Hitler's Terror Weapons

by Brooks, Geoffrey

  In an aside to accredited journalists Kurowski and Romersa it is alleged that Lt-Gen Putt had added, “The Germans had V-2s with atomic explosive warheads”. Hitler told Otto Skorzeny106 that the whole point was to introduce “a new and really revolutionary weapon which would take them utterly by surprise” – the same expression as used by US Lt-Gen Putt in his speech. If the Uraniumbombe was ready, and he now had the deadly warhead mass-produced to fit into his V-2s, then the picture makes some kind of sense at last. In this new campaign every V-2 arriving from the heavens on London at Mach 3.5 would crush into a critical mass on impact a sphere in its nose or waist filled with half a tonne or so of plutonium-enriched uranium powder. The assembling of the material, though instantaneous, lacked symmetry, and so a full chain reaction would not develop, but there would certainly be a “fizzle” equivalent to up to 50 tons of TNT, meltdown and fallout. And every V-2 would bring the same punishment until Britain pulled out of the war and all troops of the western Alliance departed from the European mainland. It was a bold plan.

  Once it was obvious that the Ardennes offensive had failed, Hitler admitted defeat to his Luftwaffe ADC107 in terms similar to, “I know the war is lost. The enemy superiority is too great.”

  Horten Ho XVIII bomber

  Before the war the first Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff, Wever, had demanded a fast, four-engined bomber. The initial designs, the Ju 89 and Do 19, had flown but were either scrapped or relegated to other duties, and Goering had abandoned the four-engined series subsequently in favour of the Ju 88. This was due partly to the raw materials situation but also to the fact that double the number of two-engined machines could be manufactured, which looked good in the production figures. Goering was therefore the party responsible for the decision not to have a long-range bomber fleet, and in the upshot it was probably fatal for Hitler.

  At the end of 1944 the development of new types of bomb for use against the United States from Germany and possibly from bases in Japan kick-started a bomber-building programme into life.

  An aircraft specifically built as an atomic-type bomb carrier108 was the Horten XVIII, although its designers were not made aware of that fact until after the war, its purpose being camouflaged by the Luftwaffe as the maritime anti-convoy role. The RLM requirement drawn up in mid-1944 stipulated a radius of action of 9000 kms, enabling the aircraft to make the round trip from Germany to New York without refuelling, carrying an outward bomb load of 4 tonnes. This payload would be about right for a German ‘atomic-type’ bomb with a 500-kilo core, most of the rest being casing and the conventional explosive needed to implode the device. At a conference of top aircraft manufacturers in the autumn of 1944, Messerschmitt, Focke-Wulf, Blohm & Voss, Junkers, Arado and Heinkel were invited to tender designs, but when submitted none were able to meet the radius of action, particularly after the figure of 9000 kms had been increased to 11000 kms.

  Reimar and Walter Horten were not in the mainstream of aircraft manufacture. Before the war their specialist field had been unpowered gliders of very high aspect wing ratio. Their design with a glide ratio of 45:1 was greater than an albatross, and this best performance by a flying wing stood until at least the early 1970s. When war came the brothers’ interest widened and designs for powered versions of the flying wing began to flow from the drawing board. The Hortens were told of the disappointing progress made by the major manufacturers and in November 1944 the Luftwaffe asked them to submit a design for a long-range bomber. They worked on the project full-out through the Christmas period and came up with ten variations for a ‘flying wing’ bomber, basically a wooden boomerang driven by a permutation of from four to eight turbo-jets.

  The final version tagged Ho XVIIIA had six Junkers Jumo 004B turbo-jets at the rear of the fuselage fed by air intakes in the wing’s leading edge. A rocket-boosted skate would be jettisoned at take-off and landing effected on a skid. Construction was predominantly wood held together with a carbon-based glue. This gave the aircraft a low radar profile.

  According to Speer, Hitler was very taken with the whole project, but when between 20 and 23 February 1945 Goering chaired a further design conference at Dessau, the lobbyists got their way and a few days later Goering told the Horten brothers to work in collaboration with Junkers engineers. As these had quietly co-opted some Messerschmitt people to their team, the project was now run by committee.

  The Messerschmitt-Junkers idea was to fit a huge vertical fin and rudder aft and relocate the engines below the wing. These changes increased drag and thus reduced the range but again they got their way, and the final design had two large vertical fins with a cockpit at the leading edge. The six Jumo jets were to be slung in two nacelles one to each side of the central fuselage. Between these was the bomb bay which also housed a tricycle landing gear.

  This variation did not find favour with the Horten brothers and they designed their own improvement, Ho XVIIIB, a flying wing with a crew of three seated in a plexiglass blister in the nose, propulsion being provided by four Heinkel Hirth SO11 turbo-jets each developing 1200 kgs thrust and housed below the wing in gondolas insisted upon by the development authority for safety reasons. This arrangement resulted in a weight saving of about a tonne enabling the replacement of the skid by a fixed 8-wheel undercarriage streamlined in flight by doors to reduce drag. The aircraft would have a speed of about 850 kms/hr, an operational ceiling of 16 kms and could remain aloft for 27 hours. Although armament was considered unnecessary by the Luftwaffe, the Hortens suggested two Mk 108 3-cm cannon directly below the cockpit. A special carbon-based paint and a honeycomb dielectric material pasted over the outer skin were used to suppress the reflection of radar beams.

  On 23 March 1945 the design was approved by Goering and the Hortens were told to approach Saur, Speer’s deputy, to find a suitably protected production facility. Kahla in the Harz mountains was considered suitable. It had two recently completed hangars with concrete roofs 5.6 metres thick which were virtually bomb-proof. Two airstrips were available for test flights, and a workforce of 2000 persons was on hand.

  The first prototype was expected to fly in the summer of 1945 and work was started on 1 April.

  German Intelligence of the Manhattan Project

  During the war Germany had been relatively well informed on the progress of the Manhattan Project. Most of the signals transmitted to Moscow by Klaus Fuchs’ spy ring were decrypted by the SS-RSHA109, as were those of a Canadian communist ring in Ottawa, and passed to SS atomic research groups. The information was withheld from other sections of the German project for security reasons.

  The Spanish spy Alazar de Velasco110 reported to both Germany and Japan on the American work from 1943 until mid-1944, operating from Mexico. Velasco mentioned the difficulties the Americans were having in developing an implosion fuse for their plutonium bomb design, which had already been solved by the Germans.

  On 30 November 1944 U-1230 put Erich Gimpel ashore on an American beach. On Christmas Day, a week before his capture by the FBI, Gimpel discovered from his contact that the American A-bomb would be ready by the summer of 1945. Apparently they had only two or three bombs. Gimpel transmitted this information to Berlin.

  In the autumn of 1944, when he found Hitler planning the Ardennes offensive with freshly formed panzer and fighter units, his Luftwaffe ADC von Below asked him why he did not concentrate all his forces against the Russians and received the answer that he could attack them later, provided that the Americans were not in Berlin. First of all he must have space on his western border. Von Below remarked that everybody thought it preferable to allow the Americans to take the Reich so that the Russians could be held off as far as possible from the eastern frontier. Hitler did not share this view because he feared the power of the American Jews more than the Bolshevists.

  It seems certain that a Doomsday Bomb test was carried out at Ohrdruf in the Harz on the night of 4 March 1945. Witness Frau Cläre Werner related111: “At that time I knew Hans Ritterman, who w
as Plenipotentiary for Reichspost and OKW Special Projects. He worked in the Arnstadt Building Department and was involved in secret Reichspost work in Thuringia. He was a good friend of the family and often came for coffee on Sundays. On 4 March 1945 Hans visited and said we should go to the tower and watch in the direction of Roehrensee village. He didn’t know what the new thing would go like. About nine-thirty that evening behind Roehrensee it suddenly lit up just like hundreds of bolts of lightning. The explosion glowed red inside and yellow outside and you could read a newspaper by it. It lasted only a short time, fell dark again and then came a hurricane, after which it went quiet. Next day, like many residents of Roehrensee, Holzhausen, Muehlberg, Wechmar and Bittstedt, I had nose-bleeds, headache and pressure on my ear-drums. That afternoon about two o’clock, between 100 and 150 SS came to the mountain and asked where the bodies were and where they had to take them. They had been misdirected and a motor cyclist put them right. I watched them making for the Ohrdruf Army Training Ground.”

  Another witness, a former concentration camp inmate at Ohrdruf, described how he was forced to help in the cremation of several hundred charred bodies on 5 March 1945, the inference being that they had died as the result of the weapons test the previous evening.

  V-4: The Doomsday Bomb Ready to Enter Service

  Ashen with the pallor of the Berlin Bunker, all that kept Hitler’s spirit alive in the closing months was the desperate hope that, even at the last, circumstances might yet permit him to use his weapons of frightfulness in a last throw. Accordingly, at Schloss Ferienwalde/Oder on 11 March 1945, his last visit to troops at the front, he implored General Theodor Busse and officers of the Ninth Army to stave off the Russians for as long as it might take for his new ‘wonder-weapons’ to be ready. He was honest in promising them that “every day and every hour are precious for the completion of the weapons of frightfulness which will bring the turn in our fortune!” Frau Werner continued, “The following night, 12 March, the second test took place about ten-fifteen. The air raid sirens went off at nine. The glow wasn’t so bright as the first test and we didn’t get nose-bleeds and so on. Hans spent all night on the tower with his people. He told us we mustn’t ever mention about the bolts of lightning. All the people knew Hans so I suppose they were all Reichspost and Reich Research Council. None of them was in uniform and only a few wore the Party badge in the lapel.”

  The only rocket in Hitler’s armoury able to reach London from Germany carrying a one-tonne payload was the winged A9/10. It was eighty feet long and could hit New York. The series was not yet in mass production, the project having only been resurrected in December 1944. A test launch seems to have been carried through near Ohrdruf on 16 March 1945. All four witnesses112 gave evidence that on 16 March 1945 an “Amerika” rocket was launched successfully from “Polte II” MUNA Rudisleben (an underground munitions factory site). Witnesses (2) and (3) testified to having worked at Rudisleben on a rocket “thirty metres in length” which was launched at Rudisleben on the date in question. Witness (4) testified to having worked with a party of prisoners erecting the staging for the rocket. Cläre Werner stated: “At about nine on the night of 16 March 1945 there was an air raid warning. My friend Hans Rittermann [Plenipotentiary for Special Reichpost and OKW Projects] was visiting the tower with some friends. They had binoculars and were looking towards Ichtershausen [Polte II lay between Wachsenberg Tower and Ichtershausen]. At about eleven it got very bright, something went up into the sky with a huge tail fire, it kept going up, it was heading to the north. Hans Rittermann told us we must never speak of what we had seen, just that we had been witnesses to something unique which would be written about in every history book.” This seems to confirm the launch of an A9/10 rocket, but the war was beyond recall.

  Luftwaffe Mutiny?

  Senior Engineer August Cönders, who had designed the V-3 England Gun, reported in February 1945 that the new decisive weapons would not be ready for use before April 1945113, and in the last days of March 1945 the Luftwaffe dropped leaflets across the Lower Rhine advising the population to evacuate the area, since from the beginning of April new decisive weapons were to be deployed there. A cordon sanitaire 50 kms wide was required. From a military point of view the period towards the end of March offered the last opportunity to shut down the Western Front by driving back the first crossings to the western side of the Rhine. 114 Rumours were rife that near Münster a number of Me 109 fighters were being converted for kamikaze operations (SO = Selbstopfereinsätze, self-sacrificial operations) using a special 250 kg bomb; even an Me 262 jet could not outfly the bomb’s pressure wave.

  There are indications that this proposed operation was in some way sabotaged by Luftwaffe personnel. On 31 March 1945 General Barber and 202 Luftwaffe servicemen including sixteen airfield commanders and eighty-five officers and pilots were executed for “refusing to obey orders”. 115 It can hardly be a coincidence that the Luftwaffe War Diary for the period (19-30 March 1945) and the Wehrmacht High Command War Diary for a much longer period (1 March-20 April 1945) are missing, suggesting that there must have been a serious mutiny during the period and possibly at the instigation of Goering who in May 1945 spoke of a mysterious weapon which he had declined to use “because it might have destroyed all civilization.” 116 An incident which may have been related to this situation occurred on 30 March 1945 when the second of two Me 262A-2a/U2 prototypes of the fast jet bomber version, works number 110555, became a write-off after crash landing at Schröck airfield near Marburg/Lahn and subsequently fell into American hands. This aircraft had been completed in January 1945, since when it had flown twenty-two test flights operating from Rechlin. 117 It was fitted with a bomb-aimer’s position in the nose, and along both sides of this cockpit were long, feeler-like aerials, 118 almost certainly intended as a manually operated proximity fuse for the bombs.

  Alsos Hot On The Trail

  On 22 April 1945 Dr Edward O. Salant of the American Intelligence Mission Alsos addressed to all former American Air Intelligence field teams an urgent circular requesting a search for Luftwaffe 50 kg and 150 kg bombs having an aerial in the tail section.119 Agents were to report the names of scientists, factories or laboratories linked to these bombs. The aerials were aluminium and resembled car aerials, about 40 cms long, as thick as a finger at the base where they screwed into the tail section. The bomb was 40 or 70 cms long, cylindrical and 22cms wide. There were probably brackets on the main casing. Internally were to be found radio components, metal vacuum tubes, condensers, resistors, etc. Areas of special interest were thought to be Rechlin, Celle and Stade.

  On 26 April 1945 a supplementary notice widened the search to other bombs which had a 25-cm long aerial in the nose. An accompanying sketch showed a ball with small, wire-meshed covered holes at the head of the aerial. It may be recalled that during the initial experiments with the explosive in 1944, Zippermayer had had the idea that a better effect might be obtained if the powder was spread out in the form of a cloud before the explosion. A metal cylinder had been attached to the lower end of the container and hit the ground first, dispersing the powder. A quarter of a second later a small charge in the cylinder exploded and ignited the cloud. This may explain the real purpose of the ‘aerial and ball’ fitted to the nose of the bomb. The bombs were actually stored in Austria at a massive underground SS-weapons factory codenamed Quarz at Melk.

  On 18 March 1945 the airfield commander of a fighter group at Münster, probably JG27 or JG28, received orders to accept delivery in Austria of the contents of thirty railway wagons consigned by the Office of Luftwaffe Supply. The orders were long and complicated and explained how the Me 109 fighter-bomber was to be converted to carry a new type of bomb. It was of 250 kg and would be slung under the bomb bay and kept in position by unusually long bolts which gave a clearance of 16 cms above the runway. A few days later another order arrived in which it was stated that the bomb had a destructive radius of 16 kms and would destroy the aircraft dropping it. Therefore th
e mission was to be flown only by unmarried volunteers.

  Next came telephone orders for the airfield commander to collect two heavy tractor trucks at Linz and proceed to Amstetten railway goods yard. On this occasion he was advised that the new bomb would be suspended from a parachute when dropped, thus allowing the pilot a chance of escape. An altitude of 7000 metres was allowed.

  The airfield commander’s ADC, a Luftwaffe Hauptmann, was sent to Amstetten railway yard and found a train of thirty sealed wagons each bearing the words “Caution. New Explosive Type!” painted on the panelling in large white characters. A Waffen-SS Hauptsturmführer in charge of the security detachment refused to release the contents of the wagons to him, citing a Führerbefehl which required the release order to bear Hitler’s personal signature. The Luftwaffe ADC had no document of this nature and the train remained at Amstetten until the arrival of the Americans.