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

hurricane, after which it went quiet. Next day, like many residents of Roehrensee, Holzhausen, Muehlberg, Wechmar and Bittstedt, I had nose-bleeds, headache and pressure on my ear-drums. That afternoon about two o’clock, between 100 and 150 SS came to the mountain and asked where the bodies were and where they had to take them. They had been misdirected and a motor cyclist put them right. I watched them making for the Ohrdruf Army Training Ground.”

Another witness, a former concentration camp inmate at Ohrdruf, described how he was forced to help in the cremation of several hundred charred bodies on 5 March 1945, the inference being that they had died as the result of the weapons test the previous evening.

V-4: The Doomsday Bomb Ready to Enter Service

Ashen with the pallor of the Berlin Bunker, all that kept Hitler’s spirit alive in the closing months was the desperate hope that, even at the last, circumstances might yet permit him to use his weapons of frightfulness in a last throw. Accordingly, at Schloss Ferienwalde/Oder on 11 March 1945, his last visit to troops at the front, he implored General Theodor Busse and officers of the Ninth Army to stave off the Russians for as long as it might take for his new ‘wonder-weapons’ to be ready. He was honest in promising them that “every day and every hour are precious for the completion of the weapons of frightfulness which will bring the turn in our fortune!” Frau Werner continued, “The following night, 12 March, the second test took place about ten-fifteen. The air raid sirens went off at nine. The glow wasn’t so bright as the first test and we didn’t get nose-bleeds and so on. Hans spent all night on the tower with his people. He told us we mustn’t ever mention about the bolts of lightning. All the people knew Hans so I suppose they were all Reichspost and Reich Research Council. None of them was in uniform and only a few wore the Party badge in the lapel.”

The only rocket in Hitler’s armoury able to reach London from Germany carrying a one-tonne payload was the winged A9/10. It was eighty feet long and could hit New York. The series was not yet in mass production, the project having only been resurrected in December 1944. A test launch seems to have been carried through near Ohrdruf on 16 March 1945. All four witnesses112 gave evidence that on 16 March 1945 an “Amerika” rocket was launched successfully from “Polte II” MUNA Rudisleben (an underground munitions factory site). Witnesses (2) and (3) testified to having worked at Rudisleben on a rocket “thirty metres in length” which was launched at Rudisleben on the date in question. Witness (4) testified to having worked with a party of prisoners erecting the staging for the rocket. Cläre Werner stated: “At about nine on the night of 16 March 1945 there was an air raid warning. My friend Hans Rittermann [Plenipotentiary for Special Reichpost and OKW Projects] was visiting the tower with some friends. They had binoculars and were looking towards Ichtershausen [Polte II lay between Wachsenberg Tower and Ichtershausen]. At about eleven it got very bright, something went up into the sky with a huge tail fire, it kept going up, it was heading to the north. Hans Rittermann told us we must never speak of what we had seen, just that we had been witnesses to something unique which would be written about in every history book.” This seems to confirm the launch of an A9/10 rocket, but the war was beyond recall.

Luftwaffe Mutiny?

Senior Engineer August Cönders, who had designed the V-3 England Gun, reported in February 1945 that the new decisive weapons would not be ready for use before April 1945113, and in the last days of March 1945 the Luftwaffe dropped leaflets across the Lower Rhine advising the population to evacuate the area, since from the beginning of April new decisive weapons were to be deployed there. A cordon sanitaire 50 kms wide was required. From a military point of view the period towards the end of March offered the last opportunity to shut down the Western Front by driving back the first crossings to the western side of the Rhine. 114 Rumours were rife that near Münster a number of Me 109 fighters were being converted for kamikaze operations (SO = Selbstopfereinsätze, self-sacrificial operations) using a special 250 kg bomb; even an Me 262 jet could not outfly the bomb’s pressure wave.

There are indications that this proposed operation was in some way sabotaged by Luftwaffe personnel. On 31 March 1945 General Barber and 202 Luftwaffe servicemen including sixteen airfield commanders and eighty-five officers and pilots were executed for “refusing to obey orders”. 115 It can hardly be a coincidence that the Luftwaffe War Diary for the period (19-30 March 1945) and the Wehrmacht High Command War Diary for a much longer period (1 March-20 April 1945) are missing, suggesting that there must have been a serious mutiny during the period and possibly at the instigation of Goering who in May 1945 spoke of a mysterious weapon which he had declined to use “because it might have destroyed all civilization.” 116 An incident which may have been related to this situation occurred on 30 March 1945 when the second of two Me 262A-2a/U2 prototypes of the fast jet bomber version, works number 110555, became a write-off after crash landing at Schröck airfield near Marburg/Lahn and subsequently fell into American hands. This aircraft had been completed in January 1945, since when it had flown twenty-two test flights operating from Rechlin. 117 It was fitted with a bomb-aimer’s position in the nose, and along both sides of this cockpit were long, feeler-like aerials, 118 almost certainly intended as a manually operated proximity fuse for the bombs.

Alsos Hot On The Trail

On 22 April 1945 Dr Edward O. Salant of the American Intelligence Mission Alsos addressed to all former American Air Intelligence