A. “We Can Still Lose This War”
But psychological operations or not, even the American aerospace firm Convair (Consolidated Vultee) got in on the act, with a two page advertisement in Life magazine in its August 27, 1945 edition with an “article” entitled “…by the Skin of our Teeth.”
SEVERAL TIMES during the European phase of this war, victory was almost within Germany’s grasp…on land, on the sea, or in the air.
Above all, knowing the vital importance of air supremacy, the Nazis tried time and again to wrest it back from the Allies.
And they almost succeeded.
Time Ran Out
Especially in the last months of the war, our margin of safety was slimmer than most of us suspected.
Just how slim it was is known best to certain American military experts who have since inspected some of Germany’s underground research laboratories and war plants.
Here they saw secret weapons in various stages of development…weapons which might conceivably have turned the trick for the Nazis if they could have used them boldly in a last desperate gamble.
Some of these things can be revealed. Others cannot – yet.
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:
SECRET
HEADQUARTERS
UNITED STATES STRATEGIC AIR FORCES IN EUROPE (REAR)
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. CONCLUSION:
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 Dulles19 and SS General Wolff;
(3) The disappearance of SS General Hans Kammler;
(4) The disappearance of Kammler’s most highly classified research project, “the Bell,” along with all its project documentation; and finally,
(5) The ironic – and some would say extremely suspicious – death of General George Patton shortly after the war’s end.
A speculative pattern emerges, for if Wolff was secretly negotiating with Dulles with the tacit approval of Bormann – and Bormann’s approval meant Hitler’s as well – then it is likely that the collateral was the treasure trove of the Kammlerstab’s documents, which would have included the secret patents of the Third Reich, seized and classified by the Forschung, Entwicklung, und Patente. The unerring precision with which late war American thrusts – largely by Patton’s Third Army - toward the most secret centers and installations of Kammler’s black projects empire were guided can only indicate that at some very high level the Americans were receiving “inside information” that came from an equally high level within the Third Reich: Kammler and Bormann. Patton may either have been the point man in some of these operations, or, as is more likely, was simply privy to a vast amount of first hand field intelligence reports that allowed him to piece together a thorough and nearly complete overview of the extent of Nazi black projects. One may speculate that Patton’s field reports at this time constituted a kind of “Kammler Index” of the Third Reich’s secret weapons projects. In either case, he would have been in a position to disclose a vast and hidden intelligence operation, not the least of which included a Faustian bargain for exotic technology and postwar cooperation between the Nazis and the western Allies, particularly with the United States.
And what of the treasure trove itself? A glance at more unusual German secret weapons will demonstrate why General Patton in early 1945 – perhaps already “in the loop” on the secret negotiations taking place, and the “technological potential” the Allies faced if those negotiations were not successful – expressed serious private reservations about the Allies “still being able to lose this war.”
2. Death Beneath the Seas: The Extraordinary Capabilities of the Type XXI U-boat
While Project Lusty concerned itself exclusively with Nazi aerospace technology, it is worth mentioning one of the deadliest potentials that was already coming into production as the war approached its end: the very new, and very lethal, German Type XXI U-boat. The Type XXI thus represented no mere prototype waiting to see production; it was not mere potential. It was a very real and present danger that would have presented the Allies with no end of difficulties at sea had the war continued even just a few weeks longer. And as I averred in Reich of the Black Sun, it is likely that the British had the misfortune of encountering a few Type XXIs before the end of hostilities.20
The Type XXIs possessed a novel propulsion system, the Walther turbine utilizing hydrogen peroxide, that allowed a speed of some 17.2 knots submerged, and according to the first trials information of the Kriegsmarine, were capable of a truly astonishing submerged depth of 330 meters!21 Some statements placed its submerged speed closer to 21 or 22 knots.22 Moreover, the Type XXI could continue at this phenomenal underwater speed for some 340 miles before having to slow to recharge its accumulators.23 Thus, the Type XXI, unlike the subs of every other navy or even its predecessors in the Kriegsmarine, was not merely a submersible; it was, in fact, the first truly modern submarine vessel, a vessel designed to do most of its traveling under water, not merely a vessel that could submerge when necessary. With its special “radar absorbent material” coating its newer streamlined schnorkel device, and its tremendous maximum possible submerged depth, the submarine managed to be undetectable to American surface vessels at a mere 200 meters away when the U.S. Navy conducted tests on one specimen in 1946!24 As Polish researcher Igor Witkowski puts it, the submarine “was a jump from the level of the 1940s into the 1960s.”25
But even this recitation does not even begin to exhaust its truly deadly potential in naval warfare. If an Allied aircraft somehow managed to elude its on board radar and four 20 millimeter turreted anti-aircraft guns on either side of the boat’s streamlined conning tower, the submarine could be completely under water in a mere 18 seconds.26 But that is not all, for unlike any other submarine in any other navy, the Type XXI’s captain would not ev
en have to see his target to fire torpedos at it:
The submarine possessed a completely revolutionary system of torpedo fire control, enabling it to carry out effective attacks even at complete submersion, the target positions being determined by creating three-dimensional coordinates of the noise’s source through recalculating of delays received by various microphones placed on the submarine’s hull. After an attack the Type XXI escaped at maximum speed, at which the enemy’s sonar was totally ineffective (it maintained effectiveness up to approx. 12 knots). 27
The potential of the Type XXI was thus not a mere “potential.” It was a deadly reality.
One can only imagine what a Type XXI equipped with the new wire-guided or acoustic-homing torpedoes would have done to Allied shipping had it entered service in sufficient numbers. After all, a Type XXI with conventional torpedos was bad enough…
SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology Page 3