But notably absent from Speer's comments is any indication
that he was even aware of the huge extent of the German atom- bomb 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 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 attaché 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 all- important 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 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 RugenIsland
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 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 its 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
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
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 credulity, unless these bombs were war 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 defense 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 defense 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
"Nazis Atom Bomb Plans," London Daily Telegraph,
Saturday, August 11, 1945, cited in Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner, Hitler
und die "Bombe", p. 37.
The August 1945 London Daily Telegraph Article
about a 1944 German Atom Bomb Scare in Britain
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 steam-driven 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.
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 itself?
The delivery system? orboth? 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 60- hours 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.
The October 1944 Daily Mail Article about
Berlin Telephone Service Disruption
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
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.
The Nazis may very well 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 electro-magnetic
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.
9 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis der deutschen
Atombombe, p. 51.
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.
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 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.
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.
The protective clothing 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
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.
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
17 Meyer and Mehner, Hitler und die „
Bombe " , p. 226.
However, as 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 facility 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.
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?
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).
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.
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
25 "A -Waffe",
the wording again is not "Atombombe" but only A-waffe, or "A-weapon".
26 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 245.
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 "A-Waffe" 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 critical 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 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 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 neutron- producing 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.
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
28 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 228.
29 Meyer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 251.
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 declassified is clear from his question. That this information
concerns 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
two 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 desperate? There is every indication that the Nazi leadership
contemplated just such an operation....
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