Die Glocke and the Nazi Moon Base

The Story

The story goes like this. In a mine in what is now Poland, Nazi scientists built a bell-shaped device, Die Glocke, that could produce antigravity or even bend time. At the end of the war the device vanished, perhaps traded to the Americans.

According to Popular Mechanics, rumors of such a machine first appeared as Nazi science fiction in the 1960 book Morning of the Magicians. Die Glocke itself appeared in a 2000 book by Polish writer Igor Witkowski and soon after in Nick Cook's The Hunt for Zero Point, which described a 'glowing, rotating contraption.' Online, it later merged with a separate legend that the Nazis secretly reached the Moon.

One skeptic called the best-known Bell book 'a classic example of how to spin an exciting yarn based on almost nothing.'

Nothing in the record supports it. Popular Mechanics notes that the Allies brought home German jets and missiles after the war, but there is no record of any Bell being captured. In a 2009 Skeptical Inquirer column, Robert Sheaffer called Cook's book 'a classic example of how to spin an exciting yarn based on almost nothing.' Sandboxx News quotes Cook himself in 2021 saying he now believed it was 'some form of enrichment device for the SS-run atomic bomb program,' not a propulsion system.

As for the Moon, Sandboxx says the legend 'offers no real evidence.' It quotes Fraser MacDonald, author of a history of the space rocket, on what is true: 'Nazi technology and personnel were indeed central to the moon landing,' through engineers like Wernher von Braun who later worked for NASA. The Nazi Moon base belongs with the Bell, as a modern story with no wartime record behind it.