I wasn't expecting much from this book by Joseph P. Farrell, since over the years I've read many accounts of the Nazi secret weapons programs. Nearly all use one of two approaches: either the authors paint a picture of a crackpot dictator willing to invest in any screwball scientific concept presented; or the talk goes to the same murky morass of piecework information and rumor that always has been the only evidence that Nazi Germany actually produced anything unusual, like flying saucers or ET contact. That last subject may be fascinating, but unless you've had some firsthand encounters with unusual things (example at Taking the Midnight Vril) there's no reason to suspect it's credible.

In reviewing the book Reich Of The Black Sun: Nazi Secret Weapons & The Cold War Allied Legend I did expect more of the same, but Farrell begins by explaining that his work uses files released after the reunification of Germany. That's material no one had before, and what's new in that pile of old files really is surprising. If you don't believe that public histories are intentionally distorted by governments, you probably won't believe much of what Farrell says. He does back it up with copies of communiques from Japanese diplomats, Nuremberg trial testimony, and reports gleaned from interrogations of Nazi officers after the war's end, kept secret until the end of the Cold War.

Follow up:

If you've learned recent history from World War II movies and mandatory college classes, you will be skeptical that Nazi Germany had working atomic bombs before we did and tested several successfully, or that Japanese weapons experts detonated their own version in Korea only days after Fat Boy exploded in Japan.

The picture we've received of German tactics towards the end of the war relies upon a caricature of Hitler as deranged and ineffective, making huge blunders in his command of the remaining German forces. In this new view of those old events Hitler doesn't look quite so crazy, deploying his forces in what now appear to have been critical areas and defending the secret weapons program until the end. Hitler's reasoning was that success would turn the tide of the war instantly. He wasn't crazy -- he was right. Only a cadre of morally concerned scientists stood in his way.

After you read all that and become thoroughly scared, browse the UFO information (including the familiar sketch of the Hannebau II flying disk) in the last part of the book. Did psychic contact with beings from Sirius present German scientists with the key to nuclear fission and the atomic bomb? That's a maybe.

I'm interested in conspiracy theories but don't believe everything I read. One thing which has puzzled me about the New World Order plans which many people rant and rave about is what possible benefit reducing the population to a fraction of its current total would have to the people in power today, since wealth depends on tax base and consumerism. Take away most of earth's population and you take away all the things that feed the people in power, including power itself. All of a sudden the elite have no classes to rule. That doesn't make sense to me, since if they're doing anything they should be working to maintain the status quo. Consequently I don't take NWO theories seriously. Farrell's book brings up a workable explanation for that self-destructive strategy, and I find that scary.

I've done a lot of poking around in such things astrally in past years, and I didn't ever come up with anything involving Jewish bankers. That could mean my out of body observations were just imaginary, or maybe I did see something of importance but it wasn't that. What I did see involved Nazi's and Nazi technology and led to secret places at the poles, most importantly Antarctica. I even found some satellite photos showing the same geography I saw on my OOB's to that area. Then I got warned off and I quit poking around. Didn't think it served any real purpose to get myself taken out of the picture. But, I do still wonder about these things even though I don't see much I can do about any of it except watch and learn, maybe intrude now and then in influential but unseen ways.

This book has more information than I've ever seen in one place before, with some pretty good documentation to back it up, and it does bring up a theory that makes the NWO goal more plausible. If the people behind that were a continuance of the Third Reich and in particular the SS, intending to purify the planet by removing inferior races and leaving nothing but a cadre of Aryans and some slave labor, OK, I can see the logic in that (even though I don't agree with the plan). Not many believe that to be true, though.

Joseph Farrell makes a pretty good case for it, and what he talks about matches up very well with what I've seen in my OOB work. I've read many of the specifics in other places, but usually as rumor without any documentation behind it. He's got a fair amount of documentation and I'm impressed by that. Some of it goes back to things I remember from when I was just a kid watching TV on Sunday afternoons, when nothing was being run but educational films provided free to the local TV station. One of those was The Big Picture, very militaristic pro-American propaganda, and a number of people have mentioned that certain of those programs were televised and then withdrawn. Now there's a denial that they ever existed, even though many of us remember them. One involved Project Rainbow and the Philadelphia Experiment, and the other described the military expedition Admiral Byrd led to Antarctica shortly after WWII. Historically that has been described as a small survey operation, but the program I saw had film of a military armada, including an aircraft carrier, and that's also what Farrell reports in his book.

Antarctica was the site of major secret Nazi operations during the war and possibly their major last redoubt of the war. The first Allied expedition to the area withdrew unexpectedly and was followed up a few years later by a task force armed with nuclear weapons. Three were detonated over Antarctica in what officially was called a test to see if nukes could melt the ice cap. Militarily this would have been an EMP strike aimed at underground bases protected by ice and solid rock. That would seem to have put an end to many of the overt flyovers by UFO's which were being publicly reported and widely observed in the U.S. during the 50's.

To me this seems like an important book, once which provides a sensible framework for understanding a wide range of crazy topics which don't just go away. WWII isn't over yet.