This would have been an ill-disciplined leap of faith, a lapse in cold reasoning on my part, but for one thing.
By June 1944, the S S was almost a year into its takeover of the German secret weapons industry. Bit by bit, the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht were being eased out of arms production. In spite of the failures at Kertl and Messerschmitt, there is ample justification— based on what happened next — to assume that the Czech-based projects had validated at least some of Schauberger's ideas.
A month previously, a month before Schauberger went to Breslau, he was ordered to Mauthausen concentration camp to handpick a team from among the inmates to start building as many as five different types of Schauberger machine. This is confirmed by the Schauberger archive. The S S wanted him to stop "tinkering around with prototypes and begin serious construction work."
Somewhere along the line, someone must have been convinced that the technology worked.
The essential point, the point that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I settled into the part of Schauberger's diary that dealt with the last six months of the war, was one of which Viktor himself would have been unaware as he arrived outside the stone walls of Mauthausen camp in that summer of 1944. The big picture, which was in the possession of a mere handful of individuals in Berlin, was that the concentration camps were the designated production engines of the "state within the state," as Speer had called the SS; the grim new powerhouses of the Reich economy.
Viewed this way, it shed light on Schauberger's frantic activities during 1941, when his feet had hardly touched the ground as he dashed between project locations in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, a time that could now be reinterpreted as the start date for prototype work of a diverse and highly secret nature; work that continued until early 1944, when the SS became satisfied that the machines were ready for manufacture.
The immediate task of Schauberger's handpicked team at Mauthausen was to produce engineering drawings from which production work could begin.
Schauberger's diaries tell us what these machines were. One was a water purifier. Another was an energy device capable of generating highvoltage electricity. A third was for "biosynthesizing" hydrogen fuel from water. A fourth was a machine that "naturally" produced intense heat or cold. The fifth, dubbed the "fleigende scheibe, "or "flying saucer," was the unconventional aero-engine that had come to the attention of Heinkel and others during 1941. It was this latter device that I now focused on.
Schauberger set up design offices in the SS technical engineer school, in the Rosenhugel district of Vienna.
Working under oppressive conditions, effectively at gunpoint, he managed to gain a number of key concessions from the SS. Telling them that he needed personally to select his team from Mauthausen's inmates and that these men should be removed from the camp environment, fed and clothed properly if they were to work productively, he was able to extract around 25 former technicians from the camp and set them up in workshops nearby.
The first set of preproduction drawings were signed off on in August 1944 and delivered from the engineer school to these facilities. Schauberger moved between the two sites, his visits to Mauthausen increasing in frequency as metal was cut on the propulsion device, which he referred to sporadically in the text as the Repulsine (even though this name had come to be associated in former years with other projects).
By early October 1944, Schauberger's diary shows that he was already starting to mill components for the Repulsine. On October 6, he made the first preproduction drawings of a part of the device he refers to as the Schaufelentwurf, a design for a cone-shaped air intake that bolted onto the top of the disc.
Five days later, work is interrupted by the first of many air raid alerts as Vienna and its environs are hit by Flying Fortresses on daylight missions against local industrial targets. Mauthausen was close to Linz, home of the Hermann Goering Works, a giant heavy engineering complex. It is clear from these and other entries that Schauberger was racing against the clock to complete his task.
On October 14, he wrote: "I wish I could work longer, but I have to stop at four in the afternoon. There is a shortage of materials and tools. I had to construct parts today from an old tank." Because much of the raw material was of low quality, he instructed his team to be particularly mindful of heat stresses and welding quality.
It was also clear that he was being forced to shift between projects as demands required. On October 23, he turned his attention to developing a more efficient carburetor for Opel Blitz army trucks, presumably on the instructions of the SS, an activity that distracted him for the best part of ten days. On November 4, one of the water-based devices needed his design input. On November 26, it was the turn of the Repulsine again— the electric starter motor needed to be checked and fitted.
The team worked on the Repulsine on Christmas Day and on into the New Year, all the while having to contend with power cuts and air raids. Finally, on February 28, Schauberger moved his operations center to the little village of Leonstein in Upper Austria. The decision was a fateful one on two counts. It not only took him away from the bombing, but placed him squarely in what would later become the U.S. zone of occupation. Had he stayed in Vienna, Schauberger would have found himself in the Soviet zone of influence.
In light of what happened to him in the days, weeks and months that followed the end of the war, it might have been the softer option.
On April 5, 1945, the diary reveals that final assembly of the Repulsine had commenced. A month later, it was ready to go. But the end, when it came, was almost surreal. Instead of firing up the turbine for its first test run as planned on May 6, Schauberger awoke to find that the SS officers charged with oversight of the operation had fled into the night. The team stopped work on May 8, hours before the surrender of German forces took effect at a minute past midnight on May 9.
The SS machine had not flown in the last days of the war, as the Legend had maintained, but in almost all other respects it had held up remarkably well.
The diary had made it clear that Viktor Schauberger had built a machine that had flown earlier in the war at Kertl (and almost certainly during Schauberger's secret period of research in Czechoslovakia). It was also quite clear that the device's modus operandi was wholly unconventional — that is to say, the method by which it generated lift was insufficiently explained by current scientific knowledge. The diary had given me something I could believe in at long last.
Via Schauberger, the Nazis had been deeply involved — no question— in what can only be described as flying saucer technology. And from this flowed the corollary that other parts of the Legend were perhaps also based on fact.
Couple the Schauberger evidence with what I had seen in the Lusty files and suddenly it wasn't so hard anymore to believe that the Germans had developed prototype remote-controlled air vehicles — craft that had the ability to latch onto the exhaust wakes of Allied bombers or the infrared signatures of the aircraft themselves — that explained many of the foo-fighter sightings of 1944 and 1945.
It was also highly likely that some of these "conventionally powered" German disc-shaped craft were test beds for Schauberger-type propulsion systems. And therein lay another subset to the mystery. Something about this whole strand of development had conspired to make it the most classified form of technology in existence. Even more so than the bomb.