Burning Angels
Authors: Bear Grylls
For Roger Gower, killed by poachers while flying conservation patrols over East Africa, and for the Roger Gower Memorial Fund and Tusk Trust, two foremost conservation charities.
Contents
Daily Mail
, August 2015
Nazi Gold Train is FOUND: deathbed confession leads treasure hunters to secret location as Polish officials claim they have seen proof on radar.
A Nazi gold train has been found in Poland after the man who helped hide it at the end of the Second World War revealed its location in a deathbed confession. Two men, a German and a Pole, last week claimed they had found the train – believed to contain treasure – close to the small town of Walbrzych in south-west Poland.
Piotr Zuchowski, Poland’s National Heritage and Conservation Officer, said: ‘We do not know what is inside the train. Probably military equipment, but also jewellery, works of art and archive documents. Armoured trains from this period were used to carry extremely valuable items, and this is an armoured train.’
Local lore says Nazi Germany ordered the vast underground rail network, which snakes around the massive Ksiaz Castle, be built to hide Third Reich valuables. Concentration camp inmates were used to build the huge tunnels – code-named Riese (Giant) – to use as production spaces for strategic weapons, as the site was safe from Allied air raids.
Sun
, October 2015
History tells us that the Special Air Service regiment created in 1942 was disbanded in 1945 . . . But a new book by acclaimed historian Damien Lewis has revealed that in fact one lone, top secret 30-man SAS unit fought on. This group ‘went dark’ at the end of the war to go on an unofficial mission to hunt down Nazi war criminals.
Their aim was to find the SS and Gestapo monsters who had murdered their captured comrades, as well as hundreds of French civilians who had tried to help them. By 1948 the band had captured more than 100 of the war’s worst killers – many of whom had avoided facing justice at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946 – and brought them to trial.
This tiny SAS unit, dubbed ‘the Secret Hunters’ was run from a shadow HQ based in the Hyde Park Hotel in London. It was funded off the books by an exiled Russian aristocrat working for the British War Office, Prince Yuri Galitzine.
And it was members of this group who were the earliest to uncover the full horror of the Nazi extermination camps . . . The Natzweiler concentration camp near Strasbourg had been the scene of horrific experiments by the Nazis. It was there that commandant Josef Kramer experimented with the technique of using gas to murder Jewish prisoners.
BBC, January 2016
OETZI THE ICEMAN HAD A STOMACH BUG, RESEARCHERS SAY.
Microbes extracted from the insides of a 5,300-year-old mummy have shown he was suffering from a stomach bug before he died, scientists have discovered. Oetzi the Iceman, the name given to the frozen body discovered in the Alps in 1991, had a bacterial infection that is common today, researchers said.
A genetic analysis of the bacteria –
Helicobacter pylori
– was carried out, helping to trace the history of the microbe, which is closely linked to the history of human migration.
Professor Albert Zink, head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman, at the European Academy in Bolzano, said: ‘One of the first challenges was to obtain samples from the stomach without doing damage to the mummy. Therefore we had to completely defrost the mummy, and could finally get access by an opening . . .’
16 October 1942, Helheim Glacier, Greenland
SS Lieutenant Herman Wirth brushed aside the flakes of swirling snow that obscured his vision. He forced himself closer, so that his face and hers were barely a foot apart. As he stared through the intervening mass of ice he let out a strangled gasp.
The woman’s eyes were wide open, even in her death throes. Sure enough, they were sky blue – just as he’d known they would be. But there his hopes came to a sudden, crashing end.
Her eyes drilled into his. Crazed. Glazed. Zombie-like. A pair of red-hot gun barrels boring into him from out of the translucent block of ice that held her.
Unbelievably, when this woman had fallen to her death to be entombed within the glacier, she had been crying tears of blood. Wirth could see where the oozing, frothy redness had streamed from her eye sockets, only to be frozen into immortality.
He forced himself to break eye contact and flicked his gaze lower, towards her mouth. It was one that he had spent countless nights fantasising about, as he shivered in the Arctic cold that penetrated even his thick goose-down sleeping bag.
He had envisaged her lips in his mind. He’d dreamed about them ceaselessly. They would be full and pouting and gorgeously pink, he’d told himself; the mouth of a perfect Germanic maid who had waited five thousand years for a kiss to revive her.
His kiss.
But the more he looked, the more he felt a wave of revulsion rise within his guts. He turned and dry-retched into the icy blast of wind that seared and howled through the crevasse.
In truth, hers would be the kiss of death; the embrace of a she-devil.
The woman’s mouth was encrusted with a deep red mass – a frozen bolus of engorged blood. It thrust into the ice before her like a ghastly swirling funeral shroud. And above the mouth, her nose too had been voiding a tidal wave of crimson fluid, a gruesome haemorrhage.
He swung his gaze lower and to left and right, letting his eyes rove across her frozen, naked flesh. For some reason this woman of the Ancients had torn off her clothes, before crawling across the ice sheet and stumbling blindly into this crevasse that cut through the glacier. She had come to rest on an ice shelf, becoming frozen solid within a matter of hours.
Perfectly preserved . . . but far from perfect.
Wirth could barely believe it, but even the ice woman’s armpits were streaked with thick, stringy beads of crimson fluid. Before she had died –
as
she had died – this so-called Nordic ancestor goddess had been sweating out her very lifeblood.
He let his gaze creep lower still, dreading what he would find there. He was not mistaken. A thick frozen smear of red surrounded her nether regions. Even as she had lain there, her heart pounding its last, thick gouts of putrid blood had flowed from her loins.