Chapter 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 Setting 1

1 F. Lee Benns, Europe Since 1914 In Its World Setting (New York: F.S. Crofts and co., 1946), p. 630.

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 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

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 General , the equivalent of a four star American general.

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 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

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.

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 the Wehrmacht had to do was hold out a bit longer. And above all, it must hold Prague and lower Silesia.

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.

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.

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.

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 blown off the map by Allied bombers

(2) Prague

(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

7 Arnstadt is where the great German composer and organist J.S. Bach first began his career.

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 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.

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

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.

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 basics of nuclear physics, and certainly not the sort of scientist one would expect to encounter working on atom bombs.10

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."

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.

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.

But that is not all.

In the transcripts, Heisenberg and company, who had suffered 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

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)

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 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

13 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 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).

14 Ibid., p. 218.

Dutch-Jewish Manhattan Project Physicist Samuel Goudsmit

In the years immediately after the war, the Dutch-Jewish Manhattan Project physicist Samuel Goudsmit explained the whole 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, and Heisenberg's knowledge - or lack of it - in particular.

15 Philip Henshall, The Nuclear Axis: Germany, Japan, and the Atom Bomb Race 1939-45, "Introduction."

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

16 Robert K. Wilcox, Japan's Secret War, p. 15.

17 The 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.

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 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?

18 Q.v. Nick Cook, op. cit., p. 198, Henshall, op. cit., pp. 171-172.
19 Italy, as well, launched long-range air missions to Japan.

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 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 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.

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, 1988). It should be noted that the SS Ahnenerbedienst did come under the tribunal's scrutiny.

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

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.

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.

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. Personal observations of the colors of the explosion cloud found an almost blue-violet shade. During this manifestation reddish-colored rims were to be seen, changing to a dirty-like shade in very rapid succession.

  5. The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing.

  6. About one hour later I started with an He 111 from the A/D24 at Ludwigslust and flew in an easterly direction.

    24 "A/D" probably "aerodrome".

    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 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.

  7. Because of the P-38s operating in the area Wittenberg-Mersburg I had to turn to the north but observed a better visibility at the bottom of the cloud where the explosion occurred. Note: It does not seem very clear to me why these experiments took place in such crowded areas.25

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."

.

Note also the suggestive title of the report.

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 U235 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.

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 post- war 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 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

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.

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 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 A-bomb. Thus, there is sufficient reason, due to the science of bomb- making 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 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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