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Vast Nazi Facility Uncovered In Austria; Purported A-Bomb Development Site
schwit1 (797399) writes "Suspiciously high radiation levels around the Austrian town of St. Georgen an der Gusen had long fueled theories that there was a buried bunker nearby where Nazis had tested nuclear weapons during WWII. Those suspicions came one step closer to being confirmed last week after the opening of a 75-acre underground complex was dug out from below the earth and granite used to seal off the entrance, the Times of Israel reports. The excavation team was led by Austrian filmmaker Andreas Sulzer, who says the site was "likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich" — a facility that probably relied on forced labor from the nearby Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and may have even been the testing location for a nuclear bomb, the Daily Mirror reports. The weapons facility was believed to have been manned by SS General Hans Kammler and situated near the B8 Bergkristall factory, where the first working jet-powered fighter was created, International Business Times reports; Sulzer first got wind of the site after seeing references to it in an Austrian physicist's diary.
The Washington Post cautions that while "the full scope of what occurred inside those reported chambers in the Austrian town of St. Georgen remains unclear and Sulzer’s conclusions are speculative, some analysts are already trumpeting the findings. ... The reported findings, if corroborated by further inquiry, could add fresh fodder to an ongoing debate over the Third Reich’s ultimately failed attempt to secure an atomic weapon."
Film-maker digs through granite, measures radiation, concludes there have been nuclear weapons. Right. It's not like granite is one of the most radioactive materials in the world.
If they were truly the Master Race, they would have realized that banking is the way to go to control or destroy the World.
Look it now. Merkel pretty much controls Europe - thanks to the Deutsche Bundesbank. And without a single shot fired. I think I'm gonna send my kids to Merkel Youth camp where they can grow up to be bankers, make billions for doing nothing other than rent seeking, fees, bonuses and commissions.
STEM?! Pfft! That's just a fairy tale that's told to you peons to keep you in line.
.....just waiting for orders.
Probably a fascinating find no matter what it turns out to actually have been used for! The topic brings me recall of a long held fantasy wish I held from boyhood until the first decades of my adulthood, that I could somehow find a forgotten WW2 or similar asset and find a vintage transmitter or other "cool stuff".A young and unsophisticated fantasy of course. Anything of the sort found today would likely claimed by the powers that be and some of it hopefully wind up in a museum. Happy New Year fellow slashdotters!
Some of these claims seem to be overblown.
If you take a look at the Manhattan Project, you get an idea what efforts in research and production (i.e. uranium enrichment) were required.
The Nazis never had a programm that came anywhere near these dimensions.
All they had was a handfull of phsysicists (most of the best had emmigrated to the US anyway) and a small research reactor.
So while there was some nuclear research, there never was a atomic bomb or anything close to it in Germany.
And the tunnels? The whole 3rd Reich and it's occupied territories were tunneled mostly for the purpose of weapons production.
And St. Georgen-an-der-Gusen is about a good hour's drive away. I'll certainly visit the place once it is opened up for the public. It is quite amazing what lengths the Nazis went to in order to shelter their weapons production from Allied bombing. Just outside the town I now live in, the Nazis dug out an existing cave complex, which had been a gypsum mine up to WO II, until the volume was large enough to facilitate a complete HE162 jet fighter production line.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
huh
Posted about an hour ago and no sign of Godwin's Law yet. Another sure sign that Slashdot's standards are slipping.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I just searched for St. Georgen: The current top story in local newspapers is: A lumberman was hit by a bouncing branch. Of course, that Nazi story can be found too, but it doesn't get a lot of attention. Nobody cares because there is simply no story. That filmmaker just dug a hole and found a staircase. That's all. Well, that's not a 100% correct: They also found an army helmet, an army bike and several warning signs. Not really surprising, since it was a well known nazi base. But hey, maybe the staircase will indeed lead to a super-secret 75-acre nuclear testing underground complex dug by 320.000 inmates that died from it. Or maybe these numbers are simply completely bogus too. The actual number of victims in KZ Gusen (I + II + III) was 44.600, that includes children and people that died from exhaustion after they were freed).
That's where BJ Blazkowicz busted out of, with my help.
Sounds like Austria is getting Geraldo'd.
You are wrongly informed, did not search deeply enough, or maybe simply don't read German ? A team of Austrian archeologists is preparing to start digging, as soon as the weather allows it, i.e. as soon as precipitation and hydrology levels are so low as to let them work without danger of being suddenly flooded. Here in Austria, this would typically be from the end of April to the beginning of November.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Nobody cares because there is simply no story. That filmmaker just dug a hole and found a staircase. That's all.
TFA says that digging has stopped because the local authorities wanted new permits, but should resume next month. Maybe they'll find something interesting, maybe they won't, but there's one way to find out.
Of course I can read German. Sure, there is probably something there, some tunnels, a storage area maybe, but a secret/unknown "75-acre underground complex"? Those articles are totally exaggerated. There is no evidence at all for anything. Currently it's just rumors.
Radioactive nazi zombies are quite hard to kill.
If TFA is about Nazis?
Still finding secret stuff that these guys did? Scary. ISIS has nothing on them.
It's the original Hydra base.
I remember hearing a story about POWs who substitued regular water for a shipment of heavy water and thus delayed the German program.
Lucky for for all of us they were guarded by a blithering Sargent who would willingly ignore their shenanigans!
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
dug by 320.000 inmates that died from it. Or maybe these numbers are simply completely bogus too. The actual number of victims in KZ Gusen (I + II + III) was 44.600
regarding the 44.600 you seem to forget, that KZ Gusen has been a part of KZ Mauthausen-Gusen, where the number of 320.000 murdered imprisoners has been taking of, like TFA also states.
I lag
While the linked articles may be only highly speculative hype, Germany did have a nuclear program during WWII. What is also certain is that Hitler refused to allocate that program sufficient resources due to his disdain of what he called "Jew science."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"Iron Sky is a 2012 Finnish-Australian-German[4] comic science fiction action film directed by Timo Vuorensola and written by Johanna Sinisalo and Michael Kalesniko.[5][6] It tells the story of a group of Nazi Germans who, having been defeated in 1945, fled to the Moon where they built a space fleet to return in 2018 and conquer Earth."
We have only three years left to get ready!!! :-)
Seriously though, the Nazis show what can happen when soulless bureaucracy gets out of control... And modern schooling was invented in Prussia and made possible the Nazi war effort built on people unquestionably following horrific orders... ... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. ... A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. ... Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men -- but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."
http://johntaylorgatto.wordpre...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?
And:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
While that number is not reasonable by itself and far to high ("only" 200.000 people were deported to Mauthausen and its subcamps), even if it were correct, not all of those prisoners were vitims of slave labour digging a huge underground complex. I guess someone looked into WP and simply took the highest number it could find.
Even though we have this distrubing news of a missed WMD program in Austria that lay hidden for 70 years under occupation and democratic governments, we still have the assurance of "top men" that we known all and found everything in Iraq. Yes indeed, ... "top men" .... some even post here.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I'm not surprised it wasn't in the paper and prominently featured. It would only cause difficulties for people of a certain age who would rather not bring such things up and who deep down inside think that there was an overall benefit.
Same is true of things in the US, although not to the same degree, although I'm sure that if you took comparable small areas (Austria isn't that big, comparable to a single US state), you'd find places (e.g. the deep south) where a significant fraction of the population feels that they got a raw deal with the Emancipation Proclamation and the subsequent "war of northern aggression" or "war between the states" (the popular formulation in the 60s and 70s when I was a youth)
>Hitler did nothing wrong
His bomb didn't work.
"The state exists to serve man."
FTFY
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Oy vey! It's another Holocaust I tell you! A Holocaust!
If, could, fodder, ultimately, failed, secure. Every one of these words as cast is a pablum-brained Orwellian nightmare.
The German Jesus nut was supremacy in all things. After setbacks in The Battle of Britain and Moscow/Stalingrad, the Germans found themselves in a situation where they needed to tighten their belts (both militarily and technologically) and settle for supremacy in merely the most essential things.
It was this belt-tightening challenge they bungled like crazy. Belt-tightening somehow wasn't in the German lexicon.
There was a scold Fuehrer who lived in a shoe
with so many children, he couldn't kick through;
He gave them some broth without any bread,
Then stripped 'em unsoundly to hiss boot instead.
Well, it was a try anyway, but it does capture the main idea.
Jews did WTC and 9/11 was an inside job.
I'll just leave this right here.
Kammler can be linked to every fantastic and most absurd idea on nazi secret projects. However there is a caveat - till now I have never seen his name in any document that can be surely sourced to any atomic project nazis may have had. None, zero, nada, nechego...
The most striking fact that Kammler had nothing to do with nukes is how real nazi nuked scientists tried to survive the last days of the Third Reich. Most interesting was how Heisenberg managed to find food and other essential things for his family - he got help from an old acquaintance working at one of Kammler's key labs! For that, he came to town on a bycicle and the acquaintance was shocked by his shabby looks. So Heisenberg was a lost soul at the end of the war.
Nukes and Kammler, until someone proves the contrary, don't cope. However, this does not mean someone may still find some mega-leftovers of Kammler's Underground Empire. For the sake of what? Well he surely was an early participant of "Amerika Bomber" project, still in a very classical form. He also was the V-2/A-4 boss and there are tons of questions on how deep was his knowledge and participation of such projects like the A-10. He once worked at Luftwaffe and seemed to have been in good relations with Goering, so he could know about such wonders as the Silbervogel. And, at the end he was the last boss of the nazi jet projects (which was the reason why von Braun suddenly stopped at Oberammergau, with this guy breathing at his back). While war demanded some humbleness, it was usual to see many nazi projects exploding into mega-machines. I wouldn't be shocked to see the last of the last of Kammler's projects, the Messerschmidt P.1101, having a megabrother nearby. Or maybe it was just for the P.1101 itself! Once tested, they had to be produced somewhere, in large numbers, in very, very large numbers.
So the huge, nearly empty bunkers. Maybe for one of these bloated conceptions of World Domination. And nukes were just speculation, still without any proof of concept. At the end of the War, nazis still thought that the key to victory was the Very Big, Surely Bad and Really Ugly.
...you Americans should consume fewer cheap Hollywood movies. Do you have any PROOF of your fantasies ?
As someone pointed out: 75 acres. 75. Now Oak Ridge Tennessee was 10,000 acres. Hanford Washington was 586 square miles. There were also large cyclotron facilities at the University of Chicago, and at the large Livermore Radiation Laboratory operated by the University of California. There was also research work done at Princeton and in New Mexico. With everything running, the US had enough material for three bombs in 1945 (the trinity test site, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Hoechst fertilizer company was tasked with concentrating uranium hexaflouride prior to cyclotrons refining it. 75 acres is a start, but not an end.
... these sites were described extensively in decades past, in books that aren't allowed for print in many countries anymore, for being "Nazi apologists", for daring to tell what really happened and not the zionist history revisionism we have today.
The story should instead be, what was already there, that took them 6 decades to clean and/or move to another place, before releasing them to the press?
Not secret. Just forgotten and unimportant and not a priority.
Why underground? As has has been pointed out elsewhere, during the Great War Adolf was an infantryman on the Western Front, who associated safety with being in a bunker underground. So the Nazis wasted much effort constructing vast underground complexes in which to do all sorts of things.
Let's assume there are elevated radiation levels at this site, which is 75 acres. Compared to many industrial sites, that's big; compared to the Hanford estate, or Windscale, or Chelyabinsk 65, or Oak Ridge, or ... it's tiny. Probably not a bomb project, then. What else nuclear-related might Adolf's minions have been up to?
How about: processing pitchblende to recover interesting metals? Such as ...
[1] Uranium. Principal metal to be had from pitchblende. The oxide can be used to make fancy yellow glass. If you're one of Adolf's minions, it's a waste product.
[2] Polonium. Also a waste product.
[3] Radium. Which can be used to make luminous paint for instrument dials, for use in eg aeroplanes. It's not like the Nazis built any aeroplanes, is it?
Actually, it's an acronym for NAtionale soZIalist, the political party.
Wrong again. it's a contraction of a single German word (because compound words are common in Germanic languages), Nazi is the short form of Nationalsozialismus. Ergo it is a contraction and should be capitalised as a proper noun because it's full version is a proper noun.
What, you didn't know the NAZIs were socialists?
Thats because they aren't. The key part of " Nationalsozialismus" is nationalism, not socialism. Nazism is an extreme right wing form of government committed to a single party state and diametrically opposed to communism and Marxism.
One of the first jobs of the Sturmabteilung or SA was to beat up Bolshevik supporters around Munich in the 1920s. By the 1930's when the SA were disbanded and merged into the SS (after the night of the long kinves) there were no Bolseviks left in Germany due to the SA's actions.
You need to learn about the Nazis before commenting about the Nazis.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Some of these claims seem to be overblown.
If you take a look at the Manhattan Project, you get an idea what efforts in research and production (i.e. uranium enrichment) were required.
Well, enrichenment is not really needed. A CANDU-style reactor works fine with natural uranium, and can produce plutonium (for bombs) which is easily separated out chemically. This way, no large-scale enrichenment program - but instead, a need for lots of heavy water. Plutonium is not so nice to work with, but they used slaves for unpleasant work anyway.
They should test the isotope mix of the radioactive site. That will show if it was merely industrial pollution from uranium mining, remains of fuel that has seen use in reactors, or the remains of a bomb test. The latter is not likely. If the nazis made even one working bomb, London or Stalingrad or Moscow would have a ground zero.
Or does 'failed attempt to secure an atomic weapon' and 'failed to develop an atomic weapon' mean two completely different things?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
maybe the staircase will indeed lead to a super-secret 75-acre nuclear testing underground complex
Let's assume there is. Either:
1) it's still there and Allied intelligence never heard anything about it
2) it was there but it got cleaned up after VE-Day by Axis powers (or their Chitauri masters) and Allied intelligence never heard about it.
2a) by detonating the bomb they were working on inside (makes for a better story).
3) Allied intelligence knew about it and covered it up (also a good story).
Or it's not there. Mostly likely explanation sells few newspapers.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
All is nice and very cool, but the US "investigators" forget a few facts:
A) Europe is not a dark place hidden in the dark jungles of Africa: We are at least as devolped as any of the most developed places in the USA, yes, Austria too.
B) We know our history pretty well, and it happens that the Nazis, as good Germans, wrote down every single thing that they did in minute detail. Hell, we even have the time tables of the trains carrying people to Auschwitz! This "secret" complex is far from secret, and it even has it's very own Wikipedia page:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
(In German).
C) The Germans did an excellent job in getting rid of ANY scientist that could have been able to build a basic _reactor_. The only person in Germany that had an idea about fission was Otto Hahn, and he was completely ignored by the military and would have otherwise extremely reluctant to participate as he was involved in helping Germans of jewish religion to escape the country. And for the less agile of mind: No Fission = No U238 / No PU239 = NO Friggin' BOMB.
D) Despite it's "German" Name, Oppenheimer, the father of the A-Bomb' is as USian as a bucket full of burgers, born in NYC (which is NOT a part of Austria, AFAIK)
E) The only reason that Germany still exists today and is not a radioactive crater is that the Allies knew they had no bomb, else they would have called in the Little Boy and the Fat Man to pay my adoptive country a visit (for the slower of mind: That were the names of the two A-Bombs used to nuke the fuck out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
-- 29A the number of the Beast
And why the hell would hey have bothered about hte Amerika Bomber if they had A-10s??
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
Fucking hell, that's a gun with wings!!!
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
Tell me that your Second Amendment allows stuff like this and I will swim all the way to your country and sell my balls to get the nationality.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
is nationalism
Finally. The thread is so hung up with socialism that they've ignored Nationalism!
Now there is nothing wrong with Nationalism and more countries should move towards its goals. You can have right or left wing Nationalism. Nationalism can exist in all the political continuum. It can go far as xenophobia or as welcoming as global, but you can still celebrate nationalism no matter what.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
In May 1945, von Braun had to decide whether to surrender to the U.S. or the USSR. This is how he described the decision:
We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.
Draw your own conclusion about his ethical compass.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
it's a race against evil. If it is captured by the Nazis the armies of darkness will march all over the face of the earth.
Nazis - I hate those guys!
Nazis! Why did it have to be Nazis?
WMD were found in Iraq according to the New York Times..... The NYT is hardly a right-wing supporter so one suspects they're telling the truth here
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/100000003173431.mobile.html?_r=1
Not to mention that, according to Saddam's Number Two Man, many were moved to Syria - one tens to believe that if anyone knows what was going on, he did
http://www.nysun.com/foreign/iraqs-wmd-secreted-in-syria-sada-says/26514/