The early Years
The town was mentioned first in 724/725 when Bonifatius founded the first monastery of Thuringia in Ohrdruf, the Michaelis Monastery. Johann Sebastian Bach also used to live here for four years.
Since 1906, Ohrdruf was a military training ground that included parts of an especially enchanted area: the Jonas Valley. In 1934, the Kraftfahr-Lehrkommando or Motorized Demonstration Command was formed at Ohrdruf. It was Germany’s first dedicated tank unit and, in the words of General Ritter von Thoma, was “the grandmother of all the others.” Initially composed of one battalion, the unit later gained a second battalion and was equipped with Germany’s first new tank, the small two-man PzKpfw I light tank armed with two machineguns. A second Motorized Demonstration Command was later established at Zossen. These two commands provided the nucleus from which several panzer regiments were born.
Amt 10
During 1936-1938, an Army underground telephone/telex exchange known as Amt 10 was built in the limestone strata below the Ohrdruf training ground Its entrances were disguised as chalets. The bunker was 50 feet down and measured 70 by 20 metres. Both floors had a central corridor about 3 metres wide with rooms either side, and 2 WCs. End-doors were gas-proofed, the installation had central heating, air was supplied under pressure, water drawn from a spring 600 feet below. A 475 hp ship's diesel was on hand as the emergency electrical generator. One of the three full-time Reichspost maintenance engineers employed there from 1938 to 1945 stated that Amt 10 was never used until the last few months of the war when it was "more than it seemed" and "its clandestine purpose was fairly obvious."
A witness stated that in 1944 there was an installation below the Ohrdruf military ground which created an electro-magnetic field capable of stopping the engines of a conventional aircraft at seven miles. During the war, the Allies never photographed Ohrdruf from the air, nor bombed it. A German electro-magnetic field which interfered with their aircraft at altitudes of up to seven miles is admitted by a 1945 United States Air Force Intelligence document (see sources). The USAF suspected that it was a device to bring down their bombers, Many Arnstadt witnesses described occasions when electrical equipment and automobile engines cut out.
Special Construction Site S-III
In October 1944, General von Gockl, commander of the Ohrdruf training area, evacuated all Wehrmacht personnel from the plain. Within a fortnight the notorious Ohrdruf-KZ had been set up while SS-Fuehrungsstab S-III, in charge of the Führer headquarters project, occupied a school at nearby Luisenthal. At the end of 1944, Hauptsturmfuehrer Karl Sommer, deputy head of WVHA-DH (SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt- Economics and Administrative Department) assembled a workforce at Buchenwald to build a secret Führer headquarters named S-III (Sonderbauvorhaben III) at Ohrdruf.
From the autumn of 1944 until spring 1945 thousands of slave labourers from nearby Ohrdruf, Espenfeld and Crawinkel built a system of 25 tunnels with more than 3 km in length in the Jonas Valley. The actual sense and purpose of the 25 lugs are still unclear today. Was the “Fuehrer’s Last Headquarter” to be built here? Or was the openly visible construction site meant to camouflage the large number of forced labourers secretly working on other spots within the mountain?
SSP-Exploration, a company specialised in field anomaly based in Weil am Rhein, has been exploring the Jonas Valley and its history for years. And they have found some intriguing hints: “The documented transports of forced labourers found in the archives of Buchenwald, a former concentration camp, seem to point to a sham construction site. In the period between November 1944 (starting of the building activities in Jonastal) and March 1945 (abandonment of the site) approx. 25.000 forced labourers were brought to S III. Various authors assume that the extremely high amount of forced labourers had something to do with a still unknown Nazi Nuclear and Intercontinental Rocket Research Program, and that most of the forced labourers had to work in order to build these subterranean sites.” This theory is covered by the statements of US Colonel R. Allen, who accompanied General Patton, when he liberated Ohrdruf on April 11, 1945. In his book “Lucky Forward: The History of Patton's 3rd US Army” he wrote:
The Americans Beyond Belief
"The underground installations were amazing. They were literally subterranean towns. There were four in and around Ohrdruf. One near the horror camp, one under the Schloss (castle), and two west of the town. Others were reported in near-by villages. None were natural caves or mines. All were man-made military installations. The horror camp had provided the labour. An interesting feature of the construction was the absence of any spoil. It had been carefully scattered in hills miles away. The only communication shelter, which is known, is a two floor deep shelter, with the code AMT 10.
Over 50feet underground, the installations consisted of 2 & 3 stories several miles in length and extending like the spokes of a wheel. The entire hull structure was of massive reinforced, concrete. Purpose of the installations was to house the High Command after it was bombed out of Berlin. This place also had panelled and carpeted offices, scores of large work and store rooms, tiled bathrooms with bath tubs and showers, flush toilets electrically equipped kitchens, decorated dining rooms and mess halls, giant refrigerators, extensive sleeping quarters, recreation rooms, separate bars for officers and enlisted personal, a moving picture theatre and air conditioning and sewage systems.”
Nuclear Test in Ohrdruf?
The theory of a nuclear laboratory was substantiated with the release of the book “Hitler´s Bomb” in 2005. The rather disturbing message from the book was that Nazi Germany tested a crude nuclear device in March 1945, killing hundreds of people in a massive explosion in the Ohrdruf area. “Hitler's Bomb” theorizes that the March 1945 device didn't achieve fission, but did scatter telltale radioactive particles at the Ohrdruf test site. It also claims that Nazi Germany briefly had a working nuclear reactor, something historians generally dispute.
Author Rainer Karlsch, an economic historian, offers no first-hand proof, saying his account is an interpretation of available evidence and he hopes it will spur more research.
He said soil samples from the Ohrdruf site he had analyzed for his book turned up above-average levels of radioactive isotopes such as cesium 137 and cobalt 60, though he quotes the testers as saying the site poses no radiation hazard.
However, access to what he believes was ground zero was barred because of old munitions at the site, which served as a Soviet military training area in East Germany after the war.
A U.S. mission that arrived in Germany with American troops in 1945 to investigate the German atomic bomb program concluded that the Germans were nowhere near making a nuclear weapon.
A U.S. mission that arrived in Germany with American troops in 1945 to investigate the German atomic bomb program concluded that the Germans were nowhere near making a nuclear weapon.
Karlsch doesn't claim they were near. But based on witness accounts recorded after the war, post war Allied aerial photos and Soviet military intelligence reports, he argues that a test blast happened March 3, 1945, at Ohrdruf — then being run as a Nazi concentration camp. He says there probably were several previous tests.
"Hitler's bomb — a tactical nuclear weapon with a potential for destruction far below that of the two American atomic bombs — was tested successfully several times shortly before the end of the war," the book says.
"Hitler's bomb — a tactical nuclear weapon with a potential for destruction far below that of the two American atomic bombs — was tested successfully several times shortly before the end of the war," the book says.
On June 1, 2005, The BBC News published an article entitled “Drawing uncovered of 'Nazi nuke”: Historians working in Germany and the US claim to have found a 60-year-old diagram showing a Nazi nuclear bomb.
It is the only known drawing of a "nuke" made by Nazi experts and appears in a report held by a private archive. The researchers who brought it to light say the drawing is a rough schematic and does not imply the Nazis built, or were close to building, an atomic bomb. But a detail in the report hints some Nazi scientists may have been closer to that goal than was previously believed.The report containing the diagram is undated, but the researchers claim the evidence points to it being produced immediately after the end of the war in Europe. It deals with the work of German nuclear scientists during the war and lacks a title page, so there is no evidence of who composed it.
One historian behind the discovery, Rainer Karlsch, caused a storm of controversy earlier this year when he claimed to have uncovered evidence that the Nazis successfully tested a primitive nuclear device in the last days of WWII. A number of historians rejected the claim.
The drawing is published in an article written for Physics World magazine by Karlsch and Mark Walker, professor of history at Union College in Schenectady, US. The newly uncovered document was discovered after the publication of Karlsch's book, Hitlers Bombe (Hitler's Bomb), in which he made the nuclear test claim.
"The Nazis were far away from a 'classic' atomic bomb. But they hoped to combine a 'mini-nuke' with a rocket," Dr Karlsch told the BBC News website. "The military believed they needed around six months more to bring the new weapon into action. But the scientists knew better how difficult it was to get the enriched uranium required."
Heisenberg and Diebner
The head of Nazi Germany's nuclear energy programme was the physicist Werner Heisenberg. Though he was highly accomplished in other areas of physics, Heisenberg failed to understand a key aspect of nuclear fission chain reactions. Some researchers say this led him to overestimate the amount of uranium - the so-called fissile material - required to build a nuclear bomb. However, the German report contains an estimate of slightly more than 5 kg for the critical mass of a plutonium bomb. This is comparatively close to the real figure and may suggest some Nazi scientists had a better grasp of nuclear fission than Heisenberg.
Professor Paul Lawrence Rose, of Pennsylvania State University, US, and author of a 1998 book about the German uranium programme, said he had no reason to believe the report was not genuine, but was dubious about the significance of the critical mass detail. "Though it's wonderful to find the 5kg figure written on the document, one has to be sceptical about the rationale for it. Even if it's true and [some scientists] did understand it, Heisenberg's group wouldn't have accepted it," Rose told the BBC News website. He further speculated it was possible the author arrived at this figure by reading the Smyth Report into the development of the US atomic bomb, which was published in July 1945. But Karlsch and Walker reject this claim.
In "Hitlers Bomb", Dr Karlsch suggests a team of scientists directed by the physicist Kurt Diebner, which was in competition with Heisenberg's group, tested a primitive nuclear device in Thuringia, eastern Germany, in March 1945.
Rose says that this is unlikely. Transcripts of conversations taped by MI6 when the scientists were held captive in England after the war showed Diebner lacked the knowledge to have done this, he says. "Karlsch revealed some very important details in his book, but I can't go along with the picture he constructs with those details - of a Nazi nuclear test," said Professor Dieter Hoffmann, of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin.
But in their Physics World article, Karlsch and Walker point to evidence of innovations made by Diebner's team, including a nuclear reactor design superior to that produced by Heisenberg's group. "[Diebner] got the research papers from all other groups and he could control the information flux. Only a few scientists around Diebner knew about his bomb project. Heisenberg was not aware of it," Dr Karlsch explained.
Meanwhile the labour in the Jonas Valley continued. In early March 1945, Organization Todt began work on the Brandleite railway tunnel at Oberhof to accommodate the special trains of Hitler and Goering, installed a telephone exchange in the station-master's house and positioned flak batteries on surrounding peaks. The Amt 10 telephone engineer gave evidence that "200 so-called female signals auxiliaries" arrived to staff the second bunker.
Delaying Action by the Waffen-SS
In early April Pattons troups approached Thuringia and Ohrdruf. Here the were engaged with the 6. SS Alpine (Gebirgsjäger) Division in and around the Jonastal area. The 'Gebirgsjäger' were specially trained mountain troops and something which concerned the Allies greatly, since they had no such counterpart. Heavy fighting began on April 3, 1945. But there apparently was no strategic objective in the area. Why had the Germans chosen to fight here?
Later it was learned that the Germans were working frantically behind the scenes sealing the vast S-III underground facility with explosives. The charges were placed in the tunnels hundreds of meters underground and detonated. The process was repeated at the mouths of these entrances.
On April 7, 1945, the United States Atomic Energy Commission inspected various underground workings at Ohrdruf, and removed technical equipment before dynamiting surface entrances. The US authorities have classified all 1945 documents relating to Ohrdruf for a minimum period of 100 years.
Very shortly after the cessation of hostilities, the region was handed over to the Soviets, as part of their zone of occupation and before full discovery of the purpose and extent of these underground facilities could be determined by the Americans. The Soviets never reopened or investigated the facilities to any great extent, so besides the local people seeing strange glowing lights at night, the whole matter went without investigation for many years.
In 1962 a semi judicial tribunal sat at Arnstadt in the then DDR (East German Democratic Republic), to take depositions from local residents for an enquiry entitled "Befragung von Buergern zu Ereignissen zur oertlichen Geschichte" (Interrogation of citizines in regards to events of local history). The enquiry was principally interested in what went on at the Ohrdruf military training area in the latter years of the war. The depositions became common property in 1989 upon the reunification of Germany and are at display at Arnstadt town hall.
"A Light as Bright as hundreds of Bolts"
Among the witnesses who claimed to have sighted atomic weapons tests on the training ground in March 1945, the late Cläre Werner, throughout the war custodian of the adjacent Fortress Wachsenburg watch tower, assured officials that she had seen a glowing light, as bright "as hundreds of bolts of lightning," red inside and yellow on the outside, at approximately 9:30 p.m. on March 4, 1945. Werner went on to describe how a powerful squall had moved across the mountains. The next day, she said, she and others in the areas had had nosebleeds, headaches, and sensations of pressure in their ears. She also claimed that she had heard another loud noise on March 12th at 10:15 p.m.
A further interesting set of depositions from the 1962 Arnstadt DDR enquiry refer to the test of a rocket apparently the size of an A9/10 "America" rocket. Cläre Werner stated that a rocket with a huge tail-fire was fired after 21.00 hours on the night of March 16, 1945 while she was looking through binoculars towards Ichtershausen. She had been informed earlier by a friend working for the Reichspost Sonderbauvorhaben (mail office S-III) at Arnstadt that a tremendous achievement was to be celebrated in the sky that night. Other witnesses were a technician and fuel system engineer respectively who all stated that they worked on the construction of a huge rocket over 30 metres in length which was fired on the night of March 16, 1945 at Polte II underground facility, one kilometre from Rudisleben.
Even the East German political leadership was aware of the legends and had its state security agency (Staatssicherheit/STASI) poke around in the Jonas Valley. Stasi investigator Paul Enke, for example, spent his entire life searching for the Amber Room, and his work also took him to the Jonas Valley. Enke concluded that his intensive search through archives had yielded evidence of art treasures "that had been taken from East Prussia to Thuringia." The ruins of Hitler's last-ditch headquarters play a central role in Enke's writings.
The Horrors of Ohrdruf
When Patton and the 89. Infantry Division arrived at Ohrdruf they were not prepared for what they were about to be confronted with, as Ohrdruf-Nord was the first concentration camp to be liberated bythe U.S. Army. Ralph Craib, then a twenty year old sergeant in the Second Infantry Battalion described the horrors in the official division history: “On our approach to Ohrdruf in the Thuringian countryside about 30 miles southwest of Weimar, we encountered so many corpses they were beyond counting. The first we saw in what appeared to be a central courtyard, where prisoners had been machine-gunned, apparently because they lacked the strength to join the walking evacuation to hide them from the eyes of approaching liberating troops.
These people were typical of the Ohrdruf prisoners we found, dead or alive, skinny as rails, the thickest part of their thighs as small as the wrists of a 10-year-old. They died wearing the standard prison stripes, lying in grotesque positions, many with mouths agape. Nearby was what appeared to be a wood shed. In it, naked bodies were stacked like cordwood, neatly placed head to toe and covered only with lime, the chemical apparently intended to hasten deterioration.
The final Ohrdruf horror was the death pit. In this pit, camp officials had placed two elevated steel rails parallel each other to form a macabre cremation spit. Fuel had been poured over the bodies, which were then torched so they could not be identified-not, of course, as individuals, but as the remains of human beings. It didn't work. The combustion had been incomplete, and it was still possible to distinguish a leg here, a head there. The number of victims was hard to ascertain. One General placed it at 3,200; a survivor told and interrogation team that the ghastly pit held the remains of 8,000 people”.
Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did arrive a couple of days later with other military leaders, was aghast as we had been. The group included Army Group Commander Omar Bradley and Third Army Commander George (Blood and Guts) Patton, who became physically ill during the inspection.
John B. MacDonald, a Portland Ore. priest who served as chaplain with my division, has become an expert on Ohrdruf and has gather writings on the camp and its crimes. Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley all recalled Ohrdruf in their memoirs. "I have never been able to describe my emotional reactions," Eisenhower wrote, "when I came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it was my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand in case there ever was at home the belief or the assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda. I would like every American unit not actually in the front line to see this place. We are told that the American soldier doesn't know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against."
Bradley was more emotional: "The smell of death overwhelmed us even before we passed through the stockade. More than 3,200 emanciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen. Lice crawled over the yellow skin of their sharp bony frames." He related how starving prisoners had apparently torn out the entrails of the dead for food.
The generals flew on from Ohrdruf to inspect captured artwork and bullion looted by Nazi occupiers in other countries. A press contingent recorded their Ohrdruf visit. But that night, April 12, 1945, Eisenhower was awaken with the news that Franklin D. Roosevelt had died. This event so dominated press attention that Ohrdruf received no coverage.
It is ironic but fitting that the forgotten death camp has finally gained immortality. A huge photomural of the Ohrdruf death pit is the first image visitors see at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. One member of my old squad insists he can identify himself and me in that photo.
