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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."
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
First, Nazi is a noun not an acronym. Second, the Euro is controlled by the ECB where the Bundesbank has only one vote. It is led by an Italian. However, Merkel is a neoliberal politician fueled by a strategy based on demobilizing the opposition. Key is her phrase of "no alternatives". Her goal is similar to other neoliberals like Cameron to reduce state influnce as much as possible. If you feel conquered its by the world upper class.
Look it now. Merkel pretty much controls Europe -
Look at Angela Merkel now . . . she has Ph.D. in Physics, and a bad bowl-head haircut to boot! A German TV camera team caught her last year buying a jar of mustard in a supermarket in Berlin. The team was filming an advertisement, until one of the crew said. Hey, isn't that the Channcellor or something?"
When was the last time you saw President Obama anywhere, without a half Marine Brigade protecting him . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
While I lived at RAF Gatow, Berlin (dad was in the RAF) during the 1980s, we used to play a heck of a lot in the extensive woods on base - we even played in and around the fairly large bunker on the edge of the airfield. Until, that is, someone discovered a second entrance to the bunker, and a second level - full of aircraft engines, parts, and about 200 tonnes of WW2 era high explosive in the form of rockets, bombs and other stuff. There were two chambers each about the size of a basket ball court.
In the four years we were there, they discovered previously unknown cellars in three major buildings on base (including the Havel School), and a two mile long tunnel linking the airfield with the Havel river.
All of this on an RAF airbase which covered only a few square miles, and had been active in allied hands since the end of WW2.
There is plenty yet to be discovered in ex-Nazi occupied land, mark my words.
Yes, the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) was a socialist party.
I suggest watching the whole thing some time: The Soviet Story
Liberal Fascism
Benito Mussolini was a socialist and earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the socialists in Italy. When he founded the fascist party, its program called for implementing a minimum wage, expropriating property from landowners, repealing titles of nobility, creating state-run secular schools and imposing a progressive tax rate. Mussolini took socialism and turned it in a more populist and militaristic direction, but remained a modernizing, secular man of the left.
The Nazis too were socialists, “enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system,” in the words of the party’s ideologist Gregor Strasser. The party’s platform sounded a lot like that of the Italian fascists. The Nazis wanted to chase conventional Christianity from public life and overturn tradition, replacing them with an all-powerful state. Both Hitler and Mussolini were revolutionaries, bitterly opposed to “reactionary” forces in their societies.
Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism
On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.
Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.
So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:
It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.
. . . . Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.
Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”
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
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
True. I have to say as a Brit visiting Huntsville in Alabama, it was a shock to find that they named the local exhibition centre after the designer of the V rockets that hit London during WW2.
"could of" "would of". Jesus, where the fuck do you people go to school that you learn this crap?
True. I have to say as a Brit visiting Huntsville in Alabama, it was a shock to find that they named the local exhibition centre after the designer of the V rockets that hit London during WW2.
And I was not shocked when I visited the United Kingdom and found that they had built a memorial to Lord Kitchener, a man that was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of South African civilians through neglect born of incompetence, arrogance and mindless prejudice. It seems visiting South African Boers, it seems, regularly go there with the intention of urinating on the memorial. That may shock the sentiments of the average patriotic Briton but the Boers hated both Kitchener and his country with such passion that many of them fought with the Germans during WWI although these days most of them reserve their hatred for Kitchener in particular.
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.
Let me add to your excellent post -- having grown up in Huntsville during the 60's and the peak of von Braun's American fame (not infamy, yet), he serves as an almost perfect corner case for techies to consider as to how they would fit into their larger society to advance their technical dreams. von Braun did not ask to be born into what would become Nazi Germany and when he started working for the army there it was before the Nazi atrocities started. He wasn't particularly interested in weapons and by all accounts his goal was always space flight. The German army resources allowed him to pursue the development of the rockets he had been working on for years before, at that time Germany was not yet the horror it would become. By the time the really bad stuff started happening there -- the deadly slave labor, which his project was involved in, he was stuck -- continue the work or head to prison or execution, most likely the latter by that time in the war; he was arrested in 1944 and released only due to the intervention at the highest levels (Albert Speer, Minister of War Production). Those slave laborers (which he claims to not know the extent of) were doomed from the start; there is nothing he could have done for them. So, just what was he supposed to do? -- given that there was nothing he could have done to improve the lot of the populations under Nazi control? The fact that he was working on weapons aimed at the civil population of England could be problematic but by then the English and American bombers were incinerating German cities. He didn't have the option of just quitting and going away to work on something else. Given the same circumstances what would any of us techies had done? I don't know and I'm glad I will never have to find out. There is an excellent recent bio (2007) of von Braun by Michael Neufeld which tries to address the moral ambiguities of von Braun's life -- worth a read.
Look it now. Merkel pretty much controls Europe -
Look at Angela Merkel now . . . she has Ph.D. in Physics, and a bad bowl-head haircut to boot! A German TV camera team caught her last year buying a jar of mustard in a supermarket in Berlin. The team was filming an advertisement, until one of the crew said. Hey, isn't that the Channcellor or something?"
When was the last time you saw President Obama anywhere, without a half Marine Brigade protecting him . . . ?
On a trip to Iceland years ago I once shared a hot tub with a bunch of locals (which seems to be a favourite Icelandic activity) one of whom turned out to be the president of the country. He was unaccompanied, no aides, no staff, no body guards, no snipers on rooftops no drones packing hellfire missiles hovering above. His driver just dropped him off at the local bathing facility and then used the down time to have the presidential Mercedes changed to summer tires. We had a pleasant conversation about geothermal energy and fisheries management. It was quite surreal because I have experienced a number of state visits including one by the Queen of Denmark, the president of France, the Chancellor of Germany, a Soviet general secretary, a Saudi Arab crown prince, the prime minister of the UK and the President of the USA to name a few. They all had some level of security but it was never really overbearing although the Saudis were pretty paranoid but even the Brits were relatively diplomatic. The only time I felt like I was living under martial law imposed by a foreign invader was during the visit by the US president.
While the NSDAP (acronym for "National Socialist German Workers Party") started of with some elements they had "borrowed" from socialists the ideology changed soon to the absolute opposite. Some of the early members, like the Gregor Strasser you mentioned, stuck to some of those ideas, but they lost all influence. And Strasser is a good example: he was killed in the "night of the long knieves" in 1934 once Hitler felt he was in a position strong enough to get rid of former allies that didn't follow the new party line and completely sold out to the establishment which he, rhetorically, had opposed in former years. Not a whiff of "socialism", except in the party's name, remained - but it never had been anything but propaganda anyway to attract popular support. If you read "Mein Kampf", which Hitler wrote back in 1924 (nearly 10 years before coming into power), you will have to look very hard to find anything that resembles "socialist" ideas. Unfortumately, no-one seems to have read that book back then - but it's hard to blame people for that, it's such an unpallatable piece of shit...
There are openings accessing a Nazi test facility in Oberammergau adjacent to the old kasern. They were off limits in 1970 when I entered them. I made the first exploration on foot. For the second I took a bicycle. The facility is a series of tunnels and chambrrs paved with macadam and lit by overhead lights. Some of the smaller rooms were still closed off with locked gates in 1970. The tunnels went all the way to a highway tunnel just South of Murnau on the road to Garmisch-Partenkirsch, 19 kilometers distant. The exits from these tunnels and old loading docks are now mostly sealed,but still visible in the road tunnel. At the time I explored them, they were alleged to be booby trapped. However, I am former EOD and ordnance and saw no trace of booby traps or any other obstacles or hazards. There is also an old explosives factory hidden under a former chocolate factory in Westphalia. So, yes, there are many old Nazi bunkers still to be fully explored.