Nazi UFOs: Die Glocke, the Haunebu and the Flying-Saucer Myth

The story, in its full form, goes like this. In the last years of the war, SS engineers working from occult knowledge channeled by a medium built disc-shaped craft, the Vril and Haunebu series, capable of speeds and altitudes no Allied aircraft could match. A parallel program at a mine in Silesia built Die Glocke, a bell-shaped device that bent gravity and time. When the Reich fell, the machines and their makers escaped to a base beneath the Antarctic ice, from which they have flown ever since, explaining the flying saucers of 1947 and everything after. Admiral Byrd's 1947 Antarctic expedition was a failed invasion of the base.

None of it is documented. The legend was assembled after the war, in stages, by people who can be named and whose motives ranged from selling magazines to rehabilitating the Reich. This article separates the parts that happened from the parts that were written, and traces who wrote them.

German aviation in 1944–45 was genuinely advanced and genuinely strange. The Horten brothers' Ho 229, a jet-powered flying wing, flew in early 1945 and looks, from any angle, like something from the next decade. The Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket interceptor, the Bachem Natter vertical-launch fighter, the Focke-Wulf Triebflügel tail-sitter with rotating wingtip ramjets (never built), and the V-2 all fed Allied intelligence a stream of designs that seemed to come from the future, and Operation Paperclip brought their engineers to the United States. A circular-winged aircraft, the Sack AS-6, was built by a farmer and tested at Brandis in 1944; it managed only hops before being abandoned.

That is the whole documented list. No German disc-shaped aircraft flew, no program for one appears in the Reich Air Ministry's extensive surviving files, and Allied technical intelligence teams that combed every factory and test center in 1945 found no saucers. The flying wing is the closest the Luftwaffe came, and it was captured, shipped to the United States, and now sits in the Smithsonian.

The saucers appeared in 1950, in the newspapers. In March, the Italian engineer Giuseppe Belluzzo told the press that flying discs had been designed in Italy and Germany in 1942. Days later, Rudolf Schriever, a former Luftwaffe pilot and mechanic, told Der Spiegel that he had built a "flying top," a disc with a rotating rim of blades, at the Škoda works near Prague, and that its prototype was destroyed and his plans stolen in the final days of the war. In 1953 Georg Klein claimed to have watched a Schriever-Habermohl disc fly at Prague in February 1945, and the engineer Richard Miethe was said to have gone to Canada to build one for Avro.

The claims came with no drawings that could fly, no witnesses beyond the claimants, and no trace in the Škoda records. Avro Canada did build a disc, the Avrocar, for the U.S. military in the late 1950s, without Miethe; it could not rise above ground effect and was cancelled. But the Schriever story fixed the idea that flying saucers were a German invention, and it was the seed the rest grew from.

Vril is a fictional energy from "The Coming Race," an 1871 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton about a subterranean master race. The idea that a real Vril Society existed in Berlin comes from a 1947 magazine essay by the rocket writer Willy Ley, who recalled a small, silly occult group; the French authors Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier inflated it in "The Morning of the Magicians" (1960) into a secret society behind Nazism. There is no record of any such society in the extensive files on German occult groups, and the "medium" Maria Orsic, who channeled the saucer plans from Aldebaran, first appears in the 1990s.

The Haunebu and Vril saucers themselves, with their neatly typed specifications, gun turrets and SS insignia, come from a set of videos and documents circulated in Germany from the late 1980s by Ralf Ettl and Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer, associated with a small neo-Nazi occult circle. The drawings are the source of every Haunebu image on the internet and every model kit. They were produced forty years after the war by people with an interest in making the Reich look like it had touched the stars.

The Bell is the newest and, for a while, the most respectable piece of the legend. The Polish writer Igor Witkowski described it in "Prawda o Wunderwaffe" (2000): a bell-shaped device, about nine feet across, filled with a mercury-like substance called Xerum 525, spun at high speed in a mine complex near Ludwikowice in Lower Silesia under the SS project name Chronos, killing several scientists and warping time and gravity, and removed by the SS at the war's end. His source was, he said, transcripts of the interrogation of SS general Jakob Sporrenberg, which he had been allowed to read but not copy. No one else has seen them.

The British aviation journalist Nick Cook carried the story to an English readership in "The Hunt for Zero Point" (2001), and it has since been attached to everything from Kecksburg, where the 1965 object was acorn-shaped, to Operation Paperclip. The "Henge" at Ludwikowice that is offered as the Bell's test rig is the concrete base of a cooling tower for the mine's power plant. There is no wartime record of Chronos, Xerum 525 or the Bell, and the physics described does not exist.

Germany did send an expedition to Antarctica in 1938–39, which surveyed a region it called Neuschwabenland and dropped swastika markers from a flying boat, in support of whaling claims. The United States did send Operation Highjump in 1946–47, a large training and mapping exercise under Admiral Byrd, which was cut short by weather. Everything connecting the two is from one book: "UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?" (1974), published under a pseudonym by Ernst Zündel, a German-Canadian Holocaust denier who later said the UFO material was a way to fund and draw attention to his political publishing. Byrd's "enemy aircraft that could fly from pole to pole" quotation is a mistranslation of a 1947 interview about strategic vulnerability.

Hollow-earth openings, submarine convoys of Nazi gold and Hitler's survival were folded in from other conspiracy literature. Under the ice at Neuschwabenland there is rock; the region has been surveyed by several nations since.

The Nazi UFO has a permanent place in popular culture, from Iron Sky and the Wolfenstein games to Hellboy and Captain America, because it fits two stories at once: the technological Reich that was always one step ahead, and the saucer that needs a builder. It also has a darker use. For the neo-Nazi occult writers who built the Haunebu, and for the readers who take them literally, a Reich with antigravity ships is a Reich that did not really lose. The saucers are a retrospective victory.

For the flying-saucer mystery the myth is a dead end: if Kenneth Arnold's objects had been German, someone would have found the factory. What Germany left behind was real aircraft, real rockets and real engineers, whose work became the American space program in the open, with names attached. Anti-gravity technology covers the physics the legend claims, and Area 51 the postwar programs the saucer stories attached themselves to next.