NI academic helps unlock mystery of notorious WWII Nazi general

Dr Colm Lowery, a Biomedical Sciences lecturer at Coleraine, was part of a team investigating the disappearance in May 1945 of notorious SS General Hans Kammler.

Sidekick to SS chief Heinrich Himmler and supervisor of German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, Kammler was responsible for the construction of Hitler’s concentration camps.

Through decades of investigation, Dr Lowery and co-authors Dean Reuter and Keith Chester have published ‘The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America’s Deal with the Devil’, a work that unveils the shocking, true history not only that Kammler’s suicide was faked, but that he escaped exposure and justice through a secret deal with America.

Dr Lowery said: “Kammler designed and built Auschwitz and all other concentration camps. He actually increased crowding in the camps to encourage the spread of infectious disease and was the man who made the Holocaust possible. He was a war criminal of the highest order and was wanted to stand trial at Nuremberg.

“At the end of the war he was declared dead and war crimes investigators called off their hunt for him. An official account was that he died by suicide, something which was backed up by his driver, but he could not produce the general’s dog tags or any other proof of death.

“Adding to the mystery are multiple contradictory accounts of Kammler’s death – each given by men who served under him. The true fate of General Hans Kammler is a conundrum that has baffled historians for decades.”

Dr Lowery said his interest in Kammler was first piqued many years ago when as an amateur astronomer he studied German-born space engineer r von Braun, who worked on Germany’s rocket development programme during World War Two – where Kammler was his boss.

Dr Lowery spent decades on the trail of the elusive Kammler, uncovering documents unseen since the 1940s.

He posted his research on a Second World War discussion forum and was contacted by Keith Chester, an investigative researcher from the US, who was also fascinated by Kammler’s fate. With the assistance of Kammler’s surviving family, they gained unprecedented access to private archives, letters and interviews, and their research eventually took them to the highest levels of the US government.

They teamed up with lawyer Dean Reuter in America and the trio embarked on an investigation to unlock the multiple mysteries surrounding this “evil genius” of the Third Reich.

Their book will be released on November 28.