Podkletnov. Now, I began to pay more attention. If I'd interpreted Witkowski correctly, there was some kind of a relationship between the Russian's experiments with spinning superconductors — the effect he had tripped over in Finland when his assistant's pipe smoke had hit that column of gravity-shielded air — and the effect produced by the Bell.
I needed to call Marckus and run some of this stuff past him; if, that is, he was still talking to me after my refusal to dig deeper in America.
Witkowski also claimed there were anomalies in the curriculum vitae of Professor Walther Gerlach that placed him firmly in the orbit of the gravity scientists, despite the fact that, ostensibly, his discipline was nuclear physics. In the '20s and '30s, Witkowski discovered, Gerlach had immersed himself in phenomena such as "spin polarization," "spin resonance" and the properties of magnetic fields — areas that had little to do with the physics of the bomb, but much to do with the enigmatic properties of gravity.
A student of Gerlach's at Munich, O.G. Hilgenberg, published a paper in 1931 entitled "About Gravitation, Vortices and Waves in Rotating Media" — putting him in the same ballpark as Podkletnov and the Bell. And yet, after the war, Gerlach, who died in 1979, apparently never returned to these subject matters, nor did he make any references to them; almost as if he had been forbidden to do so.
"The Germans ignored Einstein and developed an approach to gravity based on quantum theory," Witkowski said. "Don't forget that Einsteinian physics, relativity physics, with its big-picture view of the universe, represented Jewish science to the Nazis. Germany was where quantum mechanics was born. The Germans were looking at gravity from a different perspective to everyone else. Maybe it gave them answers to things the pro-relativity scientists hadn't even thought of."
Kammler, Witkowski told me, had the ability to vacuum up all scientific activity, whether it was theoretical or practical, through an SSrun organization called the FEP, for Forschungen, Entwicklungen und Patente—researches, developments and patents. The FEP introduced the last major player in the story of the Bell and the Special Evacuation Kommando, an SS-Obergruppenführer called Mazuw. A high-ranking general, Emil Mazuw had been able to acquire any significant technology, science theory or patent application that had come to the attention of the SS — and via its prolific security arms, there wasn't much that passed it by. The FEP, according to Witkowski's researches, operated independently of the Reichsforschungsrat, the Reich Research Council, but would unquestionably have had oversight of it.
My guess was that the FEP had been administered by Kammler's secret research cell within the Skoda Works. After the war, the Allied powers seized 340,000 German-held patents from the captured records of the Reich Research Council.
But here was something else: the cream of Germany's wartime scientific research that had been skimmed off by the SS and compartmentalized for its own use. Its value would have been immeasurable. Perhaps this really was what Kammler had returned to Czechoslovakia for in the death throes of the Reich?
There were other clues, too, but these, Witkowski repeated, were the physical traces at the mine itself and were best explained when we got there.
At Ludwigsdorf we followed the line of an old railway that had been built before the war to connect the region's network of industries to the outside world. As the road climbed, we found ourselves in a valley bordered on both sides by tall trees. A patchy mist clung to the upper branches as we ascended into the hills.
Then we rounded a bend and the scenery opened up. We were in a valley, one that had appeared out of nowhere. Witkowski parked on a patch of gravel overlooking some level ground. The railway track, overgrown from years of disuse, followed its median line, eventually disappearing from view behind a large derelict building whose tall arched windows rose cathedral-like into the mist. It was next to this building, Witkowski said, that the shaft of the mine disappeared belowground.
I stood on the edge of a steep bank a short walk from the car. The valley was around 300 yards across, the trees either side of it so dense you'd never know the place existed unless you happened upon it.
The bank, which was 20 feet high, was mirrored by an identical feature on the opposite side. During the war, this expanse of land had been an underground marshaling yard, Witkowski told me, thick wooden planks called sleepers topped with turf hiding a six-lane section of track where the railhead met the workings of the mine. Even the buildings disguised the facility's true purpose. High on the opposite bank was a large redbrick house, an original 19th-century feature of the Wenceslas Mine. But look a little closer, Witkowski said, and you could see where the Germans had tunneled into the ground underneath and constructed a large concrete bunker, one of the many blockhouses scattered around the complex. All of the bunkers had been covered with earth and trees planted on top.
In short, the Germans had gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that the place looked pretty much as it had always looked since mining operations began here at the turn of the last century, a clear indication that whatever had happened here during the war had been deeply secret. Now, half a century after the Germans had left, second-guessing the use to which it had been put, simply from the available physical evidence, was far from easy.
When, immediately after the war, the Poles repatriated the local German population, substituting German place-names for Polish ones in the process, they removed any witnesses who could have shed light on the SS' activities. Almost everything that was known about the Wenceslas Mine had been handed down from Sporrenberg.
It had been run by the SS, had employed slave labor and had been sealed from the outside world by a triple ring of checkpoints and heavily armed guards.
Beyond that, Witkowski said, we were into the realm of analysis, interpretation and detective work; the skills required for such a task being more akin to those of an archaeologist.
Although the locals had used the site for small-scale industrial activity in the years since the war — I could see freshly milled lumber stacked on a flat piece of land over by the valley entrance — it had been entirely neglected by the history books; its wartime use known only to the handful of people Witkowski had brought here.
That, I could understand. The place was as far off the beaten track as I'd ever been on the continent of Europe. I felt like I was tramping on ground that had hardly been touched since the Germans had pulled out more than half a century earlier.
The first thing to point out, Witkowski said, was the structure at the end of the valley. This, built before the war, was a power station capable of burning a thousand tons of coal a day — enough to provide the valley with vast quantities of electricity. It had more than likely been this single feature that had drawn the SS to the site, Witkowski said, since it had helped to make the place entirely self-sufficient. After the war, when the Russians eventually made it into these hills, they would have found an abandoned complex given over to some quasi-military purpose, a mine shaft that had been flooded, possibly deliberately, and little more.
"With the help of Sporrenberg's testimony, we have an edge that was denied to the first Red Army units to enter this place," Witkowski said. "Come, I want to show you something; something very strange."