We crawled out of Wroclaw in a heavy convoy of trucks bound for the Czech border. I focused on a faint ribbon of sky between the clouds gathering to the south and the outline of the Sudeten Mountains, the inner core of Kammler's high-tech kingdom, indistinct yet somehow threatening, on the distant horizon.
Chapter 20
In his interrogation sessions with the NKVD and his deposition to the Polish courts, SS General Jakob Sporrenberg could only tell the interrogators and the prosecutors so much, Witkowski told me. Sporrenberg was a policeman and an administrator, not a technician. He could relay what he had seen and heard, little snippets he had picked up, but the technology itself was beyond him. He had been tasked with getting men, materiel and documents out of Lower Silesia before the Russians reached them; he had had no need to know much else. This was standard SS operating procedure. I asked what else he knew about Sporrenberg. Witkowski stared straight ahead as he talked. First, I had to understand that Sporrenberg was very high up the chain of command. Records showed, he said, that Sporrenberg was appointed deputy commander of the Waffen-SS VI Korps under SS-Obergruppenführer Walter Krueger in 1944. Krueger, as far as Witkowski had been able to ascertain, had been involved in a series of top secret SS-conceived operations in the closing months of the war, including a plan to occupy neutral Sweden, the evacuation of Nazi wealth to South America and other neutral or nonaligned states, a harebrained scheme to strike at New York with V-ls launched by submarine and, of course, the special evacuation of Nazi secret weapons and high technology. Sporrenberg was appointed plenipotentiary in charge of northern-route "special evacuations" to Norway on June 28, 1944. Like Kammler, it seemed that General Sporrenberg was recognized and rewarded for his ability to organize, not for his ability to fight.
Following his capture, as much as Sporrenberg was able to divulge to Soviet intelligence and the Polish courts about the Bell was this, Witkowski said. The project had gone under two code names: "Laternentrager" and "Chroms" and always involved "Die Glocke" — the bellshaped object that had glowed when under test. The Bell itself was made out of a hard, heavy metal and was filled with a mercury-like substance, violet in color. This metallic liquid was stored in a tall thin thermos flask a meter high encased in lead three centimeters thick.
The experiments always took place under a thick ceramic cover and involved the rapid spinning of two cylinders in opposite directions. The mercury-like substance was code-named "Xerum 525." Other substances used included thorium and beryllium peroxides, code-named Leichtmetall.
The chamber in which the experiments took place was situated in a gallery deep belowground. It had a floor area of approximately 30 square meters and its walls were covered with ceramic tiles with an overlay of thick rubber matting. After approximately ten tests, the room was dismantled and its component parts destroyed. Only the Bell itself was preserved. The rubber mats were replaced every two to three experiments and were disposed of in a special furnace.
Each test lasted for approximately one minute. During this period, while the Bell emitted its pale blue glow, personnel were kept 150 to 200 meters from it. Electrical equipment anywhere within this radius would usually short-circuit or break down. Afterward, the room was doused for up to 45 minutes with a liquid that appeared to be brine. The men who performed this task were concentration camp prisoners from Gross-Rosen.
During the tests, the scientists placed various types of plants, animals and animal tissues in the Bell's sphere of influence. In the initial test period from November to December 1944, almost all the samples were destroyed. A crystalline substance formed within the tissues, destroying them from the inside; liquids, including blood, gelled and separated into clearly distilled fractions.
Plants exposed to the Bell included mosses, ferns, fungi and molds; animal tissues included egg white, blood, meat and milk; the animals themselves ranged from insects and snails to lizards, frogs, mice and rats.
With the plants, chlorophyll was observed to decompose or disappear, turning the plants white four to five hours after the experiment. Within eight to fourteen hours, rapid decay set in, but it differed from normal decomposition in that there was no accompanying smell. By the end of this period, the plants had usually decomposed into a substance that had the consistency of axle grease.
In a second series of experiments that started in January 1945, the damage to the test subjects was reduced to around 12–15 percent following certain modifications to the equipment. This was reduced to two to three percent after a second set of refinements. People exposed to the program complained of ailments, in spite of their protective clothing. These ranged from sleep problems, loss of memory and balance, muscle spasms and a permanent and unpleasant metallic taste in the mouth. The first team was said to have been disbanded as a result of the deaths of five of the seven scientists involved.
This, Witkowski said, was all contained in the documents he had been shown. What impressed him — and what I now confessed had me intrigued as well — was their level of apparent detail. It told him — and me — that in all likelihood something had happened down the mine; something mysterious. But what? Witkowski insisted that it had all the hallmarks of an antigravity experiment. But I wasn't so sure. Before I could begin to believe this was the Holy Grail, I needed to check off a set of more rational explanations first. And the most glaring of these was the probability that this had been some kind of test involving nuclear material. The documents that Witkowski had seen had mentioned the involvement of Professor Walther Gerlach, the man charged with oversight of Germany's atomic weapons programs. Disturbingly, they also cited Dr. Ernst Grawitz, head of the euphemistically labeled SS Medical Service. Grawitz had been the boss of Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor of Auschwitz. Inevitably, there were reports that the Bell had been tested on humans as well. Again, if the Bell had emitted radiation, the Nazis — given their record on war crimes in this area— would have probably monitored its effects.
I said nothing, however, out of deference to Witkowski, who told me that much of the rest of his evidence was visible at the Wenceslas Mine itself.
As we approached Waldenburg, Walbrzych as it is today, the landscape altered. After nothing but lowlands and flatlands all day, the road now started to twist and climb as we headed into the foothills of the Sudeten range.
Waldenburg itself was bleak, its imposing mix of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture, Germanic to the rooftops, blackened with coal dust and beset by decay. Though it had escaped the ravages of the war, the Soviet advance passing it by to the north and the south, it had been less fortunate in the wake of the communist collapse. By the early 1990s, almost all mining operations in the region had been shut down, transforming it overnight from one of Poland's most prosperous areas to its poorest.
Men with nothing to do gathered on street corners and intersections and passed bottles of cheap vodka among one another, eyeing us suspiciously as we swept by.
On the narrow road leading out of Waldenburg to Ludwigsdorf, I asked Witkowski what had led him to believe that the Bell experiments had been an attempt by the Nazis to manipulate gravity.
There were scant clues, he admitted, but those that Sporrenberg had provided in his testimony seemed to add up to something. Many of the descriptions used by the Bell scientists did not gel with any of the accepted terms associated with nuclear physics, nor were there any obvious radioactive materials used in the experiments themselves. One of the terms Sporrenberg had picked up had been "vortex compression"; another was "magnetic fields separation." These were physical principles that had come to be associated with the new wave of gravity and antigravity pioneers — people like Dr. Evgeny Podkletnov, Witkowski said.