Echo of the Reich (30 page)

“That’s horrendous,” he said again.

“You know, almost everyone who has read anything about the Second World War knows about the V1 and the V2, but hardly anybody has ever heard of the V3.”

“You’d better include me in that,” Bronson said, “because I’ve never heard of it. What was it? Another type of rocket?”

Angela shook her head. “No. It was something much simpler, but arguably even more dangerous than the other two ‘vengeance’ weapons. It was known to the Germans as the England Cannon or Busy Lizzie, and it consisted of five batteries, each containing twenty-five high-velocity cannons that were designed to fire shells up to one hundred and twenty miles.”

“Jesus,” Bronson muttered. “If they’d ever got that working, from the right location it could have flattened London.”

“It did work and they had the right location. It was a small French village near the English Channel coast
named Mimoyecques. Luckily for all of us, the British government found out about it in nineteen forty-four. The Nazis had built an underground facility for the production, and also the operation, of the weapon. But this time, instead of relying on the natural defenses of an existing mountain, they had to build their own mountain, as it were, because the terrain around there is fairly flat. So they constructed a reinforced concrete roof that was five meters thick, and walls that were almost equally massive. On the sixth of July nineteen forty-four, aircraft from 617 Squadron—you’d know them better as the Dambusters—attacked the site with twelve-thousand-pound Tallboy bombs. They were one of the first of what are now called ‘bunker-busters,’ and one bomb went straight through the concrete roof and exploded inside the facility.”

Bronson nodded. “And I suppose that was more or less that,” he said.

“Yes. It was obviously the right decision in the circumstances, and it was a fine piece of precision bombing. What worried the British government at the time, quite apart from the possibility of a constant stream of high-explosive shells landing in and around London, was that they suspected the Nazis might be prepared to fit the shells with chemical or biological payloads. After all, they were very experienced by this time in the use of lethal gases. Zyklon B gas had been supplied to the Buchenwald concentration camp early in nineteen forty, and to Auschwitz in September of the following year. Oddly enough, its principal use was for delousing in an attempt to control the spread of typhus, but fairly soon it started to be
used as the principal agent to solve the Nazi’s Jewish problem. The gas had also been used as early as nineteen twenty-nine, but in America, not Germany, for disinfecting freight trains and sanitizing the clothing of Mexican immigrants.

“But Zyklon B wasn’t what the British were worried about, because it only works effectively in a confined and unventilated space, like the Nazi gas chambers. Toward the end of the war, the German chemical company IG Farben moved into another underground facility named Falkenhagen, about ten miles northwest of Frankfurt, near the Polish border. Believe it or not, some of the British records concerning this place are still classified, even today, but it’s fairly clear that the facility was intended to produce a brand-new and much more lethal type of weapon: a nerve gas. This new concoction was named sarin, which can’t be seen, smelled or tasted. The lethal dose is tiny: one droplet on the skin will cause death in about six minutes. Zyklon B was just as lethal, but took up to twenty minutes to do its job. Luckily, the war ended before large-scale production of sarin, or any other of what you might call the ‘new generation’ nerve agents, like tabun, could start.”

Angela looked up from her notes for a moment and stared ahead at the road that was unwinding steadily in front of them.

“Where are we now?” she asked.

Bronson glanced down at the satnav display.

“About halfway there, I suppose,” he replied. “As soon as we see somewhere we like the look of, we’ll stop and buy ourselves some lunch. Right, I think I understand
the kind of things that the Nazis were working on toward the end of the Second World War, but I still have no idea about the significance of the ‘lantern bearer.’”

Angela smiled at him, but without any humor in her expression. “Ah, yes,” she said, “the
Laternenträger
. Now that was something completely different.”

25 July 2012

Half an hour after they’d spotted a roadside café that looked clean and welcoming, they were back on the road again, and Angela continued telling Bronson what she’d discovered.

“It’s not clear exactly when this particular Nazi project was conceived,” she said, “but from what I’ve been able to find out, it looks as if sometime in mid–nineteen forty-one an unidentified German scientist came up with a theory that was sufficiently interesting, and presumably already sufficiently well-developed, for the Nazi leadership to allocate development funds to it.

“What is known is that in January ’forty-two, a brand-new project code named
Thor
—or possibly
Tor
, meaning ‘gate’—was created, under the leadership of Professor Walther Gerlach, a leading German nuclear physicist. The project was under contract to the
Heereswaffenamt Versuchsanstalt
—that roughly translates as ‘Army Ordnance
Office Research Station’—number ten, and was a part of the Nazi atomic bomb project. The operation functioned as a single entity until August of the following year. Then the project was divided into two separate parts, and the code name
Tor
or
Thor
was replaced by two other names:
Chronos
and
Laternenträger
. Depending on which source you look at, by the way,
Chronos
could either be spelled with a ‘C’ or a ‘K,’ as
Kronos
, and that could be significant.”

“Okay,” Bronson replied. “I already know what
Laternenträger
stands for, but what about
Chronos
? Is that Latin for ‘time,’ perhaps? You know, like in ‘chronometer’?”

“Almost. It’s actually Greek, but you’re right: the word does mean ‘time.’ Some researchers who’ve investigated this project have come up with some fairly unlikely conclusions about what the Nazis were trying to achieve. They looked at the code names—
Tor
and
Chronos
, ‘gate’ and ‘time’—and presumed that the purpose of the project was to build a time machine, or maybe come up with a device that could somehow be used to manipulate time.”

“I see what you mean by ‘unlikely.’”

“Exactly,” Angela agreed. “The chances of the Nazis actually managing to get anywhere with a project as futuristic as time manipulation well over half a century ago are pretty slim. And the other fairly obvious counterargument is that, even if they had, by some miracle, devised a way of altering time, it’s difficult to see how that could possibly have helped the war effort. What they really needed were weapons, guns or rockets or bombs, stuff
like that, to achieve superiority on the battlefield or in the air, and that was what all their other secret projects, all their various
Wunderwaffen
programs, were designed to create. Personally, I think it’s most likely that the code words were randomly generated, and had no direct connection with the projects they were linked to. And that brings us neatly to our mystery weapon,
Charité Anlage
, the Wenceslas Mine and
Die Glocke
.”

“Now you’ve lost me,” Bronson said, pulling out to overtake two slow-moving cars. “Charity what?”

“Charité Anlage,”
Angela repeated, “aka
Projekt SS
ten forty. It was a massive operation, beginning in June nineteen forty-two, and required the German company AEG to supply huge amounts of electrical power. It may even have been a joint project with Bosch and Siemens. According to one source, the entire venture was officially named
Schlesische Wekstätten Dr. Fürstenau
, presumably because for a time it was based at Ksia˛z˙, also known as Fürstenstein Castle, a thirteenth-century castle at Silesia in Poland.”

“But what did it do?” Bronson asked.

“I’m coming to that. First, we need to go back to the nineteen thirties, before the war started. In nineteen thirty-six, a German scientist named Dr. Ronald Richter performed some experiments using electric arc furnaces to smelled lithium for U-boat batteries. Almost by accident, he discovered that by injecting deuterium into the plasma, into the arc, he could create a kind of nuclear fusion. Or at least, that was what he claimed.

“His work was to some extent complementary to that being undertaken at around the same time by Professor
Gerlach, who had been involved in the creation of plasma by utilizing the spin polarization of atoms since the nineteen twenties. To me, it looks as if this entire project was conceived by Gerlach, who apparently convinced the Nazi high command that he could build a device that could transmute the element thorium into uranium, most likely using beryllium as a source of neutrons. Now you can really appreciate the significance of at least one of the code names, because I believe that it wasn’t called
Projekt Tor
, but
Projekt Thor
, a reference to thorium, and nothing to do with any kind of a gate.”

Angela glanced across at Bronson to make sure that he was still paying attention. He was.

“To me, as a nonscientist, the next step in the chain of logic seems to make sense. The Nazis were having a lot of trouble trying to get sufficient supplies of heavy water out of Norway, and they hadn’t got many other potential sources. I think they turned to Gerlach and his theoretical machine for converting thorium into uranium—uranium that could then be used to produce plutonium to create a nuclear bomb.”

Angela glanced back at her notebook to refresh her memory.

“There are a few more facts that I’ve been able to turn up but, as you’ll obviously appreciate, some of the information is pretty sketchy, just because of the circumstances and what happened at the end of the war. It seems there were at least two important laboratories involved, one at a town named Leubus—its modern name is Lubiaz—in Silesia, and another at Neumakt—which is now called Sroda Slaska—to the east of Breslau or Wroclaw. I mentioned
Die Glocke
, and this device was at the very heart of the project. The German name means ‘the Bell,’ and was apparently inspired by a poem penned by a man named Friedrich Schiller, entitled the ‘Song of the Bell,’ which describes the forging of a great bell from metal of extreme purity. I’m sure the Nazis would have loved the mystical overtones of this idea, creating a perfect device from perfect material, much as they were trying to do with the huge and diverse population of the European countries they had conquered.

“The other reason for the name was because the device apparently looked very much like a large bell. Again, it depends upon which source you refer to, but it seems that
Die Glocke
was partly built at the laboratories in Leubus and Neumakt. The main part of the unit was a contrarotating centrifuge, and that was fabricated in Germany, at Dessau, by a company named BAMAG: the Berlin Anhaltische Maschinenbau AG.

“The obvious question is: did it work? Well, it did do
something
, that much we’re quite sure of. And, if it did work, how did it function? Were the Nazis able to produce uranium in this device? Nobody knows the answer to that specific question, and there are various ideas about its form and function. This isn’t my area of expertise, obviously, but I’ve looked at various theories suggested by people who seem to know what they’re talking about.”

Angela turned to a fresh page in her notebook and read from her notes: “The most plausible suggestion is that the device was a plasma induction coil, which worked by using the two colocated contrarotating centrifuges to spin mercury in a powerful magnetic field. This would
cause a thing called a toroidal plasma to be created. Compounds of thorium and beryllium would already be in position in the core of the centrifuge, held in position in a kind of jelly made from paraffin. The thorium would then be bombarded by neutrons stripped from the beryllium, and this bombardment would result in the creation of uranium.” She looked up. “That was the theory, as far as most researchers have been able to deduce. But I have no idea if it’s scientifically plausible, or even possible, because nobody, apart from the scientists and technicians who worked on it, ever saw it.”

Bronson glanced at her. “You mean, they didn’t find it after the war?”

Angela shook her head. “No, but that’s another story, and we’re not there yet. First, you remember that I told you the
Thor
project was divided into two?”

“Yes. The new ones were called
Chronos
and
Laternenträger
.”

“Exactly. And I also said that there was some dispute over the spelling of the word
Chronos
. One reason for this is that
Kronos
spelt with a ‘K’ is a classical name for Saturn, and the shape that a toroidal plasma would assume is much like that planet, a central core containing the compounds of beryllium and thorium, with the plasma forming a ring around the outside. To me, that just seems too deliberate a name to be coincidental.

“There are a few other things we know about
Die Glocke
. It was obviously reasonably portable. After it was manufactured, it was taken to yet another of the Nazis’ underground complexes at an airfield to the west of Breslau. That was on the first of November nineteen forty-three,
and as far as I can gather it first became operational in May nineteen forty-five, with catastrophic results. According to one set of records, seven scientists were responsible for conducting that experiment, and five of them died shortly afterward from what appears to have been a massive dose of radiation poisoning. The following month, or possibly in July of the same year, they held a second test run, when the scientists were wearing protective clothing, but again some deaths—we don’t know how many—occurred soon afterward.

“But by this time, the Soviet forces were beginning their inexorable advance toward Berlin, and in November nineteen forty-four the device was moved to the tunnels that lie under Fürstenstein Castle, along with the scientists who were still working on it. But even that proved to be only a temporary relocation and a month later, on the eighteenth of December nineteen forty-four, the Bell was moved for the last time within Europe, to the Wenceslas Mine, near the village of Ludwigsdorf, which is now known as Ludwikowice.”