The vision of the invasion
No prophecy of the Third World War has cut as deep as this one: Alois Irlmaier saw three armoured army columns breaking into Germany from Russia and the east overnight, running west day and night, and shattering only at the Rhine. This page gathers what has been handed down about the course of that invasion — stage by stage, place by place, with the literal sentences, their sources, and what the military history of the Cold War has to say about them.
The war comes from the sunrise, and it goes very fast.
Alois Irlmaier — as handed down
Column of Soviet T-72 main battle tanks in march order
“Pitch black an army column comes in from the east.” What Irlmaier described as an image in the 1950s was military reality on the inner-German border two decades later.
Alois Irlmaier (1894–1959) was a well-finder, dowser and clairvoyant in the Rupertiwinkel of Upper Bavaria — a man without schooling who said of himself only: “I just say it as I see it.” What he saw, by his own account, came not in words but in pictures, “like at the cinema”: an inner film without a date, without names, without explanation. That is precisely what makes his vision of war so peculiar and so hard to grasp. It is extraordinarily rich in geographical detail — rivers, forest edges, roads, a church tower with a wrongly oriented altar — and at the same time entirely devoid of the one thing that would make any examination possible: years.
The heart of this prophecy of the Third World War is the invasion itself. Irlmaier described it not as a diffuse catastrophe but as a military operation with recognisable structure: three great movements, which he called “wedges” or “army worms”, each with its own direction, its own terrain, its own objective. The tradition names the attacker explicitly as “the Russian” — the forces come from the east, from Russia and the states allied with it. They do not advance side by side but in echelon; they stop nowhere; they all aim at the same point in the west. Laid side by side, the surviving sentences yield not a vision in the fog but something that looks disturbingly like an operational plan for a Russian attack on Germany.
This page follows the sequence as it stands in the sources. It begins with what precedes the first Russian tank — the assassination in the south-east — then traces each of the three wedges across its terrain, arrives at the point where the invasion collapses in on itself, and ends where Irlmaier himself ended: at a narrow stretch of land in south-east Bavaria over which, as he said, a mantle lies. The remaining parts of his vision of the Third World War — the seven signs before the war, the cross in the sky and the three days of darkness — are set out on the page about Alois Irlmaier.
One thing first, and it belongs at the beginning rather than in the small print: not a single one of these sentences was written down by Irlmaier himself. All we have are records made by others — above all by the collector Conrad Adlmaier, whose book appeared between 1950 and 1961 in several mutually divergent editions. What stands here is tradition. It is not verified prophecy, and it is certainly not a prediction with a date.
Schematic map of Central Europe showing the three wedges advancing west from Bohemia, Saxony and the north-east, the yellow line from Prague to the Baltic, and the spared zone in south-east Bavaria
The three wedges, the yellow line and the spared zone — assembled from the place names in the tradition. The rendering is schematic: it shows directions and relations, not front lines and not scale.
Irlmaier called them “wedges” and “army worms” — images from a man who had never seen a general staff map. They are the core of what is known today as his prophecy of the Third World War: three Russian army columns overrunning Germany from the east. Across the years and the various editions, their number, direction and objective remain remarkably stable; in detail the versions diverge. Here they stand as they were handed down.
The southernmost of the three wedges is the most precisely described — presumably because it runs through Irlmaier’s own homeland. Adlmaier’s second edition of 1955 reads: “Three wedges I see flooding in. The lower army worm comes over the forest, then draws up north-west of the Danube. The line is roughly Prague, Bavarian Forest and north-west.” The “forest” is the Bavarian Forest; the line leads from the Bohemian basin over the ridges down into the Bavarian plain.
Father Norbert Backmund, who claims to have questioned Irlmaier in person, specified the march route in 1961: “The lower army worm comes from Bohemia over the Bavarian Forest. Probably chiefly along the road Furth — Cham — Stallwang — Straubing.” Put those places on a map and the reason is obvious: it is the natural passage through the uplands, the old trade road from Prague to Regensburg, for centuries the axis between Bohemia and Bavaria.
What happens next is decisive, and it is one of the most striking details in the whole vision: the wedge does not cross the Danube. “The enemy does not go over the Danube but turns north-west.” The river remains the southern limit of the movement. The third edition of 1961 puts it this way: “Up to Regensburg not a bridge is left standing over the Danube; south of the blue water they do not come.” The “blue water” is the Danube; it is not overcome but becomes a wall along which the movement scrapes.
And there, in the angle between forest and river, Irlmaier saw the centre of the entire operation: “In the Naab valley in the Upper Palatinate Alois sees his headquarters.” Witnesses report that he described the place with unusual precision, even naming it and marking the point on a map. Its identifying feature is an architectural rarity: “There is a church there in which the altar points not east but north.”
The lower army worm comes over the forest, then draws up north-west of the Danube. The line is roughly Prague, Bavarian Forest and north-west.
Conrad Adlmaier, 2nd edition 1955
The middle wedge is the shortest and the most brutal, because it uses the flattest ground. “The second wedge goes from east to west over Saxony”, reads the 1955 text. Six years later the objective is named: “The second thrust comes over Saxony westward towards the Ruhr area.” Between the Saxon lowland and the Rhine lies only one serious threshold — the Hessian uplands — and it has exactly one gap.
That gap has a name Irlmaier did not know and could not have known: the Fulda Gap. Between the Rhön and the Vogelsberg opens the shortest route from Thuringia to the Rhine, a corridor wide enough for armoured formations and flat enough for high march speed. For four decades NATO concentrated its heaviest units precisely here, because every serious plan reached the conclusion Irlmaier’s image reaches: whoever wants to reach the Rhine quickly goes through here.
The second wedge is also the one for which the tradition describes the tempo that makes the whole vision so uncanny. It is not the clash of armies that stands in the picture, but the absence of any warning: “Pitch black an army column comes in from the east. They come so fast that the farmers are still sitting together at the inn table when the foreign soldiers are already looking in at the doors and windows.” In the 1961 version the farmers are playing cards.
The second thrust comes over Saxony westward towards the Ruhr area, just like the third army worm, which goes from the north-east westward via Berlin.
Conrad Adlmaier, 3rd edition 1961
The northern wedge is the broadest. “The third from the north-east to the south-west”, Adlmaier notes in 1955; by 1961 the axis is concrete: “the third army worm, which goes from the north-east westward via Berlin.” The terrain it moves through is the North German Plain — a landscape without appreciable elevation between the Oder and the Ruhr, threaded with canals and rivers, but without a single mountain barrier.
Militarily this is the classic route: the same plain across which armies rolled twice in the twentieth century, and the same one along which NATO stationed its Northern Army Group during the Cold War. The distance from the Oder to the Rhine across this plain is only a few hundred kilometres, with no natural barrier capable of seriously halting an armoured advance.
The convergence is striking: the second and third wedges do not diverge but come together — both towards the industrial region on the Rhine and Ruhr. Irlmaier’s vision knows no fanning out across the country, only a converging on one point. It is the movement of a pincer, not of an occupation.
The third from the north-east to the south-west.
In Irlmaier’s account the war begins not with a deployment but with a murder. “I see a ‘great one’ fall, a bloody dagger lying beside him”, runs the best-known sentence. More fully: “Two men kill a third, a high-ranking man. They have been paid by other people. One murderer is a small dark man, the other somewhat taller with fair hair. I think it will be in the Balkans, but I cannot say for certain.” And then, very briefly: “The third murder has happened. Then it is war.”
This is preceded by a phase of deceptive détente. “Everyone is calling peace, shalom! That is when it will happen” — among the most quoted sentences of all, describing a situation in which the diplomatic signs point to calm while the actual fuse has long been laid. The spark itself falls not where everyone is looking, but is “thrown into the powder keg in the Balkans”.
The assassination is followed by a headlong escalation. A witness who appears in Leo Degard’s account under the name “Gärtner” hands down a chain of events unfolding within hours: “Because of a lightning attack by Russian units in Belgrade, a conference is convened in Budapest at very short notice.” And immediately afterwards: “Right after the Budapest conference the people in Passau come out of the cathedral and find that there are tanks on the other (Austrian) side.” Between the last negotiation and the first tanks in sight lies, in this image, less than a day.
A word of caution is needed here. Irlmaier spoke of a “third” high-ranking man but named no one. The widespread reading that the two preceding murders were the assassinations of Mahatma Gandhi and of the UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948 comes from his interpreters — not from him. It is later exegesis and is not presented here as his statement.
What distinguishes Irlmaier’s vision of the invasion from most war prophecies is not the scale of destruction but the speed. “Then it goes blow upon blow”, the text runs. And: “Immediately afterwards three armoured wedges thrust north of the Danube across West Germany towards the Rhine like lightning — without warning.”
The images in which he captures this are everyday ones, and disturbing for exactly that reason. They are not battle scenes. They are pictures of people still sitting at cards when the war is already at their door: “The farmers are sitting playing cards in the inn, and the foreign soldiers are looking in at the windows and doors.” Between peace and occupation, in this image, there is no mobilisation, no declaration of war, not even a news bulletin.
One witness pushes the tempo to its extreme: “The Russians are already on the Rhine on the first day of the attack.” That statement belongs to one chain of transmission and not to the Adlmaier editions — it is the most extreme version of the motif and must be marked as such. What all versions share is the core: the attack is faster than a defence can form.
At the same time the civilian population is set in motion. As early as 1950 the Landshuter Zeitung reported a description of refugee traffic that is startlingly modern: “In the south the Austrians are fleeing on both lanes of the motorway from Salzburg towards Munich, tens of thousands of them in headlong flight.” Both carriageways in one direction — an image scarcely anyone in Germany could have known from experience in 1950.
All three wedges converge on the same area. Irlmaier names the objective not by its name but by what he sees — and he names the attacker outright: “The Russian runs on in his three wedges, they stop nowhere, day and night they run as far as the Ruhr area, where the many furnaces and chimneys stand.” It is one of the few sentences in which the tradition names the enemy: in this vision the attack of the Third World War comes from Russia.
Militarily this is the most obvious objective imaginable. At the time of these statements the Ruhr was the industrial heart of Western Europe: coal, steel, coking plants, power stations, transport hubs. Whoever holds it deprives the enemy of the ability to fight a long war. Whoever destroys it does the same, permanently. The phrase “where the many furnaces and chimneys stand” is the description of a man who never saw the Ruhr and yet hits it unmistakably.
“They stop nowhere” is the operationally decisive half-sentence. It describes not a conquest but a march-through. Towns are not taken but bypassed; resistance is not broken but overtaken. It is exactly the logic by which armoured formations operated in the twentieth century — tempo before ground, depth before breadth.
At this point the vision turns. What ends the advance is not a battle but a weapon for which Irlmaier had no words — only images. He saw, as he said, “the earth like a sphere”, and above it “so many doves (aircraft) rising from the sand that I cannot count them”. The “sand” is generally read as a desert region; the “doves” as aircraft or missiles.
“Then come the white doves and all at once it rains down quite yellow from the sky. It will be a clear night when they begin to drop them.” And then the sentence no one who has read it once escapes: “The tanks are still rolling, but the drivers are already dead.” In the 1961 version: “The tanks still drive, but those sitting in them are already dead.”
What falls, Irlmaier described as small black containers — the famous “black boxes”: “Those are devil’s lumps. When they explode a yellow and green dust or smoke arises; whatever comes under it is done for, whether man, beast or plant.” They explode before touching the ground. The effect is not destruction but extinction: “Where it falls nothing lives any more, no man, no cattle, no tree, no grass; it withers and turns black.” The houses remain standing.
Geographically this effect is outlined with frightening precision. It does not fall over an area but as a line: “And then a yellow dust rains down in a line. The Golden City is destroyed, that is where it begins. Like a yellow stroke it goes up as far as the city in the bay.” The Golden City is universally read as Prague. Where the line ends is contested: the phrase “up to the great water at a bay” points most readily to the Baltic, while other readings take it as Hamburg. Irlmaier himself would not give the name.
The line separates what was previously joined. “It is a long stroke. Whoever walks across it dies.” And: “Those on this side cannot get over, and those on the far side cannot get across.” With that the supply lines of the three wedges are severed — not by fighting, but by a strip of land no living thing can enter. According to Irlmaier the area stays lethal for a full year.
As the front tears apart, a second movement runs in the west — that of the fleeing. Here the tradition holds an image of great harshness: three columns of people press westward, two reach the saving bank, the third does not. In the version of the witness “Gärtner”: “Two large throngs of people still get across the Danube and save themselves with us, but the third throng no longer gets over; a ring closes around them.”
This motif of three columns, one of which is encircled, appears in several versions — sometimes tied to the Danube, sometimes to the Rhine. It is one of the images that show the imprecision of the tradition particularly well: the core is stable, the location is not.
At the Rhine itself the advance ends. “At the Rhine the attack is finally beaten back”, runs the common summary; and for the attackers there is no way back: “Then they are all killed; not one of the three army columns comes home again.” The sentence stands in Adlmaier’s first edition of 1950 and has survived into every later version. It is the verdict on the entire operation: no soldier of the three columns returns.
The place where the movement finally breaks has a name in the tradition: “Around Cologne the last battle flares up.” It marks the point at which the westernmost tip of the wedges meets the river that is never crossed.
Cologne as the setting is not a whim of the imagination but geography. Where the Rhine leaves the North German Plain lies the crossing towards which every movement from the east ultimately runs — the same place where the last German Rhine front collapsed in March 1945, leaving the city a field of rubble. Irlmaier certainly knew the images of that collapse; whether that explains his vision or only its vocabulary must remain open.
In the vision the collapse is followed by a counterstroke: “Instantly vengeance comes across the great water” — commonly read as America. The attackers’ retreat then follows not in order but as dissolution: “Then everything collapses among the army columns on this side. They must all go north.” And in the earliest version of 1950, more drastically still: they throw away everything they are carrying.
In the middle of this vision there is one place where nothing happens. Irlmaier was as definite about this as about almost nothing else — and he was so because it concerned his own home: “You need have no fear at all, nothing will happen to you; above all to us here inside, from the Watzmann to the Wendelstein, nothing happens to us, because the Mother of God of Altötting protects us.”
The same image returns in the later editions: “There the Blessed Lady of Altötting spreads her mantle over the ‘Saurüssel’.” The “Saurüssel” is the tongue of land between the Salzach and the Inn, that south-easternmost corner of Bavaria in which Irlmaier lived. The reason given is explicitly religious: not terrain, not luck, but the protecting mantle of the Lady of Altötting.
Depending on one’s standpoint, two things can be seen in this: the heart of the matter — that this vision is a spiritual one and not a military one — or its greatest weakness, since the seer exempts precisely his own district. Naming both honestly is better than passing over one of them.
Asked about the duration, Irlmaier settled on one number and one uncertainty. “The whole thing will not last long, I see three strokes — three days, three weeks, three months, I do not know exactly, but it does not last long!” In the 1961 version: “How long does it last with the war? I clearly see a three, but whether it is three days, three weeks or three months I do not know.”
Within this short war lies the span that has remained inseparable from his name: “During the war comes the great darkness, which lasts 72 hours.” The accompanying instruction is the most practical statement in his entire tradition — do not go out, do not look out of the window, keep candles and supplies ready, and pray. It is set out in full on the page about Alois Irlmaier.
About the outcome he was unambiguous: no second war follows, but a long, warm, peaceful time. In his vision the invasion is not the beginning of the end of the world, but the end of an epoch.
The order in which the events follow one another in the sources. It is taken from the tradition and carries no dates — Irlmaier named a year for none of these stages.
Before
“Everyone is calling peace, shalom!” A new Middle East war flares up; naval formations face each other in the Mediterranean.
The spark
Two paid men kill a third, high-ranking man. “The third murder has happened. Then it is war.”
Zero hour
A lightning attack on Belgrade, a hasty conference in Budapest — and immediately afterwards tanks stand opposite Passau.
Day 1
Overnight, without warning. Bohemia, Saxony, the north-east. “They stop nowhere.”
Advance
West day and night, “where the many furnaces and chimneys stand”. The Danube is not crossed.
The turn
White doves rise from the sand. Yellow dust falls in a line from Prague to the city on the bay. “Whoever walks across it dies.”
Collapse
The fronts are separated; the tanks still drive, the crews are dead. “They must all go north.”
The end
At the Rhine the attack is finally beaten back. “Not one of the three army columns comes home again.”
After
Three days, three weeks or three months: “it does not last long”. Afterwards a long and happy time.
Every place named or unmistakably described in the tradition of the invasion — with what is said about it.
Prague — “the Golden City”
Starting point of the first wedge and beginning of the yellow line. “The Golden City is destroyed, that is where it begins.”
Bavarian Forest
Transit terrain of the lower army worm. March route Furth — Cham — Stallwang — Straubing.
The Danube — “the blue water”
Southern limit of the movement. “South of the blue water they do not come.” Up to Regensburg no bridge is left standing.
Naab valley, Upper Palatinate
Site of the enemy headquarters. Identifying feature: a church on a hill whose altar points north. “I see the church burn.”
Saxony
Axis of the second wedge, from east to west, aimed at the Ruhr.
Berlin
Waypoint of the third army worm, moving from the north-east to the west.
The Ruhr
Common objective of the wedges — “where the many furnaces and chimneys stand”.
Cologne
“Around Cologne the last battle flares up.” At the Rhine the attack is finally beaten back.
City in the bay
End point of the yellow line at the “great water”. Read as a Baltic port or as Hamburg; Irlmaier gave no name.
Vienna
In one chain of transmission: after three or four days a west wind sets in and a band of yellow dust falls between Salzburg and the Baltic — “in Vienna no one survives”.
Passau
People come out of the cathedral and find tanks already standing on the Austrian side.
Salzburg — Munich
Refugee traffic on both motorway lanes in one direction, “tens of thousands in headlong flight”.
South-east Bavaria, from the Watzmann to the Wendelstein
Spared. “There the Blessed Lady of Altötting spreads her mantle.”
Irlmaier’s prophecy of the Third World War cannot be verified. Something else can: whether the geography he describes matches what the general staffs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact actually planned for a Russian attack on Germany during the Cold War. It does — and that is remarkable enough to be presented cleanly and without exaggeration.
For four decades NATO assumed exactly three main axes of attack on West Germany, and they follow inescapably from the terrain. In the north the North German Plain: flat, wide, without a mountain barrier, the classic armoured route from the Oder to the Rhine. In the centre the Fulda Gap between the Rhön and the Vogelsberg, the shortest way from Thuringia to Frankfurt and the Rhine — which is why the heaviest American formations stood there. And in the south the corridors through the Upper Palatinate and the Bavarian Forest, along the old roads from Bohemia to Regensburg, with the Danube as a natural southern limit.
Irlmaier’s description matches this point for point: a wedge out of Bohemia over the forest that does not cross the Danube; a wedge westward across Saxony; a wedge from the north-east via Berlin across the plain. All three aimed at the same area. It is the list any planner must arrive at with a map of Central Europe before him — and a Bavarian well-digger, as far as anyone knows, had no such map.
The objective matches too. The exercise plan drawn up by the Warsaw Pact in 1979 bore the name “Seven Days to the River Rhine” and envisaged occupying Western Europe as far as that river within a week. The Rhine was not some arbitrary marker but the operational finish line — precisely the line at which Irlmaier’s wedges break.
And finally the nature of the weapon matches. The same plan provided for the use of tactical nuclear weapons; among the intended targets in West Germany were Stuttgart, Munich and Nuremberg, while Vienna was to be struck by two bombs of 500 kilotons each. Irlmaier had no word for radioactivity. He described what a person without that word would see: a dust falling in a line, under which plants wither and turn black while houses remain standing, and men die in tanks that are still moving. That is the description of an effect, not of a bomb.
The Polish defence minister Radosław Sikorski had these planning documents declassified in 2005 in order to inform the public about the military doctrine of the communist era. They are publicly accessible today. What is attributed to Irlmaier was therefore written down decades before that release — and decades afterwards it became testable.
What follows is restraint in both directions. The correspondence does not prove that Irlmaier saw the future: anyone who knows the map of Central Europe finds the same three routes, and Soviet attack plans had been discussed publicly in Germany since 1948. Nor can it be shrugged off, because the details are too specific for that — the Danube as an uncrossed southern limit, the Naab valley, the church with the north-facing altar, the target area with its furnaces and chimneys.
Three wedges I see flooding in. The lower army worm comes over the forest, then draws up north-west of the Danube.
The second wedge goes from east to west over Saxony, the third from the north-east to the south-west.
The enemy does not go over the Danube but turns north-west; in the Naab valley in the Upper Palatinate Irlmaier sees the headquarters.
Pitch black an army column comes in from the east. They come so fast that the farmers are still sitting together at the inn table when the foreign soldiers are already looking in at the doors and windows.
The Russian runs on in his three wedges, they stop nowhere, day and night they run as far as the Ruhr area, where the many furnaces and chimneys stand.
And then a yellow dust rains down in a line. The Golden City is destroyed, that is where it begins. Like a yellow stroke it goes up as far as the city in the bay.
The tanks still drive, but those sitting in them are already dead.
It is a long stroke. Whoever walks across it dies.
Then they are all killed; not one of the three army columns comes home again.
There the Blessed Lady of Altötting spreads her mantle over the “Saurüssel”.
The whole thing will not last long, I see three strokes — three days, three weeks, three months, I do not know exactly, but it does not last long!
They throw something down on the headquarters; I see a church on a hill, the altar looks north, I see the church burn.
This page collects a tradition. It collects it as precisely as the sources allow — and it does not claim that a single one of these sentences will come to pass. Anyone reading Irlmaier’s vision of the invasion honestly must hold four things at once.
First: Irlmaier wrote none of it down. Everything handed down comes from listeners and collectors, first of all from Conrad Adlmaier, whose book appeared between 1950 and 1961 in three editions that contradict one another at decisive points. “Three great lines westward” (1950) become “three wedges” (1955); in 1955 the first worm draws up north-west of the Danube, in 1961 it goes “from the blue water north-west as far as the Swiss border”. Such shifts are the normal behaviour of oral tradition — and they make any appeal to the exact wording questionable.
Second: there is damaging material about the man that must not be suppressed. In 1947 a clergyman charged Irlmaier with fraud and “trickery” before the district court in Laufen. Two witnesses testified that they had never believed his contradictory prophecies; five others confirmed his accuracy; he was acquitted. The record also shows fifteen previous convictions, seven of them for fraud. This does not refute his visions — but whoever cites the testimony in his favour must cite this as well.
Third: there is no date. Not one. Every year in circulation comes from interpreters, not from Irlmaier. Whoever attaches a date to his name goes beyond what the sources permit — and regularly does so to gain attention or to sell books.
Fourth, and this is decisive: Scripture itself gives us the standard, and it is a strict one. “Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:19–21). Both stand there: do not despise, and test. And about the timing Jesus himself ruled out all calculation: “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but my Father only” (Matthew 24:36).
Whoever reads this page should therefore neither take fright nor start counting. What Jesus told his disciples about wars and rumours of wars ends not with a number but with a posture: “See that you are not alarmed” (Matthew 24:6). That is the standard by which even the most impressive vision of a Bavarian well-digger must be measured.
The questions most often asked about this prophecy — answered briefly, with pointers to the detailed sections above.
Irlmaier never gave a date — no year, no month, no day. Every year in circulation comes from later interpreters, not from him. He named only signs: a deceptive peace, a new war in the Middle East and a political assassination in the Balkans. Asked about the duration, he answered with an image rather than a number: “I see three strokes — three days, three weeks, three months, I do not know exactly, but it does not last long.”
That is what Irlmaier called the three armoured thrusts he saw coming into Germany from the east. The first comes out of Bohemia over the Bavarian Forest and turns north-west of the Danube; the second runs westward from Saxony through Thuringia and Hesse; the third moves from the north-east via Berlin across the North German Plain. All three share one objective: the Ruhr.
The tradition names above all Prague as the “Golden City”, Belgrade, Passau, Regensburg, Berlin, the Ruhr, Cologne as the site of the last battle, and Vienna. The “yellow line” runs north from Prague to an unnamed “city in the bay” at the great water. The full gazetteer with every statement is set out above on this page.
South-east Bavaria. Irlmaier was as definite about this as about almost nothing else: “From the Watzmann to the Wendelstein nothing happens to us, because the Mother of God of Altötting protects us.” Later versions say the Blessed Lady of Altötting spreads her mantle over the “Saurüssel” — the tongue of land between the Salzach and the Inn where Irlmaier himself lived.
A band of lethal yellow dust which, in Irlmaier’s vision, falls in a line from Prague to the “city in the bay” and cuts the front in two: “Whoever walks across it dies.” He described small black containers exploding before impact and an effect under which nothing lives while the houses remain standing. The common reading takes this as a description of tactical nuclear weapons by a man who did not know the word radioactivity.
The tradition names “the Russian” as the attacker outright. No prediction about the present can be drawn from that, however: Irlmaier died in 1959, spoke without dates and described a political situation that no longer exists. This page sets out what has been handed down, not what will happen.
That cannot be verified, and this page does not claim it. Irlmaier wrote nothing himself; every text comes from collectors, above all Conrad Adlmaier, whose three editions between 1950 and 1961 contradict one another at important points. What remains remarkable is only that the geography he describes matches the three real invasion corridors of the Cold War.
It is the most tangible yardstick. Drawn up in 1979 and declassified by Poland in 2005, the exercise plan envisaged occupying Western Europe as far as the Rhine within a week — precisely the line at which Irlmaier’s wedges break — and counted on tactical nuclear weapons against West German cities. That proves nothing about the vision, but it makes it testable.
schauungen.de — Alois Irlmaier, full source collection with comparison of editions (https://schauungen.de/wiki/Alois_Irlmaier)
schauungen.de — index of prophecies on the Third World War (https://schauungen.de/Sonstiges/Prophezeiungsindex/)
Conrad Adlmaier: “Blick in die Zukunft”, 1st edition 1950, 2nd edition 1955, 3rd edition 1961 — principal source of all Irlmaier quotations
Father Norbert Backmund, communication of 1961 — march route of the lower army worm and the headquarters in the Naab valley
Wikipedia — Alois Irlmaier, biographical details and the 1947 court case (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Irlmaier)
irlmaier.com — compilation “Drei Stoßkeile” (https://irlmaier.com/drei-stosskeile/)
aloisirlmaier.de — collection of prophecies (https://www.aloisirlmaier.de/wiki/prophezeiungen/)
Wikipedia — “Seven Days to the River Rhine”, Warsaw Pact plan of 1979, declassified 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine)
Britannica — Fulda Gap, its significance in the Cold War (https://www.britannica.com/place/Fulda-Gap)
GlobalSecurity.org — Hof Corridor Operations (https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/ww3-hof-corridor.htm)
Every photograph on this page is in the public domain or released under CC0 — none carries an attribution requirement or any further licence condition. Most are official images of the US armed forces, the Royal Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Library of Congress. Author and source are nonetheless named and linked for each image. The situation map of the three army columns was made specifically for this page.