Hitler's Terror Weapons

by Brooks, Geoffrey

  Odd Goings-on at Führer-HQ Waldenburg

  Near the town of Waldenburg in Lower Silesia was a coal mine turned by the SS in 1944 into a laboratory for V-weapons research.146 The entire site, Führer HQ Riese, was started in the spring of 1944 and consisted of six underground systems with a 30-square kilometre area plus tunnels housing the proposed Führer HQ below Schloss Fürstenstein 25 kilometres away. Each system was a design of mostly concreted cross-tunnels on one or several levels. The most secure was Säuferhofen, whose entrances were protected by steel doors and machine-gun emplacements.

  The research, which replicated a larger project at Ohrdruf in the Harz, took place between November 1944 and May 1945. It was code-named Laternenträdger (Torch bearer) and Chronos. Professor Walther Gerlach, Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Science, coordinated the programme with Dr Ernst Grawitz, Chief of SS Medical Services.

  The experiments were conducted within a 20-cm thick ceramic cover in the shape of a bell. The studies were aimed at analyzing the effects of contra-rotating at very high speeds two cylinders containing about 250 kgs of mercury or a mercury amalgamate around a hard and heavy metal core.

  Another experiment codenamed Leichtmetall (light metal) used thorium and beryllium peroxides. Thorium oxide is one of the most heat-resistant metals known and beryllium has a very high melting point. By 1944 Germany had cornered all available European stocks of thorium, but, on enquiring the reason, the US Alsos Mission was unable to establish a satisfactory answer.

  The research room was 30 metres square with ceramic-tiled walls, the floor covered with rubber mats which were burned after three experiments. The entire contents of the room were destroyed after each ten experiments. After each test the room would be doused with brine for up to 45 minutes.

  Each test lasted from 45 seconds to one minute when the apparatus emitted a strange, pale blue light. Some members of the research team suffered health problems from exposure to this light. Despite the precautions employed, many personnel complained of insomnia, memory loss, imbalance, muscle spasms and a permanent unpleasant metallic taste in the mouth. The first scientific team in May-June 1944 had been disbanded after the death of five of its seven members. While the test was proceeding, all personnel stood back 200 metres from the epicentre and wore thick rubber protective suits and helmets with large red glass visors.

  During the tests electrical equipment up to 150 metres from the bell would short-circuit or break down.

  The research involved tests on small animals, animal substances, plants such as mosses, ferns, ivies and fungi and possibly on humans as well. It was found that, during the spinning experiments, samples exposed inside the bell were completely destroyed by an alien crystalline matter which could not be described precisely, being unknown to science. The substance formed within the host and destroyed its tissues. Liquids such as blood gelled and separated. In plants, chlorophyll disappeared after 4-5 hours, followed by decay within 14 hours. However, there was no smell of decomposition and the plants transformed into matter of the consistency of axle grease. Efforts were made to reduce the damage inflicted by the unknown substance and by 25 March 1945 this had been cut to no more than 3%.

  The menial work was carried out by prisoners from the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. These people, and some lower-level German scientific workers, sixty-two in all, were murdered near Pattag at the beginning of May 1945 when the project closed down, indicating its high level of secrecy.

  The interruption of electrical current is symptomatic of most close-contact UFO reports. It is an electromagnetic effect and occurred at Waldenburg, where one assumes it was directly related to spinning containers of mercury at high speed in order to achieve some effect in the various indescribable materials being experimented upon. It was suggested in the Polish bulletin that there was reason to suspect that the subject was connected with the Waffen-SS Haunebu flying saucer research project under the SS-E-IV and SS-U-13 research teams, but nothing is known about the work of either.147

  The Motorstoppmittel

  The valley of Jonastal lies in the heart of Germany, south-west of Weimar in the Harz Mountains, at the centre of a ring of the towns of Erfurt, Waltershausen, Crawinkel and Stadtilm. Since Imperial times there had been a Military Training Area at Ohrdruf on a plateau in Jonastal. Organization Todt began work building a vast underground city in the limestone in 1937. The entrances were disguised as ‘weekend chalets’. The actual size of the development is difficult to estimate since the entrances to the lower galleries were sealed off by the SS with explosives and, after exploring what remained accessible, the Americans closed down the rest.

  A number of surface structures – five giant halls which can be seen in immediate post-war Allied aerial photos – were demolished in the DDR period and covered over below an unbelievably thick layer of industrial rubbish to make a hill. Exploration below ground is strictly prohibited. With a Land Rover in dry weather it takes several hours to tour the perimeter of the area. The Feldherrn hill and Musketierberg are central elevations offering a good view over a plateau of grass and scrub extending for several kilometres in all directions. The terrain is dangerous and remains littered with shrapnel, unexploded bombs and shells.

  In 1944 the SS took over at Ohrdruf, which had been established as a V-weapon centre some time previously, and soon strange things began to happen. Ohrdruf was the largest underground factory city of the Third Reich and the most impregnable place on earth. The mapped tunnel system is 1.5 miles in length, although that is definitely only the tip of the iceberg.

  Below ground there are thought to be four facilities consisting of many long galleries on as many as four levels designated Jasmin, Wolfsturm, Siegfried and Olga. Huge ventilation shafts are still to be found at the surface. It is known that there are sufficient generators below ground to supply current to a city the size of Berlin. At least one underground power source there has been running without any maintenance since 1945. The German writer Dieter Meinig148 reported that when the Bundeswehr reclaimed the territory on the reunification of Germany in 1989 they discovered a large thick electric cable which emerged from the ground directly above facility Olga. On examination it was found to be of wartime manufacture and carrying a high voltage current. The cable was cut to see if a consumer complained, but nobody did. This deep underground facility was sealed by the SS from the inside as well as at the surface. It has never been investigated and is probably the origin of the strange glow in the night sky occasionally reported even nowadays, leading one to assume that the power plant could not be shut down and is continuing to produce energy over 55 years later. After the war the US air force photographed the region from the air and saw the underground construction as being shaped like the spokes of a huge Celtic cross. A senior American officer who saw below ground wrote of it:

  “The underground installations were amazing. They were literally subterranean towns. There were four in and around Ohrdruf: one near the horror camp, one under the Schloss, and two west of the town. Others were reported in nearby villages. None were natural caves or mines. All were man-made military installations. The horror camp had provided the labour. An interesting feature of the construction was the absence of any spoil. It had been carefully scattered in hills miles away. The only communication shelter which is known is a two floor deep shelter with the code Amt 10. Over fifty feet underground the installation consisted of two and three galleries several miles in length and extending like the spokes of a wheel. The entire hull structure was of massive reinforced concrete. Purpose of the installations was to house the High Command after it was bombed out of Berlin. The place also had panelled and carpeted offices, scores of large work- and store rooms, tiled bathrooms and tubs and showers, flush toilets, electrically equipped kitchens, decorated dining rooms and mess halls, giant refrigerators, extensive sleeping quarters, recreation rooms, separate bars for officers and enlisted personnel, a cinema and air-conditioning and sewage systems.”149

  According to witnesse
s, from 1943 onwards Ohrdruf was a testing ground for new weapons systems above ground and new panzer weapons, guns and remote control systems are well remembered, as is the Motorstoppmittel, which could bring down aircraft by means of a strong electro-magnetic field. While the machine was thought to be operating at Ohrdruf automobile and panzer engines for miles around would cut out and refuse to function. The Allies do not appear to have photographed or bombed the area during the war, which suggests that the area was deliberately avoided by their aircraft.

  The Motorstoppmittel was reported in 1944 by a member of the Technical Intelligence Division of the US Strategic Air Force:

  “We were getting reports from a number of overlapping sources: planes returning to England from bombing missions over the continent kept experiencing engine trouble. The engines would suddenly become rough, cutting in and out. As the stories accumulated, scattered spy and POW reports reinforced the suspicion that a secret ground installation was responsible for our engine trouble.

  “There was considerable discussion among Intelligence people as to what should be done. The general feeling – that some new German device was causing the electrical problems – presented one major difficulty: the amount of electricity required to short out a B-29 engine was calculated as greater than all the known electrical energy output of Europe!

  “A special plane was fitted out with monitoring equipment. A volunteer was found to fly the plane. He flew his mission and when he returned to base, he behaved like a madman. He was angry and hysterical and raved about ‘How we could have subjected him to such things’. When we tried to debrief him he cursed and screamed. He was so wild that nobody could find out just what had happened to him. He was finally sedated and put to bed.

  “But the strangest thing of all was that when he woke up next day, he acted as if nothing unusual had happened. He had completely forgotten the previous day’s insanity. He had no memory of his anger or hysteria. He was feeling fine, ready to return to duty. Of course, the plane’s instruments showed nothing.”

  An interesting account of what it was like to experience this from ground level is provided by Frau Cläre Werner150 who was a watchtower lookout on the Wachsenburg, close to the Ohrdruf military testing centre. She often observed a strange lightning effect across the territory lasting several minutes which lit up the whole horizon at night and so bright that she could read a newspaper by it. Frau Werner and two other witnesses reported that, after these phenomena, they would suffer a feeling of being completely drained and exhausted for the next three days. Scientists explain the exhaustion as a form of shock caused by waves of energy from a gravitational field.

  This development probably resulted from the observation that spinning experiments with mercury caused electrical equipment and motors to short-circuit and malfunction. By stepping up the output of the device the gravitational field expanded over a far greater area. Possibly the manufacture of the gelatinous organic-metallic serum was carried out on a larger scale at Ohrdruf for the flying saucer programme.

  Most of those who had worked at Ohrdruf under the SS, whether concentration camp inmates from the Buchenwald satellite camp S-III nearby, local civilian workers or lower ranking German technical staff, disappeared on or before the arrival of American forces under General Patton on or about 11 April 1945. As many as 3,000 local people remain unaccounted for. Elite SS units murdered even Wehrmacht personnel who had seen the Ohrdruf technologies and therefore knew too much151. In addition there are substantial rumours that large groups of SS men and their families were seen entering the tunnel system during the fighting for Jonastal just before the lower galleries were sealed while the mysterious electro-magnetic source was left operating. Whatever its purpose, the last Führer HQ at the centre of such a defence would have been impregnable so far as mechanical means of attack were concerned.

  The German work at Ohrdruf may have been aimed at investigating other space-time continua. This was said to have been the purpose of the alleged Philadelphia Experiment in 1943. Scientists such as Dr Joseph Weber of the University of Maryland have confirmed that good reasons exist to suspect some form of gravitic anomaly disposed around the Earth in a particular pattern. This might be an ordinary gravitational field beyond our spectrum acting in a manner equivalent to electro-magnetism. The thinking is that there could be ten areas of the world, five in each hemisphere, where this form of gravitic anomaly operates, and in these regions it does seem that the number of disappearances of ships, people and aircraft is disproportional to the occurrence of losses elsewhere. The most famous of these is an oblong area with one corner at Fort Lauderdale on the Florida coast, the so-called ‘Bermuda Triangle’. In order to be clear on the concept, I have cited three post-war cases. Although the basic anomaly seems to be chronometric, i.e aircraft arriving at a geographical location at a calculated speed beyond their modest capabilities, the actual cause may have been the operation of Gravity II a – second gravitic force first postulated by the geophysicist Dr John Carstoiu in his NAS thesis The Two Gravitational Waves Propagation.

  These theories may well explain, for example, two USAF cases over the Pacific in the 1950s and the US Navy tragedy involving the mysterious loss of five Avenger aircraft on a training flight from Fort Lauderdale on 5 December 1945.

  Ivan T. Sanderson investigated in his book Invisible Residents (Universal Tandem, 1974 at pp. 152-162) two reports by experienced military aviators involving an inexplicable time anomaly while aloft. The reports were then analyzed by Captain R.J. Durrant, an airline pilot.

  J. F. O’D was a B-26 group navigator who briefed three squadrons daily on navigational routes operating while serving in Korea in late 1955. Returning from a training mission heading almost due south between Seoul and Pusan at 7000 feet, he calculated at three check points over a twenty-five minute period a ground speed for his aircraft of 550 knots. This would imply a tail wind of 265 knots for an aircraft of that type on a routine flight. There were no side-effects such as unusual turbulence reported. Meteorologists were of the opinion that such a wind blowing south at 7000 feet would be impossible. Captain Durrant stated that the only explanation available to fit the reported facts was that the aircraft must have unknowingly entered a mass moving at a speed greater that the spin of the Earth. A selective force pushing or pulling the aircraft would have shown up on the airspeed indicator.

  In the second case Lt Col Frank P. Hoskins USAF stated that in the spring of 1966 he was AF advisor to 106th Air Transport Group NY Air Guard based at NASNY. On the day in question he was a basic navigator aboard an Air Guard C-97 from Kwajalein to Guam. Guam is an area notorious for unexplained aircraft disappearances. It was a 6-hour flight at 12,000 feet with a forecast side wind of 10 knots. His Loran and celestial fixes over part of the course resulted in the calculation of a speed of 340 knots, indicating a following wind of 110 knots. On landing, the weather debriefing officer admitted that he was aware of such inexplicable phenomena which occurred for a few hours eight to ten times a year.

  The possibility of this assist being the jet stream was ruled out by low altitude and wrong direction, and Captain Durrant also calculated that Lt Col Hopkins had actually underestimated the strength of the assist, which was nearer to 200 knots. A wind of such velocity would have affected the land surface below. The only explanation is that this old C-97 aircraft ran into a local gravity field anomaly. To put it more simply, in both cases the two aircraft got to their destination impossibly fast. The only possible known cause, a wind of super-hurricane force, was not recorded, and if it had occurred would have had a devastating effect at ground level. Thus for a brief period the aircraft slipped into an unknown strata which happily was moving in the same direction of travel.

  The third case is more complicated, since none of the aircrew survived. The verdict of the Navy Department enquiry into the loss of five Avenger aircraft and their crews on 5 December 1945 adjudged the flight leader, Lt Charles C. Taylor, culpable for the tragedy: “The flight leader’s
false assurance of identifying as the Florida Keys islands he sighted plagued his future decisions and confused his reasoning. He was directing his flight to fly east even though he was undoubtedly east of Florida.”

  On 9 November 1946 the Board of Correction of Naval Records upheld an appeal lodged by Lt Taylor’s mother on a technical point and substituted an amended cause of loss attributable to “reason or reasons unknown”. Unlike other so-called Bermuda Triangle mysteries, the unique factor about the loss of Flight 19 is that radio contact was maintained with the straying aircraft during the critical period for no less than three and a quarter hours, yet in all that time the shore stations were never able to obtain a radar or DF fix on them. The depositions to the board of enquiry when plotted on a chart enable us to satisfactorily resolve this mystery. A significant red herring has been the interpretation of a single word given in evidence by an instructor colleague of Lt Taylor.

  The factual information which follows is from information supplied by the Department of the Navy’s Naval Historical Centre, Washington, and logs compiled by the researcher Gian Quasar who has taken a special interest in the case.

  On the afternoon of 5 December 1945 five TBM Avenger bombers were readied at Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station, Florida for an authorized advanced overwater navigational training flight. Four of the aircraft had a pilot, gunner and radio operator; the fifth was a crewman short. All five pilots were qualified as basic flight instructors with up to 350 to 400 hours’ flying time, of which at least 55 hours had been on TBM aircraft. The aircraft had a cruise speed of about 145 knots and a range of just over 1130 miles, which meant that the type could remain up for at least seven hours of normal flight, more if well throttled back.

  All five aircraft were fitted with two compasses and carried a radio operator who worked the transmitter/receiver. A ZBX homing receiver to obtain a bearing on base and an IFF transponder for use in emergency enabling ground stations to identify aircraft were also fitted. The aircraft had been carefully serviced beforehand and carried inflatable life rafts. Each man wore a life-jacket and had a parachute. The flight leader was 28-year-old bachelor Lt Charles Carroll Taylor USNR, a 6-year Navy veteran and a senior qualified flight instructor who had over 2500 flying hours’ experience, including ten months on combat missions in the Pacific. He had been appointed a flight instructor in Miami in January 1945. Two of his pilots, Edward J. Powers, USMC, and George W. Stivers Jr, USMC, were Captains and thus outranked Taylor.