Date: ca. 1930–1945
Location: Germany
The Conspirators: The Nazis
The Victims: World War II Allied Forces
The Nazis were well known for having the world’s most advanced technology during World War II, but less well known are some of their Wunderwaffen (wonder weapons) that were kept secret and destroyed so the Allies couldn’t get their hands on them.
The fact that these wonder weapons did actually exist has led to a whole subculture of conspiracy theorists who credit the Nazis with technologies that were not just too advanced for 1945, but almost impossible even by today’s standards. The most impressive one is a flying saucer called Die Glocke (the Bell), which was powered by antigravity technology—a substance known as Vril—that even today, theorists say, remains unknown to top scientists in the West. Vril is said to be a source of unlimited power that was known even to the residents of Atlantis. These theorists claim that pictures of the Nazi saucer can even be found online.
The technology developed by the Nazis at the end of World War II was indeed cutting edge, but they didn’t make any flying saucers, or anything else quite so extraordinary. Fairly complete records and all their design facilities were captured and analyzed at the end of the war, and nothing they actually did create remains unknown today.
It’s 100 percent true that Nazi scientists were ahead of Allied scientists in many ways, or at the very least at the same level. This is especially true when it comes to their aeronautical engineers. They had a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft called the DFS 228 that later inspired the designers of the U-2 spy plane. They had a single-seat jet fighter prototype under construction called the Messerschmitt P.1101 with a variable geometry swing wing similar to that on the American F-14 Tomcat fighter plane developed in the 1970s. Its captured prototype was actually studied by the engineers who designed the Bell X-5 test aircraft of the 1950s. The Nazis had even completed glide tests on a delta-winged ramjet-powered fighter, the Lippisch P.13a, believed to be capable of going Mach 2.2—a concept the Allies were still only dreaming about.
When World War II ended, Nazi scientists generally destroyed their records and even their prototypes, so there is some unknown amount of technical knowledge that died alongside their war effort. But today we have no public record of anything like Die Glocke being recovered at the end of the war. With each passing decade of records declassification and research through old archives, it is increasingly unlikely that anything like it actually existed. And, certainly, any substance with properties as amazing as those attributed to Vril would either be well known and incorporated into daily life, or would be the highest of all government secrets.
So how does anyone know about Die Glocke? Well, we know about Vril because, in 1960, two French authors published an account of the occult underpinnings of Nazi society in their wide-ranging book The Morning of the Magicians. According to them, the very deepest core of the Nazi Party was the Vril Society, an inner circle among inner circles. The Morning of the Magicians was key to popularizing the belief that the Nazis practiced the occult, and this discussion of a Vril Society is what supercharged the belief in the reality of Die Glocke.
Nearly everything known about Die Glocke comes from a book written as recently as 2000 by a Polish military historian named Igor Witkowski called The Truth about the Wunderwaffe. In it, he recounted his examination of the classified transcript from an interrogation of captured Nazi SS officer, Jakob Sporrenberg. According to Witkowski, Sporrenberg said Die Glocke was powered by a pair of rotating drums containing a mysterious iridescent purple fluid, which later authors have presumed to be Vril. This gave Die Glocke antigravity powers and permitted it to fly at fantastic speeds.
Okay, so when it comes to Die Glocke and Vril, all we have in the way of evidence is a third-hand anecdotal account of something that’s desperately implausible, backed up by neither evidence nor even a corroborating account. So once again we call to mind Hitchens’s Razor: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
That said, we can still follow the threads of the tale backward to see if its origins are sound. Was the interrogation transcript Witkowski claimed to have read reliable? Unfortunately, he said he was allowed only to read it, not to copy it, and didn’t even say where or when this reading took place. This means that Witkowski’s story leaves us with nothing to verify.
We can, however, track down the SS officer who was being interrogated. Jakob Sporrenberg was a real SS officer. However, he was a field officer, not a researcher or scientist. Sporrenberg fought resistance fighters in Belarus, and served as police chief of occupied Poland. He was executed as a war criminal in 1952 for the murders of some 43,000 Jewish civilians in Poland. According to his official military record, he never had any connection to anything involving engineering or aviation, and there’s no reason that he might have been privy to the details of a top secret project entirely unrelated to his duties. What does this mean? Well, it means that even if we choose to believe Witkowski (which is a stretch), there’s not much of a reason to believe Sporrenberg.
Now, if Die Glocke and Vril didn’t exist, how did they enter the narrative enough to become a major conspiracy theory? Vril was first introduced in 1871 in the science fiction novel The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In this story, Vril was the power source and life elixir employed by the people of Atlantis to escape when the mythical island sank. No researchers have yet found a primary nonfiction reference to Vril.
Vril entered the German popular consciousness during the years between World War I and World War II. This was a time when esotericism, an emphasis on the metaphysical rather than the physical, became something of a fad in Germany. Modern authors have since tried to exaggerate this fad into a fictional Nazi obsession with occultism (the so-called esoteric Nazism movement). Willy Ley, a German rocket scientist and author who emigrated to the United States in 1935, wrote of this period in a 1947 essay for Astounding Science Fiction called “Pseudoscience in Naziland”:
That group which I think called itself Wahrheitsgesellschaft—Society for Truth—and which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril. Yes, their convictions were founded upon Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race.
Even though Ley was clear that this group’s interest in Vril was based purely in fiction, his one brief comment here became the main reference from which the French authors drew their “Vril Society” for The Morning of the Magicians. The French book, so often referenced as a trusted source describing interwar Germany’s fascination with the occult, is in fact quite an imaginative and speculative work. It also discussed ancient astronauts, a race of giants who once ruled the Earth, prophecies, alchemy, and the paranormal. Much of The Morning of the Magicians appears to have been inspired by the fiction of imaginative horror author H.P. Lovecraft. Even in the book itself, the authors wrote “There will be a lot of silliness in our book.” Thus, the stories of Die Glocke and Vril turn out to have no historical basis at all—outside of esoteric fiction.