PREFACE

iv

PART ONE: GOTTERDAMMERUNG

1. A BADLY WRITTEN FINALE

3

2. ELECTRICITY, SLAVES, AND ,,BUNA"

25

3. U-234, U235, AND THE STRANGE CASE OF THE MISSING URANIUM

53

4. MMEIN HUT ER HAT DREI ECKEN": THE TEST SITES

66

A. An Unusual Exchange at Nuremberg

66

B. A Marshal, Mussolini, and the First Alleged Test Site at

Rugen Island

70

C. The Three Corners(Dreiecken) and the Alleged Test at

the Troop Parade Ground at Ohrdruf

80

5. STRANGE MAPS, STRANGE FLIGHTS, AND UNKNOWN CARGOES

89

A. The Oberkommando der Luftwaffe's Unusual Map

90

B. Strange Flights

90

C. Unknown Cargoes and a Curious Airfield

93

6. THE STRANGE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING GENERALS: SS

OBERGRUPPENFUHRER DR. ING. HANS KAMMLER AND GENERAL

GEORGE S. PATTON

99

A. Introduction: The Rediscovery of the SS Sonderkommando,

Kammler, and a Brush with "The Legend"

100

B. The Four Deaths of SS Obergruppenfurhrer Dr. Ing. Hans

Kammler

107

C. The Ironic Death of General George S. Patton

110

D. The Kammler SS Sonderkommando Secret Weapons Empire 114

7. THE HONORARY ARYAN BRETHREN

117

A. Strange Rumors

119

B. Strange Industrial Complexes: Kammler Revisited, Noguchi

Style

122

8. THE HEERESWAFFENAMT AND HOUTERMANS MEMORANDA

130

9. POPENSPIEL BEI FARM HALL AND OTHER FARCES

140

10. GATEWAY TO THE BLACK SUN: CONCLUSIONS TO PART ONE

154

PART TWO: THE MYTH OF SURVIVAL AND THE REALITY OF PAPERCLIP

11. THE BLACK ORDER: THE OCCULT INFLUENCE ON NAZI SECRET

WEAPONS

161

A. Some Necessary Definitions

162

B. Into the Labyrinth of the Beast

165

C. The Black Sun, thc Cclcstial Swastika, and Other SS

Connections

172

D. The Will to Power as the Paradigm of "Occulted Science and

Nazi Secret Weapons Programs

178

12. THE ALCHEMY OF ATLANTIS: AN INVENTORY OK NAZI SECRET

WEAPONS AND THEIR HISTORICAL PROBLEMATIC

181

A. The Missiles

183

B. Prototypical Stealth (Radar Absorbent) Materials

184

C. Computers

187

D. The "Superbombs"

189

1. The "Molecular" Bomb: The Hydrogen Bomb?

190

2. The Fuel-Air Bomb

191

E. The Historical Problematic

193

1. The Cold War

193

2. The Alchemy of Atlantis: the "Mission Brief of the

Kammlerstab

194

3. Whose Military-Industrial Complex?

195

13. QUANTUM NUMEROLOGY AND VORTICULAR PHYSICS, NAZI

STYLE

196

A. Gravity, Vortices, and Quantum Numerology

198

B. Disks, Boundary Layer, and Turbines

200

C. Viktor Schauberger: Rotational Physics and Extreme

Temperature Gradients

206

D. "Death Rays": An Unusual Installation at the University of

Heidelberg

221

E. Indications of Zero Point Energy and Scalar Physics

Experimentation

226

PART THREE: AFTERMATH

14. THE ANTARCTIC SIIANGRI-LA

238

A. The Antarctic Survival Myth

240

B. The Neuschwabenland Expedition

249

C. Spitzbcrgen, Greenland, and Artic Canada: The Other German

Polar Survival Myth

255

15. THE PHOENIX RISES: THE BORMANN PLAN

263

A. Bormann's Special Evacuation Command and the Link to the

Kammlerstab

269

B. Paperclip, Compartmentalization, and Capitalization

271

16. ROSWELL: THE "E.T. MYTH" VS. THE "NAZI LEGEND": AN

EXAMINATION OF SOME MJ-12 DOCUMENTS

274

A Introductory Remarks

274

B. The Similarity of Evidence for Roswell and the "Nazi Legend"

An Examination of Some MJ-12 Documents

274

C. The Majic-12 Documents: The ET Myth vs the Nazi legend 281

1. The "White Hot Intelligence Estimate" of General Nathan

Twining

285

(a) Odd Language of a General Nature Describing the UFO

Phenomenon and Its Area and Types of Activity 286

(b) Technical Language that Describes Something

Simultaneously Both Very Advanced, yet Very

Commonplace

287

2. The 16 July 1947 Air Accident Report by General Nathan

Twining to Headquarters

303

D.Russians, Terrorists, Asteroids, and Aliens: The Rosin

Affidavit

318

E. An Unlikely Source: Benito Mussolini's Secret RS/33 UFO-Marconi

Study Group: The Original Italian "MJ-12" Documents

319

17. THE KECKSBURG ACORN RINGS THE BELL

331

A. The "Bell"

331

B. The UFO Crash and Retrieval at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania,

December 1965

335

C. Analysis

339

18. FINAL THOUGHTS

345

APPENDIX: A SHORT NOTE ON THE KRAFTSTRAHLKANNONE

349

Preface
When I was a boy, oddities fascinated me, particularly if they appeared to make no sense. Historical oddities or anomalous news stories especially attracted my interest, lingering in my mind for years to come. Like many Americans, I well remember where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated. I was home, sick, and watching television, sipping an endless stream of the chicken noodle soup that my mother always made for me when I was ill. My mother sat on the sofa, sewing and watching her shows. Then, the programs were interrupted by the familiar voice of Walter Cronkite, and the news began to break. Like many children in America, I cried that night.
A year or so later when the Warren Report was published and excerpted in almost every newspaper in the country, I remember thinking "bullets just don't do that." And I listened intently as family members debated the official conclusions of Oswald, the "lone nut" in his Texas School Book Depository, versus what was beginning to emerge with the "Grassy Knoll."
As a teenager I became fascinated with the history of World War Two, and particularly the European theater and the race for the atomic bomb. Physics was also an interest for me, and another oddity lodged in my mind as I read the standard histories: the United States had never tested the uranium bomb it dropped on Hiroshima. I thought that was an extremely odd oddity indeed. It seemed to have the same sharp angles and corners as the Warren Commission's "magic bullet". It just didn't fit. Other odd facts accumulated over the years as if to underline the strangeness of the war's end in general and that fact in particular.
Then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the two postwar Germanies raced toward reunification. The events seemed to unfold faster than the news media's ability to keep pace. I remember that day too, for I was driving with a friend in his van in Manhattan. My friend was Russian, as was his family, some of

whom were veterans of the harsh conflict on the Russian front. We listened to the reports on the radio with a kind og breathlessness and anxiety. My friend lurried to me and said "Now it will start to come out in the wash." I nodded in agreement. We had often discussed what would happen in the eventuality of German reunification, and were agreed that many things from the end of the war would begin to surface, answering old questions and raising new ones. Our long talks about World War Two had convinced us that there was much about the war that did not make sense, Hitler's and Stalin's genocidal paranoia notwithstanding.
Gradually, and one must say, predictably, the Germans themselves raced to uncover what lay hidden in the formerly inaccessible archival vaults of East Germany and the Soviet Union. Witnesses came forward, and German authors endeavored to come to grips with yet another aspect of the darkest period in their nation's history. Much, if not all, of their work remains ignored in the U.S.A., both by mainstream and by alternative researchers.
This present book is based in part on these Germans' efforts. It, like them, raises dangerous questions, and often presents dangerous and disturbing answers. As a consequence, while the Nazi regime's "image" becomes even more blackened, the image of the victorious Allies also suffers to a great degree. This book presents not only a radically different history of the race for the bomb, but also outlines a case that Germany was making enormous strides toward acquisition of a whole host of second and third and even fourth generation weapons technologies even more horrific in their destructive power.
That in itself would not be too unusual. After all, there have been a wealth of books on World War Two German secret weapons projects and their astonishing results. Those seeking new technical data on these weapons will find some new material here, for the thrust of the book is not on the weapons per se. Rather, the present work seeks a context within Nazi ideology and in some aspects of contemporary theoretical physics for these projects. This book argues that the Nazis' quest for this barbarous arsenal of prototypical "smart weapons" and weapons of mass destruction was intimately linked to the Nazi racial and genocidal ideology and

war aims, to the machinery, bureaucracy, and technologies of mass death and slavery that the Nazis had perfected. Even more darkly, this relationship points to a hidden core of occult beliefs and practices that, allied with certain very "German" advances in physics, e.g., quantum mechanics, drove their quest for ultimate weapons.
Accordingly, this is not a work of history. But neither is it a work merely of fiction. It is best described as a case of possibilities, of speculative history. It is an attempt to make sense, by means of a radical hypothesis placed within a very broad context, of events during and after the war that make no sense.
I would like to thank Mr. Frank Joseph of Fate magazine for encouraging me to write about these ideas, after he had patiently listened to me outline them while we were both attending a conference in 2003. And I would like to thank the many people too numerous to mention - who listened, read, and critiqued the book along the way.
Joseph P. Farrell Tulsa, Oklahoma

PART ONE:
GOTTERDAMMERUNG
"A comprehensive February 1942 (German) Army Ordnance report on the German uranium enrichment program includes the statement that the critical mass of a nuclear weapon lay between 10 and 100 kilograms of either uranium 235 or element 94.... In fact the German estimate of critical mass of 10 to 100 kilograms was comparable to the contemporary Allied estimate of 2 to 100.... The German scientists working on uranium neither withheld their figure for critical mass because of moral scruples nor did they provide an inaccurate estimate as the result of gross scientific
error. " Mark Walker, Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic
Bomb, p. 216.

1.
A Badly Written Finale
"In southern Germany, meanwhile, the American Third and Seventh and the French First Armies had been driving steadily eastward into the so-called 'National Redoubt'.... The American Third Army drove on into Czechoslovakia
and by May 6 had captured Pilsen and Karlsbad and was approaching Prague."
F. Lee Benns, Europe Since 1914 In Its World Setting1
The end of the Second World War in Europe, at least as normally recounted, does not make sense, for in its standard form as learned in history books that history resembles nothing so much as a badly written finale to some melodramatic Wagnerian opera.
On a night in October 1944, a German pilot and rocket expert by the same of Hans Zinsser was flying his Heinkel 111 twin engine bomber in twilight over northern Germany, close to the Baltic coast in the province of Mecklenburg. He was flying at twilight to avoid the Allied fighter aircraft that at that time had all but undisputed mastery of the skies over Germany. Little did he know that what he saw that night would be locked in the vaults of the highest classification of the United States government for several decades after the war. And he certainly could not have been aware of the fact when his testimony finally was declassified near the end of the millennium, that what he saw would require the history of the Second World War to be rewritten, or at the very minimum, severely scrutinized. His observations on that one night on that one flight resolve at a stroke some of the most pressing questions and mysteries concerning the end of the war. By the same token, what he saw raises many more mysteries and questions, affording a brief and frightening glimpse into the labyrinthine world of Nazi secret weapons development. His observations open a veritable Pandora's
1 F. Lee Benns, Europe Since 1914 In Its World Setting (New York: F.S. Crofts and co., 1946), p. 630.
3

box of horrifying research the Third Reich was conducting, research
far more horrendous in its scope and terrible promise than mere
atomic bombs. More importantly, his observations also raise the
disturbing question of why the Allied governments - America in particular - kept so much classified for so long. What, really, did we recover from the Nazis at the end of the war?
But what precisely is that badly written finale? To appreciate how badly written a finale it truly is, it is best to begin at the logical place: in Berlin, far below ground, in the last weeks of the war. There, in the bizarre and surreal world of the Fuhrerbunker, the megalomaniac German dictator huddles with his generals, impervious to the rain of Allied and Soviet bombs that are reducing the once beautiful city of Berlin to piles of rubble. Adolph Hitler, Chancellor and Fuhrer of the ever-diminishing Greater German Reich is in conference. His left arm shakes uncontrollably and from time to time he must pause to daub the drool that occasionally oozes from his mouth. His complexion is gray and pallid; his health, a shambles from the drugs his doctors inject in him. His glasses are perched on his nose as he squints at the map before him.2 Generaloberst3 Heinrici, commander of the vastly outnumbered Army Group Vistula that faces the massed armies of Marshal Zhukov poised less than sixty miles from Berlin, is pleading with his leader for more troops. The general is questioning the disposition of the forces he sees displayed on the battle map, for it is clear to him that some of Germany's finest and few remaining battle worthy formations are far south, facing Marshal Koniev's forces in Silesia. These forces were thus, incomprehensibly, poised to make a stiff defense of Breslau and Prague, not Berlin. The general pleads for Hitler to release some of these forces and transfer them north, but
2 Contributing yet another nuance to the end of the war Legend of Hitler's delusional insanity, some have proposed that the German dictator's doctors had diagnosed him with heart disease and/or Parkinson's disease, and were keeping him drugged at the behest of Msrs Bormann, Gobbels, Himmler et al. in a desperate attempt to keep him functioning.
3 Generaloberst: i.e., Colonel Gc n e r a l , the equivalent of a four star American general.
4

to no avail.
"Prague," the Fuhrer responds stubbornly, almost mystically, "is the key to winning the war." Generaloberts Heinrici's hard-pressed troops must "do without."4
One may also perhaps imagine Heinrici and the other assembled generals perhaps casting a doleful glance at Norway on the situation map, where thousands of German troops are still stationed, occupying a country that had long since ceased to be of any strategic or operational value to the defense of the Reich. Why indeed did Hitler maintain so many German troops in Norway up to the very end of the war?5
These paradoxical German troops deployments are the first mystery of the badly written finale of the war in Europe. Both Allied and German generals would ponder it after the war, and both would write it off to Hitler's insanity, a conclusion that would become part of the "Allied Legend" of the end of the war. This interpretation does make sense, for if one assumed that Hitler were having a rare seizure of sanity when he ordered these deployments, what possibly could he have been thinking? Prague? Norway? There were no standard or conventional military reasons for the deployments. In other words, the deployments themselves attest his complete lack of touch with military reality. He therefore had to have been quite insane.
But apparently his "delusional insanity" did not stop there. On more than one occasion during these end-of-the-war conferences with his generals in the Fuhrerbunker, he boasted that Germany would soon be in the possession of weapons that would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat at "five minutes past midnight." All
4 They did in fact "do without" and yet managed to put up a fierce resistance against overwhelming odds in the initial stages of Zhukov's final offensive on Berlin.
5 The standard versions, of course, are that he wished to maintain the supply line of iron ore from Sweden to Germany, and that he wished to continue to use the country as a base to interdict the lend-lease supply route to Russia. But by late 1944, with the huge losses of the German Kriegsmarine, these explanations no longer were militarily feasible, and hence do not make military sense. One must look for other reasons, if indeed there are any beyond Adolph Hitler's delusions.
5

the Wehrmacht had to do was hold out a bit longer. And above all, it must hold Prague and lower Silesia.
Of course, the standard historical interpretation of these and similar utterances by the Nazi leadership near the end of the war explains them - or rather, explains them away - by one of two standard techniques. One school understands them to refer to the more advanced versions of the V-l and V-2, and on rare occasions, the intercontinental A9/10 rockets, the jet fighters, anti-aircraft heat-seeking missiles, and so on that the Germans were developing. Sir Roy Fedden, one of the British Specialists sent to Germany to investigate Nazi secret weapons research after the war, left no doubt as to the deadly potential these developments held:
In these respects (the Nazis) were not entirely lying. In the course of two recent visits to Germany, as leader of a technical mission of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realize that if they had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare.6
The other standard school of interpretation explains such remarks of the Nazi leadership as the utterances of madmen desperate to prolong the war, and hence their lives, by stiffening the resistance of their exhausted armies. For example, to make the insanity gripping the Reich government complete, Hitler's ever-faithful toady and propaganda minister, Dr. Josef Gobbels also boasted in a speech near the end of the war that he had seen "weapons so frightening it would make your heart stand still." More delusional ravings of a Nazi madman.
But on the Allied side of the Allied Legend, things are equally peculiar. In March and April of 1945, US General George S. Patton's Third Army is literally racing across southern Bavaria, as fast as is operationally possible, making a beeline for:
(1) the huge Skoda munitions works at Pilsen, a complex all but
6 Sir Roy Fedden, The Nazis' V-Wcapons Matured Too Late (London: 1945), cited in Renato Vesco and David Hatcher Childress, Man-Made UFOs: 1944-1994, p. 98.

blown off the map by Allied bombers; (2) Prague; and (3) A region of the Harz Mountains in Thuringia known to
Germans as the Dreiecks or Three Corners," a region encompassed by the old mediaeval towns and villages of Arnstadt, Jonastal, Wechmar, and Ohrdruf.7
One is informed by countless history books that this maneuver was thought to be necessary by the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHEAF) because of reports that the Nazis were planning to make a last stand in the "Alpine National Redoubt", a network of fortified mountains stretching from the Alps to the Harz Mountains. The Third Army's movements, so the story goes, were designed to cut off the "escape route" of Nazis fleeing the carnage of Berlin. Maps are produced in old history books, accompanied in some cases by de-classified German plans some dating from the Weimar Republic! - for just such a redoubt. Case settled.
However, there is a problem with that explanation. Allied aerial reconnaissance would likely have told Eisenhower and SHAEF that there were precious few fortified strong points in the "National Redoubt". Indeed, it would have told them that the "Redoubt" was no redoubt at all. General Patton and his divisional commanders would most certainly have been privy to at least some of this information. So why the extraordinary and almost reckless speed of his advance, an advance the post-war Allied Legend would have us believe was to cut off the escape route of Nazis fleeing Berlin, who it turns out weren't fleeing, to a redoubt that didn't exist? The mystery deepens.
Then, remarkably, in a strange twist of fate, General Patton himself, America's most celebrated general, dies suddenly, and, some would say, suspiciously, as a result of complications from injuries he sustained in a freak automobile accident soon after the end of the war and the beginning of the Allied military occupation. For many, there is little doubt that Patton's death is suspicious. But
7 Arnstadt is where the great German composer and organist J.S. Bach first began his career.
7

what of the explanations offered for it by those who do not think it was accidental? Some propose he was eliminated because of his remarks about turning the Germans "right back around" and letting them lead an Allied invasion of Russia. Others believe he was eliminated because he knew about the Allies' knowledge of the Soviets' execution of British, American, and French prisoners of war, and threatened to make it public. In any case, while Patton's barbed tongue and occasional outbursts are well known, his sense of military duty and obligation were far too high for him to have entertained such notions. These theories play out best, perhaps, on the internet or in the movies. And neither seems a sufficient motivation for the murder of America's most celebrated general. But then, if he was murdered, what was sufficient motivation?
Here too, the lone German pilot Hans Zinsser and his observations afford a speculative key as to the possibilities, if General Patton was murdered, of why he had to be silenced. Let us return, for a moment, to a less-well publicized explanation for his end-of-the war lightening-like strikes into south central Germany and into Bohemia:
In Top Secret, Ralph Ingersoll, an American liaison officer at S.H.A.E.F., gives a version of the facts much more in line with German intentions: "(General Omar) Bradley was complete master of the situation.... in full command of the three armies that had broken through the Rhine defenses and were free to exploit their victories. Analyzing the whole situation, Bradley felt that to take battered Berlin would be an empty military victory.... The German War Department had long since moved out, leaving only a rear echelon. The main body of the German War Department, including its priceless archives, had been transferred to the Thuringian Forest..."8
But what exactly did Patton's divisions discover in Pilsen and the forests of Thuringia? Only with the recent German reunification and declassification of East German, British, and American documents are enough clues available to allow this fantastic story - and the reason for the post-war Allied Legend - to be outlined and its questions answered.
8 Vesco and Childress, op. cit., p. 97.
8

Thus, finally, one arrives at the main theme of the post-war Allied Legend. As the Allied forces penetrated ever deeper into the German fatherland itself, teams of scientists and experts and their intelligence coordinators were sent in literally to scour the Reich for German patents, secret weapons research, and above all, to find out about the state of the German atomic bomb project.9 Literally vacuuming the Reich of every conceivable technological development, this effort became the largest technology transfer in history. Even at this late stage of the war, as Allied armies advanced across western Europe, there was fear on the Allied side that the Germans were perilously close to the A-bomb, and might actually use one on London or other Allied targets. And Dr. Gobbels and his speeches about fearsome heart-stopping weaponry were doing nothing to alleviate their fears.
It is here that the mystery of the Allied Legend only deepens. It is here that the badly written finale would be truly comical, were it not for the vast scale of human suffering involved with it, for the facts are clear enough if one examines them independently of the explanations we have become accustomed to apply to them. Indeed, one must wonder if we were not conditioned to think about them in a certain way, for as the Allied armies advanced deeper and deeper into the Reich, famous German scientists and engineers were either captured, or they surrendered themselves. Among them were first class physicists, many of them Nobel laureates. And most of them were involved, at some level, with the various atomic bomb projects of Nazi Germany.
Among these scientists were Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Kurt Diebner, a nuclear physicist, Paul Hartek, a nuclear chemist, Otto Hahn himself, the chemist who actually discovered nuclear fission, and curiously, Walter Gerlach, whose specialty was not nuclear, but gravitational physics. Gerlach had written esoteric papers before the war on such abstruse concepts as spin polarization and vorticular physics, hardly the
9 "Alsos" was the code name of this effort. "Alsos" is a Greek word meaning "Grove", an obvious pun on General Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project. It is the name of the book about the Manhattan Project by Dutch-Jewish physicist Samuel Goudsmit.
9

basics of nuclear physics, and certainly not the sort of scientist one would expect to encounter working on atom bombs.10
Much to the Allies' puzzlement, their scientific teams found but crude attempts by Heisenberg to construct a functioning atomic reactor, attempts that were wholly unsatisfactory and unsuccessful, and almost unbelievably inept. This "German ineptitude" in basic bomb physics became, and remains, a central component of the Allied Legend. And yet, that itself raises yet another mystery of the badly written finale.
Top German scientists - Werner Heisenberg, Paul Hartek, Kurt Diebner, Erich Bagge, Otto Hahn, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, Karl Wirtz, Horst Korsching, and Walter Gerlach - were carted off to Farm Hall, England, where they were kept in isolation, and their conversations recorded. The transcripts, the celebrated "Farm Hall Transcripts", were only declassified by the British government in 1992! If the Germans were so far behind and so incompetent, why keep them classified for so long?" Bureaucratic oversight and inertia? Or did they contain things the Allies did not wish to be known even at that late date?
What a surface reading of the transcripts reveals only deepens the mystery considerably. In them, Heisenberg and company, after hearing of the a-bombing of Hiroshima by the Americans on the BBC, debate the endless moral issues of their own involvement in the atomic bomb projects of Nazi Germany.
But that is not all. In the transcripts, Heisenberg and company, who had suffered
10 Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point, p. 194. Cook notes that these areas have little to do with nuclear physics, much less A-bomb design, but "much to do with the enigmatic properties of gravity. A student of Gerlach's at Munich, O.C. Hilgenberg, published a paper in 1931 entitled 'About Gravitation, Vortices and Waves in Rotating Media'.... And yet, after the war, Gerlach, who died in 1979, apparently never returned to these matters, nor did he make any references to them; almost as if he had been forbidden to do so. That, or something he had seen...had scared him beyond all reason."
11 It was Manhattan project chief General Leslie Groves who, in fact, revealed in his 1962 book about the bomb, Now It Can Be Told, that the German scientists' conversations had been recorded by the British. Apparently, however, not everything could be told in 1962.
10

some inexplicable mathematical and scientific dyslexia during the whole six years' course of the war, the same Heisenberg and company who could not even design and build a successful atomic reactor to produce plutonium for a bomb, suddenly become Nobel laureates and first rank physicists after the war. Indeed, Heisenberg himself within a matter of a few days of Hiroshima, gave a lecture to the assembled German scientists on the basic design of the bomb. In it, he defends his first assessment that the bomb would be about the size of a pineapple, and not the one or two ton monster he maintained throughout most of the war. And as we shall discover in the transcripts nuclear chemist Paul Hartek is close - perilously close - to the correct critical mass of uranium for the Hiroshima bomb.12
This demonstrable mathematical prowess raises yet another question directly confronting the Allied Legend, for some versions of that Legend would have it that the Germans never aggressively pursued bomb development because they had - via Heisenberg overestimated the critical mass by several order of magnitude, thus rendering such a project impractical. Hartek had clearly done the calculations before, so Heisenberg's estimates were certainly not the only calculations the Germans had available to them. And with a small critical mass comes the practical feasibility of an atomic bomb.
In his August 14, 1945 "lecture" to the assembled German Farm Hall physicists, Heisenberg, according to Paul Lawrence
12 Q.v. Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb project: A Study in German Culture (Berkeley: 1998), pp. 217-221. Thomas Powers notes of Heisenberg's lecture that "this was something of a scientific tour de force - to come up with a working theory of bomb design in so short a time, after years of laboring under fundamental misconceptions." (Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), pp. 439-440). Samuel Goudsmit, of course, used the transcripts to construct his version of the Allied Legend: "That the German scientists were at odds with one another, that they didn't understand bomb physics, and that they concocted a false story of moral scruples to explain their scientific failures.... The sources of Goudsmit's conclusions are all obvious in the transcripts, but what leaps out at the reader now are the many statements which Goudsmit failed to notice, forgot, or deliberately overlooked." (Ibid., p. 436)
11

Rose, used a tone and phrasing that indicated that "he has only just now understood the solution" to a small critical mass for the bomb,13 since "others" reported a critical mass of about 4 kg. This too only deepens the mystery. For Rose, an adherent of the Legend - though now in its highly modified post-Farm Hall declassification mode - the "others" could be the Allied press reports themselves.14
In the years immediately after the war, the Dutch-Jewish Manhattan Project physicist Samuel Goudsmit explained the whole
Dutch-Jewish Manhattan Project Physicist Samuel Goudsmit
13Q.v. Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture (Berkeley: 1998), pp. 217-221. Thomas Powers notes that this lecture was "something of a scientific tour de force - to come up with a working theory of bomb design in so short a time, after years of laboring under fundamental misconceptions." (Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb(1993), pp. 439-440).
14Ibid., p. 218.
12

mystery, alone with many others, as being simply due to the Allies having been "better" nuclear scientists and engineers than the very Germans who had invented the whole discipline of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics. That explanation, in conjunction with Heisenberg's own sell-evidently clumsy attempts to construct a functioning reactor, served well enough until these transcripts were declassified.
With the appearance of the transcripts and their stunning revelations of Heisenberg's actual knowledge of atomic bomb design, and some of the other scientists' clear understanding of the means to enrich enough weapons grade uranium without having to have a functioning reactor, the Legend had to be "touched up" a bit. Thomas Powers' Heisenberg's War appeared, arguing somewhat persuasively that Heisenberg had actually sabotaged the German bomb program. And almost as soon as it appeared, Lawrence Rose countered with Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project, arguing even more persuasively that Heisenberg had remained a loyal German and had not sabotaged anything, but that he simply labored under massive misconceptions of the nature of nuclear fission, and consequently over-calculated the critical mass needed to make a bomb during the war. The Germans never obtained the bomb, so the new version goes, because they never had a functioning reactor by which to enrich uranium to plutonium to make a bomb. Besides, having grossly overestimated the critical mass, they had no real impetus to pursue it. Simple enough, case closed once again.
But again, neither Powers' nor Rose's books really go to the heart of the mystery, for the Legend still requires the belief that "brilliant nuclear physicists including Nobel prize winners before the war, apparently struck by some strange malady which turned them into incompetent bunglers during the...War,"15 were suddenly and quite inexplicably cured of the malady within a few days of the bombing of Hiroshima! Moreover, two such widely diverging contemporary interpretations of the same material - Rose's and Powers' - only highlights the ambiguity of their contents in general,
15 Philip Henshall, The Nuclear Axis: Germany, Japan, and the Atom Bomb Race 1939-45, "Introduction."
13

and Heisenberg's knowledge - or lack of it - in particular. Matters are not helped by events on the other side of the world
in the Pacific theater, for there American investigators would uncover similarly strange goings on after the war ended.
There, after Nagasaki, the Emperor Hirohito, overriding his ministers who wanted to continue the war, decided that Japan would surrender unconditionally. But why would Hirohito's ministers urge continuance of the war in the face of overwhelming Allied conventional arms superiority, and, from their point of view, facing a potential rain of atomic bombs? After all, "two" bombs could just as easily have turned into twenty. One could, of course, attribute the ministers' objections to the Emperor's intentions to "proud samurai traditions" and the Japanese sense of "honor" and so on. And that would indeed be a plausible explanation.
But another explanation is that Hirohito's cabinet ministers knew something.
What his ministers probably knew was what American intelligence would soon discover: that the Japanese, "just prior to their surrender, had developed and successfully test fired an atomic bomb. The project had been housed in or near Konan(Japanese name for Hungnam), Korea, in the peninsula's North."16 It was exploded, so the story goes, one day after the American plutonium bomb, "Fat Man", exploded over Nagasaki, i.e., on August 10, 1945. The war, in other words, depending on Hirohito's decision, could have "gone nuclear". By that time, of course it would have done Japan no good to prolong it, with no viable means of delivery of an atomic weapon to any worthwhile strategic American targets. The Emperor stood his ministers down.17
These allegations constitute yet another difficulty for the Allied Legend, for where did Japan obtain the necessary uranium for its (alleged) A-bomb? And more importantly, the technology to enrich
16Robert K. Wilcox, Japan's Secret War, p. 15. 17The Japanese were, in fact, developing large cargo submarines to transport a bomb to West Coast American port cities to be detonated there, much like Einstein warned in his famous letter to President Roosevelt that initiated the Manhattan Project. Of course, Einstein was more worried about the Germans using such a method of ship-born delivery, than the Japanese.
14

it? Where did it build and assemble such a weapon? Who was responsible for its development? The answers, as we shall eventually see, possibly explain events far in the future, and even possibly down to our own day.
Yet even now, we have only begun to penetrate into the heart of this "badly written finale." There are also the "odd little, and little known, details" to consider.
Why, for example, in 1944, did a lone Junkers 390 bomber, a massive six engine heavy-lift ultra long-range transport aircraft capable of round trip intercontinental flight from Europe to North America, fly to within less than twenty miles of New York City, photograph the skyline of Manhattan, and return to Europe?18 Germany launched several such top secret long-distance flights during the war, using these and other heavy-lift ultra-long range aircraft. But what was their purpose, and more importantly, the purpose of this unique flight?19 That such a flight was extremely risky goes without saying. What were the Germans up to with this enormous aircraft, and why would they even risk such an operation just to take pictures, when they only ever had two of these enormous six engine monsters available?
Finally, and to round out the Legend, there are the odd details of the German surrender and the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals. Why does former Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, mass murderer and one of human history's most notorious criminals, try to negotiate a surrender to the Western Allies? Of course, one can dismiss this as delusion, and Himmler was certainly delusional. But what could he possibly have thought he had to offer the Allies in return for a surrender to the West, and the sparing of his own wretched life?
What of the strangeness around the Nuremberg Tribunals themselves? The Legend is well known: obvious war criminals like Reichmarschall Goring, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Army Chief of Operations Staff Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, are sent swinging from the gallows, or, in Goring's case, cheating the hangman by
18Q.v. Nick Cook, op. cit., p. 198, Henshall, op. cit., pp. 171-172. 19Italy, as well, launched long-range air missions to Japan.
15

swallowing cyanide. Other Nazi bigwigs like Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, mastermind of Germany's devastating U-boat campaign against Allied shipping, or Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, or Finance Minister and Reichsbank President Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, were imprisoned.
Missing from the docket of the accused, of course, were the Pennemunde rocket scientists headed by Dr. Werner von Braun and General Walter Dornberger, already headed to America to take charge of America's ballistic missile and space programs along with a host of scientists, engineers and technicians under the then super secret Project Paperclip.20 They, like their nuclear physics counterparts in Germany, had seemingly suffered from a similar "bungler's malady", for once having produced the first successful V-l and V-2 prototypes comparatively early in the war, they suffered a similar lack of inspiration and ingenuity and (so the Legend goes) managed to produce only "paper rockets" and theoretical study projects after that.21
But perhaps most significantly, by joint agreement of the Allied and Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg, missing from evidence in the tribunal was the vast amount of documentary evidence implicating the Nazi regime in occult belief systems and practice,22 a fact that
20 The best sources on the overall outlines of Operation Paperclip are Mark Aaron's and John Loftus' Unholy Trinity: the Vatican, Nazis, and Soviet Intelligence (New York: St Martin's Press. 1991), and Christopher Simpson's Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. 1988).
21 Henshall, op. cit, "Introduction." 22 Q.v., Jean-Michel Angebert, The Occult and the Third Reich (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974); Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press. 1992); Michael Howard, The Occult Conspiracy: Secret Societies- Their Influence and Power in World History (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1989); Peter Levenda, Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi involvement with the Occult (New York: Avon Books, 1995); Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the magicians, trans from the French by Rollo Meyers (new York: Stein and Day, 1964); Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult (New York: Dorset Press, 1977); James Webb, The Occult Establishment and The Occult Underground (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court,
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has given rise to a whole "mythology, and one that has never been adequately explored in connection with its possible influence on the development of German secret weapons during the war.
Finally, a curious fact, one of those obvious things that one lends to overlook unless attention is drawn to it: the atomic bomb test that took place at the Trinity site in new Mexico was a test of America's implosion-plutonium bomb, a test needed to see if the concept would actually work. It did, and magnificently. But what is immensely significant - a fact missing from almost all mainstream literature on the subject since the end of the war - is that the uranium bomb with its apparatus of a cannon shooting the critical mass of uranium together, the bomb that was actually first used in war, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was never tested. As German author Friedrich Georg notes, this tears a rather gaping hole in the Allied Legend:
Also another question is of great importance: Why was the uranium bomb of the USA, unlike the plutonium bomb, not tested prior to being hurled on Japan? Militarily this would appear to be extremely dangerous.... Did the Americans simply forget to test it, or did others already do it for them?23
The Allied Legend accounts for this in various ways, some ingenious, some not so ingenious, but basically they boil down to the assertion that it was never tested because it did not need to be, so confident were Allied engineers that it would work. So we have been asked to believe, by the post-war Allied spin, that the American military dropped an atomic bomb of untested design, based on concepts of physics that were very new and themselves very untested, on an enemy city, an enemy also known to be working on acquiring the atomic bomb as well!
It is indeed a badly written, truly incredible, finale to the world's most horrendous war.
1988). It should be noted that the SS Ahnenerbedienst did come under the tribunal's scrutiny.
23 Friedrich Georg, Hitlers Siegeswaffen: Band 1: Luftwaffe und Marine: Geheime Nuklearwaffen des Dritten Reiches und ihre Tragersysteme (Schleusingen: Amun Verlag, 200), p. 150, my translation.
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So, what exactly did the German pilot Hans Zinsser see on that night of October, 1944, as he flew his Heinkel bomber over the twilight skies of northern Germany? Something that, had he known it, would require the previous badly written Wagnerian libretto to be almost completely revised.
His affidavit is contained in a military intelligence report of August 19, 1945, roll number A1007, filmed in 1973 at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Zinsser's statement is found on the last page of the report:
47. A man named ZINSSER, a Flak rocket expert, mentioned what he noticed one day: In the beginning of Oct, 1944 I flew from Ludwigslust (south of Lubeck), about 12 to 15 km from an atomic bomb test station, when I noticed a strong, bright illumination of the whole atmosphere, lasting about 2 seconds.
48. The clearly visible pressure wave escaped the approaching and following cloud formed by the explosion. This wave had a diameter of about 1 km when it became visible and the color of the cloud changed frequently. It became dotted after a short period of darkness with all sorts of light spots, which were, in contrast to normal explosions, of a pale blue color.
49. After about 10 seconds the sharp outlines of the explosion cloud disappeared, then the cloud began to take on a lighter color against the sky covered with a gray overcast. The diameter of the still visible pressure wave was at least 9000 meters while remaining visible for at least 15 seconds.
50. Personal observations of the colors of the explosion cloud found an almost blue-violet shade. During this manifestation reddishcolored rims were to be seen, changing to a dirty-like shade in very rapid succession.
51. The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing.
52. About one hour later I started with an He 111 from the A/D24 at Ludwigslust and flew in an easterly direction. Shortly after the start I passed through the almost complete overcast (between 3000 and 4000 meter altitude). A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections (at about 7000 meter altitude) stood, without any
24 "A/D" probably "aerodrome".
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seeming connections, over the spot where the explosion took place. Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lightning, turned up.
53. Because of the P-38s operating in the area WittenbergMersburg 1 had to turn to the north but observed a better visibility at the bottom of the cloud where the explosion occured (sic). Note: It does not seem very clear to me why these experiments took place in such crowded areas.25
In other words, a German pilot had observed the test of a weapon, having all the signatures of a nuclear bomb: electromagnetic pulse and resulting malfunction of his radio, mushroom cloud, continuing fire and combustion of nuclear material in the cloud and so on. And all this on territory clearly under German control, in October of 1944, fully eight months before the first American A-bomb test in New Mexico! Note the curious fact that Zinsser maintains that the test took place in a populated area.
There is yet another curiosity to be observed in Zinsser's statement, one that his American interrogators either did not pursue, or, if they did pursue it, the results remain classified still: How did Zinsser know it was a test? The answer is obvious: Zinsser knew, because he was somehow involved, for clearly the Allies would not have control over a test site deep in Nazi Germany.
Earlier in the same report, there are clues that unravel the mystery:
14. When Germany was at this stage of the game, the war broke out in Europe. At first investigations on this disintegrating of 235U (sic) were somewhat neglected because a practical application seemed too far off. Later, however, this research continued, especially in finding methods of separating isotopes. Needless to say that the center of gravity of Germany's war effort at that time lay in other tasks.
25 The entire documentation of this report is as follows: "Investigations, Research, Developments and Practical Use of the German Atomic Bomb," A.P.I.U. (Ninth Air Force) 96/1945 APO 696, U S Army, 19 August 1945." The report is classified secret. Note that the report begins in no uncertain terms: "the following information was obtained from four German scientists: a chemist, two physical chemists, and a rocket specialist. All four men contributed a short story as to what they knew of the atomic bomb development." (Emphasis added). Note also the suggestive title of the report.
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15. Nevertheless the atomic bomb was expected to be ready toward the end of 1944, if it had not been for the effective air attacks on laboratories engaged in this uranium research, especially on the one in Ryukon in Norway, where heavy water was produced. It is mainly for this reason that Germany did not succeed in using the atomic bomb in this war.
These two paragraphs are quite revealing for several reasons. First, what is the source for the assertion that the Germans
expected the bomb to be ready in late 1944, well ahead of the Manhattan Project, and a statement in flat contradiction to the postwar Allied spin that the Germans were actually far behind? Indeed, during the war, Manhattan Project estimates consistently placed the Germans ahead of the Allies, and project chief General Leslie Groves also thought they were. But after the war, everything suddenly changed. Not only was America ahead, but according to the Legend, it had been consistently far ahead throughout the war.
Manhattan Project Chief General Leslie Groves Zinsser's account raises a disturbing possibility - besides completely contradicting the Allied Legend - and that is, did the Allies learn of a German A-bomb test during the war? If so, then we may look for certain types of corroborating evidence, for the
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other Statements of the post-w a r report containing Zinsser's affidavit would seem to indicate that the Allied Legend is already beginning to take tenuous shape. The intelligence report talks, for example, only of laboratories being the facilities conducting isotope enrichment and separation research. But mere laboratories would simply be incapable of development of an actual functioning atom bomb. So one component of the Legend emerges in this early report: the German effort was lackadaisical, being confined to laboratories.
Secondly, note the clear assertion that Germany did not succeed in "using the atomic bomb in this war." The language of the report is very clear. Yet it would also appear to be designed to obfuscate in aid of the then emerging Allied Legend, for the statement does not say that the Germans never tested a bomb, only that they did not use one. The language of the report is oddly careful, deliberate, and for that reason, all the more thought provoking.
Thirdly, note how much is actually - and inadvertently it would seem - revealed about German atomic bomb research and development, for the statements make it clear that the Germans were after a uranium based A-bomb. A plutonium bomb is never mentioned. The theory of plutonium development and the possibility of a plutonium based A-bomb were clearly known to the Germans, as a Top Secret memorandum to the Heereswaffenamt (Army Ordnance Bureau) in early 1942 makes abundantly clear.26
So it is the absence of plutonium from this report that affords us a first significant clue into what was probably the real nature of
26 This memorandum obviously constitutes another sore spot for the Allied Legend that emerged after the war, namely, that the Germans never knew the correct amount of the critical mass of a uranium fission bomb, but that it had been grossly overestimated by several orders of magnitude, hence rendering the project "unfeasible" within the span of the war. The problem of the HWA memorandum is that the Germans had a good ball-park estimate as early as January-February of 1942. And if they knew it was so small, then the resulting "decision" of the German High Command as to the impracticality of its development becomes immensely problematical. On the contrary, because of this memorandum - most likely prepared by Dr. Kurt Diebner or Dr. Fritz Houtermans - they knew that the undertaking was not only practical but feasible within the span of the war.
22

German atom bomb research. It is this absence that explains why the Germans never placed much emphasis on achieving a functioning reactor in order to enrich uranium to make weapons grade plutonium for an atom bomb: they did not need to do so, since there were other methods of enriching and separating enough U235 to weapons grade purity and a stockpile of critical mass. In a nutshell: the Allied Legend about the German failure to obtain the atom bomb because they never had a functioning reactor is simply utter scientific nonsense, because a reactor is needed only it one wants to produce plutonium. It is an unneeded, and expensive, development, if one only wants to make a uranium Abomb. Thus, there is sufficient reason, due to the science of bombmaking and the political and military realities of the war after America's entry, that the Germans took the decision to develop only a uranium bomb, since that afforded the best, most direct, and technologically least complicated route to acquisition of a bomb.
Let us pause a moment to put the indications of the German project in the context of the Manhattan Project taking place in the United States. There, with a production capacity larger than Germany's, and with an industrial base not being targeted by enemy bombing, the American project decided to concentrate on development of all available means to production of working atom bombs, i.e., uranium and plutonium bombs. But the production of plutonium could only be achieved in the construction of a functioning reactor. No reactor, no plutonium bomb.
But it should also be noted that the Manhattan Project also constructed the giant Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee to enrich uranium to weapons grade by gaseous diffusion and Lawrence's mass spectrometer processes, a facility that at no stage of its operation relied upon a functioning reactor in order to enrich uranium.
So, if the Germans were pursuing a similar approach to that employed at Oak Ridge, then we must find indicators to corroborate it. First, to enrich uranium by the same or similar methods as employed in Tennessee, the Reich would have had to build a similarly huge facility, or smaller facilities scattered throughout Germany, transporting the various levels of dangerous
23

uranium isotope from one point to another as feedstock until the desired level of purity and enrichment was achieved. The material would then have to be assembled in a bomb, and tested. So one must first look for a facilities or facilities. And given the Oak Ridge operation and its massive size, we know exactly what to look for: enormous size, close proximity to water, an adequate transportation infrastructure, enormous electrical power consumption, and finally, two other significant factors: an enormous labor pool, and enormous cost.
Secondly, in order to verify or corroborate Zinsser's astonishing affidavit, we must look for corroborating evidence. We must look for indications that the Germans had stockpiled enough weapons grade uranium to constitute a critical mass for an atom bomb. And then we must hunt for the test site or sites and see if it(or they) bear(s) the signature(s) of an atomic blast.
Fortunately, the information is now slowly coming available with the recent declassification of documents by Great Britain, the United States, the former Soviet Union, and as the archives of the former East Germany are being opened by the German government itself. This allows us to examine each of these aspects of the problem in a detail not possible until the last few years. The answers, as we shall see in the remaining chapters of part one, are disturbing, and horrifying.
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2.
ELECTRICITY, SLAVES, AND "BUNA"
"Assertions made by General Groves after the war... were probably designed to divert attention from the German isotope separation program. The idea being that if the existence of the German uranium enrichment program could be hidden, then the cover story could be established that Germany's atomic bomb effort consisted only of failed attempts to create a reactor pile to bread
plutonium " Carter P. Hydrick: Critical Mass: the Real Story of the Birth of the Atomic
Bomb and the Nuclear Age.1
"The men who interrogated Heisenberg and other German scientists, read their reports, and gaped at the primitive reactor vessel in a cave in southern Germany were hard put to explain what had gone wrong. Germany had begun the war with every advantage: able scientists, material resources, and the support and interest of the highest military officials. How could they have achieved so little?"2 These are the basic facts, and the central question, that have plagued every researcher into the subject of German secret weapons research since the end of World War Two. How indeed could Germany have not obtained the atom bomb?
The thesis of this book, among many others, is radical, namely, that Germany did acquire atomic bombs during the war. What must be explained, rather, is why Germany apparently did not use this and other dreadful weapons available to her, or, if she did, why we have not heard about it. But of course, to maintain such a radical thesis, one must argue persuasively that Germany had the bomb to begin with.
1 Carter Hydrick, Critical Mass: the Real Story of the Atomic Bomb and the Birth of the Nuclear Age, Internet published manuscript, www.3dshort.com/nazibomb2/CRITICALMASS.txt, 1998, p. 21. Hydrick's research is painstaking and meticulous, and his speculative reconstructions of the detailed history of the war's end merit close attention. It is earnestly hoped he will eventually publish this important work in book form.
2 Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War, p. viii.
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This implies a relatively easy set of corroborative evidence to search for. If Germany had a uranium based atom bomb, one must look for the following things:
(1) A method or methods of separating and enriching uranium235 isotope, the necessary isotope for a uranium atom bomb, to weapons grade quality, and in sufficient quantity to stockpile enough material for the critical mass, without the use of a functioning atomic reactor.
(2) An actual facility or facilities where such technologies are used en masse; This implies in turn (a) enormous electrical power consumption; (b) adequate water and transportation supplies; (c) an enormous labor pool; (d) a physically large facility or facilities that are relatively shielded from Allied and/or Russian bombing;
(3) The necessary basic theory for the design of a uranium bomb;
(4) Available and adequate supplies of uranium for use in enrichment;
(5) A site or sites to assemble and test the bomb
Fortunately, all these aspects of the investigation afford the researcher several clues, all of which corroborate the existence, at the minimum, of a very large and successful German uranium refinement and enrichment program during the war.
We begin by looking in a very unlikely spot: Nuremberg. At the War Crimes Tribunal after the war, several formerly elegantly attired business executives and senior managers of the huge, enormously powerful, and quite notorious German chemicals cartel, I.G. Farben A.G., had their time in the dock. They story of this early "global corporation", its bankrolling of the Nazi regime and its central role in its "military-industrial complex", as well as its role in producing the deadly Zyklon-B poison gas for the death camps has been chronicled elsewhere.3
3 Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben; Anthony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.
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I.G. Farben had been more than just complicit in Nazi atrocities by its construction of a large Buna, or synthetic rubber, production plant at Auschwitz in the Polish part of Silesia during the war, committing atrocities against the concentration camp victims during its construction and operation.
For Farben, the choice of Auschwitz as the site for the Buna plant was logical, and made for "sound business reasons." The concentration camp nearby the site selected for the enormous facility guaranteed an endless supply of slave labor for its construction, and, conveniently, when the slaves had exhausted themselves in its secret construction and operation, they could be permanently "laid off". Farben director Carl Krauch assigned one of its top Buna synthetic rubber experts, Otto Ambros, to investigate the sites for the proposed plant and make a recommendation. The site eventually selected - Auschwitz - was "particularly suited for t h e installation" over a competing site in Norway for one very important reason.
A coal mine was nearby and three rivers converged to provide a vital requirement, a large source of water. Together with these three rivers, the Reich railroad and autobahn afforded excellent transportation to and from the area. These were not decisive advantages, however, over the Norwegian site. But the Silesian location had one advantage that was overwhelming: the S.S. had plans to expand enormously a concentration camp nearby. The promise of an inexhaustible supply of slave labor was an attraction that could not be resisted.4
The selection having been approved by the Farben board, Krauch then wrote a top secret letter to Ambros:
In the new arrangement of priority stages ordered by Field Marshal Keitel, your building project has first priority.... At my request, (Goring) issued special decreees a few days ago to the supreme Reich authorities concerned.... In these decrees, the Reich Marshal obligated the offices concerned to meet your requirements in skilled workers and laborers at once, even at the expense of other important building projects or plans which are essential to the war economy.5
4 Borkin, op. cit, p. 115. 5 Ibid., pp. 115-116.
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I.G. Farben Auschwitz "Buna" Expert Otto Ambros
With the Wehrmacht poised to blast its way into Russia soon, and sensing enormous profits to be made in the effort, the Farben directors decided to finance the enormous plant privately, rather than in concert with the Nazi regime, earmarking 900,000,000 Reichsmarks - nearly $250,000,000 in 1945 dollars or over $2 billion in contemporary dollars - to the project. It was to be the Buna plant to dwarf all other Buna plants.
However, as the testimony at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal unfolded, the Auschwitz Buna factory emerged as one of the big mysteries of the war, for in spite of the enormous sum of money set aside for its construction, in spite of the personal blessings of Hitler, Himmler, Goring, and Keitel, and in spite of an endless supply both of skilled company contract laborers and an endless supply of slave labor from Auschwitz, "the project was continually disrupted by shortages, breakdowns, and delays.... Some malign influence seemed to be affecting the entire operation" to such an extent that Farben appeared to be faced with the first failure in its long corporate history of technological success.6 By 1942, the whole effort was viewed by many directors not only as a failure, but as a near disaster.7
6 Ibid., p. 118. 7 Ibid., p. 120.
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Disaster notwithstanding, the huge synthetic rubber and gasoline plants were completed, after 300,000 concentration camp
workers had passed through the corporations construction mills. 25,000 of these inmates were simply and cruelly worked to death from exhaustion. The plants themselves were nothing less than gigantic. So gigantic, in fact, that "they used more electricity than the entire city of Berlin."8
During the war crimes tribunals, however, it was not this gruesome catalogue of facts about the plant that puzzled the Allied prosecutors. What puzzled them was that, in spite of such an enormous investment of lives, money, and material, "not a single pound of Buna was ever produced"9 The Farben directors and managers in the docks were almost obsessively insistent on this point. More electricity than the entire city of Berlin - the eighth largest in the world at that time - to produce absolutely nothing? If this was true, then the enormous outlay of capital and labor and the huge electrical consumption contributed nothing significant to the German war effort whatsoever. Needless to say, there is something very wrong with this picture.
None of it made sense the, none of it makes sense now, unless of course the plant was not a Buna plant at all...
***
When I.G. Farben began its construction of the "Buna" plant at Auschwitz, one of the more unusual events to being the process was the removal of over 10,000 Polish inhabitants from their homes to make way for the thousands of German scientists, technicians, contract works and their families who were moved into the area. The parallel with the Manhattan Project in this respect is obvious. It is simply unbelievable in the extreme that, with such a technical and scientific effort on the part of the corporation with the most successful track record in advanced technologies and production
8 Ibid., p. 127. 9 Ibid., emphasis added.
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facilities, and a plant consuming more electricity than Berlin, that nothing whatsoever was ever accomplished or produced.10
One contemporary researcher who is also mystified by the
whole "Buna plant affair" is Carter P. Hydrick. Contacting Ed Landry, an expert in the field of synthetic rubber production from Houston, Texas, and informing him of the I.G. Farben plant, its huge electrical consumption, and the directors' claims that it produced no Buna at all, Landry responded: "That was not a rubber plant - you can bet your bottom dollar on that." Landry simply does not believe the primary purpose of the "Buna plant" was the production of rubber at all.11
How then to account for the enormous electrical consumption and post-war insistence of Farben directors that the plant never produced any synthetic rubber at all? What other technology would require such enormous electrical power consumption, such an enormous technical and unskilled labor staff, and such close proximity to plentiful water supplies? At that time, there was only one other technological process that could conceivably require all these things. Hydrick puts the case this way:
Certainly there is something wrong with this picture. A compilation of the three central and readily known facts just outlined - electrical consumption, construction costs, and I.G. Farben's previous record does not readily form a picture that a Buna processing plant was the type of project being constructed at Auschwitz. Such a compilation does sketch a picture, however, of another important wartime production process, though secret at the time. The process is uranium enrichment.12
So why call it a Buna plant? And why protest so vociferously to the Allied prosecutors that the plant never produced any Buna at all? One answer is that with so much labor being provided by the slave labor from the SS concentration camp nearby, the plant fell under SS security jurisdiction, and an effective "cover" would therefore been at the head of the list of Farben's and the SS' concerns. In the
10 Carter P. Hydick, op. cit., p. 34. 11 Hydrick, op. cit., p. 35. 12 Ibid., p. 38.
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unlikely event, for example, of an escape by one or more inmates, the "Buna" plant would have ottered a plausible cover story should the Allies ever learn of it. Since isotope separation would have been such a secret and eostly process, "it becomes hard to imagine the so-called Buna installation being anything but a cover for a uranium enrichment facility."13 Indeed, there is odd corroboration as we shall see from the Farm Hall transcripts. The "Buna plant" became the cover story to explain the construction to the laborers - in the event that explanations were offered at all! - and to the Farben company contract employees who were "out of the loop."
In this respect, the delays in its construction and the difficulties Farben encountered are also best explained by its being a huge isotope separation facility, not unlike those the Manhattan Project encountered when constructing its own similarly sized plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Like its American counterpart, shortages and delays and technical difficulties dogged the project from its inception, and like its American counterpart, these delays were experienced in spite of its enjoying a similarly privileged position in the hierarchy of Nazi priorities as Oak Ridge.14
So the strange assertions and behavior of the Farben directors on trial after the war begins to make sense. Faced already with an emerging "Allied Legend" about German incompetence in nuclear matters, the Farben directors and managers were perhaps trying in a subtle way to "set the record straight" in the only way that would not overtly challenge that Legend. They were attempting, perhaps, to provide a clue as to the real nature and achievements of the German bomb program that would only be noticed over time and with careful scrutiny.
The selection of the site - near the concentration camp at Auschwitz and its hundreds of thousands of hapless victims - also makes strategic, if not gruesome, sense. Much like dictators of more recent times, it would appear that the Nazi regime had placed the facility near the camp in a deliberate attempt to use "human shields" to protect the facility from Allied bombing. If so, the decision was a correct one, as no Allied bombs ever fell on
13 Hydrick, op. cit., p. 38. 14 Ibid.
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Auschwitz. The plant was dismantled only in the face of the approaching Russian armies in 1944.
The Isotope Separation Facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee To establish that the "Buna plant" was most likely an isotope separation facility, however, requires that one prove the Germans possessed the technological means for isotope separation. Additionally, if such technology was employed at the "Buna plant", then it implies that there was more than one atom bomb project in Germany, for the "Heisenberg" wing of the project, and all the subsequent debates that surround it, are well known. So in addition to ascertaining whether or not Germany possessed the technology to separate isotopes, one must also attempt a broad reconstruction of the actual outlines and relationships of the various German atom bomb projects. By stating the problem in this fashion, one is again confronted by the post-war Allied Legend:
In the traditional history of the bomb, (Manhattan project chief General Leslie) Groves has positioned the German plutonium effort as the only nuclear initiative Germany ever pursued. And he has magnified this misinformation, couched in a cushion of half-truths, to immense proportions - large enough to hide what appears to be a huge
32

German uranium enrichment project behind it - and thus he has shielded the Nazi near-success from the view of the world.15
Did Germany have isotope enrichment technology available? And could it have employed that technology in sufficient quantity to make significant amounts of enriched uranium available for a bomb program?
There can be no doubt that Germany certainly had a sufficient supply of uranium ore, for the region of the Sudetenland - annexed by Germany after the infamous Munich conference in 1938 - is a region known for its rich deposits of some of the highest grade uranium ore in the world. The region, coincidentally, lies close to the "Three Corners" region of Thuringia in south central Germany, and therefore close to Silesia and the various installations that will be examined in parts two and three. So the Farben directors may have had another reason for choosing Auschwitz as the site for an enrichment facility. Auschwitz was close not only to water, an adequate transportation network, and abundant labor, it was conveniently close to the uranium fields of the German-Czech Sudentenland.
These facts raise a speculative possibility. It is well-known that the announcement by nuclear chemist Otto Hahn of his discovery of nuclear fission did not occur until after the Munich conference and the surrender of the Sudetenland to the Third Reich by Chamberlain and Daladier. But might the reality have been something different? Might, in fact, the discovery of fission taken place before the conference, and its results withheld by the Reich until after Europe's only uranium supply was firmly in Nazi hands? It is perhaps significant that Adolf Hitler was prepared to go to war over the matter.
In any case, before we investigate the question of the technology available to the Germans, we must first answer the question of why they apparently concentrated almost exclusively on
15 Hydrick, op. cit., p. 3. Obviously, Hydrick himself does not appear ready to go all the way and acknowledge that the Germans actually successfully tested an atom bomb before its American Manhattan project counterpart produced and tested one.
33

obtaining a uranium atom bomb in their program. After all, the American Manhattan Project had elected to pursue both a uranium and a plutonium bomb. The theoretical possibility of plutonium bombs - "element 94" as it was officially called in German documents of the period - was certainly known to the Nazis. And, as the early 1942 memorandum to the Heereswaffenamt also makes clear, the Germans also knew that this element could only be synthesized in an atomic reactor.
So why did they apparently concentrate only on a uranium bomb and isotope separation and enrichment almost exclusively? With the destruction of the Norwegian heavy water plant at Ryukon in 1942 by Allied commandos, and German failures in obtaining sufficient purity of graphite for use as a moderator in a reactor, the only other moderator available to them - heavy water - was now in critically short supply. Thus, according to the Legend, a functioning reactor leading to a critical mass supply of "element 94" was not feasible to them in the projected span of the war.
But let us, for a moment, assume that the Allied commando raid had not taken place. The German failures with graphite moderated reactors were already a matter of record, and it was obvious to them that there were significant technological and engineering hurdles to be surmounted before a reactor came into production. On the other hand, the Germans already had the necessary technology to enrich U235 for a bomb, and thus uranium enrichment constituted the best, most direct, and technologically feasible route to the acquisition of a bomb within the expected span of the war for the Germans. More on that technology in a moment.
One now has to deal with yet another component of the Allied Legend. American progress in the plutonium bomb, from the moment Fermi successfully completed and tested a functioning reactor in the squash court at the University of Chicago, appeared to be running fairly smoothly, until fairly late in the war, when it was discovered that in order to make a bomb from plutonium, the critical mass would have to be assembled much faster than any existing Allied fuse technologies could accomplish. Moreover, there was so little margin of error, since the fuses in an implosion device
34

would have to fire as close to simultaneously as possible, that Allied engineers began to despair of making a plutonium bomb work.
Thus one is confronted with a r a t h e r interesting scientific picture, one directly in contradiction to the traditional history of the bomb. If the Germans indeed had a successful and large scale uranium enrichment project running ca. 1941-1944, and if their bomb project was devoted almost exclusively on acquiring a uranium atom bomb, and if at the same time Allied engineers were coming to realize the problems inherent in plutonium bomb design, then this means, in one respect at least, that the Germans have not wasted time or effort" on what is admittedly a more difficult task, namely, the plutonium bomb. As we shall see in the next chapter, this fact gives rise to serious doubts about the state of "success" in the Manhattan Project in late 1944 and early 1945.
So what were the actual technologies available to Nazi Germany for isotope enrichment and separation, and how did it compare to similar technologies employed at Oak Ridge for
efficiency and output? Difficult as it seems to accept, the fact of the matter is that Nazi
Germany had "at least five, and possibly as many as seven, serious isotope separation development programs underway."16 One of these, an "isotope sluice" developed by Drs. Bagge and Korsching, two of the scientists interred at Farm Hall, was brought to such a state of efficiency by mid-1944 that a single pass of uranium through it would enrich it to four times that produced by a single pass through the gaseous diffusion gates at Oak Ridge!17
16 Hydrick, op. cit., p. 25. 17 Ibid.
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Contrast this with the end-of-war difficulties being faced by the Manhattan Project. Even with the enormous gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, stocks of fissionable uranium were still woefully short of critical mass requirements as late as March 1945. Passes
36

through the Oak Ridge facility would enrich uranium from aproximately a .7 percent concentration in around 10-12 percent, a n d t h u s the decision was taken to use the Oak Ridge production as
feedstock for Earnest O. Lawrence's far more efficient and effective "beta calutrons," which were essentially a cyclotron with separation tanks, using electromagnetic means to enrich and separate isotope via mass spectrography.18 Consequently, one may assume that if a similar quantity of Bagge and Korsching's "isotope sluices" were used en masse, the result would have been a more rapid build-up of enriched uranium feedstock. Similarly, the more efficient German techno logy may also have allowed for relatively smaller separation facilities.
Good as it was, however, the isotope sluice was not Germany's most efficient or technologically advanced means of uranium enrichment. This was the centrifuge, and its progeny - designed by nuclear chemist Paul Hartek - the ultracentrifuge.19 American engineers, of course, knew of this possibility, but there was a significant drawback they had to face: the highly corrosive uranium gases used in this technology made it unfeasible to rely on centrifuges as a means of enrichment. On the German side, however, this was a solved problem. A special alloy called Bondur was developed precisely for use in centrifuges.20 But even centrifuge technology was not, however, the best available method the Germans had.
18 Hydrick, op. cit., p. 25. 19 The same technology was captured by the Soviet Union and further perfected in its own bomb program. On the post-war German side, such ultracentrifuges were provided by the Siemens company and other German firms first to South Africa in its own bomb program (q.v. Rogers and Cervenka, The Nuclear Axis: West Germany and South Africa, pp. 299-310). In other words, the technology is not only originally German, but is advanced enough to be employed today. It should be noted that, as of the mid-1970s, several of the Germans involved in the corporate development of centrifuge enrichment facilities for the Federal Republic (West Germany) had ties to the third Reich's bomb project, among them Prof. Karl Winnacker, a former member of the I.G. larben board (p. 300). 20 Hydrick, op. cit., p. 25.
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Baron Manfred von Ardenne, a rich eccentric and self-taught nuclear physicist and inventor, and his close associate of physicist Fritz Houtermanns, both correctly calculated the critical mass for a U235 atom bomb in 1941, and with funds from Dr. Ing. Ohnesorge's money-rich Deutsche Reichspost, constructed a huge underground laboratory in his baronial manor in Lichterfelde, outside eastern Berlin. This laboratory included a 2,000,000 volt electrostatic generator and the only other cyclotron known to exist in the Third Reich besides that of the Curies in France. It is the only cyclotron acknowledged by the post-war Allied Legend.21
21 Hydrick, p. 26. 38

At thus juncture it is necessary to pause to examine the German bomb program more closely, for we now have evidence of at least three different, and seemingly separate, technological efforts:
(1) The Heisenberg-Army program, centered around Heisenberg himself and various associates at the Kaiser Wilhelm and Max Planck institutes, a purely "small laboratory" effort concentrating, or rather, dibbling and dabbling in the construction of a reactor. This is the "program" the Allied Legend focuses on, and the one most people think of when they think of the German atom bomb effort. It is the program deliberately inculcated by that Legend as proof of German nuclear incompetence and bungling;22
(2) The I.G. Farben "Buna plant" at Auschwitz, whose relationship to the other programs, and to the SS, is not entirely clear;
22 It should be noted again, however, that the German Army's Ordnance Bureau was in possession of essentially correct estimations of the critical mass for a uranium bomb in early 1942, and that Heisenberg himself after the war suddenly reassumed his commanding position by detailing the construction of the Hiroshima bomb along essentially correct principles, and allegedly from information gleaned only from the BBC!
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(3) The Bagge-Korsching-von Ardenne-Houtermanns circle, developing an array of advanced separation technologies, and apparently, via von Ardenne, tied somehow to, of all things, the German postal service!
Why the Reichspost? For one thing, it afforded an effective cover for the program, which, like its American counterpart, appears to have been compartmentalized under a number of government agencies, many having no plausible connection with a large secret weapons research effort. Secondly, and more significantly, the Reichspost was awash with money, and could therefore have provided some of the massive funding necessary to the project, a true "black budget" operation in every sense. And finally, the head of the Reichspost was, perhaps not coincidentally, an engineer: Dr. Ing. Ohnesorge. It is, from the German point of view, a logical choice. Even his last name, "Ohnesorge", meaning "without sorrow or regret", is an ironic twist to the story.
What was the method of separation and enrichment developed by von Ardenne and Houtermanns? Very simply, it was the cyclotron itself. Von Ardenne had invented a modification of the cyclotron - electromagnetic separation tanks - very similar to Ernst O. Lawrence's "beta calutrons" in the United States. It is to be noted, however, that von Ardenne had completed his modifications in April of 1942, whereas General Groves in the Manhattan Project would not have Lawrence's beta calutron at Oak Ridge for fully a year and a half after that!23 "In addition, the ion plasma source Ardenne had designed for his isotope separator to sublime the uranium compound was far superior to that provided for the calutrons." So efficient, in fact, was Von Ardenne's version as a source for emitting particle rays, that to this day it is known as "the Ardenne source."24
Von Ardenne himself is a mysterious figure, for after the war he was one of the few German scientists to deliberately opt to cooperate with the Soviet Union rather than the Western Allies. His contribution to the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb in 1949
23 Hydrick, op. cit, p. 26. 24 Hydrick, op. cit., p. 27.
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was to earn him the "Stalin Prize" in 1955, the Soviet equivalent to the Nobel Prize. He was the only non-Russian and non-Soviet ever to win the prize.25
In any case, Von Ardenne's work, plus that of the other German scientists working on separation and enrichment - Bagge, Korsching, Harteck and Houtermanns - indicates one thing: that there was a sound and solid basis in Allied wartime estimations of German progress and capabilities, for they were, in mid-1942,
running a dead heat with the Manhattan Project, and were not "far behind" as the post-war Allied Legend would subsequently have us believe.
So what is the likely scenario, as it has emerged thus far? What conclusions may be drawn?
(1) There were several German bomb and enrichment projects, compartmentalized to maintain security, perhaps being coordinated by some as yet or hitherto unknown entity. In any case, it appears that one such serious program was at least nominally being coordinated by the Deutsche Reichspost under its chief, Dr. Ing. Wilhelm Ohnesorge;
(2) The most significant enrichment and separation projects were not being conducted by Heisenberg or his circle, or for that matter, by any of the more "high profile" German scientists, save perhaps Harteck and Diebner. This suggests that perhaps the more famous scientists were being used as "fronts" and being kept out of the loop of the most serious and significant technological achievements as a matter of security. Had they been involved in such efforts and then subsequently kidnapped or assassinated by the Allies - a thought that certainly occurred to the OSS26 - then the German program would have been severely crippled and exposed;
25 Henshall, op. cit, p. 156. 26 Powers, op. cit., pp. 379-382. Samuel Goudsmit was at one point being considered as a member of the team that would attempt to kidnap or assassinate Heisenberg.
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(3) At least three German technologies were arguably more efficient and technologically advanced than their American counterparts: (a) Bagge and Korsching's "isotope sluice"; (b) Harteck's centrifuges and ultra-centrifuges; (c) Von Ardenne's modified cyclotrons, the "Ardenne source";
(4) At least one known facility was large enough in terms of its physical size, labor requirements, and electrical consumption, to have conceivably been sued as a large separation facility, the I.G. Farben "Buna plant" at Auschwitz. The case is strong because: (a) No Buna was ever produced there in spite of thousands of scientists, technicians, engineers, contract and slave laborers working there; (b) The site was close to the uranium ore fields of the Czech and German Sudentenland, being located in Polish Silesia; (c) The site was close to plentiful water supplies, also needed in isotope enrichment; (d) It was close to rail and road networks; (e) It was close to plentiful (slave) labor; (f) And finally -though not yet discussed - it was close to several large underground secret weapons production and research facilities in lower Silesia, and was close to one of the two alleged test sites of German atom bomb tests during the war;
(5) it may reasonably be assumed, in addition to the "Buna factory", that the Germans constructed smaller facilities in the area for separation and enrichment of isotope, using the Buna plant's production as feedstock for these other facilities.27
27 Powers, op. cit., p. 74. Powers also mentions another problematical fact concerning the Clusius-Dickel method of thermal diffusion, that we will encounter in chapter 7: "One pound of U-235 was not a daunting figure, and Frisch calculated that 1,000,000 Clusius-Dickel tubes for thermal diffusion of uranium isotopes could produce it in a matter of weeks. Such a large industrial effo r t would not be cheap, but the two men concluded, 'Even if this plant costs as much as a battleship, it would be worth having.'"
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To round out this unpleasant picture, one must also mention two further interesting facts: Von Ardenne's close associate and theoretical mentor, Dr. Fritz Houtermanns' specialty was thermonuclear fusion, indeed as an astrophysicist, he had staked his claim to fame in physics by
describing precisely the type of nuclear process at work in stars. Interestingly enough, there does exist, from 1938, an Austrian patent for a device known as a "Molecular Bomb," a bomb that upon examination is an early version of a hydrogen bomb. Atomic bombs, of course, supply the necessary heat to get hydrogen atoms
to collide and produce the much more enormous and terrible energies of thermonuclear hydrogen fusion bombs.
Secondly, it may now clearly be seen why, of all the German scientists working on the atom bomb, that Manfred Von Ardenne was the one nuclear scientist that Adolf Hitler most often went
personally to visit.28
In any case, all the evidence points to the conclusion that there was a large, very well-funded, and very secret German isotope enrichment program during the war, a program successfully disguised during the war by the Nazis, and covered-up after war by the Allied Legend. But this too raises its own questions. How close was that program to acquiring sufficient stocks of weapons grade uranium to make a bomb (or bombs). And secondly, why did the Allies after the war go to such stupendous lengths to cover it up?
As a final note to this chapter, and a tantalizing indication of further mysteries that will be investigated subsequently in this work, there is a report, declassified by the National Security Agency only in 1978; the report is apparently a decoded intercept from the Japanese embassy in Stockholm to Tokyo. It is entitled simply
28 Hydrick, op. cit, p. 29. Rose notes that Von Ardenne had written him and stated that he had never tried to persuade the Nazis to develop his process and employ it in large quantities. He then notes that the Siemens company did not develop it (Rose, op. cit., p. 140, n. 38). This would appear to be pure obfuscation on Von Ardenne's part, for it was not Siemens, but I.G. Farben, that had developed the processes and employed them in large amounts at Auschwitz.
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"Reports on the Atom-Splitting Bomh." It is best to cite its amazing contents in their entirety, with their original breaks where they occurred in the text for transmission:
This bomb is revolutionary in its results, and it will completely upset all ordinary precepts of warfare hitherto established. I am sending you, in one group, all those reports on what is called the atomsplitting bomb:
It is a fact that in June of 1943 the German Army tried out an utterly new type of weapon against the Russians at a location 150 kilometers southeast of Kursk. Although it was the entire 19th Infantry Regiment of the Russians which was thus attacked, only a few bombs (each round up to 5 kilograms) sufficed to utterly wipe them out to the last man.
Part 2. The following is according to a statement by LieutenantColonel UE(?) I KENJI, advisor to the attache in Hungary and formerly (?on duty?) in this country, who by chance saw the actual scene immediately after the above took place:
"All the men and the horses (?within the area of?) the explosion of the shells were charred black and even their ammunition had all been detonated. "
Moreover, it is a fact that the same type of war material was tried out in the Crimea, too. At that time the Russians claimed that this was poison-gas, and protested that if Germany were ever again to use it, Russia, too, would use poison-gas.
Part 3. There is also the fact that recently in London - in the period between October and the 15th of November - the loss of life and the damage to business buildings through fires of unknown origin was great. It is clear, judging especially by the articles about a new weapon of this type, which have appeared from time to time recently in British and American magazines - that even our enemy has already begun to study this type.
To generalize on the basis of all these reports: I am convinced that the most important technical advance in the present great war is in the realization of the atom-splitting bomb. Therefore, the central authorities are planning, through research on this type of weapon, to speed up the matter of rendering the weapon practical. And for my part, I am convinced of the necessity for taking urgent steps to effect this end.
Part 4. The following are the facts I have learned regarding its technical data:
■
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Recently the British authorities warned their people of the possibility that they might undergo attacks by German atom-splitting bombs. The American military authorities have likewise warned that the American east coast might be the area chosen for a blind attack by
some sort of flying bomb. It was called the German V-3. To be specific, this device is based on the principle of the explosion of the nuclei of the atoms in heavy hydrogen derived from heavy water. (Germany has a large plant (?for this?) in the vicinity of Rjukan, Norway, which has from time to time been bombed by English planes.). Naturally, there have been plenty of examples even before this of successful attempts at smashing individual atoms. However,
Part 5. as far as the demonstration of any practical results is concerned, they seem not to have been able to split large numbers of atoms in a single group. That is, they require for the splitting of each single atom a force that will disintegrate the electron orbit.
On the other hand, the stuff that the Germans are using has, apparently, a very much greater specific gravity than anything heretofore used. In this connection, allusions have been made to SIRIUS and stars of the "White Dwarf" group. (Their specific gravity is (?6?) 1 thousand, and the weight of one cubic inch is 1 ton.)
In general, atoms cannot be compressed into the nuclear density. However, the terrific pressures and extremes of temperature in the "White Dwarfs" cause the bursting of the atoms; and
Part 6. There are, moreover, radiations from the exterior of these stars composed of what is left of the atoms which are only the nuclei, very small in volume.
According to the English newspaper accounts, the German atomsplitting device is the NEUMAN disintegrator. Enormous energy is directed into the central part of the atom and this generates at atomic pressure of several tons of thousands of tons (sic) per square inch. This device can split the relatively unstable atoms of such elements as uranium. Moreover, it brings into being a store of explosive atomic energy.
A-GENSHI HAKAI DAN. That is, a bomb deriving its force from the release of atomic energy.
The end of this amazing intercept then reads "Inter 12 Dec 44 (1,2) Japanese; Rec'd 12 Dec 44; Trans 14 Dec 44 (3020-B)," apparently references to when the message was intercepted by American intelligence, its original language (Japanese), when the message was
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received, when it was translated (14 Dec 44), and by whom (3020-
B).29 The date of this document - after the lest allegedly seen by
Hans Zinsser and two days before the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge - must have set off alarm bells in the offices of Allied Intelligence personnel both during and after the war. While it is certainly clear that the Japanese attache in Stockholm seems to be somewhat confused bout the nature of nuclear fission, a number of startling things stand out in the document:
(1) The Germans were, according to the report, using weapons of mass destruction of some type on the Eastern Front, but had apparently for some reason refrained from using them on the Western Allies; (a) The areas specifically mentioned were Kursk, in the approximate location of the southern pincer of the German offensive, which took place in July, and not June, of 1943, and the Crimean peninsula; (b)The time mentioned was 1943, though since the only major action to have occurred in the Crimea was in 1942 with the massive German artillery bombardment, one must also conclude that the time frame stretched back into 1942; (At this juncture is it worth pausing to consider briefly the German siege of the Russian fortress of Sevastopol, scene of the most colossal artillery bombardment of the war, as it bears directly on the interpretation of this intercept. The siege was led by Colonel-General (later Field Marshal) Erich Von Manstein's 11th Army. Von Manstein assembled 1,300 artillery pieces - the largest concentration of heavy and super-heavy artillery deployed by any Power during the war - and pounded Sevastopol with this mighty
29Edgar Mayer and Thomas Mehner, Hitler und die ,,Bombe" (Rottenburg: Kopp Verlag, 2002), pp. 110-114, emphasis added, citing "Stockholm to Tokyo, No. 232.9 December 1944 (War Department), National Archives, RG 457, SRA 14628-32, declassified October 1, 1978.
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arsenal twenty-four hours a day for five clays. These were no ordinary heavy field pieces.
Two mortar regiments - the 1st Heavy Mortar Regiment and the 70th Mortar Regiment - as well as the 1st and 4th Mortar Battalions, had been concentrated in front of the fortress under the special command of Colonel Nieman - altogether 21 batteries with 576 barrels, including the batteries of the 1st Heavy Mortar regiment with the 11- and 12 1/2 inch high explosive and incendiary oil shells...
Even these monsters were not the largest pieces deployed at Sevastopol. Several of the 16 1/2 inch "Big Bertha" Krupp cannon and their old Austrian Skoda counterparts were massed against the Russian positions, along with the even more colossal "Karl" and "Thor" mortars, gigantic self-propelled 24 inch mortars firing shells that weighed over two tons.
But even "Karl" was not quite the last word in gunnery. That last word was stationed at Bakhchisary, in the "Palace of Gardens" of the ancient residence of the Tartar Khans, and was called "Dora," or occasionally "Heavy Gustav." It was the heaviest gun of the last war. Its caliber was 31 1/2 inches. Sixty railway carriages were needed to transport the parts of the monster. Its 107-foot barrel ejected high-explosive projectiles of 4800 kg - i.e., nearly five tons - over a distance of 29 miles. Or it could hurl even heavier armour-piercing missiles, weighing seven tons, at targets nearly 24 miles away. The missile together with its cartridge measured nearly twenty-six feet in length. Erect that would be about (the) height of a two-storey house....
These data are sufficient to show that here the conventional gun had been enlarged to gigantic, almost superdimensional scale - indeed, to a point where one might question the economic return obtained from such a weapon. Yet one single round from "Dora" destroyed an ammunition dump in Severnaya Bay at Sevastopol although it was situated 100 feet below ground.30
30 Paul Carrell, Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (Ballantine Books, 1971) pp. 501-503, emphasis added. So horrendous was the bombardment from this
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Why are these details significant? First, note the reference to "incendiary oil shells." These shells are the indication that unusual weaponry was deployed by the Germans at Sevastopol and delivered through conventional - though quite large - artillery pieces. The German Army did possess such shells and deployed the frequently and with no little effectiveness on the Eastern Front.
But might there have been an even more fearsome weapon? In subsequent chapters we will present evidence that the Germans indeed developed an early version of a modern "fuel-air" bomb, a conventional explosive with the explosive power of a tactical nuclear weapon. Given the great weight of such projectiles, and the German lack of sufficient heavy-lift aircraft to deliver them, it is possible if not likely that super-heavy artillery was used to deploy them. This would also explain another curiosity in the Japanese military attache's statement: the Germans apparently did not deploy weapons of mass destruction against cities, but only against military targets that would have been within the range of such weapons. We may now resume with the analysis of the Japanese statement.} (2) The Germans may have been seriously pursuing the hydrogen bomb, since reactions of the nuclei of heavy water atoms - containing deuterium and tritium - are essential in thermonuclear fusion reactions, a point highlighted by the Japanese delegate(though he confuses these reactions with fission reactions of atom bombs), and corroborated by Fritz Houtermans' pre-war work in the thermonuclear fusion process at work in stars;
massed heavy and super-heavy artillery that the German General Staff estimated that over 500 rounds fell on Russian positions per second during the five days' artillery and aerial bombardment, a massive expenditure of ammunition. The rain of steel on the Russian positions pulverized Russian morale and was often so thunderous that eardrums burst. At the end of the battle, the city and environs of Sevastopol were ruined, two entire Soviet armies had been obliterated, and over 90,000 prisoners were taken, (pp. 501-502, 511)
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(3) The enormous temperatures of at o m bombs are used as
detonators in conventional hydrogen bombs; (4) In desperation the Russians appeal to have been ready to
resort to the use of poison gas against the Germans if they did not "cease and desist"; (5) The Russians believe the weapons to have been "poison gas" of some sort, either a cover story put out by the Russians, or a result of field reports being made by Russian soldiers who were ignorant of the type of weapon deployed against them;31 and finally, and most sensationally, ( 6 ) According to the Japanese cable, the Germans appeared to have gained their specialized knowledge via some connection to the star system of Sirius and that knowledge involved some exotic form of very dense matter, a statement that strains credulity even today. It is this last point that directs our attention to the most fantastic and arcane recesses of wartime German secret weapons research, tor if the allegation has even a partial basis in truth, then it indicates that at some highly secret level, physics, and the esoteric, were being pursued by the Nazi regime in some very extraordinary ways.32 In this regard it is important to note that the extreme density of the material described by the Japanese envoy resembles nothing so much as a construct of modern post-war theoretical physics called "dark matter". In all likelihood his report greatly overestimates the mass of this material - if it existed at all - but nonetheless it is crucial to observe that it is material far beyond the ordinary density of matter.
31 The detail of "charred bodies" and exploded ammunition certainly point to non-conventional weaponry. A fuel-air device would at least account for the charring. The tremendous heat produced by such a bomb could also conceivably detonate ammunition. Likewise, radioactive burns with its characteristic blistering effects might well have been misunderstood by Russian field soldiers and officers, who would most likely not have been familiar with nuclear energy, as the effects of poison gas.
32 To anyone familiar with the wealth of material on alternative research into the Giza compound in Egypt, the reference to Sirius will immediately conjure images of Egyptian religion, its preoccupation with death, with the Osiris myth, and to the Sirian star system.
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Strangely, the German-Sirian connection pops up again, long alter the war, in an unusual context. In my previous book, The Giza Death Star Deployed, I mentioned the research of Robert Temple into the mysterious African Dogon tribe, a tribe of primitive peoples that nonetheless appears to have preserved an accurate knowledge of the Sirian star system for many generations, from a period long before modern astronomy knew anything about it. In that book, I noted that
Temple also alleges serious Soviet KGB and American CIA and NSA interest in his book.... An odd mention, perhaps significant in the light of our later discussion of possible German involvement in scalar physics research during World War Two and after, is Temple's allegation that Baron Jesco von Puttkamer wrote him a denunciatory letter on NASA stationary, only later to retract that, stating that it did not represent an official NASA position. Temple believes that Puttkamer was one of the Germans brought to the USA during the notorious Operation Paper Clip in the days immediately following the Nazi surrender (pp. 9-10).33
As I then go on to observe in that book, Karl Jesco von Puttkamer was no ordinary German, being a member of Adolf Hitler's military staff throughout the war as his naval adjutant to staff, beginning the war with the rank of captain and ending with the rank of admiral. Puttkamer was subsequently employed by NASA.
So the investigation of the German atom bomb, via this recently declassified Japanese cable, has already led us far afield, into a realm of frightening potentialities, into a world of fuel-air bombs, gigantic artillery delivery systems, super-dense matter, the hydrogen bomb, and what seems to be a curious blend of mystical esotericism and Egyptology, and physics.
Was there a German bomb? In the above context, the question seems almost plain and ordinary. If so, then given the extraordinary reports that leaked out from time to time from the Eastern Front, what other even more secret research lay behind their atom bomb projects, for evidently such research there was?
33 Joseph P. Farrell, The Giza Death Star Deployed (Kempton, Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2003, p. 81).

But exotic super dense matter or not, according to some versions of the Allied Legend, the Germans never had enough fissile weapons grade uranium to begin with. We will now investigate the problem of the "missing uranium."
"Heavy Gustav " or "Dora " the 31 1/2 Monster that Hurled Five and Seven Ton Projectiles Against Sevastopol:
Were they Conventional Rounds, or Fuel-Air Bombs? 51

3.
U-234, U235, AND THE STRANGE CASE OF THE MISSING
URANIUM
"The traditional history denies, however, that the uranium on board U-234 was enriched and therefore easily usable in an atomic bomb. The accepted theory asserts there is no evidence that the uranium stocks of U-234 were transferred into the Manhattan Project... And the traditional history asserts that the bomb components on board (the) U-234 arrived too late to be included in the atomic
bombs that were dropped on Jepan. "The documentation indicates quite differently on all accounts. " Carter P. Hydrick, Critical Mass: The Real Story of the Atomic Bomb and the
Birth of the Nuclear Age.'
In December of 1944, an unhappy report is made to some unhappy people: "A study of the shipment of (bomb grade uranium) for the past three months shows the following....: At present rate we will have 10 kilos about February 7 and 15 kilos about May 1."2 This was bad news indeed, for a uranium based atom bomb required between 10-100 kilograms by the earliest estimates (ca. 1942), and, by the time this memo was written, about 50 kilos, the more accurate calculation of critical mass needed to make an atom bomb from uranium.
One may imagine the consternation this memo must have caused at headquarters. The was, perhaps, a considerable degree of yelling and screaming and finger pointing and other histrionics, interlarded with desperate orders to re-double efforts amid the firetinged skies of the war's Wagnerian Gotterdammerung.
1 Carter Hydrick, Critical Mass: the Real Story of the Atomic Bomb and the Birth of the Nuclear Age, Internet published manuscript, www.3dshort.com/nazibomb2/CRITICALMASS.txt, 1998, p. 6.
2 Ibid., p. 11.
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The problem, however, is that the memo is not German at all. It originates within the Manhattan Project on December 28, 1944, from Eric Jette, the chief metallurgist at Los Alamos. One may imagine the desperation it must have triggered, however, since the Manhattan Project had consumed two billion dollars all in the pursuit of plutonium and uranium atom bombs. By this time it was of course apparent that there were significant and seemingly insurmountable problems in designing a plutonium bomb, for the fuses available to the Allies were simply far too slow to achieve the uniform compression of a plutonium core within the very short span of time needed to initiate uncontrolled nuclear fission.
That left the uranium bomb as the more immediately feasible alternative - as the Germans had discovered years earlier - to the acquisition of a functioning weapon within the projected span of the war. Yet, after a veritable hemorrhage of dollars in pursuit of the latter objective, the Manhattan Project was far short of the necessary critical mass for a uranium bomb. And with the inevitability of an invasion of Japan looming, the pressure on General Leslie Groves to produce results was immense.
The lack of a sufficient stockpile, after years of concerntrated all-out effort, was in part explainable, for two years earlier Fermi had been successful in construction of the first functioning atomic reactor. That success had spurred the American project to commit more seriously to the pursuit of a plutonium bomb. Accordingly, some of the precious and scarce refined and enriched uranium 235 coming out of Oak Ridge and Lawrence's beta calutrons was being siphoned off as feedstock for enrichment and transmutation into plutonium in the breeder reactors constructed at Handford, Washington for the purpose. Thus, some of the fissionable uranium stockpile had been deliberately diverted for plutonium production.3 The decision was a logical one and the Manhattan Project decisionmakers cannot be faulted to taking it. The reason is simple. Pound for weapons grade pound, a pound of plutonium will produce more bombs than a pound of uranium. It thus made economic sense to convert enriched uranium to plutonium, for more bombs would be possible with the same amount of material.
3 Hydrick, op. cit, p. 12.
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But in December of 1944, having pursued both options, General Leslie Groves now stood on the verge of losing both gambles. And let us not forget what had just happened in I urope to sour the mood of "those in the know" in the United States even further. There, six months after the Allied landings in Normandy and the headlong dash across France, Allied armies had stalled on the borders of the Reich. Allied intelligence analysts confidently reassured the generals that no further significant German military offensive was possible, and their optimism was reflected in the general mood of the citizenry in France, Britain, and the United States. The mood was brutally shattered when, on December 16, 1944, the German Army and Luftwaffe mounted one last, desperate offensive with secretly husbanded reserves in the Ardennes forest, scene of their 1940 triumph against France. Within a matter of hours, the offensive had broken through American lines, surrounded, captured, or otherwise decimated the entire 116th American infantry division, and days later, surrounded the 101st Airborne division at Bastogne, and appeared well on the way to crossing the Meuse River at Namur. On December 28, 1944, when the memo was written, the German offensive had been stalled, but not stopped.
For the Allied officers privy to intelligence reports and "in the loop" on the Manhattan Project, the offensive was possibly seen as confirmation of their worst fears: the Germans were close to a bomb, and were trying to buy time. The horrible thought in the back of every Allied scientist's and engineer's head must have been that after all the Allied military successes of the previous years, the race for the bomb could still be won by the Germans. And if they were able to produce enough of them to put unbearable pressure on any one of the Western Allies, the outcome of the war itself was still in doubt. If, for example, the Germans had a-bombed British and French cities, it is unlikely that a continuance of the would have been politically feasible for Churchill's wartime coalition government. In all likelihood it would have collapsed. A similar result would have likely occurred in France. And without British and French bases available for supply and forward deployment, the
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American military situation on the continent would have become untenable, if not disastrous.
In any case, word of the Manhattan Project's difficulties apparently leaked in the Washington DC political community, for United States Senator James F. Byrnes got in on the act, writing a memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and confirming that the Manhattan Project was perceived - at least by some in the know - as being in danger of failure:
SECRET March 3, 1945
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT
FROM: JAMES F. BYRNES
I understand that the expenditures for the Manhattan project are approaching 2 billion dollars with no definite assurance yet of production.
We have succeeded to date in obtaining the cooperation of Congressional Committees in secret meetings. Perhaps we can continue to do so while the war lasts.
However, if the project proves a failure, it will be subjected to relentless criticism.4
Senator Brynes' memorandum highlights the real problem in the Manhattan Project, and the real, though certainly not publicly known, military situation of the Allies ca. late 1944 and early 1945: that in spite of tremendous conventional military success against the Third Reich, the Western Allies and Soviet Russia could conceivably still be forced to a "draw" if Germany deployed and used atom bombs in sufficient numbers to affect the political situation of the Western Allies. With its stockpile of enriched uranium already depleted by the decision to develop more plutonium for a bomb (which as it turned out was undetonatable
4 Memorandum of US Senator James F. Byrnes to President Frankliin D. Roosevelt, March 3, 1945, cited in Harald Fath, Geheime Kommandosache - S III Jonastal und die Siegeswaffenproduktion: Weitere spurensuche nach Thuringens Manhattan Project (Schleusingen: Amun Verlag, 2000), p. 41.
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with existing British and American fuse technology anyway) and far below that needed for a uranium-based atom bomb, "the entire enterprise
Senator Byrnes' March 1945 Memorandum to President Roosevelt
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appeared destined for defeat."5 Not only defeat, but for "those in the know" in late 1944 and early 1945, the possibility was one of ignominious defeat and horrible carnage.
If the stocks of weapons grade uranium ca. late 1944 - early 1945 were about half of what they needed to be after two years of research and production, and if this in turn was the cause of Senator Byrnes' concern, how then did the Manhattan Project acquire the large remaining amount or uranium 235 needed in the few months from March to the dropping of the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima in August, only five months away? How did it accomplish this feat, if in feet after some three years of production it had only produced less than half of the needed supply of critical mass weapons grade uranium? Where did its missing uranium 235 come from? And how did it solve the pressing problem of the fuses for a plutonium bomb?
Of course the answer if that if the Manhattan Project was incapable of producing enough enriched uranium in that short amount of time - months rather than years - then its stocks had to have been supplemented from external sources, and there is only one viable place with the necessary technology to enrich uranium on that scale, as seen in the previous chapter. That source was Nazi Germany. But the Manhattan Project is not the only atom bomb project with some missing uranium.
Germany too appears to have suffered the "missing uranium syndrome" in the final days prior to and immediately after the end of the war. But the problem in Germany's case is that the missing uranium it not a few tens of kilos, but several hundred tons. At this juncture, it is worth citing Carter Hydrick's excellent research at length, in order to exhibit the full ramifications of this problem:
From June of 1940 to the end of the war, Germany seized 3,500 tons of uranium compounds from Belgium - almost three times the amount Groves had purchased.... and stored it in salt mines in Strassfurt, Germany. Groves brags that on 17 April, 1945, as the war was winding down, Alsos recovered some 1,100 tons of uranium ore from Strassfurt and an additional 31 tons in Toulouse, France ..... And he claims that the amount recovered was all that Germany had ever held, asserting, therefore, that Germany had never had enough raw material
5 Hydrick, op. cit, p. 13.
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to process the uranium either for a plutonium reactor pile or through magnetic separation techniques.
Obviously, if Strassfurt once held 3,500 tons and only 1,130 were recovered, some 2,370 tons of uranium ore was unaccounted for - still twice the amount the Manhattan Project possessed and is assumed to have used throughout its entire wartime effort.... The material has not been accounted for to this day....
As early as the summer of 1941, according to historian Margaret Gowing, Germany had already refined 600 tons of uranium to its oxide form, the form required for ionizing the material into a gas, in which form the uranium isotopes could then be magnetically or thermally separated or the oxide could be reduced to a metal for a reactor pile. In fact, Professor Dr. Riehl, who was responsible for all uranium throughout Germany during the course of the war, says the figure was actually much higher....
To create either a uranium or plutonium bomb, at some point uranium must be reduced to metal. In the case of plutonium, U238is metalicized; for a uranium bomb, U235 is metalicized. Because of uranium's difficult characteristics, however, this metallurgical process is a tricky one. The United States struggled with the problem early and still was not successful reducing uranium to its metallic form in large production wuantities until late in 1942. The German technicians, however,... by the end of 1940, had already processed 280.6 kilograms into metal, over a quarter of a ton.6
These observations require some additional commentary. First, it is to be noted that Nazi Germany, by the best available evidence, was missing approximately two thousand tons of unrefined uranium ore by the war's end. Where did this ore go?
Second, it is clear that Nazi Germany was enriching uranium on a massive scale, having refined 600 tons to oxide form for potential metalicization as early as 1940. This would require a large and dedicated effort, with thousands of technicians, and a commensurately large facility or facilties to accomplish the enrichment. The figures, in other words, tend to corroborate the hypothesis outlined in the previous chapter that the I.G. Farben "Buna" factory at Auschwitz was not a Buna factory at all, but a huge uranium enrichment facility. However, the date would imply
6 Hydrick, op. cit., p. 23, emphasis added.
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another such facility, located elsewhere, since the Auschwitz facility did not really begin production until sometime in 1942.
Finally, it also seems clear that the Germans possessed an enormous stock of metallic uranium. But what was the isotope? Was it U238 for further enrichment and separation into U235, was it intended perhaps as feedstock for a reactor to be transmuted into plutonium, or was it already U235, the necessary material for a uranium atom bomb? Given the statements of the Japanese military attache in Stockholm cited at the end of the previous chapter - that the Germans may have used an atomic or some other weapon of mass destruction on the Eastern Front ca. 1942-43, and given Zinsser's affidavit cited in the first chapter of an atom bomb test in October of 1944, it cannot be conclusively denied that some of this enormous stockpile may also have been U235, the essential component for a bomb.
In any case, these figures strongly suggest that the Germans, ca. 1940-1942 were significantly ahead of the Allies in one very important aspect of atom bomb production: the enrichment of uranium, and therefore, this suggests also that they were demonstrably ahead in the race for an actual functioning atom bomb during this period. But the figures also raise another disturbing question: where did this uranium go?
One answer lies in the mysterious case of a U-boat, the U-234, captured by the Americans in 1945.
***
The case of the U-234 is well-known in literature about the Nazi atom bomb, and of course the Allied Legend is that none of the material on board the U-boat found its way into the American atom bomb project.
None of this could be further from the truth. The U-234 was a very large mine-laying U-boat that had been adapted as an undersea freighter to carry large cargoes. Consider then the following "cargo manifest" of the U-234's very odd cargo:
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(1) Two Japanese ollicers;7 (2) 80 gold-lined cylinders containing 560 kilograms of uranium
oxide;8 (3) Several wooden cases or barrels full of "water"; ( 4 ) I nfrared proximity fuses;
(5) Dr. Heinz Schlicke, inventor of the fuses.
When the U-234 was being loaded with its cargo in Germany for the outward voyage, its radio operator, Wolfgang Hirschfeld, observed the two Japanese officers writing "U235" on the paper wrapping of the cylinders prior to their being loaded into the submarine.9 Needless to say, this observation has called forth the full range of debunking techniques normally applied by skeptics to UFO sightings: low sun angles, poor lighting, distance was to great
to see clearly, etc. etc. This is no surprise, for if Hirschfeld saw what he saw, then the enormous implications were obvious.
The use of gold lined cylinders is explainable by the fact that uranium, a highly corrosive metal, is easily contaminated if it comes into contact with other unstable elements. Gold, whose radioactive shielding properties are as great as lead, is also, unlike lead, a highly pure and stable element, and is therefore the element of choice
when storing or shipping highly enriched and pure uranium for long periods of time, such as a voyage.10 Thus, the uranium oxide on board the U-234 was highly enriched uranium, and most likely, highly enriched U235, the last stage, perhaps, before being reduced to weapons grade or to metalicization for a bomb (if it was already in weapons grade purity). Indeed, if the Japanese officers' labels on
7 The two officers were Air Force Colonel Genzo Shosi, an engineer, and Navy Captain Hideo Tomonaga. When the captain of the U-234 made known his intentions to surrender the submarine, which was then en route to Japan after the German surrender, the two Japanese officers committed hari-kiri, and were buried at sea with full military honors by the Germans.
8 Hydrick's comment on the U-234's cargo manifest explains why the U234 was off limits to the American press following its surrender: "Whoever first read the entry and understood the frightening capabilities and potential purpose of uranium must have been stunned by the entry." (op. cit, p. 7)
9 Hydrick, op. cit., p. 5. 10 Ibid., p. 8.
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the cylinders were accurate, it is likely that it was at the final stage of purity before metallicization.
The cargo of the U-234 was so sensitive, in fact, that when the U.S. Navy prepared its own cargo manifest for the German submarine on June 16, 1945, the uranium oxide had entirely disappeared from the list.11 Significantly, within a week of the appearance of the U.S. Navy's version of the U-234's cargo manifest, Oak Ridge's output of enriched uranium very nearly doubled.12 This in itself is highly suspect, since as late as March of 1945, as we have already seen, a U.S. Senator is worried about the failure of the Manhattan Project, so much so that he writes President Roosevelt a memorandum on the subject, and of course, we have also already seen that the chief metallurgist of Los Alamos laboratory indicates the stock of fissile U235 is far short of the needed critical mass, and would remain so for several months.
The conclusion is therefore simple, but frightening: the missing uranium used in the Manhattan Project was German, and that means that Nazi Germany's atom bomb project was much further along that the post-war Allied Legen would have us believe.
But what of the other two items in the U-234's strange cargo manifest, the fuses and their inventor, Dr. Heinz Schilcke? We have already noted that by late 1944 and early 1945, the American plutonium bomb project had run afoul of some nasty mathematics: the critical mass of a plutonium bomb, "imploded" or compressed by surrounding conventional explosives, would have to be assembled within 1/3000th of a second, otherwise the bomb would fail, and only produce a kind of "atomic fizzling firecracker", a "radiological" bomb producing very little explosion but a great deal of deadly radiation. This was a speed far in excess of the capabilities of conventional wire cabling and the ordinary fuses available to the Allied engineers.
It is known that late in the timetable of events leading to the Trinity test of the plutonium bomb in New Mexico that a design modification was introduced to the implosion device that incorporated "radiation venting channels", allowing radiation from
11 Hydride, op. cit., p. 9. 12 Ibid., p. 11
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the plutonium core to escape and reflect off the surrounding reflectors as the detonator was fired, within billionths of a second a f t e r t h e beginning of compression. There is no possible way to explain this modification other than by the incorporation of Dr. Schlicke's infrared proximity fuses into the final design of the
American bomb, since they enabled the fuses to react and fire are the speed of light.13
In support of this historical reconstruction, there is a communication from May 25, 1945 from the chief of Naval Operations, to Portsmouth where the U-234 was brought after its surrender, indicating that Dr. Schlicke, now a prisoner of war, would be accompanied by three naval officers, to secure the fuses and bring them to Washington.14 There Dr. Schlicke was apparently to give a lecture on the fuses under the auspices of a "Mr. Alvarez,"15 who would appear to be none other than wellknown Manhattan Project scientist Dr. Luis Alvarez, the very man who, according to the Allied Legend, "solved" the fusing problem for the plutonium bomb!16
So it would appear that the surrender of the U-234 to the Americans in 1945 solved the Manhattan Project's two biggest outstanding problems: lack of sufficient supplies of weapons grade uranium, and lack of adequate fusing technology to make a plutonium bomb work. And thhis means that in the final analysis the Allied Legend about the Germans having been "far behind" the Allies in the race for the atom bomb is simply a incorrect in the extreme in the best case, or a deliberate lie in the worst. But the fuses raise another frightening specter: What were the Germans developing such highly sophisticated fuses for? Infrared heatseeking rockets, which they had developed, would be one answer,
13 Q.v. Hydrick, op. cit, pp. 46-51, for a detailed discussion of this issue and the historical problems it poses for the Allied Legend.
14 Ibid., p. 46. 15 Ibid. 16 As I observed in my previous book, The Giza Death Star Deployed, Dr. Luis Alvarez also had some other strange distinctions to his credit, being one of the scientists allegedly involved with the alleged Roswell "UFO" crash, the CIA's subsequent "Robertson Panel" in the 1950s on UFOs and government policy, and subsequent cosmic ray experiments inside the 2nd Pyramid at Giza.
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and of course an implosion device to compress critical mass would be another.
But what about the other missing German uranium mentioned previously? The mission of the U-234 and its precious cargo thus raises certain other questions, and highlights other possibilities in this regard. It is a fact that throughout the war Germany and Japan both conducted long-range exchanges of officers and technology via aircraft and submarine - the exchange of technology being mostly a one-sided affair from Germany to Japan. It is conceivable that many of these voyages - just as with the U-234 - would have included similar transfers of uranium stocks and high technology to Japan. Some of the missing uranium must therefore surely be looked for in the Far East, in the Japanese atom bomb program.17
Similarly, during the war both Germany and Italy undertook long-range flights to Japan, the Germans using their special longrange heavy lift transport aircraft such as the Ju-290 for polar flights. It is conceivable that these flights and their Italian counterparts also involved the exchange of officers and technology, if not a small amount of raw material as well. Some of the missing uranium probably also fell into the hands of the Soviets as the Russian armies steamrollered into Eastern Europe and finally into what would become the Soviet "eastern" zone of occupation in Germany.
But why, after traveelling under radio silence from Germany, did the U-234 finally surrender its precious uranium, fuses, and "water", when its obvious destination was Japan? This is an intriguing question, and one taht unfortunately cannot be answered here except briefly. Again, Carteer Hydrick's superb research elaborates one highly probable hypothesis: U-234 was handed over to the US authorities on the orders of none other than Martin Bormann, in a maneuver designed to secure his and others' freedom after the war, and as part of a deliberate plan to continue Nazism and its agendas and research underground.18 It is thus, on this view,
17Q.v. chapter 7. 18 Q.v. part two. The allegation that Bormann's action was a component of this plan is my own, and not Hydrick's although Hydrick also clearly suggests a connection. This "Bormann hypothesis" of the events leading up to the U-234's
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the first visible, and crucial, element of the emerging Operation Paperclip, the transfer of technology ami scientists from the collapsing Third Reich to the United States. There, the German scientists and engineers could, would, and did continue their lines of esoter i c research and development of high technology and sophisticated weaponry, with a similar moral and ideological effect on the culture at large as occurred in Nazi Germany.
And finally, of course, as we have already seen, some of the missing uranium ended up in the German atom bomb program itself, enriched, and refined, and probably assembled and tested - if not used - in actual bombs themselves.
surrender is a major component of Hydrick's work, spanning several pages of meticulous research.
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4.
,,MEIN HUT ER HAT DREI ECKEN";
THE TEST SITES
"We still have things that need to be finished, and when they are finished, they will turn the tide "
Adolf Hitler, March 13, 1945, addressing officers of the German Ninth Army.
A. An Unusual Exchange at Nuremberg
At the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals after the war, an amazing exchange occurred between former architect cum Nazi minister of armaments, Albert Speer, and Mr. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor.
JACKSON: Now, I have certain information, which was placed in my hands, of an experiment which was carried out near Auschwitz and I would like to ask you if you heard about it or knew about it.
The purpose of the experiment was to find a quick and complete way of destroying people without the delay and trouble of shooting and gassing and burning, as it had been carried out, and this is the experiment, as I am advised.
A village, a small village was provisionally erected, with temporary structures, and in it approximately 20,000 Jews were put. By means of this newly invented weapon of destruction, these 20,000 people were eradicated almost instantaneously, and in such a way that there was no trace left of them; that is developed, the explosive developed, temperatures of from 400 degrees to 500 degrees centigrade and destroyed them without leaving any trace at all.
Do you know about that experiment? SPEER: No, and I consider it utterly improbable. If we had had such a weapon under preparation, I should have known about it. But we did not have such a weapon. It is clear that in chemical warfare attempts were made on both sides to carry out research on all the weapons one
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could think of, because one did not know which party would start chemical warfare first...1
This exchange is remarkable in several respects, not the least of which is that its "explosive contents" are almost entirely overlooked in standard histories of the war and its aftermath.
Previous chapters have presented evidence that there was a large, and very secret, uranium enrichment program inside Nazi Germany, beginning sometime ca. late 1940 or early 1941, and continuing, apparently unabated - as the surrender of the U-234
w o u l d imply - right up to the end of the war. Zinsser's affidavit goes further, and alleges an actual atom bomb test, complete with descriptions of all the signatures of an atom bomb: mushroom cloud, electromagnetic pulse effects, and continued combustion of nuclear materials in the cloud. The Japanese military attache in Stockholm further corroborated the story with undeniably fantastic allegations of the German use of some type of weapon of mass destruction on the Eastern Front ca. 1942 (the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimea), to 1943, just days prior to the massive German offensive at Kursk.
Now, at Nuremberg, we have a third corroboration of the use of some type of weapon of awesome explosive power in the east by the Germans, this time from no less an individual than the chief American prosecutor at the Tribunal. And in his case, it is apparent that he is relating information gathered by intelligence. It is worth pausing to consider the implications of the exchange between Jackson and former armaments Reichminister Speer.
We shall begin with Speer. Albert Speer was successor to Dr. Fritz Todt as minister of armaments and production for the entire Third Reich. Speer's accomplishments are not to be gainsaid, it was largely owing to his efforts to organize the huge Nazi industrial capacity and streamline its efficiency that the wartime production of Germany increased dramatically under his oversight. In fact, in all
1 Cited in Harald Fath, Geheime Kommandosache - S III Jonastal und die Siegeswaffenproduktion: Weitere Spurensuche nach Thuringens Manhattan Project (Schleusingen: Amun Verlag, 1999), pp. 82-83. Original text cited in English.
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pertinent areas of German industrial war production, Specr managed to achieve peak production levels in all categories during the same precise period that Allied strategic bombing also was at its height.
His methods in achieving this feat were simple but effective: German industry was decentralized and dispersed into smaller plants, and, to the extent possible, moved into underground bombproof factories. "Modular" construction techniques were employed wherever possible. For example, German U-boats were produced in modular fashion, in sections, far inland in such factories, and transported to ports for final assembly. The deadly Type XXI Uboats with their exotic and revolutionary underwater propulsion systems - allowing an underwater cruising speed in excess of 21 knots, an unheard of speed for that time - were produced in this fashion at the end of the war.
But notably absent from Speer's comments is any indication that he was even aware of the huge extent of the German atombomb project and its enormous uranium enrichment program. Lofty as his position in the Nazi hierarchy was, it would appear that Speer was entirely in the dark on the programs and totally oblivious to any progress that had been made. The reason for Speer's ignorance will be addressed in due course (and by Speer himself!), but suffice it to say, the German government, like its American counterpart, had rigidly "compartmentalized" its atom bomb production program and placed it under the tightest security. But clearly, by the time of the exchange between Jackson and him, Speer and the whole world had heard of the atom bomb. So Speer appears to obfuscate his answer somewhat by redirecting the topic to chemical warfare.
The question of a revolutionary chemical explosive is not, however, as far-fetched as it might at first seem, for Jackson's comments suggest it by referring to temperatures of 400 to 500 degrees centigrade, far below the enormous temperatures produced by an atomic explosion. Was Speer obfuscating his answer, or was Jackson his question?
The prosecutor's statements and question also corroborate in loose fashion another component of our developing story, for he
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clearly alludes to the use of some type of weapon of mass destruction, possessed of enormous explosive power, in the east, and significantly, at or near Auschwitz, site of the I.G. Farben "Buna factory." It is to be noted that the Nazis had apparently gone so Far as to build an entire mock town and placed concentration camp inmates in it, an obvious though barbaric move to study the effects of the weapon on structures and people. His statements, along with those of the Japanese military attache in Stockholm cited in the previous chapter, afford a serious clue - and one often overlooked even by researchers into this 'alternative history" of the war - into the nature of the Nazi's secret weapons development and use, for it would appear that insofar as the third Reich possessed weapons of mass destruction of extraordinary power, atomic or otherwise, they were tested and used against enemies consider by the Nazi ideology to be racially inferior, and that means, in effect, they were used on the Eastern Front theater of the Reich's military operations.
Thus we are also afforded a speculative answer to the allimportant question: If the Germans had the bomb, why didn't they use it? And the answer is, if they had it, they were far more likely to use it on Russia than on the Western allies, since the war in the East was conceived and intended by Hitler to be a genocidal war from the outset. And it certainly was that: fully one half of the approximately fifty million fatalities of World War Two were inflicted by the efficient Nazi war machine on Soviet Russia.
The use of such weapons on the Eastern Front by the Germans would also tentatively explain why more is not known about it, for it is highly unlikely that Stalin's Russia would have publicly acknowledged the fact. To do so would have been a propaganda disaster for Stalin's government. Faced with an enemy of superior tactical and operational competence in conventional arms, the Red Army often had to resort to threats of execution against its own soldiers just to maintain order and discipline in its ranks and prevent mass desertion. Acknowledgment of the existence and use of such weapons by the mortal enemy of Communist Russia could conceivably have ruined Russian morale and cost Stalin the war, and perhaps even toppled his government. As we proceed further
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into our investigation of German secret weaponry, its connection to Nazi ideology, and its use on the eastern front, we will encounter more and more examples of the strange story or event.
For now, however, we note the strangely ambiguous quality of Mr. Jackson's remarks. "Now I have," he begins, "'certain' information, which was placed in my hands, of an experiment which was carried out near Auschwitz..." By the time Mr. Jackson uttered these remarks, Hans Zinsser's statements were almost a year old, raising the possibility that Zinsser's affidavit may itself have been the "certain information" alluded to by Jackson, who may have intentionally altered its correct location. In this regard, it is significant that Zinsser expressed mystification that the test took place so close to a populated area. If Jackson deliberately altered the location of the test, he did not alter the nature of its victims. But another possibility is that the event took place where he says it did, "near" Auschwitz.
B. A Marshal, Mussolini, and the First Alleged Test Site at Rugen Island
The question of the location of a possible German atom bomb test comes from five very unlikely sources: an Italian officer, a Russian marshal's translator, and Benito Mussolini himself, an American heavy cruiser, and an island off the coast of northern Germany in the Baltic Sea.
Before he and his mistress Clara Petacci were murdered by Communist partisans, and then later hung from meat hooks in Milan to be pelted with rocks from an angry mob. Benito Mussolini, by the end of the war reduced to a mere puppet of Hitler and governing a "Fascist republic" in German-controlled northern Italy, spoke often of the German "wonder weapons":
The wonder weapons are the hope. It is laughable and senseless for us to threaten at this moment, without a basis in reality for these threats.
The well-known mass destruction bombs are nearly ready. In only a few days, with the utmost meticulous intelligence, Hitler will probably execute this fearful blow, because he will have full
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confidence.... It appear, that there are three bombs - and each has an astonishing operation. The construction of each unit is fearfully complex and of a lengthy time of completion.2
It would be easy to dismiss Mussolini's statements as more delusional and insane ravings of a fascist dictator facing defeat, clinging desperately to forlorn hopes and tattered dreams. It would be easy, were it but for the weird corroboration supplied by one Piotr Ivanovitch Titarenko, a former military translator on the staff of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, who handled the Japanese capitulation to Russia at the end of the war. As reported in the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1992, Titarenko wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In it, he reported that there were actually three
bombs dropped on Japan, one of which, dropped on Nagasaki prior to i t s actual bombing, did not explode. This bomb was handed over by Japan to the Soviet Union.3
Mussolini and a Soviet marshal's military translator are not the only ones corroborating the strange number of "three bombs", for yet a fourth bomb may actually have been in play at one point, being transported to the Far East on board the US heavy cruiser Indianapolis (CA 35), when the latter sank in 1945.4
These strange testimonies call into question once again the Allied Legend, for as has been seen, the Manhattan Project in late 1944 and early 1945 faced critical shortages of weapons grade uranium, and had yet to solve the fusing problem for the plutonium bomb. So the question is, if these reports are true, where did the extra bomb(s) come from? That three, and possibly four, bombs were ready for use on Japan so quickly would seem to stretch
2 Benito Mussolini, "Political Testament," April 22, 1945, cited in Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, Hitler und die ,,Bombe": Welchen Stand erreichte die deutsche Atomforschung und Geheimwaffenentwicklung wirklich? (Rottenburg: Kopp Verlag, 2002), p. 87, my translation from the German.
3 Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe: Gewann Hitlers Wissenschaftler den nuklearen Wettlauf doch? Die Geheimprojekte bei Innsbruck, im Raum Jonastal bei Arnstadt und in Prag. (Rottenburg: Kopp Verlag, 2001), p. 146.
4 Fath, op. cit., p. 81
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credulity, unless these bombs were w a r booty, brought from Europe.
But the strangest evidence of all comes from the German island of Rugen, and the testimony of Italian officer Luigi Romersa, an eyewitness to the test of a German atom bomb on the island on the night of 11-12 October, 1944, approximately the same time frame as indicated in Zinsser's affidavit, and it is also the same approximate area as Zinsser indicated.
In this context it is also extremely curious that this time frame in 1944 was, for the Allies, a banner year for atomic bomb scares. On Saturday, August 11, 1945, an article in the London Daily Telegraph reported British preparations for German atom bomb attack on London the previous year.
NAZIS' ATOM BOMB PLANS BRITAIN READY A YEAR AGO
Britain prepared for the possibility of an atomic attack on this country by Germany in August, 1944.
It can now be disclosed that details of the expected effect of such a bomb were revealed in a highly secret memorandum which was sent that summer to the chiefs of Scotland Yard, chief constables of provincial forces and senior officials of the defence services.
An elaborate scheme was drawn up by the Ministry of Home Security for prompt and adequate measures to cope with the widespread devastation and heavy casualties if the Germans succeeded in launching atomic bombs on this country.
Reports received from our agents on the Continent early last year indicated that German scientists were experimenting with an atomic bomb in Norway. According to these reports the bomb was launched by catapult, and had an explosive radius of more than two miles.
In view of our own progress in devising an 'atomic' bomb the Government gave the reports serious consideration. Thousands of men and women of the police and defence services were held in readiness for several months until reliable agents in Germany reported that the bomb had been tested and proved a failure.5
5 "Nazis Atom Bomb Plans," London Daily Telegraph, Saturday, August 11, 1945, cited in Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, Hitler und die ,,Bombe", p. 37.
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The August 1945 London Daily Telegraph Article about a 1944 German Atom Bomb Scare in Britain
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This article, coming as it does a mere two days after the bombing of Nagasaki, and almost a year since the actual alert in Britain was called, deserves careful scrutiny.
First, and most obviously, the alert in Britain was apparently conducted entirely in secret, as law enforcement, defense, and medical personnel were placed on high alert. The reason for security is obvious, since to have signaled a public alert would have notified the Germans that there were Allied spies close enough to the German bomb program to know about its tests.
Second, the site of the alleged test - Norway - is unusual in that the timing of the test would place it a full two years after the British commando raid on the Norsk heavy water plant at Ryukon. This might indicate two things:
(1) It might indicate that Hitler's interest in maintaining troops in Norway had more to do with the German atom bomb project than anything else, since, if the report was accurate to begin with, it would indicate a large scale German atom bomb effort was underway there;
(2) Conversely, the report may have been deliberately inaccurate, i.e., there may really have been a test, but one that took place somewhere else.
Third, the presumed "alert" continued from August 1944 "for several months," that is, the alert could conceivably have stretched into October, i.e., into the time frame of the test mentioned in Zinsser's affidavit. Thus, the news account indicates something else: Allied intelligence was aware, and genuinely fearful, of German atom bomb testing.
Fourth, the article mentions that the test concerned a bomb launched from a "catapult". The V-l "buzz bomb", the first generation of the cruise missile, was launched from large steamdriven catapults. Putting two and two together, then, the "Norway" test may have been a test of an atom bomb delivery system based on the V-l, or of an atom bomb itself, or possibly both an atom bomb and its delivery system.
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With these thoughts in mind, we come to the final point. The alert was canceled when the test was proven a failure. The question is, what failed? Was it the bomb i t s e l f ? T he delivery system? or both?
An answer lies, perhaps, in another curious news article that appeared in the British press almost a year earlier, on Wednesday, October 11, 1944, in the London Daily Mail:
BERLIN IS 'SILENT' 60 HOURS STILL NO PHONES
STOCKHOLM, Tuesday
Berlin is still cut off from the rest of Europe to-night. The 60hours silence began on Sunday morning - and still there is no explanation for the hold-up, which has now lasted longer than on any previous occasion.
The Swedish Foreign Office is unable to ring up its Berlin Legation.
Unconfirmed reports suggest that the major crisis between the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party has come to a head and that "tremendous events may be expected."
To-day's plane from Berlin to Stockholm arrived four hours late. It carried only Germans, two of whom appeared to be high officials. They looked drawn and pale, and when Swedish reporters approached them they angrily thrust their way out of the Swedish Aero-Transport offices, muttering: "Nothing we can say."
German papers arriving here on to-day's plane seem extraordinarily subdued, with very small headlines.
It is pointed out, however, in responsible quarters that if the stoppage were purely the technical result of bomb damage, as the Germans claimed, it should have been repaired by now.6
6 Walter Farr, "Berlin is 'Silent' 60 Hours: Still No Phones," London Daily Mail, Wednesday, October 11, 1944, cited in Meyer and Mehner, Hitler und die ,,Bombe" p. 81, emphasis added.
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The October 1944 Daily Mail Article about Berlin Telephone Service Disruption
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Of course we now know what was not known in October of 1944: when an atomic or thermonuclear bomb is detonated, the extreme electromagnetic pulse knocks out or interferes with electrical equipment for miles from the detonation site, depending on the size of the blast, the proximity of such equipment to it, and the degree of "shielding" such equipment has. For the normal, non-military phone lines in Berlin, the strange disruption of phone service is explainable precisely as the result of such an electromagnetic pulse. But this would imply that such a pulse, if the result of an atom bomb test, be considerably closer to Berlin than Norway. Presumably if telephone service in Berlin was affected by an atom bomb test in Norway, similar disruptions would have occurred in large cities that were much closer to the test, such as Oslo, Copenhagen, or Stockholm. Yet, not such disruptions are mentioned; only Berlin appears to have been affected.7
Thus, if the atom bomb test mentioned in the 1945 London Daily Telegraph article occurred, then one must look for a site considerably closer to Berlin than Norway. The Daily Mail phone service disruption article stands as clear corroboration of the probable test of a German atom bomb sometime in October of 1944, the same time frame as Zinsser's affidavit, and within the time frame mentioned in the Daily Telegraph article about a secret alert in Britain from August of 1944, and continuing for "several months."
But the Daily Mail's phone service disruption article does more: it suggests why the Germans may have considered the test a failure. At that time the effects of nuclear explosions electromagnetic pulse and disruption of electrical equipment, radioactivity and fallout - were still largely unknown and not well understood. The Berlin telephone service was one of the finest, if not the finest, in the world at the time.8 The Nazis may very well
7 There is another possibly, though extremely unlikely explanation, for the lack of reports in other cities. Very simply, it may reflect a lack of intelligence from those areas.
8 Up to the very end of the war, for example, the cable lines between Berlin and Tokyo remained open, allowing the Japanese to send condolences to the Nazi government even as Russian tanks were rolling over the streets of the city.
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have been shocked at this curious result of their alleged test of an atomic "wonder weapon", and therefore considered it a "failure" until more tests could be done and the phenomenon of electromagnetic pulse more fully understood. After all, it would do no good, so to speak, to deploy the "ultimate weapon" only to be unable to receive the telephone call of surrender after having used it! And to the totalitarian and paranoid Nazi state, a disruption of communications from its capital city to its provinces, armed forces, and occupied territories was literally an unthinkable nightmare, being the perfect opportunity for a coup d'etat.
Finally, to round out the newspaper scavenger hunt, a curious series of articles from the London Times between May 15 and May 25, 1945, covered a story about German troops on the Danish Baltic Sea island of Bornholm that refused to surrender to attacking Russian forces.9 Bornholm was within one hundred miles of the German rocket site at Peenemunde, and quite close to an alleged atom bomb test site on the small island of Rugen on the Baltic coast close to the port city of Kiel.
It is here on this island that Italian officer Luigi Romersa was the guest and eyewitness to a German "wonder weapon" test on the night of October 11-12, 1944. After journeying by a night drive for two hours in the rain from Berlin, Romersa reached the island by motorboat. According to his statements to German atom bomb researchers Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, the island was guarded by a special elite unit, which we can only presume was an SS unit, and that admission to the island was only granted by special passes issued directly by the OberKommano Der
Most communications lines in Berlin were laid underground by the Deutsche Reichspost before the war for the express purpose of mitigating phone service disruption during bombing attacks. If the phone service disruption was therefore a result of EMP from a nuclear detonation, then the size of the detonation would have to have been rather large to cause this lengthy disruption of the entire city's telephone service for that length of time, shielded as the lines were by being underground. The other alternative, a second coup attempt, may be a possible explanation, but there is no mention of such an attempt in any literature.
9 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe, p. 51.
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Wehrmacht (OKW).10 At this point, it is best to cite Romersa's own words:
There were four of us: my two attendants, a man with worker's clothes, and I. "We will see a test of the disintegration bomb.11 It is the most powerful explosive that has yet been developed. Nothing can withstand it," said one of them. He hardly breathed. He glanced at his watch and waited until noon, the hour for the experiment. Our observation post was a kilometer from the point of the explosion. "We must wait here," the man with the worker's clothes ordered, "until this evening. When it is dark we may leave. The bomb gives off deathly rays, of utmost toxicity. its effective area is much larger than the most powerful conventional bomb. Around 1.5 kilometers...."
Around 4:00 PM, in the twilight, shadows appeared, running toward our bunker. They were soldiers, and they had on a strange type of "diving suit". They entered and quickly shut the door. "Everything is kaput," one of them said, as he removed his protective clothing. We also eventually had to put on white, coarse, fibrous cloaks. I cannot say what material this cloak was made of, but I had the impression that it could have been asbestos, the headgear had a piece of mica-glass12 in front of the eyes.
Having donned this clothing, the observation party then left the bunker and made its way to ground zero:
The houses that I had seen only an hour earlier had disappeared, broken into little pebbles of debris, as we drew nearer ground zero,13 the more fearsome was the devastation. The grass had the same color as leather, the few trees that still stood upright had no more leaves.14
There are peculiarities of Romersa's account that one must mention, if this were the test of nuclear bomb. First, some of the blast damage described is typical for a nuclear weapon: sheering of trees, obliteration of structures, and so on. The protective clothing
10 Meyer and Mehner, Hitler und die ,,Bombe", p. 64. 11 "Auflosungsbombe". 12 "Glimmerglas". 13 "Explosionspunkt". 14 Luigi Romersa, private telephone interview with Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, Hitler und die ,,Bombe", pp. 62-66, my translation from the German.
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worn by the German technicians as well as the polarized glasses also are typical. And the test does appear to have involved use in a "populated area" with houses and so on, in similar fashion to prosecutor Jackson's exchange with Speer, and Zinsser's own comments in his affidavit. However, Romersa, apparently a careful observer, fails to make any mention of a fusion of soil into silicate glassy material that also normally accompanies a nuclear blast close to the ground.
But whatever was tested at Rugen, it does have enough of the signatures of an atom bomb to suggest that this is, in fact, what it was. Most importantly it is to be noted that it coincides with the time frame of Zinsser's affidavit and the phone service outage in Berlin, and the timing of the British alert.15 Finally, it is perhaps quite significant that during this same time frame, Adolf Hitler finally signed an order for the development of the atom bomb. In context, this can only mean that he has given approval to develop more of a weapon already tested.16
C. The Three Corners (Dreiecken) and the Alleged Test at the Troop Parade Ground at Ohrdruf
A more controversial allegation, however, concerns the alleged test of a high yield atom bomb by the SS at the troop parade ground and barracks at Orhdruf, in south central Thuringia in March of 1945. As we shall see, this date too is significant. Shortly after the German reunification in 1989, old rumors of an atom bomb test conducted by the SS late in the war in south central Germany, in what was formerly East Germany, again surfaced. The test is alleged to have taken place on March 4, 1945.17 However, as
15 One significant difference that does emerge is that Zinsser's affidavit places the test close to the hours of twilight, whereas Romersa has it taking place in full daylight. The latter would make sense, from a security point of view, since daylight would tend to mask the visibility of the blast more effectively from prying eyes in the distance.
16 Rose, op. cit., notes that Hitler actually gave a formal order in October of 1944 for the immediate development of the atom bomb.
17 Meyer and Mehner, Hitler und die „ Bombe " , p. 226.
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we shall soon see, there is an additional problem associated with the allegation of this test near the Three Corners.
The Three Corners part of the story begins with a component of the Allied Legend. According to former Last German sources, one plausible reason for the swift advance of US General Patton's divisions on this region of Thuringia was that the last Fuhrer Headquarters (Fuhrerhauptquartier), a facility code-named "Jasmine" by the Germans, was located in the vast underground facilities at Jonastal.18 "There exists an American document, under point number four, that informs us that the last (Fuhrer Headquarters) was not at the Obersalzburg, but in the region of Ohrdruf,"19 that is, in the region of the Three Corners. Thus, the Legend is elaborated: Patton's drive was to cut off the escape route
of fleeing Nazis and seize Hitler's last secret underground headquarters, and, presumably, the Grand Prize himself. This entire facili t y was part of a vast complex of underground sites under the command structure of the SS, and named "S III" - a designation not without its own suggestive possibilities as we shall discover in subsequent parts of this work - and the Fuhrer Headquarters was but one component of this complex.20 The problem with the view that this complex was simply a headquarters complex is that SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kammler - a man with whom we shall have much to do later in this work - was directly involved in the construction of all facilities in the region since 1942, thus making it unlikely that they were constructed merely for Hitler's last headquarters, since Kammler was directly involved with the most sensitive areas of the Reich's secret weapons research and development. It is therefore more likely that they were a part of Kammler's vast SS Secret weapons black projects empire.21 There is no mention of any of these facilities in surviving German archives, or, seemingly, any where else for that matter, and yet, they are definitely there for all to see.22
18 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis der deutschen Atombombe, p. 209. 19 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 207. 20 Ibid., p. 213., "Report of Mr. Oskar Muhlheim, Bad Durenberg." 21 Ibid., p. 239. 22 Ibid., p. 240.
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So what were these facilities researching? Almost nothing was known about them until witnesses and relatives of witnesses began to talk after German reunification. One such man was Adolf Bernd Freier who, before his death in Argentina, wrote German researchers Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner a letter detailing his knowledge of the facilities gained while he was on the construction staff. There were, Freier alleged, facilities dedicated to special circular aircraft(!), to the "Amerika Raket", the intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States, and research facilities of atomic experiments under the direction of Dr. Kurt Diebner, and a complete underground factory for the production of heavy water!23
But most importantly, Freier alleges that the "atomic weapon" was ready on July 2, 1944!24 What type of atomic weapon is meant here? A "dirty" radiological bomb, designed to spray a vast area with deadly radioactive material but far short of an actual nuclear fission bomb? Or an actual atom bomb itself? Freier's choice of words is not clear. But one thing does stand out, and that is the date of July 2, 1944, the same month as the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the - very aptly named - "Bomb Plot" approximately two weeks later. The consequence of a successful German development of even a radiological bomb might thus be one of the primary motivations for the anti-Hitler conspirators to attempt to remove the Fuhrer when they did, and might explain their hidden logic in assuming that the Allies would negotiate with an anti-Nazi (or at least un-Nazi) provisional German government in spite of the Allies' own demands for an unconditional surrender, for the possession of such a weapon would have given the conspirators considerable negotiation leverage. And if the conspirators knew of the existence of the weapon, and of Hitler's plans to deploy it in actual use, it may have been the final moral compulsion for them to act.
23 Meyer and Mehner, das Geheimnis., p. 242. 24 Ibid., p. 245. According to Freier's allegations, the bomb was ready on July 2, 1944, but not its delivery system, meaning presumably the "Amerikaraket" (p. 249).
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In any case, the most problematical aspect of the alleged test of an atom bomb by the Nazis in the Ohrdruf-Three Corners region of Thuringia comes from a rather specific, and rather startling, assertion. According to Freier, the test took place on March 4, 1945 at the old troop parade ground at Orhdruf. There, a small scaffold about 6 meters high had been erected, a the top of which a small "atomic weapon"25 was placed. The weapon, according to Freier, was "100 g", a mere one hundred grams! This is one of the most significant, and highly problematical, allegations regarding the real nature of the Nazi atom bomb project, made by someone supposedly involved in it, for as will be immediately obvious, 100 grams is far short of the 50 or so kilograms of critical mass reportedly needed for a uranium-based atom bomb, as has been seen, and it is still well below the amount needed for the critical mass for a typical plutonium bomb. Yet, Freier is insistent upon this point, and moreover alleges that all the "slaves", the luckless concentration camp victims that were forced to take part in the test, within a circle of 500-600 meters from ground zero were killed.26 This would give an area of approximately 1 to 1.2 kilometers of blast damage, roughly the effect of a modern tactical nuclear bomb. Such a blast radius would require an enormous amount of the then available conventional explosives, and that amount would far exceed the mere 100 grams Freier alleges for the device. These points indicates that the "AWaffe" or "atomic weapon" was in fact a fully fledged atom bomb. So how does one explain the extraordinarily small critical mass, especially since the Manhattan Project was aiming for a uranium
crititcal mass of around 50 kilograms? This question deserve serious consideration, for it affords yet
another possible clue - if the allegation is to be credited with accuracy - into the real nature of the Nazi atom bomb project. We have seen already that the project was developed under several different and discreet groups for reasons partly due to security, and for reasons partly due to the practical nature of the German
25 "A -Waffe", the wording again is not "Atombombe" but only A-waffe, or "A-weapon".
26 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 245.
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program. For security reason, I believe the "Heisenberg" group and the high-profile names associated with it were deliberately used by the Nazis as the "front" group for public, namely Allied, consumption. The SS security and intelligence apparatus would have undoubtedly concluded, correctly, that these high profile scientists would be high priority targets for Allied intelligence for kidnapping and assassination. Accordingly, it is highly unlikely that the Nazis would have concentrated any genuine atomic bomb secrets or development exclusively in the hands of this group. The very existence of the Allied Legend for so many years after the war is direct testimony to the success of this plan. The real atom bomb development occurred far from the prying eyes of Allied intelligence, under the auspices of the Reichspost and more importantly, under the direct auspices of the SS.
The second facet of the German atom bomb program we have likewise previously encountered: its emphasis on what was practically achievable during the war. Hence, while the Germans knew of the possibilities of plutonium and a plutonium-based atom bomb, and therefore knew that a functioning reactor used to produce plutonium for bombs would thereby enable Germany to develop more bombs for the same investment of fissile material, they also knew that a major technical hurdle lay across the path: the development of a successful reactor in the first place. Thus, as has been previously argued, they opted to develop a uranium-based bomb only, since uranium could be enriched to weapons grade purity without the necessity of the development of a reactor, and since they already possessed the necessary technologies to do so, if employed en masse. Like its American Manhattan Project counterpart, the SS-run program relied on massive numbers of enrichment units to separate and purify isotope.
Now let us extend this line of reasoning further. Germany was also seeking to be able to deploy such bombs as warheads on its rockets. And that meant, given their limited lift capabilities, that the weight of the warheads had somehow to be reduced by several orders of magnitude for the rockets to be able to carry them. And there is an economic factor. Knowing that their industrial capacity would be stained by the effort, even with the help of tens of
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thousands of slave laborers from the camp-, another problem may have presented itself to the Germans, a problem illuminated for them by their own knowledge of the possibilities offered by plutonium-based bombs: How does one get more bang for the
Reichsmark without the use of plutonium? Is there a way to rely on less uranium in a critical mass assembly than is conventionally thought? And so we return to Freier's statement of a remarkably small 100 g atom bomb test at Ohrdruf on March 4, 1945. There does exist a method by which much smaller critical masses of fissile material can be used to make a bomb: boosted fission. Essentially,
boosted fission simply relies on the introduction of some neutronproducing material - polonium, or heavy hydrogen: deuterium, or even tritium - to release more neutrons into the chain reaction than is actually released by the fissile critical mass assembly by itself. This raises the amount of free neutrons initiating chain reactions in the critical mass, and therefore allows two very important things:
(1) It allows slightly lower purity of fissile material - materially not considered of sufficient purity to be weapons grade without boosted fission - to be used for an actual atom bomb; and,
(2) it requires less actual fissile material for the critical mass assembly to make a bomb.
Thus, "boosted fission" would have afforded the German bomb program a practical way to increase the number of bombs available to them, and a reliable method for achieving an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction with lower purity of enriched material.27 it is perhaps quite significant, then, that Freier's testimony concerning the Three Corners underground weapons factories also mentions the existence of an underground heavy water plant in the facilities, for heavy water, of course, contains atoms of deuterium and tritium(heavy hydrogen atoms with one and two extra neutrons in the nucleus respectively).
27 Q.v. Meyer and Mehner, Hitler, pp. 121-123.
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In any case, the test of a small critical mass, boosted fission device of high yield at Ohrdruf on March 4, 1945, is at least consistent with the parameters of the German bomb program and its practical needs. But there are interesting, and intriguingly suggestive, corroborations of the test. According to Freier, Hitler himself was indeed in the Three Corners headquarters for a brief period at the end of march 1945.28 It is known that Hitler did personally visit and address the officers of the German Ninth Army, operating in that precise area, in March of 1945., and stated to them that there were still things that needed to be "finished", an interesting comment if seen in the light of Freier's allegations that it was not the bomb that Germany needed, but the delivery systems. It does make sense that if there were such a test, that Hitler would have been present as an observer to witness the final success of German science in delivering to him the "ultimate weapon".
But perhaps the most persuasive bit of evidence that there is far more about the end of World War Two than we have been told can be found in two exceedingly odd facts that emerge from the Three Corners region of Thuringia in south central Germany. In a statement made on March 20, 1968, former German General Erich Andress was in the Three Corners region at the end of the war, when suddenly, more American military personnel(who were already occupying the area), arrived with jeeps and heavy transports, and immediately ordered all the buildings and houses in the area to have their windows totally blacked out, leaving one to conclude that the Americans were removing something from the area of great value to them, something they wished no one to see. The second odd fact is even more curious, for it is a fact that, of all the areas in modern Germany, the region of Thuringia, precisely in the area of Jonastal and Ohrdruf, is the region of Germany with the highest concentration of background gamma radiation.29
So, what is really signified by the unique exchange of remarks between former Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, and Chief American Prosecutor Jackson at Nuremberg? That Jackson is privy to information similar in nature to reports only recently
28 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 228. 29 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 251.
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declassiefied is clear from his question. That this information c o n c e r n s the real nature of German atom bomb research and its what appear to be astounding achievements completely at variance with the postwar Allied Legend - would also seem to be indicated. And that Albert Speer seems either unwilling to talk about them candidly, or is simply entirely ignorant of them, also seems indisputable. Thus Jackson's question would seem to imply a test of the extent of Speer's knowledge of the program and his complicity in the wo tests at Rugen and Ohrdruf. If the Minister if Armaments for the entire Third Reich knew nothing of it, then indeed, we are dealing with a black Reich within the black Reich, a beast in the belly of the beast, of which even high ranking Nazis such as Speer knew very little, if anything. The great secret of World War Two, one which the victorious Allies and Russians wish to keep secret to this day, was that Nazi Germany was indisputably first to reach the atom bomb, and was indisputably for a very brief period before the end of the war, the world's very first nuclear power. But why is the Allied and Russian secrecy continued even to the present day? The answer to that disturbing question will be addressed more completely in the subsequent parts of this book, for the answer, disturbing as it is, concerns far more than mere nuclear weapons. But why didn't the Nazis use their bombs if they had them? The answer to that question has already been partly addressed in this chapter: if they used any weapons of mass destruction, nuclear or Otherwise, they would have been far more likely to have used them in a fashion consistent with their racist and genocidal ideology, as well as against the enemy that was their largest military threat: on the Eastern Front, against the Soviet Union, where a paranoid Stalinist regime would have been loathe to admit to the world or to its own war-savaged people that they faced an enemy with overwhelming technological superiority. Such an admission would likely have so demoralized the Russians, already forced to spend rivers of their own blood in every engagement with the Wehrmacht, that Stalin's regime itself may not have survived such an admission. But why not use them against the Western Allies in the last stages of the war, as the military situation grew increasingly
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desperate? There is every indication that the Nazi leadership contemplated just such an operation....
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5.
STRANGE MAPS, STRANGE FLIGHTS, AND UNKNOWN CARGOES
"Gerlach goes on to explain that the Nazi party seemed to think that they were working on a bomb and relates how the Party people in Munich were going around from house to house on the 27th or 28th of April last telling everyone
that the atomic bomb would be used the following day." Jeremy Bernstein, Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm
Hall1
The United States was in a unique position among all the powers involved in World War Two. For the last time in its history, it was able to undertake military operations on a global scale relatively free of the fear of enemy reprisal. Its cities and factories were beyond the reach of any known enemy bomber. Moreover, much of its industrial capacity was located in its interior, far from the northeastern Atlantic States or the Pacific coast. According to conventional wisdom that has been reiterated countless times in numerous standard histories of the war, there was absolutely nothing the United States had to fear from Nazi Germany with its "tactical mission-oriented Luftwaffe" or its puny navy. To this day, many Americans, even ones relatively familiar with the operational details of Word War Two, believe that Germany had no aircraft even capable of reaching the United States and returning to Europe, much less of carrying a heavy enough payload, or being available in sufficient numbers, to be of any military significance.
All that changes, however, if Germany had the atomic bomb and if she possessed aircraft capable of delivering one and of returning successfully to Europe. In that case, only one bomber need be used to strike a significant military and psychological blow against the United States. Was such an operation feasible? Did Germany have such aircraft at least capable of being modified to
1 Jeremy Bernstein, Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Records at Farm Hall (Copernicus, 2001), p. 126.
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carry an atom bomb? Are there indications that such studies and operations were contemplated by the Nazis?
A. The Oberkommando der Luftwaffe's Unusual Map
In 1943 the Supreme Command of the Luftwaffe (Oberkommando der Luftwaffe) conducted a highly unusual study. The study consisted of a map, a map of lower Manhattan Island. On the map are concentric circles detailing the blast and heat damageradii of an atomic bomb detonation over New York City. But the most unusual aspect of this "study" is that it shows the detonation of an atom bomb in the 15-17 kiloton range, approximately the same yield as the Little Boy uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima, an odd "coincidence" in the series of "odd coincidences" we havealready encountered.
The Luftwaffe's intentions are quite obvious and clear. The destruction of the financial and business center of New York City would alone have been an unparalleled military and psychological blow against the American war effort. Beyond this, given the fact that New York City was an important point of embarkation for American shipping and troops, as well as a naval base, and a transportation hub for the entire American northeast, such a blow would have been incalculable.
For the Nazi leadership, such a blow would have made military and political sense. It would have demonstrated conclusively to the United States that Germany was capable of mounting significant military operations against the American mainland, and at levels of destructive capability that were militarily, economically, and psychologically devastating. From their point of view, such a blow would arguably been seen as weakening American resolve and perhaps, after a succession of similar such blows against prominent targets such as Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC or Norfolk, would conceivably have led to America's exit from the war, leaving Britain to follow not far behind. The war against the Soviet Union could then either have been prosecuted without mercy until the inevitable Soviet capitulation, or at the minimum, a negotiated peace highly favorable to the Reich.
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In October of 1943, then, such a study was a tempting prospect. But is there any indication that the OKL's "study map" was anything more than a study? From the evidence presented thus far, the answer is clearly that the Luftwaffe was not merely conducting the typical staff exercises that all general staffs conduct, even in wartime. For the Luftwaffe, the study was a practical and immanent feasibility.
The OKL 's "Feasibility Study" of an Atom Bomb Blast of Hiroshima Size over Manhattan Island in New York City 91

But what of Freier's allegations that the bomb was ready, but the delivery systems were not? Without a delivery system the German Wehrmacht could have possessed all the atom bombs it
wished, but they would have been utterly useless, expensive toys, without a viable means to deliver them to its most significant militarily and economically powerful opponent.
B. Strange Flights Did the Germans possess any strategic bombers or aircraft capable of reaching the North American continent with a significant payload, and returning to Europe? Beyond the relatively wellknown Messerschmitt 264, a four engine bomber that looks far too similar to the American B-29 to be coincidental, Germany possessed in small numbers a quantity of heavy-lift, ultra-long range transport craft, including the four engine Junkers 290 and its massive six engine cousin, the Junkers 390.
The Junkers 390
Only two of these massive aircraft were ever built. The Junkers 390 assumes an odd significance here (and later) in our story, for in
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1994, one such Ju 390 took off from Bordeaux, France, and flew to within 12 miles of New York City, snapped a picture of the Manhattan skyline, and flew back, a non-stop flight of 32 hours.
Within the context of the German SS atom bomb project, this flight was more than a mere feasibility study. Photo reconnaissance could only be for target identification. And the flight itself, to within 12 miles of the city, could conceivably have been a test of American air defenses and reactions. In any case, the fact that such a flight
returned safely can only indicate that the American Army Air Force simply was not expecting a visit from the Luftwaffe at all,
reconnaissance, feasibility study, or otherwise.
The Messerschmitt 264 Long Range "Amerikabomber ", Note the Curious Resemblance to the Boeing B-29 Superfortress
C. Unknown Cargoes and a Curious Airfield
The Ju 390 and is smaller four engine cousin the Ju 290 will play another important role in subsequent parts of this book. Hut perhaps they had a role envisioned for them in conjunction with another little-known, but nonetheless important, fact. In 1945 the Luftwaffe completed construction of an enormous airfield near
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Oslo, Norway, capable of handling v e r y large aircraft like the Me 264, the He 177, and the Ju 290 and 390. In an article for the June 29, 1945 issue of the Washington Post, a report that originated from 21st Army Group headquarters outlines the frightening discovery that awaited Allied military personnel who came to occupy Norway after the German forces there surrendered:
R.A.F. officers said today that the Germans had nearly completed preparations for bombing New York from a "colossal air field" near Oslo when the war ended.
"Forty giant bombers with a 7,000 mile range were found on this base - the largest Luftwaffe field I have ever seen,' one officer said.
"They were a new type bomber developed by Heinkel. They now are being dismantled for study. German ground crews said the planes were held in readiness for a mission to New York.
It is known that Heinkel undertook special modifications of its He 177 four engine heavy bomber late in the war, adapting it to carry large atom bombs, radiological bombs, and biological and chemical bombs.2 Within the context of the SS atom bomb program and the earlier flight of the Ju 390 from France in 1944, however, a purpose immediately suggests itself. The loss of France to Allied forces in 1944 deprived the Luftwaffe of its large French airfields. Norway, however, as has already been stated, remained in German hands up until their very surrender, and thus constituted the only remaining base of operations available to the Germans for any type of offensive operation against the North American continent.
The presence of such an airfield and its deliberate construction so late in the war also strongly suggests a connection to the SS atom bomb program in an entirely different way, since its construction would likely have fallen under the jurisdiction of the SS Building and Works Department, which was under the direction of none other than SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kammler. It is also significant that jurisdiction over all long range aircraft was also in Kammler's hands by war's end, thus linking the precious long-range
2 Q.v. Friedrich Georg, Hitlers Siegeswaffen band 1: Luftwaffe und Marine: Geheime Nuklearwaffen des Dritten Reiches und ihre Tragersysteme pp. 131, 133.
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