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

An underlying thread of argument towards the end of this volume runs along the lines that far more lay behind National Socialism than a mad racialist warlord wanting to conquer the world for no good reason. Conceivably this will not find much of a welcome amongst those whose vision, being fixed on purely material causes, allows no possibility of a supra-physical impetus in history. The determination of the world not to understand Hitler or see the manifest signs is something which perhaps only an author who has spent countless hours poring over masses of documents can appreciate. The facts do bear investigation.

At the beginning of 1934, when Rudolf Hess swore in the entire NSDAP to Hitler in a mass spectacle bringing millions of Germans to the microphones, he said to them:

“By this oath we again bind our lives to a man through whom – this is our belief – superior forces act in fulfilment of Destiny.”5

Whatever Hess meant by this we have never been able to discover, but it might have been the reason why he spent all his life after 1941 imprisoned in solitary confinement. The former Gauleiter of Danzig, Hermann Rauschning recalled6 that in the early years of the regime during the course of his discussions with Hitler (whom he described as the Master Enchanter and High Priest of the Religious Mysteries of Nazism), Hitler spoke openly about his innermost ideas – a programme to be kept secret from the masses. Rauschning continued:

“One cannot help thinking of him as a medium. For most of the time mediums are ordinary, insignificant people. Suddenly they are endowed with what seems to be supernatural powers which set them apart from the rest of humanity. These powers are something that is outside their true personality – visitors, as it were, from another planet. The medium is possessed. Once the crisis is past, they fall back again into mediocrity. It was in this way, beyond any doubt, that Hitler was possessed by forces outside himself.”

During Mussolini’s visit to Munich in September 1937 the great psychologist C. J. Jung observed that, compared to the Duce,

“Hitler presents the appearance of a robot. One would have said a double, in whose interior the man Hitler was hiding as an appendix, careful not to interfere with the mechanism.”

Jung’s final conclusion of Hitler was that:

“He belongs in the category of authentic wizards. His body does not suggest strength. He has in his eyes the expression of a prophet. His power is not absolutely political, it is magical. Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is always one who is well led. The idea is confirmed by the word Mahdi, the Islamic Messiah, which translates to ‘He who is well led’.”

What man would have wanted such a responsibility foisted upon him? The extraordinary allegation being made here is that Adolf Hitler and the Führer were different entities inhabiting the same body.

What strikes one particularly in this context is Hitler’s intuition vis-à-vis the motives of Stalin and the Soviet Union. It is not necessary to enlarge on this subject. What is required is for the British authorities to declassify all the papers relating to the interrogations of Rudolf Hess for the period 1941–1942.

It is, of course, not the intention of the foregoing to justify Nazi atrocities or the Holocaust. But we prefer to rely on the assertions of Governments and academic historians who, labouring in the realm of effects, cannot in the nature of things admit belief in cosmic intelligences, let alone their acting for change through leaders like Adolf Hitler. There is a danger in that, and the concluding chapter accentuates certain facts which should make the true situation incapable of being misunderstood.

Geoffrey Brooks

Uruguay, March, 2002

CHAPTER 1

Vergeltungswaffen:

V-1 to V-4

I N A TALK with Marshall Antonescu of Rumania at Führer HQ Wolfsschanze on 5 August 1944 Hitler spoke of four V-Weapons which Germany was in the process of introducing into the conflict. The source of this information is Henry Picker7 who between 1942 and 1944 was Martin Bormann’s ADC and stenographer.

The German noun Vergeltung has a dictionary meaning of ‘retribution’, ‘retaliation’ or ‘reprisal’, but its National Socialist meaning was broader, for the concept of retaliation as such merely contemplates the taking of revenge.

In the case of the United Kingdom, for example, this would simply imply taking measures to inflict more damage on British cities than the RAF and American air raids had inflicted on German cities, a militarily purposeless enterprise. It was by no means the object of the V-weapons programme to exchange ‘rubble for rubble’: Vergeltung meant the use of retaliation to terrorize the enemy’s civilian population as a political tool to coerce their Government into seeking an armistice. It was not intended to punish Londoners, therefore, but to extract Britain’s agreement to withdraw from the war and to expel from her soil the American presence there.

The V-1

The first of Hitler’s V-Weapons was the Fieseler Fi 103 unpiloted flying bomb. It was launched either from a short ramp under its own jet power or from a low-flying Heinkel bomber. The warhead was 1 tonne of high explosive. Its maximum speed was 650 kms per hour and its range 370 kms. At the nose was a small log consisting of a propellor connected to a revolution counter preset with the number of turns of the propellor imparted at a particular speed and height in reaching a known distance. As soon as the preset revolutions were reached, the counter cut out the engine and the bomb then dropped. The weapon was grossly inaccurate and indiscriminate. London and southern England were always its intended target but in May 1943 preliminary discussions were held on the feasibility of firing the V-1 from a submarine such as the large Type XIV replenishment U-boat. After Field Marshal Milch had expressed his scepticism the idea of using the flying bomb against New York was shelved.8

The bombardment of London began on the morning