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 post- war Germanys 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 of breathlessness and anxiety.

My friend hurried 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

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