This is a work of fiction. The plot and the characters are products of the author’s imagination. Where real persons, places, incidents, institutions, and such have been incorporated to create the illusion of authenticity, they are used fictitiously. Inspiration was drawn from the following nonfiction sources:
Agoston, Tom.
Blunder!: How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia.
New York: Dodd Mead, 1985.
Béon, Yves.
Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age.
Translated by Yves Béon and Richard L. Fague. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
Berlitz, Charles, and William Moore.
The Philadelphia Experiment.
London: Souvenir Press, 1979.
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The Roswell Incident.
New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1980.
“Bomber Command, 1939-1945.”
www.raf.mod.uk/bombercommand
.
Bower, Tom.
The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Battle for the Spoils and Secrets of Nazi Germany.
London: Michael Joseph, 1987.
Cook, Nick.
The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology.
New York: Broadway Books, 2001.
Cook, Stan, and R. James Bender.
Leibstandarte SS Adolph Hitler: Uniforms, Organization and History.
San Jose, CA: Bender Publishing, 1994.
“Death by Moonlight.”
The Valor and the Horror.
Directed by Brian McKenna. Toronto: National Film Board of Canada, 1992.
Dornberger, Walter.
V-2.
Translated by James Cleugh and Geoffrey Halliday. New York: Viking, 1958.
Dungan, Tracy. “A-4/V-2 Resource Site.”
www.v2rocket.com
.
Egger, Steve A.
The Killers Among Us: An Examination of Serial Murder and Its Investigation.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.
Holmes, Richard.
World War II in Photographs.
London: Carlton, 2000.
Hunt, Linda.
Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
“The Language of the Camps.”
http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/General/LanguageEng.html
.
Lasby, Clarence G.
Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War.
New York: Atheneum, 1971.
Lewis, Brenda Ralph.
Hitler Youth: The Hitlerjugend in War and Peace 1933-1945.
Osceola, WI: MBI Publishing, 2000.
Lomas, Robert.
The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century: Nikola Tesla, Forgotten Genius of Electricity.
London: Headline, 1979.
Longmate, Norman.
Hitler’s Rockets: The Story of the V-2’s.
London: Hutchinson, 1985.
Lusar, Rudolf.
German Secret Weapons of the Second World War.
London: Spearman, 1959.
Mann, Chris.
SS-Totenkopf: The History of the “Death’s Head” Division 1940-45.
Osceola, WI: MBI Publishing, 2001.
Maule, Henry.
The Great Battles of World War II.
Chicago: Regnery, 1973.
McGovern, James.
Crossbow and Overcast.
New York: William Morrow, 1964.
Michel, Jean, with Louis Nucera.
Dora.
Translated by Jennifer Kidd. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979.
Middlebrook, Martin.
The Peenemünde Raid: The Night of 17-18 August 1943.
London: Penguin, 1988.
National Timberwolf Association. “Mittelbau Dora Concentration Camp.”
www.104infdiv.org/CONCAMP.HTM
.
Neufeld, Michael J.
The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era.
New York: The Free Press, 1994.
O’Donnell, James P.
The Bunker.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978.
Peden, Murray.
A Thousand Shall Fall.
Toronto: Stoddart, 1988.
Petrova, Ada, and Peter Watson.
The Death of Hitler: The Full Story with New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives.
New York: Norton, 1995.
Piszkiewicz, Dennis.
The Nazi Rocketeers: Dreams of Space and Crimes of War.
New York: Praeger, 1995.
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Wernher von Braun: The Man Who Sold the Moon.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.
Randle, Kevin D.
The Roswell Encyclopedia.
New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
Rhodes, Richard.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Rossmo, D. Kim, and Anne Davies. “Stealth Predator Patterns.”
Crime Mapping News.
Volume 3, Issue 4 (2001). Pages 6-7.
Saler, Benson, with Charles A. Ziegler and Charles B. Moore.
UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1997.
Sellier, André.
A History of the Dora Camp: The Story of the Nazi Slave Labor Camp That Secretly Manufactured V-2 Rockets.
Translated by Stephen Wright and Susan Taponier. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003.
Simpson, Christopher.
Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War.
New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988.
Speer, Albert.
Infiltration: How Heinrich Himmler Schemed to Build an SS Industrial Empire.
New York: Macmillan, 1981.
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Inside the Third Reich.
Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston. New York: Avon, 1970.
Stolley, Richard B.
LIFE: World War II.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.
Time Life/BBC.
Secrets of WWII: Adolf Hitler’s Last Days.
London: Nugus/Martin Productions, 1998.
Time Life/BBC.
Secrets of WWII: How Germany Was Bombed to Defeat.
London: Nugus/Martin Productions, 1998.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh.
The Last Days of Hitler.
London: Pan, 2002.
Warriors of the Night.
Directed by James Hyslop. Toronto: Nightfighters Productions, 1999.
Williamson, Gordon.
The SS: Hitler’s Instrument of Terror.
Osceola, WI: MBI Publishing, 1994.
World at War: An Illustrated History of the Second World War.
New York: Dorset, 1991.
The V-2 was called the A-4 until it was renamed the Vengeance Weapon 2 and began to be used against Britain in retaliation for nighttime raids against the Reich by RAF Bomber Command. To avoid confusion, only the term V-2 is used in the novel.
For those of you interested in delving into the truth that inspired this fiction, I recommend several books. O’Donnell’s
The Bunker
captures the madhouse atmosphere of Hitler’s last days underground in Berlin. The author was there in 1945, and he also interviewed those who endured that experience. A stiff drink is advisable before you sink into Michel’s
Dora
and Béon’s
Planet Dora,
two hellish memoirs about what went on in the V-2 production tunnels at Work Camp Dora, both written by prisoners of war. Although SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher and his sons are fictional, that nonexistent Nazi engineer is based on a real-life monster in Hitler’s Reich: SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler. In
The Rocket and the Reich,
Neufeld, a curator of Second World War history at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, details the involvement of Kammler and Wernher von Braun in building the V-2 and explains what happened when the Pentagon moved in at the close of the war. Finally, to answer the question that tormented Jean Michel for decades—what became of Hans Kammler after the fall of the Third Reich?—you definitely want to read Cook’s
The Hunt for Zero Point.
Written by the aviation editor of
Jane’s Defence Weekly,
the world’s top journal of military affairs, it’s a work that would impress Sherlock Holmes.
Hans Kammler? Work Camp Dora? The Mittelwerk?
Never heard of them?
I wonder why.
Slade
Vancouver, BC