Nazi Superweapons

[nacho]

RC has his UFO thread, so I thought I'd throw together a fun Nazi superweapons/occultism/what-the-fuck-were-they-doing thread. Because I really want to believe there is a Nazi moonbase.

Probably the most used Nazi weirdo experiment is "The Bell."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Glocke

You'll see at that link that this is the inspiration for the Outpost franchise, Hellboy, Iron Sky, and others... It's also suspiciously Star Treky in that it's powered by red mercury!

Claims about the existence of Die Glocke originated in the works of Igor Witkowski. His 2000 Polish language book Prawda O Wunderwaffe (The Truth About The Wonder Weapon, reprinted in German as Die Wahrheit über die Wunderwaffe), refers to it as "The Nazi-Bell". Witkowski wrote that he first discovered the existence of Die Glocke by reading transcripts from an interrogation of former Nazi SS Officer Jakob Sporrenberg. According to Witkowski, he was shown the supposedly classified transcripts in August 1997 by an unnamed Polish intelligence contact who claimed to have access to Polish government documents regarding Nazi secret weapons.[2] Witkowski maintains that he was only allowed to transcribe the documents and was not allowed to make any copies. Although no evidence of the veracity of Witkowski's claims have been produced, they reached a wider audience when they were retold by British author Nick Cook, who added his own speculations to Witkowski's claims in The Hunt for Zero Point.[4]

Allegedly an experiment carried out by Third Reich scientists working for the SS in a German facility known as Der Riese ("The Giant")[5] near the Wenceslaus mine and close to the Czech border, Die Glocke is described as being a device "made out of a hard, heavy metal" approximately 9 feet wide and 12 to 15 feet high having a shape similar to that of a large bell. According to Cook, this device ostensibly contained two counter-rotating cylinders which would be "filled with a mercury-like substance, violet in color. This metallic liquid was code-named "Xerum 525" and was otherwise cautiously "stored in a tall thin thermos flask a meter high encased in lead".[6] Additional substances said to be employed in the experiments, referred to as Leichtmetall (light metal), "included thorium and beryllium peroxides".[6] Cook describes Die Glocke as emitting strong radiation when activated, an effect that supposedly led to the death of several unnamed scientists[7] and various plant and animal test subjects.[6] Based upon certain external indications, Witkowski speculates that the ruins of a metal framework in the vicinity of the Wenceslas mine (aesthetically dubbed "The Henge") may have once served as test rig for an experiment in "anti-gravity propulsion" generated with Die Glocke;[8] others, however, dismiss the derelict structure as simply being a conventional industrial cooling tower.

Nazi occultism, generally, is pretty crazy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_occultism), but it's always fun when you read about how the Nazis tried to use various occult ideas practically... Like anti gravity/reality shift shit.

Sometimes it's just normal weirdness, like the whole Tibet thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_German_expedition_to_Tibet

The outfit responsible for all the Indiana Jones-style Nazi occult obsessiveness was the Ahnenerbe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenerbe). Some of their expeditions are really pretty goofy:

Grönhagen agreed to lead a voyage through the Karelia region of Finland, to record pagan sorcerers and witches.

The root of the Antarctic base conspiracy theory comes from the New Swabia expedition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Swabia#New_Swabia_expedition). While it seems inconsequential, it was top secret and suspiciously funded by the Ahnenerbe . So why did an organization devoted to finding out if ancient societies were of Aryan origins fund a seemingly innocuous Antarctic mission?

Of course, that's all a bunch of BS. The ultimate neo-pagan emo freakout given a huge budget and a war machine to propel it. The real fun stuff is in how close the Nazis got to actually making scary weapons...

Project Giant remains shrouded in mystery... It's a series of underground complexes probably intended to maintain Germany's industry in light of air raids and everything else...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Riese

But their real purpose can just be guessed at and, supposedly, we've only found and explored half of the complex.

These projects required 328,000 cubic yards of reinforced concrete (including small quantities of masonry), 277,000 cubic yards of underground passages, 36 miles of roads with six bridges, and 62 miles of pipes. The "Giant" complex alone consumed more concrete than the entire population had at its disposal for air-raid shelters in 1944

Before the entry of the Red Army some underground structures were probably destroyed, or at least the tunnels leading to them were blown up. In the documents of the Third Reich there are records which allow an assessment of the quantity of materials used in the construction of Project Riese and the volume of the tunnels. On this basis it appears that about half of the underground corridors have not been found yet.

There there are the superweapons...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderwaffe

All of those are pretty awesome...and, if they had had the time, scary. But the best is the Sun Gun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_gun

Later during World War II, a group of scientists at a research center in Hillersleben, Germany began to expand on Oberth’s idea of creating a superweapon that could utilize the sun's energy. This so-called "sun gun" would be part of a space station 5,100 miles above Earth. The scientists calculated that a huge reflector, made of metallic sodium and with an area of 3.5 square miles, could produce enough focused heat to make an ocean boil or burn a city.[1] After being questioned by Allied officers, the Germans claimed that the sun gun could be completed within 50 or 100 years.

[nacho]

Not-so-superweapons!

Just when you think you've gotten to the end of the bizarre by-products of World War II, you learn about talking Nazi dogs. The question is: How official were they? We'll look into the school — or possibly the con game — of talking dogs.

Here's what we know. In 1930, Margarethe Schmidt lived with her mother in a relatively large house, and kept Asra, a Great Dane. Asra gave birth to five puppies, and the Schmidts took in a terrier. Somewhere along the line, all the dogs began learning to talk. And at some later point along the line, reports went out that these talking, spelling, and "reasoning," dogs, would go out into the battlefields and the villages and start working for the Nazis.

The idea that dogs could talk was not unprecedented in Germany. In the 1920s, a dog named Don, that would bark his name, tell people he was hungry, and ask for "kuche," became a celebrity and brought his owner a great deal of wealth. The Nazis harbored a sentimentality for animals, and a belief in the deep connection between humans and nature. Great Danes speaking German and helping their human comrades didn't seem that crazy. This might be why German newspapers published plans for educated dogs taking over low-level command posts and helping out on the battlefields. One dog, Rolf, reportedly learned to spell with his paw. He spelled out his thoughts on religion - in between hitting on women and asking them if he could wag their tails. Margarethe Schmidt was referred to as an "animal psychologist," in these pieces. Possible uses for the new educated dogs that she churned out were bandied about in the German power structure.

On the other hand, people who actually saw the educated wonder dogs generally agreed that they saw little more than the Clever Hans effect. Clever Hans was a horse who was said to talk and to do math problems by tapping his hoof, but was shown to be responding to clues in the body language of his trainer and the people around him. When the crowd relaxed back (after the proper number of taps that had been achieved), Hans stopped tapping. Animal behaviorists have, ever since, had to take pains not to let their expressions or body language show when they are gauging animal reaction.

The "speaking" dogs didn't speak. One guest was told they all had colds. They seemed to respond to trainers and to rehearsed commands. After the war - and after posing for a lot of pictures with her educated dogs - Margarethe Schmidt agreed with this assessment, saying that she received no money from the Nazi government and had no real plans with them. She was only running a sort of circus.

So the question remains a mystery. Did Germany actually try to train an army of talking Nazi dogs?