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

statements to an Argentinian commission of enquiry to the effect that on 28 and 29 July 1945 they carried out naval duties in connection with the arrival on the Patagonian coast of two U-boats of an alleged six which escaped from Europe loaded with gold bullion and passengers. Extensive sonar sweeps along the inshore coast of Patagonia in March 2002 have resulted in a contact which, pending visual confirmation, will probably be a U-boat believed scuttled in these coordinates in July 1945. As it is neither of those mentioned by the two Graf Spee crewmen, it is clear that the General Plan was put into effect.

A leftist correspondent of a leading Neuquen daily newspaper active in exposing Nazi war criminals in the Bariloche area of Argentina and who prefers anonymity for that reason has stated in writing that he inspected official documents confirming that the German anti-gravity experiments SS-E-IV and SS-U-13, together with the notorious Bell described elsewhere in this volume, arrived aboard a Junkers Ju 390 long-range transport aircraft which flew non-stop from Norway to Gualeguay aerodrome in Entre Rios province, Argentina, at the war’s end1. If true, this might be seen by some as suggestive that the SS anti-gravity aircraft project was the post-war utmost priority for the National Socialist scientific elite.

Just a few days after the Nagasaki bombing in August 1945 the US authorities interrogated a German flak rocket expert whom they named only as Zinsser, a trained observer of aerial explosions. The interview document has a high reliability rating. During the interview Zinsser described certain characteristics of an A-bomb test he claimed to have observed over Germany in 1944 which he could not possibly have known about unless he had actually witnessed such an explosion. A nuclear weapons physicist whose opinion I sought thought that a small, possibly one-kiloton, device was being described, although the signs to look for were buried in the text and would elude the casual, unscientific reader of the document such as myself. That is the reason why its significance has been overlooked until now.

Unlikely as it may seem, therefore, on 11 October 1944, off Rügen Island in the western Baltic, German scientists successfully obtained a small atomic reaction from, for want of a better description, a rudimentary bomb within a lead jacket to suppress fallout. In a letter from Robert Oppenheimer to James B. Conant dated 30 November 1942 it was stated that in the opinion of General Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, a successful bomb was one “which had a 50% chance of exceeding a 1,000-ton TNT equivalent” and, as the German device seems to have fallen within this specification, Hitler’s scientists won the race for the atom bomb.

The V-4 is what catches the imagination. It was described by Hitler as being a weapon “of such potent effect that all human life would be exterminated within a radius of three to four kilometres of the point of impact”. This terminology could describe equally well an atomic weapon, a 250kg bomb of sarin nerve gas or even radiological material.

The looseness of Hitler’s description was intended to mislead his guest at table, Marshal Antonescu of Rumania, as to the nature of this “weapon of frightfulness” and how it was to be deployed, facts which have correspondingly remained a mystery ever since.

The researcher’s problem is that in the most important areas of history, particularly the Second World War, many governments intend that the truth of certain affairs is to be suppressed for ever. This may be done for a variety of reasons, both honourable and not. Thus, deep in national archives the papers which contain the true history will lie in darkness for decades and perhaps never see the light of day.

Aged servants of the former Third Reich in Germany and Austria often have useful files and documents which they are fearful to disclose lest their State pensions and those of their dependants should become forfeit on some unfortunate “technicality”. A file of correspondence between an Austrian Gauleiter and Hitler pertaining to the successful development of an efficient implosion fuse capable of detonating a plutonium bomb is, to my certain knowledge, in Sicherheit, which means in the custody of a lawyer until the death of the rightful holder, when it is to be released to a named researcher for publication.

Even more to be deplored is the sale of microfilmed documents from allegedly classified US archives. In two references in this book the source document does not appear to have been made available to the public but was “brokered through a licensee”. Exactly what the machinery is for this operation remains obscure. The author of one of the books concerned has given his word of honour that such a microfilmed document in his possession reads as he says it does, and I have no reason to doubt him. “Many researchers and physicists would give an arm for a glimpse of this document,” he writes. That may be so, but what sort of history is built on such a foundation?

All this official secrecy has led to the creation of lobbies. One of them believes passionately in an SS atom bomb built in some deep catacomb in the Tyrol or Harz Mountains. Another thinks that Professor Heisenberg must have been behind everything. An opposing lobby is tied to revealed documentation which dictates that National Socialist Germany not only had no atom bomb project and no nuclear reactor, but could not possibly have had one even if they wanted because their best scientists had all emigrated.

In fact, given the right implosion fuse, a couple of rudimentary zeroenergy nuclear reactors in an underground factory beside the Danube, two years and a chemical separation plant, a low-grade plutonium bomb would not have been beyond Germany’s capabilities in the Second World War, and from September 1941 they knew it. Simply to dismiss as a flight of fancy the V-4 explosive mentioned by Hitler, as academics and historians have done over the last half-century, seems too easy a solution. I