NAZI Secret Weapons NAZI Secret Experiments, Weapons, War Technology Reported in Harper's Magazine

NAZI Secret Weapons
"NAZI Secret Experiments, Weapons, War Technology
Reported in Harper's Magazine"

            Someone wrote to Wright Field recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets, that many were now on public sale, and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of 'the Army Air Forces' answered: "Sorry – but that would be fifty tons." Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled.

            It may interest you to learn that the war secrets in this collection run into the thousands, that the mass of documents is mountainous, and that there has never before been anything quite comparable to it. Wright Field is working from a documents "mother lode" of fifteen hundred tons. In Washington, the Office of Technical Services ... reports that tens of thousands of tons of material are involved. It is estimated that over a million separate items must be handled, and that they, very likely, contain practically all the scientific, industrial, and military secrets of Germany.

            How the collection came to be goes back, for beginnings, to one day in 1944 when the Allied Combined Chief' of Staff set in motion a colossal search for war secrets in occupied German territory. They created a group of military-civilian teams, termed the Joint Intelligence Objectives Committee, which was to follow the invading armies into Germany and uncover all her military, scientific, and industrial secrets for early use against Japan.

            What did we find? You'd like some outstanding examples from the war secrets collection? The head of the communications unit of Technical Industrial Intelligence Branch [TIIB] opened his desk drawer and took out the tiniest vacuum tube I had ever seen. It was about half thumb-size. "Notice it is heavy porcelain – not glass – and thus virtually indestructible. It is a thousand watt – one-tenth the size of similar American tube. Today our manufacturers know the secret of making it.

He [also] showed me then what had been two of the most closely-guarded technical secrets of the war: the infra-red device which the Germans invented for seeing at night, and the remarkable diminutive generator which operated it. The diminutive generator – five inches across – stepped up current from an ordinary flashlight battery to 15,000 volts. It had a walnut-sized motor which spun a rotor at 10,000 rpm. The generator then ran 3,000 hours!

            "You see this..." the head of Communications Unit, TIIB, said to me. It was metal, and looked like a complicated doll's house with the roof off. "It is the chassis or frame, for a radio. To make the same thing, Americans would machine cut, hollow, shape, fit – a dozen different processes. This is done on a press in one operation. It is called the 'cold extrusion' process. We do it with some soft, splattery metals. But by this process the Germans do it with cold steel! Thousands of parts now made as castings or drop forgings or from malleable iron can now be made this way. The production speed increase is a little matter of one thousand per cent."

            But of all the industrial secrets, perhaps, the biggest windfall came from the laboratories and plants of the great German cartel, I. G. Farbenindustrie. Never before, it is claimed, was there such a store-house of secret information. It covers liquid and solid fuels, metallurgy, synthetic rubber, textiles, chemicals, plastics, drugs, dyes. One American dye authority declares: "It includes the production know-how and the secret formulas for over fifty thousand dyes. Many of them are faster and better than ours. Many are colors we were never able to make. The American dye industry will be advanced at least ten years."

            In matters of food, medicine, and branches of the military art the finds of the search teams were no less impressive. Perhaps one of the most exciting searches was also the grimmest. This was the hunt for hidden documents which might reveal that Nazi scientists had frozen human beings to death and then tried to bring them back to life again. Victims had been immersed naked in ice water until they lost consciousness. All the time elaborate testings were constantly made. Seven subjects were chilled to death beyond revival in from fifty-three to one hundred and six minutes.

            "As for medical secrets in this collection," one Army-surgeon has remarked, "some of them will save American medicine years of research; some of them are revolutionary – like, for instance, the German technique for treatment after prolonged and usually fatal exposure to cold." This discovery ... reversed everything medical science thought about the subject. In every one of the dread experiments the subjects were most successfully revived, both temporarily and permanently, by immediate immersion in hot water. In two cases of complete standstill of heart and cessation of respiration, a hot bath at 122 degrees brought both subjects back to life.

            Positively ionized air was discovered to have deleterious effects upon human well-being, and to account for the discomfort and depression felt at times when the barometer is falling. In many persons, it was found, its presence brought on asthma, hay fever, and nervous tension. It raised high blood pressure, sometimes to the danger point. It would bring on the symptoms common in mountain sickness – labored and rapid breathing, dizziness, fatigue, sleepiness. Negatively ionized air, however, did all the opposite. It was exhilarating, creating a feeling of high spirits and well-being. Mental depression was wiped out by it.

            And in aeronautics and guided missiles [the secrets] proved to be downright alarming. "The V-2 rocket, which bombed London," an Army Air Force publication reports, "was just a toy compared to what the Germans had up their sleeve."

            When the war ended, we now know, they had 138 types of guided missiles in various stages of production or development, using every known kind of remote control and fuse: radio, radar, wire, continuous wave, acoustics, infra-red, light beams, and magnetics, to name some; and for power, all methods of jet propulsion for either subsonic or supersonic speeds. Jet propulsion had even been applied to helicopter flight. Little wonder, then, that today Army Air Force experts declare publicly that in rocket power and guided missiles the Nazis were ahead of us by at least ten years.

            For the release and dissemination of all these one-time secrets the Office of the Publication Board was established by an order of President Truman within ten days after Japan surrendered. Today translators and abstracters of the Office of Technical Services [OTS], successor to the OPB, are processing them at the rate of about a thousand a week. The order directed that not only enemy war secrets should be published, but also (with some exceptions) all American secrets, scientific and technical, of all government war boards.

            And is the public doing anything with these one-time war secrets? It is eating them up. As many as twenty thousand orders have been filled in a month, and the order rate is now a thousand items a day. Scientists and engineers declare that the information is "cutting years from the time we would devote to problems already scientifically investigated."

            Company executives practically park on the OTS's front doorstep, wanting to be first to get hold of a particular report on publication. Some information is so valuable that to get it a single day ahead of a competitor, may be worth thousands of dollars. A research head of another business firm took notes for three hours in the OTS offices one day. "Thanks very much," he said, as he stood to go, "the notes from these documents are worth at least half a million dollars to my company."

Secrets by the Thousands

By C. Lester Walker