Captain Schaeffer turned away. I saw Kammler’s tight lips. General Nebe took his pistol from its holster and then cocked the hammer. He nodded to his sergeant. They both approached the bloodied men. Most were silent, but a few were still whimpering, their hands opening and closing. General Nebe fired the first shot. His sergeant fired the second. They took turns, bending over the bodies, their gunshots reverberating. It seemed to take a long time. It did not take long at all. When they had finished, General Nebe turned away and waved his free hand.
Some men jumped out of the truck. The machine gun’s barrel clanged. General Nebe returned his pistol to its holster and then walked toward us. There was no sweat on his brow. His dark eyes were unrevealing. He nodded and we all turned away and climbed down to the submarines.
We moved out shortly after. We did not go very far. I stood with Nebe and Kammler on the deck and watched the men on the dock. There were only four men. They worked long and hard. They put the bodies of their dead comrades in the truck and drove it into the hangar. The dock was very quiet. Its lamps beamed down on the wet stones. More Allied planes rumbled overhead as the four men emerged again. They were not in the truck. They merged gradually with the darkness. They climbed down the steel ladder one by one and dropped into a dinghy. The oars splashed in the water. The distant lamps showed desolation. After what seemed like a very long time the men arrived at the submarine. They were all helped aboard. The dinghy drifted away. I stared back across the water to the dock and saw the lamps on the hangar.
The explosion was catastrophic. The whole hangar disintegrated. The flames shot up in jagged, yellow lines that turned the night into daytime. The noise was demoniac. A black smoke billowed out. The flames swirled and turned into crimson tendrils that embraced one another. Then the smoke drifted sideways, revealing the rubble. Flames leaped across the charred, broken beams and stained the road with shifting shadows. The flames burned a long time. The harsh wind made them dance. They were still burning brightly when we submerged and disappeared in the Baltic Sea.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
EDITED TRANSCRIPT GER/0023/DEC 3 77
TAPED INTERVIEW BETWEEN DR FREDERICK EPSTEIN & PROFESSOR RONALD MANSFIELD OF THE GROUPMENT D’ETUDES DES PHENOMENES
AERIENS
LOCATION: PARIS, FRANCE, AS ABOVE
INTERVIEW DATE: NOV 27 77
EPSTEIN EDITED OUT
Tape 1: Yes, Dr Epstein, it is of course true that we in the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee were particularly interested in German scientific progress during the Second World War. It must be borne in mind that from the moment Hitler took power, in 1933, a gross militarism prevailed and all outstanding German scientists were compelled, despite their personal beliefs, to work on military projects. Now most of that work was concerned with the production of various kinds of advanced weaponry, but as early as 1934 there was talk emerging from Germany about even more disturbing projects, such as aerial torpedoes, pilotless aircraft, remote-controlled rockets, long-range guns, and mysterious death rays – so quite naturally we worried. Our anxieties were increased when, in 1942, various resistance groups informed us of the flying bombs and giant rockets being constructed at a secret research establishment at Peenemünde; and then we started receiving reports, from experienced pilots, of mysterious ‘fireballs’ that were harassing them on their bombing runs over occupied Europe.
Confirmation that the Peenemünde experiments had been successful came on June 13, 1944, when the first V-1 flying bombs fell on England, and, more forcefully, on September 6 the same year, when the first of the V-2 rockets devastated parts of Chiswick and Epping. Since these fearsome inventions were dropping on London and surrounding areas, the populace was obviously aware of them; however, what the populace did not know – and what we were not about to reveal
– was that many Allied pilots had started returning from bombing runs with wild tales of being pursued by mysterious ‘fireballs’ that made their aircraft’s ignition and radar malfunction.
The first recorded incidence came from Lieutenant Edward Schlueter of the 415th US Night Fighter Squadron. Reportedly, on the night of November 23, 1944, Lieutenant Schlueter was flying in a heavy night fighter over the Rhine, about twenty miles from Strasbourg, when he and Air Intelligence Lieutenant Fred Ringwall glanced out of their darkened cockpit and saw ‘ten small balls of reddish fire’ flying in formation at what they claimed was amazing speed. The lights followed the aircraft for some time, were pursued and disappeared, returned and seemingly caused the aircraft’s ignition and radar to malfunction. The ‘balls of fire’ eventually vanished over the Siegfried Line.
Four days later, on the night of November 27, pilots Henry Giblin and Walter Cleary submitted an official report stating that their airplane had been harassed over the vicinity of Speyer by ‘an enormous burning light’ that was flying fifteen hundred feet above their plane at about two hundred and fifty miles per hour and seemingly caused their radar to malfunction. This report was followed by a sudden spate of similar reports, most of which agreed that the objects were large, bright, orange lights, that they appeared to ascend from low altitude, and that when they leveled out and followed the aircraft there were inexplicable ignition and radar malfunctions. Finally, when on January 12, 1945. Several bomber squadrons simultaneously reported seeing the lights, we decided to open a dossier on the subject.
Naturally, when the war ended, our major priority was to take under our control as much as possible of the documents, drawings and actual components belonging to Nazi Germany’s scientific and military research. Regarding this, the Red Army moved into the enormous underground rocket factory in Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains, where they took charge of almost completed flying bombs and rockets, numerous precision tools and parts, and over three thousand research workers from Pennemünde, including leading scientist Helmut Grottrup and quite a few other rocket experts – all of whom disappeared into the Soviet Union to create God knows what. The Americans, on the other hand, managed to get their hands on over a hundred V-2 rockets, five cases of hidden and highly secret Peenemünde documents and, of course, the very famous Wernher von Braun, a few hundred other V-2 specialists, and another hundred-odd scientists who were intimate with the various Peenemünde projects.
I give you these figures not just to impress upon you the fact that both the Soviets and the Americans gained from this division much of the material, human and otherwise, vital to advanced weaponry research and the exploration of space, but also to impress upon you the sheer size of the German projects.
And the British? It was our intention right from the start – as it was doubtless the intention of the Soviets and the Americans – to complete the picture on the state of development of German research on guided missiles, supersonic aircraft and other secret weapons. Apropos of this, we sent teams of specialists belonging to the Ministry of Aircraft Production all over western Germany and Austria, their brief being to locate every cave, disused mine, tunnel, ravine or forest where secret German establishments might be hidden and, once having located them, to dismantle and return to England the most valuable or enigmatic equipment, even including the Germans’ quite extraordinary wind tunnels.
Since the British zone of occupation extended from the Dutch frontier to Prussia, centering on the invaluable port of Hamburg and including a large part of the eastern Alpine massif in Austria, we really did quite well out of the deal. The movement of this mass of captured documents and equipment was discreetly controlled by the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, and in general it was transported to Hamburg, shipped from there to England, and from there distributed to various interested parties such as the experimental center then being built at Bedford, the Royal Radar Establishment at Great Malvern, the Telecommunications Research Establishment, and other top-secret establishments in Canada and Australia.
Working under British Intelligence, my job was to organize the Anglo-Canadian teams of scientists who would scrutinize
every aspect of the captured German technology. Our main concern was with unraveling the mystery of certain German secret weapons that may, or may not, have existed. These would have included the Foo Fighter or ‘ball of fire’ that reportedly harassed so many Allied pilots; the ‘circular German fighter without wings or rudder’ which, according to one reliable source, crossed the flight path of a four-engined Liberator at very high speed, gave off a number of little ‘bluish’ clouds of smoke, and caused the Liberator to catch fire and eventually exploded; and the ‘strange flying machine, hemispherical or circular in shape’ that reportedly flew at incredible speed, attacked a whole convoy of twelve US night fighters, and destroyed them without using visible weapons. Naturally, being British, we approached our task with a certain skepticism – but such skepticism would shortly be dispelled and replaced with amazement.
Let me briefly summarize what we found. First, whether or not the mysterious aircraft that sprayed those bluish clouds of smoke over the unfortunate Liberator was ‘a circular German fighter without wings or rudder’, it certainly could have caused that aircraft to explode without using its guns. We came to this conclusion when we discovered that documents recovered from the technical departments of factories hidden in the densely forested areas of the Schwarzwald contained details of experiments conducted with a liquid gas that would, when blown with considerable force over an aircraft, catch fire from the aircraft’s exhaust fumes and cause the aircraft to explode. The existence of this gas was confirmed by one Dr Rosenstein, an organic chemist and Jewish collaborator who, when interrogated by members of the American Aslos Mission in Paris in 1944, stated that the Germans had succeeded in perfecting a new gas whose use would have caused ‘strong vibrations and even breakage in aircraft engines’ by encouraging immediate and repeated self-ignition.
In this context, it is worth noting that in April 1945, on the outskirts of the Hillersleben testing grounds west of Berlin, members of the Intelligence Technical Branch of the 12th Army Group found the rusty remains of a rather odd item called the Windkanone – a cannon that shot gas instead of shells – and another odd item called the Wirbelringkanone, or whirlwind annular vortex cannon, which was designed to shoot, and then ignite, a gas ring that would spin rapidly on its own axis and form a rather fierce ‘ball of fire’.
Regarding the possibility that the ‘circular German plane without wings or rudder’ might have been some kind of remote-controlled flying device, we discovered that as far back as 1939 Dr Fernseh of Berlin, in collaboration with Professor Herbert Wagner of the Henschel Aircraft Company, was working on the development of a television component that would enable pilots to control bombs and rocket bombs after they had been launched; that Fernseh was also involved in the development of a microtelevision camera that would be installed in the nose of an antiaircraft rocket and guide it precisely to its target; and that similar projects were quite commonplace in Nazi Germany – and, more importantly, highly successful.
Naturally, such information led us back into an investigation of the apparently remote-controlled German ‘fireballs’. What we found was that Messerschmitt had developed two workable radio-controlled interceptor planes, the Krache and the Donner, that these were initially designed to be controlled from the ground by a television receiver installed in an armored console, but that certain negative aspects to the system led to the development of numerous highly advanced electromagnetic, electroacoustical and photoelectric fuses, and to even more advanced warheads that were sensitive to the natural electrostatic fields that surround aircraft in flight. Indeed, some of those devices were incorporated into ‘automatic’ aircraft weapons, with the result that all a German pilot had to do was flying his plane a few hundred yards beneath or above his target and the automatic firing mechanism would operate. Thus, by installing similar devices in a pilotless interceptor rocket, the Germans could engage in aerial combat without using pilots.
The devices I’ve just mentioned led inevitably to a more solid version of the original ‘wind-cannon’ idea. By 1945 a Luftwaffe experimental center in Oberammergau in Bavaria had completed its research into an apparatus capable of short-circuiting the ignition system of an aircraft’s engine at a distance of about a hundred feet by producing an intense electrical field. Their intention – aborted by the ending of the war – was to expand the field greatly, but certainly, by the middle of 1944, they had incorporated the device into a weapon actually called the Feuerball, or ‘fireball’.
The Feuerball was first constructed at the aeronautical factory at Wiener Neustadt. Basically, it was an armored, disk-shaped object, powered by a special turbojet engine, which was radio-controlled at the moment of take-off, but then, attracted by the enemy aircraft’s exhaust fumes, automatically followed that aircraft, automatically avoided colliding with it, and automatically short-circuited the aircraft’s radar and ignition systems. During the day this device looked exactly like ‘a shining disk spinning on its axis’ – which may account for the first Allied newspaper reports of ‘silver balls’ observed in the skies over Germany – and by night it looked like a ‘burning globe’. The ‘burning globe’ was actually a fiery halo around the solid device, caused by the very rich chemical mixture that over-ionized the atmosphere in the vicinity of the target and thus subjected it to extremely damaging electromagnetic impulses. It is also worth noting – with regard to the fact that the Feuerballs reportedly flew away when attacked – that under the armored plating of the Feuerball was a thin sheet of aluminum that acted as a defensive ‘switch’; a bullet piercing the armored plating would automatically establish contact with the switch, trip a maximum acceleration device, and cause the Feuerball to fly vertically out of range of enemy gunfire. In short: the Feuerball really existed, it was described accurately by our pilots, and it was used with great effect from about November 1944 to the end of the war.
At this point I feel I should remind that from as far back as 1942 the German military establishment had encouraged every kind of research and experiment in the field of jet propulsion and advanced remote-control systems. However, after the attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944, Hitler in a bout of vengeful fury, turned control of the planning and construction of these astonishing new weapons over to Himmler’s dreaded SS. I mention this because the SS were, by that stage of the war, a self-ruling and highly secretive body with their own research centers and construction plants and factories, many of which even Hitler didn’t know about. In other words, from that point on the fate of many of the secret weapons was even more difficult to trace – and indeed, in many cases is not known even to this day.
What we do know is that many of the leading scientific establishments were evacuated totally and transferred to vast underground complexes scattered all over Germany, most notably in the area of the aborted Alpine redoubt. Once transferred, they were virtually sealed off from the outer world, rigidly controlled by the SS, and forced to concentrate their attention on nothing other than advanced military projects. Given that this work went on twenty-four hours a day, that even the scientists worked in shifts, and that thousands of slave workers from the concentration camps were at their disposal, there can be little doubt that some extraordinary advances were made in those secret research plants.
Unfortunately the SS, when retreating from the Allies, destroyed much of this remarkable research. Unfortunate because what we often found were highly advanced but frustratingly incomplete documents, isolated parts of obviously complex components, and a wealth of other odds and ends that could have belonged to just about anything. Even more disturbing was the fact that thousands of slave workers who had been used in such establishments had, with their SS overlords, simply disappeared by the time we arrived there – and few of them were ever located again.
So, my evaluations are incomplete. Nevertheless, regarding the ’wingless’ aircraft so often reported, we did collect enough material to tantalize us and keep us involved for years. Found across the length and breadth of Nazi G
ermany were not only the V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets, the gas cannons and Feuerballs, and the extraordinary variety of automatic flying devices and infrared warheads, but also a considerable number of highly advanced U-XX1 and U-XXIII submarines, almost completed ME-262 jet fighters, a nearly completed atom-bomb project, the prototypes for various vertical-rising aircraft, and even, in the immense underground Riva del Garda research complex, the manufacturing process for a metallic material that could withstand temperatures of about one thousand degrees Centigrade. So, as you can imagine, the Germans were on the verge of some truly remarkable developments.
Tape 2: There are two problems standing in the way of a supersonic, completely circular aircraft: one is the need for gyroscopic stabilization and the other is control of the boundary layer. It is therefore worth noting that scientists of the Kreiselgerate at Berlin Britz had, in 1943, worked on the construction of mechanisms employing gyroscopic phenomenon and succeeded in reducing the oscillations of a violently shaken body to under a tenth of a degree. This was, of course, a most important achievement – and added to control of Prandt’s ‘boundary layer’ it would have led to some extraordinary advances in aerodynamics.
Let me briefly explain this ‘boundary layer’. While being four or five times less viscous than oil, air is, nonetheless, viscous. Because of this, the air sweeping in on the solid body of an aircraft forms imperceptible stratifications of resistance and consequently decreases the speed of the body in flight. These layers of air are known as the ‘boundary layer’ – and the boundary layer increases its resistance in direct proportion to the increasing speed of the flying object.
In layman’s terms, therefore, the major problem regarding supersonic flight was to somehow or other move this negative air as far to the rear of the aircraft as possible, thus minimizing the expenditure of energy required to propel the aircraft through the sky. Further: it is possible that a revolutionary type of aircraft could – by not only completely removing the boundary layer, but by somehow re-routing it and utilizing it as an added propulsive force – fly through the skies using little other than the expelled air itself. Should this be accomplished we would have an aircraft capable of remarkable speeds while utilizing the barest minimum of fuel.
GENESIS (Projekt Saucer) Page 50