Nazi Secrets: An Occult Breach in the Fabric of History (3 page)

Mittelwerk factory

Der Riese
(German for “The Giant”) is another very extensive complex of underground tunnels and bunkers in the Owl Mountains and under Książ Castle in Lower Silesia, which was part of Germany at that time, but is now in Poland. It was built in 1943 to serve as another headquarters for Hitler. Its underground bunkers were located in eight different places and took thousands of forced laborers to build. According to Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production of the Reich, "These projects required 328,000 cubic yards of reinforced concrete, on top of the masonry involved, and they entailed 277,000 cubic yards of underground passages, 36 miles of roads with six bridges, and 62 miles of pipelines. The ‘Giant’ complex alone consumed more concrete than what was allocated for the entire population to build their air-raid shelters in 1944." The total cost was almost five times higher than the Wolf's Lair bunker.

Kilometers of tunnels are part of the Giant’s network

The works were never fully completed before the war ended, and since the Polish secret service confiscated the blueprints and all the relevant confidential information, nobody really knows what its exact purpose was to this day. People assume that it was meant to be the biggest of all Hitler's headquarters, and a shelter for the underground factories, but this assumption could never be confirmed for sure. SS General Hans Kammler was in charge of all these underground facilities, but since he disappeared in 1945 close to Prague, in Czechoslovakia, his alleged death became surrounded by many controversies, the most likely being that he was shot by Russian troops in the woods surrounding the Czech capital city. Others claim that he bargained with the US Army to barter his knowledge about German Wonder Weapons in exchange for his immunity in the USA. This theory would not be implausible if he had made it through to the Americans before being captured by Soviet troops, since Kammler was a man who knew even about the A9 rocket, known as the Amerika rocket, that was going to be built in these 30-meter high tunnels with the purpose of reaching New York City.

Książ Castle in Poland

It has been calculated that over half of the underground galleries and chambers have yet to be discovered, because a SS team blasted many of their entrances. This is how the Warsaw Voice reports what the post-war Polish researchers had estimated: "There are 35 stoneware pipes meant to carry liquid. Where to? We don't know. We measured their depth and tried to use smoke to find out whether the pipes were connected inside, and where they ended. We put two lit flares in each opening – the smoke was evidently sucked inside. In one case, we could hear what sounded like an air-lock working ... smoke from 26 flares went inside and didn't really come out anywhere. How great must be the capacity of those pipes, or even the underground tunnels, if they could take in such a quantity of smoke!"

There seems to be even more tunnels, suggested by the fact that some have been bricked up. Researchers went on claiming, "In some places, pipes come out the surface of the mountain from nowhere, and in others, narrow-gauge railway tracks stick out of piles of rock; such tracks were used to remove the excavated material. There are also empty chambers with no direct connection to the tunnels accessible today, nor to any surface structures. Some elements suggest that the tunnels in the Owl Mountains could have had a multi-level structure, very seldom seen in other German facilities around the same period. This could confirm the presumption of some amateur explorers that there might still be some things in the corridors which are still inaccessible today. The question as to what exactly, still remains unanswered. The obvious interest shown in these facilities after the war, by the special services either in the Soviet Union, in East Germany, or in Poland could do nothing to dispel these doubts."

The Jonas Valley
- It’s now worth mentioning the most mysterious of all underground facilities: the 25 tunnels dug in the mountains of the Jonas Valley (Jonastal) in Germany. Tens of thousands of prisoners worked there to complete this gigantic enterprise, many of them starving to death or losing their lives in the process. The secrecy surrounding this operation was so strict that even nowadays no one can say for sure what their actual purpose was. The tunnel entrances have been blasted in order to prevent access to the public for security reasons. Some claim that it was one more huge headquarters for Hitler, others that it was a site for testing nuclear bombs, or to host factories producing the Amerika rocket meant to reach American soil (Hitlers Bombe by Rainer Karlsch, 2005).

Jonastal: 25 tunnel entrances can

be seen entering the mountain

Last but not least, adventurous minds claim that the Amber Room treasure, called the Eighth Wonder of the World, would be buried there. It was a room pertaining to Catherine's Palace, called Tsarskoye Selo in Russia, and was a true marvel of art and craftsmanship. The most likely theory is that is was brought to Königsberg by the Germans after they stole it, and that it was destroyed there by none other than the advancing Soviet troops. Königsberg is now a Russian exclave bearing the name of Kaliningrad.

True or not, there are still very strange stories being told about the underground Reich, and the author of this book heard one such tale recounted by a reliable good friend. This friend's grandfather was one of the very first French soldiers fighting on German soil, where he heard that American soldiers had found a very deep tunnel, probably in the Harz Mountains where the Jonastal is located. He claimed that they were ordered to go inside to find out what it was meant for. The deeper they went inside, the longer the tunnel appeared to be. They allegedly had even found two dead SS soldiers, probably by starvation, holding onto their MG42 machine guns in a desperate effort to try to prevent any Allied intrusion. Where it gets even stranger is that they were ordered to blast the tunnel after nearly 14 kilometers, and not even try to get any farther. Did the US generals know more, or were they simply afraid of what they could have found?

Wonder Weapons

The Wonder Weapons (Wunderwaffen in German) were real cutting-edge weapons, as well as a new means of propaganda in the hands of Dr. Joseph Goebbels. They were technologically so ahead of their time that they gave birth to a full new myth. Some of them were proven to be quite useful, like the V2 rockets, while some others may have been just as efficient if they had been produced on time and in sufficient quantities to really turn the tide of the war around. The most famous example is probably the Me 262 jet-engine aircraft; moreover, there were some Wonder Weapons which never developed beyond the stage of blueprints or prototypes.

Silbervogel: Wind tunnel model, picture taken in 1935.

Many innovative projects were cancelled before they even started, or they were never completed by the time the war ended. We are talking about different types of aircraft carriers, U-boats with all-electric engines using an air-independent propulsion device, both able to carry ballistic missiles and super-heavy tanks like the Ratte (The Rat) which would have weighed 1,000 metric tons. German scientists had also planned some rocket-powered aircrafts, reusable A5-type rockets, A11-and A12-type satellite launchers, a Silbervogel sub-orbital Amerika bomber that could be launched from the mid-Atlantic Azores islands, manned surface-to-air missiles, a sun gun with a concave mirror that could focus reflected sunlight on a specific target on the Earth and possibly destroy an entire city, a gigantic static V-3 cannon to bombard London from their Northern France location, and finally, the infamous German nuclear project, which failed for lack of unified research management.

Below are listed some of the Wunderwaffen that made it to the field of battle, even though some were only in small quantities:

The
Type XXI U-Boot
, also known as the "Elektroboot", was the first submarine designed to operate primarily submerged rather than as surface ships that could submerge, providing a means to escape detection or to launch a surprise attack.

Type XXI U-boats in Bergen, Norway

The
Panzer VIII Maus
was completed in late 1944 and it was the heaviest tank ever built.