Heinkel coerced the patent office into restricting the use of Schau berger's technology to water purification and distillation applications, leaving Heinkel free to make fraudulent use of Schauberger's innovations in his aircraft projects. When the Reich Patent Office offered Schauberger a patent on this basis, the Austrian refused and consequently had his application turned down.
In May 1941, Schauberger was formally approached by the "Ges tapo," who served him notice (in the company of his patent lawyers) that they would not restrict his work — far from it — but in future he had to pursue it in secret.
This meeting appears to be the trigger for a period of highly co vert activity in Schauberger's life, about which he leaves few clues in his letters. Weeks after his meeting with the Gestapo (which, in Schauberger-speak, could just as easily have been any SS personnel), he wrote to his son Walter saying he was in Gablonz (present-day Jablonec) in Czechoslovakia and that "what I am doing is secret."
Today, Jablonec is almost exactly where the Czech, German and Polish borders meet. During the war, it was bang in the heart of Kammler's high-tech kingdom.
In a letter the following month, Schauberger told his son that he had an agreement with a "factory" in the Sudeten region which was undertaking unspecified "research." This factory appears to be one and the same place Schauberger had mentioned earlier: Gablonz.
Looking at the map and trying not to be seduced by the Legend, I noted that Gablonz was conveniently located between Prague and Breslau.
In the same correspondence, Schauberger reveals two other facts of significance: first that work at Kertl (apparently on repairs to the device that smashed against the roof of the hangar) is "going so slowly it is as if someone is deliberately trying to slow it down"; and that he has become aware that Heinkel has stolen his ideas.
Schauberger also reveals that his source in the Heinkel matter is a member of the "secret police" — a term Schauberger used interchangeably with "SS."
In July 1941, Schauberger describes how "an intermediary" has approached him in a bid to rectify certain problems Heinkel was experiencing with the technology he had lifted from Schauberger's patent application. With ill-concealed schadenfreude', Schauberger reveals that Heinkel's engineers have made a mistake copying his design, and that he knows what the error is. Through his dialogue with the intermediary, Schauberger believes that Heinkel is trying to substitute conventional engine technology with technology of his own.
On the face of it, this ought to mean one of two things: that the compressor technology of the troubled He 280's HeS 8 turbojets had been marked for replacement by Schauberger turbine components, the "centripetal compressors" of his successful 1936 patent application; or that Heinkel was attempting to swap complete Schauberger power-plant units for the underperforming HeS 8 turbojets.
The first explanation makes little sense. Adding a "centripetal compressor" — one that causes air to flow radially inward — would have destroyed the carefully tailored flow dynamics of the HeS 8 engine, which was a centrifugal gas turbine based on a principle diametrically opposed to the Schauberger implosion technique.
The second explanation is equally vexing. Strapping Schauberger's engines, which worked on a suction principle, onto the He 280 would have made a total nonsense of the aircraft's graceful aerodynamics.
History, in any case, tells us that the Air Ministry (RLM) would give the He 280 a production order only if Heinkel substituted the HeS 8 engine for BMW 003 or Jumo 004 axial-flow turbojets. Neither of these would fit, so the entire project was scrapped.
There has never been any mention in Heinkel files, so far as I am aware, of any association between the He 280 project and Viktor Schauberger.
This process of elimination allowed me to entertain the notion with greater confidence than I had earlier that Heinkel had been working on some altogether different form of air vehicle — one that would have worked best with a Schauberger engine, not a gas turbine; and one that has never come to light.
It is interesting to note that the legend of the Schriever Flying Top makes specific mention of the fact that construction of full-sized discshaped vehicles was transferred from Heinkel's Marienehe facility at Rostock to Czechoslovakia in 1943.
From late 1941, Schauberger's correspondence makes it plain that he is busily engaged in secret work in Czechoslovakia. In late 1941, he found himself in a "weapons factory" at Neudek (now Nejdek) near Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), around 120 km southwest of Gablonz. In December 1941, he was back in Gablonz eagerly awaiting the arrival of a starter motor — presumably, the little electric engine that was needed to kickstart his implosion device. At one point he tells his son that he is having to make frequent visits to the train station at Reichenberg (today, Libérée in the Czech Republic) to see if the "apparatus" has arrived.
In early 1942, Schauberger transferred to the Messerschmitt proto type works at Augsburg in Bavaria. There, he worked on the further development of a Repulsator implosion machine. In his correspondence, it is not clear if this is the same machine as the ones on which he was working in secret at the two locations in the Czech Republic, although it seems unlikely. What appears to be the case is that Schauberger's work was central to a number of parallel activities during 1941 and 1942: Heinkel's mysterious work at Marienehe, the two secret weapons factories in Czechoslovakia, the Kertl company in Vienna and Messerschmitt at Augsburg.
From Schauberger's writings, we know what happened to the Kertl and Messerschmitt machines. Work on the former ceased due to the company's inability to obtain essential supplies for the repair of the damaged device. This is not unreasonable, given Germany's growing inability to get hold of strategic raw materials from this period on, but Schauberger still voices his doubts, being convinced that somebody has ordered the work to be slowed deliberately.
The Messerschmitt device suffered a catastrophic failure due to the use of substandard casting techniques (and probably low-grade metal alloys) during the manufacture of the turbine. According to Schauberger it suffered a "meltdown" as soon as it reached its maximum rotational velocity. A company in Vienna, Ernst Kubiznak, was ordered to repair the device under a "Führer directive," but this, like the Kertl work, appears to have come to naught.
This leaves the Heinkel work and the secret activities in Czecho slovakia.
After the war, when Schauberger picked up on rumors of German flying saucers that supposedly flew near Prague during the closing stages of the conflict, he voiced his conviction that these were developments of his own ideas — and, given the way Heinkel had behaved, this may have been the case. It was already quite clear that the Sudeten region was the epicenter of some of the Nazis' most secret and unconventional research of the war period. But flying saucers? Antigravity propulsion? In April 1944, after a yearlong period of inactivity, Schauberger was summoned before a "draft panel" of the Waffen-SS. In June, he traveled to Breslau, ostensibly to join an SS-Panzergrenadier division. But more than six months before the Red Army had battled its way to the gates of the city — before Gauleiter Hanke had sifted the citizenry of Breslau for men far fitter than Schauberger — it is ludicrous to suppose that the SS would have recruited an Austrian of his age to fight in the defense of a patch of the Fatherland hundreds of kilometers from his home. In April 1944, Schauberger was 59 years old.
Given the S S penchant for extreme secrecy, coupled to the fact that Schauberger had already been up to his eyes in secret program work in Czechoslovakia, it is infinitely more likely that the Panzergrenadier story was a cover and that Schauberger was taken to Breslau for a specific purpose; one that played to his primary talent as an inventor.