Seperating myth from reality: Nazi secret tech development projects

[Stearmen]

The waist started almost from the onset of the war. This is an M30 Drilling rifle, two 12 bore shotgun barrels and a 9.3x74R rifle barrel below. Fit for a Maharajah! They were ordered by old Herman Goering as a survival rifle for the Luftwaffe crews in North Africa! Most Allied crews had a pistol or maybe am M1A.

 

[nick123]

They were arguably dabbling about with time travel, possibly tested an a-bomb, the bell, etc etc. We took a lot of their scientists for our own programs. Thank God the war ended when it did. The Antarctic base is an interesting case. Fellow conspiracy nut here...

 

[Trenchfriend]

No one really knows, what it was, that happened at 4th March 1945 at military-training-area Ohrdruf. It just seems to be a very little kind of any radioactive bomb, not more. All just experimental.

Heisenberg's assistant Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker said, that their failed. The most physicians don't wanted to be succesfull, because they knew very well about the evil potenial of the whole thing and don't wanted to give it to Hitler's hands.
That's all.

 

[filfoster]

Did anyone check some of the links posted yesterday to see the gun that shoots around corners? Laugh out loud. Who knew Wile E. Coyote had a real wonder weapon from Acme!

 

[Trenchfriend]

To come to reality:

If they had have got a second, improved version of the "Panther" and 15.000 pieces, at beginning of the war...

Tiger I ( only 1.355 pcs.!) and II (only 489 pcs.!) were then just ridiculous "rolling targets".

 

[MikeKardec]

I'm laughing at all of this though I'm sure that other militaries have suffered from the same hyperactive imagination and romantic notions. The Luftwaffe Drilling, hysterical ... though you can see the edges of typical colonial thinking and perhaps an aspect of some concept of depraved chivalry ... romantic German knights of the skies in their bespoke armor. The urge to create a few amazing devices, rather than raising the basic quality of the average soldier's kit, was certainly both aristocratic (in all it's negative connotations) and sort of an early industrial mind set; giant machines made one at a time by master craftsmen like railroad engines or battle ships rather than the completely interchangeable, logistically based equipment that others had. Definitely an indication that they really weren't mentally ready for the war they started or were living in a science fiction fantasy with a great art director but little sense of reality. We all do it, the US in Iraq, the British Empire ... it seems the older fantasies lasted longer though! We'd be so much healthier if we reserved our fantasies for things other than war and domination.

 

[Capesofwrath]

Thanks. That is a very interesting link. Some additional possible circumstantial evidence to support the centrifuge theory is the curious story of U-234 which surrendered at the end of the war, thus aborting its secret mission to take highly classified technology from Nazi Germany to Japan. Among the items found on board was (supposedly) uranium packed in gold-lined containers. I've read that gold would only be necessary if the uranium was enriched. After the U-boat was taken into custody by the Americans, the uranium part of the cargo very quickly became top secret and "disappeared". So, at the end of the war were the Nazis closer to an A-bomb than we are generally taught to believe? Following link goes into some detail on the U-234 story.

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/atomicbomb/chap01.htm

The definitive answer to how close they were to a functioning bomb was established just after the war, and declassified in the seventies I think it was. The British had a lot of the captured main German nuclear scientists locked up together in comfort in a country house in England with all the rooms bugged. The same technique had been used with captured German airman too, and much valuable information had been acquired.

In the case of the German scientists it was established that they were nowhere near a bomb, and thought any viable nuclear device would have to be the size of a small house. This was proved when the first bomb was dropped on Japan. They were allowed to listen to the BBC report and were amazed at it - unlike the general populations they knew instantly what it was of course. They had no idea how it was done and stayed up all night theorising with each other about it.

This was the theme of the play Copenhagen which fictionalised a meeting between Niles Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in that city in 1941. The point of the play, which Michael Frayn claimed was based on notes and letters and was very close to the actual words spoken was that Bohr did know how it could be done - with uranium 235 or plutonium - and Heisenberg did not. Bohr thought his old friend was pumping him for information to help the German bomb breakthrough and in the play it ended their friendship. Heisenberg and the other German scientists believed that a tonne or more of uranium would be needed. Hence the size he and the others thought a nuclear device would have to be, and why they did not get very far with it. The play ends with a possible scenario where Bohr did let the secret slip, and Heisenberg grasped instantly that with only a dozen kilos of plutonium needed a viable bomb became simply an engineering problem, and the Germans were very good engineers.

The play was perhaps fictional licence and Bohr may not have known about the plutonium bomb. He had given a lecture just before the war where he spoke of the possibility of creating a bomb by splitting uranium 235, but pointed out that it was technically extremely difficult and would be decades off. But Heisenberg’s letters, and after the war the captured German scientists, confirmed that Nazi Germany did not know how to build a nuclear bomb.

 

[filfoster]

Or is that just the cover story...remember, The History Channel evidently believes Otto Gunsche, Heinz Linge and others who actually saw and handled the corpses of AH and Mrs. H were just complicit dupes, lying to conceal the truth....(cue lightning and sinister organ music here).

 

[MikeKardec]

WAIT! Hold the phone! Here's one we forgot: The wacko yet prophetic Projekt Saucer series by W.A. Harbinson. I'm sure this has been mentioned somewhere on this site before (I did but only in passing) but I completely forgot that this dude (writing fiction) practically invented the Nazi saucer conspiracy decades ago.

It's VERY interesting how writers like I have mentioned before (Koontz and Hogan) seemed to get to The Bell before "reality" did and Harbinson (both in fiction and "non fiction") may have arrived at saucers that way too ... it's odd how fiction writers seem to have manifested ... well, if not truth then something that keeps being presented as theory. Harbinson started creating one Nazi/UFO/Antarctica conspiracy theory to rule them all in fiction back in 1991, probably around the time Chris Carter started working on creating The X-Files.

His melding of research and imagination is interesting even if he's not the most accomplished writer who walked the planet. Heck he even wrote a book about Elvis, and anyone who is willing to open their mind just a bit knows that he is still living on Mars!

 

[filfoster]

MikeKardec, thanks for the Harbinson tip. "...to rule them all.." Like it.

 

[Trenchfriend]

And not to forget.

The A4-production at the Kohnstein/Niedersachswerfen was maybe a modern manufacturing, but luckily it was sabotaged so heavily!

 

[MikeKardec]

I remember Harbinson's fiction made me a bit queasy. Some combination of the subject matter and his way of presenting it. It's interesting, however, for it's role in establishing the mythos. I've never tried to plot the trajectory of the development of the Nazi saucer story but for the second, modern, phase it seems very early. His non fiction, I guess this was the packaging of his research or speculation, was an easier read for me. It didn't contain so much personal oddness.

Again, I assume (given some of his stories) that when there are two competing versions he (like so many of these alt. history "researchers") takes the more interesting one or the one that upholds his thesis. Given that a great deal of the wonder weapon speculation was created by petulant Nazis after the war who were building on the foundation of verified technology (V2, Type XXI sub, Me262, etc) it not surprising that there were a lot of different stories. The Third Reich always contained a great deal of fantasy to balance its oddly imbalanced accomplishments.

I too have always wanted to write something fictional about some facet of all this but I fear it has a strange effect on writers (or it's strange writers who do it!) and so I intend to approach with caution.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I was told by someone who was there, that the Canadian army had the least equipment and the worst, especially at the beginning of the war and when training. The man who told me this was in charge of training signal men. He said they scrounged through bookstores and libraries to get any kind of technical manuals, made their own equipment, and were assigned leaky run down quarters that had been meant for temporary use in WW1.

But when they got in the field the Canadian signalmen beat everybody. They could set up anywhere, and make do somehow with broken or missing equipment and face emergencies that would stop better equipped signalmen. It got so the Germans recognized Canadian signalmen on the air, and knew when they were assigned to a certain section it meant trouble. The Brits put the Canadian signalmen in the toughest spots knowing they would come through.

Better trained, and better equipped signalmen didn't know what to do if they did not have the equipment they were trained on. The Germans in particular were lost without specific instruction. The Americans had better ability to improvise if they had radio or telegraph experience before the war but many did not.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Speaking of rumors, I have an old book written by an American war correspondent who was with the American force that invaded Germany. He said there were many reports at the time, that the Nazis had secret underground bases in the mountains and were prepared to launch a counter attack at the opportune time. As they went along the rumors got bigger and wilder. They were said to have whole underground cities with airplane factories prepared for a 20 years siege. Of course this was all Baron Munchausen stuff but the top brass took it seriously for a while.

This may be the origin of some of the wild tales of bases at the South Pole and even the moon.

 

[Otter]

I belive the Nazis actually encouraged those rumours concerning the Alpenfestung.

 

[filfoster]

Yes, the Alpine Redoubt was a big bluff.

 

[Trenchfriend]

1933-45 = great machinery, but in the end just not recognizing the real potential of technologies.

Our classic GERMAN "FACH-IDIOTS", here!

Two of your great Iowa-class had Bismarck and Tirpitz blown away.

 

[Stanley Doble]

If you mean what I think you mean, it reminds me of a remark made by automotive expert Tom McCahill 50 years ago. He called German engineers the world's biggest mechanical hams. By that he meant, they have to overdo everything and find some clever, difficult, expensive way to make everything. The way a ham actor overdoes his part.

I saw what he meant in my lowly VW beetle. The front wheel nuts were made of aluminum with an allen head set screw to clamp them in place. Every American car had a steel nut and cotter pin. There were hundreds of details like that, one of the reasons I loved my VW but I must admit, overdone.

If they took the same approach to everything, no doubt they made excellent equipment but if they had simplified they could have made more equipment just as good using the same materials and man hours.

This is where the Americans shone. There equipment was often crude but they turned it out in incredible quantities and as the war went on, developed ways of making everything faster and cheaper. In his memoirs the head of General Motors tells how the Browning company doubted their ability to make the complex, precision made Browning 50 cal machine gun. The ones Browning made cost $600. The first batch GM made were done in less time at a cost of $375. As time went on they kept making them faster, cheaper and more efficiently and he said, would have had the cost under $150 if the war went on another year.

Of course they didn't have to contend with bombing raids every night.

 

[MikeKardec]

There is a showoff-iness to a good deal of European engineering ... as an Italian (and German) car owner I can vouch for it not just being the Germans! "Ingenious solutions to non-existent problems," we used to call it. On the other hand a lot of that Captain Showoff behavior led to some amazing stuff.

I suspect that a connection to the world of hand built technology is more the issue. In the US we made things simple (no longer!) to make more of them and to sell them to the average bloke. A focus on the middle class and we had a middle class that could afford them. In Europe the focus (with notable exceptions like the VW) was more upper class and thus we in the US pay attention to their amazing and overdone engineering ... but think of Packard, and Dusenberg, the Lincoln Zephyr (which was not even the coolest Lincoln you could get). A good deal of the "German" mentality shows up in those sort of products. Practically bespoke technology produced almost like art. Really, here on TFL I'm guessing that's what we'd all really like. It's certainly the aesthetic I'm always looking for ... if I can afford it.

 

[filfoster]

The observation of US production focused on middle class consumers is very insightful and significant, isn't it? It involves so many related matters of the culture, natural resources and property rights that created entrepreneurship and a middle class large enough to be an appealing market.
The previous posts underline that each manufacturing method has its place. We'd agree for the Germans, the near-perfect became the enemy of the good. (And the peculiar penchant for wasting time on multiple overlapping projects). The results of the War proved mass produced, simple Shermans and T-34's were a better bet than the superlative (once the bugs were worked out) Panthers and Tiger II's.

The Germans could manage some ersatz production. I've seen examples of infantry long arms produced at war's end that would have been doubted by any factory in Rumania or Bulgaria: raw wood, badly finished stocks and crudely machined barrels and recievers. Some of the late-war uniforms were appalling, with shoddy cloth and fugitive dyes, very simplified construction.

This peace-time consumer loves Rolex, Ferrari and Jaguar although I can only afford the watches, all examples of wonderful over-engineering. And yes, I loved my 1971 VW beetle, bought new for $2300. I'd give much more to be able to buy it again.