by Frank Lost
Many know from WWII movies about the impressive chain of bunkers along the Atlantic Wall, which was meant to prevent any attempt of the Allied forces to land by sea. Others may remember pictures of Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia (Wolfsschanze aka The Wolf's Lair) or in Ukraine (at Vinnitsa: Werwolf aka The Werewolf). But who had ever heard of the underground cities in the Jonas Valley, or of the underground networks of factories at the Dora concentration camp?
They had built no less than fourteen headquarter-ready bunkers for Hitler, of which he actually used ten. Some of them were well known, but others are barely mentioned in the history books. For example, most French are not even aware that there exists a large bunker complex just 60 km from Paris, in the city of Margival adjacent to Soissons. Except for the people who live very close to it, nobody else had ever visited Hitler’s Polish headquarters of Stępina or Strzyżów, referred to as the Anlage Süd, (Southern Installations). Hitler met Mussolini there on August 27, 1941. Based on the information that I was able to personally gather from the local elderly, villagers were asked to stay home and close their windows in order not to see the Duce and the Führer while they stayed at Stępina, although they were allowed to stay put in their homes.
The same old people told me that just after the war, Polish secret service agents discovered that there was a multi-level structure right under the bunker that may be four to five underground floors. Nobody could know for sure, since the Germans flooded the whole building thanks to a nearby river. Polish divers tried to locate the breach in the structure from which the river poured in, but always failed in doing so. Pumping up the water was therefore not an option. Rumors have said that rich North Americans of Polish descent would try in the near future to invest the necessary money in order to stop the leak and drain the bunker and its underground floors. Yet nobody knows exactly what they expect to find down there because of the lack of archives on the matter.
Stępina Train Bunker where Mussolini's train was hosted
Even more mysterious were the vast network of tunnels and bunkers, which were so big that they sometimes looked like underground cities. Their real purpose has not always been clear up to this day.
The less mysterious and yet probably the most gruesome among them was the Dora concentration camp near the city of Nordhausen, with its Mittelwerk factory.
The majority of Nazi covert activities took place in their underground facilities beneath Kohnstein Mountain, where they had buried their entire factory that produced the famous V2 rockets. The existence of these rockets was discovered after the Allied air raid on the Peenemünde island’s U-boat facilities, on August 17 and 18, 1943, which destroyed most of its infrastructure.
Mittelwerk factory
Der Riese (German for “The Giant”) is another very extensive complex of underground tunnels and bunkers in the Owl Mountains and under Książ Castle in Lower Silesia, which was part of Germany at that time, but is now in Poland. It was built in 1943 to serve as another headquarters for Hitler. Its underground bunkers were located in eight different places and took thousands of forced laborers to build. According to Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production of the Reich, "These projects required 328,000 cubic yards of reinforced concrete, on top of the masonry involved, and they entailed 277,000 cubic yards of underground passages, 36 miles of roads with six bridges, and 62 miles of pipelines. The ‘Giant’ complex alone consumed more concrete than what was allocated for the entire population to build their air-raid shelters in 1944." The total cost was almost five times higher than the Wolf's Lair bunker.
Kilometers of tunnels are part of the Giant’s network
The works were never fully completed before the war ended, and since the Polish secret service confiscated the blueprints and all the relevant confidential information, nobody really knows what its exact purpose was to this day. People assume that it was meant to be the biggest of all Hitler's headquarters, and a shelter for the underground factories, but this assumption could never be confirmed for sure. SS General Hans Kammler was in charge of all these underground facilities, but since he disappeared in 1945 close to Prague, in Czechoslovakia, his alleged death became surrounded by many controversies, the most likely being that he was shot by Russian troops in the woods surrounding the Czech capital city. Others claim that he bargained with the US Army to barter his knowledge about German Wonder Weapons in exchange for his immunity in the USA. This theory would not be implausible if he had made it through to the Americans before being captured by Soviet troops, since Kammler was a man who knew even about the A9 rocket, known as the Amerika rocket, that was going to be built in these 30-meter high tunnels with the purpose of reaching New York City.
Książ Castle in Poland
It has been calculated that over half of the underground galleries and chambers have yet to be discovered, because a SS team blasted many of their entrances. This is how the Warsaw Voice reports what the post-war Polish researchers had estimated: "There are 35 stoneware pipes meant to carry liquid. Where to? We don't know. We measured their depth and tried to use smoke to find out whether the pipes were connected inside, and where they ended. We put two lit flares in each opening – the smoke was evidently sucked inside. In one case, we could hear what sounded like an air-lock working ... smoke from 26 flares went inside and didn't really come out anywhere. How great must be the capacity of those pipes, or even the underground tunnels, if they could take in such a quantity of smoke!"
There seems to be even more tunnels, suggested by the fact that some have been bricked up. Researchers went on claiming, "In some places, pipes come out the surface of the mountain from nowhere, and in others, narrow-gauge railway tracks stick out of piles of rock; such tracks were used to remove the excavated material. There are also empty chambers with no direct connection to the tunnels accessible today, nor to any surface structures. Some elements suggest that the tunnels in the Owl Mountains could have had a multi-level structure, very seldom seen in other German facilities around the same period. This could confirm the presumption of some amateur explorers that there might still be some things in the corridors which are still inaccessible today. The question as to what exactly, still remains unanswered. The obvious interest shown in these facilities after the war, by the special services either in the Soviet Union, in East Germany, or in Poland could do nothing to dispel these doubts."
The Jonas Valley - It’s now worth mentioning the most mysterious of all underground facilities: the 25 tunnels dug in the mountains of the Jonas Valley (Jonastal) in Germany. Tens of thousands of prisoners worked there to complete this gigantic enterprise, many of them starving to death or losing their lives in the process. The secrecy surrounding this operation was so strict that even nowadays no one can say for sure what their actual purpose was. The tunnel entrances have been blasted in order to prevent access to the public for security reasons. Some claim that it was one more huge headquarters for Hitler, others that it was a site for testing nuclear bombs, or to host factories producing the Amerika rocket meant to reach American soil (Hitlers Bombe by Rainer Karlsch, 2005).
Jonastal: 25 tunnel entrances can
be seen entering the mountain
Last but not least, adventurous minds claim that the Amber Room treasure, called the Eighth Wonder of the World, would be buried there. It was a room pertaining to Catherine's Palace, called Tsarskoye Selo in Russia, and was a true marvel of art and craftsmanship. The most likely theory is that is was brought to Königsberg by the Germans after they stole it, and that it was destroyed there by none other than the advancing Soviet troops. Königsberg is now a Russian exclave bearing the name of Kaliningrad.
True or not, there are still very strange stories being told about the underground Reich, and the author of this book heard one such tale recounted by a reliable good friend. This friend's grandfather was one of the very first French soldiers fighting on German soil, where he heard that American soldiers had found a very deep tunnel, probably in the Harz Moun
tains where the Jonastal is located. He claimed that they were ordered to go inside to find out what it was meant for. The deeper they went inside, the longer the tunnel appeared to be. They allegedly had even found two dead SS soldiers, probably by starvation, holding onto their MG42 machine guns in a desperate effort to try to prevent any Allied intrusion. Where it gets even stranger is that they were ordered to blast the tunnel after nearly 14 kilometers, and not even try to get any farther. Did the US generals know more, or were they simply afraid of what they could have found?
Wonder Weapons
The Wonder Weapons (Wunderwaffen in German) were real cutting-edge weapons, as well as a new means of propaganda in the hands of Dr. Joseph Goebbels. They were technologically so ahead of their time that they gave birth to a full new myth. Some of them were proven to be quite useful, like the V2 rockets, while some others may have been just as efficient if they had been produced on time and in sufficient quantities to really turn the tide of the war around. The most famous example is probably the Me 262 jet-engine aircraft; moreover, there were some Wonder Weapons which never developed beyond the stage of blueprints or prototypes.
Silbervogel: Wind tunnel model, picture taken in 1935.
Many innovative projects were cancelled before they even started, or they were never completed by the time the war ended. We are talking about different types of aircraft carriers, U-boats with all-electric engines using an air-independent propulsion device, both able to carry ballistic missiles and super-heavy tanks like the Ratte (The Rat) which would have weighed 1,000 metric tons. German scientists had also planned some rocket-powered aircrafts, reusable A5-type rockets, A11-and A12-type satellite launchers, a Silbervogel sub-orbital Amerika bomber that could be launched from the mid-Atlantic Azores islands, manned surface-to-air missiles, a sun gun with a concave mirror that could focus reflected sunlight on a specific target on the Earth and possibly destroy an entire city, a gigantic static V-3 cannon to bombard London from their Northern France location, and finally, the infamous German nuclear project, which failed for lack of unified research management.
Below are listed some of the Wunderwaffen that made it to the field of battle, even though some were only in small quantities:
The Type XXI U-Boot, also known as the "Elektroboot", was the first submarine designed to operate primarily submerged rather than as surface ships that could submerge, providing a means to escape detection or to launch a surprise attack.
Type XXI U-boats in Bergen, Norway
The Panzer VIII Maus was completed in late 1944 and it was the heaviest tank ever built.
Panzer VIII Maus with crew members
The Junkers Ju 390 was one of the aircraft candidates, along with the Messerschmitt Me 264 and Focke-Wulf Ta 400, which was submitted for deployment in the Amerika Bomber project.
Six-engine Junkers Ju 390
The Messerschmitt Me 323 Gigant was in fact the biggest land-based transport aircraft of the war.
Messerschmitt Me 323 Gigant
The V-1 flying bomb (Vergeltungswaffe 1 in German, standing for the Retaliation Weapon 1) was the jet-powered predecessor of our modern-day cruise missiles.
V-1 missile on a launch rail at Imperial War Museum Duxford
The V-2 rocket (also called Aggregat-4 or A4), was a ballistic missile specifically targeted to hit London and Antwerp.
V2-Rocket in the Peenemünde Museum
The Horten Ho 229 was a prototype fighter/bomber combination, designed by Reimar and Walter Horten, and it was the first wing-powered jet aircraft in the world.
Horten Ho 229
The Flettner Fl 282 Kolibri (“Hummingbird”) was a single-seat, open-cockpit intermeshing-rotor helicopter. It was the first series production helicopter in the world.
German helicopter Fl 282 Kolibri
The Fieseler Fi 103R was a manned version of the V-1 flying bomb, intended for attacks in which the pilot was likely to be killed.
Fieseler Fi 103R, code-named Reichenberg
The Me 163 Komet was a rocket-powered fighter aircraft, which was the only one ever to be deployed.
Messerschmitt Me 163
The Me 262 Schwalbe ("Swallow") was the world's first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft, which was much faster than its counterpart Allied fighters.
Me 262A at the National Museum
of the US Air Force in Dayton
The Dora was the name of one German ultra-heavy railway gun which weighed 1,350 tons. It fired shells that weighed seven tons, with a 47-kilometer range.
Dora gun
The StG 44 (Sturmgewehr 44) is considered by many historians to be the first modern assault rifle.
StG 44
The Zielgerät 1229 (ZG 1229), aka Vampir, was an infrared device developed for the Sturmgewehr 44 assault rifle, designed to offer the night-vision advantage.
Vampir infrared device for night vision
The Sarin Gas was discovered in 1938 by two German scientists who were attempting to create a strong pesticide. In mid-1939, the formula for the agent was passed to the chemical warfare section of the German Army Weapons Office, which ordered that it be brought into mass production for wartime use. A number of pilot plants were built, and a high-production facility was still under construction by the time World War II ended. Although sarin could be incorporated into artillery shells, for some reason Germany decided not to use nerve agents against Allied targets too close to home. This gas was used with devastating effects in a Tokyo subway during the 1995 attack of the Aum Sect.
NAZI OCCULTISM
Nazi occultism is a concept where it is difficult to separate historical facts from post-war fantasies. The latter are numerous, especially from the ‘60s onward. Two books helped this surge in Nazi occultism: Pauwels and Bergier's The Morning of the Magicians (1960) and Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny (1972). After these, any book that tackled the Nazi occultism theme was sure enough to make strong sales, well above 50,000 copies for the worst among them.
The only researched academic book to have seriously studied this field is The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke). It links the late 19th century ariosophist theories to the Thule Society, and possibly to the very beginnings of the Nazi Party. The only proven aspects of Nazi occultism are Himmler's known interest in the matter and the researches he ordered.
It is nonetheless obviously true that the twelve years of the Nazi era are like a breach in the fabric of history. The Nazi standards and values may be seen as the archetype embodiment of an evil empire compared to our own civilization, but they are above all values from the Absolute Elsewhere, as Pauwels and Bergier put it rightfully in their best-seller.
At this stage, it is hence more than necessary to determine the real facts concerning Nazi researches, expeditions and beliefs before we can properly evaluate post-war fantasies and cheap Internet Nazi myths. Let’s stress, though, that these myths are still best-selling as many readers prefer anything but the truth as long as it thrills them like a good TV series would.
The Hollow Earth Theory
Although this theory is merely a notion which was dismissed by the scientific community as early as the late 18th century, it still has advocates today.
During the Nazi era, the Hollow Earth Theory had followers in Germany but not more than in any other Western country during that time. In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, telling us of an awe-inspiring voyage inside the earth by a ship that entered through an alleged hole in the South Pole; in 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton published his famous fiction called The Coming Race about some superior creatures, called Vril-ya, that dwelled in the subterranean world; in 1864 Jules Verne wrote of A Journey to the Center of the Earth where prehistory still existed; in 1922 Ferdinand Ossendowski mentioned in his Beasts, Men and Gods the existence of an underground kingdom, with Agarthi as their capital city ... the very residence of the King of the World.
According to the book written
by Pauwels & Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (1960), German scientists were testing life inside a hollow universe on Rugen Island of the Baltic Sea. They even tried to use infrared rays to detect British navy ships, since the alleged inverted curvature of the Earth would have permitted the monitoring of their whereabouts. One does not wonder anymore why it failed so miserably.