Hitler's Terror Weapons (23 page)

The valley of Jonastal lies in the heart of Germany, south-west of Weimar in the Harz Mountains, at the centre of a ring of the towns of Erfurt, Waltershausen, Crawinkel and Stadtilm. Since Imperial times there had been a Military Training Area at Ohrdruf on a plateau in Jonastal. Organization Todt began work building a vast underground city in the limestone in 1937. The entrances were disguised as ‘weekend chalets'. The actual size of the development is difficult to estimate since the entrances to the lower galleries were sealed off by the SS with explosives and, after exploring what remained accessible, the Americans closed down the rest.

A number of surface structures – five giant halls which can be seen in immediate post-war Allied aerial photos – were demolished in the DDR period and covered over below an unbelievably thick layer of industrial rubbish to make a hill. Exploration below ground is strictly prohibited. With a Land Rover in dry weather it takes several hours to tour the perimeter of the area. The Feldherrn hill and Musketierberg are central elevations offering a good view over a plateau of grass and scrub extending for several kilometres in all directions. The terrain is dangerous and remains littered with shrapnel, unexploded bombs and shells.

In 1944 the SS took over at Ohrdruf, which had been established as a V-weapon centre some time previously, and soon strange things began to happen. Ohrdruf was the largest underground factory city of the Third Reich and the most impregnable place on earth. The mapped tunnel system is 1.5 miles in length, although that is definitely only the tip of the iceberg.

Below ground there are thought to be four facilities consisting of many long galleries on as many as four levels designated
Jasmin, Wolfsturm, Siegfried
and
Olga.
Huge ventilation shafts are still to be found at the surface. It is known that there are sufficient generators below ground to supply current to a city the size of Berlin. At least one underground power source there has been running without any maintenance since 1945. The German writer Dieter Meinig
¹⁴⁸
reported that when the Bundeswehr reclaimed the territory on the reunification of Germany in 1989 they discovered a large thick electric cable which emerged from the ground directly above facility
Olga.
On examination it was found to be of wartime manufacture and carrying a high voltage current. The cable was cut to see if a consumer complained, but nobody did. This deep underground facility was sealed by the SS from the inside as well as at the surface. It has never been investigated and is probably the origin of the strange glow in the night sky occasionally reported even nowadays, leading one to assume that the power plant could not be shut down and is continuing to produce energy over 55 years later. After the war the US air force photographed the region from the air and saw the underground construction as being shaped like the spokes of a huge Celtic cross. A senior American officer who saw below ground wrote of it:

“The underground installations were amazing. They were literally subterranean towns. There were four in and around Ohrdruf: one near the horror camp, one under the Schloss, and two west of the town. Others were reported in nearby villages. None were natural caves or mines. All were man-made military installations. The horror camp had provided the labour. An interesting feature of the construction was the absence of any spoil. It had been carefully scattered in hills miles away. The only communication shelter which is known is a two floor deep shelter with the code Amt 10. Over fifty feet underground the installation consisted of two and three galleries several miles in length and extending like the spokes of a wheel. The entire hull structure was of massive reinforced concrete. Purpose of the installations was to house the High Command after it was bombed out of Berlin. The place also had panelled and carpeted offices, scores of large work- and store rooms, tiled bathrooms and tubs and showers, flush toilets, electrically equipped kitchens, decorated dining rooms and mess halls, giant refrigerators, extensive sleeping quarters, recreation rooms, separate bars for officers and enlisted personnel, a cinema and air-conditioning and sewage systems.”
¹⁴⁹

According to witnesses, from 1943 onwards Ohrdruf was a testing ground for new weapons systems above ground and new panzer weapons, guns and remote control systems are well remembered, as is the
Motorstoppmittel,
which could bring down aircraft by means of a strong electro-magnetic field. While the machine was thought to be operating at Ohrdruf automobile and panzer engines for miles around would cut out and refuse to function. The Allies do not appear to have photographed or bombed the area during the war, which suggests that the area was deliberately avoided by their aircraft.

The
Motorstoppmittel
was reported in 1944 by a member of the Technical Intelligence Division of the US Strategic Air Force:

“We were getting reports from a number of overlapping sources: planes returning to England from bombing missions over the continent kept experiencing engine trouble. The engines would suddenly become rough, cutting in and out. As the stories accumulated, scattered spy and POW reports reinforced the suspicion that a secret ground installation was responsible for our engine trouble.

“There was considerable discussion among Intelligence people as to what should be done. The general feeling – that some new German device was causing the electrical problems – presented one major difficulty: the amount of electricity required to short out a B-29 engine was calculated as greater than all the known electrical energy output of Europe!

“A special plane was fitted out with monitoring equipment. A volunteer was found to fly the plane. He flew his mission and when he returned to base, he behaved like a madman. He was angry and hysterical and raved about ‘How we could have subjected him to such things'. When we tried to debrief him he cursed and screamed. He was so wild that nobody could find out just what had happened to him. He was finally sedated and put to bed.

“But the strangest thing of all was that when he woke up next day, he acted as if nothing unusual had happened. He had completely forgotten the previous day's insanity. He had no memory of his anger or hysteria. He was feeling fine, ready to return to duty. Of course, the plane's instruments showed nothing.”

An interesting account of what it was like to experience this from ground level is provided by Frau Cläre Werner
¹⁵⁰
who was a watchtower lookout on the Wachsenburg, close to the Ohrdruf military testing centre. She often observed a strange lightning effect across the territory lasting several minutes which lit up the whole horizon at night and so bright that she could read a newspaper by it. Frau Werner and two other witnesses reported that, after these phenomena, they would suffer a feeling of being completely drained and exhausted for the next three days. Scientists explain the exhaustion as a form of shock caused by waves of energy from a gravitational field.

This development probably resulted from the observation that spinning experiments with mercury caused electrical equipment and motors to short-circuit and malfunction. By stepping up the output of the device the gravitational field expanded over a far greater area. Possibly the manufacture of the gelatinous organic-metallic serum was carried out on a larger scale at Ohrdruf for the flying saucer programme.

Most of those who had worked at Ohrdruf under the SS, whether concentration camp inmates from the Buchenwald satellite camp S-III nearby, local civilian workers or lower ranking German technical staff, disappeared on or before the arrival of American forces under General Patton on or about 11 April 1945. As many as 3,000 local people remain unaccounted for. Elite SS units murdered even Wehrmacht personnel who had seen the Ohrdruf technologies and therefore knew too much
¹⁵¹
. In addition there are substantial rumours that large groups of SS men and their families were seen entering the tunnel system during the fighting for Jonastal just before the lower galleries were sealed while the mysterious electro-magnetic source was left operating. Whatever its purpose, the last Führer HQ at the centre of such a defence would have been impregnable so far as mechanical means of attack were concerned.

The German work at Ohrdruf may have been aimed at investigating other space-time continua. This was said to have been the purpose of the alleged Philadelphia Experiment in 1943. Scientists such as Dr Joseph Weber of the University of Maryland have confirmed that good reasons exist to suspect some form of gravitic anomaly disposed around the Earth in a particular pattern. This might be an ordinary gravitational field beyond our spectrum acting in a manner equivalent to electro-magnetism. The thinking is that there could be ten areas of the world, five in each hemisphere, where this form of gravitic anomaly operates, and in these regions it does seem that the number of disappearances of ships, people and aircraft is disproportional to the occurrence of losses elsewhere. The most famous of these is an oblong area with one corner at Fort Lauderdale on the Florida coast, the so-called ‘Bermuda Triangle'. In order to be clear on the concept, I have cited three post-war cases. Although the basic anomaly seems to be chronometric, i.e aircraft arriving at a geographical location at a calculated speed beyond their modest capabilities, the actual cause may have been the operation of Gravity II a – second gravitic force first postulated by the geophysicist Dr John Carstoiu in his NAS thesis
The Two Gravitational Waves Propagation.

These theories may well explain, for example, two USAF cases over the Pacific in the 1950s and the US Navy tragedy involving the mysterious loss of five Avenger aircraft on a training flight from Fort Lauderdale on 5 December 1945.

Ivan T. Sanderson investigated in his book
Invisible Residents
(Universal Tandem, 1974 at pp. 152-162) two reports by experienced military aviators involving an inexplicable time anomaly while aloft. The reports were then analyzed by Captain R.J. Durrant, an airline pilot.

J. F. O'D was a B-26 group navigator who briefed three squadrons daily on navigational routes operating while serving in Korea in late 1955. Returning from a training mission heading almost due south between Seoul and Pusan at 7000 feet, he calculated at three check points over a twenty-five minute period a ground speed for his aircraft of 550 knots. This would imply a tail wind of 265 knots for an aircraft of that type on a routine flight. There were no side-effects such as unusual turbulence reported. Meteorologists were of the opinion that such a wind blowing south at 7000 feet would be impossible. Captain Durrant stated that the only explanation available to fit the reported facts was that the aircraft must have unknowingly entered a mass moving at a speed greater that the spin of the Earth. A selective force pushing or pulling the aircraft would have shown up on the airspeed indicator.

In the second case Lt Col Frank P. Hoskins USAF stated that in the spring of 1966 he was AF advisor to 106th Air Transport Group NY Air Guard based at NASNY. On the day in question he was a basic navigator aboard an Air Guard C-97 from Kwajalein to Guam. Guam is an area notorious for unexplained aircraft disappearances. It was a 6-hour flight at 12,000 feet with a forecast side wind of 10 knots. His Loran and celestial fixes over part of the course resulted in the calculation of a speed of 340 knots, indicating a following wind of 110 knots. On landing, the weather debriefing officer admitted that he was aware of such inexplicable phenomena which occurred for a few hours eight to ten times a year.

The possibility of this assist being the jet stream was ruled out by low altitude and wrong direction, and Captain Durrant also calculated that Lt Col Hopkins had actually underestimated the strength of the assist, which was nearer to 200 knots. A wind of such velocity would have affected the land surface below. The only explanation is that this old C-97 aircraft ran into a local gravity field anomaly. To put it more simply, in both cases the two aircraft got to their destination impossibly fast. The only possible known cause, a wind of super-hurricane force, was not recorded, and if it had occurred would have had a devastating effect at ground level. Thus for a brief period the aircraft slipped into an unknown strata which happily was moving in the same direction of travel.

The third case is more complicated, since none of the aircrew survived. The verdict of the Navy Department enquiry into the loss of five Avenger aircraft and their crews on 5 December 1945 adjudged the flight leader, Lt Charles C. Taylor, culpable for the tragedy: “The flight leader's false assurance of identifying as the Florida Keys islands he sighted plagued his future decisions and confused his reasoning. He was directing his flight to fly east even though he was undoubtedly east of Florida.”

On 9 November 1946 the Board of Correction of Naval Records upheld an appeal lodged by Lt Taylor's mother on a technical point and substituted an amended cause of loss attributable to “reason or reasons unknown”. Unlike other so-called Bermuda Triangle mysteries, the unique factor about the loss of Flight 19 is that radio contact was maintained with the straying aircraft during the critical period for no less than three and a quarter hours, yet in all that time the shore stations were never able to obtain a radar or DF fix on them. The depositions to the board of enquiry when plotted on a chart enable us to satisfactorily resolve this mystery. A significant red herring has been the interpretation of a single word given in evidence by an instructor colleague of Lt Taylor.

The factual information which follows is from information supplied by the Department of the Navy's Naval Historical Centre, Washington, and logs compiled by the researcher Gian Quasar who has taken a special interest in the case.

On the afternoon of 5 December 1945 five TBM Avenger bombers were readied at Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station, Florida for an authorized advanced overwater navigational training flight. Four of the aircraft had a pilot, gunner and radio operator; the fifth was a crewman short. All five pilots were qualified as basic flight instructors with up to 350 to 400 hours' flying time, of which at least 55 hours had been on TBM aircraft. The aircraft had a cruise speed of about 145 knots and a range of just over 1130 miles, which meant that the type could remain up for at least seven hours of normal flight, more if well throttled back.