Preface
When I was a boy, oddities fascinated
me, particularly if they appeared to make no sense. Historical oddities
or anomalous news stories especially attracted my interest, lingering
in my mind for years to come. Like many Americans, I well remember where
I was when President Kennedy was assassinated. I was home, sick, and watching
television, sipping an endless stream of the chicken noodle soup that
my mother always made for me when I was ill. My mother sat on the sofa,
sewing and watching her shows. Then, the programs were interrupted by
the familiar voice of Walter Cronkite, and the news began to break. Like
many children in America, I cried that night.
A year or so later when the Warren Report
was published and excerpted in almost every newspaper in the country,
I remember thinking "bullets just don't do that." And I listened
intently as family members debated the official conclusions of Oswald,
the "lone nut" in his Texas School Book Depository, versus what
was beginning to emerge with the "Grassy Knoll."
As a teenager I became fascinated with
the history of World War Two, and particularly the European theater and
the race for the atomic bomb. Physics was also an interest for me, and
another oddity lodged in my mind as I read the standard histories: the
United States had never tested the uranium bomb it dropped on Hiroshima.
I thought that was an extremely odd oddity indeed. It seemed to have the
same sharp angles and corners as the Warren Commission's "magic bullet".
It just didn't fit. Other odd facts accumulated over the years as if to
underline the strangeness of the war's end in general and that fact in
particular.
Then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came
down and the two post- war Germanies raced toward reunification. The events
seemed to unfold faster than the news media's ability to keep pace. I
remember that day too, for I was driving with a friend in his van in Manhattan.
My friend was Russian, as was his family, some of
whom were veterans of the harsh conflict
on the Russian front. We listened to the reports on the radio with a kind
og breathlessness and anxiety. My friend lurried to me and said "Now
it will start to come out in the wash." I nodded in agreement. We
had often discussed what would happen in the eventuality of German reunification,
and were agreed that many things from the end of the war would begin to
surface, answering old questions and raising new ones. Our long talks
about World War Two had convinced us that there was much about the war
that did not make sense, Hitler's and Stalin's genocidal paranoia notwithstanding.
Gradually, and one must say, predictably,
the Germans themselves raced to uncover what lay hidden in the formerly
inaccessible archival vaults of East Germany and the Soviet Union. Witnesses
came forward, and German authors endeavored to come to grips with yet
another aspect of the darkest period in their nation's history. Much,
if not all, of their work remains ignored in the U.S.A., both by mainstream
and by alternative researchers.
This present book is based in part on
these Germans' efforts. It, like them, raises dangerous questions, and
often presents dangerous and disturbing answers. As a consequence, while
the Nazi regime's "image" becomes even more blackened, the image
of the victorious Allies also suffers to a great degree. This book presents
not only a radically different history of the race for the bomb, but also
outlines a case that Germany was making enormous strides toward acquisition
of a whole host of second and third and even fourth generation weapons
technologies even more horrific in their destructive power.
That in itself would not be too unusual.
After all, there have been a wealth of books on World War Two German secret
weapons projects and their astonishing results. Those seeking new technical
data on these weapons will find some new material here, for the thrust
of the book is not on the weapons per se. Rather, the present work seeks
a context within Nazi ideology and in some aspects of contemporary theoretical
physics for these projects. This book argues that the Nazis' quest for
this barbarous arsenal of prototypical "smart weapons" and weapons
of mass destruction was intimately linked to the Nazi racial and genocidal
ideology and
war aims, to the machinery, bureaucracy,
and technologies of mass death and slavery that the Nazis had perfected.
Even more darkly, this relationship points to a hidden core of occult
beliefs and practices that, allied with certain very "German"
advances in physics, e.g., quantum mechanics, drove their quest for ultimate
weapons.
Accordingly, this is not a work of history.
But neither is it a work merely of fiction. It is best described as a
case of possibilities, of speculative history. It is an attempt to make
sense, by means of a radical hypothesis placed within a very broad context,
of events during and after the war that make no sense.
I would like to thank Mr. Frank Joseph
of Fate magazine for encouraging me to write about these ideas, after
he had patiently listened to me outline them while we were both attending
a conference in 2003. And I would like to thank the many people -too numerous
to mention - who listened, read, and critiqued the book along the way.
Joseph P. Farrell Tulsa, Oklahoma
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