SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology (5 page)

(3) The disappearance of SS General Hans Kammler;

(4) The disappearance of Kammler’s most highly classified research project, “the Bell,” along with all its project documentation; and finally,

(5) The ironic – and some would say extremely suspicious – death of General George Patton shortly after the war’s end.

A speculative pattern emerges, for if Wolff was secretly negotiating with Dulles with the tacit approval of Bormann – and Bormann’s approval meant Hitler’s as well – then it is likely that the collateral was the treasure trove of the
Kammlerstab’s
documents, which would have included the secret patents of the Third Reich, seized and classified by the
Forschung, Entwicklung, und Patente.
The unerring
precision
with which late war American thrusts – largely by Patton’s Third Army - toward the most secret centers and installations of Kammler’s black projects empire were guided can only indicate that at some very high level the Americans were receiving “inside information” that came from an equally high level within the Third Reich: Kammler and Bormann. Patton may either have been the point man in some of these operations, or, as is more likely, was simply privy to a vast amount of first hand field intelligence reports that allowed him to piece together a thorough and nearly complete overview of the extent of Nazi black projects. One may speculate that Patton’s field reports at this time constituted a kind of “Kammler Index” of the Third Reich’s secret weapons projects. In either case, he would have been in a position to disclose a vast and hidden intelligence operation, not the least of which included a Faustian bargain for exotic technology and postwar cooperation between the Nazis and the western Allies, particularly with the United States.

And what of the treasure trove itself? A glance at more unusual German secret weapons will demonstrate why General Patton in early 1945 – perhaps already “in the loop” on the secret negotiations taking place, and the “technological potential” the Allies faced if those negotiations were not successful – expressed serious private reservations about the Allies “still being able to lose this war.”

2. Death Beneath the Seas: The Extraordinary Capabilities of the
Type XXI U-boat

While Project Lusty concerned itself exclusively with Nazi aerospace technology, it is worth mentioning one of the deadliest potentials that was already coming into production as the war approached its end: the very new, and very lethal, German Type XXI U-boat. The Type XXI thus represented no mere prototype waiting to see production; it was not mere potential. It was a very real and present danger that would have presented the Allies with no end of difficulties at sea had the war continued even just a few weeks longer. And as I averred in
Reich of the Black Sun
, it is likely that the British had the misfortune of encountering a few Type XXIs before the end of hostilities.
²⁰

The Type XXIs possessed a novel propulsion system, the Walther turbine utilizing hydrogen peroxide, that allowed a speed of some 17.2 knots submerged, and according to the first trials information of the
Kriegsmarine
, were capable of a truly astonishing submerged depth of 330 meters!
²¹
Some statements placed its submerged speed closer to 21 or 22 knots.
²²
Moreover, the Type XXI could
continue
at this phenomenal underwater speed for some 340 miles before having to slow to recharge its accumulators.
²³
Thus, the Type XXI, unlike the subs of every other navy or even its predecessors in the
Kriegsmarine
, was not merely a submersible; it was, in fact, the first truly modern submarine vessel, a vessel
designed
to do most of its traveling
under
water, not merely a vessel that could submerge when necessary. With its special “radar absorbent material” coating its newer streamlined schnorkel device, and its tremendous maximum possible submerged depth, the submarine managed to be undetectable to American surface vessels at a mere 200 meters away when the U.S. Navy conducted tests on one specimen in 1946!
²⁴
As Polish researcher Igor Witkowski puts it, the submarine “was a jump from the level of the 1940s into the 1960s.”
²⁵

But even this recitation does not even begin to exhaust its truly deadly potential in naval warfare. If an Allied aircraft somehow managed to elude its on board radar and four 20 millimeter turreted anti-aircraft guns on either side of the boat’s streamlined conning tower, the submarine could be completely under water in a mere 18 seconds.
²⁶
But that is not all, for unlike any other submarine in any other navy, the Type XXI’s captain would not even have to
see
his target to fire torpedos at it:

The submarine possessed a completely revolutionary system of torpedo fire control, enabling it to carry out effective attacks even at complete submersion,
the target positions being determined by creating three-dimensional coordinates of the noise’s source through recalculating of delays received by various microphones placed on the submarine’s hull.
After an attack the Type XXI escaped at maximum speed, at which the enemy’s sonar was totally ineffective (it maintained effectiveness up to approx. 12 knots).
²⁷

The potential of the Type XXI was thus not a mere “potential.” It was a deadly reality.

One can only imagine what a Type XXI equipped with the new wire-guided or acoustic-homing torpedoes would have done to Allied shipping had it entered service in sufficient numbers. After all, a Type XXI with
conventional
torpedos was bad enough…

3. Death in the Air: The Sound Barrier Too?

The Project Lusty documentation referred to previously indicates that the Type XXI’s deadly performance characteristics were matched, if not surpassed, by similar German developments in aerial warfare.

With the Allied and Soviet Air Forces’ increasing dominance of the skies over Germany, it became increasingly vital for the Luftwaffe to pursue the unconventional avenue toward recovering mastery of the air over Germany. One such solution, the Focke Wulfe
Triebflügel
, is well-known to researchers. This “vertical takeoff and landing” or VTOL fighter was a viable solution, since there was no need to try to take off or land on bombed and cratered airfield runways. Consisting of three rotating
wings
around a central fuselage, each wing was tipped with a ramjet engine. The wings could in turn be rotated to increase or decrease the angle of attack. With rockets to assist the ramjets to get started, the
Triebflügel
was in effect a vertical takeoff and landing jet-airplane combined with a helicopter. Witkowski describes it as follows:

(The) name could be translated as “propulsive wing”, reflecting its unusual principle of operation. During takeoff and landing the lifting surfaces performed the function of a helicopter’s rotor, whereas during flight at high speed they “transformed” into wings…. Three ramjet engines were mounted on the wing tips, each with a maximum thrust of 840 KG. During takeoff they were boosted by three Walter rocket engines, accelerating the wings to a speed enabling the ramjet engines to be started.
²⁸

Prior to the publication in English of Witkowski’s research, however, little was known about the performance capabilities of this unconventional aircraft, and it remained a curiosity.

Witkowski, however, managed to procure a postwar Polish report on the actual test results the craft managed to achieve:

The maximum vertical speed did not exceed 124 km/h. After climbing to a sufficient altitude, the aircraft commenced horizontal flight with the adjustment of control surfaces and ailerons.(…) In horizontal flight the aircraft reached a speed of 1,000 km/h. The rotor operated at 520 rpm, which after conversion gave a rotational speed of the tips of 1,500 km/h.

The initial rate of climb amounted to 7.5 km/min. Rotor working time -42 min., range 640 km.
At an altitude of 11 km horizontal speed amounted to 800 km/h.
²⁹

Note that the speed of the craft at normal altitudes was 1,000 kilometers per hour, or approximately 600 miles per hour. Note also that the craft was apparently capable of reaching altitudes of some 11 kilometers, or about six and a half miles above the surface, far above the normal operational altitudes of most Allied and Soviet aircraft of the war.

The performance characteristics cited are made even more remarkable by the fact that the
Triebflügel
and similar craft were apparently brought to the United States as part of Project Lusty:

A report reached Lt Col. O’Brien’s party that a “strange aircraft” had been seen in a mountainous retreat near Salzburg. Investigation quickly determined that this “strange aircraft: was a jet-propelled helicopter, the only one of its kind in the world. The inventor and his entire staff, who had laboriously worked ten years to perfect it, were present, guarding his invention as one would a precious jewel. The helicopter was examined, and a preliminary superficial interrogation of the staff was sufficient to reveal its tremendous importance. It was carefully loaded in a large truck and taken to Munich. From there it was sent across Europe to France, placed on a boat and shipped to Wright Field, together with the confiscated notes, drawings, and meticulous records of experiments conducted by the scientist and his assistants.
³⁰

The
Triebflügel
and similar other projects were thus for the American military no mere curiosities. They represented significant technological advances over then existent American aerospace technology.

But now a question occurs: if the machine – and there was only one such of its kind in the world – was brought to Wright Patterson Airfield
³¹
and its scientists interred and papers confiscated, how did the postwar Polish Communist government know so much about its performance within six years of the war’s end? The standard answer is, of course, that there were Soviet spies within the program, and that is the most likely explanation. But there is another possible answer that will loom ever larger as we proceed, and that is that it is possible that all these programs were continued after the war in a variety of host countries including Russia, and yet were independently coordinated from some hidden center, passing information back and forth between the cells in various host countries via a continuing “Nazi International”.

The
Triebflügel
also points to another direction wartime German research pursued, and pursued with a vengeance: high performance ramjet-propelled aircraft. Indeed, when entering
this
area of inquiry, one is again entering one of those areas where the reality of wartime German accomplishments in secret weapons research was in diametric contradiction to the postwar Allied Legend, only in this case, the legend is not about the Allies having acquired the a-bomb while the Nazis remained incompetent nuclear bunglers, but about the fact that an American, Chuck Yeager, was the first human to pilot an aircraft through the sound barrier, an event that occurred after the war’s end and the beginning of America’s own black projects in exotic aircraft and space-based weapons.

The story begins with the acknowledged expert on ramjets, Prof. Dr. Alexander Lippisch, and his designs for a delta-winged P-13b ramjet aircraft. The goal of the project was to produce a supersonic aircraft with a cheap, reliable propulsion system. Lippisch produced a number of designs, beginning with the P-12.

Lippisch’s P-12 Design

Work on this aircraft was interrupted in May 1944, and Lippisch produced the design for the cleaner lines of the P13b.