Hitler’s Secret Science: The Secret Files of the Third Reich-ZZ

In the crucible of World War II, Germany’s most brilliant scientists raced to create an arsenal of terrifying new weapons of mass destruction.

A stealth-like transatlantic spacecraft called the Silver Bird.

An invisible death ray straight out of science fiction.

Rockets, flying saucers, even an atomic bomb.

Seventy years later, long secret Nazi files reveal the classified blueprints for these and many other devastating wonder weapons.

They are the masterworks of a desperate quest to terrify America and their allies, win the war, and rule the world for a thousand years.

April 1945.

The war against Germany is at an end and the Third Reich emerges victorious.

Hitler’s flight to New York is escorted by supersonic jets and greeted with German victory celebrations like those in occupied France.

State ceremonies are staged theatrically to heighten the historic moment.

A Nazi salute from the Statue of Liberty.

New York is in ruins with only just enough left standing for a victory parade to Wall Street.

It is the ultimate nightmare of how World War II could have ended, thanks to Hitler’s own dream team of hundreds of scientific masterminds.

Rocket science superstar Werner Von Braun.

Engineer, mathematician and physicist Irene Breth.

Aerospace engineer Eugen Zenger.

Even a Nobel Prize winning nuclear physicist, Werner Heisenberg.

Through the 20s and 30s, the Germans technologically were very, very interested in rocket development, science development, tech.

This sort of really advanced aerospace development really became a German forte that the other nations around the world were really lagging behind.

From this now defunct, top secret, high-tech German complex, thousands of brilliant engineers, physicists, chemists and their staff are generously funded from the Nazi treasury.

Provided with the most modern laboratories in Europe and ordered to develop the deadliest armaments the world has never seen.

The delta-winged Lippisch P13.

A vertical takeoff rotor-winged warplane half a century ahead of its time.

A flying aircraft carrier.

And the Zilberfogel, the Silver Bird.

A supersonic suborbital spacecraft capable of bringing the Blitz to Broadway.

They could have launched a one-way attack on America, ditched the bombers in the ocean, dropped a handful of tons on New York perhaps.

We certainly didn’t have any defenses that would have stopped them.

Silverbird never leaves the drawing board, but today questions still remain.

How did German scientists leap so far ahead of their enemies? What’s the science behind these machines? And how close does the genius of Nazi science bring Adolf Hitler to the brink of victory? In the early stages of World War II, Hitler’s blitzkrieg races across a helpless Europe.

Germany is the first modern nation to wage is so heavily that science and technology are the fast lane to world .

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domination.

Hitler probably was very significantly influenced and impacted by dramatic, you know, weapon systems.

The Germans tend to have a philosophy of quality over quantity, and they felt that the superior quality would turn the tide.

And that was really an extension of.

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Hitler’s mentality.

Hitler uses science to conceive, test, and in some cases deploy a fascinating and frightening series of firsts.

From highly advanced long-range ballistic missiles to jet fighters, the first to enter the war, said to overpower the Allies’ propeller-driven aircraft.

To an early stealth designed monoplane straight out of Star Wars.

Decades ahead of America’s B-2 stealth bomber.

Even kamikaze bombs for a pilot’s one-way flight.

The Allies are ill-prepared.

The American missile development programs during the war were very, very primitive in comparison to what the Germans had already achieved.

On this small remote island off the Baltic Sea is a top-secret complex of laboratories and airfields.

Here Nazi scientists trial the world’s first cruise missile.

Just one of the wonder weapons in development at the Baltic super lab.

The sleepy seaside town of Peenemunde is the location the Nazis choose for their most secret science.

It will become the birthplace of the jet age and the space age.

The cradle of the wonder weapons.

The Peenemunde location was kind of ideal because it was a really remote part of Germany.

You’re close to the Baltic Ocean that you’d launch rockets into and you wouldn’t have necessarily the problem with somebody, you know, stealing the technology and getting out to the west.

The existence of Peenemunde’s satellite town is a strictly controlled state secret, complete with futuristic apartment blocks for the scientific elite.

But it’s also a concentration camp for the expendable prisoners who live, work, and die here as slaves.

When they are too weak to continue, they are murdered, lest anyone reveal Hitler’s scientific secrets.

Peenemunde’s scientists are not slaves.

But their welfare and that of their families hinges on cooperating with the Nazis.

Private trains carry engineers and physicists to the self-contained metropolis of metalwork power plants and proving grounds.

Peña Mundo becomes the Nazis’ Los Alamos and their Cape Canaveral.

1943, Germany.

The Allies pummel the nation in a hail of bombs.

But Adolf Hitler still believes in victory.

The Nazis plan an arsenal of terrifying new weapons of mass destruction.

With capabilities and range so far advanced, not even America will be spared.

Hitler entrusts his propaganda minister to rally the German people toward victory and revenge.

Joseph Goebbels coins these terms Vengeance 1 and Vengeance 2 and the idea was that they would be effective to counter the American air offensive and the British air offensive.

The Vengeance 1 or V1 is a revolutionary liquid-fueled pulse jet capable of flying 360 miles an hour on autopilot.

Launched from ski ramps or from beneath a flying aircraft, the V-1 bursts into action.

A sophisticated gyrocompass feedback system guides it toward its target.

The V-1 gets nicknamed the buzz bomb for the loud noise its jet engine creates.

An odometer tracks its pre-programmed distance, at which point the V-1 is designed to take a.

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Steep power dive.

But in early use, the dive cuts off fuel flow and kills the engine.

Sudden silence becomes a tip-off to impending doom.

Of the 8,000 bombs launched, 2,300 penetrated British defences, most of them falling in the London vicinity.

The propulsion roar of the flying bombs.

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The world’s first cruise missile rains fire and ash on Britain in 1944 and 45, terrorising London with thousands killed and tens of thousands injured.

Hundreds of homes, hospitals and public buildings were hit.

They fell in crowded streets during rushed traffic hours.

But new deep shelters built for this emergency were put to use and saved the lives of thousands of people.

Only one life was lost for every three bombs launched.

Few of the robot bombs resulted in fire, but the great concussive blasts of vengeance weapon number one succeeded anything London had experienced.

Part technological masterpiece, part military triumph.

Hitler’s secret science is paying off.

But there’s one big problem with the Big Bang.

Accuracy.

To target and destroy Allied bases with troops and convoys, somebody would have to fly this bomb.

While Hitler promises the nation that his rockets will turn the war, engineers add a pilot seat and crude controls to the V-1, creating the Reichenberg, a German kamikaze aircraft.

Hundreds were built, but none ever see combat.

They were difficult to fly.

Putting a pilot would have ensured some small amounts of damage.

But the potential of the airplane in terms of its top speed, of its range and its endurance, of its ability to get to a target, these were not essential war winning weapons.

Decades later, the original plans for the Reichenberg resurface in a private archive.

In this small Bavarian garage, Hitler’s secret science is coming back to life, as several wonder weapons are rebuilt or reconstructed here for museums.

The Bavarian builders find welded seams of inconsistent quality, suggesting that some were done by skilled technicians, others by exhausted concentration camp prisoners.

This restored relic is still capable of flight.

All it lacks is the volunteer to fly it.

For Hitler’s secret scientists, no concept is too futuristic.

No propulsion system or wing design too bizarre.

Some will fly, some will fail.

Many live on in the war zones of the 21st century.

And in a strange twist of history, one of Hitler’s most brilliant scientists will survive the fall of the Third Reich to become an American hero.

1943.

Germany’s National Socialist Party announces vengeance weapon V1, suggesting that a V2 is also planned.

So from the Nazi secret complex at Peenemünde, engineers give birth to the space age from the ground up, via a brilliant young physicist, Dr.

Werner von Braun, and his A4 rocket, ultimately named the V2.

The V2, the vengeance weapon.

To Wernher von Braun, it was an artillery piece that would land somewhere in England and kill some Englishmen, but that was really not his point.

His point was proving the aerodynamics, the power, the thrust, the cooling, all of the things necessary to take him one more step into space.

He wanted to see man in space.

It was a consuming passion.

His engineering ideas were what drove him.

Von Braun has given his own laboratory and team of experts at a time when rocketry is little more than a schoolboy hobby in the United States.

Ultimately, he creates the world’s first long-range ballistic missile, the unstoppable V-2 Retaliation Rocket.

In September of that same year, 1944, the Germans also began their firings of the vastly superior V-2, which was powered.

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By a real liquid fuel engine.

Military rockets in a rudimentary form had been used for centuries.

But their propulsion was by the use of gunpowder.

In this new era, it was the Germans who realized that the liquid fuel rocket could be put to military use.

That it could be given impressive range and great destructive power.

The German focus on advanced technology completely changes the capabilities of science and warfare.

They not only took a toll of more than a thousand, they also had a devastating psychological effect.

For unlike the Bussbaum, the V-2 fell without warning.

It had a speed of 3,300 miles per hour, and it could not be intercepted by fighter aircraft.

or brought down by anti-aircraft artillery.

According to Boyne, von Braun’s focus was more on the science than winning the war.

All that mattered to him was solving the aerodynamic problems, the problems of control, the problems of burn, all of the things that are inherent in a ballistic missile, not as a weapon, but as a means to get into space.

But defiance of the Fuhrer is not an option for any German scientist.

And neither is the suggestion of defense.

The real impact on the outcome of the war was in an area that the Germans really failed to develop, and that was really the defensive technologies.

You had to be very politically correct as a Nazi or else you’d be in trouble.

That meant you couldn’t have weapons that were seen to be too defensive that might indicate that the war was being lost.

But the truth for Germany was that the war was being lost.

1944, U.

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warplanes attack a Nazi convoy of trucks carrying the one wonder weapon that might have made a difference had it ever been deployed.

The Typhoon, the world’s first defensive ground-to-air missile.

Designed to augment Nazi efforts to shoot down Allied bombers.

The one thing that Germany could have done by 1943, if they had properly concentrated their resources, was to concentrate not on a V2 to hit Great Britain, but on a series of anti-aircraft missiles to knock down any bomber that comes over it.

They could have created an effective integrated air defense system.

The typhoon’s first field tests were conducted at station 4 in Peña Munda in 1944.

It’s revolutionary and economical.

A simple steel tube about six feet long filled with a mix of nitric acid and synthetic fuel.

Able to travel over six miles in just 14 seconds.

Over a million are planned for production by 1945.

But that didn’t happen.

It was clearly beyond their capacity to do.

They were absorbed.

They thought they had either won the war, or then they were absorbed with maintaining the war to keep themselves in power as long as possible.

They never concentrated their resources.

They never allowed the people who might have done these things to get together and do them.

There was too much suspicion.

There was too much party politics.

This computer simulation shows how the defensive Typhoon rocket’s mobile shooting base will look when rebuilt.

A secret science artifact that perpetuates the wonder weapon mystique today.

These craftsmen are building just one Typhoon, not the millions Germany dreamed would cleanse the sky of Allied bombers.

Ultimately, it’s the ingenuity of Nazi weapons, not their numbers, that propels the world further, faster, and higher than anything ever seen.

Nazi secret files reveal war machines so futuristic that it’s hard to believe they were spawned in our grandparents’ time.

Our flight is less than 30 years old when Hitler seizes power.

Yet within.

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In months, the blackboards and blueprints of his Third Reich are bursting with incredible designs.

Before the war is over, Germany will produce a series of aeronautical firsts that remain the basis for many air and spacecraft today.

The Erado 234, the world’s first operational turbojet bomber and the most advanced jet of its kind.

The Arado was the second of the airplanes that reached production employing the Junkers YUMO-004 engine.

And it was just a very lightweight, clean, streamlined airplane that put a lot of pilot duties on.

The pilot had to be the bombardier, the navigator, and the gunner.

But it was effective, it was easy to fly, and relatively easy to maintain.

So it served in small numbers and was an airplane that any country would have been proud to fly.

Even earlier, there were the many marvels of Munich-born Dr.

Alexander Lippisch, who designed a series of delta-wing gliders in the 1930s that eventually led to the introduction of the rocket-powered interceptor Messerschmitt Me 163 Comet and the better-known Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first operational jet fighter.

Able to outrun any allied aircraft by as much as 100 miles an hour, it is considered the most advanced German craft to actually make it into combat.

A lot of the things that they were trying to do were things that were driven to do.

With the invasion of France, the Germans were faced with a situation in which their territory was more and more confined.

So their thoughts began to turn to vertical takeoff aircraft, and so they wanted rocket fighters that could ascend vertically to attack the American squadrons because they didn’t have time to take them off and have a.

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regular fighter plane climb.

To this end, Nazi dream machines include the Falkwolf rotary jet, with liquid-fueled rockets at the tips of its triple propellers, designed to take off vertically, then fly like a plane.

But the most incredible vertical lift weapon of all is thought to be hidden in the secret hangars at Peenemunde, a Nazi UFO.

An article in German news magazine, Der Spiegel, later reveals the secret invention Rudolf Schriever plans for the SS from neighboring Czechoslovakia.

The piloted Schriever Flugkreisel.

Nearly 50 feet in diameter, with three impulse jets on a rotor inside a circular fuselage.

This UFO was never built.

But further clues to a flying saucer surface here along alpine forests and streams at a castle in Upper Austria.

A disc-shaped propeller-like invention, using the principles of matter transformation and energy flow, to create a fuel-less engine based on the natural turbulence created by swirling water or air.

Jörg Schauberger says that his grandfather’s concept for a totally new propulsion system turned rumors of a UFO into reality.

In the early 1930s, Victor Schauberger is intrigued by the ability of fish to swim upstream.

Inspired by this natural phenomenon, He devises a silent vacuum-powered engine to generate thrust without combustion.

A revolutionary unit for airplanes to be pulled rather than pushed forward.

He calls it the Repulsine.

The Repulsine or Repulsine in German was meant to be some kind of reaction chamber.

There are some transmutations that take place with the molecules that are sucked into this chamber.

Even today the Austrian would be ahead of his time.

In World War II his invention is right on course with Hitler’s quest for wonder weapons.

Against his will, Victor Schauberger is forced into the very heart of Nazi science.

Working inside a weapons lab staffed by slave labor.

There is no weapon-like thing with this repulsion.

It’s only meant to be some kind of propulsion system and not a weapon itself.

But elsewhere, deadly innovation is in full swing.

Among the top secret correspondence between Nazi officials and German Air Force Colonel Schroeder-Stranz, there’s a clue about a wonder weapon that’s rumored to have the power to kill, heal, and even help find oil.

The colonel repeatedly offers his ambitious proposal to the armed forces.

In the last desperate days of the Third Reich, the SS decides to support the project.

His brainchild is the stuff of science fiction.

A wonder weapon that can pierce the thickest armor or send enemy planes crashing down from the sky.

A test is to be conducted at a secret location.

Crates are unloaded at night so no one will be alerted to the classified operation.

The crates contain valuable metals and a Geiger counter to measure radiation.

Dawn, March 1944.

The Colonel takes off for the test area.

If the weapon works, he’ll receive unlimited financial support.

Colonel Schroeder-Stranz is the only man who knows the exact details of the tests to be run.

A quarry in the middle of the forest in the Harz Mountains.

Documents don’t reveal the secret of what it looks like, only that its cannon-like front end shoots out an invisible ray.

Colonel Schroeder-Straanz has invented an X-ray beam.

Using the technical knowledge available at the time, it might have looked like this.

Despite shortages caused by the war, Nazi scientists still have access to valuable metals and measuring instruments which were by now extremely rare.

A trial run claims that the weapon shoots out a bolt of radiation that can be detected up to 25 miles away.

The SS and Colonel Strahns are successful.

But then, mysteriously, the file is closed.

The special unit is disbanded in October 1944 with no explanation to be found to this day.

Shrouded in secrecy, Hitler’s science straddles the border between fact and fiction.

But one of the Fuhrer’s quests is beyond dispute.

It is the most desperate and decisive race of all.

Who will be the first to build an atomic bomb? 1943.

The scientists continue their work at the secret city on the Baltic.

The tide of war continues to turn against the Third Reich.

In the east, the German army is turned back at Stalingrad.

Hitler’s invasion of Russia collapses into panic, slaughter and retreat.

And in the west, British pilots record the first aerial images of the Peenemünde factories and rocket launching buildings.

British bombers pound the complex, targeting the dormitories where Hitler’s scientists and engineers live.

Hundreds are killed.

To a certain extent, Peenemunde never totally recovered.

They lost a lot of key personnel, scientists, research equipment.

Peenemunde’s production has moved underground to mountain fortresses and remote mines safe from allied blockbusters.

Elsewhere, Stuttgart, Germany, 1944.

Nazis plot the ultimate weapon to win the war, an atomic bomb.

A team of German scientists attempt to un- Lock the secret of nuclear fission to produce electric power.

Half a world away, physicists at Los Alamos, New Mexico are on the same quest, using the radioactive uranium of the American West to set off the world’s first nuclear weapon.

But the Germans have their own atomic genius, Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg.

Heisenberg and his team call themselves the Uranium Club, but the German army has other plans for the atom smashers.

In early 1945, neither the US military nor researchers know anything about the state of nuclear capability in Germany.

A secret US project, codenamed Operation Alsos, is established to find out if the German atomic bomb project exists.

Outside the city of Stuttgart, beneath a castle in Heigerloch, Alsos agents discover an atomic reactor in a stone cellar and uranium cubes hidden in a field nearby.

They take the evidence back to the United States for further investigation.

Months earlier at this same medieval castle, clandestine shipments of heavy water, a key ingredient to nuclear power, arrive here from Nazi-occupied Norway, despite valiant attempts from the Norwegian resistance to prevent it from ever reaching Germany.

A secret code reveals the amount of deuterium inside each transferred barrel.

Deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, makes water about 10% heavier.

The Nazis plan to combine this shipment of heavy water with the cubes of uranium to begin the nuclear age.

On every front, from stealth technology to nuclear power, Hitler’s push for scientific success is fueled by the Nazi dream of a global Reich.

A German empire lasting a thousand years, where a massive railway system connects main power centers from Siberia to Moscow, Paris and Berlin.

Berlin, the capital, is to be renamed Germania.

The dominant high-tech centerpiece of a new world order.

But by March 1945, the dream is fading fast, and Hitler is growing desperate.

With Allied forces closing in on Germany, only a wonder weapon can save the Third Reich.

But at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert, it’s America who proves the power of the atomic bomb.

What the Allies were very much interested in when the war was at its end was, what about the German atomic bomb? How far did they come? This was the final question.

And so they decided to put.

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We put the ten leading atomic scientists together in Farm Hall near Cambridge.

And there in Farm Hall they were bugged.

And the outcome was that obviously the Germans first had no atomic bomb and second had also in the end not a clue about the function of the atomic bomb.

What about the Nazi wonder weapons that did come to pass? And where do they live on today? The world’s first cruise missile.

First long-range ballistic missile.

First guided surface-to-air missile.

First anti-ship missiles.

Even the world’s first closed-circuit TV the world’s first operational jet fighter and jet bomber Aerodynamics in Germany there were a small group of people who are very very advanced and there is some sort of a special genius about it count .

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less designs years ahead of their time, secret sites wholly dedicated to science, backed by propaganda, boasting German money and fearful enemies.

How could Hitler’s plan for wonder weapons fail? In Germany, virtually everything was a secret.

So any science was a secret.

It hurt the Germans more than it hurt us.

They also had a very, very confining security system.

There was not the cross-feed that you get in a good scientific community.

You had enthusiasts building dreams, but without adequate resources.

You had people making decisions about resources who had no idea about the projects.

And at the top, you had Hitler making the final decisions on many things upon which he had only partial information.

Such controlled secrecy slowed wartime production to a devastating degree.

The Germans ultimately produced about.

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1,300 Me 262s, of which they got 300 in combat.

And at the time, we were putting 1,000 bombers and 1,000 fighters over Germany in a day.

The Third Reich nurtures hundreds of deadly inventions.

But to roll them out and win the war, they’d have to prioritize a mere handful of wonder weapons and mass-produce these by the thousands.

Thankfully, they lacked the production methods, materials, and the management required.

Had Germany focused on defense, more strategically chosen her ammunition, and greatly increased production of these specific weapons, the outcome of the war might have been very different.

That would have made invasion in 1944 very difficult, probably problematic.

It made probably an invasion put off until 1945, and it’s even conceivable that the war might have ended with the first atomic bomb being dropped on Germany instead of upon Japan.

But that didn’t happen.

1945.

The Nazi dream is finally destroyed by Allied bombs.

Hitler and his adjutant Himmler commit suicide.

At the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis face their own death sentence.

The entire world now learns of the unspeakable horror of concentration camps and the depth of Hitler’s dark dreams of domination.

Dreams that would reach far beyond Europe.

Attacks on America had been planned since 1939.

In this inventive German newsreel, the Nazis focus abundant long-range air power on the United States as part of the planned America Bomber Project.

Had the Germans been able to develop and deploy their America bomber program to bring the war to the mainland of the United States, I think it might have had some impact on American strategic doctrine.

Especially if these bombings had been nuclear.

I mean the only result the German Air Force could achieve was to send a handful of very long-range bombers over the Atlantic and to drop, say, a dozen tons of bombs on New York or Washington.

None of the German vengeance weapon programs, and certainly not the America bomber, would have had any chance of its intended effect without a nuclear weapon.

In the end, Adolf Hitler never sets foot in New York.

But the head of Hitler’s secret science program does cross the Atlantic and changes the course of history.

In 1945, as American and Soviet troops close in on Berlin, rocket genius Wernher von Braun and a small group of his most loyal associates must choose their destiny.

Surrender to the Russians, take cyanide, or align with the Allies.

They choose America, and von Braun immediately is put in charge of the nation’s infant missile program.

White Sands Testing Grounds in New Mexico, where von Braun works on a new rocket, and accomplishes his space dream after all.

Escaping from the dark shadows of Peña Munda, the creator of the deadly V2 spends the rest of his life in loyal service to his new country.

Thanks to Von Braun, America wins the space race and puts a man on the moon.

Yes, we see it, we see it, here it is.

Okay, engine stop.

There’s been a.

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Tranquility Base here.

The Eagle has landed.

Roger, Twink.

Tranquility, we copy you on the ground.

You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.

We’re breathing again.

Thanks a lot.

That is probably the principal achievement of the Peenemunde mines.

Warner R.

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Brown is undoubtedly the most significant American rocket engineer of the century.

Many would say he’s the most significant rocket engineer of the world.

So with the German scientists and knowledge that was brought back to the United States in the 1940s and early 1950s, you can make a very strong case, and nobody really disputes it, but there’s almost a direct line from Peenemunde to the moon through Wernher von Braun.

Yet rockets aren’t the only descendants of Hitler’s secret science.

In the 1950s, after decoding thousands of captured Nazi files, the United States Air Force performs classified flight tests of airframes that bear an eerie resemblance to the incredible dream machines on the runways and drawing boards of Peenemunde.

The flying wing can carry a larger load.

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Farther and with greater economy than conventional airplanes of similar size and power.

Human indeed is a flying wing in operation without saying, plane of tomorrow is today.

Had it been in peacetime, perhaps if the war had not come on and they made the same effort, you would have seen German jet airliners before you would have seen British jet airliners.

A piloted futuristic deadly space shuttle named Silverbird, designed by German engineers Senga and Brett, is never built.

But today’s space shuttle and almost all modern rocket engines still use principles of its design.

Parallel to Von Braun’s work with the V2 and the type of fuels that he used in the V2, combustible fuels, those engines were used subsequently in the United States by Bell and others.

Ultimately, the much more sophisticated variations of them would even appear, for example, in the X-15.

To this day.

The rocket-powered high-altitude X-15 still holds the world record for the fastest speed ever reached by a piloted aircraft, taking mankind to the edge of outer space with every flight.

There’s no argument that Germany had some of the most talented weapons designers on the planet at the time, but they were failed by their leadership.

Hitler really strongly hoped and believed that his scientists were going to develop a nuclear weapon.

Even without atomic energy, the Nazis reached unprecedented heights of scientific advancement, all in the name of war.

I think we’re fortunate that, you know, the German inability to collate and focus its programs and having an impact on the Allied strategic bombing campaign is really a silver lining for democracy.