Igor Witkowski

One of the enduring myths of World War II is that of the Nazi "super-weapons". Starting with the jet aircraft - Messerschmitt Me.262 and Arado Ar.234 - and then the "V" weapons, this has been a source of fascination for many over the years. Research widened into associated areas - missiles, exotic armaments, super-heavy tanks and "paper aeroplanes" of all sorts, from those that nearly went into service (the Horten Ho.229 flying wing), to those that were ordered but never made it into production, to those that only really existed on the back of some designer's cigarette packet. And the rumours go further down a whole lot of rabbit holes...

Polish author Igor Witkowski has addressed this eager market with his book Truth about the Wunderwaffe. In this book, he covers all these subjects in some detail. There is a particularly interesting section on Focke Wulf aircraft designer Kurt Tank, with an account of his relocation to Argentina and his work on the indigenous Argentinian jet fighter, the I.Ae. Pulqui II. This was based on his unrealised Luftwaffe jet fighter design, the Ta.183 - a design which, in the hands of a different design team, was the genesis for Russia's MiG-15.

Other sections deal with more prosaic projects - recoilless weapons, infra-red sights, proximity fuses, and so on. Some of these get quite technical. But the part of this book that has gathered the most attention is the last 50 pages of text, where Witkowski talks at length about a project which he refers to as "The Bell". This is based on an account that he unearthed about an exotic machine deep in an underground installation, which emitted strange energies, caused plants to wither and die, and caused people in its vicinity to suffer symptoms that sound suspiciously like radiation sickness.

Witkowski makes a case for this being some sort of experimental anti-gravity device. His evidence is sparse, though his analysis sounds remotely plausible. He cites some authorities, such as the British investigative journalist Nick Cook and the maverick physicist Professor Eric Laithwaite; and some of his conclusions seem to have some congruency with the work of Dr, Robert Forward, an American aviation engineer who tried to patent an anti-gravity machine in the 1980s, but only failed because, although his maths was sound, the technologies required to make the machine were so esoteric as to be beyond human reach in the lifetime of the patent.

Forward's work was mathematically sound; but Witkowski's evidence is less so. Throughout the book, he offers little substantiated evidence of some of his more remarkable claims. Whilst his work is backed by documentary evidence, much of this is based on second-hand reports from not necessarily reliable witnesses. And that's the problem. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but Witkowski only offers ordinary evidence. His approach is more rigorous than many writers who probe conspiracy theories, but it only goes so far.

Having said that, there is much in this book that is thought-provoking and rational. The account of the various Nazi underground installations suggests that the Nazi propaganda myth of the "Alpine Redoubt" that the Reich's leaders were supposed to retreat to, to continue the war by other means after the collapse of the regime, might have been some clever misdirection, and that redoubt was not in the Alps but instead in the Riesegebirgen, the mountains along the current-day border between the Czech Republic and Poland. And if we allow that the story of "The Bell" might contain a kernel of truth, then the outcome of this would be that all the stories about crashed UFOs in a secret hangar in Nevada - and, indeed, the recent resurgence of UFO sightings from otherwise reliable sources - might have their basis, not in improbable aliens but in (slightly) less improbable secret German projects. It makes the rumours and theories less unlikely. Not by much, but certainly a little more likely.

For me, though, my main problem with this book was not the unlikeliness of its claims - I was prepared for that; and indeed, Witkowski's style is not quite as credulous as I was expecting - but the translation (which is poor) and the design (where illustrations do not relate to the adjacent text or are displaced by a number of pages). The translation, in particular, shows signs of being a literal one, with no editing made to render the text into a proper English format. Non-English word order and grammatical constructions persist throughout. And indeed, the translation renders some more technical sections - such as that on recoilless weapons - almost completely incomprehensible. Many of the sources used are Polish, and even where they are from German originals, it seems likely that the English translation is of the Polish translation of those German documents, rather than a direct German to English translation.

This is all something of a shame. The technical sections on more conventional weapons are worthwhile, if the reader can persist with them; and there is a clear sense that the development of advanced weaponry was hindered very much by Hitler's own ideas about the value of competing teams, and his dislike of defensive weapons technology. Surface-to-air missiles, in particular, are highlighted as an area where Hitler diverted development work to the V weapons because he believed that the best form of defence was attack, leaving his cities open to aerial bombardment whilst he waited for the public will to prosecute the war in Britain to evaporate under the onslaught of the V-1 and V-2s. This did not happen.

And interestingly, Witkowski makes it clear that Germany was unlikely to have an atomic weapon in the short term, There was no German "Manhattan Project", but rather competing teams taking different approaches to making an atomic bomb. Hitler hoped that competition between these teams would deliver a super-weapon; it is good for us that he was so very wrong.

So: I found this book thought-provoking, even if some of its more outlandish claims cannot be said to be substantiated on the strength of the evidence Witkowski presents. There is more to be said about "The Bell", if more evidence emerges. But om the strength of this book, that subject must remain a matter for conjecture and nothing more.… (meer)