Ojc
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1) Sources and reference Material
The OKW and Luftwaffe War Diaries and all copies of them for the period March 1945 have disappearedand are suspected to be in American keeping.
On 7 April 1945 the US Atomic Energy Commission inspected various underground workings at Ohrdruf and removed technical equipment before dynamiting surface entrances. The US authorities have classified all 1945 documents relating to Ohrdruf for a minimum period of 100 years.
Fortunately for researchers, in 1962 a quasi-judicial tribunal sat at Arnstadt in the then DDR to take depositions from local residents for an enquiry entitled "Befragung von Buergern zu Ereignissen zur oertlichen Geschichte". The enquiry was principally interested in what went on at the Ohrdruf Truppenuebungsplatz (TUP) in the latter years of the war. The depositions became common property in 1989 upon the reunification of Germany and may be viewed at Arnstadt Town Hall.
THE OHRDRUF MILITARY TRAINING GROUND
(2) There had been a military training ground at Ohrdruf since Imperial times. It was a large, rugged area of upland, nowadays disused and strewn with shells and other military scrap. Its perimeter can be circumnavigated by Land Rover in about three hours. Through binoculars small parts of the ruins of Amt 10, described below, can be made out but not visited.
During 1936/38 an Army underground telephone/telex exchange known as Amt 10 was built in the limestone strata below the TUP. Its entrances were disguised as chalets. The bunker was 50 feet down and measured 70 x 20 metres. Both floors had a central corridor about 3 metres wide with rooms either side, and 2 WCs. End-doors were gas-proofed, the installation had central heating, air was supplied under pressure, water drawn from a spring 600 feet below. A 475 hp ship's diesel was on hand as the emergency electrical generator, and this piece of equipment plays an important role in understanding the Ohrdruf mystery.
One of the three full-time Reichpost maintenance engineers employed there from 1938 to 1945 stated that Amt 10 was never used until the last few months of the war when it was "more than it seemed" and "its clandestine purpose was fairly obvious."
Col Robert S Allen, a Staff officer with General Patton's Third Army described in his book "Lucky Forward - The History of Patton's Third Army" (New York, 1947) a completed underground reinforced-concrete metropolis 50 feet down "to house the High Command". It was on two or three levels and consisted of galleries several miles in length and "extending like the spokes of a wheel." The location of Hitler's FHQ was not stated and Amt 10 was described misleadingly as "a two-floor deep concrete shelter."
If the structure was built like a wheel,, the FHQ would logically be at the hub, and Amt 10 was at the hub. Allen's description of Amt 10 as having two floors on April 1945 conflicts with the evidence of two persons who worked there: one hinted that there were more than two floors, the other testified there were three. The latter witness also stated that Amt 10 was two great bunkers of the same size, each of three floors, but not connected except by underground piping. Each bunker was guarded on each level by an SS sentry and passes for each entrance were not common to both. The most likely explanation is that the second bunker was constructed in 1944 at the same time as a third level was added to the first Amt 10 bunker as the Fuehrer-suite.
As regards the second bunker, a witness stated that in 1944 there was an installation below the TUP which created an electro-magnetic field capable of stopping the engines of a conventional aircraft at seven miles. During the war, the Allies never photographed Ohrdruf from the air, nor bombed it, even though their spies must have assured them it was crawling with SS and scientific groups. A German electro-magnetic field which interfered with their aircraft at altitudes of up to seven miles is admitted by a 1945 USAF Intelligence document. The USAF suspected that it was a device to bring down their bombers, but it obviously had some other purpose, or it would have been operating below Berlin.
Many Arnstadt witnesses described occasions when electrical equipment and automobile engines cut out. They always knew when this was about to happen, for the ship's diesel engine at Amt 10 would smoke. A diesel motor is not affected by an electro-magnetic field. In 1980, Russians scientists were still able to measure the field on their equipment, but they were never able to identify the source.
THE FHQ AT OHRDRUF
The FHQ at Ohrdruf is not admitted by academic historians. However, the evidence for it is strong:
(a) S-III was an SS military factory complex below Jonastal nearOhrdruf where 1000 Buchenwald inmates began digging in June 1944. No decision had been taken to build an FHQ in Thuringia before 24 August 1944.
(b) In September 1944, a geologist consulted by SS-WVHA regarding the suitability of Jonastal for an FHQ suggested the TUP at Ohrduf instead.
(c) In October 1944, General von Gockl, TUP.commandant, evacuated all Wehrmacht personnel from the plain. Within a fortnight the notorious Ohrdruf-KZ had been set up while SS-Fuehrungsstab SIII, in charge of the FHQ project, occupied a school at nearby Luisenthal. Firms working on building projects in Poland were ordered immediately to Ohrdruf.
(d) At the end of 1944, Hauptsturmfuehrer Karl Sommer, deputy head of WVHA-DH (forced labour) assembled a workforce at Buchenwald to build a secret FHQ named S-III at Ohrdruf. S-III had a fully-equipped telephone-telex exchange before work started, thus identifying it as around Amt 10.
(e) Hitler's Luftwaffe ADC Oberstlt von Below stated in his memoirs that in early 1945 he visited the location of the new Thuringian FHQ and it was at the TUP Ohrdruf.
(f) In late January 1945, Hitler spoke openly of evacuating Ministry staff from Berlin "perhaps to Oberhof in Thuringia".
(g) In compliance with order 71/45 and the communique from FHQ Berlin issued by Wehrmacht ADC General Burgdorf on 9 March 1945, General Krebs of the Army General Staff reported that between 12 February and 29 March 1945 a substantial proportion of OKH Staff had transferred to the Ohrdruf area.
(h) On the nights of 4 and 12 March 1945, "a small explosive of terrific destructive power" was tested on the TUP. 200 KZ inmates and 20 SS guards were scorched to death on the first test due to a miscalculation of the extent of the effect. The bodies were immolated on a common pyre, the ashes being scattered across central Germany from aircraft. In mid-March, a 30-metre long rocket was reported test fired into the night sky from a weapons site within five miles of TUP Ohrdruf. The Amt 10 telephone engineer gave evidence that "200 so-called female signals auxiliaries" arrived to staff the second bunker in this period. Why they were "so-called" is not explained.
(i) In early March 1945, Org Todt began work on the Brandleite railway tunnel at Oberhof to accommodate the special trains of Hitler and Goering, installed a telephone exchange in the station-master's house and positioned flak batteries on surrounding peaks.
(j) A witness stated that the Fuehrer-Sperrkreis at Ohrdruf was called Burg and alleged that Hitler spent at least one day there in late March 1945.
(k) In late March a Luftwaffe mutiny occurred in which General Barber and over three hundred pilots and air base command personnel were executed for refusing to obey an unknown order (the Luftwaffe War Diaries for March and first part April 1945 have vanished).
(l) Upon his arrest in May 1945, Goering told his captors that he had engineered the mutiny thus saving the world by "refusing to deploy bombs that could have destroyed all civilisation." It was freely reported at the time, since nobody knew what on earth he meant.
END
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Ditch
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Registered: 29th Nov 02
Location: St Albans Drives: JDM Celica GT4 WRC
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SPANG
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Cybermonkey
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Registered: 22nd Sep 02
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Oliver, did you know that had a suitable jet engine been found for the ME262, they may have won the war in europe?
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Ojc
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Yes, Spunkey.
Adolf Galland admited if the Me262 had the engines of the Gloucester Meteor jets which came into British service in the last month of the war they could have significantly turned the tied of war.
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Ojc
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Hitler wanted a thousand turbojet fighter-bombers to support German troops in Normandy. By June, 1944, however only a few engines had even been built. After that time the design of the Junkers Jumo 004B engines were frozen in a fairly experimental stage and production therefore steadily increased. The only difference between the fighter-bomber version of the Me 262 A-2 and the fighter only Me 262 A-1 is the addition of two bomb-racks on the nose and fewer guns. The idea that Hitler held up the Me 262 is a complete myth. I've covered it many times on the forum before, including posting the number of engines produced each month. After a successful Normandy invasion obviated the need for the fighter-bomber, production did go to the fighter-only version to defend against Allied bombers (coinciding with an increase in engine production) but even then the Me 262, despite enjoying top priority throughout 1944, only started becoming successful in the Spring of 1945, especially with the use of R4M air-air rockets. Btw, the fuel for the jet was diesel oil thinned with a little low-octane motor-gasoline. This was cheaper to produce from coal than high-octane aviation gasoline, best produced from natural petroleum (very scarce in 1944-45). The cheaper fuel was the reason that jet propulsion was developed further in Germany than anywhere else.
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Cybermonkey
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Registered: 22nd Sep 02
Location: Sydney, Australia
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"tide of war". Yes, it is frightening how advanced the Nazi machine was, it was only a matter of certain things happening that caused their downfall, particularly the meteoric fall of the Luftwaffe in a matter of months once the Allies had suitable machines like the P51, Spitfire mk9 and various other high power fighters, not to mention the miriad of fantastic bombers like the B17 and Lancaster.
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Ojc
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It is well attested that Hitler was no fool when it came to aircraft. The potential of the Me 262 as a fighter was such that his decision to produce it exclusively as a bomber implies that he had to believe it was a WAR-WINNER in that role.
The various explanations that the Me 262 was required as a fighter-bomber for this or that purpose are suppositions discredited by Hitler's observation in fury to Oberst Petersen during the aircraft production conference at the Berghof on 23 May 1944, still a month prior to the Allied landings in Normandy: "This aircraft is so fast that it needs neither armour protection nor guns. They can all be removed." A fighter-bomber without guns is a bomber pure and simple.
What could the bomber role have been? Peltz and Galland were both adamant that the Me 262 was useless as a bomber UNLESS the bomb to be carried was no more than 250 kgs in weight and could be dropped in level flight without aiming. This implies a bomb of terrific destructive effect. A miracle bomb produced in large numbers. And for some technical reason, the bomb could only be carried by a jet aircraft.
There are at least three declassified documents, from German and British archives, and two English language books authored by intelligence or military ordnance authorities, which indicate that such a bomb was under development in Germany during 1944/45 and was tested on two occasions at Ohrdruf in March 1945.
Too many German sources believed in the miracle weapon for it to have been a bluff. Too many documents about Ohrdruf and other weapons centres remain sealed for at least a hundred years in Allied archives for there to have been "nothing in it". The unexpected opening of the municipal archive at Arnstadt, formerly in the DDR before German reunification, has lifted the edge of the veil. But pressures on historians to look away remain rigidly in force.
Source of 23.5.1944 statement: Mano Ziegler: Turbinen-Jaeger 262, Motorbuch, 1978.
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Cybermonkey
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Registered: 22nd Sep 02
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did you know that Hitler wanted the ME262 to be a fighter-bomber rather than an all-out fighter-interceptor. He thought that the Jumo004 engine was more suited to this role. A defected ace then started up his own squadron on the coast of holland to intercept incoming bombers from the british isles, with the Nazis unaware that he was doing this! we are talking early 1945 anyway.
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Cybermonkey
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Registered: 22nd Sep 02
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fpmsl, thats what i said 
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Ojc
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Read the story at the top, it makes a very intresting read.
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Cybermonkey
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i have.
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Ojc
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Registered: 14th Nov 00
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How do you feel about the EMF idea?
Must be something going on if the Americans have classifed all documents for 100 years.
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Ojc
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So we won't find out until 2045 
Jesus
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Robbo
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Registered: 6th Aug 02
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quote:
Originally posted by Ojc
Yes, Spunkey.
Adolf Galland admited if the Me262 had the engines of the Gloucester Meteor jets which came into British service in the last month of the war they could have significantly turned the tied of war.
Without a doubt
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Robbo
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Registered: 6th Aug 02
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quote:
Originally posted by Cybermonkey24
did you know that Hitler wanted the ME262 to be a fighter-bomber rather than an all-out fighter-interceptor
I heard that that was the reason too
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jr
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Registered: 20th May 02
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ollie have your read the reserch and develoment that hiltler commenced asking for araldo to build a all weather bomber to bomb new york
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Ojc
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Yeah, I've read about that story.
Its was a near impossible task unless the plane was launched from a carrier and Germany did'nt have any carriers in service in WW2.
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