Nazis, UFO's, aliens, Oh my!

May 12, 2004 9:38 AM

Secrets of the Third Reich...UFO's?"...As Sir Roy Feddon, Chief of the Technical Mission to Germany for the Ministry of Aircraft Production stated in 1945. "…I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realise that if they (the Germans) had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare.".....upright, vertical take-off aircraft.....a saucer-shaped craft with enclosed twin rotors.....Cruise missiles....the V-2....[predecessor of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles]....a rocket-powered fighter, the ME 163...These then, were some of the known German advances. However there were also hints of darker technologies not fully understood." Woo woo! So begins the four part "Secrets of the Third Reich" - where does fact merge into fiction? It's such a great read that it almost doesn't matter. A version with pictures lives here (go to menu, "Book 4"). Then, there's The Hunt For Zero Point We have met the aliens, and they are us ?
posted by troutfishing (10 comments total)

Paging Tyrone Slothrop..Mr. Slothrop please report to the invisible courtesy telephone...
posted by freebird at 9:40 AM on May 12, 2004

Yes, there were some remarkable aircraft in the works or in early stages of mobilization (like the unsung Do 335 and the Me 262 jet fighter), but the old "What If" game doesn't really play here: The British also had a jet fighter, and given those few more months, we would have deployed B-29s over Germany. The Me-163? A bad joke, except for attacking bomber formations, and absolutely useless at night against the rafts and rafts of Lancasters that annihilated cities like Dresden.

And in any case, Germany was starving and unable to manufacture enough spare parts to keep even its basic machinery of warfare functioning. (See Ryan's Last Battle for some revealing insight into their supply situation.)

And don't forget that we had "cruise missiles" of our own, at a similar level of sophistication. What's more, we actually had the manufacturing muscle to make them.

Trite as it sounds, WW-II was won in the end by industrial power. It's a cliche, but it remains true: A small, resource-poor nation was never likely to be able to stand against the other two great industrial powers of the world, US and GB. Especially not when much of our equipment was better and we could vastly outnumber them on every front. (As Comrade Lenin remarked, "Quantity has a Quality all its own.")

That said, the Nazis were clearly not the soooper-geniuses that we seem to have wanted them to be. Their thinking was clouded by mysticism, their technical decision-chains were interrupted by amateurs; they never produced a heavy bomber (at all) or a fighter that could really fly with the Mustang, and as far as we could tell they weren't about to.

What they were good at was grand strokes: The V-1 and V-2 raids, for example, were of virtually no strategic importance. But they had a terrific impact on the civilian populace. Blitzkrieg, so effective in France against ill-prepared troops with poor chains of command (and not nearly as effective against the horse-mobile Poles as you've been led to believe), didn't work nearly so well in North Africa against an army with deep supply lines and strong command and control.

So, can we at least consider laying off this glamorization of the Nazis as Evil Military Geniuses? With a few exceptions, it just doesn't hold up.
posted by lodurr at 10:00 AM on May 12, 2004

"Mr. Slothrup ? It's someone called 'Peperclip' on the line for you - says it's classified...."

"Slothrup ? Good man, despite the name...You're in the loop now. Welcome aboard. You'll be sent a casefile at the designated location. You might want to have a strong drink first before you read it. Oh - and pull the shades. You never know. We'll be in touch."
posted by troutfishing at 10:04 AM on May 12, 2004

Nazis as Evil Military Geniuses Party
posted by thomcatspike at 10:12 AM on May 12, 2004

Thought a similar flying machine was recently discovered in Russia last year. There is no access for it to leave the building thou.
posted by thomcatspike at 10:20 AM on May 12, 2004

( I'd say thomcatspike hit the nail on the head : Evil Military Party )

lodurr - Excellent! - an informed skeptic. I agree with some of your points, yes :

"...Trite as it sounds, WW-II was won in the end by industrial power. It's a cliche, but it remains true...." - Yes, it's very true. That said, if the War had dragged on for a bit longer and the Nazis had acquired, say, nuclear weapons they surely would have used them without hesitation....

One can play "what if" scenarios all day. But the fact remains that both the US and the Russians were in a race, at the close of WW2, to grab all of the nazi scientists they could lay their hands on. And there was some reason for this.

For example, Von Braun's Peenemunde V-2 plant - moved wholesale to the US complete with key personnel - proved key to the development of ICBMs and the US space program.

Hitler's occult mysticism led to a lot of unorthodox research under the 3rd Reich - How much of this was cracked, and how much had promise ? We may never know.

But you are incorrect, I believe, in suggestion Nazi technical incompetence. The Nazi Party, as such, may have been an ignorant group, and The 3rd Reich was clearly outnumbered and resource poor. However, the Nazis also had access to technology - not speculative UFO project technology either, but patented industrial processes not available to the Allies :

"Along with the Rockefellers (Standard Oil, Chase Manhattan Bank), Mellons (Gulf Oil, Alcoa Aluminum), DuPonts (DuPont Chemicals), General Motors and Henry Ford, banks and shipping companies operated by the Bush family were crucial players in setting up the industrial power behind the Third Reich. These companies poured hundreds of millions of dollars into IG Farben and provided it with technology for tactically-essential synthetic materials while withholding the same materials and patents from the US government.

 The Rockefeller family, long aligned with the Bushes, owned Standard Oil. Through a stock transfer they became half owners of Germany's IG Farben with Farben likewise owning almost half of Standard Oil. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, IG Farben built and operated more than 40 concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz.

 At their slave labor/factory/death camps chemicals, weapons, drugs, synthetic fuels and other materials vital to the Nazi war effort were manufactured. In addition, eugenicists like Dr. Josef Mengele used the human subjects in the camps for experiments the data from which are today the basis for many drugs marketed by the pharmaceutical industry-not too surprising in light of the fact that more Americans die from prescription drugs than from any other single cause.

 At the end of WWII the allies split up IG Farben into companies that are now the top pharmaceutical concerns on earth among them Bayer, Hoescht, BASF, the Agfa-Gevaert Group and Cassella AG. Many of Wall Streets favorite pharmaceutical/chemical companies behind the proliferation of genetically-altered foods, transgenic animals, human cloning, dangerous psychiatric drugs, deadly vaccines and pesticides-such as Aventis-are subsidiaries of these same companies.

 War provides the necessary medium in which this witches brew of oil, eugenics, pharmaceuticals, munitions and Wall Street investing can reach maximum growth."
posted by troutfishing at 10:37 AM on May 12, 2004

it's interesting to rummage through the Nazi-era archives (I'm not sure there's much on the Internet tho) and see all the crazy shit Hitler's scientists were trying to dream up to win the already-lost war at the last minute -- big planes carrying smaller suicide-bomber planes, super-cannons, literally anything to try to change the war already-written (at least since spring 1943) ending.

plus, Hitler's fixation with the occult is by now well-documented. not to mention, the old guy escaped to Antarctica, X-Files style, as we all know

good post trout
posted by matteo at 11:27 AM on May 12, 2004

matteo - There's an awful lot an Viktor Schauberger - But he wasn't a Nazi. The Nazis just bullied him into building UFO-like craft for them - which may or may not have worked.
posted by troutfishing at 12:30 PM on May 12, 2004

dean koontz almost got it right, except hitler escaped and is hiding somewhere in the future.
posted by quonsar at 2:41 PM on May 12, 2004

so, q, you always make fun of people who, quote unquote, waste their time watching movies (like, by De Sica and Renoir) and instead you... read... ...Koontz?

BWAHAWHAHAHAHA

;)

posted by matteo at 5:18 PM on May 12, 2004