InfoTrac Web: Custom Newspapers. Source: The Houston Chronicle (Houston, TX), Jan 10, 1999 p22. Title: WORLD WAR II's MYSTERY SUB; Voyage and surrender of a German U-boat in 1945 may prove one of the conflict's most ironic episodes. Author: Bob Tutt Electronic Collection: CJ64126336 RN: CJ64126336 Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Houston Chronicle Publishing Company Division, Hearst Newspapers Partnership, LP GRIM-faced Marines clutching rifles lined a walkway for Germans who landed from a huge Nazi submarine in the closing days of World War II. News reporters gathering at Portsmouth, N.H., on that day, May 19, 1945, received a grim warning: The leathernecks would shoot anyone trying to talk to these Germans. This puzzled the journalists because they had easy access to other U-boat crews landing there since Germany's surrender 11 days earlier ended the war in Europe. Adding to the mystery that day was a scowling German clad in civilian clothes who drew most of the attention from the onlookers. He clearly was some sort of big shot, but none of the reporters recognized him. One news story described him "as tall, dark, stout and middle-aged" and attired in "an old gray hat, trenchcoat with belt and a dark suit of civvies." A banner headline in the Boston Evening Globe that day described him as "Mystery Man on Huge Nazi Sub." His identity remains unknown. Carter Hydrick, a history scholar in Houston, is one of the researchers who have continued to dig into the story of the submarine, the U-234. He contends the mystery man may well have been Heinrich Mueller, the chief of the Nazis' terroristic Gestapo. Going further, Hydrick says a strong circumstantial case can be made that the U-234's surrender on the high seas actually was a setup engineered in the war's final stages by Martin Bormann, the powerful chancellor of the Nazi Party and dictator Adolf Hitler's most influential adviser. In return for a load of atomic bomb fuel, the activated uranium substance scientists have designated as U235, and other war goods loaded on the submarine, Hydrick theorizes, Bormann and his longtime partner-in-crime, Mueller, were allowed to escape prosecution as war criminals and live in safe havens. "It's one of those weird, coincidental, cosmic kind of things," Hydrick said, "that the submarine U-234 would carry U235 and that they would have consecutive numbers." The U-234, originally designed as a minelayer, was three times the size of the Nazi subs that preyed on Allied shipping. That enabled it to take on an amazing assortment of war goods it ostensibly had set out to deliver to Japan, then still battling against the Allies in the Pacific and Asian theaters. The sub bore crates containing two dismantled German Messerschmidt 262s, the only jet fighter to see World War II combat; plans and parts to assemble powerful, long-range V-2 rockets, against which no defense existed; and advanced silent, electric-powered torpedoes. But most astounding were blocks of U235, that the Japanese could have used to make atomic bombs. There were 560 kilograms, or 1,120 pounds, of this substance, enough, Hydrick says, to arm as many as 10 atomic bombs. That may well have set the stage for an ironic historical episode. After the submarine carrying the uranium fell into American hands, the material may have gone into the making of the atom bomb that hammered Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, Hydrick and other researchers theorize. For years, assorted historical researchers have probed to determine if this was how the captured German U235 was put to use. If true, it's not something that U.S. government officials, at least to now, have been willing to verify. Hydrick says he has turned up documents providing "the strongest evidence to date" that the German shipment of uranium did, in fact, help fuel the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima. Through declassified documents found at the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington and Atlanta, Hydrick says he was the first researcher to ascertain that the uranium carried by the U-234 was enriched, bomb grade fuel and that it was later shipped to scientistsworking on the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs. Additionally, he says, he has found evidence that Heinz Schlicke, a German scientist aboard the U-234, may well have provided infrared fuses used in the triggering mechanisms for the other two atomic bombs that the United States detonated weeks later in the summer of 1945. In the National Archives there is a formerly secret cable "recounting how Schlicke was flown back to the U-234 site to retrieve those infrared fuses," Hydrick says. One of these two bombs in question was the first tested. It detonated in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert near Alamogordo on July 16. The other was the bomb that ripped Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, three days after the Hiroshima attack. These two were plutonium bombs requiring a means of ignition different from the uranium bomb that exploded over Hiroshima. Hydrick, 44, now works as a Compaq Computer Corp. marketing manager, but he became involved in researching the U-234 saga more than eight years ago while working in Utah as a film writer. He was retained to write a script for a feature about the U-234, but he says that his research to ensure the movie's historical accuracy stretched out so long that the project fell through. Hydrick continued his research, and he is now writing a book about the episode that he plans to entitle "Critical Mass," which is the minimum amount of enriched uranium necessary to create a nuclear explosion. He says his first big break came in finding a now declassified "secret dispatch" from the chief of naval operations in Washington. It stated that the uranium carried by the U-234 was shipped "in cylinders lined with gold." That indicated the uranium was almost certainly U235, Hydrick says, which is so highly corrosive that it would need some very stable metal, like gold, to contain it. In the summer of 1945, the Manhattan Project was running low on U235 because so much of it had gone into producing plutonium, a man-made substance. Hydrick says it appears certain that much of the German U235 replaced Manhattan Project-made U235 used to produce plutonium. If these contentions are correct, Hydrick notes, they contradict what he terms the "commonly accepted story" that the first nuclear weapons were solely the product of the Manhattan Project. The United States carried out the project over a five-year period at a cost of $2 billion with crucial help from British and refugee scientists. Producing U235 cost the Manhattan Project $100,000 an ounce in 1940s' dollars, and if the value of the U235 on the U-234 were calculated on that basis, it would come to $1.72 billion today, nearly equal the project's final cost. The Allied bomb makers badly needed more enriched uranium to prepare the Hiroshima bomb, Hydrick says. And, he speculates that the German U235 must surely have fulfilled that need. Hydrick argues that there was far more to the surrender of the U-234 than just the reported decision of its captain, Johann Heinrich Fehler, to throw in the towel. The U-234 had set out for Japan about a week before Germany's surrender on May 8, 1945, that ended the war in Europe. Hydrick contends that both Bormann and Mueller were aboard. Capt. Fehler surrendered the submarine on May 12, four days after the war in Europe ended, at a position in the North Atlantic about 500 miles off Newfoundland. After learning the war was over for Germany, Fehler told his crew and passengers that there was no point in trying to complete a perilous two-month voyage half-way around the Earth. He said it might well become a suicide mission. That probably would have been fine with two Japanese officers aboard the U-234 who were returning home. They added a dramatic twist to the voyage by committing hara-kiri rather than disgracing themselves by becoming prisoners of war. Fehler had ordered that the men, Genzo Shosi, an air force colonel and aeronautical engineer, and Hideo Tomonaga, a navy captain and submarine engineer, be confined to their quarters and deprived of their weapons. They died after taking overdoses of sleeping pills, and they were buried at sea before the submarine surrendered. Hydrick says Fehler's actions suggest that he was under instructions to surrender to the Americans. As he took a course that appeared to be headed toward Philadelphia, he falsely radioed his course and speed to a Canadian naval base at Halifax, Nova Scotia, that had learned of his plans to surrender. If the U-234 were truly following the course entered in its log, Hydrick says, it meant it was cruising at a speed of from 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 mph. That's about the speed of a man walking, far less than the routine cruising speed of the submarine. Hydrick says Fehler's deceptions could have helped give the U-boat time to drop off Bormann at "a prearranged rendezvous point in the Bay of Biscay." There, he says, another vessel could have picked him up and dropped him off on the north coast of Spain. He cites reports by Soviet agents that Bormann was spotted boarding a large submarine at Hamburg in early May. He contends that vessel would have had to be the U-234. According to a memoir written by Wolfgang Hirschfeld, the U-234's chief radio operator, Fehler brushed aside suggestions by others on board that he consider heading for such safe havens for Germans as Argentina or the South Seas islands. Finally, a U.S. Navy destroyer, the Sutton, apparently began jamming the U-234's radio transmissions. A short time later, the crew from the Sutton took the sub into custody. But historian Gerhard Weinberg at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill disputes Hydrick's contention there was a plan for the U-234 to deliver its cargo to the Americans. "There is no question that the uranium was headed for Japan," he says. "It was clear to the people in the German naval high command that the war was going badly, but they clung to the hope that new, advanced model submarines, soon to go into service, could turn the tide of the war to Germany's favor." He also notes that a German Luftwaffe general, Ulrich Kessler, was aboard the submarine, heading to Japan to serve as Hitler's air attache there. "You don't send an air attache around the world except to the place he's supposed to go," the historian says. Hydrick, however, contends that Bormann hatched a plan to surrender the U-234 to the Americans after the German navy had assigned the U-boat to set sail for Japan. When World War II engulfed much of the planet, relatively few people knew that splitting atoms could unleash energy powerful enough to produce the most devastating bombs ever conceived. But the scientists assembled in the United States for the supersecret Manhattan Project were working on such weaponry, as were scientists in Germany and Japan. Concern about guarding the project's secrecy and, if Hydrick's theory is correct, also about covering up a secret deal with Bormann and Mueller would explain the tight security on the day the U-234's crew and passengers debarked at Portsmouth. Hydrick maintains that strong evidence shows that the United States and its Allies hadn't leaped far ahead of the Axis powers in nuclear bomb making as has been commonly assumed over the years. When Nazi Germany seized Czechoslovakia before the war broke out, he says, Hitler had gained control of the world's "largest and most high-grade uranium deposit." This ore is rich in U235, an isotope of uranium used to set in motion the fission process. That triggers the supersurge in energy that ignites a nuclear explosion. Hitler held out hope almost to the end of his life that "a miracle weapon" might still win the war, and Hydrick says it is clear that the weapon was an atomic bomb. It's documented, he says, that the Fuhrer paid many visits to the private, underground Berlin laboratory of nuclear physicist Manfred von Ardenne, who was working on the bomb. He was the chief physicist on the scientific staff of Richard Ohnesorge, the postal minister who was a physicist and a mathematician. His ministry underwrote the research and development of an atomic bomb-making technology. Hydrick theorizes that the Germans set up a plant to produce U235 adjacent to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland and disguised it as a synthetic rubber plant. A rubber plant would have needed a rather minimal amount of electricity, he says, but, as the Manhattan Project demonstrated, a plant producing U235 would have required an enormous amount of power. "Records show this German plant used more electricity than the city of Berlin, then the world's eighth-largest city," he says. And, he adds, no records exist of rubber being produced there. Hydrick also has delved into the fates of Bormann and Mueller. They joined other top Nazis holing up in Hitler's Berlin bunker when Soviet forces advanced on the German capital in the closing days of World War II. According to one account, Mueller, a major figure in the slaughtering of Jews in the Holocaust and one of the most-wanted Nazi war criminals, was killed as he tried to flee Berlin after Hitler's suicide. Another version indicated that Mueller escaped to Switzerland or South America and served as Bormann's security officer. Still other reports held that Mueller escaped war crimes prosecution by performing valuable services for the West during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. According to the most recent story, Western intelligence agents pragmatically recruited him to continue operating what had been Nazi intelligence networks in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Hydrick says his research convinces him that Bormann, a supreme manipulator, managed to survive the war as a free man. In the early days of the Nazi movement, he says, Bormann had endeared himself to Hitler by helping cover up Hitler's murder of his niece, Geli Raubal. Hitler had compelled her to enter a sordid sexual liaison with him. By 1943, Hydrick notes, Bormann had become the sole official through which all communications were forwarded to Hitler. He also decided who got direct access to the dictator. Hydrick shares the view that Bormann in the last years of the Nazis' Third Reich had become "the secret master of a despot" and "the leader in fact of Germany." In April 1945, Bormann was with Hitler in the dictator's Berlin bunker while Soviet troops fought their way into the German capital. With "Hitler visibly crumbling in front of him," Hydrick says, it's understandable that Bormann would have begun plotting an escape. Hydrick theorizes that at some point, Bormann, acting through emissaries, negotiated with Allen Dulles, the top official in Europe of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Dulles, later the CIA's director, was based in Berne, Switzerland, during the war. Hydrick theorizes that there may well have been a deal between the United States and Bormann to swap freedom for Bormann and Mueller in exchange for the uranium and other war goods on the U-234. At the end of the war, a story was circulated that Bormann had died while attempting to flee Berlin after Hitler's suicide. However, in 1946 he was tried in absentia at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and sentenced to death. Over the years, many reports of Bormann sightings in Europe and South America cropped up. There is even an Argentine police file purportedly on him. Last May, German authorities reported DNA tests had established that bones found at a Berlin construction site were Bormann's, but Hydrick contends these tests are suspect. He argues that the German government wants to cover up what quite possibly was Bormann's significant role in West Germany's remarkable economic recovery after the war, using his immense wartime profits stashed in neutral countries. Aaron Breitbar, senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Museum in Los Angeles, says he is convinced that the DNA tests validly establish that Bormann died in Berlin at the end of the war. The museum's namesake, the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, once contended he had proof Bormann survived the war but later said he believed the Nazi committed suicide in Berlin when he found escape impossible. Hydrick, however, is convinced that the wily Bormann managed to survive and thrive on a multibillion-dollar fortune he had amassed during the war. Hydrick cites reports by Soviet agents that someone they identified as Bormann was seen escaping Berlin in a small aircraft early on April 30, 1945, then boarding a huge submarine at Hamburg in early May. The Harris County resident says he is certain that this vessel is the U-234, which pulled into Portsmouth harbor about two weeks later and discharged a dour, trench-coated man and his comrades. -- End --
