Echo of the Reich (2 page)

The orders from Berlin had been unequivocal. It was essential that
Die Glocke
remained in German hands. There was a chance, just the faintest possibility, even when defeat seemed both imminent and inevitable, that the device could be used to snatch victory, or at least serve to prevent the total destruction of Germany.

It didn’t look like much of a weapon, Wolf thought as he stared across the chamber, though he could see exactly why it had acquired its nickname
Die Glocke
: what it resembled more than anything else was a bell. A big bell, almost three meters in diameter and over four meters high.

“What’s that?” one of his men asked, pointing at a number of objects positioned around the perimeter of the largely circular chamber.

Wolf walked across to the wall and looked down, then prodded one with the toe of his boot. They were small blackened lumps, largely shapeless and with a jellylike consistency. But a couple of them had appendages that gave a clue as to their origin.

“I think they’re plants,” Wolf said, “or they were plants, anyway. I can see a couple of leaves and a bit of stem on that one.”

“Quick! Over here,” another of his men said, walking around to the opposite side of the vast device.

What he’d found clearly weren’t more plants. Lying slumped against the wall, their wrists secured to chains attached to the wall, were two bodies. Both were male, both naked, and both very obviously dead. The numbers “3” and “4” were painted on the wall above the two corpses, and further over to the left were two more sets of chains and the painted numbers “1” and “2.”

“Test subjects,” Wolf commented. “I was briefed that we might see some of these. They’re of no consequence, just Jews from the Gross-Rosen camp.”

“So what killed them?”

“This, obviously,” Wolf said, gesturing at the metallic object that almost filled the chamber. “
Die Glocke
.”

He stepped forward and looked closely at the bodies. Whatever had killed them, whatever lethal force was generated by the Bell, their deaths clearly hadn’t been pleasant. The faces of both corpses were contorted into expressions of absolute agony, and although their arms and legs were stick-thin, as would be expected of an inmate at Gross-Rosen, their torsos were bloated and lumpy in appearance, the skin discolored by reddish-purple blotches.

One of Wolf’s men placed the sole of his boot against the stomach of one of the corpses and pressed downward. With a faint tearing sound, the skin on the side of the body ruptured and a foul-smelling black substance splashed down onto the rough concrete floor. A rank odor filled the chamber, and both the soldier and Wolf stepped quickly backward.

“What the hell?”

“Don’t touch the other one,” Wolf ordered, turning away.

But the soldier stayed where he was, staring down at the corpse with horrified fascination. “How could that, that thing,” he almost stammered, “how could it do that to a human being?”

“It’s only a Jew,” Wolf snapped, “and I’ve no idea. Right,” he went on, ignoring the two bodies and consulting a list of names, “we know what we have to do. Find Major Debus and bring him here to unhitch
Die Glocke
from the power supply and the other connections. Then we can load it onto the truck.”

Getting the device out of the test chamber was far from easy, because of its bulk and weight and also because
of the myriad connections that needed to be detached before they could even begin the removal process.

Eventually, Wolf ordered his men to back a truck through the main entrance to the Wenceslas Mine. The driver maneuvered it carefully down the narrow corridor until it was within a few meters of the test chamber. Struggling with the object’s bulk and inconvenient shape, they used a pair of trolleys to haul it over to the truck, finally transferring it to the back of the vehicle.

As well as the device and the people who had been developing it, Wolf had also been ordered to remove the most vital sections of the reams of documentation that had been generated during the testing process. In all, it took nearly five hours to complete this part of the operation and transfer everything to the trucks waiting outside. The scientists would be easier to deal with.

Wolf consulted his list of names again. In fact, he had two lists, which corresponded with the two groups of scientists now waiting in the different chambers to leave the facility. He nodded to two of his men and led the way down the corridor. He opened the door of one room, stepped inside and carried out another roll call. It didn’t take long, because there were only three people on his list: SS Major Kurt Debus, the engineer who’d shown his men how to detach the connections and prepare
Die Glocke
for removal from the test chamber; Elizabeth Adler, the specialist mathematician who had previously worked with Professor Walter Gerlach, the founder of the project; and the scientist Dr. Herman Obeth. As soon as he was satisfied that he had correctly identified these three individuals, he stepped outside again and ordered
his men to escort the scientists out of the mine and into one of the waiting lorries.

Only then did he instruct another group of his soldiers to place the demolition charges that would be used to collapse the roof of the main tunnel and seal the mine for all eternity. Finally, he turned his attention to the large group of men and women in the second chamber.

Wolf stepped inside the room and duplicated his earlier action with the first group, taking a careful roll call to confirm exactly who was in the room in front of him. The twenty-eighth name he called out was Georg Schuster. Nobody was missing. He nodded, replaced the paper in his pocket and gestured to two of his men who were standing just behind him.

“Unfortunately,” he began, “although the Junkers is a very big aircraft with an impressive carrying capacity, I regret that it is not big enough to take the device and all of you as a single load. But the Führer has decided that your knowledge of this project is so detailed and so important that we have to take elaborate precautions to ensure that you will not be captured by the advancing Russian forces. I wish there was some other way, but my orders leave me with no choice.”

Wolf stepped out of the chamber, ignoring the puzzled expressions on the faces of the thirty-seven men and women who were standing there, as the first questions were directed toward him.

The two soldiers who were still standing just inside the room each removed a stick grenade from their belt, primed it and tossed it into the midst of the crowd of people in front of them. As the first terrified screams
echoed through the chamber, they stepped outside, slammed the heavy door closed, and threw home the two massive steel bolts to secure it.

The grenades exploded within half a second of each other, the double explosion echoing through the tunnels and bringing down a scattering of small rocks and dust from the stone ceiling above.

The loud screaming inside the room had stopped, but neither Wolf nor his two men believed that just two grenades would have been sufficient.

“Go inside and finish them,” he ordered crisply, then strode away toward the main entrance of the Komplex Milkow.

Wolf waited outside the entrance to the Wenceslas Mine until the last of his men emerged, then gave orders for the explosives to be blown. Seconds later, there was a dull rumble from inside the mine as the dynamite completed its work. He waited a couple of minutes to ensure that all the charges had detonated, then crossed to the entrance to check that the inner passageways were no longer accessible.

He glanced at the narrow-gauge railway that linked the Wenceslas Mine with the airfield at Bystzyca Klodzka and for a moment wondered if that would have been a better way to transport
Die Glocke
, but then shook his head. It would have meant transferring the device from the truck onto one of the railway carriages, and then repeating the process in reverse at the other end of the journey, and all of that would have taken time. Time which he really didn’t have.

Only when he was completely satisfied did Wolf climb
into his staff car and lead the small convoy of three trucks containing his men, the device they had extracted from the testing chamber, and those three scientists whose work, knowledge and ability was of the highest caliber and who were vital for the eventual success of the project.

At Bystzyca Klodzka airfield, which lay in a valley within the Eulenbirge Mountains, to the west of Opole, the flight crew had already removed the tarpaulins that had concealed the huge six-engined Junkers Ju-390. They’d carried out the necessary preflight checks on the aircraft and the rear cargo door was wide-open, waiting for loading to begin.

The device was heavy, bulky, and awkward to handle because of its shape, and maneuvering it inside the relatively confined space of the fuselage was difficult. But eventually they got it secured in place, and Wolf then ordered the three scientists to climb on board the aircraft. The expressions on their faces reflected their conflicting emotions. They’d expected to be evacuated from the area, simply because of the importance of their work to the Reich and the vital knowledge they possessed, but what had happened at the mine clearly showed that there was more than one way for their masters to ensure that they kept their mouths shut.

When they had taken their seats in the cabin, Kurt Debus—the only one of the three with any military training—leaned across to Elizabeth Adler, who was visibly shaking.

“Don’t worry,” he murmured. “If they were going to kill us, they’d have done it back at the mine. We’re safe, because we’re too important to Hitler.”

“Where are they taking us?” Herman Obeth asked. “Not Berlin, surely?”

“I’ve no idea, but somewhere out of the Fatherland, I think we can be sure of that. What we’ve achieved can still change the course of the war. We just need a little more time to perfect it.”

“I hope you’re right,” Adler replied, her voice quivering with emotion. “I really hope you’re right.”

Hauptsturmführer
Wolf was the last to take his seat, and only did so after carrying out a final check that nothing had been left in any of the vehicles that might compromise the project.

One of the engines on the port wing of the Junkers spluttered into life, then settled down to a steady reassuring roar. Then the second engine started, and the third, and in less than a minute the flight deck crew had all six running. The Junkers, which had been painted light blue and illegally wore the markings of the Swedish Air Force—a rudimentary disguise that might make an enemy pilot pause before opening fire with his cannon—began to move, and the massive aircraft started to taxi across the short distance to the end of the runway.

Moments later, the pilot pushed the throttles fully forward and the huge aircraft began gathering speed. It lifted into the darkening sky and swung around toward the west.

It’s reasonable to assume that the paint job was a success, because no units of either the Russian forces or the Western Allies reported seeing a Swedish aircraft at any time that day or evening. They were too busy watching out for enemy aircraft, and it seems likely that the Junkers managed
simply to slip through the front lines, perhaps seen but certainly not noticed.

The Junkers’ ultimate destination was never recorded in any of the surviving documentation, and it’s quite possible that the flight was so highly classified by the Nazis that no details of it were ever committed to paper.

After the war, various places were suggested as the location of the aircraft’s final landing. One of the most cogent and believable reports states that a multi-engined German aircraft was seen touching down at an airfield in the Entre Rios Province of northern Argentina in May 1945.

Another report describes various witness sightings of a six-engined aircraft, provisionally identified as a Junkers Ju-390, being dismantled on a German-owned farm in Paysundu Province in Uruguay at about the same date. Some of the local residents also reported that the parts of the aircraft were then taken to the River Uruguay, which is over a kilometer wide at this point, and thrown into the water.

A third report suggested that the aircraft had a very much shorter flight, and landed near Bodø in Norway, though this might of course have simply been an interim or refueling stop as part of a much longer flight, and it seems probable that if the aircraft had remained in Norway it would have been seen and reported by somebody, and most probably seized by Allied forces.

What is certain is that at the end of the Second World War nobody knew where either the aircraft or its unusual cargo had been taken, or exactly what the secret device constructed in the Wenceslas Mine was intended to do.
Current researchers believe the project designation implied that it was a weapon of some description, probably a very early type of weapon of mass destruction, but since 1945 no definite information has been recovered about
Die Glocke
and nobody had any real idea of its function or its purpose.

Until now, that is.

17 July 2012

“Can I just say something?” Chris Bronson asked. “I dislike sport to the extent that if you gave me a Cup Final ticket, I would rather pay you money than have to go and watch the match.”

“Is that right?” The Met inspector looked distinctly unimpressed. He was sitting in a battered swivel chair behind a large but extremely cluttered desk—files stacked in piles on both sides of it—in a glass cubicle at one end of a squad room in a police station in east London’s Forest Gate. Bronson was standing in front of him. He had no option—there was no other chair, not even enough space for one, in the tiny office.

The walls behind the desk were plastered with the usual selection of notices and leaflets, everything from Health and Safety directives—which looked noticeably clean and unread—to part of a faded page of newsprint apparently cut from the
Evening Standard
, the print too
tiny for Bronson to make out the story. Other notices were attached to the glass walls of the office, but Bronson guessed that their principal purpose was less to convey information than to provide the inspector’s tiny sanctum with some slight measure of privacy.