The Rise of the Fourth Reich Page 9
This idea was echoed by Stevens, who became convinced that the Third Reich produced an atomic bomb. “The Germans did make atomic bombs,” he stated emphatically. “Not only did they make atomic bombs, they made uranium as well as plutonium bombs and other atomic weapons which remain somewhat of a mystery. What the Germans could not do, in these dying days of the Third Reich, was to match up one of these nuclear weapons with an effective delivery system. The reasons for this differ with each weapon, individually, and run the [gamut] from mistake to treachery to incompetence.”
One thought that must have crossed the minds of Nazi leaders was the total destruction of Germany that would have resulted from the use of a nuclear weapon. The devastation of London or New York would not have materially altered the course of the war in the spring of 1945. And the retaliation of the Allies would have been unimaginable. Further, high-ranking Nazis, such as Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann, who by war’s end had become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, realized the war was lost, and used advanced technology as a bargaining chip with the Western allies.
Hydrick proposed just that intriguing possibility: that the U-234 was purposely handed over to U.S. authorities on the order of Bormann in exchange for immunity as part of a covert plan for the continuation of Nazi research. Although there was criticism over Hydrick’s technical descriptions of both the atomic bomb and its detonators, his mass of documentation concerning the transfer of nuclear technology from Germany to America is compelling. Hydrick’s claim is supported by Farrell, who wrote, “I have argued that most likely all of it [extra uranium and even atom bombs] came from Nazi Germany, courtesy of Nazi Party Reichsleiter Bormann and SS Obergruppenfuehrer Hans Kammler.”
But Farrell had an even more horrifying thought about why the Nazis did not drop an atomic bomb. Considering Nazi research into quantum physics and energy manipulation, Farrell speculated that their atomic bombs “were being developed as detonators for something far more destructive.” Since only a few scattered plans to Nazi super-science were recovered after the war, the question arises, “What became of their advanced technology?” There has never been a public answer.
HOWEVER, THE ANSWER to this question may be found by studying the man in charge of Germany’s high-tech weapons programs, Dr. Engineer Hans Kammler.
Kammler, whose name has been largely lost to history, may have played a large role in developing and hiding away the technology secrets of Hitler’s Third Reich. Kammler did not have higher purposes in mind when he set out to develop rockets and energy manipulation. He was searching for new weapons.
Born in 1901, Kammler completed engineering studies at a technical university and began working for the German Air Ministry. After joining the Nazi SS, he managed finances and construction for the SS until 1942, when he became chief of Group C under the Wirtschafts und Verwal-tungshauptamt, or the Economic and Administrative Central Office (WVHA) of the SS, one of five key branches of the Black Shirts. This branch controlled all economic enterprises as well as all concentration and extermination camps. Beginning in 1943, Kammler took control of all “special tasks,” which included “Kammler special construction”—the creation of secret underground facilities as well as exotic weapons programs. His official title was SS Obergruppenfuehrer, or lieutenant general, and he had worked his way up to command the Third Reich’s most precious wartime secrets.
In mid-1943, SS chief Heinrich Himmler sent a letter to armaments minister Speer. “With this letter, I inform you that I, as SS Reichsfuehrer…do hereby take charge of the manufacture of the A-4 instrument,” it read. The A-4 rocket was later designated by Hitler as the V-2. Himmler then placed Kammler in charge of the project, one of Germany’s most secret high-tech weapons systems. Due to the devastation brought on by incessant Allied air raids, by the end of 1944, Kammler had taken control of weapons research as well as the construction of underground factories and concentration camps.
“Thus—just a few weeks before the end of the war—he had become commissioner general for all important weapons,” wrote Speer, who later bemoaned the fact that Himmler’s SS gradually assumed total control over Germany’s weaponry, production, and research.
In connection with his new responsibilities, Kammler created an SS Sonderkommando, or special command, independent from the normal German military and bureaucracy. “What Kammler had established was a ‘special projects office,’ a forerunner of the entity that had been run by the bright young colonels of the USAF’s stealth program in the 1970s and 1980s,” noted Cook. It was “a place of vision, where imagination could run free, unfettered by the restraints of accountability. Exactly the kind of place, in fact, you’d expect to find anti-gravity technology, if such an impossible thing existed.”
Kammler also had use of computer technology that was only dreamed of in American science fiction stories. “Dr. Kammler had the benefit of knowledge, hardware and software that was developed by the computing pioneer, Dr. Konrad Zuse,” wrote Stevens. “In spite of everything churned out by the computer industry and ‘history’ as we know it, Dr. Zuse built the first digital computer in 1938 and the first programmable software language, Plankaikuel. He also was instrumental in developing magnetic tape as a computer storage medium. By 1944 the Germans were using computers, the Zuse-built Z-3, to plot the course of ballistic attack by the V-2 at Peenemunde and Nordhausen.” Stevens, who spent more than fifteen years researching the Reich’s most secret technology, including flying saucers, wrote, “By the end of the war a whole new research and production command and control structure had been set up which reduced or replaced the figures we normally think of as running the Third Reich, such as, for instance, Hermann Goering and Albert Speer.” It was Kammler and his Sonderkommando that became the repository for the Reich’s most advanced technology, going far beyond the rockets and flying discs.
But Kammler’s immediate concern was the V-2 rocket program. Kammler worked closely with Wernher von Braun and his superior, Luftwaffe Major General Walter Dornberger. Von Braun, who had been a member of the SS since 1940, carried the rank of SS Sturmbannfuehrer, or major.
Alarmed by progress on the V-2 rockets, Britain’s Bomber Command sent 597 bombers on the night of August 16–17, 1943, to raid Peenemunde—Germany’s top-secret rocket facility built on an island at the mouth of the Oder River near the border of Germany and Poland. Because of a navigation “blunder,” much of the underground and well-camouflaged Peenemunde site was left undamaged. Brian Ford described the results: “Even so, over 800 of the people on the island were killed…. After this, it was realized that some of the facility had better be dispersed throughout Germany; thus the theoretical development facility was moved to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, development went to Nordhausen and Bleicherode, and the main wind-tunnel and ancillary equipment went down to Kochel, some 24 miles south of Munich. This was christened Wasserbau Versuchsanstalt Kochelsee—experimental waterworks project—and gave rise to the most thorough research center for long-range rocket development that, at the time, could have been envisioned.”
Mary Bennett and David S. Percy, authors of Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistleblowers, speculated that the British air raid on Peenemunde was designed not to knock out the V-rocket site but to force it to move to safer environs, to ensure the safety of the rocket program. They showed how the raid bombed the site’s northern peninsula rather than the main facility, due to misplaced target indicators. These authors noted that of the eight hundred personnel who died in the air raid, about half were mostly Russians from the prisoner labor force and the other half were technicians and their families. After this raid, the irreplaceable Hermann Oberth was transferred to the safety of the Reinsdorf works near Wittenberg, to continue his work.
“Instructions from the highest level, it seems, had been to target personnel and certainly not the V-2 rocket production facilities. It was clearly CRUCIAL that these rockets, plans and parts were spared,” they stated (emphasis in original). Someone with high authority
wanted this Nazi technology available to them after the war.
Nick Cook also saw the connection between such exotic technology and the mysterious Hans Kammler. “There was, via the Kammler trail, a mounting body of evidence that the Nazis, in their desperation to win the war, had been experimenting with a form of science the rest of the world have never remotely considered,” he wrote. “And that somewhere in this cauldron of ideas, a new technology had been born; one that was so far ahead of its time it had been suppressed for more than half a century.”
One clue to what this revolutionary technology might involve was found in the capture of physicist Walter Gerlach, one of the Nazi scientists brought to the United States after the war. Gerlach has been connected with the German attempts to build an atomic bomb, yet his background indicated even more esoteric knowledge.
In 1921, Gerlach received a Nobel Prize, not for nuclear research but for magnetic spin polarization, dealing with the momentum of electrons of atoms situated in a magnetic field. Such work had little to do with the atomic bomb but much to do with energy manipulation to include anti-gravity.
In 1931, a paper titled “About Gravitation, Vortices and Waves in Rotating Media” was published by O. C. Hilgenberg, a student of Gerlach, which indicated the focus of Gerlach’s work. “And yet, after the war, Gerlach, who died in 1979, apparently never returned to these subject matters, nor did he make any references to them; almost as if he had been forbidden to do so,” noted Cook. Interestingly, Gerlach’s wartime work diaries were confiscated by U.S. authorities and remain classified today.
At the turn of the current century, both Cook and the Polish military journalist Witkowski tracked Kammler and his top-secret Nazi energy work to the Wenzeslaus Mine, located about 215 miles west of Warsaw in Lower Silesia, near the border with Czechoslovakia. This mine is in Ludwikowice Klodzkie, formerly Ludwigsdorf. The location was perfect for security purposes as it was outside Germany yet within the Greater Third Reich. Additionally, Kammler spoke fluent Czech.
During their journey, Witkowski revealed his access to a formerly classified Soviet document detailing the interrogation at the end of the war of a Rudolf Schuster, who had been a member of the Reichssicherheit-shauptamt, or Reich Central Security Office, Nazi Germany’s version of the Department of Homeland Security. Schuster revealed that in June of 1944, he was transferred to a special evacuation Kommando called General Plan 1945, formed by Martin Bormann to evacuate valuable science and technology from the Reich. Schuster, who was not privy to the plan’s overall agenda, nevertheless located much of these evacuation activities in the area of the Wenzeslaus Mine.
Schuster’s testimony, coupled with other information, convinced Cook that the Bormann evacuation plan had been one of the Nazis’ greatest secrets. “There has never been any official acknowledgment of the existence of the special evacuation Kommando,” he wrote. It was this unacknowledged evacuation operation that saved the Reich’s most precious technology. Once at the mine site, Cook and Witkowski found remnants of what once had been a secret SS testing and production facility that may have even included a giant early superconductor.
In 1931, the Wenzeslaus Mine suffered an accident that caused bankruptcy and a takeover by the Polish government. With the occupation of Poland, the mine was reconditioned by the Nazis as a gigantic science center. “The whole area, in the center of which was located the main left shaft, proved to be the interior of a deep valley, which was accessible only through two ‘mountain passes,’” noted Witkowski. “Since the remnants of watchtowers could be seen in them, it was obvious that the whole area had been closely guarded, and its configuration caused that in this way the whole valley was physically cut off [from] the outside world.” This valley, about three hundred yards across, was bisected by rail lines, and lined with a variety of structures, concrete bunkers, and guard stations, many covered with dirt and trees to act as camouflage. Today the site is virtually ruins and overgrown with trees and vegetation.
Cook saw that “the Germans had gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that the place looked pretty much as it had always looked since mining operations began here at the turn of the last century, a clear indication that whatever had happened here during the war had been deeply secret…. Almost everything that was known about the Wenzeslaus Mine had been handed down from [SS General Jakob] Sporrenberg [the officer appointed to command the ‘northern route’ of General Plan 1945’s evacuation Kommando]. It had been run by the SS, had employed slave-labor and had been sealed from the outside world by a triple ring of check points and heavily armed guards.” Sporrenberg’s testimony and affidavits, the only known description of the strange experiments at the mine, were given during a postwar trial in Poland. He was found guilty of war crimes and executed.
In the closing days of the war, most of the local population was evacuated westward. In fleeing the Russians, many of these refugees died during the fighting or froze in one of the coldest winters on record. Today, most of the local residents are newcomers with no recollection of what transpired at the mine during the war.
A central shaft led downward to the original mine as well as a labyrinth of additional underground facilities dug by Germans. But what most intrigued Cook and Witkowski was a huge circular concrete structure. Green camouflage paint was still visible on the edges. The circular structure was formed by twelve thick columns supporting a dodecagon-shaped reinforcing concrete ring about ninety feet in diameter.
Initially, Witkowski thought this might be the remains of a cooling tower. He abandoned this idea once he saw cooling towers at a different location on photographs of the area, taken in 1934. Next he thought of the structure as a “fly trap,” similar to those used to test helicopters and other hovering aircraft. Yet, this answer was not satisfactory either in that the researchers found a concrete duct containing thick electric cables leading to a power-generating station. Learning that high-voltage current cannot be used in mines with the potential for flammable gas—such as the Wenzeslaus Mine—Cook and Witkowski determined that the structure had nothing to do with mining but was used in connection with the strange experiments described to his captors by the SS officer Sporrenberg.
These experiments centered around a bell-shaped object—appropriately enough codenamed Die Glocke, or the Bell—which was housed in a concrete chamber hundreds of feet underground. According to the research of Witkowski and Cook, the Bell was made from hard, heavy metal and cylindrical in shape with a semicircular cap and hook or clamping device on top. Huge quantities of electricity were fed into it through thick cables dropping into the housing chamber from the outside. Inside the Bell was a thermos-like tube encased in lead and filled with a metallic liquid.
During operation, the Bell was covered by a ceramic material, apparently to act as insulation. Inside, two contra-rotating cylinders filled with a mercury-like and violet-colored substance spun a vortex of energy, which emitted a strange phosphorescent blue light and made such a buzzing sound that operators nicknamed it the Bienenstock, or beehive.
Due to the phosphorescent light and reports that operators suffered from nervous-system disruption, headaches, and a metallic taste, Witkowski concluded the Bell’s operation involved iodizing radiation as well as a very strong magnetic field of energy. The scientists experimenting with the Bell would place various plants, animals, and animal tissue within its energy field. “In the initial test period from November to December 1944, almost all the samples were destroyed,” noted Cook. “A crystalline substance formed within the tissues, destroying them from the inside; liquids, including blood, gelled and separated into clearly distilled fractions.”
Very little is known for certain about the Bell. However, it was given the highest—and perhaps most unique—classification possible in the Third Reich. In a few captured documents, experimenters with the Bell were said to be working on something Kriegsentscheidend, or decisive for the war. Most top-secret German weapons, including the V rockets, were classified Kriegswichtig
, or important to the war.
One major reason that so little is known about the Bell was the loss of the scientists involved in the project. “They were taken out and shot by the SS between the 28th of April and the 4th of May, 1945,” explained Witkowski. “Records show that there were 62 of them, many of them Germans. There were no survivors, but then that’s hardly surprising…. It’s quite clear that someone had gone to great lengths to clean up.”
The whole concept is a nightmare—Nazis tinkering with the building blocks of the universe. And it gets even worse.
TO TRY AND understand the purpose of the Bell requires a brief side trip into the amazing world of cutting-edge science and quantum physics. While discussions and articles about energy manipulation—whether termed cold fusion, antigravity, or free energy—have been generally discouraged as science fiction in mainstream America, many credible writers have dealt with the subject.
In his 2003 book Winning the War: Advanced Weapons, Strategies, and Concepts for the Post-9/11 World, Colonel John B. Alexander noted, “A potential link between superconductor quantum mechanics and gravity has been inferred from recent quantum gravity research. Another approach to modifying gravity involved the manipulation of the quantum vacuum ZPE [Zero Point Energy found in the vacuum of space] field. One proposed experiment to manipulate the ZPE involves the use of ultrahigh-intensity lasers to irradiate a magnetized vacuum. If any of these are successful it will change energy issues on Earth and our relationship with the universe by allowing deep space travel.”
The idea of gaining mastery—and power—from the environment around us is nothing new. Such ideas were advanced by American physicist Thomas Townsend Brown, who, in the early 1920s, experimented with antigravity based on his understanding that a charged capacitor tended to move toward a positive plate when sufficiently energized in the hundred kilovolt and upward range. Brown contended that all matter is essentially an “electrical condition.” “It fact, it might be said that the concrete body of the universe is nothing more than an assemblage of energy which, in itself, is quite intangible.”