NAZI SECRET WEAPONS
By Patrick J. Kiger
Wunderwaffen: Miracle Weapons
When the U.S. Army rolled into Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, special intelligence units searched factories, opened bricked-up underground vaults, and even poked around in cemeteries in search of unusual sort of plunder: scientific documents and engineering blueprints from the Third Reich’s weapons research and development programs. Eventually, they hauled nearly half a million pounds of paper back to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. When U.S. Army Air Corps researchers began perusing the materials, some of what they found was mind-boggling: Designs for scores of futuristic weapons, ranging from a rocket-powered intercontinental glide bomber and an antiaircraft weapon that could shoot a stream of metal at 25,000 feet per second, to an orbiting solar mirror gun, designed to boil harbors dry and burn enemy cities to a crisp. That outlandish arsenal had been dreamed up by German scientists at the behest of the Fuhrer, who apparently actually believed the Nazi regime’s propaganda claims that Wunderwaffen—“miracle weapons”—would turn the tide of the war against the Allies.
“Above all else, these documents reveal that nothing was too far-fetched or fantastic for the Germans to consider in their wild drive to snatch victory,” U.S. Army Col. Donald L. Putt, then deputy chief of engineering for the Air Materiel Command, told a wire service reporter. Even so, he was careful not to dismiss the Third Reich’s brainstorming too lightly. “We, too, are giving all their plans careful study,” he noted. “We don’t want to overlook a thing that might be of possible benefit to this country.”
 Indeed, some of the Germans’ innovations in military technology would prove extremely useful. Nazi Germany’s advances in rocketry such as the V-2 guided missile, for example, would accelerate American efforts to develop ballistic missiles and send manned missions into space. And today’s B-2 bomber bears unmistakable design similarities to the Horten Ho 229, a German jet still under development at the war’s end, whose swept-back single wing and radar-shielding carbon-impregnated plywood skin might have made it the first stealthy aircraft.
 At the same time, the Nazi fixation upon developing Wunderwaffen—plus the veil of secrecy dropped over at least a few of the captured designs by the U.S. Military—also has provided fodder for sensational book-length exposes, web sites, and legions of enthusiasts who revel in rumors of science fiction-like weapons supposedly invented by Hitler’s scientists. For example, there’s the legend of the Nazi flying saucer, which may have originated from a newspaper interview given in the mid-1950s by German engineer George Klein, in which he claimed to have worked on a saucer prototype that achieved a speed of 1,300 miles per hour in a 1945 flight test. (All traces of the saucer project, conveniently, were destroyed by the Germans to keep them out of the hands of advancing Soviet troops.) Another popular subject of speculation is Die Glocke (“The Bell”), a supposed gravity-altering device described by Jane’s Defence Weekly journalist Nick Cook in his 2001 book, The Hunt for Zero Point. David Myhra, a former scientist with General Electric’s missile and space division and author of numerous books on World War II German aviation, is skeptical that such weapons ever actually existed. “The Germans were trying to come up with things like rocket-propelled aircraft because they were desperate to stop the Allies,” he explains. “If they had flying discs, then why didn’t they use them?”
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