Rainer Karlsch is a historian who took an unorthodox glance at stories
that, previously, had been the reserve of "stranger than science"
authors. You know, the sort of authors who wrote of UFOs, sea monsters,
ghosts and Bigfoot.
Karlsch's examination centers on a headland in the Baltic Sea that is
named Rugen, just to the west of the Pomeranian Bay. Cities in Rugen
are Sassnitz, Bergen and Stralslund.
Luigi Sacerra was an Italian who claimed in the 1950s that he had been
an eyewitness at a secret weapon test by the Third Reich. According to
Sacerra, on the evening of Thursday 10-12 and the predawn hours of
Friday 10-13, 1944, he was an Italian observer at a test on Rugen of
what was described to him as a "disintegration" bomb. He was told to
wear coveralls and helmet of a rough material that he assumed was
absestos and he looked through a visor of dark mica, like a welder's
lense. There was an extremely bright flare in the darkness, and all the
trees in a forest were scorched and knocked over. In hindsight, Sacerra
would tell people that he had witnessed the Germans test an atomic bomb.
Of course, weaknesses to that story are obvious to SHWI enthusiasts.
Italy had defected from the Axis publically on Wednesday 9-8, 1943, so
it sure is odd that the Nazis had an Italian national as a guest at that
top secret test a year later. (An apologist for the tale might
rationalize that the witness was loyal to the Salo Republic.)
John Prados, the military/espionage specialist from whom I first learned
the story 25 years ago, conjectured that the Reich tested a "behemoth
incendiary" that an imaginative Italian later conflated with an atomic
bomb.
The second fragment of information relied on by Karlsch are some
after-action re****ts filed in the wake of Kursk by Japanese observers
attached to Soviet forces. The Japanese sent news to their Moscow
embassy that there had been two extraordinary attacks by the Germans.
The Germans had launched two kilo shells at the Red Army and those uses
had an extraordinary affect on the troops. The Soviet troops had been
"burned black" and supposedly the Reds identified the weapon as a gas
attack, and signalled the foe that any repetition of the attack would
bring immediate Soviet chemical reaction.
The Japanese observer claimed that the Kursk weapon had been an atom
splitting bomb, and re****ted that the weapon had also once been used in
the Crimea at some unspecified time.
Again, this is not the strongest evidence. The date of the "attacks" is
given as Saturday 7-3, 1943, when a careful re****ter would know that
Kursk started Monday 7-5. (Of course, it is possible the secret weapon
was used a weekend in advance of the armored assault.)
Karlsch speculates that the Soviets might have been right and it was a
test of some caustic chemical smoke. More romantically though, might it
have been a radiological dirty bomb like the kind that AG John Ashcroft
speculated that Osama bin Laden would have Padilla plant in the USA?
The third curiosity is that the Berlin telephone system broke down for
three whole days in middle October 1944. Of course, that also coincides
with thousand bomber day and night raids on the German capitol, so
conventional bombs are a more likely culprit for bad phones than a EMP
from the Baltic coast.
That is pretty near the sum total of evidence that Germany was further
along in atomic tech than the consensus opinion of modern historians
would indicate.
The speculation is that field artillery deploying poison powder,
possibly of a radioactive nature, was tried on the Russians at the
beginning of the Battle of Kursk. The stuff was not a practical success
and used up very expensive raw materials, and so the experiment was not
repeated. Stalin could have concealed the existance of the new enemy
weapon to avoid stricken morale, or Stalin and the rest of Stavka could
have assumed that the event was a limited use of chemical weapons.
The Rugen flareup of October 1944 might have been an conventional if
potent firebomb. To hold that it was an atomic bomb test is to postulate
that Germany had a uranium bomb available two months before the Battle
of the Bulge. If a theory like that had merit, do you not think that
Adolf Hitler might have used his superweapon on Antwerp?
I think the chances are extremely low that Nazi nukes were ever created.
I cannot demonstrate that such things were categorically impossible, but
I do not think the odds are good that a working prototype in October
1944 would be followed by a misfiring production model in sixty days.
Besides, it is past belief that Hitler knows of these superweapons being
tested and never brings up the subject at his table talk or military
conferences.
Karlsch tried to check his guesswork by checking Rugen for radioactivity
remnents that might hint of Nazi research not preserved by history.
There is a heightened background of radioactivity at Rugen, but nuclear
experts say that the pollution from Chernobyl was blown straight towards
Rugen by weather patterns on the days of the catastrophe. What is found
there now more likely came from Gorbachev's Russia, not Hitler's
Germany.
Any other comemnts or trivia on the tale?
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