The Rise of the Fourth Reich

by Jim Marrs

  The duke’s plane clearly was in the process of ascending when it crashed, indicating it may have lifted off from nearby Loch More near Braemore Lodge, where accounts place the captive Hess. Second, when statements from witnesses and the one survivor are compared with the official rosters, it becomes clear that there was an unaccounted-for passenger on the craft.

  These factors, coupled with much other evidence—both hard and circumstantial—support the conjecture that the anti-Churchill peace group waited until mid-1942, a low ebb in Britain’s war fortunes, before attempting to fly the duke of Kent and Rudolf Hess to Sweden to announce a peace plan that would topple the Churchill government. Of course, this never happened, due to the plane crash. Whether this was sabotage or an accident has not been clearly established.

  If Hess died in the duke’s plane, it would have presented a thorny problem for Churchill—how to explain the mangled corpse of a man who was supposed to be their prized prisoner. Any investigation would have revealed the involvement of ranking members of British society, even the royals, in the peace initiative.

  Here the story takes an even more bizarre twist. Evidence gathered for their book by Picknett, Prince, and Prior—including Hess being reported as seen in different locations at the same time, and inconsistencies in official reports—indicated that a duplicate Hess may have been prepared prior to the plane crash. “We are convinced that in the summer of 1942 there were two Hesses, one in Scotland and one at Maindiff Court, Aber-gavenny, Wales,” they wrote. The real Hess died in the crash and the double lived to stand trial at Nuremberg and serve his sentence at Spandau.

  But even these astute authors acknowledged a huge problem with such a scenario. “Even though it seems to fit the evidence perfectly, it has to be admitted that the mind skids on the thought that any man would allow himself to be tried and sentenced in Hess’s name, not to mention continuing with the deception for the rest of a very long life in the harshest and most hopeless of conditions,” they remarked.

  The idea of a Rudolf Hess double is not new, and various theories have been advanced. One suggested that the look-alike was forced to play Hess out of fear for his family. Another was that the Hess double was a German—whoever the man was, German was his first language—and an ardent Nazi, who was convinced it was necessary to the party that he maintain the subterfuge, especially since he might become the founder of a Fourth Reich.

  But the most provocative explanation comes from Picknett, Prince, and Prior, who learned that former CIA director Allen Dulles, a founder of the Council on Foreign Relations and high commissioner of Germany after the war, had dispatched Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron to Nuremberg to examine Hess. Dulles expressed to Cameron his belief that the Hess being held in Germany was an impostor and that the real Hess had been secretly executed on orders from Churchill. Knowing of Hess’s war wounds, Dulles wanted Cameron to especially note if there were any scars on the prisoner’s chest. Interestingly enough, British military authorities in Nuremberg refused to allow such an examination.

  But the story grows stranger. Dr. Cameron was a Scot who pioneered brainwashing techniques before the end of the war, at the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. He went on to become president of the American Psychiatric Association as well as the first president of the World Psychiatric Association. He also became part of the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA mind-control program. Various researchers have wondered if Dulles’s choice of Dr. Cameron to study Hess might have grown from the knowledge or suspicion that the man posing as Hess had been brainwashed into actually believing he was the Nazi deputy fuehrer. Mind-control experimentation was much further along—particularly in Europe, as shall be seen—than most people realize. Why else should Dulles have chosen a brainwashing expert to study Hess when any competent physician could have checked for scar tissue?

  This subterfuge could account for Hess’s eccentric behavior at the Nuremberg trials, during which he repeatedly claimed he had lost his memory, a convenience for someone who had not lived Hess’s life.

  Once the peace plan went awry, all the usual methods of cover-up came into play—documents disappeared or were locked away from public scrutiny, witnesses were coerced into silence, and multiple “theories” from authoritative sources were spread.

  One clue that a geopolitical game was being played out in the Hess affair is that the last person to dine with the duke of Kent prior to the fatal crash that killed him and perhaps the real Hess was a foreign exile, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. The dinner represented an unusual gathering of the British royals at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, which, in addition to the duke and Prince Bernhard, included King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

  But it is Bernhard’s presence that has caught the interest of researchers. Prince Bernhard originated meetings of the Bilderberg Group, a collection of world movers and shakers so secretive they have no proper name. Bernhard was a former member of the Nazi SS and an employee of Germany’s I. G. Farben in Paris. In 1937, he married Princess Juliana of the Netherlands and became a major shareholder and officer in Dutch Shell Oil, along with Britain’s Lord Victor Rothschild.

  After the Germans invaded Holland, the royal couple moved to London. It was here, after the war, that Rothschild and the founder of the European Movement for Unity, Polish socialist Dr. Joseph Hieronim Retinger, encouraged Prince Bernhard to create the Bilderberg Group. The prince personally chaired the group until 1976, when he resigned following revelations that he had accepted large payoffs from Lockheed to promote the sale of its aircraft in Holland.

  It is impossible to know for certain whether Prince Bernhard sided with the British royal family and the peace initiative or was monitoring their activities for the prowar Churchill clique. But it is an indication of the machinations of the global elite. The peace initiative was stopped and the globalists’ decision to stop National Socialism at all costs proceeded.

  There can be little doubt that the failure of Hess’s peace mission to Britain on the eve of the attack on Russia created the unwanted two-front war that cost Hitler the victory. After the failure of Hess’s ill-fated flight, his place in the Nazi hierarchy was taken by Martin Bormann, a man who will be discussed later. Some Nazi leaders, including Himmler and Bormann, became uncertain of victory and began laying plans for their survival. They also turned to science for new Wunderwaffen, or wonder weapons, that might turn the tide of war in their favor.

  CHAPTER 3

  NAZI WONDER WEAPONS

  JUST SIX DAYS AFTER THE D-DAY INVASION OF EUROPE, ON JUNE 12, 1944, the residents of London were startled to hear a droning buzz in the skies over their city. They were more startled when the sound suddenly stopped and moments later a huge explosion rocked the East London neighborhood of Mile End, killing eight civilians.

  It was the first of the V-1 Buzz bombs—a forerunner of today’s cruise missiles.

  The V-1 and the later V-2 rockets that terrorized London are two of the more famous examples of German war technology. These Vergeltungswaffe, or retaliation weapons, were developed at the secret German rocket facility Peenemunde and put into operation just after the D-Day landings in Normandy, France. From June 12, 1944, until August 20, more than eight thousand of the V-1 rockets (each carrying a ton of explosives) rained down on London, inflicting 45,479 casualties and destroying 75,000 buildings. The less numerous V-2 rockets—which, unlike the V-1, could not be seen, heard, or intercepted in flight—nevertheless produced more than 10,000 casualties in the British capital.

  In addition to the vengeance weapons, the Germans produced a number of scientific breakthroughs in their quest for weapons technology during World War II. German ingenuity and efficiency appeared capable of overcoming almost any obstacle. One clear example may be found simply by comparing figures from its armaments industry. Despite constant bombing by the Allies, overall production of tanks, small arms, ships, and aircraft was higher at the beginning of 1945 than in 1941, when Germany was victoriou
s on all fronts and America had not yet entered the war.

  Technological advances were seen in almost every area. The rate and quality was astounding. Plastics, which only came into general use in the United States during the 1950s, were developed in Nazi Germany. Bakelite, polystyrene (under the name Trolitul), Plexiglas, polyethylene (forerunner of today’s plastic Baggies and syringes), polyamide (nylon), and aldols (a derivative of polyvinyl) were all produced during wartime. The various forms of plastic were produced under a consortium of companies but led by I. G. Farben, which also in 1941 synthesized the opiate methadone and Demerol under the name “pethidine.”

  Television, which most Americans did not get to see until the early 1950s, was highly developed in Nazi Germany. More than 150,000 persons in twenty-eight public viewing rooms in Berlin saw clear television broadcasts of the 1936 Olympics. They watched screens equipped with Fernseh 180-line cathode ray tube projectors that presented a picture about forty-eight by forty-two inches. In 1939, the German firm Fernseh began developing a miniaturized TV system that allowed pilots to guide both bombs and missiles after launching. This system was used in the anti-aircraft rocket Wasserfall, or waterfall. “Many of these tests failed,” noted author Joseph P. Farrell. “But by the war’s end, a successful test of the television-guided ‘Tonne’ missile was conducted by German scientists for the Allies in Berlin, with the target being a photograph of a little girl’s face. The test was successful, much to the impressed, and doubtless shocked, Allied observers.”

  Tanks, which began the war as little more than armor-plated bulldozers designed to support infantry, were developed into independent, thickly armored machines powered by gas turbines, with guns stabilized while moving, hydrokinetic power transmissions, and defenses against chemical and biological attacks. Some German tanks were so far ahead of their time, they were still being utilized in other nations as late as battles in the 1970s. To counter the threat of modern tanks, the Germans developed simple, but very effective, portable rocket launchers armed with a hollow charge such as the Panzerschreck bazooka and the easily produced Panzerfaust, a forerunner of today’s hand-carried rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). The innovative 9-mm German MP-40 Schmeisser machine pistol saw extensive use during the war, and its successors, the MP-43 and the MP-44 assault rifles, became the forerunners of today’s ubiquitous AK-47. Late in the war, some MP-44s carried an early but effective night-vision light and scope called the Vampyr, or Vampire.

  At the end of the war in 1945, American military intelligence officers were shocked by the technology they found as Allied forces overran German research facilities. Supersonic rockets, nerve gas, jet aircraft, guided missiles, stealth technology, hardened armor—even flying saucers—were just some of the groundbreaking technologies being developed in Nazi laboratories, workshops, and factories. To give some idea of the aspirations of Nazi scientists, the huge ME-264 was dubbed the “America Bomber,” while a three-stage rocket was named the “Mars Rocket.”

  As respected British historian Barrie Pitt noted, “[T]he Nazi war machine swung into action utilizing as much as it could of the most up-to-date scientific knowledge available, and as the war developed, the list of further achievements grew to staggering proportions. From guns firing ‘shells’ of air to detailed discussions of flying saucers; from beams of sound that were fatal to a man at 50 yards, to guns that fired around corners and others that could ‘see in the dark’—the list is awe-inspiring in its variety.” Pitt stated that while some German technology was less developed than imagined at the time, “some were dangerously near to a completion stage which could have reversed the war’s outcome.”

  Former Polish military journalist Igor Witkowski described German wartime research as “the greatest technological leap in the history of our civilization.” He said the Germans ignored Einstein and developed an approach to science based on quantum theories. “Don’t forget that Einsteinian physics, relativity physics, with its big-picture view of the universe, represented Jewish science to the Nazis. Germany was where quantum mechanics was born. The Germans were looking at gravity [and other matters] from a different perspective to everyone else. Maybe it gave them answers to things that pro-relativity scientists hadn’t even thought of,” explained Witkowski, who had unprecedented access to German wartime documents that only recently because available, due to the collapse of communism.

  Consider that at the beginning of the war, aircraft were made of canvas stretched over a wooden frame. By 1945, Germany had become the first nation in the world to put into service an all-metal, jet-propelled jet fighter—the Messerschmitt-262. They also produced the world’s first operational helicopter and vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

  As German scientists worked feverishly to perfect the V-2 rockets and other, more secret weapons, SS chief Heinrich Himmler was taking steps to separate his SS from normal party and state control. “In the spring of 1944 Hitler approved Himmler’s proposal to build an SS-owned industrial concern in order to make the SS permanently independent of the state budget,” wrote Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer. Employing methods later used by the CIA, SS leaders created a number of business fronts and other organizations—many using concentration camp labor—with an eye toward producing revenue to support SS activities. These highly compartmentalized groups headed by young, ambitious SS officers neither required nor desired any connection with Germany’s high-profile leaders. Their purpose was to create an economic base that could continue pursuing Nazi goals long after the defeat of Germany.

  Armaments minister Speer conceded that there were weapons development programs that he knew nothing about. He admitted that an SS scheme in 1944 to construct a secret weapons plant requiring 3,500 concentration camp workers had been concealed from him. Speer even hinted at the possibility of secret weapons that “were secretly produced by the SS toward the end of the war and concealed from me.”

  While the V-2 rocket program began under the aegis of the German Army, and the ME-262 jet fighter under the Luftwaffe, they were ultimately transferred to SS control. “In short, anything that had shown any real promise as a weapon system—in particular, anything that appeared to represent a quantum leap over the then-state-of-the-art—had ended up under the oversight of the SS,” noted Nick Cook, an aviation editor and aerospace consultant to Jane’s Defence Weekly. With secret projects in the hands of hardcore SS fanatics, and with factories and research facilities scattered over—and under—the countryside, it is entirely conceivable that weapons far in advance of the V rockets could have been developed without the knowledge of anyone except Himmler and his top lieutenants.

  Other notable secret Nazi weapons nearing completion in 1945 included the Messerschmitt-163 Komet and the vertically launched Natter rocket fighters, the jet-powered flying wing Horten Ho-IX and the delta-winged Lippisch DM-1. It has been noted that some of top-secret Nazi weaponry development was moved outside Germany, to such places as Blizna, Poland—the same area where Allied aircrews first encountered the infamous “foo-fighters,” small glowing balls of light that shadowed Allied bombers. The “foo-fighters” soon caught the attention of the American news media. The New York Times, on December 13, 1944, reported news authorized by the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force. “Floating Mystery Ball Is New Nazi Air Weapon,” read the headline. The story stated:

  Airmen of the American Air Force report that they are encountering silver-colored spheres in the air over German territory. The spheres are encountered either singly or in clusters. Sometimes they are semi-translucent.

  The new device, apparently an air defense weapon, resembles the huge glass balls that adorn Christmas trees. There was no information available as to what holds them up like stars in the sky, what is in them or what their purpose is supposed to be.

  According to author Renato Vesco, the “foo-fighters” were actually the Feuerball, or fire ball, which was “a highly original flying machine…circular and armored, more or less resembling the shell
of a tortoise, and was powered by a special turbojet engine, also flat and circular, whose principles of operation…generated a great halo of luminous flames…. Radio-controlled at the moment of takeoff, it then automatically followed enemy aircraft, attracted by their exhaust flames, and approached close enough without collision to wreck their radar gear.” Vesco claimed that the basic principles of the Feuerball were later applied to a “symmetrical circular aircraft” known as the Kugelblitz, or ball lightning, automatic fighter that became an “authentic antecedent of the present-day flying saucers.” He said this innovative craft was destroyed after a “single lucky wartime mission” by retreating SS troops.

  Even though the public has been conditioned for more than sixty years to dismiss any notion of flying saucers, or UFOs, the accumulation of evidence available today makes it impossible to reject the reality of such craft out of hand. Obviously, the Nazis were experimenting with new and exotic energy technology. The extraordinary development of the Feuerball may have provided the first public glimpse into the heart of Nazi super-science.

  Several writers have produced articles about the Nazi development of flying saucers. British author W. A. Harbinson claimed that he got his ideas after discovering postwar German articles mentioning a former Luftwaffe engineer, Flugkapitan Rudolph Schriever. According to information gleaned by Harbinson from articles in Der Spiegel, Bild am Sonntag, Luftfahrt International, and other German publications, Schriever claimed to have designed a “flying top” prototype in 1941, which was actually test-flown in June 1942. In 1944, Schriever said he constructed a larger, jet version of his circular craft, with the help of scientists Klaus Habermohl, Otto Miethe, and an Italian, Dr. Giuseppe Belluzzo. Drawings of this saucer were published in the 1959 British book German Secret Weapons of the Second World War and Their Later Development, by Major Rudolph Lusar, an engineer who worked in the German Reichs-Patent Office and had access to many original plans and documents. Lusar described the saucer as a ring of separate disks carrying adjustable jets rotating around a fixed cockpit. The entire craft had a height of 105 feet and could fly vertically or horizontally, depending on the positioning of the jets.