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.
Many of the companies that had benefited from SS money, and employed concentration camp labor in the process, are still in existence today.
Bosch, Siemens, Zeiss and AEG all maintained highly secretive research and development operations in Lower Silesia.
It remains in their interests for their activities at this time to stay largely undocumented. I doubted, in any case, even if they were to open up their archives, whether anything of real value remained in them. Like the records pertaining to Kammler's past, I suspected they'd long since been cleaned out.
This, I said to Marckus, was how secrets came to be locked away, buried for all time, leaving nothing but myths and legends in their aftermath.
Maybe the Nazis had initiated a flying saucer program; maybe some of the technology had borne fruit. There was certainly enough anecdotal evidence to support the view that a variety of disc-shaped craft had flown before the end of the war. It was simply that there was no proof.
My journey into Kammler's kingdom had opened my mind to possibilities I wouldn't have begun to entertain a few months earlier. And in the process of this willingness at least to confront new ideas, I had found myself drawn to Bad Ischl.
It was there, before leaving London, that I had arranged to meet with the family of Viktor Schauberger.
I had picked up on the Schauberger story via the Legend forwarded to me by my friend and former colleague, Lawrence Cross, in Australia. I had initially dismissed it out of hand because not being an engineer but a simple forester, what this Austrian inventor was said to have achieved technically hadn't made any sense. And the phone conversation I had had with his son Walter, who back in 1991 had urged me to visit the familyrun "bio-technical institute" in the Salzkammergut mountains so I could make up my own mind, had only served to alienate me further.
But Bad Ischl was less than 15 minutes' drive time from Ebensee. And a lot had changed in the interim. I knew, for example, thanks to Podkletnov and his lab assistant's pipe smoke, that whatever antigravity was or wasn't, it had to be induced by something highly unconventional. And Schauberger's approach to the energy-generation process he referred to as "implosion" — if the Legend as relayed to me by Cross contained even a grain of truth — was certainly unconventional.
The Schaubergers maintained a large archive dedicated to Viktor's work in their house, the location of the institute, on the outskirts of Bad Ischl. If they would allow me to take a look at it, perhaps I would be able to find something, some proof, that the Germans really had developed a new and exotic propulsion medium.
They were reluctant to do so and I could understand why: It was well documented in the legends that had grown up around him that Viktor Schauberger had worked for the SS.
In my initial assessment of Schauberger's work, this association seemed to have been drawn straight from the mythology surrounding SS activities during the war and had merely compounded the case against him. Now, of course, it was quite the reverse. I'd reached the end of the road; told Marckus everything I'd learned.
It was only when I finished that I realized he hadn't interjected once. I thanked him for listening. He stopped me just before I cut the link. "Call me, won't you, if you need to talk. I mean it. Day or night.
Sometimes it can be good to download, clear the mind for what lies ahead." As I journeyed on toward the mountains, I felt better about Marckus than I had in months. It was difficult to put my finger on, but it had something to do with the fact that, for once, I was telling him about material of which he had no prior knowledge. I wasn't entirely sure why, but for the first time I felt I could trust him. Something about Marckus' final tone of voice told me something else. I felt sure that he knew exactly what I was going through.
As soon as I crossed the Austrian border, I took a break at a rest stop, got out the laptop and pulled up Cross' notes on the Legend. The relevant portion, the part devoted to Viktor Schauberger, boiled down to the following precis:
Late in the war, despite being close to pensionable age, Schauberger was called up for active duty in the German Army. Soon afterward, he received orders to report to an SS institution in Vienna. From there, he was taken to the nearby concentration camp of Mauthausen, informed by the camp commandant that his inventions had received the blessing of Reichsführer Himmler himself, and ordered to handpick a group of engineers from among the prisoners. This would be the "team" that would help him complete his work on an energy device of radical design that Schauberger had begun working on before the war. If he did not comply with this order, the commandant informed him, he would be hanged and reprisals instituted against his family. Schauberger did as he was told.
By 1944, serious work had begun on a Schauberger machine that appeared to have a dual purpose: first as an energy generator and second as a power plant for an aerospace vehicle of saucer-like appearance. Descriptions of the workings of this generator, sometimes referred to as a "trout turbine," were always woefully inadequate. One such relayed the apparent fact that "if water or air is rotated into a twisting form of oscillation known as 'colloidal,' a buildup of energy results, which, with immense power, can cause lévitation."
Details of the chronology were hazy, Cross explained, but Schau berger's team had apparently claimed success a few days before Germany surrendered. One of the scientists who'd worked with Schauberger reportedly said that at the first attempt to run the machine "the flying saucer rose unexpectedly to the ceiling and then was wrecked. The apparatus functioned at the first attempt… and rose upward trailing a blue-green and then a silver-colored glow."
The craft in question, Cross said, had a diameter of 1.5 meters, weighed 135 kilograms and was started by a small electric motor with takeoff energy supplied by the so-called trout turbine.
The next part, Cross' text alerted me, was really weird. "A few days later an American group reportedly appeared, who seemed to understand what was happening and seized everything (his emphasis, not mine)." Schauberger was kept under "protective U.S. custody" for six months to a year, Cross maintained, and some of his work was reportedly branded by the Americans as "atomic energy research." Cross ended up saying he had no idea what happened to Schauberger after this period.
I kept all of this in mind as I drove through Ebensee, scanning the mountains for a glimpse of the entrance to Kammler's tunnel system: the Zement complex that would have developed and manufactured the A-9/A-10 intercontinental rocket. I saw nothing but for some road signs directing visitors to a Holocaust Memorial. Zement had become a tourist attraction.
Following directions from Schauberger's grandson, Joerg, I pushed through Bad Ischl, following the River Traun through a patchy expanse of woodland until, on the left-hand side of the road, I spotted the institute, a large imposing house with a tower rising from one of its wings, the initials "PKS" painted in letters six feet high on one of its walls. It was here that the Schauberger family organized periodic lectures and seminars devoted to the heretical scientific principles promulgated by Viktor and his son Walter. Walter had since died, but his son Joerg continued to push the ideas that his father and grandfather had promoted for the creation of a better world.