SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology (9 page)

Another factor must be weighed. As indicated in my previous book on German secret weapons,
The Reich of the Black Sun
, there is a circumstantial case that the Nazis successfully tested an atom bomb ca. Oct. 10
^th
, 1944, on the island of Rügen, or possibly some other island, standing along the German Baltic coast in the sea lanes running from Königsburg to Kiel.
¹¹
This would imply that some time earlier in the summer of that year, the SS achieved some sort of breakthrough in its bomb program, perhaps finally acquiring enough critical mass to test in a bomb. In any case, the alleged Rügen test was successful, and as German researcher Friedrich Georg observes, the call then went out for “secure delivery systems.”
¹²
It stands to reason then, that the
Amerikaraket
, given this alleged atomic bomb success and
actual
fuel air bomb success,
¹³
was much more than a “paper rocket.” By the time of its successful testing in 1944, the paper studies and wind tunnel tests were already two years old! The rocket was, in other words, on the track to actual testing and production.

All this leads us to General Kammler’s January 31, 1945 order to evacuate Peenemünde. According to the standard line, the explanation for this curious order is that the Red Army was expected to arrive at any moment. But the Red Army would not arrive at Peenemünde until May 4
^th
!
¹⁴
This poses a significant question: Was Peenemünde, as Friedrich Georg puts it, merely a “ghost town” for the three months from the evacuation order to the Russian arrival?
¹⁵
The order is even more curious given the fact that, since the massive British Royal Air Force raid in 1943 that all but destroyed the facility, the process had already begun of moving as much of the V-2 production to underground sites as possible. True, the process was slow and still continuing when Kammler’s 1945 order came down, but nonetheless, it was already well under way. By early 1945 most of the V-2 production was at the massive underground factory of the notorious Mittelwerk at Nordhausen. Thus the problem: Why give an order for something already taking place?

One late war incident suggests, and suggests quite strongly, that this was
not
the case, for on March 9, 1945, a British twin-engine photo-reconnaissance Mosquito fighter-bomber was chased from Peenemünde by no less than
three
German Messerschmitt 262 jet fighters.
¹⁶
Of course, one possible explanation for the British presence at the site was that they were simply trying to confirm what their intelligence had probably already told them, namely, that Peenemünde had been evacuated.

But while that may explain the presence of the RAF Mosquito, it is
not
a good explanation for the – by that late date – relatively heavy presence of the Luftwaffe in the form of no less than three of its rare and valuable Messerschmitt 262 jet fighters.
Three
jets just to chase an unarmed British photo-reconnaissance plane from a “ghost town”? Clearly this makes no sense, and implies that something was still taking place at Peenemünde, something very secret and very important, something requiring all the protection the crumbling Luftwaffe could muster.

Seen in this way Kammler’s “evacuation” order of January 31, 1945 thus appears to be a clever ploy by the security-obsessed SS general, designed to throw Allied and Soviet intelligence off the trail of whatever was still going on there. Since most of the V-1 and V-2 teams were long gone from Peenemünde to their new underground facilities, something
else
must have been going on that merited such heavy protection.

But what was it?

Fortunately, there do exist reports that during the period from March to April (and perhaps as late as May) 1945 that there were at least
four
tests of a large rocket named “Thor’s Hammer” or the
Amerikaraket
. These reports moreover name both Peenemünde and Ohrdruf – site of the second alleged German a-bomb test on March 4, 1945
¹⁷
-as the possible sites of these tests. It is unlikely that Ohrdruf functioned as a test site for such a large rocket, since there was present there none of the necessary facilities to assemble and launch such a vehicle. So one is left with Peenemünde, the most likely place. In any case, three of these tests were allegedly shots of the
Amerikaraket
into the Atlantic, and a fourth test was allegedly to see if orbit could be achieved!
¹⁸

But there is even further corroboration of mysterious goings-on at Peenemünde at the war’s end.

2. The “Urals Incident”

Oddly, while Peenemünde was visited only lightly by the British RAF after its massive 1943 air raid, it was visited often, and heavily, by the Soviet Red Air Force right up to the war’s end, suggesting that, if the British had fallen for Kammler’s ruse, the Soviets had not. It is an indication that they knew something that the Allies did not.

Late-war German long-range rocket activity is corroborated, in fact, by the Russians themselves. In the Spanish language edition of the Soviet Russian science magazine
Sputnik
there is a report of the destruction in 1945 – during the war – of a Russian munitions factory in the Ural Mountains near the river Tobol. Notably, the article ascribed the destruction to a “terror attack” of “fascist perfidy” much like “the later attacks of American B-52 bombers against the port city of Haiphong in Vietnam.”
¹⁹
If the Russian report is accurate and not merely a typical Communist exercise in disinformation or blame-shifting for their own bureaucratic incompetence, then this most probably was a rocket attack, since by that late date in the war the Luftwaffe had little left by way of long range heavy bombers able to make the trip,
²⁰
a trip that in any case had little prospect of success given the Red Air Force’s mastery of the skies over eastern Europe. Only a rocket attack could guarantee success for such an operation.

Given all the foregoing, it is reasonable to conclude that the Nazis may actually have been successful in testing the first strategic ballistic missiles toward the end of the war, while falling just short of getting them into production.

….or is that too, yet another dangerous myth?

We shall answer that question in a subsequent chapter.

For now, we address another question. If the Nazis had indeed tested such long-range rockets, much less successfully fired one on Soviet Russia, then this implies that yet another phase of the
Amerikaraket
went beyond merely being a “paper study.” The Nazis could have tested all the long range rockets they wished, but they would have been utterly useless without a means to guide them to target.

Thus, the existence of a credible long range and secure guidance system is also corroborative evidence that the
Amerikaraket
was not just a paper project. The question is, did the Nazis have such means of guidance? The answer is yes, and they did not just exist on paper.

F. Over-the-Horizon Radars and the Amerikaraket

Successful German tests of long range rockets, much less an actual German rocket attack on Russian sites in the Urals, implies the existence of associated technologies and methods to guide such missiles accurately to their targets. Indeed, from the scientific and engineering point of view in the early 1940s, accurate guidance of such rockets was the principal problem that the Germans faced, not the actual rocket itself. A number of methods were therefore proposed to make the
Amerikaraket
accurate, some technological, others less so.

Given that the
Amerikaraket
was intended to carry “small atom bombs”
²¹
and “other weapons of mass destruction,”
²²
and since the inertial guidance system of the V-2 would have been inadequate and inaccurate for attacking targets on the American east coast, the Nazis had to consider a variety of alternative modes for guidance. In other words, if the
Amerikaraket
was
not
a paper project, then one should expect the Germans to be working in each of the following areas:

(1) technological and secure means of guiding a rocket to targets at long range; or, failing that,

(2) alternative methods of guiding a rocket accurately to a target at long range; and,

(3) technologies of
miniaturizing
enough rocket and/or A-bomb (or H-bomb or fuel-air bomb)
²³
components to enable a long range rocket to be able to carry such heavy payloads.

Viewed in this way, the
Amerikaraket
was anything
but
a paper project, since the Nazis considered any number of methods, from “back-pack” piloted rockets, to enable a pilot to guide the rocket to target visually before bailing out at the last minute, to actually planting a radio transponder inside the Empire State Building for a rocket to home in on,
²⁴
to much more sophisticated and ultimately much more secure technological means of guidance based on beam riding and
radar interference.
It is this last category that is of most interest to our purposes in this book, for it is this last area of development that points very clearly to Nazi interest in, and development of, areas of physics ultimately very
different
than those pursued by their Allied counterparts.

Before examining German accomplishments in the technology of long-range rocket guidance, it is necessary to examine their success in the equally important area of miniaturization of components. Such a step was absolutely necessary if the Third Reich was ever to be successful in wedding its atom bomb – a notoriously heavy device in those days – to a rocket. Indeed, as I pointed out in
Reich of the Black Sun
, any and every method appears to have been pursued by Kammler’s SS
Sonderkommando
, including techniques of boosting nuclear fission of atomic nuclei to lower the weight of the critical mass of a nuclear warhead.
²⁵
But there were other successes in miniaturization.

It is well known that Nazi Germany, during the infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics, successfully created the first live television broadcast of a sports event for a general public. The following is a picture of one of the large and cumbersome television cameras – then “state of the art” – that were stationed at crucial locations around the Olympic stadium at Tempelhof Field in Berlin.

1936 German Television Camera at the Berlin Olympics

Television sets were placed at various locations in the Olympic village and the environs of Greater Berlin to allow the visiting athletes, tourists and German citizens to watch the games as they occurred. Needless to say, for Dr. Josef Göbbels’ Propaganda Ministry it was a propaganda coup of the first order, and a clear demonstration to the world of German technological prowess.

During the war, however, television quickly suggested itself to the Germans as a means of visually guiding a short-range missile to target by placing a television camera in the nose of a missile. Transmitting a picture back to an operator on the ground or in an airplane, the rocket could then be unerringly guided to target. And by war’s end, they had successfully tested the first such “smart bomb.”
²⁶

Obviously, placing a television camera of the size of those used in the 1936 Olympic Games inside a missile was impractical, and so the camera had to be considerably miniaturized.

By the war’s end, the Germans had been hugely successful in this task, accomplishing an
almost tenfold reduction in size
, as this photo of a small television camera and receiver set, about the size of a large shoebox, attests: