Hans Kammler
Re: Hans Kammler
Maybe, but it's unidentified on the book.
" The right to believe is the right of those who don't know "
Re: Hans Kammler
He looks like the salesman who sold me my new Toyota. Unusual photo for sure Michal - color and casual clothes.
Re: Hans Kammler
When is the colour pic taken?
ttvon
ttvon
Re: Hans Kammler
Spring - Summer 1944
Michal
Michal
Re: Hans Kammler
I read The Hunt for Zero Point which gives a good section to Kammler.
Re: Hans Kammler
Is anyone familiar with "The Hidden Nazi: the Untold Story of America's Deal with the Devil"? It was written by Dean Reuter, Colm Lowery, and Keith Chester and published by RegneryHistory in 2019. The authors make a compelling case that some of the U.S. Army's intelligence officers helped Kammler escape justice in much the same way they helped wanted Gestapo officers Klaus Barbie and Rudolf Mildner escape to South America. I read this book and, while plausible, it puzzles me that such a high-ranking SS officer as Kammler could have remained "hidden" while lesser war criminals like Barbie and Mildner were eventually located and, in Barbie's case, arrested and extradited to France where he was tried, convicted and ended up dying in a French prison. Any thoughts? Thanks!
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Mark Costa
- Member
- Posts: 2775
- Joined: 26 Jul 2002, 18:41
- Location: USA
Re: Hans Kammler
I also read the book and have "followed" the Kammler story for decades. Bottom line US intelligence would certainly make sure Kammler was not brought to justice if they were going to receive info on German secret weapons projects. Remember Von Braun was also familiar to Kammler and the US wanted these men to offset anyone the Russians had in their captivity. The Allies realized quickly the Russians could not be trusted and the race to secure this information was vital for postwar dominance. Kammler's knowledge would be invaluable. Barbie on the other hand had no value whatsoever and was simply a criminal. Kammler probably was given another identity and protected by the US intelligence.sekudlyda wrote: ↑17 Jan 2021, 22:33Is anyone familiar with "The Hidden Nazi: the Untold Story of America's Deal with the Devil"? It was written by Dean Reuter, Colm Lowery, and Keith Chester and published by RegneryHistory in 2019. The authors make a compelling case that some of the U.S. Army's intelligence officers helped Kammler escape justice in much the same way they helped wanted Gestapo officers Klaus Barbie and Rudolf Mildner escape to South America. I read this book and, while plausible, it puzzles me that such a high-ranking SS officer as Kammler could have remained "hidden" while lesser war criminals like Barbie and Mildner were eventually located and, in Barbie's case, arrested and extradited to France where he was tried, convicted and ended up dying in a French prison. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Mark Costa
Re: Hans Kammler
I read the book too and agree that the authors made a compelling case for Kammler's postwar survival. And I'm not generally big on conspiracy theories but the authors did their homework and put a lot of research into the book.
Highly recommended.
Wolfguy
Highly recommended.
Wolfguy
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tracysrocket
- Member
- Posts: 5
- Joined: 26 Aug 2005, 22:02
- Location: Oklahoma City
Re: Hans Kammler
I spoke with Mike Neufeld at Smithsonian (The Rocket and the Reich) and we agreed the Reuter book is poor. He wrote a review recently for "Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly"
Review for Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly
The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America’s Deal with the Devil. by Dean Reuter, Colm Lowery and Keith Chester. Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2019. xvii + 410 pp. Hardcover $29.99. ISBN 978-1-62157-735-5.
I asked the editors of Quest if I could review this book because I wanted to come to grips with two works that claim SS General Hans Kammler, the last commander of the German V-weapons, did not die at the end of the war, but rather surrendered to American military intelligence and was secretly and scandalously protected by them, even though he was a major Holocaust perpetrator. The other piece is a paper published online by the Woodrow Wilson Center almost simultaneously with The Hidden Nazi: Frank Döbert and Rainer Karlsch, “Hans Kammler, Hitler’s Last Hope, in American Hands,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper 51 (August 2019), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publicatio ... ican-hands.
The later has a sound academic foundation, unlike The Hidden Nazi. Döbert and Karlsch provide a detailed accounting of where Kammler was just before the end of the war and cite a few documents that indicate he ended up in U.S. custody. As to his fate, they only mention a dubious, second-hand interview source that claims that the SS general was secretly held in Germany until he committed suicide around 1947. Reuter, Lowery and Chester provide images of documents about Kammler’s surrender that Döbert and Karlsch do not have, and argue that Kammler made a deal to transfer his secret weapons knowledge to America, leading ultimately to his living under an assumed name in the U.S. or Germany, or escaping to South America—their favorite scenario. They present not one shred of evidence for any of those scenarios, only a mountain of speculation based on parallel cases.
Why even review these works here? Their connection to space history is not immediately obvious. Or maybe for this readership it is, thanks to Kammler’s connection to Wernher von Braun and the V-2. Certainly, I and others have featured Kammler prominently in our narratives, which makes it more than a little bizarre that The Hidden Nazi describes Kammler as “largely unknown to history” (pp. 2-3). That mostly speaks to the authors’ lack of any historical disciplinary foundation. Dean Reuter, the general counsel of the Federalist Society, best known for its campaign to install conservative judges, is the primary author. He annoyingly writes the book as a series of phone calls, emails and meetings with his researchers: Lowery, a biomedical scientist in Ireland, and Chester, an independent author in Maryland.
The book begins as a biography and demonstrates that Kammler was indeed one of the worst of the worst. As chief of SS construction, he oversaw the gas chamber/crematoria complexes at Auschwitz and built a late-war empire of slave-labor camps and underground factories for the “wonder weapons” that were supposed to reverse the tide of the war. Unfortunately, The Hidden Nazi is riddled with unnecessary and sometimes ridiculous errors, betraying the authors’ amateurish research and weak command of German and European history.
It would take many pages to list all the howlers. For example, on p. 87 they get the date when von Braun started working with Army Ordnance wrong, on p. 88 they get the naming history of the Peenemünde Army facility wrong, and on p. 94 they make a nonsensical hash out of the V-2 guidance system. They depend on dated secondary sources and memoirs while ignoring the primary research done by Michael Allen, myself, and others. Regarding the central point about Kammler’s relationship to Peenemünde and von Braun, they repeatedly get the details wrong and minimize or ignore other major players, notably the Armaments Ministry and the V-weapons manufacturing company it established, the Mittelwerk GmbH.
I could go on, but let me get to their central conspiracy theory, The Kammler Deal, as they so confidently style it. It begins with a secret British postwar recording of Gen. Walter Dornberger, the military commander of the Army rocket program, boasting to fellow prisoners that he and von Braun had made a secret deal with General Electric in the U.S. via the German Embassy in Portugal (p. 130). There is zero evidence for this claim in any other document and neither one of them went back to that story in later memoirs and interviews. By the next page, Reuter/Lowery/Chester are making von Braun’s brother Sigismund, “a German diplomat with great influence, and a Nazi,” into an intermediary.
The problem is that both descriptors are wrong. Although a nominal party member, Sigismund von Braun was punished for his anti-Nazi opinions by being sent to marginal postings. At the time of the alleged deal, he was stranded inside the neutral Vatican after the Allies liberated Rome in June 1944, as I detailed in my biography of his brother. In the next couple of pages, based on nothing but speculation, the GE deal via Lisbon becomes Kammler’s conspiracy in which Walter Dornberger and Wernher von Braun are collaborators. Again, nothing in their later memoirs ever mentions this unlikely scenario—they describe Kammler as a dangerous threat—so either it did not happen or they went to their graves covering up a vast U.S. government conspiracy with Kammler.
The rest of this book spins out elaborations, including the multiple fantasies about the imminent Amerika Rocket (the A9/A10 winged ICBM never got off the drawing board) and nuclear weapons. The dying Third Reich was rife with fantastical projects sold to the Nazi leadership as revolutionary or imminent, including nuclear ones, but the authors are so naïve, and so in love with their conspiracy theory, they are willing to accept any rumor and fantastical claim as true.
Which brings us back to the most interesting question coming out of the two works: was Kammler actually ‘in American hands” at the end of the war? The standard story that he was killed or committed suicide near Prague on May 9, 1945, which I repeated in my books for lack of a documented alternative, is looking increasingly dubious, and possibly a cover story invented later by the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), the primary military intelligence agency at the time. The one really important document Reuter/Lowery/Chester provide is an image of a copy of a document from May 7 stating that Kammler had surrendered the previous day to the CIC at Gmunden, Austria. The problem is, the document was mysteriously obtained by a British Holocaust researcher now deceased and has no known archival origin. It is redacted and all the attachments mentioned in it are missing. It is problematic enough that it could be clever fake.
Döbert and Karlsch do cite another document from the end of May that Kammler was in American hands. Most of the rest of what both works cite is much less clear. There are British requests that Kammler be transferred to the U.K. for war crimes investigations, but these documents only cite stories that the U.S. is holding him, but no solid evidence that the British know that Kammler is alive. Space is not sufficient here to analyze all the documentary evidence. About all one can make of the available evidence now is that Kammler’s secret imprisonment in the American occupation zone of Germany is looking more likely. What happened after that, whether he escaped, died in prison, or was sent off to live under a secret identity, is unknown.
What is clear is that The Kammler Deal has no factual foundation. Certainly Kammler, Dornberger and Braun tried to make deals with the United States, but there is no evidence of a major transfer of information about missiles and atomic weapons beyond what is already well known through Projects Overcast and Paperclip. The A9/A10 was a fantasy that never would have worked (the wings would have burned off in reentry), and German nuclear research was far behind that of the western Allies and scarcely ahead of the Soviet Union. We now have excellent scholarship on what the Soviets got from the Germans too, so rumors that Kammler took his knowledge east are equally unfounded. At this point, I would say that his death in a secret American prison in Europe is the most likely scenario, if he was indeed captured. There is always hope that new documents will emerge to clear up this mystery. In the meantime, if you want to read anything, look up the Döbert and Karlsch article. But I would urge you not to put one dime into the pockets of the publisher or the authors of The Hidden Nazi. The book is that bad.
Michael J. Neufeld
National Air and Space Museum
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.
Review for Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly
The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America’s Deal with the Devil. by Dean Reuter, Colm Lowery and Keith Chester. Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2019. xvii + 410 pp. Hardcover $29.99. ISBN 978-1-62157-735-5.
I asked the editors of Quest if I could review this book because I wanted to come to grips with two works that claim SS General Hans Kammler, the last commander of the German V-weapons, did not die at the end of the war, but rather surrendered to American military intelligence and was secretly and scandalously protected by them, even though he was a major Holocaust perpetrator. The other piece is a paper published online by the Woodrow Wilson Center almost simultaneously with The Hidden Nazi: Frank Döbert and Rainer Karlsch, “Hans Kammler, Hitler’s Last Hope, in American Hands,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper 51 (August 2019), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publicatio ... ican-hands.
The later has a sound academic foundation, unlike The Hidden Nazi. Döbert and Karlsch provide a detailed accounting of where Kammler was just before the end of the war and cite a few documents that indicate he ended up in U.S. custody. As to his fate, they only mention a dubious, second-hand interview source that claims that the SS general was secretly held in Germany until he committed suicide around 1947. Reuter, Lowery and Chester provide images of documents about Kammler’s surrender that Döbert and Karlsch do not have, and argue that Kammler made a deal to transfer his secret weapons knowledge to America, leading ultimately to his living under an assumed name in the U.S. or Germany, or escaping to South America—their favorite scenario. They present not one shred of evidence for any of those scenarios, only a mountain of speculation based on parallel cases.
Why even review these works here? Their connection to space history is not immediately obvious. Or maybe for this readership it is, thanks to Kammler’s connection to Wernher von Braun and the V-2. Certainly, I and others have featured Kammler prominently in our narratives, which makes it more than a little bizarre that The Hidden Nazi describes Kammler as “largely unknown to history” (pp. 2-3). That mostly speaks to the authors’ lack of any historical disciplinary foundation. Dean Reuter, the general counsel of the Federalist Society, best known for its campaign to install conservative judges, is the primary author. He annoyingly writes the book as a series of phone calls, emails and meetings with his researchers: Lowery, a biomedical scientist in Ireland, and Chester, an independent author in Maryland.
The book begins as a biography and demonstrates that Kammler was indeed one of the worst of the worst. As chief of SS construction, he oversaw the gas chamber/crematoria complexes at Auschwitz and built a late-war empire of slave-labor camps and underground factories for the “wonder weapons” that were supposed to reverse the tide of the war. Unfortunately, The Hidden Nazi is riddled with unnecessary and sometimes ridiculous errors, betraying the authors’ amateurish research and weak command of German and European history.
It would take many pages to list all the howlers. For example, on p. 87 they get the date when von Braun started working with Army Ordnance wrong, on p. 88 they get the naming history of the Peenemünde Army facility wrong, and on p. 94 they make a nonsensical hash out of the V-2 guidance system. They depend on dated secondary sources and memoirs while ignoring the primary research done by Michael Allen, myself, and others. Regarding the central point about Kammler’s relationship to Peenemünde and von Braun, they repeatedly get the details wrong and minimize or ignore other major players, notably the Armaments Ministry and the V-weapons manufacturing company it established, the Mittelwerk GmbH.
I could go on, but let me get to their central conspiracy theory, The Kammler Deal, as they so confidently style it. It begins with a secret British postwar recording of Gen. Walter Dornberger, the military commander of the Army rocket program, boasting to fellow prisoners that he and von Braun had made a secret deal with General Electric in the U.S. via the German Embassy in Portugal (p. 130). There is zero evidence for this claim in any other document and neither one of them went back to that story in later memoirs and interviews. By the next page, Reuter/Lowery/Chester are making von Braun’s brother Sigismund, “a German diplomat with great influence, and a Nazi,” into an intermediary.
The problem is that both descriptors are wrong. Although a nominal party member, Sigismund von Braun was punished for his anti-Nazi opinions by being sent to marginal postings. At the time of the alleged deal, he was stranded inside the neutral Vatican after the Allies liberated Rome in June 1944, as I detailed in my biography of his brother. In the next couple of pages, based on nothing but speculation, the GE deal via Lisbon becomes Kammler’s conspiracy in which Walter Dornberger and Wernher von Braun are collaborators. Again, nothing in their later memoirs ever mentions this unlikely scenario—they describe Kammler as a dangerous threat—so either it did not happen or they went to their graves covering up a vast U.S. government conspiracy with Kammler.
The rest of this book spins out elaborations, including the multiple fantasies about the imminent Amerika Rocket (the A9/A10 winged ICBM never got off the drawing board) and nuclear weapons. The dying Third Reich was rife with fantastical projects sold to the Nazi leadership as revolutionary or imminent, including nuclear ones, but the authors are so naïve, and so in love with their conspiracy theory, they are willing to accept any rumor and fantastical claim as true.
Which brings us back to the most interesting question coming out of the two works: was Kammler actually ‘in American hands” at the end of the war? The standard story that he was killed or committed suicide near Prague on May 9, 1945, which I repeated in my books for lack of a documented alternative, is looking increasingly dubious, and possibly a cover story invented later by the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), the primary military intelligence agency at the time. The one really important document Reuter/Lowery/Chester provide is an image of a copy of a document from May 7 stating that Kammler had surrendered the previous day to the CIC at Gmunden, Austria. The problem is, the document was mysteriously obtained by a British Holocaust researcher now deceased and has no known archival origin. It is redacted and all the attachments mentioned in it are missing. It is problematic enough that it could be clever fake.
Döbert and Karlsch do cite another document from the end of May that Kammler was in American hands. Most of the rest of what both works cite is much less clear. There are British requests that Kammler be transferred to the U.K. for war crimes investigations, but these documents only cite stories that the U.S. is holding him, but no solid evidence that the British know that Kammler is alive. Space is not sufficient here to analyze all the documentary evidence. About all one can make of the available evidence now is that Kammler’s secret imprisonment in the American occupation zone of Germany is looking more likely. What happened after that, whether he escaped, died in prison, or was sent off to live under a secret identity, is unknown.
What is clear is that The Kammler Deal has no factual foundation. Certainly Kammler, Dornberger and Braun tried to make deals with the United States, but there is no evidence of a major transfer of information about missiles and atomic weapons beyond what is already well known through Projects Overcast and Paperclip. The A9/A10 was a fantasy that never would have worked (the wings would have burned off in reentry), and German nuclear research was far behind that of the western Allies and scarcely ahead of the Soviet Union. We now have excellent scholarship on what the Soviets got from the Germans too, so rumors that Kammler took his knowledge east are equally unfounded. At this point, I would say that his death in a secret American prison in Europe is the most likely scenario, if he was indeed captured. There is always hope that new documents will emerge to clear up this mystery. In the meantime, if you want to read anything, look up the Döbert and Karlsch article. But I would urge you not to put one dime into the pockets of the publisher or the authors of The Hidden Nazi. The book is that bad.
Michael J. Neufeld
National Air and Space Museum
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.
Re: Hans Kammler
Thank you very much for the preceding post on Kammler containing the book review by Mr. Neufeld. I should have suspected that "The Hidden Nazi" may not have been as credible as it appeared due to its publisher, Regnery. Regnery has a checkered past to say the least. Thanks again.
Re: Hans Kammler
I met a man who looked just like Hammler in El Paso Texas about 1979. He had a locked room with an SS uniform displayed with other Nazi momentous. We must have used him in our local missile programs. He and his granddaughter were very secretive and left town suddenly as congress was reviewing operation paperclip. It took me over 40 years to see his picture. I thought he was Werener Von Braun. I don’t really know how you could prove this, but his “granddaughter” went to Coronado High School and would have graduated in ‘82.
Re: Hans Kammler Myth
I don’t think the secret agency that had Kammler building our underground bases in my area would ever allow the public to know this fact. After my research on YouTube I have deduced that exposing this war criminal’s past would harm our relationship with our allies. Yes, the face is etched in my memory and I know for certain he lived a few miles from me. I enjoy adding to my story, even as nutty as it appears to others. His “luxury” apartment was not impressive and I’m sure he died angry, as his cohorts enjoyed their wealth in South America.KKC wrote: ↑30 Jan 2008, 23:36Hello,
After reading several threads on this forum and others, I have found many postings, primarily between 2002 and 2003, that indicate General Hans Kammler had surrendered to Allied forces. One site even had a posting that documents regarding his surrender were found. It was stated that the documents were forensically tested.
It's now 2008. Have any of these claims been verified? Is there any further evidence to support Kammler's survival after the war? Or, have all these claims been proven false?
Very Curious,
KKC
Re: Hans Kammler
The Kammler survival is a myth, along with the "cohorts enjoyed their wealth in South America".
You cannot say Eichmann lived in any luxury, he hardly lived much above the poverty line. The same with Klaus Barbie who basically lived hand to mouth off the offering of various South American intelligence agencies. Mengele appears to have been secretly funded by his family back home in Germany. The ones who died incognito cannot be said to have flaunted any wealth.
The only one who certainly did enjoy real postwar wealth from wartime profiteering was Karl Becher, and he didn't bother going to South America, just lived out his life in Hamburg and Bremen.
You cannot say Eichmann lived in any luxury, he hardly lived much above the poverty line. The same with Klaus Barbie who basically lived hand to mouth off the offering of various South American intelligence agencies. Mengele appears to have been secretly funded by his family back home in Germany. The ones who died incognito cannot be said to have flaunted any wealth.
The only one who certainly did enjoy real postwar wealth from wartime profiteering was Karl Becher, and he didn't bother going to South America, just lived out his life in Hamburg and Bremen.