Hans Coler
Hans Coler (also rendered Köhler) was a German naval engineer and inventor active during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich who designed two electrical circuits — the Magnetstromapparat and the Stromerzeuger — that produced measurable power output without any identifiable source of input energy, placing them in the category of apparent zero-point energy transducers. The German Navy classified his devices as a potential source of silent, limitless power for submarine propulsion, and British intelligence classified the evaluation report for over three decades before its public release in 1978.
The Magnetstromapparat and Stromerzeuger
Coler's two devices shared a common architecture: a hexagonal arrangement of coils and permanent magnets incorporating two "rotating" sub-circuits, with no external power connection. Despite this, both circuits produced measurable electrical output — apparently transducing energy from no conventional source, an observation that baffled both Coler himself and the physicist who evaluated them. The Coler coil has been interpreted as evidence that the Germans had empirical reason to understand electrical circuits as open systems coupled to an "active local vacuum" — the theoretical basis of zero-point energy transduction — and suggests this understanding was deliberately classified rather than dismissed.
Schumann's 1926 examination
Between the World Wars, Coler's devices were subjected to formal evaluation at the University of Berlin under the direction of Winfried Otto Schumann — the physicist later famous for his discovery of the Schumann resonance of the Earth and who was himself subsequently brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. In 1926, following a rigorous examination, Schumann formally certified that Coler's device exhibited "no fault, hoax, or fraud on the part of its inventor" — an endorsement from one of Germany's most respected physicists. Schumann continued to be involved in secret German research on experimental energy systems — described in documents as related to "batteries" — as late as 1943, suggesting that Coler's work stimulated a classified German program rather than simply being filed away.
BIOS Final Report No. 1043
The British government's formal evaluation of Coler's devices was compiled as part of the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-committee (BIOS) postwar reporting system, assigned as B.I.O.S. Final Report No. 1043, Item No. 31, under the title The Invention of Hans Coler, Relating to an Alleged New Source of Power, dated Summer 1946. The report remained classified until 1978, a period of thirty-two years, during which time the British had sole access to Coler's designs and Schumann's evaluation methodology — a classification period markedly longer than that applied to most conventional wartime technical intelligence. Neither the extent of wartime German development of the device nor the extent of British post-war exploitation of it has ever been disclosed.
Kriegsmarine submarine application
The ideal application of a Coler device is immediately apparent from its specifications: it produces no exhaust, burns no fuel, and could theoretically be linked directly to the existing electric-drive systems of U-boats, allowing submarines to operate submerged indefinitely without surfacing to recharge batteries. This capability — essentially unlimited underwater endurance — would have been strategically transformative for German submarine warfare. German underground researchers on the subject have claimed this application was in fact realized, and that the connection between the Coler device, German submarine technology, and German disc aircraft programs forms a continuous thread — a claim characterized as "incredible, if not outlandish" while acknowledging the Coler devices had been in German hands for fully twelve years before the war began and an estimated twelve more during wartime development, before passing to British hands for a further twenty-three years of classified work.
Context within Nazi exotic physics
The Coler devices sit within a broader pattern of German interest in scalar physics and vacuum energy during the Third Reich, a pattern that also encompassed the work of Viktor Schauberger on implosion and zero-point energy, and the Die Glocke project's apparent investigation of spin-polarised plasma fields under the direction of Walther Gerlach. The devices are specifically cited as physical evidence that German physicists operating within a non-relativistic theoretical framework — one that permitted the concept of an "active vacuum" — had stronger empirical and ideological reasons than their Allied counterparts to pursue what Bearden calls "scalar weapons," and that this pursuit was the conceptual matrix within which the Bell project later emerged.
Connection to the Haunebu propulsion system
A direct lineage runs from Coler's zero-point energy circuit work to the propulsion system fitted in the Haunebu disc craft developed under Hans Kammler at the Skoda Works. Sean David Morton, drawing on the testimony of a time-travel program insider, described the "Kohler device" as the technology that "created the shield around the person when they went through the time jump," suggesting applications beyond propulsion into temporal displacement and field-shielding. The drive is described as "the Kohler converter, developed by Captain Hans Kohler based on the Tesla coil. This motor converted the Earth's gravitational energy into electromagnetic power, but could also extract energy from the ambient vacuum in outer space." The Haunebu I and II, built to SS plans dated November 7, 1943, employed this converter as their primary drive system. In the larger Haunebu III employed for the alleged 1945 Mars mission, "life-support operations were handled by small Kohler converters, which had been in use on the smaller Vril craft for several years." The "Kohler" of the converter name appears to be a variant transliteration of "Coler" — connecting the wartime propulsion program directly to the pre-war circuit experiments that Schumann had certified as genuine in 1926. The Vril I craft also employed a derivative of Coler's work in the form of a "Schumann SM-Levitator," which incorporated Coler's zero-point/free energy device with a propulsion system developed by Schumann, though the charged capacitors in the Vril I could only power the craft for approximately five and a half hours, indicating that the zero-point energy device was still limited in its power generation capacity at that stage of development. The subsequent Haunebu I was fitted with the E-IV propulsion system — the Tachyonator-7 drive — described as "a significant electro-magnetic-gravitic engine which improved Hans Coler's free energy machine into an energy Konverter coupled to a Van De Graaf band generator and Marconi vortex dynamo [a spherical tank of mercury] to create powerful rotating electromagnetic fields that affected gravity and reduced mass."
Schumann's evaluation in the broader German research context
Coler's device sits within the German Navy's active programme of new propulsion research for its secretly assembled future U-boat fleet: "In 1925, the German Navy had arranged for Schumann to evaluate the 'Coler Device,' despite the German patent office rejecting Coler's patent application." Schumann's written evaluation reads: "After the present examination, carried through as carefully as possible, I must surmise that we have to face the exploitation of a new source of energy whose further developments can be of an immense importance... I do not believe in a deception. I deem it expedient to put the apparatus to a further test, and I believe that a further development of the apparatus and an assistance, given to the inventor, will prove justified and of great importance." Three years after Schumann certified the Coler device, T. Townsend Brown was awarded a British patent for an electrogravitic propulsion device — suggesting that the Coler evaluation stimulated a broader intellectual current linking anomalous electrical phenomena to gravitational effects that crossed national and institutional boundaries in the late 1920s.