SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology (4 page)

In one plant, the U.S. Army officers found partially assembled jet fighter planes of radical new design. There were planes potentially better than anything the Allies had in combat at that time.

IF time hadn’t run out on the Germans,
quantities of these jet planes might have changed the balance of air power in their favor.

In a V rocket plant, burrowed 800 feet deep in limestone rock, our technicians found blueprints for a fearful V bomb with an estimated range of 3000 miles.

“We planned to destroy New York and other American cities starting in November,” said a German rocket engineer.

Target: U.S.A.

In a converted salt mine, our ordnance officers examined nearly completed jet-propelled heavy bombers…
bombers claimed by the Germans to be capable of crashing high explosives into the industrial cities of the eastern United States and flying back again across the Atlantic.

Goering himself said the planes had been successfully test-flown and would have been in operation if Germany could have held out three months longer.

But those catastrophes, and others, never quite came to pass on the German timetable of war.
We managed, right to the end, to maintain the air supremacy we had achieved…sometimes
just by the skin of our teeth!
⁷

Consolidated Vultee Article

Consolidated Vultee Article

This disquieting state of affairs suggests that there was more to German rocketry at the end of the war than merely lobbing short-ranged V-1s and V-2s on London and other western European cities. Indeed, if blueprints for a rocket with a 3,000 mile range were found in an underground factory at the end of the war, this strongly suggests that the rumored intercontinental
Amerikaraket
was nearing
production
, and that implies that some long range prototype may have already been
tested.

Moreover, this “we won in the nick of time” attitude is corroborated by two very unlikely sources. Project Mercury and Gemini astronaut Gorden Cooper revealed that at the war’s end America was only one week from catastrophe.
⁸
But even more sensational corroboration of General Patton’s gloomy assessment comes from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself. After receiving information via Turkey that the Germans were working on a “V-3” that could strike the east coast of the U.S., President Roosevelt revealed in a letter to his cousin Daisy on December 6, 1944, the real reason for his concern: not the rocket itself, but the fact that the Germans possessed “a weapon named V-3, that could destroy anything within a circumference of a kilometer with a single blow.”
⁹
The dating here is significant, for it would place Roosevelt’s letter
after
both the German fuel-air bomb tests and, more importantly, after the alleged a-bomb test on the island of Rügen ca. Oct 10-11, 1944.
¹⁰

President Roosevelt and General Patton were not the only senior Allied officials to express private reservations about the future course of the war at that late date. Indeed, behind the Allied superiority in all conventional arms, there lurked a disquieting fact, a fact made clear by the following secret memorandum:

S
ECRET

H
EADQUARTERS

U
NITED
S
TATES
S
TRATEGIC
A
IR
F
ORCES IN
E
UROPE
(R
EAR
)

Office of the Director of Intelligence

AAF Sta 390

APO 633, U.S. Army

5 January 1945

MEMORANDUM:

To: Brigadier General George C. McDonald, D. of I., Hq., USSTAF.

1. You will recollect that the SHAEF forecast, arrived at after D-day in 1944, placed the capitulation of Germany at the end of December of that year. It is believed that this SHAEF forecast strongly influenced the planning in Washington and in this theater. Predicated upon this date, questions of type U.S. Air Force equipment, weapons, tactics, training and supplies were decided.

2. Hitler’s Germany did not place the termination date of this war at the end of 1944. Hitler’s Germany has indicated with determination and virility that it expects this war to continue for a long and indefinite period of time, and that it is struggling to gain supremacy in weapons as well as generalship.

3. With the exception of a few modifications and improvements in the U.S. Air Forces in this theater are fighting with substantially the same weapons as they used in 1942. From 1942 through 1944 the aircraft and equipment of the U.S. Army Air Forces were superior in practically every detail to anything the enemy had in this theater. Indeed, weapons and equipment in general, whether belonging to the Ground Troops or to the Air, enjoyed for the U.S. superiority during this first period. This period ended December 31, 1944 with Germany still fighting, but Germany is not fighting with the weapons of 1942. She is leading the world in tested jet propelled airplanes, long range missiles, new type submarines and, in certain classes, better tanks. A large part of her manufacturing facilities have gone underground and she is bending every sinew for the last stand on the Vaterland frontiers.

4. Our Ground Armies, despite superiority in manpower and quantity of equipment, are presently engaged more in defensive than offensive fighting and, unless this state of affairs is quickly changed or the Russians actually drive through to Berlin and victory, we must face the grim expectation of fighting Germany and her new capabilities through greater 1945.

5. The new submarine threat is mounting and we may expect that the Admiralty and our Navy will soon bring pressure to bear on the United States Strategic Air Forces to go after submarine yards, pens and components manufacture. The tank and armored vehicle industry is proving a fresh and considerable menace in the present Western campaigns, so pressure might be expected from the Ground Armies to devote a part of our bombardment weight to these production centers. A special report had been prepared by Lt. Col. Haines dealing with the growing menace of jet aircraft…

If this somber assessment did not succeed in warning General McDonald of the true nature of the situation, it was spelled out in no uncertain terms in the conclusions at the end of the document:

6. C
ONCLUSION
:

a. The war has not terminated in accordance with SHAEF plans.

b. SHAEF timing has dominated the development of equipment, training programs and establishment of manpower and supply for this theater.

c. The first cycle and period of the war has ended without the capitulation of Germany and with Germany leading in the development of principal new weapons and methods, which will be included in her capabilities during 1945.
¹¹

In other words, the Germans simply were not complying with SHAEF’s desires for them to roll over and surrender in the face of overwhelming Allied numerical superiority. Indeed, as the document indicates, that very numerical superiority was threatened with immanent obsolescence, if not being totally obsolete, in 1945. Germany, which had invented modern combined-arms maneuver warfare as a means of offsetting her potential opponents’ numerical superiority, was about to change the nature of warfare yet again, and catch the Allies flatfooted, unprepared, and off balance.

But was the reality of German potential in fact in line with these gloomy Allied intelligence prognostications?

B. German Potential in Late 1944 Early 1945

1. Papers for Paperclip: Project Lusty

Late war German war-making potential is perhaps best summarized by a series of recently declassified documents – first uncovered by British researcher Nick Cook – called “Project Lusty.” This, as Polish researcher Igor Witkowski observes, was a “parallel operation in relation to ‘Paperclip.’”
¹²
Its contents are “such an absolute revelation that it gives the impression of being a story from another planet.”
¹³
The Project Lusty documents

consist of a descriptive section as well as a list of intelligence facilities/ “targets” in the occupied Reich. In the descriptive section, at the very beginning, mention is made for example… of seized German evacuation transports – U-boats. This concerns facts that not only shed a completely new light on the end of World War II and the issue of the Third Reich’s scientific and technical achievements, but above all are shocking with the awareness that they are still clouded in a curtain of secrecy!
¹⁴

Under the aegis of this program alone, and by its own admission, some 110,000
tons
of scientific papers were transferred over three months to a center in the United States, where they were then processed and disseminated to the interested agencies of the US government.
¹⁵

As if that were not enough,

The records of the German Patent Office, for instance, were found buried 1,500 feet underground in a potash mine near Bacha.
There were approximately 225,000 volumes, which included secret files.(…)
Eventually, the files were evacuated and studied.(…)
¹⁶

This is a crucial revelation, for it brings us back to the context of the
Kammlerstab
SS secret weapons “think tank” for the simple reason that all patents in the Third Reich were secretly scrutinized by a highly classified SS entity called
Forschung, Entwicklung, Patente
, which answered to an SS
Obergruppenführer
Emil Mazuw, about whom more will be said in chapter four.

Project Lusty’s revelation accordingly prompts a very serious question: did the American intelligence teams simply “blindly stumble onto” this treasure trove? Or were they led there? The last possibility seems more likely, as it is known that Kammler returned to Prague and the Skoda Works at Pilsen – headquarters of his “think tank” – in the last days of the war. As Nick Cook hypothesizes, Kammler did so to put the finishing touches on gathering up all his files and gathering them together to barter for his life.
¹⁷
Thus, if the Americans knew where to look, this information could only have come to them from some source inside the
Kammlerstab
.

It is well known that SS General Wolff undertook secret surrender negotiations with OSS station chief in Zurich, Allen Dulles, in the closing days of the war. What is little known, however, is that this process was taking place with the tacit blessing of none other than Adolf Hitler and Nazi Party
Reichsleiter
Martin Bormann, by then the real master of Nazi Germany. As Carter Hydrick has argued, the classic signature of Bormann in all these late-war negotiations with the Americans was the exchange of technology for the lives of leading Nazis.
¹⁸
This permits one to speculate on a secret history that possibly underlies the strange constellation of events in southern and south central Germany, and Bohemian Czechoslovakia, at the end of the war. Among those events one must highlight the following:

(1) U.S. General Patton’s rapid drive across southern Germany toward the Skoda Works at Pilsen in Czechoslovakia and similar Allied thrusts toward the Harz Mountain SS installations in Thuringia;

(2) The secret negotiations between OSS station chief Allen Dulles
¹⁹
and SS General Wolff;