Götterdämmerung and Aftermath

"I believe there is a very real UFO problem. I have also come to believe that it is being manipulated for political ends".

--Jacques Vallee

"This is a story of how key Nazis, even as the Wehrmacht was still on the offensive, anticipated military disaster and laid plans to transplant Nazism, intact but disguised, in havens in the West.... It is story that climaxes in Dallas on 22 November 1963 when John Kennedy was struck down. And it is a story with an aftermath - America's slide to the brink of fascism."

--Mae Brussel, "The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination", The Rebel [22 November 1983)

"The Hitlers sat together on a couch in their suite....At about 3:30 P.M. Hitler picked up his 7.65 caliber Walther pistol...On a console was a picture of his mother as a young woman. He put this pistol barrel to his right temple and pulled the trigger".

--John Toland, "Adolf Hitler"

Adolf Hitler was as mythical in death as he was brutal and large in life.

Because of the curious circumstances of his suicide, and the inability of the war-time Allied powers to co-operate on an extensive and through proof that he did die, a whole mythos of his survival grew up after the war, and continues even now.

Betrayed even by Himmler himself, who had secretly begun peace negotiations with the western Allies through the Swedish government, and one time designated "Deputy Führer"  Rudolf Hess in a British prison cell, his designated replacement Reichsmarschall Göring claiming leadership in the chaos of the collapsing Reich to the quick denunciation by Hitler for treason, the Führer relinquished power before his suicide to an unlikely candidate, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz.

The selection of Dönitz by Hitler is significant, for Dönitz was in an usual position to co-ordinate the escape of fleeing Nazis to South America and other places via the new type XXI U-Boats just entering service.

But before proceeding to that story, it is worth looking at the Hitler and various other Nazi survival myths in a broad overview, in order to have a basis on which to distinguish possible fact from deliberate myth and misinformation.

For these various Nazi survival myths and legends, Hitler's survival is not so much a fact, as a grotesque parody of an icon, a disturbing possibility that hovers over every version.

For example, the standard view of Hitler committing suicide on 30 April 1945, is itself not without its own occult significance, for this is the date of the eve of a "Witches' Sabbath", the Walpurgisnacht.

Moreover, in mediaeval Cathar doctrine -a doctrine well-studied by the SS Ahnenerbe- suicide was a permissible act, if done in concert with another, with a soul mate.

Hitler and his newly married mistress of many years, Eva [Braun] Hitler, both committed suicide together.
 

The non-standard Hitler and Nazi survival myths run the whole spectrum, from fanciful and implausible stories of underground bases in the Canadian Arctic, or on Antarctica itself armed with exotic weaponry,  to more "mundane" and plausible stories of Nazi colonies in South America.

To secret weather stations and commando teams operating in Greenland during the war, to the well-known and best documented case, that of Operation Paperclip, America's wholesale importation of Nazi scientists and doctors after World War Two to assist the United States in continued covert development and research on a whole host of black projects.

In one rather interesting version of the Hitler survival myth, he and other Nazi bigwigs underwent plastic surgery before the end of the war, and were spirited off to Antarctica or South America.

One version of this myth even has an elderly Hitler ministering to the poor as a Catholic priest.

It is the thesis that there is some truth to some of these Nazi survival myths, and that all need to be viewed against the back-drop of the Nazis' own plans for postwar survival and continuance under a variety of fronts, organizations, or in concert with new "host" governments such as the United States or the various governments of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.

This includes accounts of South American colonies, to Paperclip, and finally, to Bormann's top secret plan for post-war survival and economic resurgence.

What emerges from this examination is a disturbing picture that suggests deliberate Nazi misinformation in the immediate post-war period, and a deliberate attempt to disguise ongoing projects inside the black projects of the new "host" governments and corporations

A slight, though discernible connection emerges that substantiates the thesis  that the secret weapons think tank, the Kammlerstab, survived the war more or less intact, and continued its work in a variety of host countries, most particularly in the United Kingdom and even more so in the United States.,

Either in concert with them, and sometimes independently of them.

The Antarctic Survival Myth

Of all the high-ranking German military leaders, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz is the most often overlooked, and yet he may have been the most crucial for the story of Nazi survival and continued secret weapons research.

The secret preparations and voyage of the U-234 to Japan, with its precious cargo of enriched Uranium and infrared fuses, could not likely have taken place without his express knowledge, participation, and authorization.

Outside Kammler's "think tank", he was the only military leader of a service arm to know the full extent of Nazi Germany's actual advances in atom bomb and other nuclear research.

Best known for his orchestration of the Nazi U-Boat campaign against British, Canadian, and American shipping, his alleged role in the various survival myths is little known outside a small circle of UFOlogy and World War Two researchers.

Of all the Nazi military leaders, his selection by Adolf Hitler as the second Führer of the Third Reich is, at best, problematical, unless viewed in the light of these late war technology transfers and escaping Nazis.

Why would Hitler have chosen Dönitz, a World War One veteran of the High Seas Fleet of Kaiser Wilhelm, with the Kriegsmarine's well-known imperialist culture and leanings that he represented, to be his successor?

A conventional answer is afforded by the circumstances outlined:

Betrayed on all sides -by Himmler and Göring-  a desperate Hitler reached out to what he thought was the most loyal conventional military service arm of the Wehrmacht, the Navy.

But the Survival Mythos contributes a very different perspective from which to view Hitler's possible motivations.

Dönitz himself does nothing to allay those suspicions, either during or immediately after the war.

According to Henry Stevens, who has almost single-handedly investigated every lead -no matter how implausible the detail- of the Nazi UFO and survival legends, Dönitz on more than one occasion alluded to the Navy's role in exotic secret weapons research and in the construction of very secret bases far from the Reich homeland. 

In 1943, the Grand Admiral is reported to have stated that "the German submarine fleet is proud of having built for the Führer, in another part of the world, a Shangri-La on land, an impregnable fortress".

- [Henry Stevens, "The Last Battalion and German Arctic, Antarctic, and Andean Bases" [Gorman, California: "The German Research Project", 1997] citing Col. Howard A. Buechner and Capt. Wilhelm Bernhardt, "Hitler's Ashes" [Metarie, Louisiana: Thunderbird Press Inc.]

Strange language for an admiral well-known for cold calculation in military strategy and tactics, and not well-known to be inclined to mystical statements.

Then again, in 1944, the Grand Admiral doled out a little more information:

"The German Navy will have to accomplish a great task in the future. The German Navy knows all hiding places in the oceans and therefore it will be very easy to bring the Führer to a safe place should the necessity arise and in which he will have the opportunity to work out his final plans". 

[Ibid., citing Buechner and Bernhardt]

But it was Dönitz's almost insane remarks at Nuremberg that seemed to point clearly to one of the two polar regions as the "site" for these "plans". 

At Nuremberg he boasted of "an invulnerable fortress, a paradise-like oasis in the middle of eternal ice".

- Ibid., citing Willibald Mattern, "UFOs Unbekanntes Flugobjekt? Letzte Geheimwaffe des Dritten Reiches?" [Toronto: Samisdat Publisher]

Whatever the trustworthiness of Steven's sources, these statements, plus the unusual behavior of some U-Boats at the end of the war, and the Germans' well-publicized pre-war Antarctic scientific expedition, certainly seemed to spur the United States into a sudden and intense post-war military interest in Antarctica.

Again, since the basic facts are well-known to but a small circle of World War Two and UFOlogy researchers, it is worth recalling them in some detail.

• U-530 surrendered at Mar del Plata, Argentina, on 10 July 1945
• U-977 surrendered at Mar del Plata, Argentina, on 17 August 1945
• U-465 was scuttled off the coast of Patagonia in August 1945
• Another U-Boat of unknown number surrendered to the Argentine Navy on 10 June 1945 

[Ibid., citing Buechner]

When the U-530 and U-977 surrendered so late after the European War's end, Allied Intelligence was more than a little concerned, and dispatched agents to interrogate the German officers.

They certainly did not believe that the German captains had taken their ships on a South Atlantic excursion of three to four months just to surrender to the Argentines, as Captain Schäffer of the U-977 and Captain Wermoutt of the U-530 actually, and apparently in all seriousness, stated.

Stevens summarizes the Allies' real concern - Nazi survival in no uncertain terms:

"The Allies first believed that these U-Boats had taken persons of special importance, perhaps even Adolf Hitler, from Germany to South America.

"In light of this possibility both captains were held for questioning.

"Captain Schäffer, who surrendered last, was taken to America for a month or so then to England for another period of questioning.

""Both captains maintained that there had been no persons of political importance deposited in South America.

Eventually the captains were released although Schäffer found living in Occupied Germany intolerable and relocated to South America. Captain Schäffer even went on to write a book explaining his voyage and actions".

Nobody really believed Schäffer.

Bernhardt, who himself was aboard U-530, claims that American and British Intelligence had learned that U-530 and U-977 did visit Antarctica before landing in South America but the exact nature of their mission eluded them.

A glimpse into this extra-ordinary mission and the high importance afforded by the German Navy High Command [Oberkommando der KriegsMarine or OKM] to it can perhaps be afforded by a glance of the alleged performance characteristics of the U-530.

In the spring of 1945, an old-fashioned type U-Boat with the number 530 was dry-docked after being damaged by a freighter which had rammed it.

As was typical for the Kriegsmarine, a new submarine, probably a type XXI or further development of it, was launched at approximately the same time, and was given the same service number, an obvious ploy to confuse Allied military Intelligence.

But why was the U-Boat that actually sailed to the South Atlantic and that later surrendered to Argentina probably a type XXI or some derivative?

Because Captain Wilhelm Bernhardt, a pen name of an actual crew member of Captain Wermoutt's U-530, let out a significant piece of information; He stated that her submerged speed was approximately 30 knots, an unheard of speed for a submerged submarine in that day.

The only submarines in service in any navy in the world capable of that performance at that time were the German type XXI U-Boats.

The type XXI U-Boat, like most U-Boats in the German Navy by that time, was fitted with the special Schnorkel device that allowed its main Diesel engines to operate while submerged underwater. 

t is quite possible that these newer Type XXI U-boats also had the newer Schnorkels fitted with the special anti-radar coatings.

But the Type XXI was also outfitted with the special "Walther" turbine, an underwater jet device that utilized hydrogen peroxide that allowed great underwater cruising speeds.

In effect, these turbines were "silent" engines allowing great underwater speeds for limited durations of time.

Thus, the Type XXI had brought submarine technology and warfare to a new and sophisticated level by the war's end.

But would even the Type XXI have been able to brave the North and then South Atlantic Oceans, by that point in the war all but Allied lakes?

There is some indication that not only were they successful in doing so, but wildly so.

There were special new guidance systems the Germans had adapted to missiles, and torpedoes, that included wire-guidance, as well as magnetic proximity fuses.

Stevens reports that on 2 May 1945, a flotilla of U-Boats, many of them Type XXIs, carefully husbanded by Donitz at Kristiansand fjord in Norway, departed in a wolf pack for Iceland, making the traditional run through the straits between Iceland and Greenland.

The British consistently maintained a flotilla of destroyers, accompanied occasionally by heavier units of light and heavy cruisers, on station in these straits throughout the war.

What happened next has been deleted from what passes as history, at least in the countries of the former Allied Powers.

What happened was the last great sea battle of the Atlantic. The German U-Boat convoy ran straight into an Allied naval battle formation,   

The result was stunning.

Using the new torpedoes... the Allied ships were totally annihilated.

Apparently the Allies never quite realized what they had run into.

Our only third-party report of the event was an article in a South American newspaper which learned of the event.

A quote from the only survivor of the attack is often quoted: 

"May God help me, may I never again encounter such a force" - British destroyer captain.

This was reportedly carried in "El Mercurio", Santiago, Chile, and "Der Weg" a paper published by exiled Germans living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The use of new torpedoes -whether wire-guided, acoustic-seeking, or magnetic proximity-fused, leads once again back to Kammler's "think tank" secret weapons empire.

These torpedoes, plus the high-submersible speeds and "proto-stealth" capabilities of the Type XXI U-Boats would have been more than a match for the British destroyers on station between Iceland and Greenland.

The Coler coil came to the quick attention of the Kriegsmarine in the early days of the Third Reich, which immediately classified it at the highest level, and funded further research.

It is the perfect generator for submarine use. It produces no exhaust and burns no fuel. It could be linked directly to existing electric-drive vessels and run under water indefinitely.

Did the Germans actually accomplish this?

The underground German writers say that this indeed happened.

This theme runs throughout the writing of O. Bergmann whose specialty is the link between German submarines and German flying saucers

["Deutsche Flugscheiben und U-Boote Überwachen die Weltmeere"]

This is an incredible, if not outlandish, claim.

Yet it is worth pondering for a moment.

The Coler devices, developed in 1933, [British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, 1946: "The Invention of Hans Coler Relating to an Alleged New Source of Power"] and their unusual ability to transduce electrical power out of something were known to the Germans fully six years before the war had even started, and were developed in secret for twelve years after that [and then presumably by the British for another twenty three years after that]. 

It is not knownWe do not know, nor is the British Government saying [if knows], to what state the Germans brought this device, but whatever the state, they bad fully twelve years in which to do it.

Whether perfected or not, there is the assertion that it was brought to some state of pre-trial use on submarines:

The Germans were deliberately after a method of submarine propulsion that would have allowed indefinite submerged cruising, much as a modern nuclear submarine, but by a device much simpler in design and construction, and presumably, much less risky in operation.

Whether or not the Germans were able to bring it to a state of practical use is thus, in one sense, immaterial, since the classification of the device alone indicates the nature of their interest.

In any case, the odd circumstances of the late-surrendering U-Boats, not to mention the alleged naval debacle suffered by the British so late in the war when everything seemed - from a naval and military standpoint-so secure and safe, focused Allied and particularly American eyes quite quickly and forcefully on Antarctica.

[It goes without saying that the high priority that the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee placed on recovering a Coler device and its inventor after the war tends to corroborate the notion that the British had learned the hard way that it had been brought to some state of practical use for submarine propulsion].

Whatever the Allies learned, there was a sudden, intense interest in Antarctica. This interest was so strong that in 1946, as Allied troop were returning home from the War and all thoughts were turned to peacetime pursuits, the United States Government, under President Harry Truman, found it absolutely imperative that a full military expedition be mounted against Antarctica. This campaign was called Operation High Jump.
 

On Saturday 8 July 1939 Americans across the country opened their morning newspaper to a front-page story not unlike the one from "The New York Times" Quoted below.

President Directs Speed on Byrd Trip
[Excerpts]

WASHINGTON, July 7 -  President Roosevelt moved today to prevent possible extension of Germany’s claims to Antarctic areas into the Western Hemisphere by directing Real Admiral Richard E. Byrd to leave in October to territory within the sphere of influence of the Monroe Doctrine …

Iit [is] apparent that this government was prepared to take the position, if necessary, that any attempts by foreign powers to establish bases west of the 180th meridian in the Antarctic would be considered an unfriendly act …

If the $340,000 appropriated by Congress for the expedition permitted, Admiral Byrd said, he would outfit three ships.

His own ship would be 'The Bear of Oakland', which is undergoing a careful inspection at Boston.

He said he would lend it to the government after a new engine had been installed…

As  can seen from the above a major confrontation between American and German forces seemed to be a very real and present danger in Antarctica in 1939.

However, in retrospect, though the German presence in the “land of everlasting mystery” was the publicized reason for Admiral Byrd’s hurry-up expedition, at no time did Admiral Byrd or those under his command make any attempt to observe what the German expedition was up to. 

Neither in the 1938 - 39 nor the subsequent 1947 and 1955 expeditions to Antarctica did the Americans come anywhere close to the lands claimed by the Germans.

Could the stated reason for the 1939 expedition, as is often the case in military operations, only be a cover for a more “important” secret mission for Admiral Byrd and his fellow members of the 1939 expedition.

The following small article hidden away on a back page of the 30 November 1939 issue of "The New York Times" highlights that possibility.

Secret Orders Taken by Byrd on Polar Trip
[Excerpts]

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 [AP] - Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd joined the vanguard of his South Pole expedition at the Panama Canal today with confidential orders from the White House. Officials say the Orders were a State Department secret …

Even the existence of the orders, authorities said, had been kept secret … Admiral Byrd received them, informants say, on a hurried trip to Washington last week before departing for Panama.

Is it possible that these “secret orders” contained the real reason for Admiral Byrd’s expedition?

And was the fact that the Germans were also conducting a “secret” expedition in Antarctica make the Admiral’s real reason for putting together the American expedition a matter of utmost importance?

On 11 September 1939 Richard H. Cruzen assumed command of the 65-year-old screw barkentine 'USS Bear' [AG-29].

Bear participated in the United States Antarctic Service Expedition, under the command of Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, a renowned aviator and explorer who led the government financed expedition to evaluate the economic and military value of the Antarctic continent.

There has been much speculation over the years that Admiral Byrd was actually in the Antarctic for reasons that went beyond the U.S. claim of "routine" polar exploration. 

The Nazis were supposedly establishing [or in fact, already had, established] a strong presence there and the theory is that Byrd was sent to do some reconnaissance, or perhaps even try to eliminate the threat,  

Maybe someday the records will be declassified, but a possible cover-up, suggests an ulterior motive for the expedition.

Navy records state that 1,000 miles of new coastline was discovered by survey missions by the Bear and aircraft. 

After the expedition, Cruzen was commended by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox for "superior seamanship, ability, courage, determination, efficiency and good judgment in dangerous emergencies". Cruzen was one of only 16 members of the 1939-41 expedition who received the United States Antarctic Expedition Medal in gold, which was presented in November 1946.

In 1946 Admiral Richard E. Byrd was selected as officer in charge of the Navy's Antarctic Developments Project, also known as Operation Highjump. Cruzen was chosen to commanded Task Force 68, which constituted the vast majority of the resources assigned to the operation. 

Task Force 68 consisted of 4,700 personnel, an aircraft carrier, a command ship, two destroyers, two icebreakers, two seaplane tenders, two supply ships, two tankers and a submarine. 

This was by far the largest Antarctic expedition up to that time and, possibly, the largest in history.

Cruzen departed the United States on board his flagship, the 'USS Mount Olympus', on 2 December 1946. 

Personnel assigned to the expedition included meteorologists, zoologists, physicists, and experts from oceanographic institutes. Besides gathering scientific data, another goal of the expedition was to train Navy personnel and to test Navy ships and other equipment in cold weather and ice operations.

Among the discoveries made during Operation Highjump were finding two "oases", one a region of ice-free lakes and land. More than 300,000 square miles of uncharted territory were mapped by aircraft. This led to updating of existing charts and maps of the Antarctic.

Why was Admiral Byrd at the Japanese Surrender Ceremonies.....?

There was an article in "Ice Cap News" in 1978, verified by naval records, that the USS Mount Olympus, a vessel later to become famous as the flagship of Operation Highjump was at Toyko Bay.

It was then the flagship for the Commander III Amphibious Forces with Admiral T.S. Wilkinson on board. The 'Mount Olympus' was in Toyko Bay on 2 September 945 as they landed the occupation forces of the First Cavalry Division. 

Admiral Wilkinson was unable to attend the ceremony on board the USS Missouri [BB-63]. and the representative he sent on his behalf, was none other than Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd.

Given the possible Nazi connection alluded to in several conspiracy theories, it makes for interesting fodder for thought. 

Was Byrd given a chance to see some of the fruits of his labor? 

All the time he had spent in Antarctica before the end of the war ostensibly keeping an eye out for the Nazis, and then he gets to attend the surrender ceremony of Nazi Ally, Japan? Interesting at the least. 

Coincidence or not?

And then of course, just a bit over a year later, Operation Highjump and all the conspiracy theories involved with that operation make the whole connection very interesting. 
 

• An aircraft escort carrier ['Philippine Sea'] 
• Two seaplane carriers ['Pine Island' and 'Curritich']
• Two destroyers ['Brownsen' and 'Henderson'] 
• Two escort ships ['Yankee' and 'Merrick'] 
• Two fueling ships ['Canister' and 'Capacan']
• A submarine ['Sennet']

Additionally, 4,700 troops equipped with helicopters, reliable, fixed-wing DC-3s, and a specially designed armored vehicle were also at Admiral Byrd's command.

Admiral Robert Byrd’s first expedition, where he flew to the South Pole and back and established the Little America Research base on the Ross Ice Shelf, ended in 1930. 4 years later Byrd spent five winter months alone operating a meteorological station 123 miles inland from the Little America Research Center called Advance Base, where he almost died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty heater. He was rescued after his colleagues back at Little America noticed something wrong with his radio messages and made the treacherous trek across the frozen wasteland.

In late 1938, Byrd visited Hamburg and was invited to participate in the 1938/1939 German "Neuschwabenland" Antarctic Expedition, but declined. In 1939, a large research vehicle [a behemoth] called the Snow Cruiser was built in three months by the Research Foundation of Armour Institute of Technology. It was an ungainly beast with huge balloon tires, [built by Goodyear] built to withstand the harsh environment of Antarctica. It weighed 75,000 pounds, was more than 55 feet long, 20 feet wide and was 16 feet tall. It was designed for a range of 5,000 miles and could support five people with supplies for a year. It carried a reconnaissance aircraft on top of the cruiser for aerial photography.

Its construction, costing $150,000, was financed by friends of the Institute and 80 manufacturers. Principal units in its makeup include a special alloy steel body built by the Pullman company, two six-cylinder 672 cubic inch, 150 hp Cummings Diesel engines, General Electric generators and. motors, and controls for steering, braking and jacking, by Hydraulic Controls Inc. The airplane is a specially designed Beechcraft with a 350 hp Wright Whirlwind engine.

The Snow Cruiser, the world's newest and largest automobile in 1939, had almost nothing in common with conventional cars except that it ran on four pneumatic tires, but even this comparison is not exact because the tires were so large and soft that a spring suspension was unnecessary.

Unlike an ordinary car, it had two engines instead of one, four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering by two levers instead of a steering wheel, two accelerator pedals, two brake pedals, a built-in hydraulic jack on each wheel, enough Diesel fuel for a 5,000-mile run [2,500 gallons], 1,000 gallons of airplane gasoline, bunks for four men and food for a year. 

The immediate purpose of the Snow Cruiser, was, as part of the U. S. Antarctic Service under Admiral Byrd's command, to speed up exploration work and scientific investigation as well as to claim the continent as a United States possession by maintaining colonies there for three years as required by international agreement.

Assisted by the airplane, it was believed that the Snow Cruiser would add as much to the knowledge of the South Polar regions in two or three months as all previous expeditions combined. The plane, along with others, was expected to map most of the South Polar Continent by means of aerial cameras.

The plan was for the Cruiser to go with Admiral Byrd on the United States Antarctic Service Expedition, which being an officially sanctioned government effort, was the title of the Expedition - yet most all of the newspapers of the day headlined it as Byrd's Third Antarctic Expedition, often seen shortened to BAE III. It is easy to see the confusion, as Byrd was the Commanding Officer of the expedition, having sold his ship, 'The Bear of Oakland', to the government for $1.00 so it could be used for the voyage. Byrd and his supporters had also contributed a large amount of financial support to the costs of the expedition. 

The Antarctic Snow Cruiser on its trip from Chicago to Boston for its journey to the Antarctic  was driven there on the regular highways! While enroute, it was under the captaincy of its designer, Dr. Thomas C. Poulter, who was the Scientific Director of the Armour Institute, and had been second in command and chief scientist, on the previous Byrd expedition where several tractors were used with some success. Some were of American manufacture with metal belts and others were French Citroens with metal belts in the rear and two wheels in front with pneumatic tires. The latter design had been used for some years in the Sahara Desert.

The cruiser was intended to be loaded aboard the motor ship 'S.S. North Star' and then transported to Antarctica, but defense plans halted Byrd's Third Antarctic Expedition which certainly serves to fuel much speculation currently in vogue as to a conspiracy to cover up what Byrd really saw there and later in Operation Highjump. [aka "Admiral Byrd" conspiracy]. 

There has been much speculation over the years that Admiral Byrd was actually in the Antarctic for reasons that went beyond the U.S. claim of "routine" polar exploration. 

The Nazis were supposedly establishing (or in fact, already had, established) a strong presence there and the theory is that Byrd (who better than Byrd?) was sent to do some reconnaissance, or perhaps even try to eliminate the threat, or?? 

Maybe someday the records will be declassified and we can finally know for sure - but a possible cover-up, and the discovery of a supposed secret diary kept by Byrd, suggests an ulterior motive for the expedition. Like it would be the first time the government ever launched a cover-up?

If it were truly a scientific venture, Byrd must have been instructed by his superiors to keep his eyes open, and to call anything in that they saw out of the ordinary, as flash traffic! In addition to being the great explorer, he was also a sailor's sailor... he would have understood the need to be vigilant!

When the Cruiser eventually made it to Antarctica in 1949, it was said to have been a lemon. Peter Muller, writing in "Popular Mechanics" in 1993, said that when it [finally] arrived, "The huge tires spun helplessly much of the time, sinking as much as three feet into the snow. Furthermore, the big vehicle was seriously underpowered. The motors overheated after it had gone only a few hundred yards." 

The Snow Cruiser was abandoned there at Little America, and the ice shelf on which it was left has long since caved off and the cruiser is presumed to have sunk, and is resting at an unknown location on the Antarctic shelf sea floor. A much better story, however, and one which is purely speculation - is that the Soviets took it. Without any proof, it is just a story, but it adds to the intrigue of the whole affair. 

Outfitted for a stay of eight months, the expedition encircled the German claimed territory of Neuschwabenland [New Schwabialand].
 
Admiral Byrd stationed the naval vessels off the coast, and then advanced the ground troops and aerial reconnaissance from the pole toward the German territory.

Allegedly the German "base" was quickly found, overflown, and either an American flag, or a bomb, depending on the version of the story, was dropped on the position.

In any case, the four escort craft accompanying the scout aircraft were lost without a trace.

This single event throws the whole Highjump exercise into a curious light, for it somehow changed the whole character of the Byrd expedition.

Within 48 hours Admiral Byrd had given orders which canceled the expedition and made preparations to leave Antarctica. The mission had lasted closer to eight weeks than to eight months.

No official reason was given for the sudden withdrawal.

Byrd was returned to Washington D.C., debriefed, and his personal and operational logs from the mission were seized and remain classified to this day, fueling an endless stream of rumors and conspiracy theories

Howeve, the expedition, in keeping with its cover as a mapping expedition perhaps, was composed also of small contingents of news media and reporters from other countries, one of which was Chile.

A reporter working for the Chilean "El Mercurio" in Santiago, Lee van Atta, accompanied Admiral Byrd, who "made some astounding statements, all dutifully recorded" and reported by van Atta, and dutifully ignored in the American press.

On 5 March 1947, the prestigious Chilean newspaper "El Mercurio" carried an article from its correspondent Lee van Atta aboard the support ship 'Mount Olympus'.

The title of the article was: "Admiral Richard E Byrd refers to the Strategic Importance of the Poles". 

It has often been alleged that this item never appeared and is fiction, but now the cutting in question, has been found, and so it exists.

In the past it has often been misquoted in translation by UFO enthusiasts, the usual interpolation in the text being "flying objects" having the ability "to fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds".

The article reads in true translation as follows:

"Admiral Byrd declared today that it was imperative for the United States to initiate immediate defence measures against the possible invasion of the country by hostile aircraft operating from the polar regions.

"The Admiral stated:

'I don't want to frighten anyone unduly but it is a bitter reality that in the case of a new war, the continental United States will be attacked by aircraft flying in from one or both poles'.

"As regards the recently terminated expedition, Byrd said that the most important the most important result of the observations and discoveries made is the current potential effect which they will have on the security of the United States".

At that time in history, of course, there was only one nation that had undertaken anything like an extensive exploration of the southern polar continent: Nazi Germany. 

The Neuschwabenland Expedition

In late 1938 the Germans undertook an expedition to Antarctica, specially outfitting a seaplane carrier, the 'Schwabenland' for the purpose, and placing it under the command of one of Germany's most experienced polar navigators.

At a cost of some millions of Reichsmarks, the expedition was under the personal direction and mentorship of none other than Luftwaffe chief, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring

[It is also to be noted that apparently the then Deputy Führer and Party chief, Rudolf Hess, was also privy to whatever secret purpose and findings this expedition had.

Some people allege that this was in part a hidden motivation for Hess's inexplicable flight to Great Britain in 1941 to conduct secret "peace" negotiations with representatives of the British Fascist movement] which leaves one to wonder what possible purpose Göring would have in sponsoring such an expedition.

That it was military in nature seems beyond doubt, for the Nazis spared no effort to outfit the expedition as thoroughly as possible.

New canning techniques were invented for the food needed on the voyage from and back to Germany, and new clothing was designed, including allegedly a "grey almost bullet-proof seamless and metallic appearing suit...made of whale skin"

-  Christoph Friedrich, "Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions" [Toronto: Samisdat Publishers, No date]

The inspiration for the expedition may have had hidden occult motivations as well, for the occult Thulegesellschaft or Thule Society subscribed to a Nordic Atlantis hidden beneath the polar ice, whence sprang, so the legend goes, the Germanic race. [This fact would also place the expedition within the brief of the SS Ahnenerbedienst]

In any case, small teams of specially selected biologists and other scientists accompanied the expedition to run laboratory experiments on board the refurbished Schwabenland.

The expedition is the subject of a fascinating novel by William Dietrich called "Ice Reich" [Time Warner, 1998].

Dietrich's thesis is that the Germans were after unknown microbial and bacteriological life forms that were frozen in the ice and that could be transformed into biological weapons.

The Germans chose the region of Antarctica known as Queen Maud Land, an area of the continent claimed by Denmark.

In blatant disregard for international law, the Nazis overflew the entire area, dropping thousands of little Swastika flags on the region with little spikes to embed them in the ice, and claimed it for Germany, renaming the region Neuschwabenland. but they did more than just fly and drop flags.

The German pilots extensively photographed the region, and reported mountain ranges in excess of 12,000 feet altitude, rocky crags projecting above the fields of ice.

But most amazingly, they allegedly found ice-free ponds, heated geothermally, in which grew various unknown species of algae.

They also discovered the southern tip of the fault line that runs from New Zealand, through Neuschwabenland, and up the Atlantic Ocean, the famous Atlantic "trench".

The Germans concluded that such features might indicate the presence of rocky caverns on the continent, heated geothermally, the perfect place for a hidden base in the world's most isolated, desolate, and inaccessible wilderness. 

Most intriguingly, the scientists aboard the Schwabenland were not idle in analyzing the potential foodstuffs of the continent:

Emperor penguins were captured for return to Germany for study.

Walruses were shot and their bodies dissected. Their bodies were tested for fat, protein, vitamin and other nutrient content. 

The biological findings made during this expedition would occupy German university scientists for months to come but the aim of this focus was secret.

It is known that German dieticians [sic] were commissioned to prepare tasty and nutritious meals using only what was available in Antarctica.

[citing Friedrich. Clearly, if these allegations are true, then the Germans were preparing for a relatively large and permanent presence on the Antarctic continent].

Then, via an unusual zigzagging route between Africa and South America -itself one of the intriguing mysteries of the expedition- the Schwabenland returned to Germany, reaching port on 10 April 1939. 

Göring presented the expedition members with Commemorative medals. Then, all further mention of the expedition in the German -or any other press- ceased.

So what do we have at this juncture?

Allegations from German writers of known or suspected Nazi sympathies of a continued German presence on the Antarctic continent during and after the war;

Actual suspicious U-Boat activity in the South Atlantic at the end of the war;

Allegations of German research that could have been for no other purpose than establishment of a permanent German presence on the continent;

Allegations of discoveries of small thermally heated ponds with unknown types of algae on the continent's interior;

Allegations of Grand Admiral Dönitz that the U-Boat fleet was involved in the construction of a secret base or bases far from the Reich, one base of which was surrounded by "eternal ice";

Allegations of a last sea battle in the Atlantic prior to the German surrender, with things going surprisingly disastrously for the Allies;

An actual large post-war American military adventure to the continent within two years of the end of the war, with small accompanying international press contingents, an expedition outfitted for eight months that stayed only eight weeks; and finally,

An actual newspaper report of Admiral Byrd trying to warn America of a military threat from "enemy aircraft" flying from pole to pole at tremendous speed. 

All of this would seem to imply at a minimum that something was going on in Antarctica, and that someone in the United States Federal government was quite worried about it. 

When the United States returned to Antarctica some twelve years later, it did so once again with force, this time, nuclear force, and once again, under the cover of an "international co-operative effort". -the International Geophysical Year of 1957- 1958.

This means that if there were indeed Germans on a secret base somewhere on that frozen continent, they had some twelve years to do whatever they were doing.

In terms of the Nazi legend, supposedly they were busily perfecting their strange wartime research.

As Henry Stevens points out, this period, from 1947 to 1957-58, is the "golden age" of the flying saucer.

It encompasses the Kenneth Arnold sightings, the Roswell UFO crash and recovery, and the famous 1952 Washington D.C. sightings.

Stevens speculates on the possible motivation for the UFO overflights of sensitive areas of Washington DC:

"Was this overflight in retaliation for the Byrd overflight of the German base in Antarctica, designed to show Americans they had no control over their own air-space?"

Stevens offers no evidence for this speculation.

But supposing Stevens is correct for the sake of argument.

Overflights of the American capital by Nazi flying saucers so long after the war's end would certainly have shaken the national security apparatus of the United States.

Much more than overflights by apparently benign extra-terrestrial ones.

The response would have been to clamp the lid down on government research of the UFO phenomenon, exactly as happened, since the supposedly defeated enemy was not, if this is true, really defeated after all.

Under the cover of the geophysical year, the United States again sent a naval task force to the Antarctic.

The use of military force-including atomic weapons- was "covered" by the ridiculous story that the USA and USSR, in a rare moment of nuclear co-operation during the height of the Cold War, were interested in seeing how much of the continent could be "recovered" for use by warming it with nuclear explosions.

Accordingly, it would be necessary to explode a few small nuclear "devices" for above the continent to warm and melt the ice as a proof of concept. [26]

A Stevens aptly quips, "You already know exactly where in Antarctica they planned to explode these atomic bombs".

Three bombs were thus detonated at an altitude of approximately 300 miles above the target, one on 27 August 1958, one on 30 August 1958, and a third on 6 September 1958.

Stevens also notes that these bursts may have something to do with the "ozone hole" over the South Pole and the US government's reluctance to discuss the idea or the events that may have caused it.

Additionally, perhaps it is possible that one atom bomb from each of the world's then nuclear powers, the US, the USSR, and the UK, were used.

If these bursts were indeed intended secretly against an actual target, then why so high?

Stevens hypothesizes that they were to knock out any German equipment in the region by the strong electro-magnetic pulse that results from a nuclear detonation.

While this is a plausible explanation if the intention were to occupy the alleged base via a ground assault or assaults within the time frame of the bursts, no such contingent is known to have accompanied the small armada of two destroyers, two destroyer escorts, and a small aircraft carrier.

This explanation, however, does bear some weight in connection with the allegations of the capabilities of German bases at the other pole.

With the Geophysical Year expedition of 1958's atomic detonations, the alleged German base on the Antarctic continent fades, the Germans themselves supposedly gradually evacuating it during the interim period from Byrd's expedition to the final coup de grace for more favorable climes in South America.

There the case for Nazi survival and continued research becomes much stronger.

Spitzbergen, Greenland, and Arctic Canada: The Other German Polar Survival Myth

The Western Allies, the Russians, and the Germans all relied heavily on weather reports to plan and execute their campaigns, and for this purpose, accurate up-to-the-minute reporting on Arctic conditions was crucial.

To this end it is not surprising to find the Germans in particular outfitting special commando units -usually Waffen SS- to operate independently in Spitzbergen Island north of Norway, in Greenland, and in Arctic Canada.

Such teams were delivered to their operational areas via U-Boat. Spitzbergen in particular seemed to trade hands between the British and the Germans, as each side mounted commando operations to destroy the other's weather stations and listening posts.

On one such occasion, the German battleship 'Tirpitz', sister ship to the 'Bismarck', sailed to the island where one such British station was operating, leveled her 15 inch heavy guns at it, and promptly dispatched it, no doubt to the complete shock and surprise of the British manning it.

Other allegations have a secret German weather base and listening post operating in Franz Josef Land, the islands to the north of Finland and the Soviet Union.

However, with the allegations of German bases in Greenland, one again enters the realm of the surreal.

These bases were allegedly comparatively large, as were the contingents of Germans operating them.

While they were supposedly known by the Greenlanders and occupying American forces, most efforts to find them ended in failure.

One post-war German source places as many as three independent SS battle groups [Kampfgruppen] operating in Greenland, under the code name of Thulekampfgruppen [Thule battle groups].

The connection to the occult interests of the Third Reich are once again in evidence.

Tese "Thule battle groups" become the subject of another series of survival legends.

Former SS officers supposedly reported seeing U-Boats loaded with rates designated "Thule 1 K" and so on departing Germany in the final days of the war.

Sworn to secrecy by the SS, the "clear implication is that the 'Thule 1 K is the Thule Kampfgruppe 1" and that it had "no intentions of surrender; and that there was still a mission to accomplish".

The Americans, so the story goes, were unsuccessful in locating the bases for two reasons: the area was too large, and the bases were "like the German fortifications built in Neuschwabenland...tunneled deep underneath the glaciers of ice [into presumably solid rock]and that they were bored to a length of 2000 meters".

- O. Bergmann, "Deutsche Flugsheiben und U-Boote  Überwachen die Weltmeere", Hugin Gesellschaft für politisch-philosophische Studien [Horstl, Germany: 1989]

This allegation is surely implausible, since the transport of sophisticated mining and boring equipment, let alone enough explosive, for such a task by U-Boat would have been an enormous undertaking, one quite beyond the labor capabilities of small SS battle groups.

[Consider the fact that the huge underground factories in Germany were built over several months by thousands of slave laborers working around-the-clock with the best available existing mining and tunneling technology].

But this is not the end of the surreal aspects of the story. Should the bases have been detected, they were supposedly defended with exotic electro-magnetic weapons, one of which had a short range, but that could cause the ignition of aircraft engines to fail completely.

After the war, the Vienna "Wiener Montag" reported in its 29 December 1947 edition that Eskimos reported to American authorities that an SS battle group of fully 150 men had been encountered.

[The number 150 is realistic for a battle group, but quite below the labor requirements for the construction of such large bases].

Besides these allegations of large bases and battle groups and exotic weaponry, there is a similar account circulated by the distinctly pro-Nazi novelist Wilhelm Landig in his 1971 novel "Götzen gegen Thule", a novel he billed as "full of realities" [voller Wirklichkeiten], of a large German base in the Canadian Arctic, near the magnetic North pole.

This base, he alleges, was serviced by the German military using special long-range aircraft and, of course, flying saucers.

Landig maintains that these aircraft were not equipped with normal machine guns or cannon for their defensive weaponry, but utilized a Metallstrahl, essentially an electromagnetic "rail gun" used to propel tiny pellets with extreme velocity, a kind of hyper-velocity shotgun that would more than rip apart any Allied aircraft, and do so at great distances.

All of these allegations would remain merely fanciful if it were not for the discovery by American UFOlogist William Lyne -himself definitely outside the "mainstream" of the UFOlogy community - of a piece of German equipment that, quite literally, he bought at a second-hand store in White Sands, New Mexico

Lyne is the author of a  book of UFOlogy -a field in which the extraordinary seems to be the norm- called "Space Aliens from the Pentagon", the main theme of which is his adamant insistence that UFOs are entirely terrestrial and man-made, and being used to advance a fictitious "alien agenda" and psychological operations campaign.

Lyne, notwithstanding the more often than not unbelievable aspects of his book, was, in addition to Stevens, one of the few UFOlogists to take the Nazi origins myth of UFOs seriously prior to the publication of Nick Cook's the "Hunt for Zero Point".

On 6 January 1994 the "Albuquerque Journal North" had an article featuring William Lyne and His mysterious Nazi Compass

The unusual thing about this piece of equipment was not only its circular central Swastika -a clear reference to the occult Thulegesellschaft since that version of the Swastika appeared on its emblem- but also its designation as a Peiltochterkompass, a "daughter compass".

Investigating this strange piece of equipment further, Lyne concluded that it was no ordinary compass, since it appeared not to operate by any magnetic means, which might explain how it ended up in White Sands, New Mexico. 

Lyne and his mysterious compass even became the subject of an article in a local American newspaper.

Why is Lyne's find so important to the allegations of Nazi bases in the Canadian Arctic that were being supplied by long range aircraft?

Very simple.

If there were ever any truth to the allegations of German bases in these heavily forested regions, then normal magnetic compasses would be of virtually no use for navigation purposes in the region, since standard compasses are notoriously inaccurate at the polar regions with solar energy cascading down and causing local disruptions of the magnetic field.

Some other method, therefore, had to be found to orient aircraft for safe navigation.

Landig alleges that this was done by means of a compass that oriented itself to the sun by reading polarized light, rather than magnetic field lines.

Lyne therefore seems to have found some version of this compass in an area of America known for its secret research laboratories some twenty years or so after Landig's surreal allegations first appeared.

But according to Landig there is even more to consider, for according to him the German base in the Canadian Arctic was actively researching and developing so-called "free energy" devices, devices that would tap the so-called "zero point energy" of quantum mechanics.

In this connection, the research was allegedly carried out under the auspices of the SS Entwicklungstelle IV, or SS "Developmental Installation IV," an entity, if it existed at all, that would have fallen under the mission brief and jurisdiction of Kammler's SS Sonderkommando, for it was responsible for "research into making Germany independent of foreign energy sources."

So with Landig's fantastic allegations, we come full circle back to the exotic energy sources, the technologies, the occult, and the SS research being conducted by Nazi Germany.

Before proceeding to examine more seriously substantiated instances of Nazi survival, it would be worthwhile to summarize the accumulated allegations and evidences of this:

• Fact: The Germans undertook an expedition to Antarctica whose hidden purpose was clearly military in nature, since one cannot imagine the likes of Reichsmarschall Göring sponsoring an expedition for any other purpose; 
• Fact: The United States on two separate occasions over the wide time-frame of eleven to twelve years undertook two large military expeditions to that continent, both under appropriate cover stories for mapping [the 1947 Byrd expedition, Operation High Jump], and for the 1957-58 Geophysical Years [to study the effects of atomic blasts on Antarctic weather]); 
• Fact: Admiral Byrd, the leader of the first American expedition, was recorded in a South American newspaper as warning of "enemy" aircraft capable of violating American airspace with ease, and of flying from either pole with tremendous speed; 
• Fact: The German Navy showed great interest in the "free-energy" ideas and coils of Hans Coler, for the ostensible purpose of creating a means of submarine propulsion that would allow German U-boats to stay submerged more or less indefinitely; 
• Fact: Admiral Byrd's diaries and logs from his expedition are still classified; 
• Fact: Coler's inventions were highly classified by the German Navy, and later by the British, who only declassified them over thirty years after the war's end; 
• Fact: The Germans had also apparently contrived a sophisticated compass for possible use in polar regions by aircraft, and possibly by other less conventional aircraft; 
• Fact: the alleged time span of the German Antarctic base's survival is coincident with "golden age" of the UFO, from the Arnold sightings, the Roswell crash, up to and beyond the great 1950s Washington D.C. UFO flap; 
• Fact: SS General Dr. Ing. Hans Kammler had assumed total control of all the Third Reich's secret weapons research by the end of the war, a position which would have made him privy to the German Navy's research; 
• Fact: It is evident from the movements of General Patton's divisions in the closing days of the European war that Kammler's SS secret weapons empire was the deliberate, and principal, target of these military operations; 
• Allegation: Grand Admiral Dönitz on more than one occasion alluded to the role of the German U-Boat fleet in the construction of secret bases in polar regions; 
• Allegation: These bases were staffed by SS troops, and presumably technicians conducting ongoing secret research into "zero point energy" or "free energy"; 
• Allegation: Said research fell under an SS entity called S-IV, recalling Kammler's S-III; 
• Allegation: These bases were said to be defended by exotic types of weaponry, including electromagnetic "rail guns" to devices that could interfere with and halt standard electrical engine ignitions systems; 
• Allegation: There were secret SS teams working on "areas of physics" even more exotic than atomic and thermonuclear energy; 
• Allegation: There is a connection to Nazi occult interests in the polar regions via the myth of "Thule", the pre-war occult Thule Society [Thulegesellschaft]; 
• The highest levels of the SS were initiates into Himmler's occult inner circle at Wewelsburg, making it likely that Kammler himself was such an initiate; 
• Fact: The 1944 German atom bomb test at Rügen island took place at a location with its own occult pedigree and significance for the pre-war Germanic, and very occult, Order of the New Templars.

What emerges from this list is very disturbing.

Clearly, a prima facie case can be made that the Nazi leadership had invested significant resources in the investigation of any and all avenues to power, occult and otherwise, and to new sources of energy.

Equally clearly, the Nazi leadership was willing to think "outside the box" and to go to any lengths -often quite literally- to research those matters.

What also emerges from this list is a preoccupation with areas of physics, and areas of the globe, almost completely neglected -at least publicly- by the wartime Allies.

Moreover, what also emerges is a disturbing sense, that maybe, just maybe, there was something to the survival myths after all, for one thing seems clear from the pattern of events after the war, particularly in respect to Antarctica:

Such myths were inevitably connected to the exotic research pursuits the Germans were conducting, and such myths seem clearly to have been the hidden motivation for American counter-strikes.

The "Legend" of a Nazi origin of many war-time and post-war UFO reports received a big "credibility boost" when a researcher and reporter for the prestigious "Jane's Defense Weekly", Nick Cook, wrote a book on anti-gravity and quantum zero point energy research called "The Hunt for Zero Point".

Cook's book is a personal chronicle, summarizing in anecdotal fashion his own personal research into American anti-gravity projects.

It is a "hunt" as he calls it that quickly led him to a very unsuspected source: Nazi Germany.

Recounting how many of the best reports of "foo fighters" or UFOs during the war were submitted by the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, and occurred in a triangle over southern Germany from Frankfurt-am-Main, Metz, and Strasbourg in the year 1944, Cook recounts his discovery of the book that gave birth to the Legend, German Major Rudolf Lusar's "German Secret Weapons of World War Two":

"Seeking clues to the foo-fighter mystery, I discovered a copy in the reading room of the Imperial War Museum.

"In it, Lusar described in meticulous detail, in language that often made the depths of his bitterness clear, the technical achievements of 'a small, industrious and honest nation which lost the war'.

"Secret Weapons' made somber reading".

On Saturday 10 June 1944 soldiers of 'Der Führer Regiment of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division, Das Reich', without giving any explanation for their action,  destroyed the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, and killed a total of 642 men, women and children, leaving only a few unintended survivors. 

To this day there is no universally accepted explanation for the massacre. 

Rudolf Lusar's statement made at Munich on 16 July 1962
 
This statement is part of  the Dortmund Hearings, which commenced in 1962 and ran on for several years. This particular hearing was used to try and determine whether Heinrich Bernhard Lammerding, who had been the commander of the Das Reich Division at the time of the attack on Oradour-sur-Glane, was culpable of the crime and was to be allowed to be extradited by the French to stand trial in France for the attack. The conclusion, reached at the end of the hearings and after evaluating all the statements, was that Lammerding did not have a case to answer and so he was not allowed to be extradited to France.

This particular statement is translated and paraphrased from the original document from the German National Archives, which can not be directly copied or distributed.

It  was taken by means of a face-to-face interview between the subject and a Prosecuting Attorney, with a Justice Secretary present to take a transcript of the proceedings.............

Note: There was a Rudolf Lusar, described as a, "Major of the Reserve" who wrote a book, published in 1957 describing, "German Secret Weapons of the Second World War." 

It is not known if this man was in any way related to the Rudolf Lusar who made the statement below.

Rudolf Lusar was born on 24 December 1896 and was a Captain in the Luftwaffe Flak [Anti-Aircraft] Artillery.

In early June 1944 got an order to report to his Divisional Commander in Bordeaux so as to be re-deployed to the major French Air-Force base at Mont-de-Masan 

When Lusar reported to the Flak Divisional Commander's office in Bordeaux, he was told by the Adjutant that he would have to wait before seeing him, as an SS-Officer was speaking with the Commander at the time. Lusar expressed astonishment and asked what an SS-Officer was doing talking to a Flak Divisional Commander. The Adjutant said that the SS-Officer "did" Oradour, a subject which Lusar was wholly unfamiliar with at that time.

There was no time for further questions as just then the SS-Officer came out of the Commander's office and introduced himself as, Adolf Dieckmann [sic] and according to Lusar's knowledge he was an SS-Hauptsturmführer [The name of the man who led the attack on Oradour was spelled Diekmann, not Dieckmann and he was a Sturmbannführer not a Hauptsturmführer\..

Lusar and Dieckmann then spoke together for about 10 minutes, during which time Lusar asked Dieckmann  what had happened at Oradour and was told that as communication had been lost between the 1st Battalion and the Regimental Staff, he was to take the 3rd Company to Oradour and clarify the situation. As far as Lusar remembered the staff of the 1st Battalion had gone to Oradour the previous evening in order to sleep there.

When challenged by the Prosecuting Attorney, Lusar repeated that Dieckmann was the leader of the 3rd company and that he had heard the name of Otto Kahn [who actually was the leader of the 3rd Company] for the first time that day [the day of the interview]. Lusar further claimed that Dieckmann did not mention that he was the Battalion Commander. [Lusar is being consistent here, as a Battalion Commander would have had the rank of Sturmbannführer and a Company Commander that of Hauptsturmführer. Previously, Lusar had said that he remembered Dieckmann as being a Hauptsturmführer]..

Dieckmann then claimed that as they approached Oradour they found terribly mutilated, dead German soldiers, including officers, by the roadside. Among the soldiers were some German auxiliary helpers who were equally dishonoured. When Dieckmann's men questioned local people they met with sullen resistance and a lack of help, but he gained the impression that members of the French Resistance were close-by.

Dieckmann then sent forward some scout-cars and one of them came across a truck with members of the French Resistance still in attendance and some German auxiliary helpers held captive. The SS were able to free about 12 of the auxiliary helpers and found out from them that the Resistance had attacked the place in the night and had massacred most of the German soldiers.

Lusar also mentioned that about 60 female Communication Helpers [probably telephonists and radio operators] had gone missing during the retreat from southern France. The fate of these helpers was uncertain to this day [1962].

 Dieckmann (sic) then said that his men had become infuriated at what they had seen and heard and that an example was called for. He said that he had the population rounded-up, with the women and children being locked in the church and the men held separately.

 Dieckmann then said that he had the men killed and afterwards set the village on fire. He felt justified in doing this as arms had been discovered during a search of the place. By an 'accident', the church caught fire from a flying spark. Lusar could not remember if Dieckmann was present at this time or not.

 When challenged by the Prosecuting Attorney, Lusar said that he had heard for the first time that day that women and children had been shot whilst they tried to escape from the church and that Dieckmann had not mentioned this at all.

Dieckmann seemed agitated and even depressed through this narration. Lusar remembered that there was talk of a court martial, but was not sure if he knew this at the time, or learned of it later.

Lusar said that he did not put any questions to Dieckmann. He himself remembered that at about this time the French Resistance began a series of strong attacks against German lines of communication.

 When challenged by the Prosecuting Attorney, Lusar said that until the day of his statement, he was only aware of one Oradour; namely Oradour-sur-Glane and that he had only learned of Oradour-sur-Vayres that day.

 Lusar said that he did not see Dieckmann after that day and heard later that he had been killed in France. He also said that he had the strong impression that what Dieckmann told him was true as he seemed too fluent with the story for it to have been made-up. From his memory of events the date of meeting Dieckmann must have been either the 12th or 13th June 1944. At this point Lusar states that the name of Lammerding was not mentioned in connection with ordering the attack and neither was anyone else.

 After the war, Lusar once asked the German Red Cross Tracing Service if they had any information regarding the missing German Communication Helpers, but got no definite answer and did not pursue the matter further.

 Lusar's statement is quite extraordinary for several reasons:

 1) Rudolf Lusar is the only non-SS man to make a statement concerning Oradour and Lammerding's involvement in it.

It is not known how Lusar came to be asked to make his statement, or if he volunteered it himself. If he volunteered it, how did he find out about the investigation into Lammerding's part in the affair of Oradour? Was there a national campaign in 1962 to find witnesses that could help? All the other members of the SS who were still alive were contacted for their assistance and were all in touch with each other through soldiers reunion societies and old friendships, but Lusar was outside this circle, so must have been reached in some other way.

2) Lusar's statement reads very oddly indeed, it describes a scenario which appears to be a mixture of the events at Tulle on the 9th June and at Oradour on the 10th. The comment about the Resistance attacking the place at night and massacring and mutilating the German soldiers there, fits the case of Tulle far better than that of Oradour. Yet the description of the villagers being split into two groups and the women and children being locked in the church, is what happened at Oradour and not Tulle.

 3) Kahn, in his statement says of Lusar:

 "The statement appears to me strange somehow. First I consider it impossible that Dieckmann had met with the witness in Bordeaux after the action. I know that, because as the most senior officer, I had to represent the commander in his absence. After the action at Oradour, we were almost always both on the further advance and in action in the vicinity together. Anyway I don't remember that I had to represent the commander at any time up to his death. I also consider the description of Bordeaux implausible for another reason. Furthermore if one looks for themselves on the map at the position of the city of Bordeaux and takes into account, that we continued the advance the following morning by way of Poitiers, Tours, Le Mans to Caen, I even consider it impossible that Dieckmann could have returned from the north-west front to the south.. 

 "The description, that Mr. Lusar gives, also appears to me dubious for another reason: 

"When Dieckmann claimed, that at the approach to Oradour we found at the roadside dead German soldiers, also officers, I know nothing of this. I would like to make a qualification however: I have not seen the western edge and exit of Oradour. Also, I had observed no corpses of auxiliary helpers in uniform. When the company assembled after the action, no foreign unit Germans were with it, above all no auxiliary helpers. I certainly would have had to observe these. I can also say with determination that I neither saw them on the street on which we approached, at the village exit, nor at the streetcar".

What should be made of Lusar's evidence?

Did he became confused as to what he heard, and in 1962 making his statement of events of 18 years previous, amalgamated the stories of Tulle and Oradour?. 

The man he met in Bordeaux was certainly not Adolf Diekmann, it is simply inconceivable that he had any reason to visit the city in any capacity at all.

Lusar met someone, who had some involvement with Das Reich and seems to have been an officer, and told him a version of the events at both Tulle and Oradour, which over the years became combined into one story in his memory.

One thing which Lusar said was agreed by every other witness at this hearing: Lammerding was not mentioned at all in connection with ordering the attack on Oradour-sur-Glane.

"Although German technical achievements were visible in developments such as the V-1 flying bomb, a direct forerunner of the modern-day cruise missile, and the V-2 ballistic missile, it was the vast extent of Germany's underpinning technology base, as revealed by Lusar, which showed just how far ahead of the Allies the Nazis had been in certain key areas.

"Jet engines, rocket engines, infra-red and thermal-imaging systems, proximity fuses, missiles guidance seekers....technologies that are integral to most modern aircraft and airborne weapon systems were all listed and described.

"In the late 1950s, when Lusar's book first appeared, these technologies were still in their infancy in Britain and America. Yet the Germans had been working on them a decade and a half earlier.

"But there was another side to the book, one which was so sensational that immediately on its appearance it had set alarm bells ringing in Washington.

"This side of the book related to so-called German 'wonder-weapons' beyond the V-1 and V-2.

"Other esoteric developments detailed by Lusar showed that the Germans had been working on bringing down Allied aircraft with sound waves, air vortices, intensely focused beams of light and jets of compressed air.

"In 1958, the U.S. Air Force commissioned a 'special studies group' within Air Force Intelligence headed by an Austrian-born technical consultant called Dr. Stefan Possony to carry out a detailed appraisal of Lusar's book. The research effort was branded 'secret' and has only recently come to light....

"A section in Lusar's book was devoted to 'flying saucers' which he asserted, in no uncertain terms, were the product of German wartime inventors.

"Experts and collaborators in this work confirm that the first projects, called 'flying disks', were undertaken in 1941," Lusar wrote.

"He even went on to name the key individuals involved. These were 'the German experts Schriever, Habermohl, and Miethe, and the Italian Bellonzo".
 

The premise of reputable aerospace journalist Nick Cook's book "The Hunt for Zero Point" is that German scientists developed exotic anti-gravity technologies, including flying saucers, during World War II.

This has been elaborated on the Internet into a cultish historical mythology of saucer types developed by the Nazis during and after the Second World War.

A key reference in this thesis is a book that appeared in Germany in the 1950's.

Rudolf Lusar's "Die Deutschen Waffen und Gehimwaffen des 2.Weltkrieges und ihre Weiterenwicklung" [German Weapons and Secret Weapons of the Second World War and their later Development]. 

The dialogue on Cook's book since its release includes efforts to portray Lusar as "the isolated testimony of a disenchanted German major with definite Nazi sympathies" and his book as a collection of "fantastic stories".

It is also asserted that the engineers mentioned by Lusar never existed.

The whole thing might be dismissed, but in a USAF technical description of a secret flying saucer being developed in Canada with US government support was declassified.

This was just what Lusar asserted.

Well, one way to decide is to go to the original. Through a book seller one can purchase a copy of Lusar's book.

Based on the criticism one would expect a raving tract full of flying saucers and Nazi sympathy.

In fact the book is an encyclopedia of German weapons technology.

In 268 densely-packed pages it provides the dry technical details of every major weapon developed by the Third Reich - from rifles and hand grenades through tanks, artillery, aircraft, rocketry, submarines, naval vessels, chemcial and nuclear weapons, radar, infrared detection, and on and on.

Lusar's articles are technically and factually correct and to the point. 

The articles on advanced jet and rocket weapons indicate the author understands the technology involved very well, with the technical parameters correctly described [more so than many other books in the 1950's].

The saucer pops up suddently, complete with a line drawing, on page 151, in a section devoted to 'Special Devices'

[The other two such devices are the jet backpack and the helicopter].

It is not given special treatment - understandable, given that the performance of the saucer described is considerably less fantastic than that of the V-2 or A9/A10 ICBM covered elsewhere in the book.

So the case for Lusar's book being some kind of neo-Nazi saucer tract falls apart. Before discussing its credibility further, consider this complete translation of the German original:

Flying saucers have been appearing around the world since 1947, emerging suddenly here or there, coming and going at extraordinary speeds, with rotating flames shooting from the edge of their disks. Radars have tracked them; fighters have pursued them. Nevertheless no pilot has yet to ram or shoot down a "flying saucer".

The world, including the engineering world, stands before either a profound mystery -- or a technical miracle. Only slowly have the facts emerged, that German researchers and scientists took the first steps during the war to develop these "flying saucers". They built and tested aircraft with characteristics bordering on the marvelous.

Confirmed information from specialists and workers on these first projects, called "flying diss", indicates that development began in 1941. These devices were designed by the German experts Schriever, Habermohl, Miethe and the Italian Bellonzo. Habermohl and Schriever designed a broad planar ring, which rotated around a fixed control cupola.

This disc wing could be rotated into the appropriate position as required for vertical take-off or horizontal flight. Miethe developed the 42-m-diameter diskus-shaped disc, into which adjustable jet nozzles were installed.

On 14 February 1945, Habermohl, working in Prague, tested the first "flying disc". In three minutes the craft reached an altitude of 12,400 m and a horizontal flight speed of  2000 kph [ !]). The design was planned to reach speeds of 4000 kph.

Extensive preliminary tests and research work were necessary before construction could begin. Because of the high speed and the extraordinary thermal stress, suitable heat-resistant materials had to be identified.

The development, which cost millions, was near completion at the end of the war. At war's end the existing prototypes were destroyed. However the work in Breslau, where Miethe worked, fell into the hands of the Soviets. They took all the materials and specialists to Siberia, where work on these "flying saucers" is successfully continuing.

Schriever escaped from Prague in time. Habermohl might be in the Soviet Union, since he disappeared without a trace. It has been disclosed that the formerly German technical designer Miethe is in the USA and has developed such "flying saucers" for the USA and Canada at the A. V. Roe Company.

The American Air Force received the instructions years ago not to shoot at "flying saucers". This is an indication that there are indeed American "flying saucers" which must not be endangered.

The devices observed so far are in the sizes of 16, 42, 45 and 75 m in diameter and develop speeds up to 7000 kph.

As early as 1952 "flying saucers" were observed over Korea. Such devices were also observed and reported by the press during NATO maneuvers in the Alsace in the autumn of 1954. The fact that "flying saucers" exist can no longer be denied. It is likely that continued official refusal to acknowledge there existence in America is due to development there not having been completed yet.

Any disclosure might be of use to the Soviet Union in their own program.

Further it seems that there is a reluctance to proceed with the technology. It has been recognized that these new "flying saucers" are vastly superior to normal airplanes - including modern turbojet-driven aircraft - in flight performance, load-carrying capacity and agility, thereby making them utterly obsolete. .

Note in later editions: A news report from Washington at the end of 1955 indicates that the US Air Force will soon flight test aircraft, which completely correspond in their appearance to the common conception of a "flying saucer".

Air Force Undersecretary Donald Querles stated that these flight models could take off perpendicularly and would have the form of a disc. They would not need expensive runways for operation.

This single article neatly summarizes Cook's entire book.

The German's developed saucer technology during World War II. It was taken over by the Americans after the war.

It was successfully developed, but never advanced because it represented a threat to the technology adopted by the American military-industrial complex.

The difference is that these saucers are powered by conventional jet engines, not any exotic anti-gravity drive.

Another criticism of Lusar is that he is merely summarizing reports made in the European press in 1950-1954.

In particular these are a report on flying saucers in "Der Spiegel" of 30 March 1950, which contains a paragraph on Schriever and an artist's concept of the saucer; an interview with Richard Miethe in "France-Soir" of 7 June 1952; and an interview with a Georg Klein, in "Die Welt am Sonntag" of 14 February 1953.

This is certainly true, especially as regards the interview with Klein.

However note Lusar's use of the word confirmed in his article ["..Confirmed information from specialists and workers on these first projects"]. 

This would seem to indicate that he had some kind of independent confirmation of the reports.

It is also asserted that the German engineers he mentions as being involved in the saucer project cannot be found in any documentation after the war. Some deny that any of them exist. However this is unconvincing.

The same can be said of a nearly all of the shadowy German high-technology specialists who worked on missile projects in post-war Spain, Egypt, and Argentina. These names appear nowhere on the American Object List of Scientists.

Let's consider each of these engineers in turn: 

• Rudolf Schriever certainly existed. He was interviewed, together with photographs, in several German newspapers between 1950 and 1953. He is not heard of after 1953. Some Internet sources say he died in a car crash that year [oddly enough, nobody has followed up on the possibly sinister implication of this].

Schriever is a not uncommon surname in Germany, and is concentrated around Bremen, which is where Lusar's Schriever is said to have lived. Schriever's activities are attested in a CIA press roundup from Africa: 

Inventor in West Germany Perfects "Flying Saucer" -- "Conakry", La Guinee Francise, 20 November 1952: 

"The first patent for a "flying saucer" was recently applied for in West Germany by Rudolf Schriever, a former pilot, who claimed to have perfected an "elliptical flying object" after 11 years of research.

"The inventor claimed that the craft, equipped with motors, has a diameter of 40 meters and can rise and descend vertically or remain motionless in the air. He estimated its maximum speed as 4,000 kilometers per hour".

Richard Miethe is said not to exist, there being no confirmation of his existence aside from Lusar and the "France-Soir" interview.

However that interview with Miethe, when read in its entirety, is convincing and has several obscure details of his postwar service in Egypt that are verified by other sources.

On 15 July 1959, a "UFO New York" newsletter, ridiculed the Canadian Avro saucer story and reported that personal contact with Avro indicated they knew nothing about a Miethe.

Given that the project was so secret that it was not declassified until 1995, such a denial is not surprising. In modern Germany those bearing this name are heavily concentrated on the easternmost border, particularly around Gorlitz. 

No trace is said to exist of a Habermohl, and it is asserted that this is not even a German name. That is certainly true. However Habermehl is a proper German name, of average occurrence, with an estimated 1296 persons bearing this name in modern Germany. They are concentrated in Vogelsbergkreis, in Hessen, north of Frankfurt. 

Professor Giuseppe Belluzzo [not Bellonzo] was a leading Italian turbine specialist and built the first turbine-powered train in Italy in 1907. Belluzzo was born in Verona in 1876.

He taught in Milan and then Rome, and was the author of more than fifty technical books. He was also involved in installing turbines in Italian cruisers and battleships.

He later went on to a career in fascist politics. He was elected to Parliament and was Minister of National Economy from 1925 to 1928. In the early 1950's he also gave several press interviews asserting involvement in development of Nazi turbine-powered flying saucers. He died in Rome on 21 May 1952. 

Georg Klein is not mentioned by Lusar.

In the "Welt am Sonntag" article he is described as a Lead Engineer and ex-functionary in Albert Speer's ministry during the war. He not only describes the project, but asserts that he, together with Speer, personally witnessed a flight test.

It can be seen that a lot of Lusar's content was taken from this source. Attempts to link Georg Klein with a historical personage have so far failed - unfortunately Klein is the 15th most common surname in Germany.

Various summaries of his interview is also from the CIA archives: 

German Engineer States Soviets Have German Flying Saucer Experts and Plans - Athens, "I Vrdayni", 13 May 1953 

"Vienna [Special Service] -- According to recent reports from Toronto, a number of Canadian Air Force engineers are engaged in the construction of a 'flying saucer' to be used as a future weapon of war. The work of these engineers is being carried out in great secrecy at the A. V. Roe Company factories.

"Flying saucers have been known to be an actuality since the possibility of their construction was proven in plans drawn up by German engineers toward the end of World War II.

"Georg Klein, a German engineer, stated recently that though many people believe the flying saucers to be a postwar development, they were actually in the planning stage in German aircraft factories as early as 1941.

"Klein said that he was an engineer in the Ministry of Speer and was present in Prague on 14 February 1945, at the first experimental flight of a flying saucer.

"During the experiment, Klein reported, the flying saucer reached an altitude of 12,000 meters within 3 minutes and a speed of 2,200 kph. Klein emphasized that in accordance with German plans, the speed of these saucers would reach 4,000 kph. One difficulty, according to Klein, was the problem of obtaining the materials to be used for the construction of the saucers, but even this had been solved by German engineers toward the end of 1945, and construction of the objects was scheduled to begin, Klein added.

"Klein went on to state that three experimental models had been readied for tests by the end of 1944, built according to two completely different principles of aerodynamics.

"One type actually had the shape of a disc, with an interior cabin, and was built by the Miethe factories, which had also built the V-2 rockets. This model was 42 meters in diameter. The other model had a shape of a ring, with raised sides and a spherically shaped pilot's cabin placed on the outside, in the center of the ring. This model was built at the Habermohl and Schriever factories.

"Both models had the ability to take off vertically and to land in an extremely restricted area, like helicopters.

"During the last few days of the war, when every hope for German victory had been abandoned, the engineers in the group stationed in Prague carried out orders to destroy completely all their plans on their model before the Soviet forces arrived. The engineers at the Miethe factories in Breslau, however, were not warned in sufficient time of the Soviet approach, and the Soviets therefore succeeded in seizing their material.

"Plans, as well as specialized personnel, were immediately sent directly to the Soviet Union under heavy guard, coincidental with the departure from Berlin of the creator of the Stuka, who later developed the Mig-13 and -15 in the Soviet Union".

According to the report, nothing is known of the whereabouts of Habermohl since his disappearance from Prague; Schriever died recently in Bremen; and Miethe, who escaped in a Messerschmidt 163, is in the US.

Klein was of the opinion that the saucers are at present being constructed in accordance with German technical principles and expressed the belief that they will constitute serious competition to the jet-propelled airplanes.

Klein further stated that it was very possible to construct flying saucers for civilian air travel; they could carry 30-40 passengers at a speed of 4,000 kph.

He added, however, that the tremendous amount of material necessary for their construction did not warrant their being built exclusively for civilian air travel. His opinion was shared, he stated, by Giuseppe Belluzzo, the Italian specialist with whom Klein has been corresponding for some time. 

And a further report with some additional details: 

Describes Saucer Experiments - Capetown, "Die Landste", 9 January 1954 

"A German newspaper recently published an interview with Georg Klein, famous German engineer and aircraft expert, describing the experimental construction of flying saucers carried out by him from 1941 to 1945. Klein stated that he was present when, in 1945, the first piloted flying saucer took off and reached a speed of 1,300 mph within three minutes.

"The experiments resulted in three designs: one, designed by Miethe, was a disc-shaped aircraft, 135 feet in diameter, which did not rotate; another, designed by Habermohl and Schriever, consisted of a large rotating ring, in the center of which was a round, stationary cabin for the crew.

"When the Soviets occupied Prague, the Germans destroyed every trace of the flying saucer project and nothing more was heard of Habermohl and his assistants. Schriever recently died in Bremen, where he had been living. In Breslau, the Soviets managed to capture one of the saucers built by Miethe, who escaped to France. He is reportedly in the US at present".

Flugkapitän Rudolf Schriever, one of the four saucer engineers cited in Lusar's book, began talking to the West German media in 1950 about a truly fantastic flying machine he had worked on for the Nazis—one that would have changed the course of the war had it gone into full-scale production. It stemmed from work that he had allegedly undertaken for the Heinkel Aircraft Company at Marienehe, near Rostock on the Baltic coast. 

Schriever was one of the four "scientists" mentioned in Lusar's book as having worked on the Nazi flying discs.  

Schriever appeared to have developed some highly advanced ideas about aircraft that could take off and land vertically and it was in this capacity, after he had been drafted to Heinkel's design section, that he soon came to the attention of company chairman Professor Ernst Heinkel, who in early 1940 encouraged him to construct a small flying prototype. 

Though best-known for its lumbering He 111, the Luftwaffe's mainstay bomber during the Blitz against London in 1940 and for much of the rest of the war, Heinkel was one of the most pioneering and innovative aircraft companies within Germany at the time.

In 1936, Ernst Heinkel began funding experiments that three years later would lead to Germany's successful construction of the world's first jet-powered aircraft, despite the fact that it was the British designer, Frank Whittle, who had first invented and patented the concept. The tiny, one-off Heinkel He 178 first flew on 27August 1939, five days before the German Army marched into Poland. Eighteen months later, Heinkel would again eclipse all other aircraft companies by flying the world's first jet-powered fighter, the He 280. If anyone was to develop something as radical as Schriever's idea, therefore, Heinkel was the company to do it. 

In the spring of 1941, Schriever's blueprints were being used to construct a "proof-of-concept" model in a "garage" away from prying eyes. Officially known as the VI [V for "Versuchs" or "experimental version 1"], informally it was referred to as the "Flying Top." It was probably no more than two or three feet in diameter and powered by an electric motor or a small two-stroke engine.  

Dr. Giuseppe Belluzzo was employed at Riva del Garda [renamed the Herman Göring Institute] designed a round version of the V-1 called the "Turboproietti", short for Turbine Projectile.

It is not known where this garage was, but within the sprawling complex of buildings at Marienehe, set in three square kilometers of the Mecklenburg State Park, there was ample room for Schriever's esoteric little engineering project to be hidden from view. Furthermore, it fitted into the Heinkel way of doing things. 

During the development of the world's first turbojet, Ernst Heikel had installed Dr. Hans-Joachim Pabst von Ohain, a gifted graduate of the University of Göttingen, in the same kind of environment— a converted garage at the university—before transferring the fruits of von Ohain's labors, the revolutionary HeS 3A turbojet, to a secure facility within the Marienehe site. By June 1942, Schriever's Flying Top had been test-flown and the results deemed sufficiently interesting to secure top secret funding from the RLM, the Reichsluftfahrtministerium or State Air Ministry. With RLM funding, the intention was to construct a full-scale piloted version capable of controlled vertical take-off and landing. Construction of this full-size version, the V2, began at Marienehe in early 1943. 

The V2, which was known as the "Flugkreisel" or "Flightwheel," had a diameter of approximately 25 feet, its power generated by one or perhaps two Heinkel-Hirth jet engines, depending on which version of the Legend you want to believe. The V2 supposedly flew with Schriever at the controls, but as a piece of technology it was deemed to be heavily overengineered and was quickly scrapped. As a proof-of-concept vehicle, though, it seems to have served its purpose, because shortly afterward, Schriever and his team relocated to Czechoslovakia where they set about constructing a larger and altogether more sophisticated prototype known as the V3.

With the Allied aerial bombing campaign now at its height, their activities were dispersed around the Prague area to minimize the exposure to the relentless air attacks, by now penetrating deep into the Reich. But the bulk of the team's work was centered on a restricted area of a satellite facility outside Prague belonging to the Munich-based Bayerische Motorenwerke engine company, better known today as BMW. Despite the existence of Heinkel's own jet engines, the real cutting edge of German gas-turbine research was centered on BMW and in particular on its Bramo division, located at Spandau in Berlin. 

Bramo, the Brandenburgische Motorenwerke, had been bought by BMW from Siemens in 1939. By the middle of the war, BMW-Bramo had 5,000 staff working full-time on gas-turbine research alone—a discipline then barely a decade old—and was ultimately responsible for the BMW 003 jet engine, the best turbojet of the day, which powered the Me 262, the world's first operational jet fighter, and the Ar 234, the Luftwaffe's advanced jet-propelled reconnaissance-bomber, another aircraft far ahead of its time. It was from Spandau, supposedly, that Klaus Habermohl, the second disc engineer mentioned by Lusar, was recruited to the Schriever team. 

Habermohl's job in Prague was to integrate the disc with a new and radical form of power plant called the radial-flow gas-turbine, or RFGT. Unlike Brown's electrogravitic motor, the RFGT was, at least, recognizable technology by modern standards, if extraordinary. It was essentially a jet engine. However, unlike a regular jet power plant, with its compressors, combustion chambers and turbines mounted one behind the other in what was basically a big tube, the RFGT formed part of the airframe itself, with the whirling turbomachinery rotating around the aircraft's centrally mounted cockpit. As such, "aircraft" did not adequately describe what the machine actually looked like. There was only one configuration to which an RFGT could possibly be adapted: that of a flying disc or saucer. 

By the autumn of 1944, the V3 is said to have been completed. With German airfields under constant attack from Allied daylight bombing, the prospect of a fighter or bomber that could take off and land vertically from any dispersed site would have been exactly in line with Luftwaffe requirements. However, due to "an administrative change," the V3 program was abandoned in favor of a further prototype, the V7, propulsion coming from another experimental RFGT from BMW-Bramo. The V7 supposedly had a diameter of 60—70 feet and a crew of two or three. Applying a crude rule of thumb, based on a rough estimate of the disc's weight, Habermohl's ingenious RFGT would have had to have generated around 10-15,000 pounds of thrust to have made the design of the disc in any way viable. This was the machine that supposedly test-flew on 14 February 1945 with Schriever and Habermohl at the controls, achieving 2,000 km/h in level flight. The fastest aircraft of the day, the little rocket-powered Me 163, struggled to attain half this speed. 

Lusar's third and last German saucer scientist, Dr. Richard Miethe, was supposedly working on another disc project at a subterranean facility near Breslau under the auspices of an altogether separate contract. Toward the end of the war, the legend stated that Miethe was drafted from his activities in Breslau to assist with the Schriever/Habermohl disc in Prague, an indication, perhaps, that the Schriever/Habermohl disc was the better bet in a procurement environment that was by now desperately short of money, skilled labor and raw materials. This streamlining coincided with the "administrative change" that had led to the abandonment of Schriever's V3 design for the altogether more viable V7. The V7, then, seems to have been the result of a three-way endeavor, although there were reports that a Miethe disc—based, perhaps, on the project he abandoned at Breslau—was captured by the Russians, along with a number of engineers and scientists, when they drove the Germans out of Poland. As for the V7, some say it, too, was acquired by the Russians when they took Prague; others that it was blown up by the Waffen-SS on 9 May 1945, the day hostilities in Europe ended. The Legend had it both ways. 

The detail in the Schriever/Habermohl/Miethe legend was rich and impressive. Here were names, dates and places—minutiae even, that seemed to corroborate everything Rudolf Lusar had written down. The trouble was, the data was based heavily on the say-so of Schriever, who was long since dead; the rest had magically appeared out of thin air.. No one knew where the detail emerged from. Over the years it had been passed down from one researcher to the next, with no apparent attribution. 

BMW's archivists, for example, they denied that there had been any BMW factory near Prague "engaged in advanced aircraft projects including design or advanced research during World War II.". 

This stuff was unverifiable. Within the Schriever portion of the Legend there was nothing beyond the fact that the man himself had existed. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the other characters in the story. All attempts by researchers to trace Miethe and Habermohl had foundered, although there had been occasional "sightings" in the lore that had grown up around them. 

Miethe is supposed to have escaped Czechoslovakia in early May and to have headed west, eventually making contact with U.S. technical Intelligence teams operating inside Germany. Herded into a "pen" along with Wernher von Braun and his fellow rocket scientists, Miethe was said to have been taken to the United States, ending up at Wright Field, the USAAF's premier research and development center near Dayton, Ohio. If any of this actually happened, there is no trace of it. 

Habermohl is said to have been captured by the Russians at the Letov factory, a German-administered aircraft plant outside Prague, and, after a period of detention, sent to work at a top secret Soviet aircraft design bureau east of Moscow. Again, no one could say for sure whether he had even existed at all. 

Bellonzo, was real enough, except Lusar had misspelled his name. In 1950, Professor Giuseppe Belluzzo, a former industry minister in Mussolini's cabinet, started talking about disc-shaped "flying bombs" that he claimed to have worked on during the war and passed on to the Germans, who had subsequently developed them into working prototypes.

Belluzzo was also convinced that these weapons were the basis of the flying-saucer sightings that had gripped much of America for the best part of three years and that they were now under further development inside the Soviet Union. Beyond the fact that Belluzzo, like Schriever, was real, his claims also remain un verifiable. 

Interestingly, though, he started talking to the media just a few days before Schriever, leading some researchers to reason that Schriever, a man who like so many other Germans in 1950 was struggling to make ends meet, had invented his entire story. In fact, the Legend lacked a single item of corroborating data. There was nothing in any archive or museum, no photograph, no indisputable piece of testimony, to say that any of it was true. There were splits and schisms in the Legend, just as there are orthodox and unorthodox branches within major religions. 

The declassified 1955 report on the Avro "Silverbug" saucer indicates that at that time it was still purely a design, with not even wind tunnel work being completed.

Officially this design led only to the Avro Avrocar, a modest subscale prototype used to study the operation of a saucer in ground effect in 1959-1961. Officially Miethe or the Germans had no involvement with the project, and the Silverbug was conceived by Avro Chief Engineer John Frost in 1951-1953.

And yet consider the similarity of performance figures for Lusar's "ridiculous" saucer and the smaller Avro Silverbug research

The most likely scenario is that there was indeed a German turbojet-powered saucer project; that the persons named did indeed work on it; that it was indeed investigated by both the Americans and the Soviets in great secrecy after the war. 

However, it is also apparent that it was a technological dead end [given the fact we are not flying in saucer airliners].

The same was true of a lot of Nazi technology about which there is no question - the ramjet, the flying wing, the delta wing, the rocket fighter, the Sänger Antipodal boost-glide bomber. All of these were investigated at enormous expense after the war, often with the assistance of captured German engineers. Prototypes were tested, and the technology was often found to offer advantages. But in no case did the technology divert the course of current aerospace technology.

This may be because the technology didn't work as advertised. The Avrocar had stability problems and was not officially known to have been pursued further.

The Silverbug design has a lot of complex draggy rotating machinery and inlets. It may be that wind tunnel tests revealed it could never reach the advertised supersonic speeds [the Air Force report has a whiff of skepticism in this regard]. Heavily classified 'black' programs have always been a good place to bury Congressional examination of expensive technical failures.

It may also be, as Lusar hinted and Cook asserts, that the technology worked but would be disruptive to the entrenched aerospace-industrial complex.

It should also be noted that, following a decade of experimentation with aerospace technology after the war, the world selected a few "best solutions" and has stuck with them ever since. "good enough" trumped "better".

This is certainly the position of advocates of flying wings, hovercraft, WIG aircraft, single-stage-to-orbit rockets, and intercontinental supersonic, hypersonic, or rocket transports. All of these technologies have their fans, who are certain that just a little more development would bring the technical advantages into production. But the accountants and bureaucrats are not interested.

A failure of imagination?

Officially the Silverbug never flew. UFO fans have however noted the similarity between the Canadian Silverbug and some of the UFOs sighted and photographed over the years in the Pacific Northwest.

"The documents I had before me... contained firs thand evidence that the Reichsleiter had survived the war and succeeded in escaping to Argentina. It was attested by the Argentine authorities themselves, in highly classified Intelligence reports and positions papers drawn up for their own secret and official use." 

--Ladislas Farago, "Aftermath; Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich" [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974] 

As the war turned irrevocably against the Third Reich, top Nazi leaders began to plan for the future, among them the Nazi Party's Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler's secretary and virtual shadow, and financial administrator of the Party's, as well as of Hitler's own personal and considerable, fortune.

While much of this story is known to the general public in broad outline, few appreciate the degree of organization, planning, and success it had, and, may be continuing to have.

Wat began in the secret societies of post-World War One Germany as the most explosive political movement in modern history would end by once again going underground,.

It is operating behind a variety of false fronts that included corporations, black projects, secret societies, and criminal and para-military syndicates.

It would thus exercise a considerable, though hidden, moral and cultural influence on the world that emerged after World War Two.

With the failure of the final large German offensive in Soviet Russia at Kursk in 1943, the Nazi leadership had but two courses of action:

1. Continue the war and hope for the realization of their secret weapons projects in time to provide a military resuscitation
2. Begin the process of moving capital, technology, and personnel to ensure the survival of the Party by other means

The Nazi leadership chose both courses of action.B

At first the movement of resources abroad -monetary, technological, and human- proceeded haphazardly.

Money and loot from a plundered Europe made its way into secret Swiss bank accounts, or in the case of hard assets -precious minerals, bullion, art, diamonds and other gemstones and so on- made its way overland through France into "neutral" but decidedly pro-Axis Nationalist Spain.

But it soon became apparent that haphazard efforts would not ensure the survival of the Party, nor the furtherance of its ideals, nor the spread of its power in the postwar world, nor the continuance of its research projects, which would have to be continued if it ever hoped to regain power and influence.

Organization and long-range planning in depth and breadth had to occur if Nazism were to survive covertly.

To this end, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann orchestrated a top secret meeting on 10 August 1944, at the Hotel Rotes Haus in Strassburg, in occupied France.

Representatives of all the major German industrial and armaments firms were present, including the huge firms of Krupp, Thyssen, and of course, I.G. Farben.

Also present were Bormann himself, Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, and his son-in-law, the famous SS commando, Colonel Otto Skorzeny, leader of the daring air mission to rescue Benito Mussolini in 1943.

At this meeting, "provisions were made not only to move great sums of money outside Germany but also to camouflage foreign assets on paper for the resurrection of a financial-industrial empire, of sorts, once the Reich collapsed.

This empire was to be controlled by the SS".

- Henry Stevens, "The Last Battalion and German Arctic, Antarctic, and Andean Bases"

As a result of this plan, the well-known SS-run ratlines were formed to assist fleeing SS and other Nazis, to provide for their financial security, relocation, and false identities.

The most famous of these was of course the ODESSA group, or the Organization Der Ehemahligen SS Angehörigen, or "Organization of Former SS Members".

Another famous organization was "Die Spinne" or The Spider. In any case, under the Reichsleiter's powerful protection, the SS, in concert with the Kriegsmarine, began to smuggle enormous quantities of gold, precious gems, art and both genuine and counterfeit cash out of Germany.

To a lesser extent, machine tools, steel, technicians and other personnel began to be quietly siphoned off Germany industry and smuggled out of Europe.

The financial treasure trove was then laundered by the SS via a variety of methods, for example, through Evita Peron's Swiss bank accounts, through dummy corporations, through the South American drug trade, and so on .During this immediate post-war period, most of this fortune was controlled by Otto Skorzeny.

The German industrialists who had been set up abroad with SS money dating back to the deal at the Rotes Haus in Strassbourg in 1944 were asked by Skorzeny to pay back their loans.

Both Thyssen and Krupp did so, as presumably did others.

To give the reader an idea of the sums collected by Skorzeny, Eva Peron alone had an estimated $800 million dollars in bank deposits, in 1945, and 4,600 carats of diamonds and other precious stones, 90 kilograms of platinum and 2,500 kilograms of gold. 

With these monies, the SS purchased huge tracts of land in South America and elsewhere, and large corporations were established in which "research which had begun in Germany could be carried through".

These "secure areas" or Sperrgebiete often saw the establishment of whole towns, airfields, highways and all the amenities of civilized German life.

Local security was, of course, provided by the SS or "contract labor" from the host country.

The most famous of these colonies, perhaps, is the Colona Dignidad in Chile, a "colony" notorious for the disappearances of the too-inquisitive reporter, and implicated in the us overthrow of the Chilean Marxist government of Salvadore Allende in the early 1970s and the training of Chilean dictator Pinochet's DINA "interrogators".

- Peter Levenda, "Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult" [New York: Avon Books, 1995]

And of course, secure areas in the Andes and other remote South American locations are also reputed to be the sites of secret Nazi laboratories continuing the research on "flying saucers" and other wartime Nazi black projects. 

Whatever one may think of the truthfulness of the last allegation, it is true -and generally well known- that such colonies of Nazis did and still do exist in South America, with connections to the South American underworld and governments that one can only imagine.

But there is good reason not to dismiss even the "continued research" allegation too quickly, for it conforms to a well-known pattern of secret post-war West German corporate and military research on the continent on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Africa.

In the final months of his administration, President Jimmy Carter accused South Africa's apartheid government of having tested an atom bomb in the Indian Ocean.

German and American newspaper reporters quickly uncovered -in spite of Praetoria's denials- a tapestry of corporations and dummy corporations that clearly led back to West Germany's Bundeswehr, and to a multitude of personnel and military officers with ties to the Third Reich.

The goal was clear: The Federal Republic was supplying massive technological assistance to South Africa [and to Israel as it turned out] in the areas of Uranium enrichment and Plutonium transmutation via centrifuges and other processes, in return for which Uranium-rich South Africa bartered the raw atomic fuel itself.

Germany could thus fulfill its post-war treaty obligations by not developing or deploying atomic, biological, or chemical weapons on German soil, while at the same time using South Africa to construct and test a bomb of essentially German design.

If this sounds familiar, it is, for after World War One, Germany side-stepped the Versailles treaty -which forbade the Germans possession of tanks, aircraft, and heavy artillery beyond a certain caliber- by concluding a secret protocol in the Rapallo treaty with the other pariah of the day, the Soviet Union.

Thus, as early as 1922, German officers were training in tank warfare in the Soviet Union with their Russian counterparts, among them the future Colonel-General Heinz Guderian who would lead the Second Panzer Army during Operation Barbarossa to the very gates of Moscow.

[The often overlooked story of the West German bomb and its very secret development was covered in the "New York Times" book by Zdenek Cervenka and Barbara Rogers, "The Nuclear Axis: the Secret Collaboration Between West Germany and South Africa" ["New York Times", 1978] 

"In the Spring of 1944, Merck and Company, Inc. received a large cash infusion from Martin Bormann.... This at the time Merck's president, George W. Merck, was advising President Roosevelt, and initiating strategies, as America's biological weapons industry director. According to CBS News correspondent Paul Manning, the lion's share of the Nazi gold went to 750 corporations, largely including Merck, to secure a virtual monopoly over the world's chemical and pharmaceutical industries.

This was done not only for Germany's economic recovery, but to assure the rise of "The Fourth Reich".

"Merck, then, along with Rockefeller partner I.G. Farben, received huge sums of money from the Nazi war chest to actualize Hitler's proclaimed 'vision of a thousand-year Third Reich (and) world empire'.

This was outlined with clarity in a document called "Neuordnung", or New Order' that was accompanied by a letter of transmittal to the [Bormann led] Ministry of Economics.

"'Bury your treasure", Hitler advised Bormann, "for you will need it to begin a Fourth Reich".

Bormann apparently ignored his Führer, and in a momentary burst of Christianity, heeded Christ by not burying his treasure, but investing and increasing it.

Bormann 's Special Evacuation Command and the Link to the Kammlerstab

Carter Hydrick theorized that it was  Martin Bormann who arranged the surrender of U-234 and its precious cargo of enriched Uranium, infrared proximity fuses, and heavy water to the United States..

It should be noted that Hydrick does not maintain that the Nazis were successful in building and successfully testing an atom bomb during the war, much less of trying to transport blueprints or a functioning model to the Japanese in the U-234.

The corroborative evidence is presented by Robert Wilcox in  "Japan's Secret War", that the Japanese successfully tested a bomb shortly after the bombing of Nagasaki.

An infusion of actual bomb designs to the Japanese by the Germans late in the war might account for their relatively quick ability to develop and test a weapon under such difficult circumstances as the Japanese economy and military were in at the end of the war.

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

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

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

In the total context both of Carter Hydrick's meticulous research, as well as Bormann's own Rotes Haus plan for Nazi survival,  may be placed Bormann's 1945 establishment of a special SS evacuation Kommando, that placed jurisdiction over the Ju-290 four engine and Ju-390 six-engine air transport of Luftwaffe Kampfgeschwader 200 under the direct control of none other than SS General Hans Kammler.

The intention was to evacuate: as much of the actual research files and equipment of the Kammlerstab as could be from Germany for destinations unknown to be handled by Kammler personally.

This special evacuation command held these aircraft in readiness near Lower Silesia in late 1945.

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

- Nick Cook, "The Hunt for Zero Point"

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

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

This revelation, coming late in the story of research into Nazi secret weapons and the Nazi UFO Legend, gives a clear indication that more than just money, bullion, gems, art treasures or personnel were involved in Bormann's survival plan. 

Clearly, Bormann meant to preserve and continue the research already under way in the Reich by transplanting the technology and continuing its development elsewhere, either under independent Nazi control -as the various "survival" myths maintain- or under the nominal control of a host government, or via some combination of both modalities.

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

Himmler was perhaps offering them the vast cache of secrets he thought he controlled through Kammler's "think tank", but it is very possible that the American Intelligence community already knew of this treasure trove via their SS contacts through Allen Dulles and SS General Karl Wolff, and had made "other arrangements" that included neither Himmler nor the British.

Thus, by the time of Kammler's refusal to his SS boss to allow him the use of a Ju-290 or Ju-390, effective control and disposition of the SS black projects had slipped from Himmler's hands and into Bormann's. Himmler could neither surrender nor even barter for his life, because he had nothing left with which to bargain.

Kammler, and Bormann, however, had a great deal to offer the Americans in exchange for their lives.

Paperclip, Compartmentalization, and Capitalization

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

"The state-within-a-state had been transported four thousand miles to the west and somehow, I just knew, Kammler had come with it. The intuitive feeling I'd experienced in all these years in obscure corners of the US aerospace and defense industry had suddenly acquired a face".

But an important question remains to be answered here.

ould these Nazis have continued their lines of research quasi- independently, even while ostensibly working for the US military?

Could they have again reconstituted themselves as a similar "state within a state", a black projects coordination office within the structures otherwise nominally under the control, of the American government and military?

Clearly, it would be difficult, especially if there were no means of independent financing of these projects, altogether apart from the US government's own "black budget".

But, a crucial component of Bormann's post-war survival and resuscitation plan was capitalization.

Three conduits in particular were often utilized by ODESSA and other post-war Nazi secret organizations: 

1. Drugs and thereby organized crime, 
2. The Church, i.e., various "ministries" within Protestantism and diverse religious orders and congregations within the Roman Catholic Church
3. False corporate fronts and dummy corporations, holding companies, and banking institutions.

The United State, particularly in the last few decades, seems to have been a fertile ground for all three types of activity, at least in general terms.

As for maintaining the secrecy of such an independent and "occulted" entity, this is a solved problem, for the Manhattan Project was just such an entity, with only a very few at the highest echelons of its myriad compartmentalized "need-to-know" departments possessing the whole picture.

In the post-war atmosphere, particularly with the Cold War ensuing, it may actually have been quite easy to accomplish.

With US government defense contracts and black projects run increasingly on a cost-plus basis, all expenses for such research was funded, with an addition margin tacked on for corporate profit.

This, added to the other genuinely off-the-books funding that Bormann and the SS envisioned, would have supplied twin sources of funding of almost limitless wealth.

But the most important consideration with respect to this question is the fact that the very classification and compartmentalization of black projects would itself operate as a favorable environment to run an "unofficial" black project within an "official" one.

With projects split over several locations, its needed technologies farmed out to various companies, various departments of government, and co-ordinated from some secret center, it would seem a relatively easy, rather than difficult, thing to do.

The Nazi Party had been constituted, from its early secret society beginnings, and up until the very day of the German capitulation, as a state within a state.

Within that structure, Himmler had constituted the SS as a state within the state within the state.

And within that Kammler had assembled and co-ordinated a vast machinery of weapons research that lived, parasitically, on the body of its host, the SS and the Party, themselves murderous parasites living off the misery of Germany and Europe.

Kammler had done it once, and may very well have done it again, "with a little help from his friends".

Perhaps President Dwight Eisenhower, when he warned of the morally and spiritually corrupting dangers of the military-industrial complex, had in mind a phenomenon that was not so much home-grown, as much as one that had been transplanted.

"When you started on the path that you did, sooner or later the trail was going to lead you to Germany."

--Nick Cook, "The Hunt for Zero Point"

"This is a story of how key Nazis....anticipated military disaster and laid plans to transplant Nazism, intact but disguised, in havens in the West".

--Mae Brussel, "Rebel Magazine" [Cited in Jonathan Vankin, "Conspiracies. Crimes, and Cover-ups"]

The "Bell"

The most sensational piece of information on Nazi secret research to come out since the reunification of Germany -indeed, since the origins of the Nazi "UFO" Legend itself- is the story told by Nick Cook in his "Quest for Zero Point", which appeared in the U.K. in 2001.

The story is the only real solid piece of corroboration of the Nazi UFO Legend to appear since the war, based, as as it is, on a secret and recently declassified Polish war crimes trial affidavit of a former SS general.

The Bell [Die Glocke) represented something at the very pinnacle of Kammler's super-secret SS "Wonder Weapons" empire.

Cook's book represents the only publicly accessible information on this bizarre object in the English language, the equally macabre experimentation that surrounded it, and the stringent security the SS held it under.

Discussion of Die Glocke originated in the works of Igor Witkowski. His 2000 Polish language book "Prawda o Wunderwaffe" [The Truth About The Wonder Weapon].

Although no evidence of the veracity of Witkowski’s statements has been produced, they reached a wider audience when they were retold by British author Nick Cook, who added his own views to Witkowski’s statements in "The Hunt for Zero Point".

Norwegian born physicist Rolf Wideroe wrote in his autobiography about development of the Bell at Hamburg, by the company CHF Müller. 

In his patent his diagrams showed one sphere inside another spun on a common axle. As is common with particle accelerators a vacuum has to be created to propagate plasma inside these evacuated chambers. 

Then heated mercury vapour would have been bled into the cavity and then once spun up subjected to powerful discharges of electricity to ionise the Mercury.

Under this influence the Mercury would fluoresce and photons would collide with extremely energetic electrons, creating Gamma X-Rays. 

These X-Rrays in turn would stimulate the Beryllium oxide in the Xerum 525 to emit thermal neutrons. In turn these thermal neutrons would be absorbed by the Thorium 232 changing it into Protactinium 233, .  which would naturally degrade after 27 days into pure bomb grade Uranium 233

Wideroe called this device the Wirbel-Rohr, or Vortex Tube. 

Patents for variations on the same theme had been applied for in 1935 by both Prof Max Steenbeck and his rival Swiss scientist Dr Walter Dallenbach.

After WW2 Steenbeck co-operated with the Soviets to replicate the Nazi Bell. 

The Soviets named it the Tokamak.

Mainstream reviewers such as former aerospace scientist David Myhra express skepticism that such a device existed.

Many academics deny der Glocke and pronounce it as a myth - but they also said that about the nuclear and hydrogen bomb potential of the Nazi sciences by the end of WWII - which has since become more of a realistic fact with the Heavy Water evidence and radiation remnants in many tunnels of Austria.

Author Jason Colavito wrote that Witkowski's claims were "recycled" from 1960s rumors of Nazi occult science first published in "Morning of the Magicians", and describes Die Glocke as "a device few outside of fringe culture think actually existed.

In short, it looks to be a hoax, or at least a wild exaggeration.

The following are the salient features of The Bell, according to Cook:

• The Belli was reportedly a metallic object, approximately 9' in diameter and 12-15' tall; 
• It loocked like a "Bell", hence its codename to the Germans, die Glocke; 
• It was comprised of two counter-rotating cylinders, rotating a purplish liquid-metallic looking substance code-named "Xerum 525" by the Germans, at high speeds;
• "Xerum 525" was apparently highly radioactive, being purple in color, and housed in cylinders with lead lining 3 cm thick;

Beryllium compounds used in the Nazi Bell were called “Xerum 525". 

During WW2 Nazi scientists discovered paraffin was useful as a moderator in reactor experiments. Paraffin would fit the description of "Xerum 525" as a pinkish jelly like substance.

The Pink colour possibly came from the mixing of Mercury [II] Iodide also known as Red Mercury into the compound.

Physicist Frank Barnaby says based on recovered Russian documents that Red Mercury is composed of mercury antimony oxide dissolved in ordinary mercury then it is placed in a nuclear reactor for about 20 days.

It is possibly "salted" with isotopes of hafnium and tantalum - the end result is a very thick and heavy cherry liquid.

Xxerum 525 most likely contained Beryllium and Thorium suspended in heavy paraffin.

• The Bell apparently required high amounts of electrical power in its operation;
• During use, it could only be run for approximately one to two minutes, as it apparently gave off strong radiation and/or other electro-magnetic or unknown field effects;
• ​Several scientist died on its first operation;
• Subsequent tests included various plants and animals, all of which decomposed into a blackish goo and without normal putrefaction
• Technicians near the Bell during these experiments reported metallic tastes in their mouths after being exposed to it;
• The chamber in which the Bell was tested was lined with ceramic bricks and rubber mats, and had to have its rubber matting removed and burned after each test, and it was subsequently washed down with brine by inmates from nearby concentration camps;
• All the scientists and witnesses who saw or worked on the Bell were murdered by the SS as the war neared its end.

It is due to the fact that the Bell's scientists were murdered that we know anything about it at all.

he chief executioner, SS General Jakob Sporrenberg, who was tasked by Kammler with the murders, gave the only known testimony and descriptions of the Bell in his affidavit to a post-war Polish war crimes trial, where he was conviĉted and executed.  

Jakob Sporrenberg, from 1941 to 1943, he was SS and Police Leader [SSPF] in Minsk.

In 1943 he was assigned to the staff of General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski to combat partisans.

Sporrenberg subsequently succeeded Odilo Globocnik as SS and Police Leader of Lublin, in the Generalgouvernement of occupied Poland in August 1943.

In this capacity, Sporrenberg oversaw and implemented the mass shooting of Jews during Operation "Harvest Festival"

In November 1944 Sporrenberg and several of his staff were redeployed to Norway. There Sporrenberg served as SS and Police Leader of Süd-Norwegen [South Norway]. 

In May 1945, Sporrenberg and his staff were captured by British forces.

Their interrogation shed much light onto Globocnik's activities in Lublin. 

Sporrenberg was transferred from the PWIS Detachment [Norway] in Oslo to the MI19 interrogation centre in Kensington Palace Gardens, London, for further questioning by the War Crimes Interrogation Unit.

This established his participation in a number of war crimes committed in Poland and the Soviet Union

Sporrenberg was extradited to Poland in October 1946, and sentenced to death by a Polish court in Warsaw in 1950.

The sentence was carried out on 6 December 1952 when he was executed by hanging.

Sporrenberg has since been linked to the alleged German secret project Die Glocke [The Bell)] by Polish writer Igor Witkowski, who claimed to have discovered the existence of Die Glocke from transcripts of an interrogation by Polish authorities of Sporrenberg. 

Witkowski claims to have gained access to read the transcripts through an unnamed contact in the Polish Intelligence service. 

The interrogation and its contents have no primary documentation aside from Witkowski.

• The Bell was transplanted out of Silesia to a destination that has never been discovered.
• The Bell, along with General Kammler himself, simply disappear entirely from history, never to be seen again. 

A strange "Henge" like structure also called 'The Flytrap' was constructed by the Germans out of reinforced concrete with copper power cables the thickness of a man's arm leading down to the Bell storage facility beneath. 

This structure resembled a test rig for the possible test of extremely powerful propulsion devices.

There have been many attempts to discredit the story of the Nazi Bell as nothing but a support base for a cooling tower for an electrical power plant. 

Skeptics also claim that it is merely the support for a water tower, but, unless it is on a hill [videos show no evidence of this] it is far too low for an effective water tower.

Whatever the truth is, the Nazis totally destroyed the Wenceslas mine before the Allies could liberate the area.

Cook also notes that, at the end of the war, Kammler had special jurisdiction over a secret "SS evacuation command" that had been personally established by Reichsleiter Martin Bormann in great secrecy.

This command included jurisdiction over all of Nazi Germany's heavy-lift ultra-long-range transport aircraft, including the Ju-290 and the six-engined monster, the Ju-390, that we encountered.

These planes were based at the end of the war quite near the secret underground facility where the Bell was being tested.

Certain properties about the Bell should be noted, since they constitute unusual data points that will be examined in connection with the Kecksburg "UFO crash".

These are:  

• Heavy electrical power consumption
• Rotation of a radioactive liquid in two counter-rotating cylinders
• An unusual radioactive liquid metal of unknown composition
• ​Its location in a chamber lined with ceramic bricks and rubber mats

The rotation of the object, and presumably the radioactive liquid-metal called "Xerum 525", suggests that the Germans were investigating the inertial and vortex properties of radioactive material when subjected to high speed rotation, as well as the resulting field effects.

It is likely that this rotation was caused by passing a current through the liquid -hence the high power consumption- but the possibility of mechanical rotation should not be ruled out in addition to this, as German progress in jet engine turbines and Uranium centrifuges would have given them the experience to construct very high speed turbines for rotating such material for study.

In this sense, it is possible that the Bell was nothing more than two counter-rotating ultra-high speed turbines That is to say, the Bell may have been an ultra high speed electro-mechanical turbine of some sort, an offshoot, perhaps, of German centrifuge technology development.

The housing of this device in an underground chamber lined with ceramic brick and rubber mats suggests that it gave off extremely strong electro-magnetic or electro-static field effects as well as high heat when in operation. T

he reporting of metallic tastes in the mouths of what few surviving personnel there are suggests this. The quick decay without apparent putrefaction of organic material within its field suggests effects that some would associate with scalar waves.

But what was the mysterious "Xerum 525"?

Recently a strange substance known as "red mercury", or mercury antominate oxide, has been alleged to have strong neutron emitting properties when subjected to sudden explosive stress, and is alleged to be a non-fissile method of triggering the enormous fusion reactions of hydrogen bombs, as well as being able, in its own right, of fission explosions in the small kiloton range.

Perhaps the Nazis had stumbled onto a similar such substance during the war.

It was on the basis of certain features of the above lists of the Bell's properties  that the object that crashed in the famous Kecksburg UFO crash retrieval case might have been the Bell itself. 

The UFO Crash and Retrieval at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, December 1965

Twenty years after Kammler's "Bell" went missing, a remarkably similar object reportedly crashed in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, in a wooded area in the country.

The story of the Kecksburg incident begins at approximately 4:45 PM, 9 December 1965.

From northern Canada to western Pennsylvania, thousands of witnesses described "an orange fireball tearing across the evening sky towards the south east, followed by a trail of smoke" .

- Michael Hesemann, "UFOs Secret History"

Witnesses included pilots spread throughout Ontario Michigan, and Ohio that were along the flight path of the object.

Once over Ohio, however, the object clearly demonstrated that it was not a typical meteor, nor a crash in the ordinary sense of "space debris," for according to witnesses, it stopped, stood still "for a few seconds" and then changed its course towards Pennsylvania.

At this point, the Kecksburg saga begins in earnest, for at 4:47 PM, a Mrs. Jones called the local radio station WHJB in Greensburg and told reporter John Murphy that "a huge fireball has crashed in the woods about 1.5 miles from here".

Her children had been playing outside when they first saw it, describing it as a burning star.

Mrs. Jones, visiting a neighbor at that time on then porch, saw blue smoke coming from the forest and a bright light hovering above the area.

In the meantime, the reporter John Murphy had already driven to the site, finding already a beehive of activity there, with two police cruisers and a fire engine from the local volunteer fire-department parked at the wood's edge.

After questioning Mrs. Jones and her children, the local fire marshal and one of the policemen walked into the forest, and reemerged sixteen minutes later. In response to reporter Murphy's questions, the fire marshal directed him to his lawyer.

What followed over the next few hours was genuinely bizarre, as the US Army and Air Force, and apparently some NASA scientists and technicians,appeared.

- Stan Gordon, "Kecksburg: the Untold Story"

Gordon is considered the expert on the Kecksburg case, and the video consists of a series of recorded interviews with surviving witnesses to the event.

According to Mrs. Lillian Hayes, wife of a local farmer, and her son both stated that their house was visited several times that night by military personnel, and she reports having overheard them discussing the fact that NASA was already on the scene.] literally moved in and placed the tiny village and its environs under virtual martial law:

"Whatever it was that had crashed in the forest, the Army and Air Force marched up to deal with it.

"The military and state police cordoned off the forest area, stationed armed guards at all the roads and ways leading into the forest and transported a whole lot of equipment to the crash site. The Air Force took over the premises of the local voluntary fire station and set up a commando (sic) post there.

"The firemen, now forbidden to enter the station, stood by watching while persons in military uniform brought in more equipment into the station, which included a huge radio transmitter. A little later, two large transport trucks, one of them bearing the insignia of the army, were seen driving into the forest. At about the same time, people living close to the nearby Latrobe Airfield saw a jet plane landing there, although the airfield itself had been closed to traffic for quite some time". 

Later, television, newspaper, and radio reporters arrived from Pittsburg, to be met with a wall of silence from the military.

But a police spokesman stated "there's an unidentified flying object in the woods". When the US Air Force's Project Blue book was contacted, Major Hector Quintanilla himself, then project head, informed the reporters that the Air Force's investigators were already at the site.

If it were only for the official statements and peculiar "over-reaction" of the military in such a quick response to the event, and in placing an entire town and considerable portion of its environs under virtual martial law and placing a secure perimeter around a Pennsylvania wood, little else would have been known of the Kecksburg crash.

However, a local who had been listening to the radio, Bill Bulebush, made his way to the crash site, thinking to offer help to local authorities and the presumed crash victims. When he arrived, however, he saw "something that threw him for a loop":

A metallic bullet-shaped object was sticking in the ground at the end of a trench, which it had obviously formed while landing.

"It looked like a big burned orange. It sparkled and twinkled, was about 9 feet wide and 12 feet long. Somehow it gave me the creeps and I got away quickly".

And when he read the Air Force explanation in the papers the next day, he knew they were lying. What he had seen had certainly not been a meteorite!

Suffice it to say, it strains credibility to have so many witnesses attest that the military showed up, placed an area of us territory under martial law, and called in NASA specialists, to recover a mere meteorite.

The meteorite theory made no sense to local UFO researcher Stan Gordon either, since UFOs ordinarily traveled at speeds in excess of those calculated for the object, and meteorites do not stop, stand still, and then change course.

Nonetheless, there the matter would have rested, until James Romansky came forward as a witness 2 years later [1987]. Romansky had been 19 years old at the time of the incident, and a member of the volunteer firefighting team that had arrived first and been instructed to comb the woods for the wreckage of a crashed airplane.

Romansky gave a description of the object that was slightly different than Bulebush's in certain details:

"It had the shape of an acorn, made of shining silvery metal which had a light touch of gold in it. Its bottom was surrounded by a kind of ring or, as Jim put it, a kind of metal bumper on which strange writing could be seen.

Romansky described it later. "They looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics, but without any animal signs. There were straight and broken lines, dots, squares and circles." .... There was no glass, no propeller or jet nozzle, no burst tanks from which any fuel had leaked out, and not even the sign of a hatch or entrance".

After Romansky's story was aired on an episode of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries", other witnesses emerged with their own accounts of the incident, and substantially confirmed the account, adding new details of their own.

One of these details was that a late-night convoy of trucks, one including a large flatbed semi-trailer with an object covered in a tarpaulin.

Some witnesses report that the tarpaulin was pulled tightly around the object, and its "acorn" shape could clearly be seen. The object was next seen by witnesses at its first apparent destination, Lockborne Air Force base in Columbus, Ohio, where military police units were ordered to surround a hangar and shoot anyone who attempted to enter that did not have a top secret clearance.

It was next apparently seen by a witness, "Myron", who contacted Stan Gordon, and described a similar object. Hesemann's summary of Myron's story is worth citing in full, since it bears directly on my hypothesis:

"[Myron] worked as a truck driver for a cement factory belonging to his family at Dayton, Ohio. Two days after the incident occurred at Kecksburg, his firm received a large order for specially glazed bricks from the Wright-Patterson Air Field. A representative of the base had had a look at the bricks in stock at the factory and finally ordered 6,500 double-glazed processed bricks, which, he said, "were for building a double-walled shield around a recovered radioactive object".

Myron later glanced inside the hangar to view what was inside.

The object was silhouetted by floodlights behind large silk -parachute-like screens. Myron described "the shadowy outlines of a large bell-shaped object....perhaps about 9 feet wide and 12 feet high. Through a small opening in the tent, Myron could see that it was metallic, like some kind of whitish bronze".  

Analysis

There are a number of curious data points that would appear to connect Kammler's "Bell" with Kecksburg's "Acorn". Hesemann's book, from which the above accounts and quotations were cited, was published in 1998, before Nick Cook's "Hunt for Zero Point", with its summarization of SS General Sporrenberg's descriptions of the Bell were first made known to an English speaking audience. This means that the Kecksburg witnesses record something that sounds eerily like Kammler's Bell. Consider the following list:

Both objects arc described in very similar terms, as "acorn" or "bell" shaped; the Pennsylvania witnesses could just as easily be describing Kammler's Bell, and Sporrenberg similarly, could just as easily be describing the Kecksburg Acorn; 

1. Both objects are described as having similar, if not identical, dimensions, being approximately 9 to 12 feet in diameter and 12 to 15 feet in height; 
2. Both objects had to be housed in a chamber made of "glazed" or "ceramic" bricks,
3. Both objects apparently gave off strong radioactivity or other strong field effects.

In fact, it is on only one point that the two objects differ, if indeed they are two distinct objects, and that is the consistent testimony by witnesses who actually saw the Kecksburg "acorn" UFO, that some strange form of writing existed around the "bumper" of the object, resembling hieroglyphics to some,

"but without the animal and people pictures," as James Romansky puts it, and resembling geometrical forms according to a few others. No similar statements exist for Kammler's Bell.

But even this may not necessarily be a sufficient reason to dismiss the possible connection. The kind of writing described may have been a form of runes, a form of writing in which the occult-oriented SS was also interested.

- For SS rune research, see Dusty Sklar, "The Nazis and the Occult" [Dorset Press, 1989] 

These types of symbols can sometimes resemble geometric objects that some witnesses associate with the writing on the Kecksburg UFO. It is much more difficult, however, to find a resemblance between them and "hieroglyphic" writing.

With regard to point [3], another significant question occurs: why did the Air Force so quickly decide that ceramic, or glazed, brick, would be the best means of shielding the object?

There are other more effective, though more costly means of shielding, and cost may have been a leading factor in selection of this method.

But the suddenness with which the decision is taken to shield it at Wright-Patterson Field with such bricks also suggests a knowledge of and familiarity with the object, and, possibly, of its history as a Nazi secret weapons project.

In any case, the swiftness of the military's reaction to assemble a recovery team at Kecksburg also indicates that the object had been tracked by the military for sometime as it flew over Canada and the eastern us. It is as if the military had been expecting it.

And finally, there is yet another odd point that may connect the Kecksburg Acorn to the Kammler Bell.

We have already seen that some "Nazi survival myths" have a secret German base close to the Arctic, operating at a remote location in Canada near Hudson Bay. 

It is perhaps worth noting that the trajectory of the Kecksburg Acorn as it tracked from Canada into the US to its final crash site in Pennsylvania, would, if extended north into Canada, place it along a line more or less where the "Arctic Nazi survival myth" places the alleged secret German base.

Near the end of his book, Nick Cook, recounts a meeting with a friend who had started him off on a quest that he knew would eventually lead Cook back to Nazi Germany. "Markus"" words are a chilling warning:

"When the Americans tripped over this mutant strain of non-linear physics and took it back home with them, they were astute enough to realize that their home-grown scientific talent couldn't handle it. That it was beyond their cultural terms of reference.

"That's why they recruited so many Germans. The Nazis developed a unique approach to science and engineering quite separate from the rest of the world, because their ideology, unrestrained as it was, supported a wholly different way of doing things....

"The trouble was, when the Americans took it all home with them they found out, too late, that it came infected with a virus. You take the science on, you take on aspects of the ideology, as well".

It may have been a Nazi secret weapons project, that inadvertently got away from its testers, was brought back under control, and deliberately crashed, only to be retrieved again. T

he Kecksburg incident raises the horrifying possibility that SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler's Bell and his SS secret weapons Sonderkommando survived the war intact, metastasizing throughout the very secretive, and labyrinthine compartmentalizations of America's black projects world.

This raises the specter that some of "our" black projects may not be ours at all, but someone else's. We are just footing the bill.

"By involving the concentration camps, the SS had unwittingly set the seal on any serious post-war investigation of the science and technology it had pursued during the conflict. But then Kammler told Speer he was planning to contact the Americans and that in exchange for a guarantee of his freedom he would offer them everything.... He informed Speer that he was assembling all the relevant experts in Upper Bavaria in order to hand them over to US forces".

--Nick Cook, "The Hunt for Zero Point" 

What emerges from all this? Three broad areas seem to be affected by the revelations and speculative possibilities outlinedk: physics, history, and politics/culture.

Clearly there are sufficient, though scanty, technological references, reports, diagrams, and witness accounts, to reveal the fact that the Third Reich had developed areas of physics and technology scarcely imaginable, even today.

That the Germans were much farther along in atom bomb development seems clear, even if they did not successfully test a device.

We know too certain broad outlines of that physics.

It was based on a dynamic conception of the aether as a topological space, having most likely certain inertial properties of its own. It was likewise a dynamic aether, in which particle reactions appear to have been modeled as geometries and combinations of forms of rotation.

It appears, above all, to have been a physics based on the pursuit of the will to power, and thus willing to entertain the most apparently unorthodox ideas - from the standpoint of today's "public consumption" physics- in that pursuit.

This disturbing potentiality raises a more problematical aspect of what has been outlined.

Almost any way one views it, it seems clear that the end of the war and the strange deployments on the Allied and German side exhibit the characteristics of a race against time, the Nazis trying to prolong the war by every desperate means available, and the Allies, with almost equal desperation, trying to bring it to a close. It also seems clear that the Allies and particularly the Americans were racing very deliberately toward targets that their intelligence, at a very high level, was guiding them to.   

Beyond that, the notion that the Germans successfully exploded even a large fuel air bomb -which they very evidently did- calls much into question, not only about the publicly stated origin and development of that particular piece of contemporary mass destruction hardware, but also calls into question the whole massive expenditure of billions if not trillions of dollars by both the Soviet Union and the United States on thermonuclear weapons.

A fuel air bomb is much cheaper, causes a level of destruction on the order of at least small atom bombs, which are considered strategic weapons of mass destruction.

If the Nazis succeeded with this device, as they very much did, does this explain perhaps the strange accounts from the Eastern Front of some sort of weapon of mass destruction being used on the Russians?

One that would drive them, in desperation, to pass on to Berlin via some neutral channel, to cease and desist or they would begin using poison gas?

The development of the fuel air bomb in some early prototype by the Nazis explains too another mystery, for if they did successfully develop an atom bomb - then their reasons for not using it have already been given: they were being developed as detonators for something far more destructive.

In any case, the various revelations and speculations presented make one thing abundantly clear. Our history began to be massively re-written even before the end of the war, and has been manipulated to an extraordinary degree since then. Nowhere does this seem more in evidence than in the fact that there appears to have been a successful - albeit only prototypical - development by the Nazis of a very different type of physics, a physics that remains off the books.

This to me is the most disturbing aspect of all that my own, and other's, research has uncovered, for a "two track" science -one developed and controlled in secret by the few, and for their own aggrandizement and pursuit of power, and the other developed in public and maintained by the same oligarchy with their power to grant or refuse funding, and their power thereby to control journals and what types of research will be "tolerated"- is the utmost mockery of science. And when science is mocked, morality is mocked because truth is mocked, and this brings us to the third area, the most disturbing of all: politics/culture.

The Will to Power was what drove the Nazi Regime in any endeavor it undertook, whether the conventional military operations it conducted, to the death camps and genocide it was preparing for the world, to the occult and esoteric research of the  Ahnenerbe and the Kammlerstab. That Will to Power seems evident in all aspects of the science implied by the things discussed in this book. And this compels a final observation.

Many people — and I would number myself among them - view the Zero Point Energy as our best long range hope to resolve some of the more pressing environmental and energy problems of our planet. It does hold almost limitless promise for a whole host of new technologies, and there is enough in the literature to convince me that various scientists and inventors - the ones not hobbled by academic tenure or the agendas of grant foundations and government - are on the verge of exciting discoveries.

But with that energy comes the potential for weaponization of a power and sophistication that we with our thermonuclear popguns can only imagine. With it comes a view of the universe subject to the Will to Power. A moral consequence, and commitment, is implied in such a physics. It would therefore seem to imply, inevitably, precisely a "two-tiered" science, one for the public, and one for the initiate, when he or she is spiritually able to handle the extraordinary power it makes available to them in non-destructive ways. There is a degree of evidence that this is, in fact, what happened in ancient times, and certainly it seems to have happened to the Kammlerstab's work after the war. Perhaps, at least initially, its contents were so sensational that, for moral reasons, it was decided to keep it under wraps.

But the Will to Power remains closeted within that science and the black projects it engendered and no doubt continues to engender.

The power to tinker with the topological properties of space, and the energy resulting from it, is an absolute one. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Joseph P. Farrell 
28 February 2008

The most recent issue of NEXUS magazine [March-April 2008] concludes a captivating and thought-provoking three-part series of articles by independent Australian historian and researcher Giordan Smith questioning the whole accepted version of Hitler's last days in Berlin and his suicide. 

The question assumes some importance, in the light of the evidence and arguments that Mr. Smith presents, since I have argued in my two previous books on Nazi secret weapons, REICH OF THE BLACK SUN and THE SS BROTHERHOOD OF THE BELL, that the malevolent outlines of some sort of "Nazi International" may clearly be detected in the post-war West and Latin America.

Richard C. Hoagland has provided yet another approach to the possibility of the continuance of the Nazi ideological and technological agenda with his book DARK MISSION: THE SECRET HISTORY OF NASA. 

As I made clear in REICH OF THE BLACK SUN, I did not, at the time of writing that book, subscribe to the possibility of Adolf Hitler's survival and escape from Berlin.

But Giordan Smith's NEXUS series, and particularly the final part, raises the stakes significantly enough that I now begin to entertain the idea, and ponder its broader implications.

What if, after all, the chief himself DID survive? And if he did, what does it mean in terms of the Nazi International theory and its covert post-war power and influence?

Giordan's article in the current NEXUS begins by poiting out the one major sticking point in the post-war Allied standard history of Hitler's suicide, the version concocted largely by British Intelligence and under the aegis of Hugh Trevor-Roper.

The sticking point, quite bluntly, is the consistent post-war Soviet attitude of skepticism toward the whole "Death of Hitler in Berlin" scenario.

Noting that an American war correspondent in Berlin, one Joseph W. Grigg, announced on 8 May 1945, that Hitler's body had been found. But on 10 May, the same Grigg reported that a further FOUR bodies, "blackened and charred, that seem to answer to Hitler's general appearance" were drug out of the ruins of the Reichschancellery.

Ironically, this sounds remarkably similar to the four different versions of SS General Hans Kammler's death.

Within another five days, Grigg reported that the number of possible Hitler corpses had risen to six, forcing Grigg to admit that the Soviets were beginning to despair of making any definite identification of a body, and thus to have any definite or conclusive evidence of the fact that Adolf Hitler had indeed died.

The Soviets, notes Smith, continued to insist that they were skeptical.

None other than Marshal Zhukov himself admitted, in a press conference on 9 June 1945 attended by representatives of the British, French, and American press, that the Russians "had found no corpses which could be Hitler's".

The marshal added that he considered it a definite possibility that Hitler had escaped Berlin by air. 

Adding to the Allies' problems were the fact that Stalin, as is well known, confided to various American delegates at the Potsdam Conference that he believed Hitler had escaped.

Compounding the difficulties represented by the Soviets, Smith also points out that, once they HAD decided on a set of corpses to identify as Adolf and Eva Hitler's, these were in turn buried and unburied no less than three times, once at an undisclosed location in Berlin, then moved to Finov in the Soviet Union, and then once again moved back to Germany and reburied in Rathenau.

Even then the travelling corpses were not done, for they were exhumed once more and moved to Friedrichshafen.

As Smith observes, "It would be hard to account for this macabre travelling show if the Soviets were sure that the bodiues they had found were really those of the Hitler couple".

The ultimate origins of the suicide interpretation, as Smith points out, were Hitler's chauffeur Erich Kempka, and Dr. Josef Göbbels' second in command at the Propaganda Ministry, Dr. Fritzsche.

As Smith notes, this places the whole suicide legend in yet another problematical light, for London and Washington, which had maintained throughout the war the view "that the Nazis were unconscionable liars" there was, as regards the suicide story -even when one of the sources was Göbbels' second in command!- a "dramatic shift away from scepticism".

In other words, "any Nazi who claimed to know that Hitler had committed suicide never risked having his or her veracity impugned.

Clearly, all Nazis were liars - except those who told the Allies what they wanted to hear.

As Smith points out, there are other significant problems with the suicide version as well, not the least of which is its most famous expositor:

Hugh Trevor-Roper, the same Trevor-Roper who was taken in by the spurious Hitler diaries fraud in the 1980s [and really, does it seem REASONABLE that Adolf Hitler, busily running "his" war from his various headquarters with a micro-management style worthy of a modern globalist corportion towards its employees, would have time to keep a DIARY!?)] 

In other words, Trevor-Roper's investigative skills do not, Smith implies, seem quite adequate to the task, the more so since he did not have access to any Führerbunker survivors in Soviet capitivity, and was dependent on American summaries of interviews of detainees in their possesion.

Here, observes Smith, Trevor-Roper seems to have been taken entirely by American fabrications of an interview with Hitler's famous test pilot, Hanna Reitsch.

Reisch herself REPUDIATED the interview as reported in Trevor-Roper's book in no uncertain terms:

"When I was released by the Americans, I read Trevor-Roper's book, THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER. Throughout the book, like a red line, runs an eyewitness report by Hanna Reitsch about the final days in the Bunker. I never said it. I never wrote it. I never signed it. It was something they invented. Hitler died with total dignity".

The mention of Hanna Reitsch and her repudiation of the report as recorded by Trevor-Roper, raises what is perhaps the most glaring anomaly of them all in the suicide version:

hers and General Robert Ritter von Greim's desperate and dangerous flight in a Fiesler Storch to Berlin in late April of 1945, and Reitsch's skillful landing of the small two seater
reconnaissance aircraft on Unter den Linden Strasse during a Russian artillery barrage.

Many of us know the Trevor-Roper version of the story from the famous film, HITLER'S LAST TEN DAYS, starring Sir Alec Guinness as an increasingly deranged and insane Hitler, totally out of touch with military realities and living out his last desperate fantasies in the Bunker, and clinging doggedly to his power, even at that late date, to make people serve his slightest whim, no matter how looney.

In this case, the story is that Hitler had Reitsch fly General von Greim to Berlin to appoint him head of the Luftwaffe in the wake of Göring's attempt to seize the government, and Hitler's denunciation of the Reichsmarschal for treason.

In the movie, a bewildered Reitsch and von Greim are -quite reasonably- dumb-founded that they risked their lives for something so trivial. The point is made:

Hitler was nuts, and the flight itself was foolhardy.

But, at this point, there is a serious discrepancy, and it has all the hallmarks of a cover story being put out.

Notes Smith:

"Why would Hitler, who was anxious for everyone else to leave Berlin, want someone to come to him? Why would he have been so keen to talk to the head of an almost non-existent entity?

"The official story fails to justify Greim and Reitsche's extremely dangerous flight. It also does not explain why the pair's flight from the Luftwaffe airbase at Rechlin near Berlin to Gatow airport on Berlin's periphery was accompanied by AN ESCORT OF 30-40 FIGHTER JETS - in other words, the extant Luftwaffe virtually in its entirety.

"Clearly the flight had a more serious purpose than we have been led to believe". S

mith even observes that it is Carter Hydrick's thesis that the flight was in fact to smuggle Martin Bormann out of Berlin.

Smith even presents eyewitness evidence of a Hitler Youth soldier who happened upon an SS radio post in Berlin, and of hearing a radio report that Hitler had received his birthday present and had been successfully flown out of Berlin by Hanna Reitsch in the very same Fiesler Storch.

From there, the rest of the flight is recounted by Hanna Reitsch: she flew back to Rechlin, where von Greim "attended a conference".

From there she and von Greim flew to Plön, headquarters of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, then to Dobbin, headquarters of Field Marshal Keitel, then to Lübeck, and once again back to Plön, this time to see Dönitz.

From there, in the strangest oddesy of all, she and von Greim flew to the unlikely place of Königgrätz, in Bohemian Czechoslovakia. 

And we all know, by now, whose secret weapons think tank was headquartered in Bohemian Czechoslovakia.

And here Smith's three part series ends, and the real questions begin, for if one assumes that Hitler DID survive, and moreover, escaped Berlin and Germany successfully, where did he go?

And what did he do once he arrived there?

It would simply be unreasonable in the extreme to assume that he went elsewhere in Europe.

After all, as history's most notorious criminal, and having just savaged Europe for five and a half years, there would have been no safe haven for him there.

Only Franco's Naionalist Spain would have been relatively welcoming, and even then, Hitler would have been within easy reach of Allied or Soviet "special operations teams".

The only other possibility of a relatively secure and welcoming refuge would have been Latin America.

There the situation would have been a little more secure, but it would have been more or less the same story.

The last two possibilities are disturbing, but must be mentioned.

One place, of course, for the ex-Führer of the totally eclipsed Greater German Reich to go would have been the alleged "secret base" in Antarctica.

One cannot, though, imagine Hitler, who had by this time become accustomed to living in some luxury, managing to be happy in a spartan and doubtless small living quarters surrounded by miles of cold and ice, and surviving on walrus.

Which leaves a final possibility...that Hitler's escape had been co-ordinated, not only with Nazis, but with other outside parties, who decided to take him in and screen him in thanks for a job well done.

On this view, Hitler, in effect, went to ground with the very people who had put him into power.

It would seem to take, at some point, the knowledge and connivance of a great power with the intelligence and security resources to keep a secret of that magnitude secret for that long, and to maintain for decades a cover story that looks increasingly to be as shaky as a pristine bullet on a stretcher in Dallas, Texas, in 1963.

Of these possibities, then, we end with two as being the most likely, if the escape scenario is true, and both of them end with "America".