Wondering what’s real and what isn’t? Here’s a quick rundown, along with some sources for those interested in doing further research.
The bioweapon “Sword of Solomon” is a figment of our imagination.
Operation Caesar, Germany’s last-ditch effort near the end of the Second World War to supply its ally, Japan, with war material and weapons technology, was real.
The Type XB submarine described here did exist and was used as part of Operation Caesar. One of these massive submarines, U-234, surrendered at the end of the war and was found to be carrying uranium and a variety of other war material to Japan. Another Type XB, loaded with a cargo of mercury, sank off the coast of Norway at the end of the war and is indeed causing serious problems. Four keels for an even larger U-boat, the XI-B, were indeed laid down in the shipyards of Bremen. There are no records of these giant subs ever having been completed, although rumors persist that one was built and launched on a secret mission at the end of the war. The Deutsches U-Boot Museum-Archiv in Cuxhaven-Altenbruch, Germany, is real, and is an invaluable source of documents on German submarines and their crews. For more detailed information on the U-boats of World War II, see the excellent publications of Rainer Busch and Hans Joachim Röll. The book Jax is reading, Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-boat Battles of World War II, by Herbert Warner, is real, and is a fascinating memoir written by one of the few German submarine commanders to survive the war.
At the end of World War II, over one hundred U-boats surrendered to the Allies and were scuttled off the coast of Britain in what was known as Operation Deadlight. These submarines are now being salvaged for their pre-1945 steel.
The demolition of ships, or shipbreaking, has now moved almost exclusively to third-world countries and entails serious health and environmental concerns. For more information, see End of the Line, a photo essay on shipbreaking in Bangladesh by Brendan Cor at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ship_breaking, and Greenpeace’s Platform on Shipbreaking, www.shipbreakingplatform.com.
The history of the United States government involvement in remote viewing is much as described by McClintock in Chapter 4. For more information, we suggest Jon Ronson’s Men Who Stare at Goats (2005), and Joseph McMoneagle’s Mind Trek (1997).
The history of Kaliningrad Oblast, formerly part of the German province of East Prussia, is essentially as described here. Because Western access to Kaliningrad was, until recently, prohibited, little has been written about the modern oblast. By far the best easily available study of Kaliningrad today is “Between East and West: a study of the Kaliningrad Region as a Russian exclave in the EU,” a masters thesis by Fred Balvert at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2007.
On the massacres and ethnic cleansing of Germans after World War II, little has been written in English. Probably the best look is still Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central Europe, volumes I-III, translated into English and published by the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War Victims, Bonn, in the 1950s. Be warned, it makes haunting reading.
For the tragic history of Izmir/Smyrna, see Margorie Housepian Dobkin, Smyran 1922: The Destruction of a City (1972).
The number of Palestinian refugees massacred at Sabra and Shatila in 1982 is disputed. Between six hundred and eight hundred bodies were recovered; another eighteen hundred civilians were reported missing and never found. Most are believed to lie buried in mass graves, many of them beneath Beirut’s Cité Sportif. See “Sabra and Shatila 20 Years On,” BBC News, 14 September 2002, and Leila Shahid, “The Sabra and Shatila Massacres: Eye-Witness Reports,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1. (Autumn 2002). You can also watch the eyewitness account of British journalist Robert Fisk in The Martyrs Smile, Part Two, at www.you-tube.com/watch? v=_JAmZCLhaoQ &NR=1, although be warned that the images are gruesome.
Historians continue to argue over the true extent of the German atomic program during World War II. Recent discoveries in Russian archives and what was East Germany are much as Wolfgang describes them in Chapters 42-43, and have made many earlier studies out of date. See Mark Walker, Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb (2005), and Hitlers Bombe, by Rainer Karlsch and Heiko Petermann (2007).
Much has been written about the Nazi concentration camps and medical experiments. See Doctors from Helclass="underline" The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans, by Vivien Spitz, a correspondent at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (republished 2005), and Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
For the Dachau Massacre of German prisoners of war by the U.S. 3rd Battalion of the 157th Infantry Regiment, see Colonel Howard Buechner’s The Hour of the Avenger (1986). Again, the numbers vary, from fifteen to more than six hundred; Eisenhower is said to have put the number of German prisoners murdered at around five hundred.
Politics has turned the subject of the ethnic origins of modern Jews into a potential mine field. For two opposing views, see Tel Aviv University historian and Holocaust survivor Shlomo Sand’s book, Matai ve’ech humtza ha’am hayehudi? (When and How the Jewish People Was Invented, 2008, in Hebrew), versus the article “The Khazar Myth and the New Anti-Semitism” by Steven Plaut, an American-born economics professor at the University of Haifa. For a history of the Khazars, Kevin Alan Brook’s The Jews of Khazaria (republished 2006), is considered a classic. For more on the Arab Christians, see Charles Sennott, The Body and the Blood: The Middle East’s Vanishing Christians and the Possibility for Peace (2002).
Operation Paperclip was a very real program that brought German scientists to the United States at the end of WWII to work on various projects for the government, from NASA to the CIA. Not all were Nazis. Those who were Nazis were brought in illegally and without the knowledge of either Truman or Eisenhower. See Clare Lasby’s Operation Paperclip (1975), and Christopher Simpson’s Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (1988).
For a look at American black ops, see Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (2007). For American operations run against Cuba from Florida, see Don Bohning, The Castro Obessession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba (2005). On U.S. biological and chemical warfare projects, see Seymour Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal (1969), and William Broad, Stephen Engelberg, and Judith Miller, Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War (2001). On modern ethnic biowarfare, see the British Medical Association Report, Biotechnology, Weapons, and Humanity (1999); the article reported in the London Sunday Times by Uzi Mahnaimi and Marie Colvin, “Israel Planning ‘ethnic bomb’ (November 1998); and “Lethal Legacy: Bioweapons for Sale,” an article by Joby Warrick and John Mintz in the Sunday, April 20, 2003 Washington Post on the sale of apartheid-era South African manmade pathogens to the private sector.
The “People of the Book Conference” draws upon various references in the Qur’an, where Christians and Jews are referred to as “People of the Book,” i.e., those who have received and believe previous revelations of God’s prophets, including the Jewish Torah, the Book of Psalms, and the Four Christian Gospels. In Islam, the Qur’an is seen as the completion of these earlier scriptures. See, for instance, “Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and Christians, and the Sabians-whoever believes in God and the Last Day and does good, they shall have their reward from the Lord. And that will be no fear for them, nor shall they grieve.” (Qur’an 2:62, 5:69, and many others) In Judaism, “People of the Book” tends to be applied specifically to the Jewish people and the Torah.