“Yes. It was obviously the right decision in the circumstances, and it was a fine piece of precision bombing. What worried the British government at the time, quite apart from the possibility of a constant stream of high- explosive shells landing in and around London, was that they suspected the Nazis might be prepared to fit the shells with chemical or biological payloads. After all, they were very experienced by this time in the use of lethal gases. Zyklon B gas had been supplied to the Buchenwald concentration camp early in nineteen forty, and to Auschwitz in September of the following year. Oddly enough, its principal use was for delousing in an attempt to control the spread of typhus, but fairly soon it started to be used as the principal agent to solve the Nazi’s Jewish problem. The gas had also been used as early as nineteen twenty-nine, but in America, not Germany, for disinfecting freight trains and sanitizing the clothing of Mexican immigrants.
“But Zyklon B wasn’t what the British were worried about, because it only works effectively in a confined and unventilated space, like the Nazi gas chambers. Toward the end of the war, the German chemical company IG Farben moved into another underground facility named Falkenhagen, about ten miles northwest of Frankfurt, near the Polish border. Believe it or not, some of the British records concerning this place are still classified, even today, but it’s fairly clear that the facility was intended to produce a brand-new and much more lethal type of weapon: a nerve gas. This new concoction was named sarin, which can’t be seen, smelled or tasted. The lethal dose is tiny: one droplet on the skin will cause death in about six minutes. Zyklon B was just as lethal, but took up to twenty minutes to do its job. Luckily, the war ended before large-scale production of sarin, or any other of what you might call the ‘new generation’ nerve agents, like tabun, could start.”
Angela looked up from her notes for a moment and stared ahead at the road that was unwinding steadily in front of them.
“Where are we now?” she asked.
Bronson glanced down at the satnav display.
“About halfway there, I suppose,” he replied. “As soon as we see somewhere we like the look of, we’ll stop and buy ourselves some lunch. Right, I think I understand the kind of things that the Nazis were working on toward the end of the Second World War, but I still have no idea about the significance of the ‘lantern bearer.’”
Angela smiled at him, but without any humor in her expression. “Ah, yes,” she said, “the Laternentrager. Now that was something completely different.”
34
25 July 2012
Half an hour after they’d spotted a roadside cafe that looked clean and welcoming, they were back on the road again, and Angela continued telling Bronson what she’d discovered.
“It’s not clear exactly when this particular Nazi project was conceived,” she said, “but from what I’ve been able to find out, it looks as if sometime in mid-nineteen forty-one an unidentified German scientist came up with a theory that was sufficiently interesting, and presumably already sufficiently well-developed, for the Nazi leadership to allocate development funds to it.
“What is known is that in January ’forty-two, a brand-new project code named Thor — or possibly Tor, meaning ‘gate’-was created, under the leadership of Professor Walther Gerlach, a leading German nuclear physicist. The project was under contract to the Heereswaffenamt Versuchsanstalt — that roughly translates as ‘Army Ordnance Office Research Station’-number ten, and was a part of the Nazi atomic bomb project. The operation functioned as a single entity until August of the following year. Then the project was divided into two separate parts, and the code name Tor or Thor was replaced by two other names: Chronos and Laternentrager. Depending on which source you look at, by the way, Chronos could either be spelled with a ‘C’ or a ‘K,’ as Kronos, and that could be significant.”
“Okay,” Bronson replied. “I already know what Laternentrager stands for, but what about Chronos? Is that Latin for ‘time,’ perhaps? You know, like in ‘chronometer’?”
“Almost. It’s actually Greek, but you’re right: the word does mean ‘time.’ Some researchers who’ve investigated this project have come up with some fairly unlikely conclusions about what the Nazis were trying to achieve. They looked at the code names- Tor and Chronos, ‘gate’ and ‘time’-and presumed that the purpose of the project was to build a time machine, or maybe come up with a device that could somehow be used to manipulate time.”
“I see what you mean by ‘unlikely.’”
“Exactly,” Angela agreed. “The chances of the Nazis actually managing to get anywhere with a project as futuristic as time manipulation well over half a century ago are pretty slim. And the other fairly obvious counterargument is that, even if they had, by some miracle, devised a way of altering time, it’s difficult to see how that could possibly have helped the war effort. What they really needed were weapons, guns or rockets or bombs, stuff like that, to achieve superiority on the battlefield or in the air, and that was what all their other secret projects, all their various Wunderwaffen programs, were designed to create. Personally, I think it’s most likely that the code words were randomly generated, and had no direct connection with the projects they were linked to. And that brings us neatly to our mystery weapon, Charite Anlage, the Wenceslas Mine and Die Glocke.”
“Now you’ve lost me,” Bronson said, pulling out to overtake two slow-moving cars. “Charity what?”
“Charite Anlage,” Angela repeated, “aka Projekt SS ten forty. It was a massive operation, beginning in June nineteen forty-two, and required the German company AEG to supply huge amounts of electrical power. It may even have been a joint project with Bosch and Siemens. According to one source, the entire venture was officially named Schlesische Wekstatten Dr. Furstenau, presumably because for a time it was based at Ksia?z? also known as Furstenstein Castle, a thirteenth-century castle at Silesia in Poland.”
“But what did it do?” Bronson asked.
“I’m coming to that. First, we need to go back to the nineteen thirties, before the war started. In nineteen thirty-six, a German scientist named Dr. Ronald Richter performed some experiments using electric arc furnaces to smelled lithium for U-boat batteries. Almost by accident, he discovered that by injecting deuterium into the plasma, into the arc, he could create a kind of nuclear fusion. Or at least, that was what he claimed.
“His work was to some extent complementary to that being undertaken at around the same time by Professor Gerlach, who had been involved in the creation of plasma by utilizing the spin polarization of atoms since the nineteen twenties. To me, it looks as if this entire project was conceived by Gerlach, who apparently convinced the Nazi high command that he could build a device that could transmute the element thorium into uranium, most likely using beryllium as a source of neutrons. Now you can really appreciate the significance of at least one of the code names, because I believe that it wasn’t called Projekt Tor, but Projekt Thor, a reference to thorium, and nothing to do with any kind of a gate.”
Angela glanced across at Bronson to make sure that he was still paying attention. He was.
“To me, as a nonscientist, the next step in the chain of logic seems to make sense. The Nazis were having a lot of trouble trying to get sufficient supplies of heavy water out of Norway, and they hadn’t got many other potential sources. I think they turned to Gerlach and his theoretical machine for converting thorium into uranium- uranium that could then be used to produce plutonium to create a nuclear bomb.”
Angela glanced back at her notebook to refresh her memory.
“There are a few more facts that I’ve been able to turn up but, as you’ll obviously appreciate, some of the information is pretty sketchy, just because of the circumstances and what happened at the end of the war. It seems there were at least two important laboratories involved, one at a town named Leubus-its modern name is Lubiaz-in Silesia, and another at Neumakt-which is now called Sroda Slaska-to the east of Breslau or Wroclaw. I mentioned Die Glocke, and this device was at the very heart of the project. The German name means ‘the Bell,’ and was apparently inspired by a poem penned by a man named Friedrich Schiller, entitled the ‘Song of the Bell,’ which describes the forging of a great bell from metal of extreme purity. I’m sure the Nazis would have loved the mystical overtones of this idea, creating a perfect device from perfect material, much as they were trying to do with the huge and diverse population of the European countries they had conquered.
“The other reason for the name was because the device apparently looked very much like a large bell. Again, it depends upon which source you refer to, but it seems that Die Glocke was partly built at the
laboratories in Leubus and Neumakt. The main part of the unit was a contrarotating centrifuge, and that was
