Echo of the Reich

by James Becker

  “Exactly. But the Nazis had far more interesting and exotic devices up their sleeve. Their problem was that by that time they’d lost air superiority in the skies over their own country, and the Allied bombing raids were doing enormous damage to their airfields and especially to the factories that were turning out military hardware. But one of the odd things about this period of the war was that despite all this bombing, Germany’s war production actually continued to increase.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Bronson admitted. “How did they manage it?”

  “It was all down to a man named Albert Speer.”

  “I’ve heard of him. He was one of Hitler’s ministers, wasn’t he?”

  “You’re right. In nineteen forty-two he was appointed Minister of Armaments and War Production, and as Allied bombs rained down on Germany night after night, he came up with a radical solution. Because the factories on the ground were no longer safe, he decided to move them. But instead of simply relocating them to other parts of Germany, he put them underground.”

  “Underground? That must have been an enormous job. You mean the Germans dug tunnels?”

  “It was a huge undertaking, without question, but it wasn’t the Germans who were doing the work. Because of the concentration camps, they had an enormous force of slave laborers—hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people, who could be quite literally worked to death in the most appalling conditions. And as soon as one man died, they simply dragged in another and forced him to take his place. They didn’t need to supply safety equipment or proper clothing or masks or anything. In many of the construction sites, the SS doctors estimated that a fresh concentration camp prisoner would have a working life of as little as six weeks, working twelve-hour shifts with the most basic possible rations of food and drink. In several cases, according to the testimonies of the handful of people who managed to survive, prisoners were marched into the tunnels and only left them when they died, their bodies hauled out and dumped in a mass grave.”

  “Horrendous,” Bronson muttered, “simply horrendous.” He’d decided not to mention what he’d seen at the house—the chilling sight of Marcus in full SS regalia—for the moment.

  “It was,” she agreed, her voice bitter, “but it was also very efficient, and the Nazis were nothing if not efficient. Working prisoners to death not only meant that their construction projects proceeded quickly, but it also saved them the price of a bullet or the cost of a canister of poison gas.”

  “So how many of these tunnels are you talking about?” Bronson asked.

  “It was one of the largest projects in the history of mankind,” Angela replied. “Nobody knows for sure exactly how many underground facilities were built, or even planned, but even before the end of the war the Allies knew of at least three hundred and forty underground sites and, according to the records recovered after the end of the conflict, over four hundred sites had been given code names. But in fact there were far more than that. Plans held in the German Ministry of Armaments referred to some eight hundred plants in all. Work on them started in the summer of nineteen forty-three, when Allied air raids began inflicting enormous damage on Germany, and Albert Speer gave the go-ahead for the project, with Hitler’s blessing.

  “I suppose it’s also worth saying that the idea of having underground facilities wasn’t exactly novel. From as early as the mid–nineteen thirties, the Nazis began creating massive oil and fuel tanks underground. One of these—it’s near Bremen—is still in operation today. There are eighty tanks there, each made of high-quality shipbuilding steel surrounded by a concrete jacket about a meter thick. Each tank holds four thousand cubic meters of fuel. They’re absolutely massive.”

  “Well, underground storage tanks are quite common, and have been for many years,” Bronson commented. “When you’re dealing with potentially explosive liquids, burying them is often quite a good plan.”

  “I know. But actually the tanks were only a very small part—though an important part—of the project. The biggest and most significant plants were those used for manufacturing, rather than just for storage. The Nazis built an underground aircraft factory at Kahla in Thuringia, using foreign slave laborers who worked twelve-hour shifts and who were told when they arrived there that they would be worked until they dropped dead. That place was used to manufacture the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, and the plan was to build twelve hundred aircraft there every month, a huge output that absolutely could have turned the tide of the Second World War. That one factory, if it had reached full production, could have produced enough aircraft to drive the Allied bombers and fighters from the skies of Germany. The intention was to create almost twenty miles of tunnels inside the mountain, with four huge subterranean halls, covering around twenty-seven thousand square meters, where the actual manufacturing would take place. By the end of the war, almost half of the internal construction had been completed, and the first aircraft took off from Kahla in February nineteen forty-five. And it was, as I said before, very efficient. The aircraft were assembled in the halls, then they were taken out of the mountain through the tunnels, hauled up to the top in a sloping elevator, and would then take off from a runway the Nazis had constructed on the top of the mountain. Luckily for us, only a few of these Messerschmitts were completed and flown away, so they never became a major threat to Allied aircraft.”

  Bronson took his eyes off the road for a second or two to glance across at Angela.

  “That’s huge. Was that the biggest underground factory?”

  Angela shook her head. “No, not by a long way, and some of them are still in use today. In Baden-Württemberg, down in the southwest of Germany, there’s a town named Neckarzimmern. There’s been a gypsum mine there since the early eighteen hundreds, over one hundred meters below the banks of the Neckart River. It was used as a dynamite factory in the First World War, and then after nineteen thirty-seven it became an ammunition dump. The various shafts inside it were expanded to accommodate its new role. Today, it’s a subterranean town. There’s a road network almost thirty-five kilometers long in there, and the various caverns occupy about one hundred and seventy thousand square meters of space. In nineteen fifty-seven, units of the German armed forces were first stationed there, and today over seven hundred people work underground, in the tunnel system, supplying parts and repairing equipment for the German army.”

  “Okay,” Bronson said, “I understand that the Nazis turned into moles and burrowed into the hills and mountains, or rather their slave laborers did on their behalf, but you still haven’t told me why we’re heading for the Polish border, or what the ‘lantern bearer’ has to do with any of this.”

  “Patience, Chris. To fully appreciate what I’m going to tell you about that, you need to understand a bit more about the Nazi secret weapon program, the Wunderwaffen. We talked about the so-called ‘vengeance’ weapons, the V1 and the V2. The V2 was developed by Werner von Braun at Peenemünde, though it wasn’t at first called that—it was designated the A4—and the first examples were ready for testing by early nineteen forty-three, and the weapon became operational in the summer of ’forty-four. The first V2 hit London on the seventh of September that year and after that the rockets became fairly regular and most unwelcome visitors to the capital. What’s not generally known is that this missile wasn’t built by the Germans, though it was undeniably designed by them.”

  “What do you mean? They contracted the work out?” Bronson asked.

  Angela shook her head. “No, nothing so civilized. When American troops reached a town named Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains in mid-April nineteen forty-five, they found a concentration camp there named Mittelbau-Dora. The few inmates who were still alive—the vast majority who hadn’t been executed by the Nazis before they left the area had simply starved to death—told the Americans about tunnels in the nearby mountain and a top secret missile factory deep underground where they’d worked as slave laborers of the SS. The American troops were shocked at what they found, bu
t in fact the Allies already knew about it.

  “In August nineteen forty-three, after the Royal Air Force bombed Peenemünde, the Nazis had transferred their missile production to Nordhausen. Some ten thousand slave laborers from the Mittelbau-Dora camp were forced to start digging tunnels into the mountain to accommodate the new production lines. For obvious reasons, we don’t know the exact numbers, but it’s been estimated that around three and a half thousand workers died in the first few months from pulmonary diseases, starvation, exhaustion and maltreatment by the SS. Some of them almost certainly simply froze to death.

  “In all, the Nazis had allocated an area of about six hundred thousand square meters for the production of the V2 missile, and set a target of one thousand missiles per month, a theoretical output that they thankfully never achieved. We do know that in April nineteen forty-four the factory produced four hundred and fifty missiles, but that was one of their best months ever. Most of the time, production was badly delayed because the German scientists at Peenemünde kept altering the design and making changes. And as a result of that, more than half of the rockets that were assembled were not fully operational and either never reached their intended targets or simply blew up on the launch pads. But the missiles themselves were constructed by specially selected prisoners, who assembled them from some forty-five thousand different components. The sad reality is that most of the V2s that landed on London and caused such destruction to the city were actually built by people—Poles and Jews and others—who we would have considered to be our allies. Of course, they had absolutely no option. If they didn’t do exactly what they were told, they would be summarily executed by the Nazis.”

  Bronson didn’t respond for a few moments, as he tried unsuccessfully to imagine what it must have been like to be forced to assemble weapons that you knew, without the slightest shadow of doubt, were going to be used to kill members of the only nation likely to rescue you from imprisonment.

  “That’s horrendous,” he said again.

  “You know, almost everyone who has read anything about the Second World War knows about the V1 and the V2, but hardly anybody has ever heard of the V3.”

  “You’d better include me in that,” Bronson said, “because I’ve never heard of it. What was it? Another type of rocket?”

  Angela shook her head. “No. It was something much simpler, but arguably even more dangerous than the other two ‘vengeance’ weapons. It was known to the Germans as the England Cannon or Busy Lizzie, and it consisted of five batteries, each containing twenty-five high-velocity cannons that were designed to fire shells up to one hundred and twenty miles.”

  “Jesus,” Bronson muttered. “If they’d ever got that working, from the right location it could have flattened London.”

  “It did work and they had the right location. It was a small French village near the English Channel coast named Mimoyecques. Luckily for all of us, the British government found out about it in nineteen forty-four. The Nazis had built an underground facility for the production, and also the operation, of the weapon. But this time, instead of relying on the natural defenses of an existing mountain, they had to build their own mountain, as it were, because the terrain around there is fairly flat. So they constructed a reinforced concrete roof that was five meters thick, and walls that were almost equally massive. On the sixth of July nineteen forty-four, aircraft from 617 Squadron—you’d know them better as the Dambusters—attacked the site with twelve-thousand-pound Tallboy bombs. They were one of the first of what are now called ‘bunker-busters,’ and one bomb went straight through the concrete roof and exploded inside the facility.”

  Bronson nodded. “And I suppose that was more or less that,” he said.

  “Yes. It was obviously the right decision in the circumstances, and it was a fine piece of precision bombing. What worried the British government at the time, quite apart from the possibility of a constant stream of high-explosive shells landing in and around London, was that they suspected the Nazis might be prepared to fit the shells with chemical or biological payloads. After all, they were very experienced by this time in the use of lethal gases. Zyklon B gas had been supplied to the Buchenwald concentration camp early in nineteen forty, and to Auschwitz in September of the following year. Oddly enough, its principal use was for delousing in an attempt to control the spread of typhus, but fairly soon it started to be used as the principal agent to solve the Nazi’s Jewish problem. The gas had also been used as early as nineteen twenty-nine, but in America, not Germany, for disinfecting freight trains and sanitizing the clothing of Mexican immigrants.

  “But Zyklon B wasn’t what the British were worried about, because it only works effectively in a confined and unventilated space, like the Nazi gas chambers. Toward the end of the war, the German chemical company IG Farben moved into another underground facility named Falkenhagen, about ten miles northwest of Frankfurt, near the Polish border. Believe it or not, some of the British records concerning this place are still classified, even today, but it’s fairly clear that the facility was intended to produce a brand-new and much more lethal type of weapon: a nerve gas. This new concoction was named sarin, which can’t be seen, smelled or tasted. The lethal dose is tiny: one droplet on the skin will cause death in about six minutes. Zyklon B was just as lethal, but took up to twenty minutes to do its job. Luckily, the war ended before large-scale production of sarin, or any other of what you might call the ‘new generation’ nerve agents, like tabun, could start.”

  Angela looked up from her notes for a moment and stared ahead at the road that was unwinding steadily in front of them.

  “Where are we now?” she asked.

  Bronson glanced down at the satnav display.

  “About halfway there, I suppose,” he replied. “As soon as we see somewhere we like the look of, we’ll stop and buy ourselves some lunch. Right, I think I understand the kind of things that the Nazis were working on toward the end of the Second World War, but I still have no idea about the significance of the ‘lantern bearer.’”

  Angela smiled at him, but without any humor in her expression. “Ah, yes,” she said, “the Laternenträger. Now that was something completely different.”

  34

  25 July 2012

  Half an hour after they’d spotted a roadside café that looked clean and welcoming, they were back on the road again, and Angela continued telling Bronson what she’d discovered.

  “It’s not clear exactly when this particular Nazi project was conceived,” she said, “but from what I’ve been able to find out, it looks as if sometime in mid–nineteen forty-one an unidentified German scientist came up with a theory that was sufficiently interesting, and presumably already sufficiently well-developed, for the Nazi leadership to allocate development funds to it.

  “What is known is that in January ’forty-two, a brand-new project code named Thor—or possibly Tor, meaning ‘gate’—was created, under the leadership of Professor Walther Gerlach, a leading German nuclear physicist. The project was under contract to the Heereswaffenamt Versuchsanstalt—that roughly translates as ‘Army Ordnance Office Research Station’—number ten, and was a part of the Nazi atomic bomb project. The operation functioned as a single entity until August of the following year. Then the project was divided into two separate parts, and the code name Tor or Thor was replaced by two other names: Chronos and Laternenträger. Depending on which source you look at, by the way, Chronos could either be spelled with a ‘C’ or a ‘K,’ as Kronos, and that could be significant.”

  “Okay,” Bronson replied. “I already know what Laternenträger stands for, but what about Chronos? Is that Latin for ‘time,’ perhaps? You know, like in ‘chronometer’?”

  “Almost. It’s actually Greek, but you’re right: the word does mean ‘time.’ Some researchers who’ve investigated this project have come up with some fairly unlikely conclusions about what the Nazis were trying to achieve. They looked at the code names—Tor and Chronos, ‘gate’ and ‘time’�
�and presumed that the purpose of the project was to build a time machine, or maybe come up with a device that could somehow be used to manipulate time.”

  “I see what you mean by ‘unlikely.’”

  “Exactly,” Angela agreed. “The chances of the Nazis actually managing to get anywhere with a project as futuristic as time manipulation well over half a century ago are pretty slim. And the other fairly obvious counterargument is that, even if they had, by some miracle, devised a way of altering time, it’s difficult to see how that could possibly have helped the war effort. What they really needed were weapons, guns or rockets or bombs, stuff like that, to achieve superiority on the battlefield or in the air, and that was what all their other secret projects, all their various Wunderwaffen programs, were designed to create. Personally, I think it’s most likely that the code words were randomly generated, and had no direct connection with the projects they were linked to. And that brings us neatly to our mystery weapon, Charité Anlage, the Wenceslas Mine and Die Glocke.”

  “Now you’ve lost me,” Bronson said, pulling out to overtake two slow-moving cars. “Charity what?”

  “Charité Anlage,” Angela repeated, “aka Projekt SS ten forty. It was a massive operation, beginning in June nineteen forty-two, and required the German company AEG to supply huge amounts of electrical power. It may even have been a joint project with Bosch and Siemens. According to one source, the entire venture was officially named Schlesische Wekstätten Dr. Fürstenau, presumably because for a time it was based at Ksia˛z˙, also known as Fürstenstein Castle, a thirteenth-century castle at Silesia in Poland.”

  “But what did it do?” Bronson asked.

  “I’m coming to that. First, we need to go back to the nineteen thirties, before the war started. In nineteen thirty-six, a German scientist named Dr. Ronald Richter performed some experiments using electric arc furnaces to smelled lithium for U-boat batteries. Almost by accident, he discovered that by injecting deuterium into the plasma, into the arc, he could create a kind of nuclear fusion. Or at least, that was what he claimed.