Category: People

The Schriever Story

[OLD VERSION]
The first would-be inventor of a Nazi “flying saucer”. More than Belluzzo, he launched the concept of man-made UFOs by the Nazis. Like Beluzzo he died a few years after his claims and the mistery begins.

 

Der Spiegel articleSchriever explaining his own disc projectOn the left the first page of the original “Der Spiegel” article dated March 30, 1950 (click on it for a larger picture). Mainly devoted to the overall “flying saucers” mystery (there was a huge on-going sighting wave all over Europe just that spring), the article introduced an interview with Rudolph Schriever. He claimed to have developed the blueprints for something like a  circular “supersonic helicopter” back in 1942, but the project was not finished at the end of the war. Blueprints would have been likely captured by Americans or Russians and further developed. German pride for a breakthrough new aircraft or what else?  The "Flugkreisel": Nazi UFO?
The original “Der Spiegel” artwork of the claimed Schriever’s flying saucer (“Flugkreisel”). In accordance with the famous German precision, it was duly joined by details and even a cut-through view.
Just following the 1950 “Der Spiegel” article, Arizona artist Jim Nichols produced this nice color artwork of the Schriever’s “flugkreisel”. Nichols produced three additional artworks devoted to Nazi UFOs at least, soon become very popular. Here it is another artist’s rendering of the Schriever 1950 description of his own “flying saucer”, here flying over the German mountains. These artworks look really fascinating when thinking to secret highly advanced aircrafts from the evil and somehow mysterious Third Reich. The great   interest for “What If” situations is another of the  reasons of the “evergreen” interest for such stories.
A different sketch of the Schriever disc published by an Italian aeronautics magazine in the late ’70s. As seen in the other drawings, each illustrator often gave a different visual interpretation of the original description, likely under the influence of the classic “flying saucer” imagery. One more  different  sketch  of the Schriever “flugkreisel” published by an Italian aviation magazine in the late ’70s.

 

Side view of the “flying disc”. It is really amazing the quantity of drawings produced by illustrators aimed to portrait the Schriever “wonder machine”. Most of them were quite faithful to the original 1950 description, while a few others were real wishful thinking.

 Artist conception bottom view of the Schriever disc. The original description published by the  “Der Spiegel” article was quite detailed and was taken again by the press in 1952, just after the claims from the never-traced Richard Miethe.Schriever died just one year later in a car accident, but his claims had already entered in the legend

Newsclipping about the Schriever "flugkreisel"

The German magazine “Heim und Welt” of April 2, 1950 (just very few days after the original Schriever interview) portraied the “flying saucer” take off, flight and landing by these three artworks.

This is close-up of one of the “Heim und Welt” artworks, later reprinted also by the French magazine “Tout Savoir” (November 1954).

Schriever's disc from Masters' book

In 1982, David  Master’s “German Jet Genesis” published by the prestigious Jane’s military publisher  introduced this sketch to illustrate the alleged Schriever’s flying saucer. It is very likely Masters based his information on Lusar’s book about German secret weapons of WWII, who also had a short yet provoking chapter about German “flying saucers”. Lusar’s source was likely to be early ’50s newsclippings. Master’s book illustrator got a quite free interpretation of the original Schriever description: this is a nearly classic “flying saucers”, much more next to the descriptions of UFO witnesses than to the details published in 1950.

A sketch of the Schriever saucer

Another sketch of the Schriever disc, from “Das Ufer” #18 of September 1952, introducing “flying saucers” as a possible secret German weapon developed during World War II.

Another skecth of the Schriever The Schriever story (as well as the othesr coming from later would-be inventors) and the concept behind it were really fascinating and well fitting the regular publications of news about more and more dreadful German secret weapons featured by the press since the end of WWII. Throughout the years the designers of many magazines tried to portrait the mythical Schriever “flukreisel”, most of them taking the original “Der Spiegel” artwork as a reference. Here  there are two additional views of such fantastic yet unlikely aircraft.