SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology (26 page)

Witkowski began to research the story, and uncovered what is perhaps the most important story to come out of World War Two.

3. The Personnel and a New SS Player on the Scene: the Forschungen, Entwicklungen, Patente

When Witkowski was able to assemble at least a partial list of scientists and military personnel involved with the project, a very odd picture emerged. To appreciate the oddity of the picture, one must examine each of the individuals Witkowski uncovered in their turn.

a. SS Obergruppenführer Emil Mazuw

Witkowski was quickly led to the SS, and to one of its departments that was responsible for vetting patents in the Third Reich, and classifying those that seemed to possess potential for further development:

The whole project was coordinated by a special cell cooperating with the SS armament office, subordinate to the Waffen-SS. This cell was designated “FEP”, which was an abbreviation of the words “Forschungen, Entwicklungen, Patente” – research, development work, patents. The chief of this “FEP” cell was a certain Admiral Rhein, while the described project was coordinated by a quite mysterious individual – namely SS-Obergruppenführer (Four Star General) Emil Mazuw. Why mysterious? Simply because despite possessing one of the highest general’s ranks in the SS, practically nothing is known about him. I got hold of his dossier in the USA in 1999, but through this he became in my eyes an even more obscure figure. It followed both from his dossier as well as cards from the course of his service, that Mazuw had been at the very top of the SS elite. He was promoted to the rank of SS Obergruppenführer on 20 April 1942, in other words he had possessed
the highest possible
SS rank at that time (in 1944 the SS Oberstgruppenführer rank was further established, four people being promoted to it). He was awarded with the Honorary saber of Reichsführer SS (Ehrendengen des RFSS) and honorary SS ring with skull and cross-bones (SS Totenkopfring). Such a ring was given by Himmler for special service to the organization. Their bearers constituted the highest caste of SS-men, given admittance to the greatest secrets. Each ring was personally dedicated by Himmler….Mazuw already had it in 1936. He was therefore one of the powers behind the throne of the Third Reich, almost unknown to this day.
⁸

What is interesting here in the light of my own, and other’s, previous research into the secret weapons think tank of SS
Obergruppenführer
Hans Kammler’s, is that the Bell project appears to be under the mysterious “F.E.P.”, which in turn is under an Admiral, implying a
Kriegsmarine
connection with whatever exotic technology and physics the Bell represented. The significance of this fact will be examined below.

SS Obergruppenführer Emil Mazuw
Picture from Igor Witkowski’s
The Truth About the Wunderwaffe

A second unusual feature of Witkowski’s revelations is that the Bell project itself was not
directly
coordinated by Kammler, but by the enigmatic Emil Mazuw, though, as Nick Cook and Witkowski both indicate, Kammler’s connection with the project was direct, since he seems to have been involved in Bormann’s secret “evacuation command” structure that was apparently used to fly the Bell, scientific papers, and perhaps Kammler himself, out of Europe at the war’s end.
⁹

Witkowski, in answer to a personal correspondence from me, explained the odd relationship of the F.E.P. to the
Kammlerstab
and other agencies in the following way:

As far as I know, Mazuw wasn’t tied with the Ahnenerbe. The situation was such that apart from Kammler’s office (Rüstungsstab) – which, what has to be emphasized, wasn’t directly responsible for the R&D activities as such but for armaments projects in general, there were “specialized” R&D authorities within the SS (the best proof that they were really important is that it would be virtually impossible to find anything in the literature about it … It was: the “R&D group” at the armament office of the Waffen-SS, headed by SS-Brigadeführer Heinrich Gärtner and the second was the FEP/Waffen-SS cell, headed by Mazuw…it was theoretically responsible for the protection of inventions in the period when the normal patent law was effectively suspended.
¹⁰

Note that this conflicts with the story of the
Kammlerstab
first broken by British journalist Tom Agoston, as recounted in my
Reich of the Black Sun.
¹¹
Agoston, relying on the confidential statements of former German weapons expert Dr. Wilhelm Voss, clearly implied that it was Kammler himself, plus his “think tank” staff inside of the engineering division at the Skoda Works in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, that headed research and development. But this may only be an apparent contradiction. At the rarefied levels of SS
Obergruppenführers
, contact between Mazuw and Kammler – both involved in sensitive black projects – would have been inevitable. And we know for certain that Kammler himself was in charge of Bormann’s special evacuation command at the end of the war, the command which it appears successfully evacuated the Bell from Lower Silesia via a Junkers 390, about which more in a moment.

But what of Witkowski’s statement that he knew of no direct or known association of Mazuw with the SS’ “occult bureau”, the
Ahnenerbedienst?
The answer, as in Kammler’s case, must be speculative. However, given that, at its highest level, Himmler intended for his SS to be a kind of “black knights of the round table”, and given that his chosen twelve “black knights” with access to the “SS occult center” at the castle of Wewelsburg had to be of at least
Gruppenführer
(general) rank, then again, it would seem unlikely that Mazuw did
not
know of the SS’ occult activities and interests.

That a four star SS general, about whom almost nothing is known, is not only involved with the Bell project, but actually the overall director of it, raises as many questions as it answers. Did he, like Kammler, disappear into the bowels of some Allied country’s postwar classified projects or perhaps – an equal possibility – simply
disappear
, to continue the project independently? And the presence of a navy Admiral in the parent organization, the F.E.P., raises a further question: why the indirect connection to the German navy? Does this relationship perhaps indicate something about the nature of the Bell itself?

b. Prof Dr Walther Gerlach

Unlike Emil Mazuw, Prof. Dr. Walther Gerlach was and is quite famous, and for any number of reasons. As Nick Cook noted in his
Hunt for Zero Point
, Gerlach was a Nobel laureate for his work in spin polarization. A first class physicist, Gerlach went on to specialize in gravitational physics, on the basis of his pioneering experiment
¹²
that earned him the Nobel prize. But as any researcher of the German atom bomb project knows, Gerlach was also nominally the head of atom bomb research in Nazi Germany by war’s end, and was one of the scientists interred by the British at Farm Hall in England, where the scientists’ conversations were secretly recorded.

Gerlach was also expert in two other obscure topics, both of which, as we shall see, are closely associated with the Bell: the transmutation of elements, and the “fluorescence of mercury ions in a strong magnetic field, in other words, referring to the behaviour of mercuric plasma.” Gerlach had evidently been involved in the topic “for
a long time
, because as far back as January 1925 he wrote to Arnold Sommerfeld about the spin…of ionized mercury.” In such matters, Gerlach was “faultlessly well-informed.”
¹³

Even more mysteriously, Gerlach, one of the world’s premier gravitational physicists
before
the war,
never
returned to the subject
after
the war. Nick Cook comments in his well-known book
The Hunt for Zero Point
that Gerlach thus acted as if “something had scared him beyond all reason.”
¹⁴
While Cook meant his comment in a speculative sense, there is perhaps some truth to it. If he
was
genuinely frightened, and if this is the reason for his curious postwar silence about spin polarization and gravitation, then this could be due to two causes.

First, as the lead scientist involved with the Bell project, and as a loyal Nazi, Gerlach would have been privy to the curious and strange results of the Bell’s operation and possibly have even personally witnessed some of these effects. As we shall see, these effects would have frightened any rational human. So, one explanation – the one that seems to be implied by Nick Cook, in fact – is that Gerlach
saw
or
witnessed
something in the very project he headed that had frightened him into postwar silence.

But there is a second, and I think, more plausible explanation for Gerlach’s apparent fright-into-silence. Indeed, it is an explanation that would seem to give a factual basis to Cook’s speculation that Gerlach was “frightened” into postwar silence on these admittedly esoteric topics. As Cook himself notes, following Witkowski’s research, the SS
shot
the sixty-some scientists and their assistants who worked on the project, rather than let any of them fall into Allied or Russian hands.
¹⁵
As we shall see, there appear to be only a few scientists, two of them well-known in their way, that survived the SS’ massacre: one was Kurt Debus (about whom more below), and the other was Walther Gerlach.

This allows us to undertake something of a reconstruction, speculative though it will have to be. First, it would appear that the SS, by murdering the project’s scientists with the exception of Debus, Gerlach (and one must assume, possibly others), is intent on preserving the project’s
independence
by preventing its secrets from falling into any Allied hands. That this is the most rational conclusion is evident from the fact that if the SS had bargained with the Allies or Soviets to exchange this project in return for their lives, then the process would be self-defeating, if the Soviets or Allies were denied the very technicians that made the project possible. Such scientists and technicians would have been in the Soviet’s or Allies’ “intelligence targets acquisitions and booty” list, so to speak. By its actions, in other words, the SS is clearly signaling that it has no intention of letting the project fall into
Soviet
hands, and it is equally possible that it has no intention of letting it fall into
Allied
hands either.
¹⁶

So why did Gerlach and Debus escape? They escaped simply because of their sheer notoriety and value to the project.
¹⁷
For the SS to have murdered these men, and dumped them unceremoniously into an unmarked mass grave in Silesia, would have inevitably attracted Allied and Russian interest……and
questions,
after the war. And those questions, in turn, would have inevitably led back to the Bell. Gerlach and Debus, moreover, represented a level of expertise and involvement beyond the mere day-to-day testing and experimentation involved in the project. Gerlach, in particular, was the theoretician, capable of formulating the “big picture” of whatever it was the Nazis had discovered with the Bell. Such men would be needed
after
the war if the project were to be continued and advanced. Indeed, as will be seen later in this chapter, it may have been Gerlach or someone in his close circle of friends and associates in the physics community, that initiated the Bell project.

So what frightened Gerlach? Very simply: perhaps the SS “allowed” Gerlach and Debus – and any other big name scientist that might have been involved with the project – to witness the executions of their comrades. Or perhaps the SS communicated their fates to Debus and Gerlach in some other fashion. In either case, the message was clear: “keep quiet on this subject, and keep cooperating.” If that
was
the message to the two men, then it certainly worked, for Gerlach never even intimated in the Farm Hall Transcripts of his involvement with any project during the war that involved his specialty: gravitation.
¹⁸
And as for Kurt Debus, he apparently never mentioned the more exotic technologies to his new employer after the war, as we shall see below. In any case, I believe the SS murders of the Bell’s scientists are the best explanation for Nick Cook’s observation that Gerlach never touched the subject of spin polarization and gravity after the war, acting as if “something had scared him beyond all reason.”