Hitler's Terror Weapons (18 page)

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 witnesses
¹¹²
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 1945
¹¹³
, 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 field teams an urgent circular requesting a search for Luftwaffe 50 kg and 150 kg bombs having an aerial in the tail section.
¹¹⁹
Agents were to report the names of scientists, factories or laboratories linked to these bombs. The aerials were aluminium and resembled car aerials, about 40 cms long, as thick as a finger at the base where they screwed into the tail section. The bomb was 40 or 70 cms long, cylindrical and 22cms wide. There were probably brackets on the main casing. Internally were to be found radio components, metal vacuum tubes, condensers, resistors, etc. Areas of special interest were thought to be Rechlin, Celle and Stade.

On 26 April 1945 a supplementary notice widened the search to other bombs which had a 25-cm long aerial in the nose. An accompanying sketch showed a ball with small, wire-meshed covered holes at the head of the aerial. It may be recalled that during the initial experiments with the explosive in 1944, Zippermayer had had the idea that a better effect might be obtained if the powder was spread out in the form of a cloud before the explosion. A metal cylinder had been attached to the lower end of the container and hit the ground first, dispersing the powder. A quarter of a second later a small charge in the cylinder exploded and ignited the cloud. This may explain the real purpose of the ‘aerial and ball' fitted to the nose of the bomb. The bombs were actually stored in Austria at a massive underground SS-weapons factory codenamed Quarz at Melk.

On 18 March 1945 the airfield commander of a fighter group at Münster, probably JG27 or JG28, received orders to accept delivery in Austria of the contents of thirty railway wagons consigned by the Office of Luftwaffe Supply. The orders were long and complicated and explained how the Me 109 fighter-bomber was to be converted to carry a new type of bomb. It was of 250 kg and would be slung under the bomb bay and kept in position by unusually long bolts which gave a clearance of 16 cms above the runway. A few days later another order arrived in which it was stated that the bomb had a destructive radius of 16 kms and would destroy the aircraft dropping it. Therefore the mission was to be flown only by unmarried volunteers.

Next came telephone orders for the airfield commander to collect two heavy tractor trucks at Linz and proceed to Amstetten railway goods yard. On this occasion he was advised that the new bomb would be suspended from a parachute when dropped, thus allowing the pilot a chance of escape. An altitude of 7000 metres was allowed.

The airfield commander's ADC, a Luftwaffe Hauptmann, was sent to Amstetten railway yard and found a train of thirty sealed wagons each bearing the words “Caution. New Explosive Type!” painted on the panelling in large white characters. A Waffen-SS Hauptsturmführer in charge of the security detachment refused to release the contents of the wagons to him, citing a
Führerbefehl
which required the release order to bear Hitler's personal signature. The Luftwaffe ADC had no document of this nature and the train remained at Amstetten until the arrival of the Americans.

The Waffen-SS and Americans Meet Up at Melk

On 12 April 1945 Grossadmiral Dönitz had spent 24 hours in Berne, Switzerland, and then returned to Berlin where he spoke to Hitler.
¹²⁰
In mid-April the Soviet Army had dug in at St Pöllen, only 3 kms from Merkersdorf airfield which served Melk, from where they regularly broadcast over loudspeakers in German warning of the “the greatest treachery in world history” and inviting German troops, in alluring terms describing the unsurpassable treatment they would receive, to “come over and surrender”.

Melk was being defended by the 6th SS Panzer Army with fifteen Jagdtiger tanks.

When Amstetten fell on 8 May 1945 citizens recall that the Waffen-SS were waiting quite unconcernedly in the market square to meet the American forces when they arrived. During the day when there was a Russian air raid American and SS troops sought shelter together. Later the two groups collaborated. The thirty railroad cars were taken westwards across the Enns demarcation line, while a mixed group proceeded to Melk to arrange the ceasefire. The same day the Russians moved forward and encountered American troops near Melk, where a brief exchange of fire ensued before the Americans withdrew. The US forces had examined the contents of the thirty goods trucks and satisfied themselves that the bombs were not primed with the catalyst, which was required by standing orders to be added to the bomb by the SS immediately before the fuse was set prior to take-off.

In April 1945 Otto Skorzeny's special Waffen-SS intelligence unit was ordered to provide the escort for the transport of 540 crates of documents from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin to the Austrian frontier. All Germany's atomic and biochemical weapons projects were included in these archives. Eventually, on 21 April 1945, the convoy reached Stechowitz, 30 miles from Prague. A rendezvous was made with the commanding general of the SS Weapons Engineering School, the crates were separated into lots and, together with other material, were interred, the entrances being dynamited. In American custody, the SS-General described how he and another SS-officer were the only survivors after concentration camp inmates and then their SS-guards had been murdered by a regular Wehrmacht execution squad. During his own interrogation the general “came clean” and spoke about a pressure bomb based on firedamp which “was absolutely devastating for everything”. The SS destroyed the catalyst and formula shortly before the Americans arrived.

Did Goering “save civilization” by refusing Hitler's orders to deploy these bombs? Aside from doctrinal grounds, Hitler's objection to a full nuclear blast was that it might go on to ignite the hydrogen atoms in the atmosphere. Presumably it was thought this bomb presented the same sort of threat. The orders for its use flowed down through Luftwaffe channels. The SS refused to release the bombs because there was no order signed personally by Hitler. If it became known that Hitler had forbidden the bombs to be used and Goering was disobeying him, one can see how that might have given rise to a Luftwaffe officers' mutiny. Unfortunately Hitler's Luftwaffe ADC, von Below, is silent on the matter in his memoirs and so we shall never know.

CHAPTER 11

The First and Last Voyage of the German Submarine
U-234

H
IDEO TOMONAGA, a Samurai, held the rank of captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy and was credited with the invention of an automatic depth-keeping device for submarines. On 27 April 1943, southeast of Madagascar, he transferred from the Japanese submarine
1-29
under Captain Yoichi to Korvettenkapitän Musenberg's U-boat
U-180.
He brought with him a few items of luggage – three one-man torpedoes, a 3-cm gas-pressure self-loading cannon and, in a large number of smaller cases, a quantity of gold ingots destined for the Japanese Embassy in Berlin and said to be payment for German technology. There was in fact so much gold, probably several tonnes of it, that the U-boat chief engineer found it useful to help trim the submarine. In June 1943
U-180
arrived safely at the French Biscay base of Bordeaux, and Captain Tomonaga went off to do whatever it was that he had come for.
¹²¹
He would reappear in the story twenty months later on the U-boat quay at Kiel.

The Preparation and Loading of
U-234

The seven U-boats of Type XB were the largest in the Kriegsmarine, displacing 2,700 tonnes full load submerged. They had been designed as minelayers, and for this purpose were equipped with thirty mineshafts capable of carrying sixty-six mines, but in general were used as ocean replenishment boats, the so-called
Milchkühe.
294 feet long and 30 feet in the beam, the class had diesel-electric propulsion providing a maximum surfaced speed of 17 knots and 7 knots submerged. The most economic cruising speed was 10 knots which gave them a range of 21,000 miles and made them ideal for long-distance cargo missions to Japan, which could be reached from Germany without refuelling.

U-234
had been damaged by bomb hits in 1942 and May 1943 while under construction and was not launched until 23 December 1943. The boat was commissioned by Kapitänleutnant Johann Heinrich Fehler on 3 March 1944 and spent the next five months either in the builders' yard or working-up in the Baltic. Once the training period had been completed successfully, she put into Germania Werft at Kiel on 30 August 1944 for a major refit and conversion from a minelayer into a transport submarine. The important changes were the installation of a snorkel, an air intake mast enabling submerged travel under diesel propulsion and the removal of the twenty-four lateral mineshafts to create cargo stowage compartments. The outer keel plates were removed and the keel duct remodelled to receive a cargo of mercury and optical glass.