Hitler's Terror Weapons by Brooks, Geoffrey (life books to read .txt) 📗

A9/10 could hit New York. There was no rocket of the same species for the intermediate ranges and this omission was fatal. By December 1944 when the Uraniumbombe was ready for use in numbers for the definitive V-2 campaign, the Low Countries and France had been lost and now the range was too long. After the failure of the Ardennes campaign, in March 1945 Hitler decided on a last desperate gamble. On his last appearance at the front, he exhorted his troops to hold out until the miracle weapon should be ready, which would bring about the change in Germany’s fortunes. Posterity has been left few traces of the former flak weapon based on firedamp. In principle it generated a ferocious pressure wave at ground level, killing principally by blast and suffocation, but it had a knock-on effect which threatened a structural change to the atmosphere. The mysterious loss of Luftwaffe and OKW War Diaries for the month or so in question may have been connected with the execution of Luftwaffe General Barber and several hundred pilots and airfield commanders for refusing to implement orders to use it at the end of March 1945. When captured in May that year, Hermann Goering exclaimed that he had “declined to deploy a weapon which might have destroyed all civilisation,” the inference being perhaps that the use of the explosive threatened to so destabilize the climate as to bring about the cataclysm, but that Hitler had nevertheless ordered its use against the Allies on the Western Front regardless. It certainly does not look as though it happened that way round, for reasons explained later.

CHAPTER 2

The Aryan Physics Doctrine

ON 30 JANUARY 1933 the National Socialist Party under Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Those who saw in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement knew scarcely anything of it. It was more even than a religion; it was the will to create mankind anew.

“One thing is certain – Hitler has the spirit of the prophet. We had come to a turning point in world history – that was his constant theme. We uninstructed persons, it was clear, had no conception of the scale of the revolution that was to take place in all life. At these times Hitler spoke as a seer, as one of the initiated. His inspired pronouncements were based on a biological mysticism … the pursuit of ‘the random path of the intelligence’ was the real defection of man from his divine mission. To have ‘magic insight’ was Hitler’s idea of the goal of human progress. He himself felt that he already had the rudiments of this gift. He attributed to it his successes and his future eminence. He saw his own remarkable career as a confirmation of Hidden Powers.”21

These Hidden Powers seem to have first possessed Hitler on Armistice Day 1918. He had been admitted to Pasewalk Military Hospital at the end of the war suffering from mustard gas poisoning and placed under the care of a psychiatrist, Dr Edmund Forster, who misdiagnosed his condition as psychopathic hysteria. What treatment was administered and what the correct diagnosis was remain a mystery since the Gestapo seized the records in 1933 and Dr Forster committed suicide the same year. According to Hitler while at the hospital he had experienced “a vision from another world” which told him that he needed to restore his sight so that he could lead Germany back to greatness. His anti-semitism manifested at Pasewalk. It was there that he promised solemnly to become a politician and “devote his energies to fulfilling the orders which he had received”.22

“Yes, Hitler continued, Nietzsche went so far as to recognize the superman as a new biological variety. But he was not too sure of it. Man is becoming God – that is the simple fact. Man is God in the making. Man has eternally to strain at his limitations. The moment he relaxes and contents himself with them, he decays and falls below the human level. He becomes a quasi-beast. Gods and beasts, that is what our world is made of”.23

Thus was National Socialism at root an idea embracing powerful emotions harnessed towards a demiurgic transformation of the world by a new race of Aryan mankind which was, or so he imagined, at the same time the resurgence of an Himalayan race of profound antiquity. And, from the very outset, the world enemy had been identified. In a booklet published from his notes made in 1923, and published by Hohenreichen Verlag Munich in 1924 under the title Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue between Adolf Hitler and Me24, Hitler’s tutor in magic, Dietrich Eckart, to whom he dedicated Mein Kampf, demonstrated that the roots of the hatred of the Jews stretched back to the pre-Exodus period in Ancient Egypt.

The oriental origins of Hitler’s movement are obvious not only from its symbolism. Many National Socialist speeches, including those by Hitler, were direct translations, phrase by phrase, from the works of the Chinese philosopher Yang Shang, whose theories influenced Shih Huang-Ti (246–209 BC), builder of the Great Wall, an emperor beguiled by the esoteric language of Taoist sacred writings.25 The German Customs list of books banned from entry into the Third Reich was fairly complete as far as the languages of Europe and America were concerned, but lacking in oriental titles – in fact entirely devoid of them. The works of the pacifist Chinese political philosophers were not on it, and even German, French and English translations of these books could come in.26

Rudolf Hess, interrogated in the Tower of London under the effect of a truth serum, stated that National Socialists valued the occult sciences highly and might even be, through Hitler, the puppets of a clandestine Directorate in the Orient.27 No doubt he had other things to say. Exactly why he had to serve his sentence of life imprisonment in solitary confinement has never been made clear, but his uninvited arrival in Britain one