Reichsflugscheibe

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fictional representation of an empire flying disc as recently under the name Haunebu II is widespread

A Reichsflugscheibe is a fictional saucer-shaped flight and space vehicle that appears in myths , science fiction and conspiracy theories and that according to them was built and tested in the National Socialist German Reich . No historical or technical evidence is known. Nevertheless, the topic occasionally appears in pseudoscientific literature as an example of "Nazi technology", also under numerous other names such as round airplane (RFZ) , project fireball , jet discus , Haunebu , Hauneburg device , Andromeda device , repulsine (repulsator / trout turbine ) , Gyro , bullet weapon or retribution weapon 7 (V 7) .

Origin of fiction

The legend of disk-shaped aircraft, the development of which was being worked on in the Third Reich, came up in 1950 in the context of the reports of UFOs that had been accumulating over the past three years . The German engineer Rudolf Schriever told Spiegel that he had worked on the conception of such a flying top from 1942 until the end of the war in 1945. The documents were later stolen. In the same year, the Italian engineer Giuseppe Belluzzo stated that he had worked on such a construction under Benito Mussolini . However, his drafts were also lost. Mussolini had experiments with "flying saucers" carried out with Adolf Hitler since 1942.

Speculation about the construction

In addition to the disk-shaped design, these aircraft are sometimes attributed with enormous flight performance , which would be based on a progressive technology that is still unknown or has been kept secret. The boundaries between physics , fantasy and forgery are fluid.

Reich flight disks are sometimes also mentioned together with new types of submarine objects (Unidentified Submarine Objects [USO]), whereby flightable and submersible combinations are held responsible for incidents in the Bermuda Triangle , for example.

Hand-drawn construction sketches or blurred black and white photos, which are also circulating on the Internet, are often presented as proof. Complete evidence and documents, it is usually said, were destroyed before the end of the war or were taken away by the Allies and kept secret.

The forester and naturalist Viktor Schauberger worked, among other things, in Mauthausen concentration camp , on the development of an alternative drive technology called repulsine or trout turbine , which should be able to overcome gravity by so-called "free floating". Their functionality could never be proven. This repulsine is often referred to as the drive for the flying disks.

According to a posthumously published paper by Andreas Epp (1914–1997) on round planes of the Third Reich , these should be based on a further development of a drive concept ( transverse rotors ) that had been successfully tested in the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 twin-rotor helicopter . Experimental aircraft are said to have been derived from this, the drive motor and cockpit of which were most recently located in the center of partly differently designed rotor disk systems. The chief engineer Georg Klein mentioned by Epp said in a newspaper interview in 1953 that he had been an eyewitness to the first launch of a manned flying disc on February 14, 1945 in Prague. This has risen to an altitude of 12,400 meters within three minutes and has reached a top speed of 2200 km / h. Towards the end of 1944 there were three differently constructed flying disks in Prague ; these were destroyed shortly before the Red Army marched in. Epp placed the control problems in the foreground for the sufficient maneuverability of these round planes.

reception

Right-wing extremist scene

Three authors in particular are considered to be the creators of a myth of “Nazi flying disks in the Antarctic ice”. The former SS man Wilhelm Landig (1909–1997) wrote from 1971 in his novels about flying disks with which SS men fled to Antarctica ( Neuschwabenland ) to continue their fight against Freemasonry . The German-Canadian Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel wrote two books on this myth under the pseudonym Christof Friedrich , and Miguel Serrano , a Chilean diplomat, also took up the myth of flying disks in Antarctica. Furthermore, the myth was picked up by the right-wing extremist conspiracy theorist Axel Stoll and disseminated in various YouTube videos.

The most widespread representations of alleged German flying disks today are based on publications by the so-called Tempelhof Society , in particular on the brochure Das Vril-Projekt written by Ralf Ettl and Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer in the early 1990s . The Austrian authors contributed significantly to the development of a right-wing extremist ufology . The right-wing extremist UFO authors DH Haarmann and O. Bergmann used alleged drawings of German UFOs that had been distributed by Ralf Ettl's Abraxas Videofilm Produktionsgesellschaft mbH in the 1980s. The drawings are apparently inspired by the photos in George Adamski's UFO classics and today dominate the graphic representations of German flying disks. The names Vril and Haunebu also go back to the publications by Ettl and Jürgen-Ratthofer. The ideas of the Tempelhof Society first found their greatest dissemination through the writings of Jan Udo Holey alias Jan van Helsing.

Ufological conspiracy theories

American ufologists and conspiracy theorists took up the myth of the Nazi UFOs around the turn of the millennium and reinterpreted it in their own way. After that, there is a much larger conspiracy between “German-Bavarian fascists” and extraterrestrials who wanted to jointly establish a New World Order in which an “ Aryan ” elite would rule the planet . To this end, the extermination of a quarter of the world's population is planned, namely Jews, Africans and other non-Aryans. This conspiracy theory is integrated into their dispensational end-time scenario by some evangelical Christians : According to this, the allegedly imminent extraterrestrial attacks on Jews are part of the Great Tribulation that precedes the second coming of Jesus Christ after the Gospel of Matthew .

Movies and PC games

In the retro science fiction film comedy Iron Sky (2012), highly developed Reich flight disks are used by Nazi scientists and soldiers to escape from a secret polar station in Neuschwabenland to the back of the moon in order to prepare for the conquest of the earth on a base set up there. Also in the mockbuster version Nazi Sky - The Return of Evil , Nazis use Reich flying disks from a polar station to conquer the earth. They appear in a similar context in the 2012 Australian action comedy The 25th Reich . Also in 2012 the PC game Iron Sky: Invasion was released , which is closely related to the film Iron Sky and in which the player has to fight off a Nazi invasion from the moon. Reichsflugplatten also appear in the first-person shooter Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017).

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Reichsflugscheibe  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Commons : Reichsflugplatten  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ But you are flying . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 1950 ( online ).
  2. ^ Christian Rabl: The subcamp St. Aegyd am Neuwalde . Mauthausen Studies, Volume 6, Federal Ministry of the Interior, Dept. IV / 7, 2008
  3. J. Andreas Epp: The reality of the flying disks . Peiting 2002, ISBN 978-3-89539-605-2 .
  4. The first »flying disc« flew in 1945 in Prague . In: Welt am Sonntag , April 26, 1953; Interviewer: Werner Keller.
  5. J. Andreas Epp: The reality of the flying disks . Peiting 2002, ISBN 978-3-89539-605-2 , pp. 16 .
  6. The Science Fiction Year 2009 Dierk Spreen : Reichsflugplatten and Wehrmacht myths. P. 435. (accessed November 27, 2017)
  7. Christoph Seidler: Prize for Gaga research. Who's the dumbest thing in the whole country? In: Spiegel Online. October 31, 2015, accessed September 21, 2017 .
  8. Julian Strube: The invention of esoteric National Socialism under the sign of the black sun . In: Journal for Religious Studies . tape 20 , no. 2 , 2012, p. 223-268 .
  9. Michael Barkun : A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, pp. 142 f.