ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 203
involvement in exotic weapons technology, but dismissed it as inadmissible
claptrap peddled by people with an unhealthy interest in its warped
ritualistic ideology; this, despite Speer's solid documentation of Himmler's
penchant for unconventional scientific solutions to Germany's dire
military position in the closing years of the war. In Infiltration, Speer's
account of how the SS eventually succeeded in establishing its own
industrial empire within the visible economic framework of the Reich,
he had listed some of Himmler's more absurd ideas: producing fuel
from fir-tree roots, tapping the exhaust fumes of bakery chimneys for
the manufacture of alcohol and producing oil in abundance from
geraniums.
Speer also attests to Himmler's willingness to entertain any radical
ideas for new weapons—especially those that leaped the current state of
the art. One such was a proposal for turning the upper atmosphere into a
giant high-voltage conductor, presumably for the purpose of frying the
Allies' B-17, B-24 and Lancaster bombers as they flew into Reich
airspace. These ideas, many of which were based on unsound science,
came to naught, but it would have taken only one far-reaching proposal
underpinned by some solid scientific reasoning for this vast array of
funded research activity to deliver the payoff so desperately sought by the
Nazi leadership.
Like lasers, for example. Or an atomic bomb.
It had also taught me just how effective—and this word, of course,
glosses over the grotesque cruelty of its methods—the S S security
machine had been.
The Kammlerstab had been protected by a triple ring of counterintelligence
agents to prevent word of its activities from leaking. If it
hadn't been for Voss and Agoston, the existence of the special projects
group at Skoda might never have surfaced at all.
It had been the same story at the Wenceslas Mine. A combination of
active security measures and a neighboring populace that had been
rounded up and removed en masse, and its wartime activities had all but
disappeared from existence.
But there was an even more powerful reason why none of this had ever
properly surfaced before.
By involving the concentration camps, the SS had unwittingly set the
seal on any serious postwar investigation of the science and technology it
had pursued during the conflict. Because it had been the SS, not so much
Speer's Armaments Ministry, that had backed so-called high-payoff,
"visionary" projects with funding, German industry found itself in
league up to its collective neck with the perpetrators of the Holocaust.