SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology (29 page)

But what of the other codename,
Laternenträger
? Literally, it means a “lantern bearer” or “lantern carrier,” i.e., the individual who lit gas street lights in the era before electric lights and photovoltaic cells dispensed with the need for such lamp-lighters. But there may be something more significant in the choice of this particular codename, as Witkowski notes: “(One) can look at this from yet another angle. It could be, as it was suggested to me, a not too literal translation of a certain ancient name – the name of ‘Lucifer’, i.e., ‘he who carries the light.’”
⁴⁰

In any case, the important points for our purposes are not only that the codenames may be indicative, at least in a general way, of the exotic physics the project was to investigate, but also that the project was apparently underway for at least two years
before
a practical technology – the Bell itself – resulted. This implies a high degree of theoretical background work was its inspiration, and that in turn means we must investigate the clues very carefully in an attempt to reconstruct what that theoretical basis might have been.

So what happened to the Bell and its research team? As detailed in two of my previous books
Reich of the Black Sun
and
The Giza Death Star Deployed
, most of the scientists and technicians were murdered by the SS, and the project hardware itself was evacuated. Indeed, there is now strong evidence that “Project Lantern Bearer” (or if one prefer, Project Lucifer) was evacuated in April of 1945 by a six-engine Junkers 390. This is intriguing, since
one of the last pictures of the Junkers 390 was taken at approximately the same period at an airfield in Prague.
Since at the end of the war there was only one Ju 390 left in existence, this means that it flew from Prague to near Ludwigsdorf (probably the aerodrome at Opole, in Poland), picked up its additional cargo there, and then, according to an SS officer who was involved in the project and his interrogation records which Witkowski found in the Berlin Document Center, it was flown to Bodo airbase in Norway, after which,
like the Bell and General Hans Kammler, it simply disappears.
⁴¹

The Last Known Picture of a Ju 390, Coincidentally Taken in Prague in 1945.
(From Igor Witkowski’s
The Truth About the Wunderwaffe)

In
Reich of the Black Sun
I followed Nick Cook’s hypothesis that Kammler had not, in fact, died in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war, but that he had either made his way into postwar America’s secret black projects along with the Bell as part of a comprehensive bargain struck between the United States and various high ranking Nazis, including Martin Bormann, or that he simply disappeared with it into an independently-run and continuing Nazi secret weapons project.

Witkowski has uncovered certain circumstantial information that appears to corroborate the “American scenario.” Among the many other scientists involved with the Bell, there was one Herbert Jensen, whom we have not mentioned until now. Jensen accompanied the well-known Hermann Oberth, and the very mysterious Elizabeth Adler, on their “business trip” from Prague to Lower Silesia. Oberth and Jensen were some of the main “prizes” sought by the USA after the war, along with Kurt Debus. In other words, behind the mad scramble to acquire the Peenemünde rocket scientists and pry open the secrets of the Nazis’ atom bomb project, a concerted effort also seems to have been underway to
reassemble as much of the personnel as were involved in the Bell as possible.
⁴²
Given the extremely secret nature of Project Lantern-Bearer, one must assume that the knowledge of the personnel involved with the project,
as well as the knowledge of who escaped the SS’ execution of various scientists and technicians involved,
could only have come from within the SS itself.

As for Gerlach and Debus, we have already speculated that their high profiles perhaps saved them from the SS’ death squads. Perhaps this is also why Gerlach, having been thus “warned off” the subject of spin polarization and gravity research, never publicly returned to these subjects after the war. In this regard it is also noteworthy that Gerlach, after his internment by the British at Farm Hall, was also the
only
Farm Hall scientist who was subsequently transferred to the United States for further intensive interrogation. In my view it is extremely significant that his wartime work diaries were appropriated by the American OSS, where they
remain
classified in the CIA archives. Almost nothing is known of their contents.
⁴³
The fact that Gerlach was singled out for such interrogation and that his wartime diaries were placed under tight classification speaks volumes.

Witkowski also entertains the notion that the Ju 390, which was one of the first aircraft in the world equipped
for mid-air refueling
,
⁴⁴
a technique pioneered by the Luftwaffe, might have flown its contents to Argentina to continue its research independently of the prying eyes of the Allies, and under the watchful protection of the Peron government. Indeed, Peron had built a modern laboratory for some of the exiled German scientists for research into plasmas and high voltage at Bariloche.
⁴⁵

Unlike Witkowski, Geoffrey Brooks unequivocally maintains that the Bell, General Kammler, and the missing Ju 390, made their way to Argentina and eventually to the plasma and high voltage laboratory at Bariloche as part of their super-secret strategic evacuation plans known as Operation
Regentröpfchen
(Raindrop), in which the
Gauleiter
of Lower Silesia, Karl Hanke, played a significant role. In the light of Carter Hydrick’s thesis that Martin Bormann actually aided the United States in the surrender of the U-234 and its valuable cargo of fissile uranium and atom bomb components, Brooks’ remarks again underscore the significance and importance as a “decisive war-winning weapon” that the Bell had for the Nazis:

The Nazis were particularly anxious to protect documents containing the highest classifications of secret knowledge designated
Geheime Reichssache
relating to the development of arms, aircraft and submarines. The most important of all these, files relating to a super aviation fuel and advanced aircraft, went by long-range Junkers Ju 390 transport aircraft directly to Argentina.

From the point of view of the US Government, the 260 tons of strategic material aboard the German U-boat
U-234
escorted into Portsmouth Navy Yard, New Hampshire, on 19 May 1945 is so absurdly secret that the fact that it is classified as top secret is a secret, as are the documents pertaining to Dr Heinz Schlicke and the nature of the assistance he afforded the Manhattan Project in the three months after his capture. The most secret item of cargo aboard U-234 remains the eighty small cases of uranium powder which have never appeared on any USN Unloading Manifest and which will have been the fissile material for a rudimentary atomic explosive.
But as far as the German High Command was concerned, the voyage of this U-boat with its extraordinary cargo of war materials and passengers did not rate so
highly as to fall within the ambit of the General Plan of Evacuation.
⁴⁶

According to Brooks, whose information in this regard corroborates Witkowski’s own discovery of the Bell’s classification as
Kriegsentscheidend
, the Bell rated higher than the atom bomb in the German High Command’s estimation. While this may seem odd or unusual, it should be recalled that a similar classification scheme has been alleged for captured “UFO” technology in the postwar USA, rating it higher than the hydrogen bomb.

In any case, Brooks then adds significant detail about the Bell in Argentina.

A leftist correspondent of a leading Neuquen daily newspaper active in exposing Nazi war criminals in the Bariloche area of Argentina and who prefers anonymity for that reason has stated in writing that he inspected official documents confirming that the German antigravity experiments SS-E-IV and SS-U-13, together with the notorious Bell… arrived aboard a Junkers Ju 390 long-range transport aircraft which flew non-stop from Norway to Gualeguay aerodrome in Entre Rios province, Argentina, at the war’s end.
If true, this might be seen by some as suggestive that the SS antigravity aircraft project was the postwar utmost priority for the National Socialist scientific elite.
⁴⁷

If Brook’s scenario is correct, then it is sobering in its implications, for it indicates that an independent and ongoing Nazi development of exotic weapons technologies continued
after
the war. As will be seen in the final chapters of this book, this prospect is chillingly corroborated in yet a different fashion. And it highlights the Two Space Programs Hypothesis in yet another fashion, for “one would also think it safe to assume that if the USAF had been able to make head or tail of German antigravity, they would not have bothered with the same old rocket propulsion methods at Cape Kennedy three decades afterwards.”
⁴⁸
Or perhaps, as was seen in the previous chapter, there was a space program within the space program, developing and utilizing an exotic technology, and wrapping it in rockets for show.

4. The Design of the Bell and Its Effects in Operation

Witkowski’s anonymous intelligence informant aroused enough interest in the Polish journalist in subject of what
really
constituted the so-called
Wunderwaffe
that he began to search for references to it. The quest began with yet another characteristic statement from Propaganda Minister Dr. Josef Göbbels relayed by his wife, Magda, to her sister-in-law. The Nazi propaganda minister, it seemed, had seen a weapon “so visionary” that it would guarantee ultimate victory.
⁴⁹
Such statements were, of course, standard fare for the beleaguered Reich. But Witkowski soon uncovered odd corroboration from another source, this time from the aide to the well-known SS commando, Otto Skorzeny: Karl Radl. Radl disclosed, in documents Witkowski uncovered at the American archives’ Berlin Document Center, that Skorzeny had engaged in numerous acts of sabotage behind Russian lines in 1944 because he had “come into contact with the ‘wonder weapon’ and as a result (had) ‘been possessed’ by the idea of ‘Sonderkampf’ (‘Special Warfare’), regarding the use of this weapon, to such an extent, that he considered it the only sure way to win the war.”
⁵⁰
But the matter did not rest there.

After the war, according to reports in the Spanish press that were soon followed by similar articles in the American press, Skorzeny had attempted to sell the secrets of this unknown
Wunderwaffe
to the Americans. These articles “mentioned that among other things what was involved was some unusual flying object, with ‘electromagnetic’ propulsion, which simultaneously had been ‘
responsible for a wave of flying saucer observations over North America that summer.
’”
⁵¹
The article went on to state that these “saucers” were built in Spain by exiled German scientists, and that their flight principle was based on the gyroscope.
⁵²

His curiosity now definitely piqued, Wikowski again arranged for further meetings with his anonymous informant. From these meetings, the following picture of the Bell emerged:

That mysterious device – “the Bell” (“die Glocke”) seemed at first glance relatively simple, although the unusual effects of its operation contradicted this. The description was admittedly incomplete and non-scientific, since it had originated from military personnel, who had not had access to all of the data, but even then it included, many valuable details.
The main part of “the Bell” was made up of two massive cylinders-drums around one meter in diameter, which during the experiment span in opposite directions at tremendous speeds. The drums
were made of a silvery metal and
rotated around a common axis.
T
he axis was formed by quite an unusual core, with a diameter of a dozen or so, to twenty centimeters, with its lower end fixed to “the Bell’s” massive pedestal. It was made of a heavy, hard metal
. Before each trial some kind of ceramic, oblong container was placed in the core (it was defined as a “vacuum flask”…), surrounded by a layer of lead approx. 3 cm thick. It was approx. 1-1.5 m long and filled with a strange, metallic substance, with a violet-gold hue and
preserving at room temperature the consistency of “slightly coagulated jelly”.
From the produced information it followed that
this substance was codenamed “IRR XERUM-525” or “IRR SERUM-525” and contained among other constituents the thorium oxide and beryllium oxide (beryllia). The name “Xeron” also appeared in the documentation. It was some kind of amalgam of mercury, probably containing various heavy isotopes.