It was against this background that the Order of the Black Sun came together. Its members sought to combine science, politics, and mysticism into a single driving force that would underpin the new world order, and place themselves — as the masters of this new thinking — in effective control of the world.
Although Himmler maintained a mask of servility — Hitler nicknamed him der treue Heinrich,“loyal Heinrich” — by 1941 his ambition to succeed Hitler as Führer, and their differences over völkisch mysticism, led him to keep much of Wewelsburg’s work secret. This work included the development of ideas and technologies that had originated within the Thule Society (Thule Gesellschaft) and the Vril Society (Vril Gesellschaft). The Thule Society had been disbanded on Hitler’s orders in 1935, along with the Freemasons and other organizations, while the Vril Society was on the brink of a schism: its leading “Vril medium,” a woman known to history only as Sigrun, insisted that its knowledge — especially the propulsion system used in the Vril series of saucer craft — should be used only for peaceful purposes. More information on both these societies will be found in the next chapter.
Even as Himmler began to distance Wewelsburg from Hitler, though, the Order began to distance itself from Himmler. Many leading members of the Order felt that Himmler’s emphasis on the development of his Aryan religion was a distraction from the more urgent goal of developing the superscience, and superweapons, that would enable Germany to win the war; as the tide of the war began to turn, their frustration drove them to keep more and more from their former leader.
With Britain undefeated, the Soviet Union on the counterattack, and the United States poised to launch a European front, the Order looked for a way to save Germany — or if this was impossible, to ensure the survival of their work and plan for the creation of a new Aryan state. The man they chose to lead this effort was a rising SS star named Hans Kammler.
Hans Kammler was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) on August 26, 1901. At that time, Stettin was part of the German Reich ruled by Kaiser Wilhelm II. After World War I, he studied civil engineering in Danzig (now Gdansk) and Munich and was a member of the Rossbach Freikorps, a far-right paramilitary group whose members included a young Rudolf Hess. Kammler joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and the SS in 1933.
Kammler held various administrative posts in the Nazi government, starting as head of the building department in the Air Ministry (Reichsluftfahrtministerium). He joined the Waffen-SS in June 1941, and became Oswald Pohl’s deputy at the SS Main Economic and Administrative Department (SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt), whose duties included oversight of the concentration camp system.
In 1942, Pohl assigned Kammler to construct facilities for various advanced weapons projects, including the Me 262 jet fighter and the V-2 ballistic missile. He rose quickly, largely thanks to his notorious expedient of using concentration camp prisoners as a source of slave labor. Hitler placed him in charge of all V-2 production, as well as transferring the responsibility for jet aircraft production from Hermann Goering to Kammler. On March 1, 1945, Kammler was promoted to the rank of Obergruppenführer, making him answerable only to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. A few weeks later, all special weapons development and manufacturing projects were absorbed into Kammler’s SS Development Agency IV (SSEntwicklungstelle IV, known as SS E-IV). Only Wernher von Braun’s Peenemünde rocket group remained outside Kammler’s control, and this only because of von Braun’s obstinate refusal to acknowledge Kammler’s authority. The conflict between Kammler and von Braun began as a simple clash of personalities, but came to have a profound effect on the history of manned space flight.
No one else in the Third Reich had such a comprehensive understanding of the new technologies being developed. As Germany crumbled, Kammler assembled a hand-picked team of scientists and devised a daring plan — to build a base on the Moon, bombard the Allied homelands with impunity, and return to Earth victorious once they had collapsed.
Officially, Hans Kammler committed suicide in May 1945, but the credibility of the supposed eyewitnesses has been challenged multiple times. The US Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) launched an unsuccessful hunt for him later in May. One former Office of Strategic Services agent claimed to have brought him to the United States, but this claim was never confirmed. By 1949, Kammler’s name simply vanishes from intelligence documents, without any explanation.
Kammler named his plan Protokoll Bifrost (The Bifrost Protocol) after the rainbow bridge of Norse myth that linked the mortal world of Midgard to the divine realm of Asgard. Simply put, it was a three-point plan to ensure Nazi survival — and eventual victory — after the fall of Germany. Its objectives were as follows:
Escape
The first priority was to ensure that all the necessary technology, personnel, and resources were placed out of the Allies’ reach. In Kammler’s original documents, dated to early 1944, this phase of the operation was codenamed Walküre (Valkyrie), but it was renamed Einherjar after July 20, 1944, when a group of disaffected officers launched a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler under the codename Walküre.
In Norse myth, the einherjar were the warriors found worthy of admission to Valhalla. This was a perfect metaphor for Kammler’s careful selection of projects and personnel, but it turned out to be too perfect. By now, Alan Turing’s Bombe computer at Bletchley Park had cracked the German Enigma code, and MI6 quickly deduced that signal decrypts featuring the codename Einherjar referred to some Nazi effort to evacuate key personnel and technology from Germany. This intelligence resulted in the British launching Operation Surgeon and the Americans launching Operation Paperclip, which were intended to intercept and retrieve Nazi scientists and exploit their knowledge.
In the months either side of the war’s end in May 1945, Allied intelligence officers made a concerted effort to recover and turn German personnel who had been employed on advanced technology. Operation Surgeon was run by British Intelligence and Operation Paperclip by the US Office of Strategic Services. The latter’s most notable success was the recruitment of Wernher von Braun and others of his Peenemünde rocket research group, who went on to play key roles in the American space program.
The stated purpose of both operations was to ensure that German advanced technology stayed out of Soviet hands: with the end of the war in sight, it was clear that the postwar world would be dominated by the rivalry between the capitalist West and the communist East.
The second, and perhaps more important, goal of these operations was known only to a few individuals in the very highest intelligence circles. From what Western intelligence agents had been able to discover about the Bifrost Protocol, it was clear that some Nazis had escaped and intended to fight on, using what MI6 chief Sir Stewart Menzies called “a continuation of the V-weapon offensive, conducted from some remote spot and using weapons of extremely long range with the goal of destroying the major cities of every Allied nation.” The highest priority was given to uncovering more information about this planned offensive, and the recovery of any technology that could help thwart it.