Беар Гриллс - The Hunt [=The Devil's Sanctuary]

Daily Express , 21 May 1945

It can be revealed today that for five years British and German scientists fought their own war-within-a-war. They fought to perfect the atom bomb, which, with the most explosive force in the world, would have given either side walkover superiority.

But it was no war of theorists only. British and Norwegian paratroopers fought it out too, with Wehrmacht men and their quisling supporters, in the white hell of the storm-swept Hardanger Plateau in Norway.

The Germans opened the fight in the summer of 1940. A few weeks after moving into Norway, they seized the vast hydroelectrical works at Rjukan. These works, fed by the famous ‘smoking-cascade’ waterfall, supply electricity plentifully. And plentiful electricity was essential to the German plan and to the arms plant they intended to set up at Rjukan.

Their plan was to split the atom.

At Rjukan the Norwegians produced large quantities of a substance known as ‘heavy water’.

Heavy water contains atoms of hydrogen twice as heavy as those contained in ordinary water, from which it can be made electronically…

Scientists the world over had experimented with heavy water and they believed that if they treated the metal uranium with it, under great force, they could split the atom of uranium.

And in so doing they would release terrific energy – and produce a catastrophic explosion.

There are many technical difficulties but the Germans may have been near solving them.

Mail Online , Allan Hall, 10 June 2014

The blood of thousands on his hands, SS General Hans Kammler killed himself in 1945 in the dying days of Hitler’s Germany.

That, at least, was his official fate. The man steeped in the horrors of the death camps had met his just deserts.

However, it is now claimed that Kammler survived the war, spirited away to America and given a new identity by the US authorities.

For the general wasn’t just an expert in the technicalities of industrial-scale slavery and slaughter, he was also deeply involved in the Nazis’ secret weapons programme. The Americans, according to a TV documentary, were determined to have his know-how and not let him fall into the hands of the Russians.

Both the US and the Soviet Union tried to recruit Hitler’s scientists after the war to help with their own space and military programmes. But it is claimed that Kammler’s record was so monstrous that his death had to be faked and he had to have a new identity.

‘The whole history of suicide is staged,’ said Berlin historian Rainer Karlsch. ‘There are several documents that clearly demonstrate that Kammler was captured by the Americans.’

Another expert, Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute in Moscow, said: ‘The reports from America are more credible than those given about the alleged suicide by Kammler’s associates.’

Born in 1901, by the end of the Second World War Kammler was almost as powerful as SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and armaments minister Albert Speer. He had access to the Nazis’ most advanced technology, including the ‘weapons of retaliation’ – the V-1 and V-2 rockets that caused death and destruction in Britain but came too late to turn the tide of the conflict.

He was also involved in the construction of death camps, including the design of the crematoria at Auschwitz which incinerated most of the bodies of the estimated 1.2 million people murdered at the camp in occupied Poland.

The history books say that, one day after the Third Reich surrendered on 9 May 1945, he either shot himself or took poison in the former German city of Stettin, now Szczecin in Poland. His body was never found.

‘This whole story of suicide was staged by two of his closest aides who were committed to him,’ Karlsch told ZDF TV in Germany.

At the war’s end America, while taking part in the punishment of many top Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, also launched the covert Operation Paperclip – the secret exit of top Nazi scientists.

ZDF says in the documentary: ‘Sources say that Kammler was captured by the Americans and interrogated by the US Counterintelligence CIC. The secret service man responsible was Donald Richardson, a personal confidant of Allied supreme commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower.’

The sons of the secret service man told programme makers that their father was in charge of the German weapons expert after 1945.

One of them, John Richardson, said: ‘This engineer brought a special treasure from the Third Reich into the United States. He offered us modern weapons.

‘It was put to my father that he should bring this “useful” German into the United States to prevent him from falling into the hands of the Russian intelligence service.’

It is not revealed under what name Kammler lived or when he died, though some archival material speaks of a ‘special guest’ living under Richardson’s wing.

Daily Telegraph , Justin Huggler, 22 January 2015

Austrian documentary-maker believes he has uncovered a sealed complex of underground tunnels in the town where notorious Gusen II concentration camp was, larger than previously thought.

New evidence has emerged of a possible underground nuclear weapons facility built by the Nazis that has lain secret since the Second World War.

Andreas Sulzer, an Austrian documentary-maker, has put forward documentary evidence he claims to have uncovered that a sealed complex of underground tunnels built by the Nazis in Austria using slave labour may be far larger than previously thought, and include rocket launch silos.

Mr Sulzer has previously claimed higher than normal levels of radioactivity in the area are a sign the complex was used to develop nuclear weapons – although local authorities have disputed the results of radiation tests.

The possibility that the Nazis were close to developing an atomic bomb towards the end of the Second World War remains one of history’s unanswered questions. There have been persistent rumours of a secret nuclear weapons programme in the final years of the war, but no proof.

Mr Sulzer believes he has found it in a complex of underground tunnels near the town of St Georgen an der Gusen in Austria that have lain largely undisturbed since the 1950s.

The town was the site of the notorious Gusen II concentration camp, one of the Mauthausen-Gusen group, where forced labourers were worked to death. Some 320,000 people are believed to have died in the camps.

The inmates of Gusen II were made to dig the huge Bergkristall underground complex where V-2 rockets and the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first jet fighter, were built.

Mr Sulzer believes the network of tunnels he has discovered nearby may have been a separate facility of the Bergkristall project.

But while the main Bergkristall complex was extensively investigated by the Allies after the end of the war, the Nazis appear to have gone to far greater lengths to conceal the second complex, sealing the entrance with huge granite slabs, and it has remained largely undisturbed.

Austria, 24 April 1945

They had been partying for hours.

The Allied guns might be pounding the German positions not twenty miles to the west, but these men in their smart Hitler Youth uniforms were drinking as if there was no tomorrow.