Hitler's Terror Weapons (2 page)

In fact, given the right implosion fuse, a couple of rudimentary zeroenergy nuclear reactors in an underground factory beside the Danube, two years and a chemical separation plant, a low-grade plutonium bomb would not have been beyond Germany's capabilities in the Second World War, and from September 1941 they knew it. Simply to dismiss as a flight of fancy the V-4 explosive mentioned by Hitler, as academics and historians have done over the last half-century, seems too easy a solution. I 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 for the work force. Hitler concurred. On 1 September 1943 Hans Kammler was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer and appointed Special Commissioner for the V-2 project. He recruited 2000 engineers and drew 15,000 concentration camp inmates from Buchenwald and Natzweiler
³
for the conversion work at the former Wifo factory now renamed
Nordhausen Central Works
and also
SS-Mittelwerk,
the latter by reason of its geographical position at the centre of Germany.

During the first week of March 1944 Kammler was given overall responsibility for Underground Constructions and now had 175,000 concentration camp inmates under his control. An SS Special Staff known as
Baubüro Dr Hans Kammler
became directly answerable to Himmler not only for the production, completion, storage and supply of V-weapon armaments but also for building a number of massive underground weapons factories the size of a small metropolis such as
Quarz
at Melk, Austria, and
Zement
I and II at Ebensee.

On 8 August 1944 Himmler appointed Kammler as General Plenipotentiary for V-2 Assembly and C-in-C V-2 Operations, which had previously been under the jurisdiction of LXV Army Corps. His
Lehr-und Versuchsbatterie 444
got off to an inauspicious start when the first two V-2 rockets of the campaign aimed at Paris on 6 September both failed through fuel blockage. After shifting location but with the same target, a successful launch was achieved on 8 September. The same day Artillery Detachment 485 obtained a hit at Chiswick, London, from the Hague. From August 1944 until the conclusion of the Ardennes Offensive, in addition to the V-1 and V-2, Kammler oversaw the operational deployment of the V-3 High Pressure Pump and was present to observe the first rounds being fired on Luxemburg City on 30 December 1944.

On 26 January 1945 Kammler was made commanding general of the 5th Flak Division at Rotterdam, a very remarkable appointment for a man with no battle experience, and on 14 February he took over
Army Korps zbV
(zbV = for special purposes). On 31 January he came straight from the V-3 installation at Lampaden to organize the placing of two detachments of his Division's flak on the eastern banks of the Rhine. All this was satisfactorily accomplished by late February and in early March Kammler was confirmed as General Plenipotentiary to Halt the Terror Bombing. This meant that he was now responsible to the Führer directly for all anti-aircraft measures, which would have included the supremely secret versions, as well as the conventional anti-aircraft rockets produced at Peenemünde,
Wasserfall,
Hs 117
Schmetterling, Enzian, Taifun
and the remote-controlled Hs 298 and X-4
Ruhrstahl.
It appears that he had had powers as plenipotentiary before his appointment, since on 6 February 1945 he had signed the order to discontinue work on
Schmetterling
and
Enzian.
In either February or March 1945, or at any rate by the time Kammler had achieved the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer and General der SS, he was given complete jurisdiction for the turbo-jet fighter. Another objective which does not seem so well-documented involved transferring Dr Dornberger and his work staff in February of that year from Schwedt on the Oder to Bad Sachsa where Dornerberger was to be responsible for the development and testing of “anti-aircraft measures” and for that purpose was to set up “Development Team
Mittelbau”
under Dr Alfred Buch, a scientist. Kammler ordered a large number of firms to be co-opted to concentrate on “special equipment”.

At the beginning of April 1945, for the defence of the central Harz, Kammler cobbled together an infantry corps from retreating Army units and V-1/V-2 firing commandos. He also made a determined attempt to swell SS numbers at Niedersachswerfen by recruiting Mittelwerk technicians and engineers but this does not seem to have been too successful. In any case, 500 or so of these personnel, the major part of the former Peenemünde team, had been ordered by Kammler to relocate in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen area of southern Germany, and most of them made the six-day journey by the special train sardonically known as the “Vergeltungs-Express”.

Dr Wernher von Braun was told by Kammler that he, Kammler, had been made Head of the Fighter Plane Staff and “had to report to another place”. On 7 April 1945 Kammler was seen leaving Mittelwerk towards the western Harz with a section of his General Staff and, apart from a cable to Himmler, sent from a village called Deggendorf, confirming his continuing loyalty to Hitler ten days later, that was the last heard of any of them.

Kammler knew virtually everything about the V-Weapons operational programme. His whereabouts after early April 1945 are unknown. There are reports of his death in action defending the Czech Front against the Soviet Army, and the latter gave short shrift to captured SS men. A recent book by Nick Cook
⁴
proposes that Kammler negotiated a deal for himself with the United States in exchange for Germany's anti-gravity technology. What evidence there is suggests that this was not the case. Bormann's 1944 General Plan of Evacuation was drawn up to safeguard the more advanced technological knowledge by having people like Kammler brought out of Europe before the capitulation. One must not lose sight of the fact that at the end of the war there was a huge influx of Reich money and scientific personnel into Argentina and Chile, where deep below ground perhaps some of the more important work was continued. Mr Cook's line of argument is based on the document circulated by the Polish author Igor Witkowski. This bulletin definitely states that the equipment at FHQ Waldenburg was evacuated in April and May 1945, probably to South America, by SS-Obergruppenführer Jakob Sporrenberg.

It would be in South America that the designer-builder of Auschwitz and other death camps might have felt more comfortable for his own peace of mind than in relying on a deal with the United States. One would also think it safe to assume that if the USAF had been able to make head or tail of German antigravity, they would not have bothered with the same old rocket propulsion methods at Cape Kennedy three decades afterwards.

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 recalled
⁶
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: