Though it was approaching midnight in Berlin, the streets were far from dark. On every street, fires raged out of control as the intense and savage Russian artillery bombardment crept closer to the centre of the Third Reich.
By that late hour on the night of April 27, 1945, there was not one person in Germany who thought that the Nazis could still win. Deep in his bunker, even the man who had brought such destruction to his country - indeed, to the world - knew that the war was over. As Adolf Hitler gazed at a portrait of his hero, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia and a brilliant military mind, he was certain there would be no eleventh-hour reversal of fortune.
According to Grey Wolf: The Escape Of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun (right) accompanied the Adolf Hitler when he escaped through a secret tunnel from his bunker in Berlin
The so-called ‘miracle weapons’ had never arrived, and his once mighty armies existed more in memory than in flesh and steel. The Führer had three options. He could allow himself to be captured by the Russians; but the humiliation was unthinkable. He could kill himself, but who could possibly replace him? A Fourth Reich would surely rise, and he would be needed to lead it. That left one option: escape. Everything had been prepared to the last detail by the shady head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, right down to the clothes worn by the body doubles that would pass for the corpses of Hitler and his intended bride, Eva Braun. As his office clock struck midnight, Hitler turned to his orderly and nodded. Twenty minutes later, three figures emerged from a secret tunnel connecting the bunker to the surface.
Had any German citizen spotted them, he or she would have been astonished to see the Führer scuttling away like the cowards he so despised. Accompanying him were Eva Braun and her brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein. Dodging fires and explosions, the small party made its way to the vast Hohenzollerndamm that ran through the centre of Berlin. Once a fashionable boulevard, it was now a makeshift runway, and on it sat a Junkers-52 transport aircraft, its engines being gunned by Captain Peter Baumgart, an experienced Luftwaffe pilot. Hitler and his companions climbed aboard the aircraft, and before they could even sit down, Baumgart pushed the throttle forward. Within a minute, the plane soared into the air, heading north. The Führer refused to look out of the window, unwilling to face the hell he had left behind. He was heading to a new life — and a new world. That life, as it would be for so many other Nazis, would be in Argentina.
There are some who regard Hitler's escape story as the absolute truth
Hitler’s route there was tortuous, but necessarily so for the most wanted man in the world. After landing in Denmark, he flew to Spain, where General Franco supplied him with an aircraft to take him to the Canary Islands. From there, the Führer took a submarine to the Argentine coast, where he disembarked near the small port of Necochea, some 300 miles south of Buenos Aires. Hitler would never again set foot outside Argentina. And though his dreams of a new Reich would never be fulfilled, he did at least find some form of domestic happiness by marrying Eva Braun, with whom he had two daughters. Finally, after 17 years in hiding, one of the most evil men in history died on February 13, 1962, aged 73. It was to his bitter disappointment that his old foe, Winston Churchill, had outlived him. To most of us, such a story sounds like utter fantasy. But there are some who regard it as the absolute truth. The notion that Hitler escaped from his Berlin bunker has held conspiracy theorists in thrall since the war ended. It has now reared its improbable head once more. This weekend, it emerged that the story of Hitler’s supposed escape to Argentina has become the subject of a bitter plagiarism row. In their book, Grey Wolf: The Escape Of Adolf Hitler, British authors Gerrard Williams and Simon Dunstan argued that the Führer escaped exactly in the manner described above, and did indeed see out his days in South America. However, an Argentine journalist, Abel Basti, who comes from the Patagonian town of Bariloche, where so many Nazis ‘retired’, claims that Williams and Dunstan appropriated his research, and he is seeking compensation. Williams and Dunstan strenuously deny Basti’s accusation. ‘Basti did in no way invent the idea of Hitler being alive in Argentina,’ says Williams. ‘Books on the subject existed as far back as 1953 and 1987. I have never plagiarised anyone’s work.’ To outsiders, the row looks like three bald men fighting over a comb. The idea that Hitler could have escaped - and kept that escape hidden - seems farcical. And yet many continue to believe it. Tens of thousands of Nazis escaped after the war, including the notorious Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele. Is it not possible that Hitler escaped with them? As Gerrard Williams says, there have been many versions of the Hitler escape story, and they have been spun ever since May 1945. In the years immediately after the war, there was no hard proof that Hitler had, in fact, died. One of the problems that investigators encountered was the lack of any physical evidence for his death. The existence of skull fragments, found by the Russians near the Fuhrer’s bunker and believed to be his, was not known to the West until 1968. Then, in 2009, DNA testing of the bones revealed that in fact they belonged to a woman.
There have been many versions of the Hitler escape story from his bunker (pictured) in May 1945
This has given the fantasists added ammunition to claim that Hitler didn’t die in the bunker. In the immediate aftermath of the war, British and U.S. intelligence services received countless reports suggesting the former Nazi leader had been spotted alive and at large. In September 1945, it was claimed that Hitler and his private secretary, Martin Bormann, had boarded a luxury yacht in Hamburg and had sailed to a secret island off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. The next month, staff at the British Legation in Copenhagen informed the Foreign Office that a Danish woman had told them that a friend had dreamed that Hitler was disguised as a monk and living in Spain. In December, the Americans were ‘reliably informed’ that Hitler had boarded a submarine off the island of Majorca, where he had been living in a hotel with a group of nuclear scientists. Then there were claims that he was living as a hermit in a cave in Italy, or working as a shepherd in the Swiss Alps. There were those who stated that he’d hidden himself in Antarctica, or even further away still — the Moon! All these reports, no matter how ridiculous, had to be taken seriously and investigated. One after the other, they were found to be groundless.
Some were undoubtedly the products of a Soviet disinformation campaign. For a long time, the Russians believed that the Allies were sheltering Hitler, and they put about these fake stories in an attempt to flush out what they thought to be the truth. In July 1945, the Russian commander Marshall Georgi Zhukov claimed that since Hitler’s body had still not been found, he ‘could have flown away at the very last moment’. Even General Eisenhower, the former Allied supreme commander, appeared to be taken in.
Today, the vast majority accept that Hitler shot himself in the bunker (pictured) in Berlin on April 30, 1945
In 1952, he said: ‘We have been unable to unearth one bit of tangible evidence of Hitler’s death. Many people believe that he escaped from Berlin.’ Today, the vast majority accept that Hitler shot himself in the bunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945. After the war, the historian and MI6 officer Hugh Trevor-Roper was commissioned to investigate Hitler’s death. He spoke to many of those who were present in the bunker during those last fateful days. They all said the same thing: Hitler had killed himself, and his body and that of Eva Braun were cremated with petrol. If Hitler had hotfooted it to the Southern Hemisphere, then all these people would have had to have been lying - and to have kept it secret until their dying days. It is simply impossible to believe that so many people could keep such a grand scale deception so quiet. But there are still some who cling to their conspiracy theories. Williams and Dunstan maintain that the ‘Hitler’ and ‘Braun’ who shot themselves in Berlin in 1945 were, in fact, lookalikes. But would those who had known Hitler intimately for years and who were in the bunker that night really have been fooled by two doubles? In truth, the supposed escape of Hitler should be seen as nothing more than a parlour game. There’s not a serious historian who would give the story any more credence than they would to Elvis Presley being alive and well and still hip-swinging in Tennessee. Guy Walters is author of Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped And The Quest To Bring Them To Justice.
Nazi
UFO (German: Rundflugzeug, Feuerball, Diskus, Haunebu,
Hauneburg-Geräte, VRIL, Kugelblitz, Andromeda-Geräte, Flugkreisel,
Kugelwaffen or ironically Reichsflugscheiben) refers to claims of
advanced aircraft or spacecraft Nazi Germany attempted to develop prior
to and during World War II. Some believe that ex-Nazi or possibly
American scientists continue to develop new flying saucers in secret
underground bunkers in the New Swabia region of Antarctica, South
America or the United States. The probably fictional craft appear in
science fiction, conspiracy theory, and underground comic books,
although there are more than a few documentaries on the subject
available through video sharing services.
While
there is no credible evidence to support the theory of Nazi spacecraft,
the stories are often associated with esoteric Nazism; an ideology that
supposes the unlikely possibility of Nazi restoration by supernatural
or paranormal means. Consequently all but the most plausible accounts of
actual spacecraft are generally held to be religious, political and
scientific heresy.
These
accounts were likely inspired by historical German development of
specialized engines such as Viktor Schauberger's "Repulsine" around the
time of WWII. (right photo: Viktor Schauberger)
Context
Nazi UFO tales and myths very often conform largely to documented history on the following points:
* Nazi Germany claimed the territory of New Swabia in Antarctica, sent an expedition there in 1938, and planned others.
* Nazi Germany conducted research into advanced propulsion technology,
including rocketry, Viktor Schauberger's engine research[citation
needed], flying wing craft and the Arthur Sack A.S.6 experimental
"flying disc".
* Some UFO
sightings during World War II, particularly those known as foo fighters,
were discovered to be prototype enemy aircraft designed to harass
Allied aircraft through electromagnetic disruption; a technology similar
to today's electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons.
Early claims
The
earliest non-fiction assertion of Nazi flying saucers appears to have
been an article which appeared in the Italian newspaper Il Giornale
d'Italia in early 1950. Written by Professor Giuseppe Belluzzo, an
Italian scientist and a former Italian Minister of National Economy
under the Mussolini regime, it claimed that "types of flying discs were
designed and studied in Germany and Italy as early as 1942". Belluzzo
also expressed the opinion that "some great power is launching discs to
study them".
The
same month, German engineer Rudolf Schriever gave an interview to
German news magazine Der Spiegel in which he claimed that he had
designed a craft powered by a circular plane of rotating turbine blades
49 ft (15 m) in diameter (left picture - click to enlarge). He
said that the project had been developed by him and his team at BMW's
Prague works until April 1945, when he fled Czechoslovakia. His designs
for the disk and a model were stolen from his workshop in
Bremerhaven-Lehe in 1948 and he was convinced that Czech agents had
built his craft for "a foreign power". In a separate interview with Der
Spiegel in October 1952 he said that the plans were stolen from a farm
he was hiding in near Regen on 14 May 1945. There are other
discrepancies between the two interviews that add to the confusion.
In 1953, when Avro Canada
announced that it was developing the VZ-9-AV Avrocar, a circular jet
aircraft with an estimated speed of 1,500 mph (2,400 km/h), German
engineer Georg Klein claimed that such designs had been developed during
the Third Reich. Klein identified two types of supposed German flying
disks:
* A non-rotating disk developed at Breslau by V-2 rocket engineer
Richard Miethe, which was captured by the Soviets, while Miethe fled to
the US via France, and ended up working for Avro.
* A disk developed by Rudolf Schriever and Klaus Habermohl at Prague,
which consisted of a ring of moving turbine blades around a fixed
cockpit. Klein claimed that he had witnessed this craft's first manned
flight on 14 February 1945, when it managed to climb to 12,400 m (41,000
ft) in 3 minutes and attained a speed of 2,200 km/h (1,400 mph) in
level flight.
Aeronautical engineer Roy Fedden
remarked that the only craft that could approach the capabilities
attributed to flying saucers were those being designed by the Germans
towards the end of the war. Fedden (who was also chief of the technical
mission to Germany for the Ministry of Aircraft Production) stated in
1945:
“I have seen enough of
their designs and production plans to realize that if they (the Germans)
had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been
confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air
warfare.”
Fedden
also added that the Germans were working on a number of very unusual
aeronautical projects, though he did not elaborate upon his statement.
In 1959, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, editor of the U.S.A.F.'s Project Blue Book wrote:
“When
WWII ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and
guided missiles under development. The majority were in the most
preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even
approach the performance of objects reported to UFO observers.”
Later claims
Morning of the Magicians
Main article: Le Matin des Magiciens
Le
Matin des Magiciens, a 1967 book by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier,
made many spectacular claims about the Vril Society of Berlin.(left: Vril Society logo).
Several years later writers, including Jan van Helsing, Norbert-Jürgen
Ratthofer, and Vladimir Terziski, have built on their work, connecting
the Vril Society with UFOs. Among their claims, they imply that the
society may have made contact with an alien race and dedicated itself to
creating spacecraft to reach the aliens. In partnership with the Thule
Society and the Nazi Party, the Vril Society developed a series of
flying disc prototypes. With the Nazi defeat, the society allegedly
retreated to a base in Antarctica and vanished.
Terziski,
a Bulgarian engineer who bills himself as president of the American
Academy of Dissident Sciences, claims that the Germans collaborated in
their advanced craft research with Axis powers Italy and Japan, and
continued their space effort after the war from a base in New Swabia. He
alleges that Germans may have landed on the Moon as early as 1942 and
established an underground base there. Terziski relates that when
Russians and Americans secretly landed on the moon in the 1950s they
stayed at this still-operating base. According to Terziski, "there is
atmosphere, water and vegetation on the Moon," which NASA conceals to
exclude the third world from moon exploration. Terziski has been accused
of fabricating his video and photographic evidence.
Ernst Zündel's marketing ploy
Main article: Zündel: Nazi UFOs-Antarctica
When
German Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel started Samisdat Publishers in the
1970s, he initially catered to the UFOlogy community, which was then at
its peak of public acceptance. His books claimed that flying saucers
were Nazi secret weapons launched from an underground base in
Antarctica, from which the Nazis hoped to conquer the world and possibly
the planets. Zündel also sold (for $9999) seats on an exploration team
to locate the polar entrance to the hollow earth. Some who interviewed
Zündel claim that he privately admitted it was a deliberate hoax to
build publicity for Samisdat, although he still defended it as late as
2002.
Miguel Serrano's book
In
1978 Miguel Serrano, a Chilean diplomat and Nazi sympathizer, published
The Golden Band, in which he claimed that Adolf Hitler was an avatar of
Vishnu and was at that time communing with Hyperborean gods in an
underground Antarctic base in New Swabia. Serrano predicted that Hitler
would lead a fleet of UFOs from the base to establish the Fourth Reich.
In popular culture, this alleged UFO fleet is referred to as the Nazi
flying saucers from Antarctica.
Nazi Saucers & the UFO Conspiracy
Flying saucers and the Third reich
Hitler and the Third Reich led Europe
into a decade of terror in the first half of the 20th century that
culminated in World War II. Technology played a greater part in that war
than in past conflicts and the Germans developed an amazing array of
secret weapons in a short time. Were flying discs part of the Luftwaffe
arsenal? And if so, was this secret looted and used by the Allied
victors after the war?
More than any war before it, World War II was the war of secret weapons.
A few of these advances, like the American atomic bomb and the British
ability to crack the German communication ciphers may have actually
tipped the outcome of the conflict. The Axis powers also had their
secrets and many of the most clandestine German war-time technical
advances are now well known.
German Secret Weapons
Hitler's forces flew the first
military jet, the German Heinkel 178, in 1939. In 1943 the Germans also
deployed the only jet fighter to go into regular service during the war:
The Messerschmitt 262. This ME-262 could easily overtake the fastest
Allied aircraft and only Hitler's misguided orders that the planes be
outfitted as bombers instead of defensive fighters saved Allied aircraft
from devastating casualties.
Cruise
missiles, a staple of current advanced arsenals, were also first used
by the Third Reich during the war. V-1 flying bombs were launched from
German-held territories across the channel into England. The "buzz
bombs," as they were sometimes called because of the sound of their
impulse jet engines, could outrun most Allied aircraft, making the V-1's
almost impossible to stop. The V-1's weakness was its guidance system
(a problem solved in modern cruise missiles by the use of
computer-controlled radar). Because it couldn't hit a pinpoint target,
the V-1 could only be used to cause random terror and not zero in on
truly important military assets.
The
German V-2 rocket was the predecessor of the intercontinental ballistic
missiles (ICBMs) that filled the nuclear arsenals of the Soviet Union
and the United States during the Cold War. It traveled up to 225 miles
at five times the speed of sound and a single hit could demolish a city
block. During the war, the V-2 killed 2724 civilians and injured another
6467. Like the V-1, though, it lacked a guidance system that would have
allowed it to effectively strike at important targets.
Hitler's
engineers even developed a rocket-powered fighter, the ME 163. Though
it never was put into regular service, it was the first aircraft to fly
faster than 600 miles an hour.
After
the war, rumors surfaced that the Nazis had one more secret weapon that
was still hidden: flying disc-shaped aircraft. According to these
stories, some of the victorious Allied nations had plundered the German
laboratories where these aircraft were being developed and secret
testing of these devices explained many of the reports of flying saucers
that appeared in the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950's.
German Flying Discs
Many of the reports of Nazi flying
saucers can be traced back to a book entitled German Secret Weapons of
World War II written by Rudolf Lusar in the late 1950's. Lusar had been a
major in a German army technical unit during the war. His book covered
many of the acknowledged advances like the V1 and V2, but also included a
chapter on "Wonder Weapons."
According
to Lusar, a German aircraft designer named Rudolf Schriever, along with
other engineers Habermohl, Mierth and Bellanzo (who was Italian), were
working on several disc-shaped aircraft toward the end of the war. At a
facility near Breslau, Poland, a group headed by Miethe constructed a
prototype of a circular air vehicle 137 feet in diameter with an
elongated hump on top for the cockpit. The aircraft was to be powered
with "adjustable jet engines." In Lusar's account, the device was
destroyed when the plant where it was being constructed was blown up by
retreating German troops before it could be overrun by the Soviets in
1945.
At a second location just
outside Prague, Czechoslovakia, according to Lusar, another group headed
by Schriever and Habermohl were working on an additional disc aircraft.
Diagrams included in the book show a central egg-shaped control pod
surrounded by a nearly flat disc. The flat disc appears to be composed
of fan blades that rotate to create lift. Ports on the lower part of the
pod appear to be connected to jet engines that provide the forward
propulsion.
Lusar states that the
Schriever machine was tested in 1945 and supposedly reached an altitude
of 12 kilometers (39,000 feet) in a little over three minutes. He
continues by saying it had a top speed of 2000 kilometer an hour
(1,200mph) - substantially faster than the speed of sound.
These
claims seem somewhat incredible. According to conventional history, the
first aircraft to break the sound barrier the X-1, an American
rocket-powered plane in 1947. It seems unlikely that Schriever's group
would have been able to make such a drastic leap in performance so early
and so quickly. In addition, comments from Schriever himself, who
relocated to the United States after the war, indicate that any
prototypes of the craft were destroyed before flight test as the Germans
abandoned their facilities in the face of advancing Allied troops.
Foo Fighters
According
to Lusar, the Germans' had also developed small automated,
unconventional aircraft. One version was called the Feuerball while
another, capable of vertical takeoff, was referred to as the Kugelblitz.
According to stories, these craft were only armed with devices designed
to guide them to allied aircraft and interfere with their electronics
and engines.
The Feuerball and
Kugelblitz stories seem to parallel tales of "foo-fighters" told by
Allied pilots during the war. Despite this, it seems unlikely that
Feuerballs and Kugelblitzs were ever actually built or flown. The
"foo-fighters" observed were probably some purely natural phenomena (right photo).
No Allied plane ever reported being attacked or disabled by a
foo-fighter and it is likely that if the Germans had invented a device
capable of tracking planes as well as the foo-fighters apparently did,
they would have soon armed it with more effective weapons.
The "Legend"
Nick Cook, a respected aviation
journalist for Jane's Defense Weekly Nick looked into the claims for
German flying discs in his 2001 book The Hunt for Zero Point. Cook
became interested in unconventional aircraft after seeing some articles
written in the 1950's that quoted respected experts of the era, like
Lawrence D. Bell (whose company designed the supersonic X-1) predicting
that the next major breakthrough in aviation could be anti-gravity
devices. His research led him to Lusar's book and the stories of German
flying saucers.
Cook was perhaps
one of the few aviation writers that was willing to take the "Legend" of
German flying saucers seriously. While researching his book he visited
many of the locations mentioned in German Secret Weapons of World War
II. He also connected the stories of the German saucer designers to the
work of a man named Victor Schauberger.
Victor Schauberger
Schauberger was born in Austria in
1885 and was considered by many to be a crackpot. Schauberger himself is
quoted as saying, "They call me deranged. The hope is they are
right..." While his professional training was as a "forester," Cook,
after visiting the Schauberger's grandson and examining his papers and
the machinery he had constructed, concluded that Schauberger was
actually more of an engineer. Schauberger believed that machines could
be designed better so that they would be "going with the flow of nature"
rather than against it.
One of
Schauberger's projects was to produce a flying machine, saucer shaped,
that used a "vortex propulsion" system. His theory was that "if water or
air is rotated into a twisting form of oscillation, known as a
'colloidal,' a build-up of energy results, which, with immense power,
can cause levitation."
According
to some accounts, Schauberger built several models, one of which was
almost five feet in diameter and was powered by a 1/20 hp electric
engine. Some reports indicated that one of the models actually flew. In
an echo of the story of the Schriever disc, Schauberger wrote to a
friend that a full-sized prototype of one of his designs was constructed
using prison labor at the Mauhausen concentration camp. This craft flew
on February 19th of 1945 near Prague and obtained an altitude of 45,000
feet in only 3 minutes. The letter goes on to say the prototype was
destroyed by the Nazis before it could be captured by the Allies.
After
the war Schauberger moved to the United States, where some contend he
worked on secret projects for the U.S. government. He died in 1958,
apparently claiming his ideas had been stolen.
Cook
concluded that if the stories about Schauberger's work were true, his
devices must have created an anti-gravity effect. Cook even visited a
location in the remote Sudeten Mountains in Poland where antigravity
experiments were supposed to have taken place using a bell-shaped device
that glowed a pale blue when operating.
Advantages of Disc Aircraft
The
"Legend" of German flying saucers is fascinating, but is any of it
true? It certainly seems likely that there was some experimentation with
the concept within the Reich, as there was in the United States.
Disc-shaped aircraft have several advantages, including low stall speed
and low drag, even at high speeds. The rounded shape can also lower the
craft's radar profile making it "stealthy."
The
low stall/drag of the shape would have been particularly interesting to
the Germans at the end of the war. Months of bombing had reduced German
runways to rubble. A saucer-shaped craft might have been able to lift
off the ground with a short runway or even do a vertical-takeoff-and
-landing with no runway at all.
In
his book Cook concludes that Nazis flying saucer technology was
appropriated by the United States and the Soviet Union at the end of the
war. This suggestion is not wholly without merit, since it is now clear
that US and USSR rocketry development in the 50's and 60's owed a lot
to German scientists. These engineers, quietly brought into the United
States via operation "Paperclip," assisted the United States in its
space program and its Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union.
Similarly, according to author Jim Wilson in an article in Popular
Mechanics in July 1997, there are records that suggest at least two
people, brothers named Walter and Reimar Horten, were sought by the
United States after the war because of their participation in German
military saucer programs.
UFOs and Antigravity Myths
It
is clear that at least some of the Nazi saucer lore developed after the
war, rather than during it. In his book, UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?
author Ernst Zundel claims that Hitler escaped at the end of the war to
establish a flying saucer base in Antarctica. Zundel's tale is connected
with the discredited idea that the earth is hollow and the interior can
be accessed from the polar regions. As colorful as such stories are,
they are so far afield from reality that they can't be taken seriously.
In
contrast, Cook's assertion in The Hunt for Zero Point that antigravity
technology was spirited out of Germany at the end of the war doesn't
seem all that far-fetched. It is difficult to believe, however, that
such advanced knowledge, if it really worked, would not have shown up in
the intervening 60 years in U.S. military equipment or through the NASA
space program. The ability to shield an object from gravity, if it
could be done, would greatly decrease the cost and difficulty of putting
objects into space.
