In 1945, American troops entered Germany hunting rockets, laboratories, documents and the people who understood them. Within months, German engineers who had built weapons for the Third Reich were working for the United States. Wernher von Braun eventually became one of the architects of the American Moon programme. How did captured enemy expertise become part of the machinery that carried Apollo 11 into space?
Saturn’s rings look like ornament. They behave more like an instrument. The waves, ripples and disturbances running through them have allowed scientists to probe the planet’s interior, estimate the length of its day and ask how old the rings really are. At what point does a beautiful halo around a planet start behaving like a recording surface?
Archaeology, runes, folklore, caves, ancient languages, Tibet, World Ice Theory and eventually human experimentation all passed through the same SS research organisation. What exactly was Heinrich Himmler trying to build with the Ahnenerbe?
