by James Becker
Immediately after the opening ceremony, a single runner, a twenty-nine-year-old blond-haired and blue-eyed athlete named Fritz Schilgen, entered the arena. Schilgen was carrying a flaming torch in his right hand, holding it high above his head. He paused for a bare second as he entered the stadium, apparently shocked into immobility by the deafening noise of the spectators, then ran down a long flight of steps that led to the track itself. The sound died away almost to nothing as he ran the entire length of the arena, staying on the track, the torch still held high, then ran up a set of steps at the opposite end of the stadium, where a large steel cauldron stood waiting. He paused for a moment, then plunged the burning torch into the top of the vessel. The fuel in the cauldron caught fire immediately, the flames dancing high above his head.
Again the crowd roared approval. The XI Olympiad, the Berlin Games, as much a propaganda exercise for the ruling Nazi regime as a sporting event, had finally started, and at the same time at least two enduring myths had been created.
The orders given by Adolf Hitler had been most specific. The Berlin Games were to be the most impressive and memorable that the world had ever seen. Preparations had started years before, overseen by a remarkable, imaginative and very talented individual named Carl Diem.
Diem hadn’t just organized the building of the stadia and tracks and swimming pools and accommodation and all the other facilities essential for the conduct of the games themselves. Acting on Hitler’s most specific orders, and letting his imagination run wild, he had gone further. Much, much further.
He had visited Greece, the home of the original Olympic Games, two years before, and had come up with the idea of creating a symbolic pageant that would imbue the Berlin Games with a sense of the history and traditions of the ancient Greek event. That might have been enough, but he was a lot more ambitious than that. Instead of just trying to replicate some of the historical details of the original Games, he decided to invent history. And he did it so well that two of Carl Diem’s fabricated “traditions” would be used in every subsequent Games.
The ancient Olympics were dedicated to the Greek god Zeus, whose statue, originally one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, had stood at Olympia, and the place had then given its name to the Games. Diem discovered that in the original Olympic Games a flame was burned to commemorate the legend of the theft of fire from the gods by Prometheus, and that gave him the idea for the torch relay from Olympia to the city hosting the Games, a ritual that had never taken place previously.
The carefully orchestrated procession began on the last day of June 1936, in the ruins of the Temple of Hera at Olympia in Greece, the site of the ancient Olympics. A troupe of fifteen young women, clad in white robes to symbolize virginity, and working under the direction of an apparent “high priestess,” kindled this first modern Olympic flame by using a specially designed parabolic mirror to focus the rays of the sun onto twigs gathered from nearby trees.
To further reinforce the image Diem was trying to create, the flaming torch was then carried to the Acropolis in Athens for a special invocation, and handed to the first of the runners who would carry it to Berlin. Then it was taken to the ancient stadium at Delphi for a modern re-creation of Diem’s idea of what an ancient Greek ceremony might have been like.
Central to this event was what looked like a centuries-old three-foot-tall stone altar with the now-familiar design of five interlocking rings chiseled into its surface. But this wasn’t old. It had been especially prepared for this one event, another product of Diem’s fertile imagination, and yet another of his ideas that was to become a part of the ancient Olympic myth.
So firmly entrenched did the idea of the “Rings of Olympus” become that about two decades later, when a group of British researchers visited Delphi and found the carved altar stone there, they recognized the ring design and immediately proclaimed that they’d discovered an incontrovertible link between the ancient and modern Olympics. Some apparently authoritative history books still include a reference to this ancient stone and the Olympic tradition. Public humiliation and embarrassment for the researchers followed shortly afterward when it was revealed that the ancient stone, this “millennia-old altar,” was just a clever piece of twentieth-century Nazi propaganda.
The flaming torch was then relayed along the 3,422 kilometers through Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia to the Olympic stadium in Berlin by specially selected runners—chosen as much for their Aryan appearance as for their abilities as athletes—each of whom carried the flame for a single kilometer before passing it on to the next man, culminating in the lighting of the first ever Olympic flame by Fritz Schilgen.
The Wenceslas Mine and Die Glocke
The Wenceslas Mine is real, and all the available evidence suggests that it was the final home in Europe for the experimental object that became known as Die Glocke, the true purpose of that is still uncertain, though the idea that it was some kind of generator to produce radioactive material is as plausible as any other suggestion.
The description given in this novel of the circumstances of the creation of the Bell, of the science behind it, of the events leading up to the abandonment of the Wenceslas Mine, and of the subsequent fate of the device, are as accurate as it’s possible to be at this remove. It is also a fact that the development of Die Glocke—whatever its true purpose—was of the utmost importance to the Nazi regime. As far as my research has been able to show, this project was the only clandestine development operation ever to be allocated the priority classification Kriegsentscheidend, meaning “decisive for the outcome of the war.” This was the highest possible classification in the entire Nazi system, which guaranteed that whatever supplies, equipment or personnel were required for it would be provided as quickly as possible.
One confirmation of this is that when, as the Russian forces drew ever closer to the German borders in April 1945, a request was made by the German high command in Berlin for the use of one of only two Junkers Ju-390 aircraft so far constructed to assist in the evacuation. One of these precious aircraft was under the control of General Hans Kammler, the man in charge of the operation in the Wenceslas Mine, and he refused to release the aircraft on the direct orders of Hitler, because the evacuation of Die Glocke had a higher priority. This is somewhat astonishing in military terms, that one single secret project could have acquired a greater importance than the evacuation of the entire German high command.
The three sightings reported in the book, of the aircraft being seen in Bodø and South America, are unconfirmed, but the choice of the Argentine as a destination for the device would seem to be plausible, again for the reasons outlined in this book.
But wherever it went, and whatever it was designed to do, the ultimate fate of Die Glocke remains as shrouded in mystery today as it was in 1945.
About the Author
James Becker spent more than twenty years in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. Throughout his career he has been involved in covert operations in many of the world’s hot spots, including Yemen, Russia, and Northern Ireland. He writes action-adventure novels under the name James Barrington and military history under the name Peter Smith in the UK.
