Hitler's Terror Weapons by Brooks, Geoffrey (the best books of all time TXT) 📕

ratio of 45:1 was greater than an albatross, and this best performance by a flying wing stood until at least the early 1970s. When war came the brothers’ interest widened and designs for powered versions of the flying wing began to flow from the drawing board. The Hortens were told of the disappointing progress made by the major manufacturers and in November 1944 the Luftwaffe asked them to submit a design for a long-range bomber. They worked on the project full-out through the Christmas period and came up with ten variations for a ‘flying wing’ bomber, basically a wooden boomerang driven by a permutation of from four to eight turbo-jets.

The final version tagged Ho XVIIIA had six Junkers Jumo 004B turbo-jets at the rear of the fuselage fed by air intakes in the wing’s leading edge. A rocket-boosted skate would be jettisoned at take-off and landing effected on a skid. Construction was predominantly wood held together with a carbon-based glue. This gave the aircraft a low radar profile.

According to Speer, Hitler was very taken with the whole project, but when between 20 and 23 February 1945 Goering chaired a further design conference at Dessau, the lobbyists got their way and a few days later Goering told the Horten brothers to work in collaboration with Junkers engineers. As these had quietly co-opted some Messerschmitt people to their team, the project was now run by committee.

The Messerschmitt-Junkers idea was to fit a huge vertical fin and rudder aft and relocate the engines below the wing. These changes increased drag and thus reduced the range but again they got their way, and the final design had two large vertical fins with a cockpit at the leading edge. The six Jumo jets were to be slung in two nacelles one to each side of the central fuselage. Between these was the bomb bay which also housed a tricycle landing gear.

This variation did not find favour with the Horten brothers and they designed their own improvement, Ho XVIIIB, a flying wing with a crew of three seated in a plexiglass blister in the nose, propulsion being provided by four Heinkel Hirth SO11 turbo-jets each developing 1200 kgs thrust and housed below the wing in gondolas insisted upon by the development authority for safety reasons. This arrangement resulted in a weight saving of about a tonne enabling the replacement of the skid by a fixed 8-wheel undercarriage streamlined in flight by doors to reduce drag. The aircraft would have a speed of about 850 kms/hr, an operational ceiling of 16 kms and could remain aloft for 27 hours. Although armament was considered unnecessary by the Luftwaffe, the Hortens suggested two Mk 108 3-cm cannon directly below the cockpit. A special carbon-based paint and a honeycomb dielectric material pasted over the outer skin were used to suppress the reflection of radar beams.

On 23 March 1945 the design was approved by Goering and the Hortens were told to approach Saur, Speer’s deputy, to find a suitably protected production facility. Kahla in the Harz mountains was considered suitable. It had two recently completed hangars with concrete roofs 5.6 metres thick which were virtually bomb-proof. Two airstrips were available for test flights, and a workforce of 2000 persons was on hand.

The first prototype was expected to fly in the summer of 1945 and work was started on 1 April.

German Intelligence of the Manhattan Project

During the war Germany had been relatively well informed on the progress of the Manhattan Project. Most of the signals transmitted to Moscow by Klaus Fuchs’ spy ring were decrypted by the SS-RSHA109, as were those of a Canadian communist ring in Ottawa, and passed to SS atomic research groups. The information was withheld from other sections of the German project for security reasons.

The Spanish spy Alazar de Velasco110 reported to both Germany and Japan on the American work from 1943 until mid-1944, operating from Mexico. Velasco mentioned the difficulties the Americans were having in developing an implosion fuse for their plutonium bomb design, which had already been solved by the Germans.

On 30 November 1944 U-1230 put Erich Gimpel ashore on an American beach. On Christmas Day, a week before his capture by the FBI, Gimpel discovered from his contact that the American A-bomb would be ready by the summer of 1945. Apparently they had only two or three bombs. Gimpel transmitted this information to Berlin.

In the autumn of 1944, when he found Hitler planning the Ardennes offensive with freshly formed panzer and fighter units, his Luftwaffe ADC von Below asked him why he did not concentrate all his forces against the Russians and received the answer that he could attack them later, provided that the Americans were not in Berlin. First of all he must have space on his western border. Von Below remarked that everybody thought it preferable to allow the Americans to take the Reich so that the Russians could be held off as far as possible from the eastern frontier. Hitler did not share this view because he feared the power of the American Jews more than the Bolshevists.

It seems certain that a Doomsday Bomb test was carried out at Ohrdruf in the Harz on the night of 4 March 1945. Witness Frau Cläre Werner related111: “At that time I knew Hans Ritterman, who was Plenipotentiary for Reichspost and OKW Special Projects. He worked in the Arnstadt Building Department and was involved in secret Reichspost work in Thuringia. He was a good friend of the family and often came for coffee on Sundays. On 4 March 1945 Hans visited and said we should go to the tower and watch in the direction of Roehrensee village. He didn’t know what the new thing would go like. About nine-thirty that evening behind Roehrensee it suddenly lit up just like hundreds of bolts of lightning. The explosion glowed red inside and yellow outside and you could read a newspaper by it. It lasted only a short time, fell dark again and then came a