwegian site.

The Silesian location had one advantage that was overwhelming: the S.S. had plans to expand enormously a concentration camp nearby.

The promise of an inexhaustible supply of slave labor was an attraction that could not be resisted.

The selection having been approved by the Farben board, Krauch then wrote a top secret letter to Ambros:

"In the new arrangement of priority stages ordered by Field Marshal Keitel, your building project has first priority....

"At my request, (Goring) issued special decrees a few days ago to the supreme Reich authorities concerned....

"In these decrees, the Reich Marshal obligated the offices concerned to meet your requirements in skilled workers and laborers at once, even at the expense of other important building projects or plans which are essential to the war economy"].

 

With the Wehrmacht poised to blast its way into Russia soon, and sensing enormous profits to be made in the effort, the Farben directors decided to finance the enormous plant privately, rather than in concert with the Nazi regime.

It ear-marked 900,000,000 Reichsmarks -$250,000,000 in 1945 dollars or over $2 billion in contemporary dollars- to the project.

It was to be the Buna plant to dwarf all other Buna plants. 

As the testimony at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal unfolded, the Auschwitz Buna factory emerged as one of the big mysteries of the war,.

In spite of the enormous sum of money set aside for its constructio,, and an endless supply of skilled company workers and of slave labor from Auschwitz,the project was continually disrupted by shortages, breakdowns, and delays....

Some malign influence seemed to be affecting the entire operation to such an extent that Farben appeared to be faced with the first failure in its long corporate history of technological success.

Disaster notwithstanding, the huge Bunar and gasoline plants were completed.

300,000 concentration camp workers had passed through the corporations construction mills; 25,000 of these inmates were simply and cruelly worked to death from exhaustion.

The plants themselves were nothing less than gigantic.

So gigantic, in fact, that they used more electricity than the entire city of Berlin.

During the war crimes tribunals, however, it was not this gruesome catalogue of facts about the plant that puzzled the Allied prosecutors.

What puzzled them was that, in spite of such an enormous investment of lives, money, and material, "not a single pound of Buna was ever produced".

 The Farben directors and managers in the docks were almost obsessively insistent on this point.

More electricity than the entire city of Berlin -the eighth largest in the world at that time  to produce absolutely nothing? 

If this was true, then the enormous outlay of capital and labor and the huge electrical consumption contributed nothing significant to the German war effort whatsoever.

Needless to say, there is something very wrong with this picture.

None of it made sense then, none of it makes sense now, unless of course the plant was not a Buna plant at all...

The facility has all of the characteristics of an Uranium enrichment plant....the various components of the German atomic bomb efforts could have been implemented with a high degree of secrecy, even from other high-level Nazis.

Bormann had  close-knit relationships with Wilhelm Ohnesorge; Hermann Schmitz, who was chief of I.G. Farben; Rudolf  Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz; and Heinrich Müller, who, among his many other duties as head of the Gestapo, oversaw the supplying of forced laborers to Auschwitz.

"A theory has been offered that, late in the war, certain Nazis arranged the transfer of enriched "Uranium to the United States in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

"At the heart of this transfer theory lies the saga of a Nazi submarine - the U-234".

 -- -Carter P. Hydick, op. cit.

When I.G. Farben began its construction of the "Buna" plant at Auschwitz, one of the more unusual events to being the process was the removal of over 10,000 Polish inhabitants from their homes to make way for the thousands of German scientists, technicians, contract works and their families who were moved into the area.

The parallel with the Manhattan Project in this respect is obvious.

It is simply unbelievable in the extreme that, with such a technical and scientific effort on the part of the corporation with the most successful track record in advanced technologies and production facilities, and a plant consuming more electricity than Berlin, that nothing whatsoever was ever accomplished or produced.

One contemporary researcher who is also mystified by the whole "Buna plant affair" is Carter P. Hydrick.

Contacting Ed Landry, an expert in the field of synthetic rubber production from Houston, Texas, and informing him of the I.G. Farben plant, its huge electrical consumption, and the directors' claims that it produced no Buna at all, Landry responded: "That was not a rubber plant - you can bet your bottom dollar on that".

Landry simply does not believe the primary purpose of the "Buna plant" was the production of synthetic rubber at all. 

How then to account for the enormous electrical consumption and post-war insistence of Farben directors that the plant never produced any synthetic rubber at all?

What other technology would require such enormous electrical power consumption, such an enormous technical and unskilled labor staff, and such close proximity to plentiful water supplies? At that time, there was only one other technological process that could conceivably require all these things.

Hydrick puts the case this way:

"Certainly there is something wrong with this picture.

"A compilation of the three central and readily known facts just outlined -electrical consumption, construction costs, and I.G. Farben's previous record- does not readily form a picture that a Buna processing plant was the type of project being constructed at Auschwitz.

Such a compilation does sketch a picture, however, of another important wartime production process, though secret at the time. The process is uranium enrichment". [Ibid]

So why call it a Buna plant?

And why protest so vociferously to the Allied prosecutors that the plant never produced any Buna at all?

One answer is that with so much labor being provided by the slave labor from the SS concentration camp nearby, the plant fell under SS security jurisdiction, and an effective "cover" would therefore been at the head of the list of Farben's and the SS' concerns.

In the unlikely event, for example, of an escape by one or more inmates, the "Buna" plant would have offered a plausible cover story should the Allies ever learn of it.

Since isotope separation would have been such a secret and costly process, it becomes hard to imagine the so-called Buna installation being anything but a cover for a Uranium enrichment facility. 

 The "Buna plant" became the cover story to explain the construction to the laborers -in the event that explanations were offered at all- and to the Farben company contract employees who were "out of the loop."

In this respect, the delays in its construction and the difficulties Farben encountered are also best explained by its being a huge isotope separation facility, not unlike those the Manhattan Project encountered when constructing its own similarly sized plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Shortages, delays and technical difficulties dogged the project from its inception, and like its American counterpart, these delays were experienced in spite of its enjoying a similarly privileged position in the hierarchy of Nazi priorities as Oak Ridge.

So the strange assertions and behavior of the Farben directors on trial after the war begins to make sense.

Faced already with an emerging "Allied Legend" about German incompetence in nuclear matters, the Farben directors and managers were perhaps trying in a subtle way to "set the record straight" in the only way that would not overtly challenge that Legend.

They were attempting, perhaps, to provide a clue as to the real nature and achievements of the German bomb program that would only be noticed over time and with careful scrutiny.

The selection of the site -near the concentration camp at Auschwitz and its hundreds of thousands of hapless victims- also makes strategic, if not gruesome, sense.

Much like dictators of more recent times, it would appear that the Nazi regime had placed the facility near the camp in a deliberate attempt to use "human shields" to protect the facility from Allied bombing.

If so, the decision was a correct one, as no Allied bombs ever fell on Auschwitz. The plant was dismantled only in the face of the approaching Russian armies in 1944. 

To establish that the "Buna plant" was most likely an isotope separation facility, however, requires that one prove the Germans possessed the technological means for isotope separation.

Additionally, if such technology was employed at the "Buna plant", then it implies that there was more than one atom bomb project in Germany, for the "Heisenberg" wing of the project, and all the subsequent debates that surround it, are well known.

So in addition to ascertaining whether or not Germany possessed the technology to separate isotopes, one must also attempt a broad reconstruction of the actual outlines and relationships of the various German atom bomb projects.

By stating the problem in this fashion, one is again confronted by the post-war Allied Legend:

"In the traditional history of the bomb, Manhattan project chief General Leslie Groves has positioned the German Plutonium effort as the only nuclear initiative Germany ever pursued.

"And he has magnified this misinformation, couched in a cushion of half-truths, to immense proportions -large enough to hide what appears to be a huge German Uranium enrichment project behind it- and thus he has shielded the Nazi near-success from the view of the world.

 -Hydrick, op. cit.

Hydrick himself does not appear ready to go all the way and acknowledge that the Germans actually successfully tested an atom bomb before its American Manhattan project counterpart produced and tested one.

Did Germany have isotope enrichment technology available?

And could it have employed that technology in sufficient quantity to make significant amounts of enriched Uranium available for a bomb program?

There can be no doubt that Germany certainly had a sufficient supply of Uranium ore, for the region of the Sudetenland -annexed by Germany after the infamous Munich conference in 1938- is a region known for its rich deposits of some of the highest grade Uranium ore in the world.

he region, coincidentally, lies close to the "Three Corners" region of Thuringia in south central Germany, and therefore close to Silesia and its various installationse.

so, Farben directors may have had another reason for choosing Auschwitz as the site for an enrichment facility.

Auschwitz was close not only to water, an adequate transportation network, and abundant labor.

It was conveniently close to the Uranium fields of the German-Czech Sudentenland.

These facts raise a speculative possibility.

It is well-known that the announcement by nuclear chemist Otto Hahn of his discovery of nuclear fission did not occur until after the Munich conference and the surrender of the Sudetenland to the Third Reich by Chamberlain and Daladier.

But might the reality have been something different? Might, in fact, the discovery of fission have taken place before the conference, and its results withheld by the Reich until after Europe's only Uranium supply was firmly in Nazi hands?

It is perhaps signficant that Adolf Hitler was prepared to go to war over the matter.

In any case, before investigating the question of the technology available to the Germans, we must first answer the question of why they apparently concentrated almost exclusively on obtaining a Uranium atom bomb in their program.

After all, the American Manhattan Project had elected to pursue both an Uranium and a Pllutonium bomb.

The theoretical possibility of Plutonium bombs -"element 94" as it was officially called in German documents of the period- was certainly known to the Nazis.

And, as the early 1942 memorandum to the Heereswaffenamt also makes clear, the Germans also knew that this element could only be synthesized in an atomic reactor.

So why did they apparently concentrate only on an Uranium bomb and isotope separation and enrichment almost exclusively?

With the destruction of the Norwegian heavy water plant at Ryukon in 1942 by Allied commandos, and German failures in obtaining sufficient purity of graphite for use as a moderator in a reactor, the only other moderator available to them -heavy water- was now in critically short supply.

Thus, according to the Legend, a functioning reactor leading to a critical mass supply of "element 94" was not feasible to them in the projected span of the war.

The German failures with graphite moderated reactors were already a matter of record, and it was obvious to them that there were significant technological and engineering hurdles to be surmounted before a reactor came into production.

On the other hand, the Germans already had the necessary technology to enrich U-235 for a bomb.

Thus Uranium enrichment constituted the best, direct, and technologically feasible route to the acquisition of a bomb within the expected span of the war for the Germans. 

American progress with the Plutonium bomb, from the moment Fermi completed and tested a functioning reactor successfully, appeared to be running fairly smoothly,

Fairly late in the war, it was discovered that in order to make a Plutonium bomb, the critical mass would have to be assembled much faster than any existing Allied fuse technologies could accomplish.

T there was so little margin of error, since the fuses in an implosion device would have to fire as close to simultaneously as possible, that Allied engineers began to despair of making a Plutonium bomb work.

Thus one is confronted with an interesting scientific picture, one directly in contradiction to the traditional history of the bomb.

If the Germans had a successful large scale Uranium enrichment project running ca. 1941-1944, devoted almost exclusively on acquiring a Uranium atom bomb, at the same time Allied engineers were coming to realize the problems inherent in Plutonium bomb design, then it means, that the Germans had not wasted time or effort on what is admittedly a more difficult task.

This fact gives rise to serious doubts about the state of "success" of the Manhattan Project in late 1944 and early 1945.

So what were the actual technologies available to Nazi Germany for isotope enrichment and separation, and how did it compare to similar technologies employed at Oak Ridge for efficiency and output?

Difficult as it seems to accept, the fact of the matter is that Nazi Germany had "at least five, and possibly as many as seven, serious isotope separation development programs underway.

One of these, an "isotope sluice" developed by Drs. Bagge and Korsching, two of the scientists interred at Farm Hall, was brought to such a state of efficiency by mid-1944 that a single pass of Uranium through it would enrich it to four times that produced by a single pass through the gaseous diffusion gates at Oak Ridge.

Contrast this with the end-of-war difficulties being faced by the Manhattan Project.

Even with the enormous gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, stocks of fissionable Uranium were still woefully short of critical mass requirements as late as March 1945.

Passes through the Oak Ridge facility would enrich Uranium from approximately a .7 percent concentration in around 10-12 percent, and thus the decision was taken to use the Oak Ridge production as feedstock for Earnest O. Lawrence's far more efficient and effective "beta calutrons," which were essentially a cyclotron with separation tanks, using electro-magnetic means to enrich and separate isotope via mass spectrography.

onsequently, one may assume that if a similar quantity of Bagge and Korsching's "isotope sluices" were used en masse, the result would have been a more rapid build-up of enriched uranium feedstock. Similarly, the more efficient German technology may also have allowed for relatively smaller separation facilities.

Good as it was, however, the isotope sluice was not Germany's most efficient or technologically advanced means of Uranium enrichment. This was the centrifuge, and its progeny - designed by nuclear chemist Paul Hartek- the ultra-centrifuge.

The same technology was captured by the Soviet Union and further perfected in its own bomb program.

On the post-war German side, such ultra-centrifuges were provided by the Siemens company and other German firms first to South Africa in its own bomb program

- Rogers and Cervenka, "The Nuclear Axis: West Germany and South Africa"

In other words, the technology is not only originally German, but is advanced enough to be employed today.

It should be noted that, as of the mid-1970s, several of the Germans involved in the corporate development of centrifuge enrichment facilities for the Federal Republic [West Germany] had ties to the Third Reich's bomb project, among them Prof. Karl Winnacker, a former member of the I.G. Farben board.

American engineers, of course, knew of this possibility, but there was a significant drawback they had to face: the highly corrosive Uranium gases used in this technology made it unfeasible to rely on centrifuges as a means of enrichment. On the German side, however, this was a solved problem. A special alloy called Bondur was developed precisely for use in centrifuges. But even centrifuge technology was not, however, the best available method the Germans had. 

Baron Manfred von Ardenne, a rich eccentric and self-taught nuclear physicist and inventor, and his close associate, physicist Fritz Houtermanns, both correctly calculated the critical mass for a U-235 atom bomb in 1941,

With funds from Dr. Ing. Wilhelm Ohnesorge's money-rich Deutsche Reichspost, they constructed a huge underground laboratory in his baronial manor in Lichterfelde, outside eastern Berlin.

This laboratory included a 2,000,000 volt electrostatic generator and the only other cyclotron known to exist in the Third Reich besides that of the Curies in France.

It is the only cyclotron acknowledged by the post-war Allied Legend. 

There is now evidence of at least three different, and seemingly separate, technological efforts:

(1) The Heisenberg-Army program, centered around Heisenberg himself and various associates at the Kaiser Wilhelm and Max Planck institutes, a purely "small laboratory" effort concentrating, or rather, dibbling and dabbling in the construction of a reactor.

This is the "program" the Allied Legend focuses on, and the one most people think of when they think of the German atom bomb effort. It is the program deliberately inculcated by that Legend as proof of German nuclear incompetence and bungling; 

It should be noted, however, that the German Army's Ordnance Bureau was in possession of essentially correct estimations of the critical mass for a Uranium bomb in early 1942,

Heisenberg himself after the war suddenly reassumed his commanding position by detailing the construction of the Hiroshima bomb along essentially correct principles, and allegedly from information gleaned only from the BBC.

(2) The I.G. Farben "Buna plant" at Auschwitz, whose relationship to the other programs, and to the SS, is not entirely clear; 
(3) The Bagge-Korsching-von Ardenne-Houtermanns circle, developing an array of advanced separation technologies, and apparently, via von Ardenne, tied somehow to, of all things, the German postal service.

Why the Reichspost?

For one thing, it afforded an effective cover for the program, which, like its American counterpart, appears to have been compartmentalized under a number of government agencies, many having no plausible connection with a large secret weapons research effort.

Secondly, and more significantly, the Reichspost was awash with money, and could therefore have provided some of the massive funding necessary to the project, a true "black budget" operation in every sense.

And finally, the head of the Reichspost was, perhaps not coincidentally, an engineer: Dr. Ing. Wilhem Ohnesorge.

It is, from the German point of view, a logical choice. Even his last name, "Ohnesorge", meaning "without sorrow or regret", is an ironic twist to the story.

The Uranium 235 needed to fuel the Atomic Bomb was separated from the more plentiful Uranium 238 using "Calutrons" at Y-12.

The word "Calutron" comes from CALifornia University CycloTRON to recognize that it was designed by E. O. Lawrence.

The picture shows six of the original "D-Coil" magnets. These magnets were placed on either side of a vacuum chamber where the unique and scarce material was collected. 

What was the method of separation and enrichment developed by von Ardenne and Houtermanns?

Very simply, it was the cyclotron itself.

Von Ardenne had invented a modification of the cyclotron -electro-magnetic separation tanks- very similar to Ernst O. Lawrence's "beta calutrons" in the United States.

It is to be noted, however, that von Ardenne had completed his modifications in April of 1942; General Groves in the Manhattan Project would not have Lawrence's beta calutron at Oak Ridge for fully a year and a half after that.


So efficient, in fact, was von Ardenne's version as a source for emitting particle rays, that to this day it is known as "the Ardenne source".

Von Ardenne himself is a mysterious figure, for after the war he was one of the few German scientists to deliberately opt to cooperate with the Soviet Union rather than the Western Allies.

His contribution to the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb in 1949 was to earn him the "Stalin Price" in 1955, the Soviet equivalent to the Nobel Prize. He was the only non-Russian and non-Soviet ever to win the prize.

In any case, von Ardenne's work, plus that of the other German scientists working on separation and enrichment -Bagge, Korsching, Harteck and Houtermanns- indicates one thing: that there was a sound and solid basis Allied wartime estimations of German progress and capabilities, for they were, in mid-1942, running a dead heat with the Manhattan Project, and were not "far behind" as the post-war Allied Legend would subsequently have us believe.

So what is the likely scenario, as it has emerged thus far? What conclusions may be drawn?

There were several German bomb and enrichment projects, compartmentalized to maintain security, perhaps being coordinated by some as yet or hitherto unknown entity.

In any case, it appears that one such serious program was at least nominally being co-ordinated by the Deutsche Reichspost under its chief, Dr. Ing. Wilhelm Ohnesorge; 

The most significant enrichment and separation projects were not being conducted by Heisenberg or his circle, or for that matter, by any of the more "high profile" German scientists, save perhaps Harteck and Diebner.

This suggests that perhaps the more famous scientists were being used as "fronts" and being kept out of the loop of the most serious and significant technological achievements as a matter of security.

Had they been involved in such efforts and then subsequently kidnapped or assassinated by the Allies -a thought that certainly occurred to the OSS- the the German program would have been severely crippled and exposed;

At least three German technologies were arguably more efficient and technologically advanced than their American counterparts:

• Bagge and Korsching's "isotope sluice"; 
• Harteck's centrifuges and ultra-centrifuges; 
• Von Ardenne's modified cyclotrons, the "Ardenne source"

At least one known facility was large enough in terms of its physical size, labor requirements, and electrical consumption, to have conceivably been used as a large separation facility, the I.G. Farben "Buna plant" at Auschwitz. The case is strong because:

• No Buna was ever produced there in spite of thousands of scientists, technicians, engineers, contract and slave laborers working there; 
• The site was close to the Uranium ore fields of the Czech and German Sudentenland, being located in Polish Silesia; 
• The site was close to plentiful water supplies, also needed in isotope enrichment; 
• It was close to rail and road networks; 
• It was close to plentiful [slave] labor; 
• It was close to several large underground secret weapons production and research facilities in lower Silesia, and was close to one of the two alleged test sites of German atom bomb tests during the war

It may be assumed, in addition to the "Buna factory", that the Germans constructed smaller facilities in the area for separation and enrichment of isotope, using the Buna plant's production as feedstock for these other facilities.

Powers also mentions another problematical fact concerning the Clusius-Dickel method of thermal diffusion:

"One pound of U-235 was not a daunting figure, and Frisch calculated that 1,000,000 Clusius-Dickel tubes for thermal diffusion of Uranium isotopes could produce it in a matter of weeks.

"Such a large industrial effort would not be cheap, but the two men concluded, 'Even if this plant costs as much as a battleship, it would be worth having....'

Von Ardenne's close associate and theoretical mentor, Dr. Fritz Houtermanns' specialty was thermonuclear fusion, indeed as an astro-physicist, he had staked his claim to fame in physics by describing precisely the type of nuclear process at work in stars.

Interestingly enough, there does exist, from 1938, an Austrian patent for a device known as a "Molecular Bomb," a bomb that upon examination is an early version of a hydrogen bomb.

Atomic bombs, of course, supply the necessary heat to get hydrogen atoms to collide and produce the much more enormous and terrible energies of thermonuclear hydrogen fusion bombs.

Of all the German scientists working on the atom bomb, Manfred von Ardenne was the one nuclear scientist that Adolf Hitler most often went personally to visit. 

Rose notes that von Ardenne had written him and stated that he had never tried to persuade the Nazis to develop his process and employ it in large quantities.

He then notes that the Siemens company did not develop it.

This would appear to be pure obfuscation on von Ardenne's part, for it was not Siemens, but I.G. Farben, that had developed the processes and employed them in large amounts at Auschwitz.

In any case, all the evidence points to the conclusion that there was a large, very well-funded, and very secret German isotope enrichment program during the war, a program successfully disguised during the war by the Nazis, and covered-up after war by the Allied Legend.

But this too raises its own questions.

How close was that program to acquiring sufficient stocks of weapons grade Uranium to make a bomb [or bombs].

And secondly, why did the Allies after the war go to such stupendous lengths to cover it up?

 

 

A tantalizing indication of further mysteries, is a report, declassified by the National Security Agency only in 1978

The report is apparently a decoded intercept from the Japanese embassy in Stockholm to Tokyo.

It is entitled simply "Reports on the Atom-Splitting Bomb". 

1. This bomb is revolutionary in its results, and it will completely upset all ordinary precepts of warfare hitherto established.

I am sending you, in one group, all those reports on what is called the atom-splitting bomb:

It is a fact that in June of 1943 the German Army tried out an utterly new type of weapon against the Russians at a location 150 kilometers southeast of Kursk.

Although it was the entire 19th Infantry Regiment of the Russians which was thus attacked, only a few bombs [each round up to 5 kilograms] sufficed to utterly wipe them out to the last man.

Part 2. The following is according to a statement by Lieutenant-Colonel UE [(?] I KENJI, advisor to the attaché in Hungary and formerly [?on duty?] in this country, who by chance saw the actual scene immediately after the above took place:

"All the men and the horses [(?within the area of?] the explosion of the shells were charred black and even their ammunition had all been detonated."

Moreover, it is a fact that the same type of war material was tried out in the Crimea, too.

At that time the Russians claimed that this was poison-gas, and protested that if Germany were ever again to use it, Russia, too, would use poison-gas.

Part 3. There is also the fact that recently in London - in the period between October and the 15th of November - the loss of life and the damage to business buildings through fires of unknown origin was great. It is clear, judging especially by the articles about a new weapon of this type, which have appeared from time to time recently in British and American magazines - that even our enemy has already begun to study this type.

To generalize on the basis of all these reports: I am convinced that the most important technical advance in the present great war is in the realization of the atom-splitting bomb. Therefore, the central authorities are planning, through research on this type of weapon, to speed up the matter of rendering the weapon practical. And for my part, I am convinced of the necessity for taking urgent steps to effect this end.

Part 4. The following are the facts I have learned regarding its technical data:

Recently the British authorities warned their people of the possibility that they might undergo attacks by German atom-splitting bombs. 

The American military authorities have likewise warned that the American east coast might be the area chosen for a blind attack by some sort of flying bomb.

It was called the German V-3.

To be specific, this device is based on the principle of the explosion of the nuclei of the atoms in heavy hydrogen derived from heavy water. Germany has a large plant [?for this?] in the vicinity of Rjukan, Norway, which has from time to time been bombed by English planes.) Naturally, there have been plenty of examples even before this of successful attempts at smashing individual atoms. However,

Part 5. As far as the demonstration of any practical results is concerned, they seem not to have been able to split large numbers of atoms in a single group. That is, they require for the splitting of each single atom a force that will disintegrate the electron orbit.

On the other hand, the stuff that the Germans are using has, apparently, a very much greater specific gravity than anything heretofore used. In this connection, allusions have been made to SIRIUS and stars of the "White Dwarf" group. [Their specific gravity is (?6?) 1 thousand, and the weight of one cubic inch is 1 ton].

In general, atoms cannot be compressed into the nuclear density. However, the terrific pressures and extremes of temperature in the "White Dwarfs" cause the bursting of the atoms; and

Part 6. There are, moreover, radiations from the exterior of these stars composed of what is left of the atoms which are only the nuclei, very small in volume.

According to the English newspaper accounts, the German atom- splitting device is the NEUMAN disintegrator. Enormous energy is directed into the central part of the atom and this generates at atomic pressure of several tons of thousands of tons [sic] per square inch.

This device can split the relatively unstable atoms of such elements as uranium. Moreover, it brings into being a store of explosive atomic energy.

A-GENSHI HAKAI DAN. That is, a bomb deriving its force from the release of atomic energy.

The end of this amazing intercept then reads "Inter 12 Dec 44 [1,2] Japanese; Rec'd 12 Dec 44; Trans 14 Dec 44 [3020-B]" apparently references to when the message was intercepted by American Intelligence, its original language [Japanese], when the message was received, when it was translated [14 Dec 44], and by whom [3020-B].

- Edgar Mayer and Thomas Mehner, "Hitler und die Bombe" [Rottenburg: Kopp Verlag, 2002], citing "Stockholm to Tokyo, No. 232.9 December 1944 [War Department], National Archives, RG 457, SRA 14628-32, declassified 1 October 1978]. 

The date of this document -after the test allegedly seen by Hans Zinsser and two days before the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge- must have set off alarm bells in the offices of Allied Intelligence personnel both during and after the war.

While it is certainly clear that the Japanese attaché in Stockholm seems to be somewhat confused bout the nature of nuclear fission, a number of startling things stand out in the document:

(1) The Germans were, according to the report, using weapons of mass destruction of some type on the Eastern Front, but had apparently for some reason refrained from using them on the Western Allies;

(a) The areas specifically mentioned were Kursk, in the approximate location of the southern pincer of the German offensive, which took place in July, and not June, of 1943, and the Crimean peninsula
 
(b) The time mentioned was 1943, though since the only major action to have occurred in the Crimea was in 1942 with the massive German artillery bombardment, one must also conclude that the time frame stretched back into 1942;

[At this juncture is it worth pausing to consider briefly the German siege of the Russian fortress of Sevastopol, scene of the most colossal artillery bombardment of the war, as it bears directly on the interpretation of this intercept].

The siege, was led by Colonel-General [later Field Marshal]Erich Von Manstein's 11th Army.

Von Manstein assembled 1,300 artillery pieces -the largest concentration of heavy and super-heavy artillery deployed by any Power during the war- and pounded Sevastopol with this mighty arsenal twenty-four hours a day for five clays.

These were no ordinary heavy field pieces.

Two mortar regiments -the 1st Heavy Mortar Regiment and the 70th Mortar Regiment-as well as the 1st and 4th Mortar Battalions, had been concentrated in front of the fortress under the special command of Colonel Nieman - altogether 21 batteries with 576 barrels, including the batteries of the 1st Heavy Mortar regiment with the 11- and 12 1/2 inch high explosive and incendiary oil shells...

Even these monsters were not the largest pieces deployed at Sevastopol.

Several of the 16 1/2-inch "Big Bertha" Krupp cannon and their old Austrian Skoda counterparts were massed against the Russian positions, along with the even more colossal "Karl" and "Thor" mortars, gigantic self-propelled 24-inch mortars firing shells that weighed over two tons.

But even "Karl" was not quite the last word in gunnery.

That last word was stationed at Bakhchisary, in the "Palace of Gardens" of the ancient residence of the Tartar Khans, and was called "Dora," or occasionally "Heavy Gustav.

 It was the heaviest gun of the last war.

Its caliber was 31 1/2-inches. Sixty railway carriages were needed to transport the parts of the monster. Its 107-foot barrel ejected high-explosive projectiles of 4800 kg - i.e., nearly five tons - over a distance of 29 miles.

Or it could hurl even heavier armor-piercing missiles, weighing seven tons, at targets nearly 24 miles away.

The missile together with its cartridge measured nearly twenty-six feet in length. Erect that would be about the height of a two-story house..

Were they Conventional Rounds, or Fuel-Air Bombs?

These data are sufficient to show that here the conventional gun had been enlarged to gigantic, almost super-dimensional scale - indeed, to a point where one might question the economic return obtained from such a weapon. Yet one single round from "Dora" destroyed an ammunition dump in Severnaya Bay at Sevastopol although it was situated 100 feet below ground.

So horrendous was the bombardment from this massed heavy and super-heavy artillery that the German General Staff estimated that over 500 rounds fell on Russian positions per second during the five days' artillery and aerial bombardment; a massive expenditure of ammunition.

The rain of steel on the Russian positions pulverized Russian morale and was often so thunderous that eardrums burst.

At the end of the battle, the city and environs of Sevastopol were ruined, two entire Soviet armies had been obliterated, and over 90,000 prisoners were taken..

-- Paul Carrell, "Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943" [Ballantine Books, 1971] 

Why are these details significant? First, note the reference to "incendiary oil shells."

These shells are the indication that unusual weaponry was deployed by the Germans at Sevastopol and delivered through conventional -though quite large- artillery pieces.

The German Army did possess such shells and deployed the frequently and with no little effectiveness on the Eastern Front.

Might there have been an even more fearsome weapon?

There is a evidence that the Germans indeed developed an early version of a modern "fuel-air" bomb, a conventional explosive with the explosive power of a tactical nuclear weapon.

Given the great weight of such projectiles, and the German lack of sufficient heavy-lift aircraft to deliver them, it is possible if not likely that super-heavy artillery was used to deploy them.

This would also explain another curiosity in the Japanese military attaché's statement: The Germans apparently did not deploy weapons of mass destruction against cities, but only against military targets that would have been within the range of such weapons. 

(1) The Germans may have been seriously pursuing the hydrogen bomb, since reactions of the nuclei of heavy water atoms -containing deuterium and tritium- are essential in thermo-nuclear fusion reactions.

This point is highlighted by the Japanese delegate [though he confuses these reactions with fission reactions of atom bomb], and corroborated by Fritz Houtermans' pre-war work in the thermo-nuclear fusion process at work in stars.

(2) The enormous temperatures of atom bombs are used as detonators in conventional hydrogen bombs; 
(3) In desperation the Russians appeal to have been ready to resort to the use of poison gas against the Germans if they did not "cease and desist"; 
(4) The Russians believe the weapons to have been "poison gas" of some sort, either a cover story put out by the Russians, or a result of field reports being made by Russian Soldiers who were ignorant of the type of weapon deployed against them;

The detail of "charred bodies" and exploded ammunition certainly point to non-conventional weaponry.

A fuel-air device would at least account for the charring.

he tremendous heat produced by such a bomb could also conceivably detonate ammunition.

Likewise, radioactive burns with its characteristic blistering effects might well have been misunderstood by Russian field Soldiers and officers, who would most likely not have been familiar with nuclear energy, as the effects of poison gas.

and finally, and most sensationally,

(5) According to the Japanese cable, the Germans appeared to have gained their specialized knowledge via some connection to the star system of Sirius and that knowledge involved some exotic form of very dense matter, a statement that strains credulity even today.

It is this last point that directs our attention to the most fantastic and arcane recesses of wartime German secret weapons research, for if the allegation has even a partial basis in truth, then it indicates that at some highly secret level, physics, and the esoteric, were being pursued by the Nazi regime in some very extraordinary ways.

[To anyone familiar with the wealth of material on alternative research into the Giza compound in Egypt, the reference to Sirius will immediately conjure images of Egyptian religion, its preoccupation with death, with the Osiris myth, and to the Sirian star system].

In this regard it is important to note that the extreme density of the material described by the Japanese envoy resembles nothing so much as a construct of modern post-war theoretical physics called "dark matter".

In all likelihood his report greatly overestimates the mass of this material -if it existed at all- but nonetheless it is crucial to observe that it is material far beyond the ordinary density of matter.

Strangely, the German-Sirian connection pops up again, long alter the war, in an unusual context. 

The research of Robert Temple into the mysterious African Dogon tribe, revealed a tribe of primitive peoples that nonetheless appears to have preserved an accurate knowledge of the Sirian star system for many generations, from a period long before modern astronomy knew anything about it. 

Temple also alleges that Baron Jesco von Puttkamer wrote him a denunciatory letter on NASA stationary, only later to retract that, stating that it did not represent an official NASA position.

Temple believes that Puttkamer was one of the Germans brought to the USA during Operation Paper Clip in the days immediately following the Nazi surrender.

Karl Jesco von Puttkamer was no ordinary German, being a member of Adolf Hitler's military staff throughout the war as his naval adjutan, beginning the war with the rank of captain and ending with the rank of Admiral. Puttkamer was subsequently employed by NASA.

Tthe investigation of the German atom bomb, via this recently declassified Japanese cable, has already led  into a realm of frightening potentialities, into a world of fuel-air bombs, gigantic artillery delivery systems, super-dense matter, the hydrogen bomb, and what seems to be a curious blend of mystical esotericism and Egyptology, and physics.

Was there a German A-bomb?

In the above context, the question seems almost plain and ordinary.

If so, then given the extra-ordinary reports that leaked out from time to time from the Eastern Front, what other even more secret research lay behind their atom bomb projects, for evidently such research was there.

But exotic super dense matter or not, according to some versions of the Allied Legend, the Germans never had enough fissile weapons grade Uranium to begin with. 

The traditional history denies, however, that the Uranium on board U-234 was enriched and therefore easily usable in an atomic bomb.

The accepted theory asserts there is no evidence that the Uranium stocks of U-234 were transferred into the Manhattan Project...

And the traditional history asserts that the bomb components on board the U-234 arrived too late to be included in the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan.

The documentation indicates quite differently on all accounts.

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

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

"A study of the shipment of [bomb grade Uranium] for the past three months shows the following:

At present rate we will have 10 kilos about 7 February  and 15 kilos about 1 May." [Ibid]

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

One may imagine the consternation this memo must have caused at headquarters.

The was, perhaps, a considerable degree of yelling and screaming and finger pointing and other histrionics, interlarded with desperate orders to re-double efforts amid the fire-tinged skies of the war's Wagnerian Götterdämmerung. 

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

It originates within the Manhattan Project on 28 December 1944, from Eric Jette, the chief metallurgist at Los Alamos.

One may imagine the desperation it must have triggered, however, since the Manhattan Project had consumed two billion dollars all in the pursuit of Plutonium and Uranium atom bombs.

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

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

Yet, after a veritable hemorrhage of dollars in pursuit of the latter objective, the Manhattan Project was far short of the necessary critical mass for an Uranium bomb.

And with the inevitability of an invasion of Japan looming, the pressure on General Leslie Groves to produce results was immense.

The lack of a sufficient stockpile, after years of concentrated all-out effort, was in part explainable, for two years earlier Fermi had been successful in construction of the first functioning atomic reactor.

That success had spurred the American project to commit more seriously to the pursuit of a Plutonium bomb.

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

Thus, some of the fissionable Uranium stockpile had been deliberately diverted for Plutonium production. [Hydrick, op. cit.]

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

The reason is simple.

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

But in December of 1944, having pursued both options, General Leslie Groves now stood on the verge of losing both gambles.

And let us not forget what had just happened in Europe to sour the mood of "those in the know" in the United States even further.

There, six months after the Allied landings in Normandy and the headlong dash across France, Allied armies had stalled on the borders of the Reich.

Allied Intelligence analysts confidently reassured the generals that no further significant German military offensive was possible. Their optimism was reflected in the general mood of the citizenry in France, Britain, and the United States.

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

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

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

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

The horrible thought in the back of every Allied scientist's and engineer's head must have been that after all the Allied military successes of the previous years, the race for the bomb could still be won by the Germans.

And if they were able to produce enough of them to put unbearable pressure on any one of the Western Allies, the outcome of the war itself was still in doubt. 

If, for example, the Germans had A-bombed British and French cities, it is unlikely that a continuance of the would have been politically feasible for Churchill's wartime coalition government.

In all likelihood it would have collapsed. A similar result would have likely occurred in France.

And without British and French bases available for supply and forward deployment, the American military situation on the continent would have become untenable, if not disastrous. 

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

Senator Brynes' memorandum highlights the real problem in the Manhattan Project:

In spite of tremendous military success against the Third Reich, the Western Allies and Soviet Russia could conceivably still be forced to a "draw".

If Germany deployed and used atom bombs in sufficient numbers to affect the political situation, "the entire enterprise appeared destined for defeat". [Hydrick, op. cit]

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

The stocks of weapons grade Uranium ca. late 1944 - early 1945 were about half of what they needed to be after two years of research and production,

If this was the cause of Senator Byrnes' concern, how did the Manhattan Project acquire the large amount of Uranium 235 needed in the few months from March to the dropping of the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima in August, only five months away? 

Where did its missing Uranium 235 come from?

And how did it solve the pressing problem of the fuses for a Plutonium bomb?

Its stocks had to have been supplemented from external sources, and there is only one viable place with the necessary technology to enrich Uranium on that scale. 

That source was Nazi Germany.

But the Manhattan Project is not the only atom bomb project with some missing Uranium.

Germany too appears to have suffered the "missing Uranium syndrome" in the final days prior to the end of the war.

But the problem in Germany's case is that the missing Uranium it not a few tens of kilos, but several hundred tons.

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

Groves brags that on 17 April, 1945, as the war was winding down, Alsos recovered some 1,100 tons of Uranium ore from Strassfurt and an additional 31 tons in Toulouse, France .....

And he claims that the amount recovered was all that Germany had ever held, asserting, therefore, that Germany had never had enough raw material to process the Uranium either for a Plutonium reactor pile or through magnetic separation techniques.

Obviously, if Strassfurt once held 3,500 tons and only 1,130 were recovered, some 2,370 tons of Uranium ore was unaccounted for - still twice the amount the Manhattan Project possessed and is assumed to have used throughout its entire wartime effort....

The material has not been accounted for to this day....

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

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

"To create either a Uranium or Plutonium bomb, at some point Uranium must be reduced to metal. In the case of Plutonium, U-238 is metalicized; for a Uranium bomb, U-235 is metalicized.

Because of Uranium's difficult characteristics, however, this metallurgical process is a tricky one.

The United States struggled with the problem early and still was not successful reducing Uranium to its metallic form in large production quantities until late in 1942.

The German technicians, however,... by the end of 1940, had already processed 280 kilograms into metal, over a quarter of a ton. [Hydrick, op. cit]. 

These observations require some additional commentary.

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

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

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

The figures, in other words, tend to corroborate the hypothesis outlined that the I.G. Farben "Buna" factory at Auschwitz was not a Buna factory at all, but a huge Uranium enrichment facility.

However, the date would imply another such facility, located elsewhere, since the Auschwitz facility did not really begin production until sometime in 1942.

Finally, it also seems clear that the Germans possessed an enormous stock of metallic Uranium. But what was the isotope?

Was it U-238 for further enrichment and separation into U-235, was it intended perhaps as feedstock for a reactor to be transmuted into  Plutonium, or was it already U-235, the necessary material for a Uranium atom bomb?

Given the statements of the Japanese military attaché' in Stockholm cited -that the Germans may have used an atomic or some other weapon of mass destruction on the Eastern Front ca. 1942-43, and given Zinsser's affidavit of an atom bomb test in October of 1944, it cannot be conclusively denied that some of this enormous stockpile may also have been U-235, the essential component for a bomb.

In any case, these figures strongly suggest that the Germans, ca. 1940-1942 were significantly ahead of the Allies in one very important aspect of atom bomb production:

The enrichment of Uranium, and therefore, this suggests also that they were demonstrably ahead in the race for an actual functioning atom bomb during this period.

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

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

***

The case of the U-234 is well-known in literature about the Nazi atom bomb, and of course the Allied Legend is that none of the material on board the U-Boat found its way into the American atom bomb project.

None of this could be further from the truth.

The U-234 was a very large mine-laying U-Boat that had been adapted as an undersea freighter to carry large cargoes.

Consider then the following "cargo manifest" of the U-234's very odd cargo: 

(1) Two Japanese officers

The two officers were Air Force Colonel Genzo Shosi, an engineer, and Navy Captain Hideo Tomonaga.

When the captain of the U-234 made known his intentions to surrender the submarine, which was then en route to Japan after the German surrender, the two Japanese officers committed hari-kiri, and were buried at sea with full military honors by the Germans.  

(2) 80 gold-lined cylinders containing 560 kilograms of Uranium oxide

Hydrick's comment on the U-234's cargo manifest explains why the U- 234 was off limits to the American press following its surrender:

"Whoever first read the entry and understood the frightening capabilities and potential purpose of Uranium must have been stunned by the entry." [op. cit]

(3) Several wooden cases or barrels full of "water"

(4) Infrared proximity fuses

(5) Dr. Heinz Schlicke, inventor of the fuses

When the U-234 was being loaded with its cargo in Germany for the outward voyage, its radio operator, Wolfgang Hirschfeld observed the two Japanese officers writing "U235" on the paper wrapping of the cylinders prior to their being loaded into the submarine. [Hydrick, op. cit]

Needless to say, this observation has called forth the full range of debunking techniques normally applied by skeptics to UFO sightings:

Low sun angles, poor lighting, distance was to great to see clearly, etc. etc. This is no surprise, for if Hirschfeld saw what he saw, then the enormous implications were obvious.

The use of gold lined cylinders is explainable by the fact that Uranium, a highly corrosive metal, is easily contaminated if it comes into contact with other unstable elements.

Gold, whose radioactive shielding properties are as great as lead, is also, unlike lead, a highly pure and stable element, and is therefore the element of choice when storing or shipping highly enriched and pure Uranium for long periods of time, such as a voyage. [Ibid]             

Thus, the Uranium oxide on board the U-234 was highly enriched Uranium, and most likely, highly enriched U235, the last stage, perhaps, before being reduced to weapons grade or to metallization for a bomb [if it was already in weapons grade purity].

Indeed, if the Japanese officers' labels on the cylinders were accurate, it is likely that it was at the final stage of purity before metallization.

The cargo of the U-234 was so sensitive, in fact, that when the U.S. Navy prepared its own cargo manifest for the German submarine on 16 June 1945, the Uranium oxide had entirely disappeared from the list. [Hydrick, op. cit] 

Significantly, within a week of the appearance of the U.S. Navy's version of the U-234's cargo manifest, Oak Ridge's output of enriched Uranium very nearly doubled. [Ibid]

This in itself is highly suspect, since as late as March of 1945, a U.S. Senator is worried about the failure of the Manhattan Project, so much so that he writes President Roosevelt a memorandum on the subject, and  the chief metallurgist of Los Alamos laboratory indicates the stock of fissile U235 is far short of the needed critical mass, and would remain so for several months.

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

But what of the other two items in the U-234's strange cargo manifest, the fuses and their inventor, Dr. Heinz Schllcke? 

Bby late 1944 and early 1945, the American Plutonium bomb project had run afoul of some nasty mathematics:

The critical mass of a Plutonium bomb, "imploded" or compressed by surrounding conventional explosives, would have to be assembled within 1/3000th of a second, otherwise the bomb would fail, and only produce a kind of "atomic fizzling firecracker", a "radiological" bomb producing very little explosion but a great deal of deadly radiation.

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

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

There is no possible way to explain this modification other than by the incorporation of Dr. Schlicke's infrared proximity fuses into the final design of the American bomb, since they enabled the fuses to react and fire are the speed of light. [This issue poses historical problems for the Allied Legend].

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

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

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

It would appear that the surrender of the U-234 to the Americans in 1945 solved the Manhattan Project's two biggest outstanding problems:

Lack of sufficient supplies of weapons grade Uranium, and lack of adequate fusing technology to make a Plutonium bomb work.

This means that in the final analysis the Allied Legend about the Germans having been "far behind" the Allies in the race for the atom bomb is simply incorrect in the extreme in the best case, or a deliberate lie in the worst.

But the fuses raise another frightening specter: What were the Germans developing such highly sophisticated fuses for?

Infrared heat-seeking rockets, which they had developed, would be one answer, and of course an implosion device to compress critical mass would be another.

A "Harper's Magazine" article of October 1946 makes clear that Germany had developed the making of fuses to a level unknown elsewhere in the world.

"Some fuse designs had never even been thought of by the Americans.

"The suggested fuse to detonate the Plutonium bomb was the Exploding Bridge Wire device provided to Professor Alvarez by a German infra-red and electronics specialist travelling as a passenger aboard U-234 from Kiel to Tokyo which surrendered to the US Navy at sea in mid-May 1945".

But what about the other missing German Uranium mentioned previously?

The mission of the U-234 and its precious cargo thus raises certain other questions, and highlights other possibilities in this regard.

It is a fact that throughout the war Germany and Japan both conducted long-range exchanges of officers and technology via aircraft and submarine - the exchange of technology being mostly a one-sided affair from Germany to Japan.

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

Similarly, during the war both Germany and Italy undertook long-range flights to Japan, the Germans using their special long- range heavy lift transport aircraft such as the Ju-290 for polar flights.

It is conceivable that these flights and their Italian counterparts also involved the exchange of officers and technology, if not a small amount of raw material as well.

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

But why, after traveling under radio silence from Germany, did the U-234 finally surrender its precious Uranium, fuses, and "water", when its obvious destination was Japan?

This is an intriguing question, and Carter Hydrick's superb research elaborates one highly probable hypothesis:

U-234 was handed over to the US authorities on the orders of none other than Martin Bormann, in  a maneuver designed to secure his and others' freedom after the war, and as part of a deliberate plan to continue Nazism and its agendas and research underground.

 

Atomic Bombs Dropped On Japan By U.S. Used Components Bartered From Nazi Germany,
Researcher Says Components Were Originally Shipped for Germany’s Ally Japan. 

Carter Hydrick, a researcher who has spent eight years investigating the events, has announced findings that the American atomic bomb program credited with developing the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan to end World War Two, and which resulted in the United States emerging from the war as the most powerful nation on earth, used components developed by Nazi Germany, including enriched Uranium, to fabricate the bombs.

The revelation counters important aspects of the traditional history of the American bomb project, known as the Manhattan Project.

The commonly accepted version of atomic bomb history states the bombs were created entirely by the United States, at a cost of $2 billion and five years of work by a battalion of top scientists, with assistance from Great Britain.

While the new evidence does not refute American success initially enriching Uranium -the key component of one of the bombs- strong documentary evidence indicates time pressures, technological delays, and a surprise opportunity to obtain from Germany the needed components that were in short supply in America, allowed the Manhattan Project to complete its bombs in time for the mid-August 1945 delivery deadline.

“What I suspect will shock people the most is it appears the possession of the enriched Uranium and other components fell into our hands not by capture, but as part of what may have been clandestine negotiations between top Nazis and key United States military and governmental leaders", said Carter Hydrick, .

"The agreement appears to have been made in exchange for allowing these fugitives to escape from Europe and receive United States protection while they lived in semi-seclusion for decades after the war,", he stated.

Hydrick displayed several documents from the United States National Archives and elsewhere to support his historical revision, as well as drawing from previously enigmatic events in the traditional history he contends have long been misunderstood, to show that Nazi Germany was an important source of nuclear bomb components used in the attacks on Japan.

Among the documents are captured Navy cargo manifests from German submarine U-234 that lists 580 kilograms, or 1,120 pounds, of Uranium oxide, as well as most of the Nazis’ latest, and most secret, war-making technologies; including, two fully disassembled Messerschmidt 262 jet fighters, the first jet aircraft used in combat and the only such planes employed in World War Two; the newest silent electric torpedoes; and plans and material to build Germany's feared V-2 rockets.

The existence of U-234 and its cargo have long been known, and have been the subject of discussions over whether the Uranium or any other components found on the vessel were used in the war against Japan, but, until now, no connection has ever been proved.

“The first big break was finding a secret dispatch from the Commander of Naval Operations in Washington indicating the Uranium was stored for the journey in cylinders lined with gold", explained Mr. Hydrick.

"Further research showed that gold, which is a very stable substance, was only used to handle Uranium that had already been enriched in order to protect it from contamination by corrosion".

Only enriched Uranium is fissile enough to make a Uranium bomb.

Hydrick explained that, at $100,000 per ounce in 1945 dollars, the enriched Uranium was well worth the investment in gold to protect it.

According to Hydrick's sources, gold would not have been used to ship Uranium that had not yet been enriched, since the value of raw Uranium did not justify such expense.

He cites instances in the United States program when Uranium that had not been enriched was shipped in cloth bags and steel drums with no protection from corrosion whatsoever.

A second, stronger, validation that the uranium on board U-234 was enriched Uranium came from eye-witness accounts of a crew member of the submarine, who was present at both the loading and unloading of the boat.

The crew member reported in two memoirs that the Uranium containers had the label “U235” painted on them just before they were lowered into the submarine.

U235 is the scientific designation for enriched Uranium.

The same crew member reported that United States Navy personnel later tested the supply tubes of the submarine with Geiger counters after it was turned over to the United States and the instruments registered a very high level of radioactivity.

Without understanding the import of the U235 designation, the crew member assumed the Uranium was left over from Germany's failed, but later highly publicized, Plutonium breeding reactor experiments.

“The evidence seems very strong that the Uranium on board U-234 was bomb-grade, enriched Uranium,” said Hydrick.

Even if the Uranium was enriched, that does not prove it was used in the Manhattan Project, concedes Hydrick.

To prove the two events were related, he presented copies of documents held in the United States National Archives that show relationships between the Manhattan Project and the U-Boat.

One of the documents is a secret cable, again from the Commander of Naval Operations, directing that a three-man party had been dispatched to take possession of the cargo from U-234.

According to the document, accompanying two Naval officers in an otherwise all-Navy operation was Major John E. Vance of the Army Corps of Engineers, the department of the Army under which the Manhattan Project operated.

Additional documents show that a few days following Vance’s arrival, when another accounting of the cargo was made, the Uranium had disappeared from the materials in Navy possession

 Transcripts of telephone conversations that occurred approximately one week later between two Manhattan Project Intelligence officers identify a captured shipment of Uranium powder as being in control of, and being tested by, a person identified only as “Vance.”

“It would be an improbable coincidence if they were not talking about the same “Vance” as the officer who visited U-234, and the same Uranium powder captured from that vessel,” suggested Hydrick.

A second connection is also documented between the Manhattan Project and U-234 — which carried eight high-profile military and scientific passengers who were not crew members, along with its deadly cargo, says Mr. Hydrick.

"Two of the captured passengers on U-234 had contact with an alleged United States Naval Intelligence officer identified in separate documents by the prisoners, as ‘Mr. Alvarez’ and as ‘Commander Alvarez’, Hydrick said.

The alleged “Commander Alvarez” appears to have been the personal handler of Dr. Heinz Schlicke, one of the scientific passengers on board U-234, who had now become a prisoner of war. Dr. Schlicke was an expert on high frequency technology such as radar and infra-red technology. 

Upon researching the Navy officers and alumni rosters of 1943 and 1945, Hydrick found no entry in the name of Alvarez was recorded in either document.

“General Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project, is well documented as having frequently provided military identification to scientists within the Manhattan Project in order for them to operate unimpeded, when necessary, within the military establishment", said Hydrick.

The researcher then points to one of the heroes of the Manhattan Project, Luis W. Alvarez, as the probable identity of “Commander Alvarez,” who he suggests was dressed incognito in Navy uniform to surreptitiously cull information and technological expertise from Dr. Schlicke.

“Luis Alvarez was the scientist on the Manhattan Project who is credited with coming up with, at the last minute, the successful solution for simultaneously detonating the 32 fuses that exploded the second, or plutonium bomb, which was the bomb dropped on Nagasaki", the researcher said.

Before a solution was found for this problem, according to Hydrick, the Manhattan Project had struggled for a year and a half with the dilemma.

Hydrick points to documentation from the National Archives showing that Alvarez was the head of a three-man committee tasked with solving the fusing problem.

“Dr. Schlicke had in his personal care while on the U-Boat, a supply of Germany’s newly developed infra-red fuses", Hydrick continued.

“In the national archives there is a secret cable recounting how Schlicke was flown back to the U-234 site by two United States Navy personnel expressly to retrieve those infra-red fuses. These fuses work on the basis of light, and at the speed of light.

"The evidence strongly suggests, in my view, that Luis Alvarez and 'Commander Alvarez' were one and the same person and that Luis Alvarez used Dr. Schlicke’s infra-red fuses to ignite all 32 detonation points on the American Plutonium bomb simultaneously at the speed of light, solving the Plutonium bomb detonation problem".

As substantiating evidence of the link, Hydrick cites the fact that prior to his assignment in the Manhattan Project, Alvarez worked on high-frequency technology, including radar, the same field in which Schlicke was an expert.

"Based on their backgrounds, of all the people in the Manhattan Project who would be expected to interface with Schlicke, if there was an interface, it would be Luis Alvarez", Hydrick claims.

"It is interesting that Alvarez is the one name that shows up as the United States’ counterpart to Dr. Schlicke'.”

Following the war, Schlicke joined the United States military as a contract worker in the top-secret project, “Operation Paperclip.”

Luis Alvarez went on to win the Nobel Prize for Physics relating to his high-frequency work, and was one of the original proponents for the now widely accepted theory -though greatly maligned at the time of its introduction- that a large meteorite struck the earth eons ago, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs and other profound events in the history of pre-Homo Sapien Earth.

While Hydrick’s revelations regarding the uses of U-234's cargo and passengers will probably cause widespread controversy among historians and World War Two enthusiasts, his proposition that U-234 was intentionally surrendered to United States forces according to a prearranged agreement with top Nazi leaders is certain to bring a storm of debate.

“The evidence is not of the compelling, ‘smoking gun’ nature of the documentation proving the link between U-234 and the Manhattan Project. But there is a significant body of circumstantial evidence suggesting some of Hitler’s top men made a deal with our leading Intelligence and military people to hand over the U-Boat in return for their freedom and protection. This evidence needs to be further explored",” Hydrick says.

That body of circumstantial evidence, according to Hydrick, suggests that Martin Bormann, chief of the Nazi Party, Hitler’s personal manager and secretary, and arguably the most powerful man in the German Reich outside of Hitler, at the end of the war negotiated the control of the U-Boat and its passengers and cargo over to the United States prior to the fall of Berlin in late April 1945.

Historians have long argued the claim that Bormann died trying to escape from Berlin on 1 May 1945.

The main evidence given for his death was based on eye-witness accounts by Hitler's chauffeur and Artur Axmann, head of the Hitler Youth organization, both of whom maintained strong Nazi convictions and connections until their deaths and, therefore, their motives have been considered suspect.

Although neither witness categorically stated they were certain they saw Bormann dead, their account has become the traditional version of Bormann's end.

Despite this finding, Bormann was convicted of war crimes in absentia at the Nuremberg trials and a warrant was placed for his arrest that remained in effect for many years, as did a later warrant issued in West Germany in 1967 based on new evidence of his continued survival.

Many sightings of Bormann, alive and well, were reported over the three decades following the war. The supposed grave of Bormann's escape partner, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller, was also disinterred in 1963 and found to contain the skeletal remains of three men, none of them Müller.

The traditional history has many holes in it, according to Hydrick.

"The presently accepted account says Bormann and Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller attempted their escape together, traveling partially through the subway tunnels around the Reichs Chancellery before they met their deaths in the street fighting.

"It’s fairly certain they escaped together, but the problem with the rest of the story is that the subway had been flooded by the SS — which, by the way, killed thousands of German women and children who were forced there for shelter when their homes were bombed out. The SS flooded the subway to keep Russian troops from secretly approaching and attacking Hitler’s Bunker through the underground", explained Hydrick.

"“The subway escape legend appears to be a cover story devised beforehand for later dissemination. It did not take into account the unforeseen flooding by the SS".

A more logical, objective and credible version of the Bormann escape, according to Hydrick, was reported by Josef Stalin’s Intelligence agents.

Stalin stated to Harry Hopkins, political consultant and confidant of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, and later secretary of state, that Soviet agents reported Bormann's escape from Berlin late the night of 29 April in a small plane and in the company of three men -one heavily bandaged- and a woman.

From there, Stalin insisted, his agents traced Bormann to Hamburg, where he boarded a large U-Boat and departed Germany.

Several details of these events ring true to Hydrick.

For example, it is a well-known fact that while Berlin was being bombed and the Nazi leadership fell into panic or fled, Martin Bormann maintained secret radio negotiations with Admiral Karl Dönitz, the commander of all of Germany’s U-Boats, and had made plans to escape to Dönitz's submarine headquarters. Dönitz at first resisted this effort but ultimately was ordered by Hitler [presumably at Bormann's bidding] to accept Bormann at his headquarters. From this point on, Hydrick concedes, details become sketchy and many disparate accounts are given of Bormann's escape or possible end.

But parallels from various, otherwise unconnected, Führer Bunker escape stories seem to indicate a probable scenario, according to the researcher.

First, Hitler's good friend Hanna Reitsch, the famous German aviatrix and counterpart to Amelia Earhart, tells in her autobiography how she flew seriously injured German Air Force General Ritter von Greim, whom Hitler had just made Commander of the Luftwaffe, out of Berlin late one night in the last days of the war.

Other accounts confirm the flight was made 29 April 1945, the same night Stalin's agents reported Bormann's escape by small aircraft. Reitsch recounts how they flew to Dönitz's headquarters “to make our last visit and farewell to Grand Admiral Dönitz” before flying south to the Austrian/Swiss border — an odd and seemingly careless detour of several hundred dangerous miles with the badly injured and very important General von Greim.

“There was something more to that trip than fond good-byes,” insists Hydrick.

Second, a separate, independent account purportedly of Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller's escape follows a somewhat similar path, though in it he was flown out of Berlin alone.

In this account, Müller was flown out of the German capital late the same night as in Reitsch's tale, in a Fieseler Storch airplane, the same aircraft used in Reitsch's story, under exactly the same conditions Reitsch describes.

Müller makes no account of flying to meet Dönitz, but tells a story about flying to the Austrian/Swiss border that is decidedly similar to Reitsch's version.

There are obviously discrepancies in these stories, as there are in virtually all accounts of these events; and it is hard to know what is true and what is disinformation, according to Hydrick.

But the similarities of the independent accounts set against the observations of Stalin’s informants that three men, one injured, and a woman, flying out of Berlin in a small airplane, seem to paint a compelling scenario.

“The description of that little group of night flyers is explicit and unique in its observations", argued Hydrick, "and yet it adheres in its details, even the unusual ones, with the Stalin account. It identifies Bormann and Müller by name; also a heavily bandaged man, which fits the description of von Greim at the time; and a woman, which would be Hanna Reitsch, probably the only woman in the world one could have expected to see in that circumstance, at that place, at that time.

"The three accounts just seem to interlock too well not to be connected,” insists Hydrick.

Hydrick adds other proof to his escape proposition, as well.

The chief radio operator of U-234 describes how in mid-April 1945, he received at least one coded communique on a high-priority frequency, directly from Hitler's Bunker in Berlin while the U-Boat was stationed in Kristiansand, Norway.

The order read: “U-234. Only sail on the orders of the highest level. Führer HQ".

"There are many implications here, the main ones being there was some kind of connection and an arrangement made between U-234 and someone at Hitler's headquarters", Hydrick asserted. A

n order sent to the U-Boat a short time later by Admiral Dönitz seems to be an effort to keep the U-Boat under his command.

It reads: “U-234. Sail only on my order. Sail at once on your own initiative".

U-234, the largest U-Boat in the German navy, set sail within hours, leaving Kristiansand bearing due south, exactly toward Hamburg, where Stalin's observers reported Bormann boarded the "large" U-Boat in the early hours of 1 May..

"There appear to be discrepancies between these accounts, too,” said Hydrick, “like the fact it would normally take a U-Boat only a day to sail from Kristiansand to Hamburg and according to our accounts U-234 left Kristiansand in mid-April and would not have picked up Bormann until 1 May”.

But U-234 was not heard from again after leaving Kristiansand until 12 May, almost a full month. By then, the U-Boat was only 500 miles northeast of Newfoundland.

If the boat was following the course its captain and traditional history said it took headed for Japan, then it was traveling at only 1 1/2 miles per hour.

"That is slower than a man walks and far slower than a fleeing U-Boat is likely to have traveled,” Hydrick argued.

Hydrick contends that U-234 silently patrolled the North Sea according to pre-arranged plans with Bormann at Hitler's headquarters, until Bormann was able to negotiate an agreement with Dönitz.

As the end of the war drew near, the boat slid into Hamburg harbor under cover of night and picked up Martin Bormann and Heinrich Müller, then continued its voyage, by way of a rendezvous off the coast of Spain to off-load Bormann, and then on to its surrender to United States forces at sea, again under mysterious conditions.

Hydrick asserts that successful negotiation between Bormann and Dönitz would explain not only the radio transmissions, but it would explain why Dönitz, with no political experience and virtually no political following, and quite to the surprise and puzzlement of leaders worldwide, became Hitler's successor.

He also believes that a series of enigmatic events leading up to U-234’s surrender point to an intentional secret capitulation of the boat outside of the parameters of the general surrender orders given on VE Day.

Lastly, he contends a photo taken by a local newspaper photographer at the time U-234 docked on United States shores, shows a mysterious, unidentified civilian prisoner with a remarkable physical resemblance to Heinrich Müller disembarking the Navy ship that carried U-234 passengers from the U-Boat to shore.

Hydrick believes the subject of the photo is, in fact, the former head of the Gestapo stepping onto American soil.

According to Hydrick, Müller’s mission was to oversee the transferal of the atomic bomb components and other war materials from Germany to the United States and that, in return, Müller, Bormann and many other Nazis received American protection for decades, and continue to receive such protection even up to the present day.

One of World War II's greatest unsolved mysteries is who ended up with the Uranium from the U-234? 

Strategically, the Japanese would have wanted to level important Pacific Coast naval port cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

Had the mission of U-234 gone as planned, Japan might have been able to delay her defeat and change the course of history.

As it happens, it is quite likely that the secret cargo of U-234, and its unknown end, affected history in ways that may never be fully understood.

Did the Uranium from the U-234 end up in a U.S. depot?

Was it part of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima?

Most provocatively -with the help of Stalin's enormous spy apparatus in the U.S.- could it have been shipped across Siberia on the secret U.S.-Soviet Air Bridge.

If the latter scenario were true, it would have given the Soviet Union the materials for their first atomic bomb.

In any case, the U.S.S.R. had atomic weapons by 1949, or about 48 months after the Hiroshima bombing.

Perhaps one fact above all gives a clear indication of how utterly and thoroughly Stalin's espionage apparatus had infiltrated much of the U.S. infrastructure.

During the ceremonies and delirium surrounding the founding of the U.N. in San Francisco, and in the years immediately after, Stalin successfully followed up on his Yalta Conference victories and created what President Ronald Reagan termed The Evil Empire.

What wasn't clear at the time was that the first Secretary General of the United Nations was a full-blown Soviet spy, a deep cover mole whose betrayal of the West tilted the balance in favor of the Soviets for decades to come.

His name was Alger Hiss--one of those names that will live in infamy, to borrow FDR's phrase describing the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The Soviets not only received vast amounts of U.S. materiel via the famed Arctic convoys running to Russia's few ice-free ports like Murmansk.

Because of the long journeys involved, and the heavy losses, the U.S. provided an air bridge as well. This air bridge extended from Malmstrom Air Base near Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

It began naturally, as a way for U.S. pilots to fly Lend-Lease aircraft northwest along what was called the Alaska-Siberia Air Bridge.

Either in Alaska [because Stalin was paranoid about allowing foreign pilots on Soviet soil, even his U.S. Allies] or in eastern Siberia, Soviet pilots would typically take over and fly the war planes west to the Eastern Front where Hitler's armies were being ground up at Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Notoriously, Soviet diplomats, under total immunity, shipped countless sensitive documents, industrial components, and any other Intelligence-worthy materials they could steal, back to Russia along this air bridge.

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

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

And finally, of course, some of the missing Uranium ended up in the German atom bomb program itself, enriched, and refined, and probably assembled and tested -if not used- in actual bombs themselves

A.. An Unusual Exchange at Nuremberg

At the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals after the war, an amazing exchange occurred between former architect cum Nazi minister of armaments, Albert Speer, and Mr. Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor.

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

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

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

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

Do you know about that experiment?

SPEER: No, and I consider it utterly improbable. If we had had such a weapon under preparation, I should have known about it. But we did not have such a weapon. It is clear that in chemical warfare attempts were made on both sides to carry out research on all the weapons one could think of, because one did not know which party would start chemical warfare first... 

-- Cited in Harald Fath, "Geheime Kommandosache-S III Jonastal und die Siegeswaffenproduktion: Weitere Spürensuche nach Thüringens Manhattan Project" [Schleusingen: Amun Verlag, 1999], pp. 82-83. Original text cited in English.

This exchange is remarkable in several respects, not the least of which is that its "explosive contents" are almost entirely overlooked in standard histories of the war and its aftermath.

In "The Memoirs of Felix Kersten" [1947] Kersten recorded that one of the last conversations he had with Himmler was about a "secret weapon," more powerful than the V-1 and V-2 rockets, that was to end the war.

"One or two shots and cities like New York or London will simply vanish from the earth".

He was told of a village built near Auschwitz where the new weapon was tried out.

Twenty thousand Jewish men, women, and children were brought to live there.

A single shell according to Himmler caused 6,000 degrees of heat and everything and everybody there was burned to ashes. Kersten assumed that the Germans had nearly completed constructing an atomic bomb. 

[Himmler's startling revelations are unconfirmed]

There is, evidence that there was a large, and very secret, Uranium enrichment program inside Nazi Germany, beginning sometime ca. late 1940 or early 1941, and continuing, apparently unabated -as the surrender of the U-234 would imply- right up to the end of the war.

Zinsser's affidavit goes further, and alleges an actual atom bomb test, complete with descriptions of all the signatures of an atom bomb: mushroom cloud, electro-magnetic pulse effects, and continued combustion of nuclear materials in the cloud.

The Japanese military attache in Stockholm further corroborated the story with undeniably fantastic allegations of the German use of some type of weapon of mass destruction [WMD] on the Eastern Front ca. 1942 [the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimea], to 1943, just days prior to the massive German offensive at Kursk.

Now, at Nuremberg, we have a third corroboration of the use of some type of weapon of awesome explosive power in the east by the Germans, this time from no less an individual than the chief American prosecutor at the Tribunal.

And in his case, it is apparent that he is relating information gathered by Intelligence. It is worth pausing to consider the implications of the exchange between Jackson and former armaments Reichminister Speer.

Albert Speer was successor to Dr. Fritz Todt as minister of armaments and production for the entire Third Reich.

Speer's accomplishments are not to be gainsaid, it was largely owing to his efforts to organize the huge Nazi industrial capacity and streamline its efficiency that the wartime production of Germany increased dramatically under his oversight.

In fact, in all pertinent areas of German industrial war production, Speer managed to achieve peak production levels in all categories during the same precise period that Allied strategic bombing also was at its height. 

His methods in achieving this feat were simple but effective:

German industry was decentralized and dispersed into smaller plants, and, to the extent possible, moved into underground bomb-proof factories.

"Modular" construction techniques were employed wherever possible. For example, German U-Boats were produced in modular fashion, in sections, far inland in such factories, and transported to ports for final assembly.

The deadly Type XXI U-Boats with their exotic and revolutionary underwater propulsion systems -allowing an underwater cruising speed in excess of 21 knots, an unheard of speed for that time -were produced in this fashion at the end of the war. 

But notably absent from Speer's comments is any indication that he was even aware of the huge extent of the German atom-bomb project and its enormous Uranium enrichment program.

Lofty as his position in the Nazi hierarchy was, it would appear that Speer was entirely in the dark on the programs and totally oblivious to any progress that had been made.

The German government, like its American counterpart, had rigidly "compartmentalized" its atom bomb production program and placed it under the tightest security.

But clearly, by the time of the exchange between Jackson and him, Speer and the whole world had heard of the atom bomb. So Speer appears to obfuscate his answer somewhat by redirecting the topic to chemical warfare.

The question of a revolutionary chemical explosive is not, however, as far-fetched as it might at first seem, for Jackson's comments suggest it by referring to temperatures of 400 to 500 degrees centigrade, far below the enormous temperatures produced by an atomic explosion. Was Speer obfuscating his answer, or was Jackson his question?

The prosecutor's statements and question also corroborate in loose fashion another component of our developing story, for he clearly alludes to the use of some type of weapon of mass destruction, possessed of enormous explosive power, in the east, and significantly, at or near Auschwitz, site of the I.G. Farben "Buna factory".

t is to be noted that the Nazis had apparently gone so far as to build an entire mock town and placed concentration camp inmates in it, an obvious though barbaric move to study the effects of the weapon on structures and people.

His statements, along with those of the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm, afford a serious clue -and one often overlooked even by researchers into this "alternative history" of the war- into the nature of the Nazi's secret weapons development and use, for it would appear that insofar as the Third Reich possessed weapons of mass destruction of extraordinary power, atomic or otherwise, they were tested and used against enemies consider by the Nazi ideology to be racially inferior, and that means, in effect, they were used on the Eastern Front theater of the Reich's military operations.

Thus we are also afforded a speculative answer to the all-important question: If the Germans had the bomb, why didn't they use it?

And the answer is, if they had it, they were far more likely to use it on Russia than on the Western allies, since the war in the East was conceived and intended by Hitler to be a genocidal war from the outset. And it certainly was that: fully one half of the approximately fifty million fatalities of World War Two were inflicted by the efficient Nazi war machine on Soviet Russia.

The use of such weapons on the Eastern Front by the Germans would also tentatively explain why more is not known about it, for it is highly unlikely that Stalin's Russia would have publicly acknowledged the fact.

To do so would have been a propaganda disaster for Stalin's government. Faced with an enemy of superior tactical and operational competence in conventional arms, the Red Army often had to resort to threats of execution against its own soldiers just to maintain order and discipline in its ranks and prevent mass desertion.

Acknowledgment of the existence and use of such weapons by the mortal enemy of Communist Russia could conceivably have ruined Russian morale and cost Stalin the war, and perhaps even toppled his government.

For now, however, we note the strangely ambiguous quality of Mr. Jackson's remarks.

"Now I have". he begins, "certain" information, which was placed in my hands, of an experiment which was carried out near Auschwitz..."

By the time Mr. Jackson uttered these remarks, Hans Zinsser's statements were almost a year old, raising the possibility that Zinsser's affidavit may itself have been the "certain information" alluded to by Jackson, who may have intentionally altered its correct location.

In this regard, it is significant that Zinsser expressed mystification that the test took place so close to a populated area. If Jackson deliberately altered the location of the test, he did not alter the nature of its victims. But another possibility is that the event took place where he says it did, "near" Auschwitz. 

A Marshal, Mussolini, and the First Alleged Test Site at Rügen Island

The question of the location of a possible German atom bomb test comes from five very unlikely sources: An Italian officer, a Russian marshal's translator, and Benito Mussolini himself, an American heavy cruiser, and an island off the coast of northern Germany in the Baltic Sea.

Before he and his mistress Clara Petacci were murdered by Communist partisans, and then later hung from meat hooks in Milan to be pelted with rocks from an angry mob. Benito Mussolini, by the end of the war reduced to a mere puppet of Hitler and governing a "Fascist republic" in German-controlled northern Italy, spoke often of the German "wonder weapons":

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

"The well-known mass destruction bombs are nearly ready. In only a few days, with the utmost meticulous intelligence, Hitler will probably execute this fearful blow, because he will have full confidence.... It appear, that there are three bombs-and each has an astonishing operation. The construction of each unit is fearfully complex and of a lengthy time of completion". 

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

It would be easy to dismiss Mussolini's statements as more delusional and insane ravings of a fascist dictator facing defeat, clinging desperately to forlorn hopes and tattered dreams.

It would be easy, were it but for the weird corroboration supplied by one Piotr Ivanovitch Titarenko, a former military translator on the staff of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, who handled the Japanese capitulation to Russia at the end of the war.

As reported in the German magazine "Der Spiegel" in 1992, Titarenko wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In it, he reported that there were actually three bombs dropped on Japan, one of which, dropped on Nagasaki prior to its actual bombing, did not explode. This bomb was handed over by Japan to the Soviet Union.

- Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, "Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe: Gewann Hitlers Wissenschaftler den nuklearen Wettlauf doch? Die Geheimprojekte bei Innsbruck, im Raum Jonastal bei Arnstadt und in Prag" [Rottenburg: Kopp Verlag, 200)]

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

The world's first operational atomic bomb was delivered by the Indianapolis, [CA-35] 
to the island of Tinian on 26 July 1945. The Indianapolis then reported to CINCPAC [Commander-In-Chief, Pacific Headquarters at Guam for further orders. She was directed to join the battleship 'USS Idaho' [BB-42] at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines
to prepare for the invasion of Japan. The 'Indianapolis', unescorted, departed Guam
on a course of 262 degrees making about 17 knots.

 

These strange testimonies call into question once again the Allied Legend, for as has been seen, the Manhattan Project in late 1944 and early 1945 faced critical shortages of weapons grade Uranium, and had yet to solve the fusing problem for the Plutonium bomb.

So the question is, if these reports are true, where did the extra bomb[s] come from?

At 14 minutes past midnight, on 30 July 1945, midway between Guam and Leyte Gulf, she was hit by two torpedoes out of six fired by the I-58, a Japanese submarine.
The first blew away the bow, the second struck near midship on the starboard side adjacent to a fuel tank and a powder magazine. The resulting explosion split the ship
to the keel, knocking out all electric power. Within minutes she went down rapidly
by the bow, rolling to starboard. Of the 1,196 aboard, about 900 made it into the water in the twelve minutes before she sank. Few life rafts were released.
Most survivors wore the standard kapok life jacket. Shark attacks began with sunrise
of the first day and continued until the men were physically removed
from the water, almost five days later.  

Only 317 remained alive, after almost five days of constant shark attacks, starvation, terrible thirst, suffering from exposure and their wounds.

That three, and possibly four, bombs were ready for use on Japan so quickly would seem to stretch credulity, unless these bombs were war booty, brought from Europe.

But the strangest evidence of all comes from the German island of Rügen, and the testimony of Italian officer Luigi Romersa, an eyewitness to the test of a German atom bomb on the island on the night of 11-12 October 1944, approximately the same time frame as indicated in Zinsser's affidavit, and the same approximate area as Zinsser indicated.

In this context it is also extremely curious that this time frame in 1944 was, for the Allies, a banner year for atomic bomb scares.

On 11 August 1945, an article in the "London Daily Telegraph" reported British preparations for German atom bomb attack on London the previous year:

NAZIS' ATOM BOMB PLANS BRITAIN READY A YEAR AGO

Britain prepared for the possibility of an atomic attack on this country by Germany in August, 1944.

It can now be disclosed that details of the expected effect of such a bomb were revealed in a highly secret memorandum which was sent that summer to the chiefs of Scotland Yard, chief constables of provincial forces and senior officials of the defense services.

An elaborate scheme was drawn up by the Ministry of Home Security for prompt and adequate measures to cope with the widespread devastation and heavy casualties if the Germans succeeded in launching atomic bombs on this country.

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 was launched by catapult, and had an explosive radius of more than two miles.

In view of our own progress in devising an "atomic" bomb the Government gave the reports serious consideration.

Thousands of men and women of the police and defense services were held in readiness for several months until reliable agents in Germany reported that the bomb had been tested and proved a failure.

- cited in Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, "Hitler und die Bombe" 

This article, coming as it does a mere two days after the bombing of Nagasaki, and almost a year since the actual alert in Britain was called, deserves careful scrutiny.

First, and most obviously, the alert in Britain was apparently conducted entirely in secret, as law enforcement, defense, and medical personnel were placed on high alert.

The reason for security is obvious, since to have signaled a public alert would have notified the Germans that there were Allied spies close enough to the German bomb program to know about its tests.

Second, the site of the alleged test -Norway- is unusual in that the timing of the test would place it a full two years after the British commando raid on the Norsk heavy water plant at Ryukon. This might indicate two things:

(1) It might indicate that Hitler's interest in maintaining troops in Norway had more to do with the German atom bomb project than anything else, since, if the report was accurate to begin with, it would indicate a large scale German atom bomb effort was underway there; 
(2) Conversely, the report may have been deliberately inaccurate, i.e., there may really have been a test, but one that took place somewhere else.

Third, the presumed "alert" continued from August 1944 "for several months", that is, the alert could conceivably have stretched into October, i.e., into the time frame of the test mentioned in Zinsser's affidavit. Thus, the news account indicates something else: Allied Intelligence was aware, and genuinely fearful, of German atom bomb testing.

Fourth, the article mentions that the test concerned a bomb launched from a "catapult". The V-1 "buzz bomb", the first generation of the cruise missile, was launched from large steam-driven catapults. Putting two and two together, then the "Norway" test may have been a test of an atom bomb delivery system based on the V-1, or of an atom bomb itself, or possibly both an atom bomb and its delivery system. 

 The alert was canceled when the test was proven a failure. The question is, what failed? Was it the bomb itself? The delivery system? Or both? 

An answer lies, perhaps, in another curious news article that appeared in the British press almost a year earlier, on Wednesday, 11 October 1944, by Walter Farr in the "London Daily Mail": 

BERLIN IS 'SILENT' 60 HOURS STILL NO PHONES

STOCKHOLM, Tuesday

Berlin is still cut off from the rest of Europe to-night. The 60-hours silence began on Sunday morning - and still there is no explanation for the hold-up, which has now lasted longer than on any previous occasion.

The Swedish Foreign Office is unable to ring up its Berlin Legation.

Unconfirmed reports suggest that the major crisis between the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party has come to a head and that "tremendous events may be expected".

To-day's plane from Berlin to Stockholm arrived four hours late. It carried only Germans, two of whom appeared to be high officials. They looked drawn and pale, and when Swedish reporters approached them they angrily thrust their way out of the Swedish Aero-Transport offices, muttering: "Nothing we can say".

German papers arriving here on to-day's plane seem extraordinarily subdued, with very small headlines.

It is pointed out, however, in responsible quarters that if the stoppage were purely the technical result of bomb damage, as the Germans claimed, it should have been repaired by now. 

- cited in Meyer and Mehner, "Hitler und die Bombe" 

Of course we now know what was not known in October of 1944: when an atomic or thermonuclear bomb is detonated, the extreme electro-magnetic pulse knocks out or interferes with electrical equipment for miles from the detonation site, depending on the size of the blast, the proximity of such equipment to it, and the degree of "shielding" such equipment has.

For the normal, non-military phone lines in Berlin, the strange disruption of phone service is explainable precisely as the result of such an electromagnetic pulse.

But this would imply that such a pulse, if the result of an atom bomb test, be considerably closer to Berlin than Norway.

Presumably if telephone service in Berlin was affected by an atom bomb test in Norway, similar disruptions would have occurred in large cities that were much closer to the test, such as Oslo, Copenhagen, or Stockholm. Yet, not such disruptions are mentioned; only Berlin appears to have been affected. 

Most communications lines in Berlin were laid underground by the Deutsche Reichspost before the war for the express purpose of mitigating phone service disruption during bombing attacks.

If the phone service disruption was therefore a result of EMP from a nuclear detonation, then the size of the detonation would have to have been rather large to cause this lengthy disruption of the entire city's telephone service for that length of time, shielded as the lines were by being underground. 

Thus, if the atom bomb test mentioned in the 1945 "London Daily Telegraph" article occurred, then one must look for a site considerably closer to Berlin than Norway.

The "Daily Mail" phone service disruption article stands as clear corroboration of the probable test of a German atom bomb sometime in October of 1944, the same time frame as Zinsser's affidavit, and within the time frame mentioned in the "Daily Telegraph" article about a secret alert in Britain from August of 1944, and continuing for "several months".

But the "Daily Mail's phone service disruption article does more: it suggests why the Germans may have considered the test a failure.

At that time the effects of nuclear explosions -electromagnetic pulse [EMP] and disruption of electrical equipment, radioactivity and fallout - were still largely unknown and not well understood. The Berlin telephone service was one of the finest, if not the finest, in the world at the time.

[Up to the very end of the war, for example, the cable lines between Berlin and Tokyo remained open, allowing the Japanese to send condolences to the Nazi government even as Russian tanks were rolling over the streets of the city]. 

The Nazis may very well have been shocked at this curious result of their alleged test of an atomic "wonder weapon", and therefore considered it a "failure" until more tests could be done and the phenomenon of electro-magnetic pulse more fully understood. After all, it would do no good, so to speak, to deploy the "ultimate weapon" only to be unable to receive the telephone call of surrender after having used it.

To the totalitarian and paranoid Nazi state, a disruption of communications from its capital city to its provinces, armed forces, and occupied territories was literally an unthinkable nightmare, being the perfect opportunity for a coup d'etat.

Finally, to round out the newspaper scavenger hunt, a curious series of articles from the "London Times" between May 15 and May 25, 1945, covered a story about German troops on the Danish Baltic Sea island of Bornholm that refused to surrender to attacking Russian forces.

- Meyer and Mehner, "Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe"

Bornholm was within one hundred miles of the German rocket site at Peenemünde, and quite close to an alleged atom bomb test site on the small island of Rügen on the Baltic coast close to the port city of Kiel.

It is here on this island that Italian officer Luigi Romersa, a war reporter for a Milan newspaper, "Corriere della Sera", was the guest and eyewitness to a German "wonder weapon" test on the night of October 11-12, 1944.

After journeying by a night drive for two hours in the rain from Berlin, Romersa reached the island by motorboat. According to his statements to German atom bomb researchers Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, the island was guarded by a special elite unit, which we can only presume was an SS unit, and that admission to the island was only granted by special passes issued directly by the OberKommando der Wehrmacht [OKW].

- Meyer and Mehner, "Hitler und die Bombe"

 At this point, it is best to cite Romersa's own words:

"There were four of us: my two attendants, a man with worker's clothes, and I.

'We will see a test of the disintegration bomb. [Auflösungsbombe] It is the most powerful explosive that has yet been developed. Nothing can withstand it,' said one of them.

"He hardly breathed. He glanced at his watch and waited until noon, the hour for the experiment. Our observation post was a kilometer from the point of the explosion.

'We must wait here',' the man with the worker's clothes ordered, 'until this evening. When it is dark we may leave. The bomb gives off deathly rays, of utmost toxicity. its effective area is much larger than the most powerful conventional bomb. Around 1.5 kilometers....'

"Around 4:00 PM, in the twilight, shadows appeared, running toward our Bunker. They were soldiers, and they had on a strange type of 'diving suit'. They entered and quickly shut the door. 'Everything is kaput,' one of them said, as he removed his protective clothing. We also eventually had to put on white, coarse, fibrous cloaks. I cannot say what material this cloak was made of, but I had the impression that it could have been asbestos, the headgear had a piece of mica-glass [Glimmerglas in front of the eyes".

Having donned this clothing, the observation party then left the Bunker and made its way to ground zero:

"The houses that I had seen only an hour earlier had disappeared, broken into little pebbles of debris, as we drew nearer ground zero, [Explosionspunkt] the more fearsome was the devastation. The grass had the same color as leather, the few trees that still stood upright had no more leaves".

- Luigi Romersa, private telephone interview with Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, "Hitler und die Bombe"]

There are peculiarities of Romersa's account that one must mention, if this were the test of nuclear bomb.

First, some of the blast damage described is typical for a nuclear weapon: sheering of trees, obliteration of structures, and so on. The protective clothing worn by the German technicians as well as the polarized glasses also are typical.

And the test does appear to have involved use in a "populated area" with houses and so on, in similar fashion to prosecutor Jackson's exchange with Speer, and Zinsser's own comments in his affidavit. However, Romersa, apparently a careful observer, fails to make any mention of a fusion of soil into silicate glassy material that also normally accompanies a nuclear blast close to the ground.

But whatever was tested at Rügen, it does have enough of the signatures of an atom bomb to suggest that this is, in fact, what it was.

Most importantly it is to be noted that it coincides with the time frame of Zinsser's affidavit and the phone service outage in Berlin, and the timing of the British alert.

[One significant difference that does emerge is that Zinsser's affidavit places the test close to the hours of twilight, whereas Romersa has it taking place in full daylight. The latter would make sense, from a security point of view, since daylight would tend to mask the visibility of the blast more effectively from prying eyes in the distance]. 

Finally, it is perhaps quite significant that during this same time frame, Adolf Hitler finally signed an order for the development of the atom bomb. In context, this can only mean that he has given approval to develop more of a weapon already tested.

- Rose, op. cit., notes that Hitler actually gave a formal order in October of 1944 for the immediate development of the atom bomb

The Three Corners [Dreiecken] and the Alleged Test at the Troop Parade Ground at Ohrdruf

A more controversial allegation, however, concerns the alleged test of a high yield atom bomb by the SS at the troop parade ground and barracks at Orhdruf, in south central Thuringia in March of 1945. A

s we shall see, this date too is significant. Shortly after the German reunification in 1989, old rumors of an atom bomb test conducted by the SS late in the war in south central Germany, in what was formerly East Germany, again surfaced. The test is alleged to have taken place on 4 March 1945. [Meyer and Mehner, "Hitler und die Bombe"] However, as  we shall soon see, there is an additional problem associated with the allegation of this test near the Three Corners. 

The Three Corners part of the story begins with a component of the Allied Legend. According to former East German sources, one plausible reason for the swift advance of us General Patton's divisions on this region of Thuringia was that the last Führer Headquarters [Führerhauptquartier], a facility code-named "Jasmine" by the Germans, was located in the vast underground facilities at Jonastal.

- Meyer and Mehner, "Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe".

"There exists an American document, under point number four, that informs us that the last {Führer Headquarters] was not at the Obersalzburg, but in the region of Ohrdruf", "] that is, in the region of the Three Corners.

Thus, the Legend is elaborated:

Patton's drive was to cut off the escape route of fleeing Nazis and seize Hitler's last secret underground headquarters, and, presumably, the Grand Prize himself. This entire facility was part of a vast complex of underground sites under the command structure of the SS, and named "S-III" - a designation not without its own suggestive possibilities - and the Führer Headquarters was but one component of this complex.

- Ibid., "Report of Mr. Oskar Mühlheim, Bad Dürenberg"]

The problem with the view that this complex was simply a headquarters complex is that SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kammler was directly involved in the construction of all facilities in the region since 1942, thus making it unlikely that they were constructed merely for Hitler's last headquarters, since Kammler was directly involved with the most sensitive areas of the Reich's secret weapons research and development. It is therefore more likely that they were a part of Kammler's vast SS Secret weapons black projects empire. [Ibid]

There is no mention of any of these facilities in surviving German archives, or, seemingly, any where else for that matter, and yet, they are definitely there for all to see. [Ibid] 

So what were these facilities researching? Almost nothing was known about them until witnesses and relatives of witnesses began to talk after German reunification.

One such man was Adolf Bernd Freier who, before his death in Argentina, wrote German researchers Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner a letter detailing his knowledge of the facilities gained while he was on the construction staff. There were, Freier alleged, facilities dedicated to special circular aircraft(!), to the "Amerika Rakete", the intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States, and research facilities of atomic experiments under the direction of Dr. Kurt Diebner, and a complete underground factory for the production of heavy water! [Meyer and Mehner, "Das Geheimnis"]

But most importantly, Freier alleges that the "atomic weapon" was ready on 2 July 1944! [Ibid. According to Freier's allegations, the bomb was ready on 2 July 1944, but not its delivery system, meaning presumably the "Amerikarakete"] 

What type of atomic weapon is meant here?

A "dirty" radiological bomb, designed to spray a vast area with deadly radioactive material but far short of an actual nuclear fission bomb? Or an actual atom bomb itself?

Freier's choice of words is not clear. But one thing does stand out, and that is the date of 2 July 1944, the same month as the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the -very aptly named- "Bomb Plot" approximately two weeks later.

The consequence of a successful German development of even a radiological bomb might thus be one of the primary motivations for the anti-Hitler conspirators to attempt to remove the Führer when they did, and might explain their hidden logic in assuming that the Allies would negotiate with an anti-Nazi [or at least un-Nazi] provisional German government in spite of the Allies' own demands for an unconditional surrender, for the possession of such a weapon would have given the conspirators considerable negotiation leverage.

And if the conspirators knew of the existence of the weapon, and of Hitler's plans to deploy it in actual use, it may have been the final moral compulsion for them to act. 

In any case, the most problematical aspect of the alleged test of an atom bomb by the Nazis in the Ohrdruf-Three Corners region of Thuringia comes from a rather specific, and rather startling, assertion. According to Freier, the test took place on 4 March 1945 at the old troop parade ground at Orhdruf. There, a small scaffold about 6 meters high had been erected, a the top of which a small "atomic weapon" ["A-Waffe", the wording again is not "Atombombe" but only A-waffe, or "A-weapon"] was placed.

The weapon, according to Freier, was "100 g", a mere one hundred grams. 

This is one of the most significant, and highly problematical, allegations regarding the real nature of the Nazi atom bomb project, made by someone supposedly involved in it, for as will be immediately obvious, 100 grams is far short of the 50 or so kilograms of critical mass reportedly needed for a uranium-based atom bomb, as has been seen, and it is still well below the amount needed for the critical mass for a typical plutonium bomb.

Yet, Freier is insistent upon this point, and moreover alleges that all the "slaves", the luckless concentration camp victims that were forced to take part in the test, within a circle of 500-600 meters from ground zero were killed.

- Meyer and Mehner, "Das Geheimnis" 

This would give an area of approximately 1 to 1.2 kilometers of blast damage, roughly the effect of a modern tactical nuclear bomb. Such a blast radius would require an enormous amount of the then available conventional explosives, and that amount would far exceed the mere 100 grams Freier alleges for the device.

These points indicates that the "A- Waffe" or "atomic weapon" was in fact a fully fledged atom bomb. So how does one explain the extraordinarily small critical mass, especially since the Manhattan Project was aiming for a Uranium critical mass of around 50 kilograms?

This question deserve serious consideration, for it affords yet another possible clue -if the allegation is to be credited with accuracy- into the real nature of the Nazi atom bomb project.

The project was developed under several different and discreet groups for reasons partly due to security, and for reasons partly due to the practical nature of the German program.

For security reason, the "Heisenberg" group and the high-profile names associated with it were deliberately used by the Nazis as the "front" group for public, namely Allied, consumption. 

The SS security and Intelligence apparatus would have undoubtedly concluded, correctly, that these high profile scientists would be high priority targets for Allied Intelligence for kidnapping and assassination. Accordingly, it is highly unlikely that the Nazis would have concentrated any genuine atomic bomb secrets or development exclusively in the hands of this group.

The very existence of the Allied Legend for so many years after the war is direct testimony to the success of this plan. The real atom bomb development occurred far from the prying eyes of Allied intelligence, under the auspices of the Reichspost and more importantly, under the direct auspices of the SS.

The second facet of the German atom bomb program is its emphasis on what was practically achievable during the war. Hence, while the Germans knew of the possibilities of Plutonium and a Plutonium-based atom bomb, and therefore knew that a functioning reactor used to produce Plutonium for bombs would thereby enable Germany to develop more bombs for the same investment of fissile material, they also knew that a major technical hurdle lay across the path: The development of a successful reactor in the first place.

Thus, as has been previously argued, they opted to develop a Uranium-based bomb only, since Uranium could be enriched to weapons grade purity without the necessity of the development of a reactor, and since they already possessed the necessary technologies to do so, if employed en masse. Like its American Manhattan Project counterpart, the SS-run program relied on massive numbers of enrichment units to separate and purify isotope.

Germany was also seeking to be able to deploy such bombs as warheads on its rockets. And that meant, given their limited lift capabilities, that the weight of the warheads had somehow to be reduced by several orders of magnitude for the rockets to be able to carry them. And there is an economic factor. Knowing that their industrial capacity would be stained by the effort, even with the help of tens of thousands of slave laborers from the camp, another problem may have presented itself to the Germans, a problem illuminated for them by their own knowledge of the possibilities offered by plutonium-based bombs: How does one get more-bang-for-the-Reichsmark without the use of plutonium? Is there a way to rely on less uranium in a critical mass assembly than is conventionally thought?

And so we return to Freier's statement of a remarkably small 100 g atom bomb test at Ohrdruf on 4 March 1945. There does exist a method by which much smaller critical masses of fissile material can be used to make a bomb: boosted fission. Essentially, boosted fission simply relies on the introduction of some neutron- producing material -polonium, or heavy hydrogen: deuterium, or even tritium- to release more neutrons into the chain reaction than is actually released by the fissile critical mass assembly by itself. This raises the amount of free neutrons initiating chain reactions in the critical mass, and therefore allows two very important things:

• It allows slightly lower purity of fissile material -materially not considered of sufficient purity to be weapons grade without boosted fission- to be used for an actual atom bomb;
• It requires less actual fissile material for the critical mass assembly to make a bomb.

Thus, "boosted fission" would have afforded the German bomb program a practical way to increase the number of bombs available to them, and a reliable method for achieving an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction with lower purity of enriched material.

-[Meyer and Mehner, "Hitler" 

It is perhaps quite significant, then, that Freier's testimony concerning the Three Corners underground weapons factories also mentions the existence of an underground heavy water plant in the facilities, 

Heavy water, of course, contains atoms of deuterium and tritium [heavy hydrogen atoms with one and two extra neutrons in the nucleus respectively].

In any case, the test of a small critical mass, boosted fission device of high yield at Ohrdruf on 4 March 1945, is at least consistent with the parameters of the German bomb program and its practical needs.

But there are interesting, and intriguingly suggestive, corroborations of the test.

According to Freier, Hitler himself wasd in the Three Corners headquarters for a brief period at the end of March 1945.

- Meyer and Mehner, "Das Geheimnis"

It is known that Hitler did personally visit and address the officers of the German Ninth Army, operating in that precise area, in March of 1945., and stated to them that there were still things that needed to be "finished", an interesting comment if seen in the light of Freier's allegations that it was not the bomb that Germany needed, but the delivery systems.

It does make sense that if there were such a test, that Hitler would have been present as an observer to witness the final success of German science in delivering to him the "ultimate weapon".

 

"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

But perhaps the most persuasive bit of evidence that there is far more about the end of World War Two than we have been told can be found in two exceedingly odd facts that emerge from the Three Corners region of Thuringia in south central Germany.

In a statement made on 20 March 1968, former German General Erich Andress was in the Three Corners region at the end of the war, when suddenly, more American military personnel [who were already occupying the area], arrived with jeeps and heavy transports, and immediately ordered all the buildings and houses in the area to have their windows totally blacked out, leaving one to conclude that the Americans were removing something from the area of great value to them, something they wished no one to see.

The second odd fact is even more curious, for it is a fact that, of all the areas in modern Germany, the region of Thuringia, precisely in the area of Jonastal and Ohrdruf, is the region of Germany with the highest concentration of background gamma radiation.

- Meyer and Mehner, "Das Geheimnis"

So, what is really signified by the unique exchange of remarks between former Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, and Chief American Prosecutor Jackson at Nuremberg?

That Jackson is privy to information similar in nature to reports only recently de-classified is clear from his question.

That this information concerns the real nature of German atom bomb research and its -what appear to be astounding achievements completely at variance with the post-war Allied Legend - would also seem to be indicated.

And that Albert Speer seems either unwilling to talk about them candidly, or is simply entirely ignorant of them, also seems indisputable.

Thus Jackson's question would seem to imply a test of the extent of Speer's knowledge of the program and his complicity in the two tests at Rügen and Ohrdruf.

If the Minister if Armaments for the entire Third Reich knew nothing of it, then we are dealing with a Black Reich within the Black Reich, a beast in the belly of the beast, of which even high-ranking Nazis such as Speer knew very little, if anything.

The great secret of World War Two, one which the victorious Allies and Russians wish to keep secret to this day, was that Nazi Germany was indisputably first to reach the atom bomb, and was indisputably for a very brief period before the end of the war, the world's very first nuclear power.

But why is the Allied and Russian secrecy continued even to the present day?

But why didn't the Nazis use their bombs if they had them?

The answer to that question is,if they used any weapons of mass destruction, nuclear or otherwise, they would have been far more likely to have used them in a fashion consistent with their racist and genocidal ideology, as well as against the enemy that was their largest military threat: On the Eastern Front, against the Soviet Union, where a paranoid Stalinist regime would have been loathe to admit to the world or to its own war-savaged people that they faced an enemy with overwhelming technological superiority.

Such an admission would likely have so demoralized the Russians, already forced to spend rivers of their own blood in every engagement with the Wehrmacht, that Stalin's regime itself may not have survived such an admission.

But why not use them against the Western Allies in the last stages of the war, as the military situation grew increasingly desperate?

There is every indication that the Nazi leadership contemplated just such an operation.

 

Located near Ohrdruf, Thuringia was located the S-III Führer Headquarters. Constructed by approximately 15 - to 18,000 inmates of the nearby Ohrdruf, Espenfeld and Crawinkel concentration camps, from autumn 1944 to spring 1945, was a tunnel system over 1,5 miles in length.

Ohrdruf was reached by General Patton about 11 April 1945. Colonel R. Allen accompanying him described the installations extensively in his book:

"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 near-by 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 50 feet underground, the installations consisted of two and three stories several miles in length and extending like the spokes of a wheel. The entire hull structure was of massive reinforced concrete. Purpose of the installations was to house the High Command after it was bombed out of Berlin.

"This places also had paneled and carpeted offices, scores of large work and store rooms, tiled bathrooms with bath tubs and showers, flush toilets, electrically equipped kitchens, decorated dining rooms and mess halls, giant refrigerators, extensive sleeping quarters, recreation rooms, separate bars for officers and enlisted personnel, a moving picture theatre, and air-conditioning and sewage systems".

--"Lucky Forward: The History of Patton's 3rd US Army", Col. Robert S. Allen, published by Vanguard Press, New York, 1947

Sources and Reference Material

a. The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht [OKW, High Command] and Luftwaffe war diaries and all copies of them for the period March 1945 have disappeared and are suspected to be in American keeping.

b. On 17 April 1945, the United States Atomic Energy Commission inspected various underground workings at Ohrdruf, and removed technical equipment before dynamiting surface entrances. The US authorities have classified all 1945 documents relating to Ohrdruf for a minimum period of 100 years.

Fortunately for researchers, in 1962 a quasi-judicial tribunal sat at Arnstadt in the then DDR, to take depositions from local residents for an enquiry entitled "Befragung von Bürgern zu Ereignissen zur örtlichen Geschichte".

The enquiry was principally interested in what went on at the Ohrdruf Truppenübungsplatz (TÜP) in the latter years of the war. The depositions became common property in 1989 upon the reunification of Germany and may be viewed at Arnstadt town hall.

The Ohrdruf military training ground

There had been a military training ground at Ohrdruf since imperial times. It was a large, rugged area of upland, nowadays disused and strewn with shells and other military scrap. Its perimeter can be circumnavigated by Land Rover in about three hours. Through binoculars, small parts of the ruins of Amt 10, described below, can be made out but not visited.

During 1936-1938, an Army underground telephone/telex exchange known as Amt 10 was built in the limestone strata below the Ohrdruf Truppenübungsplatz. Its entrances were disguised as chalets. The Bunker was 50 feet down and measured 70 by 20 metres. Both floors had a central corridor about 3 metres wide with rooms either side, and 2 WCs.

End-doors were gas-proofed, the installation had central heating, air was supplied under pressure, water drawn from a spring 600 feet below. A 475 hp ship's diesel was on hand as the emergency electrical generator, and this piece of equipment plays an important role in understanding the Ohrdruf mystery.

One of the three full-time Reichspost maintenance engineers employed there from 1938 to 1945 stated that Amt 10 was never used until the last few months of the war when it was "more than it seemed" and "its clandestine purpose was fairly obvious."

Col Robert S Allen, a Staff officer with General Patton's Third Army described in his book a completed underground reinforced-concrete metropolis 50 feet down "to house the High Command". It was on two or three levels and consisted of galleries several miles in length and "extending like the spokes of a wheel." The location of Hitler's Führer headquarters was not stated and Amt 10 was described misleadingly as "a two-floor deep concrete shelter."

If the structure was built like a wheel, the Führer headquarters would logically be at the hub, and Amt 10 was at the hub. Allen's description of Amt 10 as having two floors on April 1945 conflicts with the evidence of two persons who worked there: one hinted that there were more than two floors, the other testified there were three. The latter witness also stated that Amt 10 was two great bunkers of the same size, each of three floors, but not connected except by underground piping.

Each Bunker was guarded on each level by an SS sentry and passes for each entrance were not common to both. The most likely explanation is that the second Bunker was constructed in 1944 at the same time as a third level was added to the first Amt 10 Bunker as the Führer-suite.

As regards the second Bunker, a witness stated that in 1944 there was an installation below the Ohrdruf Truppenübungsplatz which created an electro-magnetic field capable of stopping the engines of a conventional aircraft at seven miles. During the war, the Allies never photographed Ohrdruf from the air, nor bombed it, even though their spies must have assured them it was crawling with SS and scientific groups.

A German electro-magnetic field which interfered with their aircraft at altitudes of up to seven miles is admitted by a 1945 United States Air Force Intelligence document. The USAF suspected that it was a device to bring down their bombers, but it obviously had some other purpose, or it would have been operating below Berlin.

Many Arnstadt witnesses described occasions when electrical equipment and automobile engines cut out. They always knew when this was about to happen, for the ship's Diesel engine at Amt 10 would smoke. A Diesel motor is not affected by an electro-magnetic field.

In 1980, Russians scientists were still able to measure the field on their equipment, but they were never able to identify the source.

The Führer headquarters at Ohrdruf is not admitted by academic historians. The evidence for it, however, is strong:

a. S-III was an SS military factory complex below Jonastal near Ohrdruf where 1,000 Buchenwald inmates began digging in June 1944. No decision had been taken to build a Führer headquarters in Thuringia before 24 August 1944.

b. In September 1944, a geologist consulted by SS-WVHA regarding the suitability of Jonastal for a Führer headquarters suggested the Ohrdruf Truppenübungsplatz instead.

c. In October 1944, General von Gockl, Ohrdruf Truppenübungsplatz commandant, evacuated all Wehrmacht personnel from the plain. Within a fortnight the notorious Ohrdruf-KZ had been set up while SS-Führungsstab S-III, in charge of the Führer headquarters project, occupied a school at nearby Luisenthal. Firms working on building projects in Poland were ordered immediately to Ohrdruf.

d. At the end of 1944, Hauptsturmführer Karl Sommer, deputy head of WVHA-DH (forced labour) assembled a workforce at Buchenwald to build a secret Führer headquarters named S-III at Ohrdruf. S-III had a fully-equipped telephone-telex exchange before work started, thus identifying it as around Amt 10.

e. Hitler's Luftwaffe aid Nikolaus von Below stated in his memoirs that in early 1945 he visited the location of the new Thuringian Führer headquarters and it was at the Ohrdruf Truppenübungsplatz.

f. In late January 1945, Hitler spoke openly of evacuating Ministry staff from Berlin "perhaps to Oberhof in Thuringia".

g. In compliance with order 71/45 and the communique from Führer headquarters Berlin issued by Wehrmacht ADC General Burgdorf on 9 March 1945, General Krebs of the Army General Staff reported that between 12 February and 29 March 1945 a substantial proportion of OKW Staff had transferred to the Ohrdruf area.

h. On the nights of 4 and 12 March 1945, "a small explosive of terrific destructive power" was tested on the Ohrdruf Truppenübungsplatz. 200 KZ inmates and 20 SS guards were scorched to death on the first test due to a miscalculation of the extent of the effect. The bodies were immolated on a common pyre, the ashes being scattered across central-Germany from aircraft. In mid-March, a 30-metre long rocket was reported test fired into the night sky from a weapons site within five miles of the Truppenübungsplatz. The Amt 10 telephone engineer gave evidence that "200 so-called female signals auxiliaries" arrived to staff the second Bunker in this period. Why they were "so-called" is not explained.

On 4 March 1945, Clare Werner, throughout the war custodian of the Wachsenburg watch-tower, who was standing on a nearby hillside, witnessed an explosion in a military training area near the town of Ohrdruf.

"It was about 9:30 when I suddenly saw something ... it was as bright as hundreds of bolts of lightning, red on the inside and yellow on the outside, so bright you could've read the newspaper.

It all happened so quickly, and then we couldn't see anything at all. We just noticed there was a powerful wind..." The woman complained of "nose bleeds, headaches and pressure in the ears."

The next day Heinz Wachsmut, a man who worked for a local excavating company, was ordered to help the SS build wooden platforms on which the corpses of prisoners were cremated.

"The bodies, according to Wachsmut, were covered with horrific burn wounds. Like Werner, Wachsmut reports that local residents complained of headaches, some even spitting up blood.

In Wachsmut's account, higher-ranking SS officers told people that something new had been tested, something the entire world would soon be talking about. Of course, there was no mention of nuclear weapons.

A further interesting set of depositions from the 1962 Arnstadt DDR enquiry refer to the test of a rocket apparently the size of an A9/10 "Amerika" rocket.

Witness 1 was Clare Werner, throughout the war custodian of the Wachsenburg watch-tower. She stated that a rocket with a huge tail-fire was fired after 21.00 hours on the night of 16 March 1945 while she was looking through binoculars towards Ichtershausen.

She had been informed earlier by a friend working for the Reichspost Sonderbauvorhaben at Arnstadt that a tremendous achievement was to be celebrated in the sky that night.

Witness 2 was a former KZ-inmate who gave evidence to the DDR tribunal that he helped erect staging for "an enormously long rocket" at MUNA Rudisleben. From the Wachsenburg watch tower, Rudisleben is close to Ichtershausen.

Witnesses 3 and 4 were a technician and fuel system engineer respectively who all stated that they worked on the construction of a huge rocket over 30 metres in length which was fired on the night of 16 March 1945 at Polte II underground facility, one kilometer from Rudisleben.

The first of the rocket series successfully tested that night may have been intended as the carrier for the mysterious explosive, and intended to bring New York under attack, as had been promised by Hitler in his references to a miracle weapon in "Hitlers Tischgespräche" [Picker's version]. 

Following this successful launch, at what stage the rocket could have entered series production is an interesting question.

i. In early March 1945, Organization Todt began work on the Brandleite railway tunnel at Oberhof to accommodate the special trains of Hitler and Göring, installed a telephone exchange in the station-master's house and positioned flak batteries on surrounding peaks.

j. A witness stated that the Führer-Sperrkreis at Ohrdruf was called Burg and alleged that Hitler spent at least one day there in late March 1945.

k. In late March a Luftwaffe mutiny occurred in which General Barber and over three hundred pilots and air base command personnel were executed for refusing to obey an unknown order (the Luftwaffe War Diaries for March and first part April 1945 have vanished).

l. Upon his arrest in May 1945, Göring told his captors that he had engineered the mutiny thus saving the world by "refusing to deploy bombs that could have destroyed all civilisation". It was freely reported at the time, since nobody knew what he meant.

The Magnetic Ray

A similar device to the one operating below Ohrdruf finds a place in declassified literature as follows: On 6 December 1944, the US Military Intelligence Service commenced Research Project 1217 "Investigation into German Possible Use of Rays to Neutralize Allied Aircraft Motors".

This resulted from "recent interference phenomena occasionally experienced on operations over Germany in the Frankfurt/Main area." It was usually described as "freakish interference to engines and electrical instruments" over the north bank of the Main River, about ten miles from Führer headquarters Adlerhorst.

In a top secret report entitled "Engine Interference Counter-Measures" addressed to the Director, Air Technical Service Command, Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, reference was made to OSS discussions about a German unit somewhere near Frankfurt/Main operating:

"...an influence interfering with conventional aircraft... however incredible it may appear to project from the ground to a height of 30,000 feet sufficient magnetic energy to interfere with the functioning of the ignition system of an airplane, it must be concluded that the enemy not only intends to interfere with our aircraft by some immaterial means, but has also succeeded in accomplishing this intention..."

The Miracle Explosive

The four items of literature appearing to relate to the explosive tested at Ohrdruf in March 1945 are as follows:

a. British Security Coordination [BSC] was the largest integrated intelligence network enterprise in history. Its Director was Sir William Stevenson, a Canadian industrialist. His code-name was "Intrepid". In his autobiography, "A Man Called Intrepid", Sphere Books, 1977, Stevenson relates: "One of the BSC agents submitted a report, sealed and stamped THIS IS OF PARTICULAR SECRECY which told of "...liquid air bombs being developed in Germany... of terrific destructive effect".

The reader should not be misled into thinking that these were modern common-or-garden "liquid air bombs": Stevenson noted that they were "as powerful as rockets with atomic warheads".

b. The book "German Secret Weapons", Ballantyne Press, UK, also Libr. Edit. San Martin, Madrid, 1975, was authored by Brian Ford [military scientist], Barrie Pitt [academic historian] and Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart (military historian). At page 28, the text states:

"The Whirlwind Bomb produced an artificial hurricane of fire and is absolutely authentic even though it may seem improbable. The explosive was developed and tested by Dr. Zippermayr at Lofer, an experimental Luftwaffe institute in the Tyrol. The explosive was pulverized coal dust and liquid air. Its effect was sufficient to create an artificial typhoon and was intended initially as an anti-aircraft weapon able to destroy aircraft by excessive turbulence. The effective radius of action was 914 metres..."

c. This is a 4-page declassified US Intelligence document of the Salzburg Detachment of the US Forces Austria Counter-Intelligence Corps, describing Dr. Zippermayr interrogated at Lofer on 3 August  1945. His laboratories were established at Lofer with head office at Weimarerstrasse 87, Vienna. Staff was 35, work financed by RLM and under direction of Chef der Technischen Luftrüstung.

--US Forces Austria Counter-Intelligence Corps, Salzburg Detachment, Zell am See report 4 August 1945, Case No S/Z/55 Dr Mario Zippermayr; NARA RG 319 Entry 82a Reports and messages, ALSOS Mission.

Zippermayr worked on three projects of which one was the Enzian/Schmetterling anti-aircraft rockets "charged with a coal dust explosive so strong that the concussion could break the wings of a bomber". This item "was proved successful by August 1943, but orders for its production were not issued until March 9, 1945..."

d. This item is an extract from BIOS [British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee] Final Report 142(g) "Information Obtained from Targets of Opportunity in the Sonthofen Area, (HMSO London).

The report states that during 1944, an explosive mixture of 60% liquid air and 40% finely powdered coal dust invented by Dr. Mario Zippermayr was tested at Döberitz explosives ground near Berlin, and was found to be very destructive over a radius of up to 600 metres.

Waffen-SS scientists then became involved and added some kind of waxy substance to the explosive. The bombs had to be filled immediately prior to the aircraft taking off. Bombs of 25 and 50 kgs were dropped on Starnberger See and photos taken. Standartenführer Klemm showed these to Brandt (Himmler's scientific adviser). The intensive explosion covered an area up to 4.5 kms radius.

This waxy substance was a reagent of some kind which was said to interact with air during the development of the explosion, causing it to change its composition and so create meteorological change in the atmosphere. A lightning storm at ground level consumes all the available oxygen. Göring's statement upon his arrest in May 1945 is significant: he claimed to have led a revolt against Luftwaffe use of a bomb "which could have destroyed all civilisation." The bomb was not a nuclear weapon, and it appears to have been a conventional explosive which used a reagent or catalyst produced by Tesla methodology or similar for its inexplicable effect.

Conclusion

The suggestion at this point is that by late 1944, Waffen-SS scientists in Germany had developed a catalyst or reagent, apparently a waxy substance, maybe a plasmoid of some kind, which when added to a conventional explosive containing liquid air vastly magnified the effect, killing everything within a three mile radius by blast, tremendous heat and suffocation. It appears also to have had undesirable meteorological effects.

On 16 April 1945 the Type XB submarine U-234 [KL Fehler] departed Kristiansand, Norway for Japan direct. She had loaded at Kiel in January and February, and besides a strategic cargo in the region of 260 tonnes carried ten German and two Japanese passengers, all of whom were specialists in the military field or scientists.

On 17 May 1945, against his express orders, Kptlt. Fehler decided to surrender his submarine to the US Navy, and arrived two days later at Portsmouth Navy Yard, New Hampshire.

What is principally of interest is the cargo, and in particular ten cases of "uranium oxide" of 560 kilograms weight, and several items which were not included on the Unloading Manifest.

The Unloading Manifest [US NAT Arch, College Park MD, Box RG38, Box 13, Document OP-20-3-G1-An [Unloading Manifest] dated 24 May 1945) is a falsified document purporting to show the entire cargo aboard U-234. The true Manifests, both American and German, have never been declassified. In the normal course of events, a Manifest upon declassification would bear the censor's deletions where it was intended that certain items should not be displayed. The USN alleged Unloading Manifest is clean of any deletions and purports to be the true Unloading Manifest. From a declassified cable, it is evident that 80 cases of Uranium Powder have been omitted, as was also, from the statements of the U-boat crew members and Kptlt. Fehler, a two-seater Me 262 bomber aircraft brought from Rechlin and stowed in its component parts.

Germany had 1,200 tonnes of uranium oxide on hand at Oolen in Belgium throughout the war, but made no strides towards making an atom bomb. Nevertheless, many commentators fantasize an embryonic atom bomb in the 560 kilos of "uranium oxide" aboard U-234. It is a fantasy, for such evidence as exists points to this being a cover word for something else.

Two official documents address the ten cases of "uranium oxide" directly.

a. A report headed "Regarding 'URANIUM OXIDE' and other CARGO aboard U-234" on the interrogation of Geschwaderrichter Kay Nieschling, U-234 passenger by USN Intelligence Officer Lt Best states that "Lt Pfaff was the man responsible for loading the U-boat" and that "the meaning behind the ore" - peculiar phrase suggesting that the ore was not the ore - would be known by Kptlt. Falk (or Falck) who took some secret courses before he boarded the U-boat. Kptlt. Fehler should also know something about the ore."

It does not appear that Kptlt. Falk or Falck survived his interrogation, for there is no record of his return to Germany, and the US authorities have not been able to account for his movements in their custody after interrogating him on 26 May 1945. There are other indications that the "uranium ore" was extraordinary.

Lt. Col. John Lansdale, chief of security for the Manhattan Project, wrote in a 1996 newspaper article published in Britain and Germany that he had personally handled the disposal of the ten cases. He stated that the American military authorities "reacted with panic" when they learned what the cases contained.

b. The second document was found by researcher Joseph Mark Scalia, a former 12-year US Navy man, during a rummage through old boxes at the Portsmouth Navy Yard.

It is a secret cable from CNO to NYPORT on the subject "MINE TUBES, UNLOADING OF" and states: "Interrogation Lt. Pfaff IIWO U-234 discloses he was in charge of cargo and personally supervised loading all mine tubes. Pfaff prepared Manifest List and knows kind cargo in each tube. 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..."

The so-called "Uranium Oxide" would become sensitive and dangerous if exposed to air. The so-called "Uranium Oxide" was perfectly safe in its cylinders provided one respected it as one would dynamite. The so-called "Uranium Oxide" was sealed in a cylinder lined with gold.

In nuclear physics gold is used to absorb fission fragments plus gamma rays in containers, and is particularly efficient at capturing neutron radiation as well. From this it is evident that the material in the ten cylinders was not just highly radioactive - it was extraordinarily dangerous and behaving as if it were itself a nuclear reactor. No atomic physicist who has examined the evidence about these ten cases has been able to deliver an opinion as to what substance kept within a lead case might have required these extraordinary precautions.

On 24 May 1945, when the US Navy began to unload U-234, it is clear from the US State papers that no decision regarding the atom bomb had been taken by the US government. On 30 May 1945, both Secretary of State Stimson and President Truman were agreed that no alternative existed to deploying America's atomic arsenal against Japan.

They had no alternative to using the atom bomb, and no satisfactory reason has ever been forthcoming why that decision was made. So what could have caused these two decent men to decide that such a course of action was unavoidable?

What was aboard U-234 might also be aboard other Japan-bound U-Boats. The Japanese had at least two submarines with a range of 30,000 miles, that were capable of being used as aircraft launchers. The Japanese had a plan of mixing the uranium from U-234 with standard explosives, and loading them in bombs or planes which were to take off the submarines and attack San Francisco. The target date was August 1945; they were ready, only waiting for the shipment of uranium to arrive.

That would make no sense unless the "Uranium" from U-234 was the waxy substance which when mixed with conventional explosives turned the material into the miracle weapon. These two Japanese submarines would be very close to San Francisco, and the pilots of the bomber aircraft would have to be kamikazes, for proximity to the waxy substance meant certain death.

If the Japanese were indeed in the process of being supplied with this material by German U-Boats for use against the United States west coast, then this was the reason for the nuclear attacks against Japan.

The miracle explosive known nowadays as R-Waffe was not based on uranium, although uranium was used in the creation of the plasmoid. The plasmoid worked as a catalyst on a conventional coal-dust/liquid air mixture to vastly expand the explosion.

Additional sources: US Nat Archive NARA/US Strategic Air Forces in Europe - Air Intelligence Summaries, January 1945 et seq. 6 February 1945, Subject: Engine Interference Counter-measures. To: The Director, Air Technical Service Command, Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, Engineering Division. From: Taylor Drysdale, Director Technical Services, HQ European Theatre of Operations, PoW and X Detachment, Military Intelligence Service, US

"Gerlach goes on to explain that the Nazi party seemed to think that they were working on a bomb and relates how the Party people in Munich were going around from house to house on the 27th or 28th of April last telling everyone that the atomic bomb would be used the following day."

--Jeremy Bernstein,
"Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall" [Copernicus, 2001]

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

Its cities and factories were beyond the reach of any known enemy bomber.

Moreover, much of its industrial capacity was located in its interior, far from the northeastern Atlantic States or the Pacific coast.

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

To this day, many Americans, even ones relatively familiar with the operational details of Word War Two, believe that Germany had no aircraft even capable of reaching the United States and returning to Europe, much less of carrying a heavy enough payload, or being available in sufficient numbers, to be of any military significance.

All that changes, however, if Germany had the atomic bomb and if she possessed aircraft capable of delivering one and of returning successfully to Europe.

In that case, only one bomber need be used to strike a significant military and psychological blow against the United States.

Was such an operation feasible? Did Germany have such aircraft at least capable of being modified to carry an atom bomb? Are there indications that such studies and operations were contemplated by the Nazis?

The Oberkommando der Luftwaffe's Unusual Map

In 1943 the Supreme Command of the Luftwaffe conducted a highly unusual study.

The study consisted of a map  of lower Manhattan Island. 

On the map are concentric circles detailing the blast and heat damag -radii of an atomic bomb detonation over New York City. 

But the most unusual aspect of this "study" is that it shows the detonation of an atom bomb in the 15-17 kiloton range, approximately the same yield as the Little Boy Uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima, an odd "coincidence" in the series of "odd coincidences" we have-already encountered.

The Luftwaffe's intentions are quite obvious and clear. The destruction of the financial and business center of New York City would alone have been an unparalleled military and psychological blow against the American war effort. Beyond this, given the fact that New York City was an important point of embarkation for American shipping and troops, as well as a naval base, and a transportation hub for the entire American northeast, such a blow would have been incalculable.

For the Nazi leadership, such a blow would have made military and political sense. It would have demonstrated conclusively to the United States that Germany was capable of mounting significant military operations against the American mainland, and at levels of destructive capability that were militarily, economically, and psychologically devastating. From their point of view, such a blow would arguably been seen as weakening American resolve and perhaps, after a succession of similar such blows against prominent targets such as Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC or Norfolk, would conceivably have led to America's exit from the war, leaving Britain to follow not far behind. The war against the Soviet Union could then either have been prosecuted without mercy until the inevitable Soviet capitulation, or at the minimum, a negotiated peace highly favorable to the Reich. 

In October of 1943, then, such a study was a tempting prospect. But is there any indication that the OKL's "study map" was anything more than a study? From the evidence presented thus far, the answer is clearly that the Luftwaffe was not merely conducting the typical staff exercises that all general staffs conduct, even in wartime.

For the Luftwaffe, the study was a practical and immanent feasibility. But what of Freier's allegations that the bomb was ready, but the delivery systems were not? Without a delivery system the German Wehrmacht could have possessed all the atom bombs it wished, but they would have been utterly useless, expensive toys, without a viable means to deliver them to its most significant militarily and economically powerful opponent.

Strange Flights 

Did the Germans possess any strategic bombers or aircraft capable of reaching the North American continent with a significant payload, and returning to Europe? Beyond the relatively well-known Messerschmitt 264, a four-engine bomber that looks far too similar to the American B-29 to be coincidental, Germany possessed in small numbers a quantity of heavy-lift, ultra-long range transport craft, including the four engine Junkers 290 and its massive six engine cousin, the Junkers 390.

Only two of these massive aircraft were ever built. The Junkers 390 assumes an odd significance here in our story, for in 1944, one such Ju-390 took off from Bordeaux, France, and flew to within 12 miles of New York City, snapped a picture of the Manhattan skyline, and flew back, a non-stop flight of 32 hours. 

Within the context of the German SS atom bomb project, this flight was more than a mere feasibility study. Photo reconnaissance could only be for target identification. And the flight itself, to within 12 miles of the city, could conceivably have been a test of American air defenses and reactions. In any case, the fact that such a flight returned safely can only indicate that the American Army Air Force simply was not expecting a visit from the Luftwaffe at all, reconnaissance, feasibility study, or otherwise. 

Unknown Cargoes and a Curious Airfield

The Ju-390 and its smaller four-engine cousin the Ju-290, perhaps had a role envisioned for them in conjunction with another little-known, but nonetheless important, fact.

In 1945 the Luftwaffe completed construction of an enormous airfield near Oslo, Norway, capable of handling very large aircraft like the Me-264, the He-177, and the Ju-290 and 390.

 

In an article for the 29 June 1945 issue of the "Washington Post", a report that originated from 21st Army Group headquarters outlines the frightening discovery that awaited Allied military personnel who came to occupy Norway after the German forces there surrendered:

"R.A.F. officers said today that the Germans had nearly completed preparations for bombing New York from a "colossal air field" near Oslo when the war ended.

"Forty giant bombers with a 7,000 mile range were found on this base - the largest Luftwaffe field I have ever seen,' one officer said.

"They were a new type bomber developed by Heinkel. They now are being dismantled for study. German ground crews said the planes were held in readiness for a mission to New York".

It is known that Heinkel undertook special modifications of its He-177 four engine heavy bomber late in the war, adapting it to carry large atom bombs, radiological bombs, and biological and chemical bombs. 

- Friedrich Georg, "Hitlers Siegeswaffen Band 1: Luftwaffe und Marine: Geheime Nuklearwaffen des Dritten Reiches und ihre Trägersysteme"

Within the context of the SS atom bomb program and the earlier flight of the Ju-390 from France in 1944, however, a purpose immediately suggests itself. The loss of France to Allied forces in 1944 deprived the Luftwaffe of its large French airfields. Norway, however, remained in German hands up until their very surrender, and thus constituted the only remaining base of operations available to the Germans for any type of offensive operation against the North American continent.

The presence of such an airfield and its deliberate construction so late in the war also strongly suggests a connection to the SS atom bomb program in an entirely different way, since its construction would likely have fallen under the jurisdiction of the SS Building and Works Department, which was under the direction of none other than SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler. 

It is also significant that jurisdiction over all long range aircraft was also in Kammler's hands by war's end, thus linking the precious long-range bombers on the Oslo field to Kammler as well. Moreover, Mayer and Mehner speculate that at least two atom bombs were built and possibly transported on the mission of the U-234. In their view, the surrender of the U-boat to the American authorities thus not only provided the Manhattan Project with much-needed stocks of enriched uranium, but quite possibly also with two fully functional atom bombs as well. 

Professor Friedrich Lachner was assistant for twenty years to professor Mache at the Department for Technical Physics at the Technical University of Vienna. Familiar with aspects of the German bomb project, Lachner unburdened himself of his knowledge to researchers Mayer and Mehner. Among his allegations were that at least one completed bomb of German construction was transported from Thuringia to Salzburg by the SS near the end of the war. ["Das Geheimnis"] 

Lachner also asserts unequivocally in his letter to Mayer and Mehner that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was German. Lachner also states that there were no less than fifteen atom bombs in German hands by the war's end. Again, on first glance, this seems a sheer fantasy, unless they had already mastered the techniques of boosted fission. The Salzburg bomb story may not be fantasy, as American tank units were operating in the area late in the war in conjunction with Patton's drive on Pilsen and Prague.

Lachner's letter is intriguing for two reasons. First, because it corroborates the existence of a large atom bomb program in the Three Corners region, and corroborates Freier's allegations of a successful test in March 1945. By mentioning the transportation of such weapons out of the region, he gives some credence to the idea that the U-234 might have been used to transport at least one such weapon to Norway. [Italian officer Luigi Romersa mentions as well that the Russians captured two such bombs].

But a more curious allegation is made in Lachner's letter to Mayer and Mehner, and with it, we begin to approach the even more horrendous potentialities of Nazi wartime secret weapons research. Citing the letter of a British espionage agent who was well-aware of the multi-tiered nature of the German atom bomb program, and who was aware of a "third team that sought another way" of making the bomb (boosted fission), [Mayer and Mehner, "Das Geheimnis". It should be noted, however, that the name of this "well known" British agent is never mentioned] he then mentions a "fourth team":

"Yes, and then there was also the fourth team, about which we heard rumors during the last phase of the war. This was certainly so shadowy and fantastic, that one could only construe it as a ploy. But after the war it became evident that the world had avoided a colossal catastrophe by a hair's breath.... This fourth team worked in a field that was monstrous on a daily basis.

"And when I say this, I meant thereby that they experimented with things that a well-informed public would to thus very day think then to be unthinkable and unbelievable, and thus imaginary. I mean to imply that these specialists worked in conceptions that totally abandoned conventional physical law"s. [Ibid. The agent then mentions that he is not aware of which side ended up with this technology].

Mayer and Mehner then point out the implications of the agent's remarks in an age long accustomed to think in terms of the destructive power of hydrogen bombs:

"That the Germans were working on an atom bomb no one may any longer question, but that they also possessed a team that was working on the destruction of the world is an unbelievable concept. This could only mean that there was a weapons system that possessed enormous range and degree of efficiency that lay beyond that of nuclear weapons technology. Did the Third Reich really prepare the Doomsday Weapon?

And if so, where is this technology today? Was it discovered by the Allies or does it lurk secretly deep in the earth waiting for its rediscovery? If such an Ultimate Weapon has already been in existence for more than fifty years, then it is a legitimate question to ask what today's military really, actually possesses". [Ibid. it is also a legitimate question to ask whose military possesses it].

The truthfulness of these stupendous allegations appears to be substantiated by a brief remark uttered by Adolf Hitler to a gathering of Axis elite in April 1944. According to Italian officer Luigi Romersa once again, who was present when Hitler made the remarks, the  Führer strolled through the room and said, "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!"

- Mayer and Mehner, "Das Geheimnis"

Bacteriological war? Bombs with an unbelievable working? Teams of specialists working in areas that defy conventional laws of physics that would threaten a global catastrophe? This is not the picture of a Germany tinkering with V-1 buzz bombs, V-2s of limited operational range and strategic value, clumsy and belated attempts to construct a working atomic reactor, and tottering on the brink of total collapse that we have been led to believe. All the evidence presented thus far tends to the opposite conclusion, that at a minimum the Third Reich possessed functioning atom bombs and was preparing to use them against the West, if she had not already done so against Russia.

So the cargoes intended to fly out of that Norwegian airfield may have not only been nuclear, but something far more horrendous. Already the path through Nazi Germany's nuclear programs have led into very unexpected places and developments, developments only made possible by the recent German reunification and the declassification of German, British, and American archives that it provoked, and suggesting that behind that nuclear program lurks something even larger and far more monstrous. 

In any case, it now seems clear why, in spite of Oppenheimer's statement in the middle of May 1945 that the earliest an atom bomb could be ready was in November of 1945. [It is significant that Oppenheimer made these remarks before the capture of the U-234] that America was able to overcome all fusing problems and fissile material shortages in a mere two months after the German surrender.