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

have yet to see anything which convinces me that Third Reich scientists developed a full-size atom bomb, as many Germans insist, but the Wagnerian monstrosity below Haigerloch church, the cave with its chain of dangling uranium cubes above a well of heavy water in the gloom, is German humour at its best. Many suspect that the standard history we have been fed is bogus and that the Third Reich must have come up with something better than this abject, dismal failure.

Re-examining with the assistance of two nuclear physicists all the wartime German nuclear documents in the hope of discovering some inconsistency, suspicion soon fell on certain experimental work at Leipzig performed by Professor Heisenberg. It was pointed out that, whether he knew it or not, what he was doing was more useful fieldwork for making a bomb than designing a nuclear reactor. If intended as the warhead in a V-2 rocket it was ingenious.

Recently released official documents allow us to deduce that in April 1945 the submarine U-234 sailed for Tokyo direct with enough treated uranium for two of these small, laboratory-built atom bombs, a scientific passenger who specialized in fuse technology, and a large quantity of heavy water, essential ingredients in the manufacture of Heisenberg’s bomb. Thus at last we may have the solution to the mystery surrounding this German submarine.

The path of the V-4 project, which was not one weapon but two, is so tortuous that it should come as no surprise to find it occupying the greater part of this book. However, the theme of the volume is the German V-weapons of the Second World War. Because they are so well known, the V-1 and V-2 are mentioned primarily with reference to their intended use in the last five months of the war. The V-3 High Pressure Pump was used operationally by the Germans to bombard Luxemburg City during the Battle of the Ardennes and merits attention for that reason.

The Motorstoppmittel, Feuerkugel, known popularly as the Foo-Fighter, and the other side of the same coin, the Kugelblitz were all exotic ideas connected with the SS electro-magnetic anti-gravity project. Some claim that the concept originated in the workshops of some other world’s air force. Official documents prove the existence of all three developments, but fifty-five years afterwards, beyond a grudging admission that their airmen were not hallucinating with respect to the foo-fighter, the authorities have still revealed nothing about how the machines worked. Initially aircrew abstained from reporting what they had seen for fear of being grounded and hospitalized for psychiatric examination. Certainly on the evidence it is strange how the Germans, whose warships’ radar needed a vast steel mattress twelve yards square at the foretop, can have made such giant strides in propulsion, aerodynamics and radar in a few months that they were able to menace enemy bomber formations at 10,000 feet with luminous aerobatic basketballs capable of making over 400 knots. It is said that these aerial vehicles, if one can call them that, had been developed by – and one hopes that they were developed by – clever SS scientists at Wiener Neustadt. They seemed to be an ingenious though harmless anti-aircraft device.

The purpose of building such vehicles so close to the cessation of hostilities, particularly in view of the unholy alliance of Allied Governments with former German military and political leaders to conceal their existence ever since, gives rise to the conviction that we should not altogether discount the possibility of a connection between the loss of the war by Hitler and the upsurge in UFO sightings from 1947 onwards, the theme of the closing chapter of this book. There is no evidence for a German flying saucer excepting claims made by German aeronautical engineers postwar that they had worked on the design or construction of the project. Nevertheless, in 1947 the USAF was absolutely certain that flying saucers existed, flew in our airspace and they suspected a German origin for them. For that reason I have considered it worthwhile to examine the evidence and to form a hypothesis for their creation in line with National Socialist ideology.

Mention must be made of the officer entrusted with running the V-weapons project from its inception. Probably the most extraordinary and enigmatic figure among the latter-day Nazi hierarchy, SS-General Dr (Ing) Hans Kammler (b. Stettin 26.8.1901) was a grey career man who had seen no fighting at the front. As engineer in charge of Building and Construction Works at WVHA, the SS-Chief Economic and Administrative Office, in 1942 Kammler had had responsibility for the planning and design of a number of death camps and had personally supervised the construction of the Auschwitz satellite camp at Birkenau.

On 7 July 1943, at FHQ Rastenburg, Hitler informed Wernher von Braun and Oberst Dr (Ing) Walter Dornberger, senior rocket scientists at the Peenemünde research establishment, that the V-2 project had been given the highest priority rating. On 22 July of that year, after the destruction by bombing of the rocket component plant at Friedrichshafen, the SS had begun looking for an underground factory and had found a suitable location at Niedersachswerfen near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains, the largest subterranean factory in the world.2

On 17 August a large force of British aircraft bombed Peenemünde. The material damage was not extensive and more than 80 per cent of the bombs fell on open land and in the nearby woods. Even the effective patterns had damaged mostly non-industrial or easily repairable facilities. Dornberger reviewed the damage at first light and concluded that the site would be operational again within six weeks, but the following day Kaltenbrunner, head of SS Security Police, arrived in order to enquire personally into an alleged security leak. The intervention provided Himmler with the opportunity to approach Hitler with a convincing argument for transferring the entire V-weapons project from the Army to the SS. The satisfactory continuation of the programme could be guaranteed only by placing it under SS supervision, he argued, ensuring secrecy by using concentration camp inmates