Operation Werewolf: Luftwaffe suicide operations against Allied bombers in 1945

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IN Göring's absence there emerged a crippling indecisiveness about certain secret Luftwaffe projects. Back in February [1945], acting on the advice of Speer and Baumbach, Hitler had agreed to go ahead with Project Mistletoe, which the air force had long been planning: 120 piggy-backed planes -- Ju 88s coupled with Me 109s -- were standing by in East Prussia to bomb the principal Soviet power stations at last. Göring too approved, and the fuel was set aside. But in mid-March Hitler decided to hurl these planes at the bridges across the Oder and Neisse rivers the moment the major Russian offensive began. Then he changed his mind; he would use twenty-six of them against the bridges across the Vistula, in the Russians' rear. General Koller objected that the project had originally been designed to wipe out Stalin's power supplies, and that the remaining Mistletoes would not suffice for this project. Hitler hesitated, and was lost -- torn between the immediate tactical needs of battle and his long-term strategic objectives, between inevitable defeat and possible ultimate victory. "Imagine," he told Koller on March 26, "if the enemy had bombed all our power stations simultaneously! I'll forego the Vistula bridges -- we can deal with them later."

"Ribbentrop," Hitler told his foreign minister, who was also anxious to end the war by diplomacy, "we're going to win this one by a nose." He mentioned the jet planes -- in March 1945 Himmler's underground factory at Nordhausen would in fact assemble five hundred Me 262's and in April twice as many. The first Type XXI submarines -- capable of cruising to Japan underwater and at high speed -- were about to enter service. By late 1945 bombproof underground refineries would be turning out three hundred thousand tons of synthetic gasoline per month. "If only," he remarked to Göbbels on March 21, "Göring had done more to rush the jets into service!" And he added bitterly, "He's just gone down to the Obersalzberg again with two trains, to see his wife."

Göring returned to Berlin keener on peacemaking than ever. When top civil servant Hans Lammers visited the Chancellery for the last time on March 27, he found the Führer very upset about the Reichsmarschall "attempting to start negotiations with the Allies." Emmy Göring certainly dropped hints to Görnnert, who stayed behind with the train, that her husband was thinking of contacting the Americans, and Göring confided to Speer that he was sure that the Americans knew he was on their side. One day, five American airmen parachuted into the Schorf Heath, and Göring ordered their captain brought to Carinhall. Perhaps he was thinking ahead, to ways of establishing links to the Americans. But this officer had only been a movie director in Hollywood, and Göring lost interest in him.

General Koller's diary establishes how concerned Göring was to end the bloodshed now that Germany appeared to have lost. "Nobody tells us anything," Koller complained to Göring on March 28. "We badly need directives from top level."

The Reichsmarschall agreed. He too is in the dark.

F[ührer] tells him nothing, won't permit the slightest political step. For instance, a British diplomat tried to enter into talks with us in Sweden, but this was flatly forbidden by Hitler.

F has prohibited Reichsmarschall to use his own extensive contacts. . . . F has also rejected every opening that the foreign minister has reported to him.

Hitler ordered Göring to attend every war conference at 4:00 P.M., but he dealt preferentially with SS Gruppenführer Kammler. "Göring," wrote Göbbels on April 3, "has to listen day after day without being able to offer the slightest excuse."

Under pressure from every side, Göring made the decision to authorize Luftwaffe suicide missions. Volunteer pilots would ram the Luftwaffe's few remaining Me 109s into Allied bombers. In mid-March British code-breakers had already intercepted the message that Göring ordered all Geschwader commodores to read out secretly to pilots who had completed fighter training:

The fateful struggle for the Reich, our people, and our native soil is at its climax. Virtually the whole world is fighting against us and is resolved to destroy us and, in blind hatred, to exterminate us. With our last and utmost strength we are standing up to this menacing onslaught. Now as never before in the history of the German fatherland we are threatened with final annihilation from which there can be no revival. This danger can be arrested only by the utmost preparedness of the supreme German warrior spirit.

Therefore, I turn to you at this decisive moment. By consciously staking your own lives, save the nation from extinction! I summon you for an operation from which you will have only the slenderest chance of returning. Those of you who respond will be sent back at once for pilot training. Comrades, you will take the place of honor beside your most glorious Luftwaffe warriors. In the hour of supreme danger, you will give the whole German people hope of victory, and set an example for all time.

~Göring

The first mission, code-named Werewolf, ran into pragmatic objections. General Koller pointed out that if the Me 109s were used up on this, all reconnaissance and conventional-fighter operations would collapse until Focke-Wulf's new Ta 152 and the Me 262 became available in large numbers. But Hitler gave the go-ahead. Several hundred volunteers were given ten days of ideological training at Stendal, and on April 4, General Pelz, whose IX Air Corps would control the mission, reported all ready for Werewolf. "For psychological reasons," Pelz told the Luftwaffe high command, "we should not delay too long with the actual operation." Three days later Werewolf was executed -- one of the most desperate Luftwaffe operations of the war. The Luftwaffe war diary confirms that 180 suicide crews took part, escorted into battle by their less-exalted comrades from JG7 and the first squadron of KG54(J). Astonished Allied radio monitors heard patriotic marches flooding the fighter-control wavelength and a female choir singing the German national anthem, while anonymous voices exhorted these 180 pilots to die -- now -- for the Führer and for Germany. Seventy of them did.

Such was the heroism of which Göring's young airmen were capable even on the threshold of national defeat.

But there were also acts of a different hue. On March 30, Messerschmitt ferry-pilot Henry Fay picked up a brand new Me 262 jet to fly to Neuburg Airbase on the Danube. He deserted to the Americans and handed the top-secret plane over in return for a promise of immediate release to his mother. Fay also revealed to the Americans where the Me 262 and its fuel were manufactured, and described its most vulnerable points. "Aim for the engines," he recommended, "as they catch fire easily."

At 5:00 A.M. on April 16, 1945, the final Soviet push across the Oder began. Sixty more suicide pilots crash-bombed their planes onto the Oder bridges in a desperate attempt to save Berlin.

But the decay of defeat had already reached the highest levels in the capital. Learning that even Speer had disobeyed orders to destroy bridges within Berlin, Hitler challenged him to say whether he still believed in victory.

"I cannot say that I do," the minister replied. But he agreed without enthusiasm that he still wished that the war could be won.

"I thank you for saying the best you could," replied Hitler. "But I can say only this" -- and Göring, watching, saw the perspiration standing out on his brow -- "We must hold on until the last hour! No matter how much Donner and Blitzen! I know we shall come through."
 


    ~David Irving, Göring 


SS General Hans Kammler took over the Nazi weapons program and used slave labor to construct underground factories etc. for such things as, the Me262 jet fighter, the V1 and V2 rockets, the Nazi Atom bomb, the Sonic cannon, and other stuff of legends like German flying saucers.

All reference to Kammler was struck from any official Nuremberg documents. It is alleged that Kammler struck a deal with US General George Patton to turn over the secrets to the Americans in return for his “disappearance.”

 

As the fall of Germany approached, the Nazi Leaders reverted to an ambitious project created by Gauleiter Franz Hofer who had become high commissioner for the Italian Tyrol and the Southern Alps. The project foresaw setting up an incredible fortress in the mountains, including parts of Italy, Austria and Bavaria. Hofer submitted his plan to Hitler's aide, Martin Bormann in November 1944, but he had prepared for this moment back in 1938 when Nazi agents carefully mapped all mountain passes, caves, bridges, highways, and located sights for underground factories, munitions dumps, arms and food caches. To complete work on this fortress, Hofer demanded a slave labor force of a quarter of a million, 70% Austrian workers and 30% men of the Tyrolese home guard. So-called U-Plants were to be set up underground as gigantic workshops and launching pads for the secret weapons which were to turn the tide of the war in favor of the Nazis. Among these were some 74 tunnels along Lake Garda, in Northern Italy, which were to be adapted and transformed into a vast assembly plant by FIAT of Turin in close collaboration with the department of Minister Albert Speer. Seven other tunnels along Lake Garda, near Limone, were to produce several weapons tested at the Hermann Göring Institute of Riva del Garda.

According to the archives of the German High Command and of the Allied Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, other plants in vital areas of Central Germany, code named M-Werke, were to produce powerful missiles such as the giant A.9/A.10 destined to destroy New York and Washington. But most important was the Alpine area, for it was from there that the supreme weapons were to come.

While we know that one of Hitler's Doppelgängers died in the Berlin Chancellery bunker, an elaborate suicide cover-up would have been required for an important reason: To hide the true whereabouts of the Southern Redoubt, which was never found by the Allies and which, according to some observers, was the secret site of Nazi nuclear weapons research. To conceal its location, it would have been necessary to spread a new propaganda  myth that there never was a hidden Mountain Redoubt, no Nazi nuclear weapons site, and the Führer directed the war from his Berlin bunker, where he finally committed suicide.

Franz W. Seidler, the author of Phantom Alpenfestung? Die geheimen Baupläne der Organisation Todt discovered plans and maps from the Organization Todt, for a real Alpenfestung, the National Redoubt that many of the Allies feared, but was more hype than real.

However, the author shows that, given 6 months or a year more, this Alpenfestung would surely have been a reality. There were plans for tunnel installations, including FHQs and HQs for all the armed forces, all over the place in the Berchtesgaden/Salzburg areas (and elsewhere). Many of these were started, but got little beyond the initial excavation phase.

If the war had gone on, almost all the critical German industry and command/control centers would have been in underground bomb-proof facilities ... facilties made by slave laborers from concentration camps.

As it was, by 1945, Thuringen already had a massive underground installation making V-1s, V-2s, and jet engines (Mittelwerk/Mittelbau/Dora site, near Nordhausen). Another underground site near Jena made Me-262 jets. Work had started on what was apparently a secret underground Führer HQ and command/control center in the Jonas Valley, near Erfurt.

Another underground site east of Salzburg had a functioning petroleum refinery. Underground installations in the Berchtesgaden area were equipped with enough supplies to last several months, if not years. These underground facilties were certainly no myth, but the war ended before most of them amounted to much.

Work on the German anti-radar Feuerball, or fireball, had been speeded up during the fall of 1944 at a Luftwaffe experimental center near Oberammergau, Bavaria. There, and at the aeronautical establishment at Wiener Neustadt, the first fireballs were produced. Later, when the Russians moved closer to Austria, the workshops producing the fireballs were moved to Black Forest.



Efforts were accelerated to perfect the craft in 1944, but work seemed to have been shifted to the development of the Kugelblitz (Round Lightning), a round, symmetrical airplane, quite unlike any previous flying object known in terrestrial aviation history.

Renato Vesco, in his book Intercept, UFO, writes that the Kugelblitz was tested some time in February, 1945 over the great underground complex at Kahla, in Thuringia. As the Allied forces crossed the Rhine, the only craft of its type was destroyed by the SS on instructions from Berlin, to prevent its capture.

So, could this story be considered fact? Could the Nazis have been developing craft of such advancement?

History has it that not only were they at war, which required much in the way of manpower, but they took on incredible projects such as constructing huge underground complexes at Nordhausen in the Harz mountains, Pennemünde and others. They also had their naval vessels provide support for a very detailed study of the Antartic in which they were alleged to have been building underground bases as well.



Peenemünde was a hive of activity in its heyday, before a major RAF bombing raid in 1943, the biggest British mission of the war, destroyed large sections of the facility.

Rockets were tested there until 1945 and fired at Britain from launch pads on the French coast.

Researchers have found evidence that tests were carried out to fire rockets from submarines, while a chilling speech by the camp commandant, Walter Dornberger, shows where the rockets were headed next.

"The crowning of our work will be the America machine, a two-stage rocket which will cover the distance between Germany and the United States in around 30 minutes,"' Dornberger wrote in a speech for a visit by SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

During the summer of 1943, the Peenemünde research centre was seized by the SS.   Brigadeführer Hans Kammler Kammler was Himmler's most trusted aide.  He had a reputation of being the man who could get things done. 
     
The Reichsführer-SS wanted underground  factories for the production of war materials in natural caves and underground tunnels "completely impervious to Allied bombs”  immune to enemy bombing  and Kammler succeeded in creating underground workshops and living quarters from a cave system in the Hartz mountains in central Germany in what (Albert) Speer, writing to congratulate him, called 'an almost impossibly short period of two months' a feat, he continued, 'unsurpassable even by American standards."

 

A9/10 drawing dated June 10, 1941. Hypersonic A9 stage highlighted

Allied intelligence knew that the Germans were working on a "New York Rocket." At least twenty of these large rockets were built at the SS underground base at Nordhausen. What happened to them is one of the enduring mysteries of World War II.

During the close of WWII, General Patton's army came upon a very unusual find at a captured German facility in France (near the V1 and V2 launch sites).

This finding was described in Patton's biography, which included specific data and photos, and also in an official document known as the "Patton memo". In fact, General Patton specifically warned the U.S. military of unbelievable facilities being found.

General Patton described coming upon a huge runway that was 200 feet wide, 11,300 feet long, and was made of concrete which was 14 feet thick. The memo stated that the runway was built by the Germans using thousands of slave laborers, and took several years to complete. It was his written opinion that the construction materials and labor force surpassed that of the great pyramids (his words). The runway incorporated a unique feature at the far end. An upward turned "ski slope" was built into the runway to allow larger aircraft with heavy cargo loads to take off more easily. This "ski slope" feature was later incorporated into the designs of British and Russian aircraft carriers.

The U.S. constructed such a runway in 1972 for our incoming and outgoing secret horizontal take off and landing spacecraft at Hunter Army Airfield Savannah GA, which was never officially closed.

In March and April of 1945, General George S. Patton and his Third Army were not racing towards Berlin, but across southern Bavaria.

They were, claims author Joseph P. Farrell, in his book, Reich of the Black Sun, making haste towards

(1) the huge Skoda munitions works at Pilsen;
(2) Prague; and
(3) a region of the Harz Mountains in Thuringia

One is informed by countless history books that this maneuver was thought to be necessary by the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHEAF) because of reports that the Nazis were planning to make a last stand in the “Alpine National Redoubt” a network of fortified mountains stretching from the Alps to the Harz Mountains. The Third Army's movements, so the story goes, were designed to cut off the "escape route" of Nazis fleeing the carnage of Berlin. Maps are produced in old history books, accompanied in some cases by de-classified German plans - some dating from the Weimar Republic! - for just such a Redoubt. Case settled.

However, there is a problem with that explanation. Allied aerial reconnaissance would likely have told Eisenhower and SHAEF that there were precious few fortified strong points in the "National Redoubt". Indeed, it would have told them that the "Redoubt" was no redoubt at all. General Patton and his divisional commanders would most certainly have been privy to at least some of this information. So why the extraordinary and almost reckless speed of his advance, an advance the post-war Allied Legend would have us believe was to cut off the escape route of Nazis fleeing Berlin, who it turns out weren't fleeing, to a Redoubt that didn't exist?

Hitler, during a conference with his generals in the Bunker in 1945, made the wild pronouncement, when questioned by one of them as to why the strongest and best formations left to the Wehrmacht were deployed, not in defence of Berlin, but of Prague, that Prague was the key to winning the war. Allied military intelligence also confirmed that the strongest SS Panzer formations were deployed in the vicinity of Prague, an order of battle that, on the plain face of things, made no military sense to them, other than, as the Allies' own estimates of the situation concluded, that Berlin had ceased to be an important economic and military target.



Heinkel He-177 “Griffin” with He-219A escort

One He177 was secretly being readied in Czechoslovakia to carry the planned
German Atomic Bomb towards the war's end

One of the many Third Reich construction projects that was started but never finished was a series of underground complexes in central Thüringen, southeast of the city of Gotha (near the concentration camp at Ohrdruf, the first such camp found by the Americans on German soil). This project had several code names, depending on what part was meant, and the names also changed over time - the following names were used for all or part of this complex - Siegfried, Olga, Burg, Jasmin; the designation S/III was sometimes used for the entire project. The main works were dug into a hill forming the north side of the Jonas Valley, between Crawinkel and Arnstadt. This part of the project was reportedly intended as a last-ditch headquarters facility for Hitler and his staff, should they fall back from Berlin into the interior of Germany (some reports say Hitler actually spent the end of March 1945 in this or another nearby underground Führer Headquarters). Other theories say this or a nearby site were intended for production of the intercontinental "Amerika" rocket, and even testing and production of a Nazi atomic bomb. Most of the complex never advanced much further than the tunnel digging stage, and the Soviets blasted most of the tunnel entrances after the war. The exact purpose of this facility remains in doubt, as does its code-names ("Siegfried" and "Olga" may actually have been names of other sites).

Ohrdruf was reached by General Patton about April 11, 1945. Colonel R. Allen accompanying him described the installations extensively in his book:

The underground installations were amazing. They were literally subterranean towns. There were four in and around Ohrdruf: one near the horror camp, one under the Schloss, and two west of the town. Others were reported in near-by villages. None were natural caves or mines. All were man-made military installations.

Over 50 feet underground, the installations consisted of two and three stories several miles in length and extending like the spokes of a wheel. The entire hull structure was of massive reinforced concrete. Purpose of the installations was to house the High Command after it was bombed out of Berlin. This places also had paneled and carpeted offices, scores of large work and store rooms, tiled bathrooms with bath tubs and showers, flush toilets, electrically equipped kitchens, decorated dining rooms and mess halls, giant refrigerators, extensive sleeping quarters, recreation rooms, separate bars for officers and enlisted personnel, a moving picture theatre, and air-conditioning and sewage systems.

Deep within his embattled Führerbunker in Berlin Hitler had boasted that Germany was on the verge of using weapons that would win the war for them at 'five minutes past midnight.' "The desperate ravings of a lunatic" is history's too pat answer to Hitler's intriguing claim. Yet Farrell, Nick Cook (author of The Hunt For Zero Point), and others have argued that the Nazis indeed had developed amazing technologies. Not only did General Patton and his Third Army stop an atomic nightmare, they also secured the evidence of Germany's secret scientific advances based upon bizarre physics. And that, suggests Farrell, may be why Patton soon died thereafter

The factual circumstances of Patton's death are plain enough. On Sunday, December 9, 1945, General Patton and Major General Hobart Gray were being driven by twenty-three old Private Horace Woodring in a 1939 Cadillac for an afternoon of pheasant shooting on the estate of a German friend. At 11.45am they were passing through the outskirts of Mannheim when a US Army truck turned left in front of the Cadillac to enter the Quartermaster Corps camp. Patton's driver, attention momentarily diverted away from the road by a remark that Patton himself had made, belatedly noticed the truck in front of them, and swerved the General's car to avoid a head-on collision.

None of the others involved in the accident were hurt, and all were able to walk away from the accident. Not so General Patton. He had suffered a broken neck, and the prognosis was paralysis from the neck down. From this point the General recovered rapidly at the military hospital in, making such good progress that until the afternoon of December 19th, his doctors were seriously considering moving him to Boston. But that afternoon his breathing difficulties increased dramatically and suddenly. On December 20th he suffered breathlessness and pallor, and Patton, who had had a prior history of embolism, died in his sleep on December 21st at 5:50 P.M.

The fact that Patton alone of all the victims of the automobile accident suffered serious injuries, plus the fact of his recovery and then sudden decline in a military hospital, have fueled various conspiracy theories. One of these, that Patton knew of the Soviet shooting of American, Canadian, and British prisoners of war and threatened to expose the Allied knowledge and cover-up of the affair, was revealed by a Ukrainian defector with close ties to the Soviet KGB, who alleged that Patton's accident was no accident, and that the KGB had been behind it. Another version is similar, but has the OSS or other Allied entity performing the 'accident" and subsequent "medical complications."

If there is any truth in the idea of a conspiracy behind the ironic death of America's most decorated and celebrated general officer of the Second World War, then the explanation is likely to lie in the more esoteric and arcane secrets he and his intelligence officers uncovered in Thuringia and at the Skoda Works in Pilsen. Having performed a preliminary assessment of the second and third generation weaponry Kammler's scientists had begun to research, the OSS specialists who arrived at these sites must have immediately realized the material would require the tightest security and highest classification then possible, beyond that even of the Manhattan Project, not least because what was uncovered would give lie to the emerging Allied Legend of nuclear technological superiority. Patton was a potential threat to the security of this operation and a risk to the continued secret American development of Kammler's technology in conjunction with Operation Paperclip.

If there is truth to the conspiracy theories of Patton's incongruous death, then of all the theories, this would seem to be the most plausible motivation and explanation for the murder of America's famous general. Patton, and his famous mouth, had to be silenced.

It is significant in this respect that on April 17, 1945, the United States Atomic Energy Commission inspected various underground workings at Ohrdruf, and removed technical equipment before dynamiting surface entrances. The US authorities have classified all 1945 documents relating to Ohrdruf for a minimum period of 100 years.


 

The Messerschmitt Me-163 rocket fighter aircraft, perhaps better known as the Komet,
was possibly the most radical German manned fighter aircraft design to actually enter the WW II combat theatre. Here Me-163 Komet fighters of the Luftwaffe climb vertically through an
8th Air Force bomber formation and its top fighter cover before swooping down
on the heavies for their short but often deadly attack.