Chapter 6: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING GENERALS :SS OBERGRUPPENFUHRER DR.ING.HANS KAMMLER AND GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON
The generals in question are General Patton, well-known to military history and America's most famous and capable field commander during the war in Europe, and SS Obergruppenfuhrer Dr. Ing. (doctor of engineering) Hans Kammler, now little known to popular history, architect of the infamous Auschwitz death camps, responsible for the demolition of the Warsaw ghetto, and by the end of the war, the Third Reich's plenipotentiary for all secret weapons research, responsible directly to Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler and to Adolf Hitler himself.
1 Tom Agoston, Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1985), p. 65.
A. Introduction: The Rediscovery of the SS Sonderkommando, Kammler, and a Brush with "the Legend"
As previous chapters have indicated, there is some entity within the Third Reich that appears to have coordinated extremely sensitive and secret weapons research projects, including possible oversight of Germany's apparently large uranium enrichment program. However, this entity, as we shall subsequently see, was responsible for a great deal more than that. It is necessary at this juncture to say something about it, however, as it now directly enters the picture in the speculative reconstruction of the strange death of the one, and the disappearance of the other, of these two very important generals.
This entity first came to public light in the aftermath of World War Two, in the 1950s, in a series of publications in West Germany, and in a book by former German major Rudolf Lusar. These publications alleged that Nazi Germany had created and successfully tested "unusual" aircraft, including flying disks or saucers. Thus was born the "Nazi Legend" of the "real origin" of UFOs. More will be said about this Legend in the subsequent parts of this book. Here it suffices to note that the Nazi Legend maintained that this secretive development occurred under the direct auspices of the SS.
The allegations of an ultra-top secret entity coordinating and controlling the Nazi secret weapons research in the final years of the war tended to be discounted, along with its more sensation component, the "flying saucers" themselves. Moreover, discounting these allegations was easy to do, since they rested upon the isolated testimony of a disenchanted German major with definite Nazi sympathies (Lusar) and the "eye witness" statements of one or two others who came forward to corroborate the story, each with their own shady associations.
All that gradually began to change, however, by a sequence of events ranging from the publication of a book by a former British intelligence officer, Tom Agoston, in 1985, by the German reunification itself in 1989, which made a host of archives of the former East Germany available to researchers. A number of books has appeared in Germany since the reunification made these archives accessible, and moreover, the lormerly inaccessible SS secret underground facilities and complexes finally became accessible to the public. Aided and abetted in their efforts by the declassification of several documents by the Clinton administration in the United States, German researchers began to probe the new information, reconnecting the dots, and presenting a chilling picture of the actual state of Nazi wartime research and its enormous discrepancy with the postwar Allied Legend. This body of work has been almost entirely ignored in North America.2 Agoston's work was the first indication from the "mainstream" that there may have been something behind the Nazi Legend. Agoston revealed his story for the first time after his source, none other than close Kammler associate at the famous Skoda Works, Dr. Wilhelm Voss, died. The story that Voss told Agoston at the end o f the war was, according to Agoston, in confidence.
As Agoston notes rather sarcastically, Kammler boasted almost the perfect "corporate resume" and a documentable record of "whole person management" as a "team player":
A modern day management consultant who was talent hunting for a "total professional with total involvement" would certainly have been fascinated by the bizarre curriculum vitae Kammler could have submitted. He could demonstrate a "track record" in "very senior appointments," with skill in putting across "aggressive growth plans."...
The most prominent post-reunification German sources for this story are Friedrich Georg's series on secret weapons, Hitler's Siegeswaffen series in thrcc volumes; and the studies of Edgar Mayer and Thomas Mehner, Das Geheimnis der Deutschen Atombombe; Die Atombombe und das Dritte Reich; Hitler un die ,,Bombe"; Harald Fath's 1945 -Tthuringens Manhattan Projekt ami Geheime Kommandosache -S III Jonastal und die Seigeswaffenproduktion. Also not to be neglected is Robert K. Wilcox's Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race against Time to Build its Own Atomic Bomb, for the latter book raises the question of where Japan acquired its enrichment capability and stocks of uranium in no uncertain terms (see chapter 7 of this book). Also important is Karl Heinz Zunneck's Geheimtechnologien, Wunderwaffen und die irdischen Facetten des UFO-Phanomens.
In the the Third Reich, within a span of a few years, the number of positions he had held in turn was phenomenal.3
Among these "senior appointments" Kammler once commanded were:
All this is to say that not only was Kammler a butcher, but that by the war's end, Hitler had "concentrated more power in Kammler's hands than he had ever entrusted to a single person," bar none.6 If one were to compare Kammler's position to a similar hypothetical position in the former Soviet Union, such a position would mean that the general who (commanded) the SS-20 rockets in Europe and Asia (the Commander in Chief of Strategic Rocket Forces) would also head research, development, and production of missiles. In addition, he would be in charge of producing all modern aircraft for the Red Air Force and have overall command of the mammoth civil engineering projects or the production centers in Siberia's sub-zero climate. Last, but very much not least, he would lead the national grid of gulags. To match Kammler's position in the SS, the Soviet general holding all these variegated commands would also be third in the KGB pecking order.7
Indeed, one would have to add to Agoston's list, for such a Soviet general would also have had to be in charge of the coordination of all the most post-nuclear and super secret advanced scientific research and black projects in the entire Soviet Union. It is thus in the person of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kamtnler that all the lines of our investigation meet: the Buna factory and slave labor of the camps, exploited for grizzly medical experimentation and labor in the secret underground laboratories and production facilities, the atom bomb project, and as will be seen in the subsequent parts of this book, even more horrendous and monstrous aircraft and weapons development. If there was a gold mine of information, then it was available in the blueprints and files that were locked in Kammler's vaults, or even more securely inhis brain. It is this fact and Kammler's extraordinary dossier thatmake his post-war fate even more problematical. But what of Kammler's "Special SS Command"(Sonderkommando) structure itself? What was it that was so revolutionary that Dr. Voss would have required Agoston to maintain confidentiality until after his death?
Voss had joined Skoda in 1938, when the plant was ceded to the Reich under the Munich Pact - Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and Daladier, allotting the Sudeten German areas of Czechoslovakia to
Chapter 6: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING GENERALS :ss OBERGRUPPENFUHRER DR.ING.HANS KAMMLERAND GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON
The generals in question are General Patton, well-known to military history and America's most famous and capable field commander during the war in Europe, and SS Obergruppenfuhrer Dr. Ing. (doctor of engineering) Hans Kammler, now little known to popular history, architect of the infamous Auschwitz death camps, responsible for the demolition of the Warsaw ghetto, and by the end of the war, the Third Reich's plenipotentiary for all secret weapons research, responsible directly to Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler and to Adolf Hitler himself.
1 Tom Agoston, Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1985), p. 65.
As previous chapters have indicated, there is some entity within the Third Reich that appears to have coordinated extremely sensitive and secret weapons research projects, including possible oversight of Germany's apparently large uranium enrichment program. However, this entity, as we shall subsequently see, was responsible for a great deal more than that. It is necessary at this juncture to say something about it, however, as it now directly enters the picture in the speculative reconstruction of the strange death of the one, and the disappearance of the other, of these two very important generals.
This entity first came to public light in the aftermath of World War Two, in the 1950s, in a series of publications in West Germany, and in a book by former German major Rudolf Lusar. These publications alleged that Nazi Germany had created and successfully tested "unusual" aircraft, including flying disks or saucers. Thus was born the "Nazi Legend" of the "real origin" of UFOs. More will be said about this Legend in the subsequent parts of this book. Here it suffices to note that the Nazi Legend maintained that this secretive development occurred under the direct auspices of the SS.
The allegations of an ultra-top secret entity coordinating and controlling the Nazi secret weapons research in the final years of the war tended to be discounted, along with its more sensation component, the "flying saucers" themselves. Moreover, discounting these allegations was easy to do, since they rested upon the isolated testimony of a disenchanted German major with definite Nazi sympathies (Lusar) and the "eye witness" statements of one or two others who came forward to corroborate the story, each with their own shady associations.
All that gradually began to change, however, by a sequence of events ranging from the publication of a book by a former British intelligence officer, Tom Agoston, in 1985, by the German reunification itself in 1989, which made a host of archives of the former East Germany available to researchers. A number of books
As Agoston notes rather sarcastically, Kammler boasted almost the perfect "corporate resume" and a documentable record of "whole person management" as a "team player":
A modern day management consultant who was talent hunting for a "total professional with total involvement" would certainly have been fascinated by the bizarre curriculum vitae Kammler could have submitted. He could demonstrate a "track record" in "very senior appointments," with skill in putting across "aggressive growth plans."...
The most prominent post-reunification German sources for this story are Friedrich Georg's series on secret weapons, Hitler's Siegeswaffen series in thrcc volumes; and the studies of Edgar Mayer and Thomas Mehner, Das Geheimnis der Deutschen Atombombe; Die Atombombe und das Dritte Reich; Hitler un die ,,Bombe"; Harald Fath's 1945 -Tthuringens Manhattan Projekt ami Geheime Kommandosache -S III Jonastal und die Seigeswaffenproduktion. Also not to be neglected is Robert K. Wilcox's Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race against Time to Build its Own Atomic Bomb, for the latter book raises the question of where Japan acquired its enrichment capability and stocks of uranium in no uncertain terms (see chapter 7 of this book). Also important is Karl Heinz Zunneck's Geheimtechnologien, Wunderwaffen und die irdischen Facetten des UFO-Phanomens.
Among these "senior appointments" Kammler once commanded were:
All this is to say that not only was Kammler a butcher, but that by the war's end, Hitler had "concentrated more power in Kammler's hands than he had ever entrusted to a single person," bar none.6 If one were to compare Kammler's position to a similar hypothetical position in the former Soviet Union, such a position would mean that the general who (commanded) the SS-20 rockets in Europe and Asia (the Commander in Chief of Strategic Rocket Forces) would also head research, development, and production of missiles. In addition, he would be in charge of producing all modern aircraft for the Red Air Force and have overall command of the mammoth civil engineering projects or the production centers in Siberia's sub-zero climate. Last, but very much not least, he would lead the national grid of gulags. To match Kammler's position in the SS, the Soviet general holding all these variegated commands would also be third in the KGB pecking order.7
Indeed, one would have to add to Agoston's list, for such a Soviet general would also have had to be in charge of the coordination of all the most post-nuclear and super secret advanced scientific research and black projects in the entire Soviet Union. It is thus in the person of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kamtnler that all the lines of our investigation meet: the Buna factory and slave labor of the camps, exploited for grizzly medical experimentation and labor in the secret underground laboratories and production facilities, the atom bomb project, and as will be seen in the subsequent parts of this book, even more horrendous and monstrous aircraft and weapons development. If there was a gold mine of information, then it was available in the blueprints and files that were locked in Kammler's vaults, or even more securely inhis brain. It is this fact and Kammler's extraordinary dossier thatmake his post-war fate even more problematical. But what of Kammler's "Special SS Command"(Sonderkommando) structure itself? What was it that was so revolutionary that Dr. Voss would have required Agoston to maintain confidentiality until after his death?
Voss had joined Skoda in 1938, when the plant was ceded to the Reich under the Munich Pact - Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and Daladier, allotting the Sudeten German areas of Czechoslovakia to Germany
6 Agoston, op. cit., p. 4.
7 Ibid., p. 7.
Also important to the Skoda-SS relationship is the fact that all of Bohemian Czechoslovakia became a "Reich Protectorate," in effect turning total political, administrative, and military control of Bohemia over to the SS. It is in this context that the special relationship between Voss and Kammler developed.
By quirk of fate, the careers of Kammler and Voss overlapped at Skoda, where they jointly set up and operated what was generally regarded by insiders as the Reich's most advanced high-technology military research center. Working as a totally independent undercover operation for the SS, the center was under the special auspices of Hitler and Himmler. Going outside the scope and field of Skoda's internationally coveted general research and development division, it worked closely with Krupp and was primarily concerned with analysis of captured equipment, including aircraft, and copying or improving the latest technical features. In so doing the SS group was to go beyond the first generation of secret weapons.9
Thus one has the first component of this Special SS Command: the analysis, duplication, and improvement of all recovered foreign and enemy technology. This in itself is not surprising, since all major combatants during the war maintained such research facilities.
The second thing one must note is the careful and deliberate camouflaging of the SS Special Command inside the normal engineering division of the Skoda works. But the real operational goals of this Special command were far more than the mere analysis of captured enemy equipment, as Voss detailed to Agoston.
Its purpose was to pave the way for building nuclear-powered aircraft, working on the application of nuclear energy for propelling missiles and aircraft; laser beams, then still referred to as "death rays"; a
8 Agoston, op. cit, p. 11.
9 Ibid., p. 12.
Nuclear powered aircraft would require the development and miniaturization of functioning atomic reactors, something the Germans were not, according to the Allied Legend, supposed to have achieved. And though the mention of lasers seems to stretch one's credulity beyond all reason, there is credible evidence that the Germans were up to just that, and more besides.11 But the most remarkable thing about this "SS think tank" was that it was established entirely without the knowledge of Goring, Speer, or any of the other big-wigs or research centers in the Reich.12 This would not only explain Speer's puzzlement at Jackson's question that we encountered earlier, but would also explain the apparent lack of information on the part of the Farm Hall scientists interred in England after the war. These two facts alone indicate that the SS Special Command headquartered at the Skoda Works in Pilsen was more than just a secret weapons project being run through ordinary channels. Unlike even its Manhattan Project counterpart, it had no connection to the standard branches of the German military, the German state, or even the Nazi Party; it was entirely off the books. It is, in every sense that we have come to know it, a Black Project, coordinating all black projects in Nazi Germany. So extensive was the mandate given to this group that if there was a large uranium enrichment program underway in Germany for the production of atom bombs, then this is the entity most likely coordinating it.13
10 Agoston, op. cit., p. 12.'' Q.v. the remaining parts of this book.12 Ibid., pp. 12-13.
So what was the Kammler Staff, or Kammlerstab, as outlined by Voss and Agoston?
First, it was the continuation of "normal" science, free of the constraints of Nazi party ideology, but under the control of the SS! But it was much more. Not only was it a "think tank," but it was also a central clearing house for ideas, for mapping out precise technology trees for the acquisition of second and third generation weapons. But it was more, it was also a fully-funded research Black Programs coordinating office with its own "inexhaustible" and expendable labor pool.
All of it was coordinated by SS General Hans Kammler.
All of it was headquartered at the Skoda Works in Pilsen.
And one more thing. By the war's end, Kammler also had control of the Reich's heavy-lift long range transport aircraft, consisting of several Ju 290s and the two enormous Ju 390s, one of which, according to Agoston, made a polar flight to Japan on March 28, 1945.16
though he surely would have suspected it. The link of the Auschwitz "Buna plant" to the SS via the death camp there already provides one link to Kammler, since the "Buna plant" fell under SS jurisdiction via the camp itself, and thus the connection to Kammler is direct.
14 Agoston, op. cit, p. 13, emphasis added.
15 Ibid., p. 14
16 This fact is merely reported by Agoston without substantiation, leading one to the conclusion that the source of the information must have been Dr. Voss. It is worth noting that Nick Cook reports that Kammler had control of the Ju 390s as part of another SS Special Evacuation Command, which was the
B. The Four Deaths of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Dr. Ing. Hans Kammler
General Kammler, in addition to his "accomplishments" in streamlining death camp efficiency, his methodical and efficient leveling of the ruined Warsaw Ghetto and meticulous accounting of every last brick and stone removed, his coordination of the most arcane, and perhaps the biggest, secret weapons black projects program in human history, has also another odd distinction to his credit. He of all the high-ranking Nazis indicted and tried at Nuremberg either posthumously or in absentia, was never formally indicted, much less brought to trial. He is altogether missing from the docket, and altogether just simply missing. Kammler has yet another distinction. He appears to have been not only a very accomplished messenger of death for others, but also appears to have achieved the astonishing feat of having died himself no less than four times, each under different circumstances. Agoston commented at length on the odd assortment of "facts" surrounding Kammler's fate: brainchild of none other than Martin Bormann. The purpose of this special command was to evacuate... something. Cook reports that one of these enormous Ju 390s simply went missing at the end of the war.
The "first death of General Hans Kammler" is recounted by Albert Speer himself, in his last book. In this most simple version, Kammler ordered his adjutant to shoot him. The "suicide" allegedly took place in Prague as Kammler realized the war was lost and, according to Speer, "acted in elitist SS loyalty."18 As Agoston quips, "even the most ardent worshipper of Teutonic creed could
17 Agoston, op. cit., pp. 102-103, emphasis added.
18 Ibid., p. 103.
Another version of Kammler's death has him giving a speech to his assembled aides in Prague in early May 1945, dismissing them from their duties and advising them to return home, and then walking into a woods where he then shot himself.23 And lastly, there is a version of Kammler's death that has him dying a typical SS hero's death, fighting and going down in a blaze of "glory" in the face of rebelling and revolting Czechs.24
19 Agoston, op. cit, p. 104.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., pp. 103-104.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., p. 99.
24 Ibid., p. 92.
In all likelihood, therefore, Kammler did not die at all; he disappeared. The important question is, where?
C. The Ironic Death of General George S. Patton
While Obergruppenfuhrer Kammler was busy dying four times in various locations by various means, another general was busy lunging his troops with the precision of a surgeon into the nerve centers of Kammler's black projects empire: General George S. Patton. His troops formed the spearhead of the Allied lance that, much to the surprise of the Nazi, Soviet, and Allied field commanders themselves, suddenly turned from its victorious drive on Berlin to a militarily questionable operation designed to take the alleged "Nazi redoubt."
By the spring of 1945, the Redoubt had ballooned to become a major military concern to the Allied High command, "despite the caveats from British and US military intelligence."25 Agoston traces the origin of the "redoubt" theme of the postwar Allied Legend to the USA's Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the precursor to the modern day CIA. The OSS had apparently not bothered, according to Agoston, to check out the sources of its intelligence or the truthfulness of the "redoubt."26 The final decision to abandon Berlin as a military objective and drive south toward Thuringia was made by Eisenhower on April 11, 1945.27
25 Agoston, op. cit., p. 22.
26 Ibid., p. 23.
27 Ibid., p. 23. A possibility is that Kammler arranged to turn over his secret weapons treasure trove to the OSS in exchange for his life. It could have been arranged by fellow SS General Wolff, already in negotiation with Allen
Dulles, OSS station chief in Zurich. If so, then the sudden shift of Allied objectives to south central Germany may have originated from intelligence originating within the Kammlerstab itself. This intelligence would have been easily verifiable by Allies who would naturally have wanted to check its veracity by means of aerial reconnaissance of the installation sites presumably leaked to them by someone in the Kammlerstab.
And this in turn may lend some credence to those who view General Patton's ironic death after the war as being something more than an ironic accident. The factual circumstances of Patton's death are plain enough. While on an inspection tour with his driver and Major General Hobart Gray on December 9, 1945, Patton's car swerved to avoid hitting a heavy US Army transport truck that had turned in front of them. Patton's driver, attention momentarily diverted away from the road by a remark that Patton himself had made, belatedly noticed the truck in front of them, and swerved the General's car to avoid a head-on collision.
None of the others involved in the accident were hurt, and all were able to walk away from the accident. Not so General Patton. He had suffered a broken neck, and the prognosis was paralysis from the neck down. From this point the General recovered rapidly at the military hospital in Frankfurt, making such good progress that until the afternoon of December 19th, his doctors were seriously considering moving him to Boston. But that afternoon his breathing difficulties increased dramatically and suddenly. On December 20th he suffered breathlessness and pallor, and Patton, who had had a prior history of embolism, died in his sleep on December 21st at 5:50 P.M.30
28 Agoston, op. cit., p. 27.
29 This fact is adequately appreciated by Mayer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 156.30 Ladislas Farago, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph, pp. 787-794.
If there is any truth in the idea of a conspiracy behind the ironic
death of America's most decorated and celebrated general officer of the Second World War, then the explanation is likely to lie in the more esoteric and arcane secrets he and his intelligence officers uncovered in Thuringia and at the Skoda Works in Pilsen. Having performed a preliminary assessment of the second and third generation weaponry Kammler's scientists had begun to research, the OSS specialists who arrived at these sites must have immediately realized the material would require the tightest security and highest classification then possible, beyond that even of the Manhattan Project, not least because what was uncovered would give lie to the emerging Allied Legend of nuclear technological superiority. Patton was a potential threat to the security of this
operation and a risk to the continued secret American development of Kammler's technology in conjunction with Operation Paperclip.31
If there is truth to the conspiracy theories of Patton's incongruous death, then of all the theories, this would seem to be the most plausible motivation and explanation for the murder of America's famous general.
Patton, and his famous mouth, had to be silenced.
31 It is significant in this respect that Mayer and Mehner report in Das Geheimnis(p. 187), that all of the documents of Patton's troops in Ohrdruf are still sealed and classified.
Were the secrets of Kammler's SS empire worth changing the entire Allied operational plan at the end of the war, and were they worth the possible deliberate assassination of one of the war's most famous generals? "Pilsen and the Skoda Works were captured by Combat Command B, Third Armored Division, the same unit that captured Kammler's unique metropolis, with its treasure-trove of missiles and jet engines, at Nordhausen in Saxony on April 11."32 Suspiciously, Agoston's Freedom of Information Act request for the war diaries of Patton's armored units that captured the SS facilities in Pilsen and Prague could not be located in he US National Archives.33
However, Agoston presents evidence that Allied intelligence, at least from the British point of view, had little to no knowledge of the Kammler Group. British Lieutenant Colonel James Brierley, commanding the first British intelligence group to arrive in Pilsen after its capture, stated that the Skoda plant workers and engineers themselves reported that everything was microfilmed, that the buildings which housed their blueprints and development projects had been demolished, and also that the files had been stored outside Pilsen.34
Destroyed by whom? And stored outside Pilsen by whom? Presumably by the SS itself. It is perhaps pertinent to this idea that many of the reports of Kammler's death place him in the area, not to die, but to remove the most sensitive data and to vouchsafe it for security.
At this point it is necessary to say something about Agoston's own thesis concerning the disappearance of the Kammler Staff's files. The whole thesis of Agoston's book is obvious from its title, i.e., that in the confusion of the transfer of the Skoda Works from American to Russian military occupation, the Kammler Group's entire secret inventory was handed over to the Soviet Union. This
32 Agoston, op. cit, p. 65.
33 Ibid., p. 70.
34 Ibid., p. 75.
Another possibility thus emerges in the "conspiracy" view of Patton's death. Could he have been assassinated because he himself was the point man to bring Kammler and his secrets and technicians and scientists into the emerging Operation Paperclip? While we will probably never know for sure, it is interesting to note that when Dr. Voss gave "the full story of the secrets leakage at Pilsen and Kammler's disappearance to US Intelligence in West Germany," he was informed "at the highest level to keep the matter under wraps, along with the briefings he than gave US Intelligence of he areas
covered by the SS research at Pilsen."35 Who was it that debriefed Voss for US military intelligence? None other than fellow general office r Lieutenant General Lucius D. Clay, a man well known to Patton.36
What happened to Dr. Voss after the war? Perhaps not unusually, he became involved in a joint CIA-West German BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst, West Germany's version of the CIA) effort to build armaments plants for Egypt's Gamel Abdul Nasser, and to train its army. Voss became the overall coordinator of an effort to supply Egypt with former Wehrmacht officers and the latest in missile technology. Also involved was former Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schact, father-in-law to famous SS commando, and later coordinator of the notorious ODESSA {Organization der Ehemalige SS Angehdriger or Organization of Former SS Members), Otto Skorzeny.37 This effort was part of a much broader postwar effort on the part of the West German government
37 Ibid., pp. 116-118.
to expand its markets for high technology military equipment to the Arab-Muslim world, a drive that has continuing political repercussions down to our own day. There is more than meets the eye in this postwar SS-Arab connection, that will be explored further in the subsequent parts of this book.
In any case, taken together the picture of the postwar behavior and associations of Dr. Wilhelm Voss, the multiple "deaths" of Obergruppenfuhrer Kammler, his more likely disappearance into you another black programs empire, and the ironic if not suspicious death of General George Patton are further corroboration that the Nazi Reich was up to far more than V-ls and V-2s. It was in the possession of prototypical technologies and military capabilities of such extreme power and sophistication that many of these secrets remain classified. Before we can examine what these secrets might be and the type of physics that they imply, we must, however, take a detour to the other Axis power seeking its own path to the atom bomb on the other side of the world.
"Pilscn and the Skoda Works were captured by Combat Command B Third Armored Division, the same unit that captured Kammler's unique metropolis, with its treasure trove of missiles and jet engines, at Nordhausen in Saxony on April 11."World War Two ended in Europe with the armored divisions of U.S. General George S. Patton's Third Army lunging deep into the tottering Third Reich, toward Arnstadt in Thuringia and toward the immense Skoda munitions works at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. This little appreciated fact links together two of the war's most famous and powerful generals and perhaps affords a basis to speculate on the real reasons for the mysterious death of the one, and the equally mysterious "death" of the other.
- Tom Agoston, Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia 1
The generals in question are General Patton, well-known to military history and America's most famous and capable field commander during the war in Europe, and SS Obergruppenfuhrer Dr. Ing. (doctor of engineering) Hans Kammler, now little known to popular history, architect of the infamous Auschwitz death camps, responsible for the demolition of the Warsaw ghetto, and by the end of the war, the Third Reich's plenipotentiary for all secret weapons research, responsible directly to Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler and to Adolf Hitler himself.
1 Tom Agoston, Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1985), p. 65.
A. Introduction: The Rediscovery of the SS Sonderkommando, Kammler, and a Brush with "the Legend"
As previous chapters have indicated, there is some entity within the Third Reich that appears to have coordinated extremely sensitive and secret weapons research projects, including possible oversight of Germany's apparently large uranium enrichment program. However, this entity, as we shall subsequently see, was responsible for a great deal more than that. It is necessary at this juncture to say something about it, however, as it now directly enters the picture in the speculative reconstruction of the strange death of the one, and the disappearance of the other, of these two very important generals.
This entity first came to public light in the aftermath of World War Two, in the 1950s, in a series of publications in West Germany, and in a book by former German major Rudolf Lusar. These publications alleged that Nazi Germany had created and successfully tested "unusual" aircraft, including flying disks or saucers. Thus was born the "Nazi Legend" of the "real origin" of UFOs. More will be said about this Legend in the subsequent parts of this book. Here it suffices to note that the Nazi Legend maintained that this secretive development occurred under the direct auspices of the SS.
The allegations of an ultra-top secret entity coordinating and controlling the Nazi secret weapons research in the final years of the war tended to be discounted, along with its more sensation component, the "flying saucers" themselves. Moreover, discounting these allegations was easy to do, since they rested upon the isolated testimony of a disenchanted German major with definite Nazi sympathies (Lusar) and the "eye witness" statements of one or two others who came forward to corroborate the story, each with their own shady associations.
All that gradually began to change, however, by a sequence of events ranging from the publication of a book by a former British intelligence officer, Tom Agoston, in 1985, by the German reunification itself in 1989, which made a host of archives of the former East Germany available to researchers. A number of books has appeared in Germany since the reunification made these archives accessible, and moreover, the lormerly inaccessible SS secret underground facilities and complexes finally became accessible to the public. Aided and abetted in their efforts by the declassification of several documents by the Clinton administration in the United States, German researchers began to probe the new information, reconnecting the dots, and presenting a chilling picture of the actual state of Nazi wartime research and its enormous discrepancy with the postwar Allied Legend. This body of work has been almost entirely ignored in North America.2 Agoston's work was the first indication from the "mainstream" that there may have been something behind the Nazi Legend. Agoston revealed his story for the first time after his source, none other than close Kammler associate at the famous Skoda Works, Dr. Wilhelm Voss, died. The story that Voss told Agoston at the end o f the war was, according to Agoston, in confidence.
As Agoston notes rather sarcastically, Kammler boasted almost the perfect "corporate resume" and a documentable record of "whole person management" as a "team player":
A modern day management consultant who was talent hunting for a "total professional with total involvement" would certainly have been fascinated by the bizarre curriculum vitae Kammler could have submitted. He could demonstrate a "track record" in "very senior appointments," with skill in putting across "aggressive growth plans."...
The most prominent post-reunification German sources for this story are Friedrich Georg's series on secret weapons, Hitler's Siegeswaffen series in thrcc volumes; and the studies of Edgar Mayer and Thomas Mehner, Das Geheimnis der Deutschen Atombombe; Die Atombombe und das Dritte Reich; Hitler un die ,,Bombe"; Harald Fath's 1945 -Tthuringens Manhattan Projekt ami Geheime Kommandosache -S III Jonastal und die Seigeswaffenproduktion. Also not to be neglected is Robert K. Wilcox's Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race against Time to Build its Own Atomic Bomb, for the latter book raises the question of where Japan acquired its enrichment capability and stocks of uranium in no uncertain terms (see chapter 7 of this book). Also important is Karl Heinz Zunneck's Geheimtechnologien, Wunderwaffen und die irdischen Facetten des UFO-Phanomens.
In the the Third Reich, within a span of a few years, the number of positions he had held in turn was phenomenal.3
Among these "senior appointments" Kammler once commanded were:
- (1)
- Operational control of the V-l and V-2 terror bombardments of London, Liege, Brussels, Antwerp and Paris;
- (2)
- Operational control of all missile production and research, including the V-2 and the intercontinental ballistic missile. the A9/10;
- (3)
- Design and construction oversight of the world's "first bombproof underground aircraft and missile factory sites," including sites for the production of jet engines and the Messerschmitt 262;
- (4)
- command of the SS Building and Words Division, the department which handled all large construction projects for the Reich, including death camps, "buna factories," and supply roads for invading German legions in Russia;
- (5)
- Design and construction of the world's first underground testing and proving range for missiles;
- (6)
- Command, control and coordination of all of the Third Reich's secret weapons research by the war's end. 4
All this is to say that not only was Kammler a butcher, but that by the war's end, Hitler had "concentrated more power in Kammler's hands than he had ever entrusted to a single person," bar none.6 If one were to compare Kammler's position to a similar hypothetical position in the former Soviet Union, such a position would mean that the general who (commanded) the SS-20 rockets in Europe and Asia (the Commander in Chief of Strategic Rocket Forces) would also head research, development, and production of missiles. In addition, he would be in charge of producing all modern aircraft for the Red Air Force and have overall command of the mammoth civil engineering projects or the production centers in Siberia's sub-zero climate. Last, but very much not least, he would lead the national grid of gulags. To match Kammler's position in the SS, the Soviet general holding all these variegated commands would also be third in the KGB pecking order.7
Indeed, one would have to add to Agoston's list, for such a Soviet general would also have had to be in charge of the coordination of all the most post-nuclear and super secret advanced scientific research and black projects in the entire Soviet Union. It is thus in the person of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kamtnler that all the lines of our investigation meet: the Buna factory and slave labor of the camps, exploited for grizzly medical experimentation and labor in the secret underground laboratories and production facilities, the atom bomb project, and as will be seen in the subsequent parts of this book, even more horrendous and monstrous aircraft and weapons development. If there was a gold mine of information, then it was available in the blueprints and files that were locked in Kammler's vaults, or even more securely inhis brain. It is this fact and Kammler's extraordinary dossier thatmake his post-war fate even more problematical. But what of Kammler's "Special SS Command"(Sonderkommando) structure itself? What was it that was so revolutionary that Dr. Voss would have required Agoston to maintain confidentiality until after his death?
Voss had joined Skoda in 1938, when the plant was ceded to the Reich under the Munich Pact - Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and Daladier, allotting the Sudeten German areas of Czechoslovakia to
Chapter 6: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING GENERALS :ss OBERGRUPPENFUHRER DR.ING.HANS KAMMLERAND GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON
"Pilscn and the Skoda Works were captured by Combat Command B Third Armored Division, the same unit that captured Kammler's unique metropolis, with its treasure trove of missiles and jet engines, at Nordhausen in Saxony onWorld War Two ended in Europe with the armored divisions of U.S. General George S. Patton's Third Army lunging deep into the tottering Third Reich, toward Arnstadt in Thuringia and toward the immense Skoda munitions works at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. This little appreciated fact links together two of the war's most famous and powerful generals and perhaps affords a basis to speculate on the real reasons for the mysterious death of the one, and the equally mysterious "death" of the other.
April 11." Tom Agoston, Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia 1
The generals in question are General Patton, well-known to military history and America's most famous and capable field commander during the war in Europe, and SS Obergruppenfuhrer Dr. Ing. (doctor of engineering) Hans Kammler, now little known to popular history, architect of the infamous Auschwitz death camps, responsible for the demolition of the Warsaw ghetto, and by the end of the war, the Third Reich's plenipotentiary for all secret weapons research, responsible directly to Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler and to Adolf Hitler himself.
1 Tom Agoston, Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1985), p. 65.
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A. Introduction: The Rediscovery of the SS Sonderkommando, Kammler, and a Brush with "the Legend"As previous chapters have indicated, there is some entity within the Third Reich that appears to have coordinated extremely sensitive and secret weapons research projects, including possible oversight of Germany's apparently large uranium enrichment program. However, this entity, as we shall subsequently see, was responsible for a great deal more than that. It is necessary at this juncture to say something about it, however, as it now directly enters the picture in the speculative reconstruction of the strange death of the one, and the disappearance of the other, of these two very important generals.
This entity first came to public light in the aftermath of World War Two, in the 1950s, in a series of publications in West Germany, and in a book by former German major Rudolf Lusar. These publications alleged that Nazi Germany had created and successfully tested "unusual" aircraft, including flying disks or saucers. Thus was born the "Nazi Legend" of the "real origin" of UFOs. More will be said about this Legend in the subsequent parts of this book. Here it suffices to note that the Nazi Legend maintained that this secretive development occurred under the direct auspices of the SS.
The allegations of an ultra-top secret entity coordinating and controlling the Nazi secret weapons research in the final years of the war tended to be discounted, along with its more sensation component, the "flying saucers" themselves. Moreover, discounting these allegations was easy to do, since they rested upon the isolated testimony of a disenchanted German major with definite Nazi sympathies (Lusar) and the "eye witness" statements of one or two others who came forward to corroborate the story, each with their own shady associations.
All that gradually began to change, however, by a sequence of events ranging from the publication of a book by a former British intelligence officer, Tom Agoston, in 1985, by the German reunification itself in 1989, which made a host of archives of the former East Germany available to researchers. A number of books
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has appeared in Germany since the reunification made these archives accessible, and moreover, the lormerly inaccessible SS secret underground facilities and complexes finally became accessible to the public. Aided and abetted in their efforts by the declassification of several documents by the Clinton administration in the United States, German researchers began to probe the new information, reconnecting the dots, and presenting a chilling picture of the actual state of Nazi wartime research and its enormous discrepancy with the postwar Allied Legend. This body of work has been almost entirely ignored in North America.2 Agoston's work was the first indication from the "mainstream" that there may have been something behind the Nazi Legend. Agoston revealed his story for the first time after his source, none other than close Kammler associate at the famous Skoda Works, Dr. Wilhelm Voss, died. The story that Voss told Agoston at the end o f the war was, according to Agoston, in confidence.As Agoston notes rather sarcastically, Kammler boasted almost the perfect "corporate resume" and a documentable record of "whole person management" as a "team player":
A modern day management consultant who was talent hunting for a "total professional with total involvement" would certainly have been fascinated by the bizarre curriculum vitae Kammler could have submitted. He could demonstrate a "track record" in "very senior appointments," with skill in putting across "aggressive growth plans."...
The most prominent post-reunification German sources for this story are Friedrich Georg's series on secret weapons, Hitler's Siegeswaffen series in thrcc volumes; and the studies of Edgar Mayer and Thomas Mehner, Das Geheimnis der Deutschen Atombombe; Die Atombombe und das Dritte Reich; Hitler un die ,,Bombe"; Harald Fath's 1945 -Tthuringens Manhattan Projekt ami Geheime Kommandosache -S III Jonastal und die Seigeswaffenproduktion. Also not to be neglected is Robert K. Wilcox's Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race against Time to Build its Own Atomic Bomb, for the latter book raises the question of where Japan acquired its enrichment capability and stocks of uranium in no uncertain terms (see chapter 7 of this book). Also important is Karl Heinz Zunneck's Geheimtechnologien, Wunderwaffen und die irdischen Facetten des UFO-Phanomens.
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In the the Third Reich, within a span of a few years, the number of positions he had held in turn was phenomenal.3Among these "senior appointments" Kammler once commanded were:
- (1)
- Operational control of the V-l and V-2 terror bombardments of London, Liege, Brussels, Antwerp and Paris;
- (2)
- Operational control of all missile production and research, including the V-2 and the intercontinental ballistic missile. the A9/10;
- (3)
- Design and construction oversight of the world's "first bombproof underground aircraft and missile factory sites," including sites for the production of jet engines and the Messerschmitt 262;
- (4)
- command of the SS Building and Words Division, the department which handled all large construction projects for the Reich, including death camps, "buna factories," and supply roads for invading German legions in Russia;
- (5)
- Design and construction of the world's first underground testing and proving range for missiles;
- (6)
- Command, control and coordination of all of the Third Reich's secret weapons research by the war's end.4
All this is to say that not only was Kammler a butcher, but that by the war's end, Hitler had "concentrated more power in Kammler's hands than he had ever entrusted to a single person," bar none.6 If one were to compare Kammler's position to a similar hypothetical position in the former Soviet Union, such a position would mean that the general who (commanded) the SS-20 rockets in Europe and Asia (the Commander in Chief of Strategic Rocket Forces) would also head research, development, and production of missiles. In addition, he would be in charge of producing all modern aircraft for the Red Air Force and have overall command of the mammoth civil engineering projects or the production centers in Siberia's sub-zero climate. Last, but very much not least, he would lead the national grid of gulags. To match Kammler's position in the SS, the Soviet general holding all these variegated commands would also be third in the KGB pecking order.7
Indeed, one would have to add to Agoston's list, for such a Soviet general would also have had to be in charge of the coordination of all the most post-nuclear and super secret advanced scientific research and black projects in the entire Soviet Union. It is thus in the person of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kamtnler that all the lines of our investigation meet: the Buna factory and slave labor of the camps, exploited for grizzly medical experimentation and labor in the secret underground laboratories and production facilities, the atom bomb project, and as will be seen in the subsequent parts of this book, even more horrendous and monstrous aircraft and weapons development. If there was a gold mine of information, then it was available in the blueprints and files that were locked in Kammler's vaults, or even more securely inhis brain. It is this fact and Kammler's extraordinary dossier thatmake his post-war fate even more problematical. But what of Kammler's "Special SS Command"(Sonderkommando) structure itself? What was it that was so revolutionary that Dr. Voss would have required Agoston to maintain confidentiality until after his death?
Voss had joined Skoda in 1938, when the plant was ceded to the Reich under the Munich Pact - Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and Daladier, allotting the Sudeten German areas of Czechoslovakia to Germany
6 Agoston, op. cit., p. 4.
7 Ibid., p. 7.
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and became an affiliate of Hitler's principle arms maker Krupp. With his flair for quiet diplomacy, Voss was immensely popular with the Czech executives, who had remained in leading positions at the time of the German takeover of Skoda. Voss even saw to it that Czech workers, paid on the local and not Reich wages, were paid more 8money.Also important to the Skoda-SS relationship is the fact that all of Bohemian Czechoslovakia became a "Reich Protectorate," in effect turning total political, administrative, and military control of Bohemia over to the SS. It is in this context that the special relationship between Voss and Kammler developed.
By quirk of fate, the careers of Kammler and Voss overlapped at Skoda, where they jointly set up and operated what was generally regarded by insiders as the Reich's most advanced high-technology military research center. Working as a totally independent undercover operation for the SS, the center was under the special auspices of Hitler and Himmler. Going outside the scope and field of Skoda's internationally coveted general research and development division, it worked closely with Krupp and was primarily concerned with analysis of captured equipment, including aircraft, and copying or improving the latest technical features. In so doing the SS group was to go beyond the first generation of secret weapons.9
Thus one has the first component of this Special SS Command: the analysis, duplication, and improvement of all recovered foreign and enemy technology. This in itself is not surprising, since all major combatants during the war maintained such research facilities.
The second thing one must note is the careful and deliberate camouflaging of the SS Special Command inside the normal engineering division of the Skoda works. But the real operational goals of this Special command were far more than the mere analysis of captured enemy equipment, as Voss detailed to Agoston.
Its purpose was to pave the way for building nuclear-powered aircraft, working on the application of nuclear energy for propelling missiles and aircraft; laser beams, then still referred to as "death rays"; a
8 Agoston, op. cit, p. 11.
9 Ibid., p. 12.
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variety of homing rockets and to seek other potential areas for high- technology breakthrough. In modem high-tech jargon, the operation would probably be referred to as an "SS research think tank." Some work on second-generation secret weapons, including the application of nuclear propulsion for aircraft and missiles, was already well advanced.10Nuclear powered aircraft would require the development and miniaturization of functioning atomic reactors, something the Germans were not, according to the Allied Legend, supposed to have achieved. And though the mention of lasers seems to stretch one's credulity beyond all reason, there is credible evidence that the Germans were up to just that, and more besides.11 But the most remarkable thing about this "SS think tank" was that it was established entirely without the knowledge of Goring, Speer, or any of the other big-wigs or research centers in the Reich.12 This would not only explain Speer's puzzlement at Jackson's question that we encountered earlier, but would also explain the apparent lack of information on the part of the Farm Hall scientists interred in England after the war. These two facts alone indicate that the SS Special Command headquartered at the Skoda Works in Pilsen was more than just a secret weapons project being run through ordinary channels. Unlike even its Manhattan Project counterpart, it had no connection to the standard branches of the German military, the German state, or even the Nazi Party; it was entirely off the books. It is, in every sense that we have come to know it, a Black Project, coordinating all black projects in Nazi Germany. So extensive was the mandate given to this group that if there was a large uranium enrichment program underway in Germany for the production of atom bombs, then this is the entity most likely coordinating it.13
10 Agoston, op. cit., p. 12.'' Q.v. the remaining parts of this book.12 Ibid., pp. 12-13.
13Agoston alludes to the existence and connection of the uranium enrichment program to the Kammler Staff when he states "Even fissile uranium-235 was reportedly made available to Berlin's prime Axis ally.(p. 32)." While the enormous implications of this statement are obvious, Agoston does not pursue the atom bomb component of the Kammler Staff in his book,
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Moreover, not only did Skoda's "overtly operating research and development division" work closely with the SS on some less sensitive projects, it "provided a convenient cover for the Kammler Staff specialists, culled in great secrecy from Germany's research institutes to supplement the in-house experts. All were picked for their know-how and not for their Party records, Voss said. All had to have the ability to tackle visionary projects. "14 The Kammler Staff Special Command even circulated top secret scientific paper and memos to the various scientists within the group itself via a central office of scientific reports. Some of these reports were then used as a basis of recruitment of top scientists.15So what was the Kammler Staff, or Kammlerstab, as outlined by Voss and Agoston?
First, it was the continuation of "normal" science, free of the constraints of Nazi party ideology, but under the control of the SS! But it was much more. Not only was it a "think tank," but it was also a central clearing house for ideas, for mapping out precise technology trees for the acquisition of second and third generation weapons. But it was more, it was also a fully-funded research Black Programs coordinating office with its own "inexhaustible" and expendable labor pool.
All of it was coordinated by SS General Hans Kammler.
All of it was headquartered at the Skoda Works in Pilsen.
And one more thing. By the war's end, Kammler also had control of the Reich's heavy-lift long range transport aircraft, consisting of several Ju 290s and the two enormous Ju 390s, one of which, according to Agoston, made a polar flight to Japan on March 28, 1945.16
though he surely would have suspected it. The link of the Auschwitz "Buna plant" to the SS via the death camp there already provides one link to Kammler, since the "Buna plant" fell under SS jurisdiction via the camp itself, and thus the connection to Kammler is direct.
14 Agoston, op. cit, p. 13, emphasis added.
15 Ibid., p. 14
16 This fact is merely reported by Agoston without substantiation, leading one to the conclusion that the source of the information must have been Dr. Voss. It is worth noting that Nick Cook reports that Kammler had control of the Ju 390s as part of another SS Special Evacuation Command, which was the
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If ever there was a reason for the Allied High Command to by-pass Berlin and head south to central Germany(Thuringia) and for Patton's Third Army to make a beeline for Pilsen and Prague, thiswas it. Thus, only in the recently revealed context of the existence of the Kammlerstab do any of the Allied or German military deployments or operations at the end of the war make any genuine military sense. The "National Redoubt" story was likely just that, a story put out by the American OSS to force the Allied commanders to change objectives, without disclosing the real nature of their concerns, priorities, and intelligence objectives.B. The Four Deaths of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Dr. Ing. Hans Kammler
General Kammler, in addition to his "accomplishments" in streamlining death camp efficiency, his methodical and efficient leveling of the ruined Warsaw Ghetto and meticulous accounting of every last brick and stone removed, his coordination of the most arcane, and perhaps the biggest, secret weapons black projects program in human history, has also another odd distinction to his credit. He of all the high-ranking Nazis indicted and tried at Nuremberg either posthumously or in absentia, was never formally indicted, much less brought to trial. He is altogether missing from the docket, and altogether just simply missing. Kammler has yet another distinction. He appears to have been not only a very accomplished messenger of death for others, but also appears to have achieved the astonishing feat of having died himself no less than four times, each under different circumstances. Agoston commented at length on the odd assortment of "facts" surrounding Kammler's fate: brainchild of none other than Martin Bormann. The purpose of this special command was to evacuate... something. Cook reports that one of these enormous Ju 390s simply went missing at the end of the war.
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Analysis of the voluminous documentation (at has accrued since embarked on the first left of the fascinating project in 1949 shows crude discrepancies, the inconsistencies of which grow with almost every addition to the mosaic of information that enters the picture Basically three major facts stand out:- In almost four decades, official records show no positive confirmation of Kammler's death. No court of law, no media editor would accept the uncorroborated statement of "unknown comrades," still so referred to in official records as conclusive evidence of death especially if the death was alleged to have taken place in the chaos of collapsing Germany.
- The record shows no subsequent sworn corroborative statement Such a statement would automatically have been entered in the Red Cross and other dossiers on Kammler.
- None of the persons reporting any of the four versions of the general's death had conformed with the prescribed duty of all servicemen to detach one-half of a dead man's soldier's paybook or officer's identity document, to the nearest unit, relevant records office, Red Cross, or holding power, if the surviving serviceman had become a prisoner of war, to help notification of next of kin. Germans are traditionally meticulous and, to say the least, most sentimental in such matters.
The "first death of General Hans Kammler" is recounted by Albert Speer himself, in his last book. In this most simple version, Kammler ordered his adjutant to shoot him. The "suicide" allegedly took place in Prague as Kammler realized the war was lost and, according to Speer, "acted in elitist SS loyalty."18 As Agoston quips, "even the most ardent worshipper of Teutonic creed could
17 Agoston, op. cit., pp. 102-103, emphasis added.
18 Ibid., p. 103.
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not possibly suggest that elitist SS loyalty can be demonstrated three times, in three locations, and all on the same day."19 The second version of the story, related to Agoston by Kammler's "civilian" aide Dr. Wilhelm Voss, was that the general took cyanide somewhere "on the road between Pilsen and Prague on May 9."20 We will have more to say about Voss's association with Kammler's vast SS secret weapons think tank in due course. The third version of Kammler's death was doled out by V-2 rocket expert, General Walter Dornberger, subsequently employed by the American firm of Bell Aerospace. According to Dornberger, Kammler's mental and emotional state had quickly deteriorated in the final days of the war, and the general overheard Kammler ordering his aide to shoot him if things became "hopeless."21 But this does not square with Dornberger's close associate, Dr. Werner Von Braun's own recollection of a conversation he overheard between Kammler and his aide Starck fully two weeks later. According to Von Braun, Kammler and Starck discussed the possibility of "going underground" before the Americans arrived, disguising themselves as monks in a nearby abbey.22 Thus report, if true, is perhaps the most interesting, since it indicates that Kammler had no intentions of surrendering himself to any of the Allied powers, but rather, intended to survive, perhaps independently continuing his oversight of secret weapons development.Another version of Kammler's death has him giving a speech to his assembled aides in Prague in early May 1945, dismissing them from their duties and advising them to return home, and then walking into a woods where he then shot himself.23 And lastly, there is a version of Kammler's death that has him dying a typical SS hero's death, fighting and going down in a blaze of "glory" in the face of rebelling and revolting Czechs.24
19 Agoston, op. cit, p. 104.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., pp. 103-104.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., p. 99.
24 Ibid., p. 92.
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What emerges from all this is that no one, no where can advance anything like a consistent account of the date, location, time, or even method of Kammler's death. Now it is suicide by poison, then suicide by gunshot, suicide by ordering an aide to shoot him, a fighting death, or disappearance into a Roman Catholic monastery. Now he is in Prague, now he isn't; now he's with people, now he isn't; now he's suffering mental and emotional collapse, now he isn't.In all likelihood, therefore, Kammler did not die at all; he disappeared. The important question is, where?
C. The Ironic Death of General George S. Patton
While Obergruppenfuhrer Kammler was busy dying four times in various locations by various means, another general was busy lunging his troops with the precision of a surgeon into the nerve centers of Kammler's black projects empire: General George S. Patton. His troops formed the spearhead of the Allied lance that, much to the surprise of the Nazi, Soviet, and Allied field commanders themselves, suddenly turned from its victorious drive on Berlin to a militarily questionable operation designed to take the alleged "Nazi redoubt."
By the spring of 1945, the Redoubt had ballooned to become a major military concern to the Allied High command, "despite the caveats from British and US military intelligence."25 Agoston traces the origin of the "redoubt" theme of the postwar Allied Legend to the USA's Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the precursor to the modern day CIA. The OSS had apparently not bothered, according to Agoston, to check out the sources of its intelligence or the truthfulness of the "redoubt."26 The final decision to abandon Berlin as a military objective and drive south toward Thuringia was made by Eisenhower on April 11, 1945.27
25 Agoston, op. cit., p. 22.
26 Ibid., p. 23.
27 Ibid., p. 23. A possibility is that Kammler arranged to turn over his secret weapons treasure trove to the OSS in exchange for his life. It could have been arranged by fellow SS General Wolff, already in negotiation with Allen
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The date of General Eisenhower's decision is crucial, for it means that the military objective shifted from Berlin toward south central Germany after the alleged atom bomb test at Ohrdruf on March 4, 1945. It is therefore possible that the OSS was in receipt of extremely secret intelligence concerning this weapons program and its centers of production, for Patton drives his troops with unerring accuracy right toward this super-secret installations, many of them underground and carefully camouflaged. Given the sensitivity of the Manhattan Project within the structure of the Allied command, it is also plausible that the OSS decided not to share this information with the Supreme Allied Command, and proffered the "Redoubt" and "fleeing Nazis" and a transferred German war archives as a cover story to sell the Allied command on a shitf of objectives away from Berlin. If indeed the OSS "Redoubt" reports were a component of an OSS psychological operation designed against the Allies' own military command structure, designed to divert Allied military operations to a gold mine of military technology and research, then one and only one general was in a position to know the real, and the whole story about the Redoubt, and what was actually recovered in Thuringia, Pilsen, and Prague, and that was General George S Patton. Patton, as his troops entered the Skoda works at Pilsen and the underground factories and laboratories at the Three Corners region in Thuringia would have been privy to the top secret reports of his divisional commanders entering these super-secret Reich facilities. Patton would thus have a thorough first hand knowledge of the complete inventory of the Reich's most sensitive black programs. As Agoston himself notes, without seeming to realize the importance of his own observations in the light of post-war events, "the sudden switch in Allied planning.... brought at least oneDulles, OSS station chief in Zurich. If so, then the sudden shift of Allied objectives to south central Germany may have originated from intelligence originating within the Kammlerstab itself. This intelligence would have been easily verifiable by Allies who would naturally have wanted to check its veracity by means of aerial reconnaissance of the installation sites presumably leaked to them by someone in the Kammlerstab.
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bonanza. The rapid eastward drive of the US Third Army brought to Kammler's secret metropolis well ahead of the Russians in whose designated zone it lay."28 The holy grail of all this research were the files and blueprints in the central coordination office of Kammler's black programs think tank inside the Skoda Works at Pilsen. And it is likely that General Patton therefore knew much of the general outlines of this treasure trove and what it portended for future secret weapons development. There is thus a direct and immediate link between General George S. Patton, General Hans Kammler, and the little-known world of top secret weapons research that Kammler headed.29And this in turn may lend some credence to those who view General Patton's ironic death after the war as being something more than an ironic accident. The factual circumstances of Patton's death are plain enough. While on an inspection tour with his driver and Major General Hobart Gray on December 9, 1945, Patton's car swerved to avoid hitting a heavy US Army transport truck that had turned in front of them. Patton's driver, attention momentarily diverted away from the road by a remark that Patton himself had made, belatedly noticed the truck in front of them, and swerved the General's car to avoid a head-on collision.
None of the others involved in the accident were hurt, and all were able to walk away from the accident. Not so General Patton. He had suffered a broken neck, and the prognosis was paralysis from the neck down. From this point the General recovered rapidly at the military hospital in Frankfurt, making such good progress that until the afternoon of December 19th, his doctors were seriously considering moving him to Boston. But that afternoon his breathing difficulties increased dramatically and suddenly. On December 20th he suffered breathlessness and pallor, and Patton, who had had a prior history of embolism, died in his sleep on December 21st at 5:50 P.M.30
28 Agoston, op. cit., p. 27.
29 This fact is adequately appreciated by Mayer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 156.30 Ladislas Farago, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph, pp. 787-794.
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The fact that Patton alone of all the victims of the automobile accident suffered serious injuries, plus the lact of his recovery and then sudden decline in a military hospital, have fueled various conspiracy theories. One of these, that Patton knew of the Soviet shooting of American, Canadian, and British prisoners of war and threatened to expose the Allied knowledge and cover-up of the affair, was revealed by a Ukrainian defector with close ties to the Soviet KGB, who alleged that Patton's accident was no accident, and that the KGB had been behind it. Another version is similar, but has the OSS or other Allied entity performing the 'accident" and subsequent "medical complications."If there is any truth in the idea of a conspiracy behind the ironic
death of America's most decorated and celebrated general officer of the Second World War, then the explanation is likely to lie in the more esoteric and arcane secrets he and his intelligence officers uncovered in Thuringia and at the Skoda Works in Pilsen. Having performed a preliminary assessment of the second and third generation weaponry Kammler's scientists had begun to research, the OSS specialists who arrived at these sites must have immediately realized the material would require the tightest security and highest classification then possible, beyond that even of the Manhattan Project, not least because what was uncovered would give lie to the emerging Allied Legend of nuclear technological superiority. Patton was a potential threat to the security of this
operation and a risk to the continued secret American development of Kammler's technology in conjunction with Operation Paperclip.31
If there is truth to the conspiracy theories of Patton's incongruous death, then of all the theories, this would seem to be the most plausible motivation and explanation for the murder of America's famous general.
Patton, and his famous mouth, had to be silenced.
31 It is significant in this respect that Mayer and Mehner report in Das Geheimnis(p. 187), that all of the documents of Patton's troops in Ohrdruf are still sealed and classified.
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D. The Kammler SS Sonderkommando Secret Weapons EmpireWere the secrets of Kammler's SS empire worth changing the entire Allied operational plan at the end of the war, and were they worth the possible deliberate assassination of one of the war's most famous generals? "Pilsen and the Skoda Works were captured by Combat Command B, Third Armored Division, the same unit that captured Kammler's unique metropolis, with its treasure-trove of missiles and jet engines, at Nordhausen in Saxony on April 11."32 Suspiciously, Agoston's Freedom of Information Act request for the war diaries of Patton's armored units that captured the SS facilities in Pilsen and Prague could not be located in he US National Archives.33
However, Agoston presents evidence that Allied intelligence, at least from the British point of view, had little to no knowledge of the Kammler Group. British Lieutenant Colonel James Brierley, commanding the first British intelligence group to arrive in Pilsen after its capture, stated that the Skoda plant workers and engineers themselves reported that everything was microfilmed, that the buildings which housed their blueprints and development projects had been demolished, and also that the files had been stored outside Pilsen.34
Destroyed by whom? And stored outside Pilsen by whom? Presumably by the SS itself. It is perhaps pertinent to this idea that many of the reports of Kammler's death place him in the area, not to die, but to remove the most sensitive data and to vouchsafe it for security.
At this point it is necessary to say something about Agoston's own thesis concerning the disappearance of the Kammler Staff's files. The whole thesis of Agoston's book is obvious from its title, i.e., that in the confusion of the transfer of the Skoda Works from American to Russian military occupation, the Kammler Group's entire secret inventory was handed over to the Soviet Union. This
32 Agoston, op. cit, p. 65.
33 Ibid., p. 70.
34 Ibid., p. 75.
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much is recounted to Agoston by Voss. However, if Kammler had previously removed, or even duplicated, the most sensitive items, blueprints, and papers and secreted them somewhere, aswould seem to be indicated by the Czech reports to British intelligence, then it is likely that all the Soviets received were the table scraps. Kammler had previously removed the most sensitive items, and Patton's men, and presumably the OSS, would have thoroughly scoured the remaining material.Another possibility thus emerges in the "conspiracy" view of Patton's death. Could he have been assassinated because he himself was the point man to bring Kammler and his secrets and technicians and scientists into the emerging Operation Paperclip? While we will probably never know for sure, it is interesting to note that when Dr. Voss gave "the full story of the secrets leakage at Pilsen and Kammler's disappearance to US Intelligence in West Germany," he was informed "at the highest level to keep the matter under wraps, along with the briefings he than gave US Intelligence of he areas
covered by the SS research at Pilsen."35 Who was it that debriefed Voss for US military intelligence? None other than fellow general office r Lieutenant General Lucius D. Clay, a man well known to Patton.36
What happened to Dr. Voss after the war? Perhaps not unusually, he became involved in a joint CIA-West German BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst, West Germany's version of the CIA) effort to build armaments plants for Egypt's Gamel Abdul Nasser, and to train its army. Voss became the overall coordinator of an effort to supply Egypt with former Wehrmacht officers and the latest in missile technology. Also involved was former Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schact, father-in-law to famous SS commando, and later coordinator of the notorious ODESSA {Organization der Ehemalige SS Angehdriger or Organization of Former SS Members), Otto Skorzeny.37 This effort was part of a much broader postwar effort on the part of the West German government
35 Agoston, op. cit., p. 94. Agoston notes that this secrecy order to Voss kept him from disclosing the story until after Voss' death.
36 Ibid., p. 116.37 Ibid., pp. 116-118.
to expand its markets for high technology military equipment to the Arab-Muslim world, a drive that has continuing political repercussions down to our own day. There is more than meets the eye in this postwar SS-Arab connection, that will be explored further in the subsequent parts of this book.
In any case, taken together the picture of the postwar behavior and associations of Dr. Wilhelm Voss, the multiple "deaths" of Obergruppenfuhrer Kammler, his more likely disappearance into you another black programs empire, and the ironic if not suspicious death of General George Patton are further corroboration that the Nazi Reich was up to far more than V-ls and V-2s. It was in the possession of prototypical technologies and military capabilities of such extreme power and sophistication that many of these secrets remain classified. Before we can examine what these secrets might be and the type of physics that they imply, we must, however, take a detour to the other Axis power seeking its own path to the atom bomb on the other side of the world.
3 Tom Agoston, op. cit., p. 5.
4 Agoston, pp. 5-6.
5 Ibid., p. 6.
