Hitler's 'flying saucer-attacks on London, NY'

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London: As Hitler's armies began to suffer a series of crushing reverses in Stalingrad and North Africa, he turned to his scientists to create a super-weapon - flying saucers to bomb London and New York.

Weapons like the V2 rockets and the first jet fighters saw action but came too late to halt defeat. Others were so outrageously ambitious that they never got past the drawing board.

The idea of building flying saucers could have been just such a scheme. But now it is claimed that Hitler's scientists had indeed designed this type of aircraft and a prototype may even have flown, the Daily Mail reports.

The programme, under the command of SS officer Hans Kammler, was said to have made significant breakthroughs in anti-gravity experiments, according to the German science magazine PM.

It quotes eyewitnesses who believe they saw a flying saucer marked with the Iron Cross of the German military flying low over the Thames in 1944.

At the time the New York Times had written about a 'mysterious flying disc' and published photos of the device travelling at high speeds over the city's high-rise buildings.

The magazine says that the Germans destroyed much of the paperwork on their activities but in 1960 in Canada, UFO experts managed to recreate the device which, to their amazement, 'did actually fly'.

Based in Prague between 1941 and 1943, the project was called the Schriever-Habermohl scheme. Rudolf Schriever was an engineer and test pilot, Otto Habermohl an engineer.

Initially a Luftwaffe plan after Hitler ordered his airforce chief Hermann Goering to come up with a super-weapon, it was eventually taken over in 1944 by Kammler.

Prisoners of the Allies claimed to have seen the silvery flying saucer, which was about six yards across, on several occasions.

Joseph Andreas Epp, an engineer on the project, said 15 prototypes were built. He described how a central cockpit was surrounded by rotating adjustable wing-vanes which formed a circle and gave the craft lift. After take-off, horizontal jets or rockets were ignited.

After the war, many German scientists helped with the US space programme. The theory is further fuelled by the claims of Igor Witkowski, a Polish former journalist and historian of military and aerospace technology.

In his book, 'Prawda O Wunderwaffe' in 2000, he claimed that a bell-shaped craft was being created by the Nazis and that Hitler wanted the best scientists and engineers at his disposal.