In the rewritten version of history, lies trumped the truth. The use of slave labor had been forced on “our Nazis” by Himmler’s SS. Von Braun’s arrest in March 1944 was a blessing. Hawke spun the real reason—Himmler’s desire to take control of von Braun’s V-2—into an anti-Nazi mythology about apolitical space enthusiasts who were forced to develop weaponry at the expense of their dreams of interstellar flight.
But a threat to that myth presented itself in 1947. The war crimes trial of those who’d headed up the rocket works at Dora-Mittelbau took place at Dachau. To protect the lies that ring-fenced his sanitized Nazis, Hawke rebuffed the prosecutors’ request to have von Braun appear as a witness. And when those prosecutors went hunting for Georg Rickhey, the general director at the Mittelwerk, they found he was doing research on underground factories for the U.S. Air Force at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. Most of the men on trial went free.
Expediency over principle.
The unexpected explosion of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb in 1949 sent shock waves rattling through the Pentagon. The following year, von Braun and his rocketeers were transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, to develop nuclear-tipped missiles to counter the Red threat. Anti-Communist sentiment slapped the last coat of whitewash onto the post-war conspiracy, and the truth about the Mittelwerk vanished into the black hole of the black world.
So impenetrable was the cover-up that by 1955, DeClercq—then a boy in a coonskin cap like Davy Crockett wore on the new medium of TV—could watch Wernher von Braun, his handsome face above the slide rule in his pocket, on a trio of popular Walt Disney shows: “Man in Space,” “Man and the Moon,” and later, “Mars and Beyond.” That same year saw the opening of Disneyland. There, DeClercq had tilted his head back in Tomorrowland to take in the sleek metal skin of the Moonliner, a needle-nosed rocket that soared higher than Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Designed for Disney by von Braun, that rocket was touted as the future of America’s space program.
That’s about as squeaky clean as you can get.
“Pearl Harbor of the Stars!” and “Red Conquest!” blared headlines across America on the morning of October 5, 1957. The Russian satellite Sputnik, developed from the V-2s left behind in East Germany, was orbiting the globe. When the Pentagon freaked and tried to launch its own Vanguard rocket, it exploded on takeoff and was christened “Stay-putnik” by the press. So von Braun got the go-ahead to give it a try, and on January 31, 1958, his Jupiter-C rocket—really a modified V-2—blasted off from Florida to put Explorer 1 in space.
By 1960, von Braun was the head of NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, a civilian agency that usurped the Pentagon’s role in the space race. With Arthur Rudolph as the project director, the whitewashed Nazi rocketeers helped create the mighty Saturn 5 booster, which put Americans on the moon in 1969. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
In the realm of science, von Braun was a genius. Every rocket that first shot into space off American and Russian launching pads had its origin in his brain. America loves its heroes—no matter what the truth behind the myth—and von Braun had become an American citizen in 1955. Life magazine crowned him one of the one hundred most important Americans of the twentieth century, and the Daughters of the American Revolution bestowed on him their Americanism Medal. Lionized, glorified, and showered with honors, SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun died of stomach cancer in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 16, 1977.
Rudolph wasn’t as lucky.
His past caught up with him.
Between 1946 and the 1960s, the story of the underground rocket factory was written out of history. The Cold War and the arms race made sure of that. In the 1960s, the East Germans tried to blow the whistle on von Braun’s membership in the SS and his links to Dora-Mittelbau, but the American media wouldn’t touch that exposé with a ten-foot pole. By then, von Braun was an American god. That’s why they say you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. The Pentagon wanted to fool all of the people all of the time.
The first memoir by a Dora survivor was published in English in 1979, two years after the death of von Braun. Congress had just created a new Nazi-hunting agency, the Office of Special Investigations, or OSI. Rudolph was persuaded to renounce his U.S. citizenship and flee to Germany, in lieu of standing trial for war crimes at the Mittelwerk.
It was that background that had brought DeClercq and Bill Hawke, Jr., to this interview room, where they sat staring each other down with the tape recorder turned off, because official secrets don’t exist. If von Braun represented the depths to which Pentagon patriots would sink to hide un-Americanisms in the white world, how far, DeClercq wondered, would the spooks of the black world go to bury their own dirtiest secrets?
On the table between them lay the pair of blueprints from the bench in the Skunk Mine.
“Roswell,” said the Mountie. “Tell me the truth.”
* * *
“Do you know what a torsion field is?”
“No,” replied DeClercq.
Bill explained the quantum mechanics of zero-point energy. Space isn’t a vacuum; it’s a quantum foam, with nanoparticles popping in and out of existence billions of times a second on every conceivable frequency and in every possible direction. Those fluctuations generate a field of zero-point energy. “At the end of the Second World War,” Bill informed the Mountie, “the Nazis were hard at work on an electromagnetic device designed to tap into ZPE.”
He rapped the blueprint of die Glocke.
“The Nazis called it the Bell.”
“Where did they build it?” asked DeClercq.
“In the Wenceslas Mine. In the Sudeten Mountains of what is now Poland but then was Nazi Germany.”
“How did the Bell work?”
“As you can see in the blueprint, it’s in the shape of a disk. That’s because anything that spins can create a torsion field. Vortexes—energy spirals—are what nature uses to funnel energy. Inside the Bell were two cylinders that spun in opposite directions. By whirling them at twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand rpm, the Nazis created an electromagnetic device that tapped into, drew energy from, and altered ZPE.”
“How did a spinning superconductor do that?”
“Spin polarization.”
“Draw me a simpler picture,” said DeClercq.
“Imagine a mixing bowl full of zero-point energy. Now imagine a whirling blender dipping into the contents of the bowl. The Bell was a Mixmaster that spun to generate a whirlpool of electromagnetism—a torsion field, in other words. And when Nazi scientists dipped the energy spiral of their man-made vortex into the mixing bowl of quantum foam, the ZPE reacted, meshed, or aligned with the Bell in such a way that it produced magical effects.”
“What sort of magic?”
“Basically, they were experimenting with the hidden properties of space-time. If you generate a torsion field of sufficient force, it’s possible to bend the three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time around the generator.”
“The Bell was a time machine?”
“That became Hitler’s obsession during his last days in the Berlin bunker. He sank into madness before he put a bullet in his brain. Time, like gravity, is a variable of hyperspace. Hyperspace is best visualized as a fifth dimension where the binding mechanisms of the universe do their work. The Nazis knew that quantum particle fluctuations slow down when they are affected by a torsion field. If the Bell was able to slow time within its vortex to a thousandth of the speed at which time was advancing outside its influence, Hitler thought he would be able to save himself by switching bunkers to the Wenceslas Mine and living down there for a year. When he stepped out of his time machine twelve months later, he would see the apex of his thousand-year Reich.”
“How?” asked DeClercq. “A time machine can transport you to the future, but it can’t actually change the future. Why wouldn’t Hitler find himself in the Germany of 2945—a Germany that
still would have lost the Second World War?”
Hawke shrugged. “Because that’s not what his horoscope foretold. He expected a miracle, like what happened with Frederick the Great.”
“Megalomania.”
“The guy was nuts,” said Hawke. “But with reason. The science is sound.”
“Gravity,” probed DeClercq. “Where does that fit in?”
“You caught that, huh?”
“It wasn’t hard,” said the Horseman, tapping the Flugkreisel blueprint on the table in front of him. “It’s staring us in the face.”
“Gravity, like time,” said Hawke, “is a variable of hyperspace. The Holy Grail of aeronautics is, and always has been, an anti-gravity device. Every aircraft in the skies today, from supersonic jets to the space shuttle, is the same as the Wright brothers’ biplane. All are powered gliders.
“But imagine if we could develop a craft that sucked—instead of pushed—its way through what’s up there. A device that not only negated the force of gravity, but also canceled out the sluggishness of inertia, an object’s innate resistance to acceleration. Such an aircraft would in effect have negative weight. And without inertia providing resistance, it would continue to gather speed all the way up to the speed of light. No more jet engines, rocket blasts, or nuclear power. No more propellant fuel of any kind. We’d be flying a machine that drew its power from the pulse of the universe, the ultimate quantum leap in aircraft design. It would be the biggest transportation breakthrough since invention of the wheel!”
Having made up his mind to come clean with DeClercq—national security depended on this, and so did the black legacy of Hardware and son—Hawke was manic in his enthusiasm. He had the look of a zealot in his eyes. DeClercq had a question he was itching to pose, but now wasn’t the time to risk turning off the verbal tap.
“Sounds fantastic,” he said.
“Not really,” Hawke replied. “Think about it. What happens when you bring the same poles of two magnets together? North meets north? Or south meets south?”
“They repel each other and bounce apart.”
“Opposites attract. Likes diverge. So electromagnetism both pulls and pushes things. Gravity, inertia, and electromagnetism are component forces of zero-point energy. By spinning the Bell at high speeds, the Nazis created a coupling device that directed the flow of ZPE, exploiting those fluctuations in the quantum sea as they blinked in and out of existence in hyperspace. The most efficient shape to whirl up electro-gravitational lift is a disk. Charge a saucer-like disk positively on the top side and negatively on the lower, and it will exert thrust from the negative to the positive and rise skyward. In other words, it will manipulate gravity for an anti-gravity effect. Divide the disk into segments and dispatch part of the charge around the outer rim, and the saucer can be made to move in any direction.”
“Sounds simple.”
“It’s not. No more simple than splitting an atom. The device must be tuned like a radio to interact with the gravity and inertia components of the ZPE field. Tune it right and you can cancel them out. Tune it wrong and what you’ve got is useless.”
“Is that what the SS was working on in the Wenceslas Mine? The nuts-and-bolts hardware of a time machine for Hitler and an anti-gravity war machine for use against the Allies?”
“Down in the mine and above,” said Hawke. “They also fashioned a Stonehenge-shaped test rig on the surface. A rig sturdy enough to hold down the lift of a flying saucer.”
Now’s the time, thought the Horseman.
“So tell me about Ernst Streicher.”
The Pentagon spook blinked.
DeClercq cinched the hangman’s noose. “And don’t try to play me for a fool.”
Mein Kampf
Vancouver
For as long as the Aryan could remember, pigs had been his best friends. Even back when he was just a young boy living on a pig farm in East Germany, with his broken father and his simpleton of a mother. That his father was crippled both physically and mentally was evident as they went about their chores, mucking out the wallow in their scrub patch of a yard, birthing litters of tiny piglets in the barn, and hanging the pigs up from hooks in the slaughterhouse to slit their throats and butcher the carcasses down to pork.
Hunched and dragging one leg behind him like a ball and chain, the Aryan’s father had struggled through every workday aided by his only son. His wife stuffed the sausages they sold on market day. The tears that ran down his father’s face as each strung-up pig squealed for its life exposed how fragile he really was. Only later, when the boy was older, did his mother tell him that his father had spent twenty years enduring torture and humiliation in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison after the war.
Seared into the Aryan’s memory was the one time he’d met his father’s tormentor.
Colonel Boris Vlasov.
It was December 1979, and winter held East Germany in its hoary glove. The landscape behind the Iron Curtain stood frozen in time, locked forever in May 1945, on the ignoble day that the Third Reich had crumbled into ruins. Time had moved forward in the zones occupied by the United States, Britain, and France. But in the grim, gray zone occupied by the Soviet Union, where Red Army jackboots continued to stomp Germans in their homes, you could still dig wartime bullets out of most of the shell-shocked walls. Only on days like this, with fresh snow blanketing the earth and icicles glittering everywhere else, could a boy fantasize that he was in wonderland.
It was slaughter day, and all three were in the barn. Each wore the leather apron of that messy work, with traditional German rural clothing underneath. Forsaking lederhosen because of the cold, both he and his father wore brown trousers with suspenders over wool vests. The barn doors were open to the snowy countryside, but inside it was misty from the plumes of their breath and the condensation rising from the pools of warm red blood on the floor. The pigs were making such a racket that the family didn’t catch the sound of footsteps entering the barn.
Bang!
A shot was fired through the roof to grab their attention.
A line of icicles crashed to the ground and shattered into a thousand ruby red diamonds.
“Drop your knives,” the gunman yelled.
Russian soldiers quickly moved forward and cuffed the hands of the boy and his parents in front of their waists. Then one by one, starting with his father, they were hoisted up by their wrists like the hog-tied pigs still squealing fearfully on the slaughterhouse hooks. The Germans, however, weren’t hog-tied. Their legs hung free, so that they could just touch the blood-soaked floor. Hanging so their backs were to the open door, the terrified boy and his mother faced his father, six feet away.
The change in his father’s expression clearly signaled that worse was to come. The eyes widened in disbelief, as if he had just glimpsed a ghost, and the lips began to tremble. Soon his father broke into gibbers while trickles of urine ran down his toes to mix with blood on the floor.
“No, Vlasov!” he wailed.
His legs jerked this way and that like a marionette trying to break free of the strings that held it prisoner. The boy saw the shadow of the puppet master creep across the floor before he saw the man behind it. When he finally got a look at his father’s demon in the flesh, he was surprised to see that the man was little more than a walking, cancer-ridden skeleton.
“Yes, Streicher,” Vlasov snarled as he sucked in a final puff from his cigarette and dropped it in the gore at his feet. “Why do you think I released you from prison, if not for this? For you to experience what your father made me suffer in the war, I had to let you start a family.”
Vlasov unbuttoned his greatcoat to expose the outdated Stalinist uniform underneath. Through a hacking fit violent enough to cough up both lungs, he motioned his thugs to attack the boy and his mother.
“Rape them,” he rasped.
The boy was still wondering why the Russian had called his father Streicher—that wasn’t the name they went by—when the soldiers grabbed hold of
his mother and ripped off her clothes. As she hung naked from the hook, they moved across to her son and stripped him, too.
“The boy first,” Vlasov ordered. “Remember, Streicher? How you screamed at Dora-Mittelbau?”
The last sound the boy heard before he passed out from shock was the high-pitched squeal from his own throat.
* * *
The boy had emerged from unconsciousness to find his father gone. The hook in front of him no longer held the crippled wreck of a man. Beside him, his mother hung bleeding, and that’s how they’d stayed until someone arrived to buy a meal of bratwurst.
That Christmas, a package addressed to the boy came in the mail. He opened the paper to find what at first seemed to be a leather-bound book. But the crest engraved into the cover was one he knew well, as it was the tattoo from the skin over his father’s heart.
What Vlasov had sent as a keepsake was a blood-splattered copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
* * *
Now it was his chore to slaughter the pigs for pork. But instead of stringing them up by their hind legs, as his father used to do, he hoisted them up by their front legs so he could pigstick them in the butt first. As he did, he fantasized about doing that to the Russian colonel.
Only pigsticking released the rage inside him.
With Russian spies everywhere in East Germany, it was too dangerous to dig too deeply into the name Streicher. Libraries were monitored and history books rewritten. He didn’t dare try until he reached high school, and even then he didn’t reap much of a payoff. Just one Nazi of consequence had borne that name: SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher. According to the book the Aryan read, that general had “died in the same cowardly way as Adolf Hitler. Two days after the Nazi surrender, he committed suicide in a forest somewhere between Prague and Pilsen.”
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