Secret armoury Thuringia
During World War Two, the Third Reich launched a massive engineering project in an effort to protect its armaments industry, government officials and material assets. The project was one of the most extensive and ambitious in history and raises many disturbing questions as to the consequences it could have had if the war had ended just a few months later.
The Nazi vision was a labyrinth of concrete bombproof tunnels and factories all over Germany, France and Poland. By 1944, 20% of Germany's armaments were being produced in factories deep underground and additional sites were still under construction right up until the last few days of the war.
There were plans to move vital control centres underground, such as the Luftwaffe headquarters being built in Austria. As the Allies made their way through Nazi-occupied Europe, they discovered miles of underground tunnels and bunkers. In some places tools and equipment were found, as if the workforce had just left for a break - labourers worked round-the-clock on the Fuhrer's subterranean cities.
In March and April of 1945, US General George S. Patton's Third Army is literally racing across southern Bavaria, as fast as is operationally possible, making a beeline for the huge Skoda munitions works at Pilsen, a complex all but blown off the map by Allied bombers, Prague; and a region of the Harz Mountains in Thuringia known to Germans as the Three Corners," a region encompassed by the old mediaeval towns and villages of Arnstadt, Jonastal, Wechmar, and Ohrdruf.
In search of hitech
Why did Patton head towards Prague and Thuringia? In “Top Secret”, Ralph Ingersoll, an American liaison officer at S.H.A.E.F., gives a version of the facts much more in line with German intentions: "(General Omar) Bradley was complete master of the situation.... in full command of the three armies that had broken through the Rhine defences and were free to exploit their victories. Analyzing the whole situation, Bradley felt that to take battered Berlin would be an empty military victory.... The German War Department had long since moved out, leaving only a rear echelon. The main body of the German War Department, including its priceless archives, had been transferred to the Thuringian Forest..."
In other words it was a race for Nazi Germany's treasures and many technological secrets. The Allies vied to plunder as much equipment and expertise as possible from the rubble of the Thousand Year Reich for themselves, while preventing others from doing the same.
The range of Germany's technical achievement astounded Allied scientific intelligence experts accompanying the invading forces in 1945. Supersonic rockets, nerve gas, jet aircraft, guided missiles, stealth technology and hardened armour were just some of the groundbreaking technologies developed in Nazi laboratories, workshops and factories, even as Germany was losing the war.
And it was the US and the Soviet Union which, in the first days of the Cold War, found themselves in a race against time to uncover Hitler's scientific secrets.
In May 1945, Stalin's legions secured the atomic research labs at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the suburbs of Berlin, giving their master the kernel of what would become the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal.
In May 1945, Stalin's legions secured the atomic research labs at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the suburbs of Berlin, giving their master the kernel of what would become the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal.
US forces removed V-2 missiles from the vast Nordhausen complex, built under the Harz Mountains in central Germany, just before the Soviets took over the factory, in what would become their area of occupation. And the team which had built the V-2, led by Wernher von Braun, also fell into American hands.
Shortly afterwards Major-General Hugh Knerr, deputy commander of the US Air Force in Europe, wrote: "Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research. "If we do not take the opportunity to seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it and put the combination back to work promptly, we will remain several years behind while we attempt to cover a field already exploited."
Operation Paperclip
Thus began Project Paperclip, the US operation which saw von Braun and more than 700 others spirited out of Germany from under the noses of the US's allies. Its aim was simple: "To exploit German scientists for American research and to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union." Events moved rapidly. President Truman authorised Paperclip in August 1945 and, on 18 November, the first Germans reached America.There was, though, one major problem. Truman had expressly ordered that anyone found "to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism militarism" would be excluded.
Under this criterion even von Braun himself, the man who masterminded the Moon shots, would have been ineligible to serve the US. A member of numerous Nazi organisations, he also held rank in the SS. His initial intelligence file described him as "a security risk". And von Braun's associates included:
• Arthur Rudolph, chief operations director at Nordhausen, where 20,000
slave labourers died producing V-2 missiles. Led the team which built
the Saturn V rocket. Described as "100 per cent Nazi, dangerous type".
• Kurt Debus, rocket launch specialist, another SS officer. His report stated:
"He should be interned as a menace to the security of the Allied Forces."
• Hubertus Strughold, later called "the father of space medicine", designed
Nasa's on-board life-support systems. Some of his subordinates
conducted human "experiments" at Dachau and Auschwitz, where inmates
were frozen and put into low-pressure chambers, often dying in the
process.
slave labourers died producing V-2 missiles. Led the team which built
the Saturn V rocket. Described as "100 per cent Nazi, dangerous type".
• Kurt Debus, rocket launch specialist, another SS officer. His report stated:
"He should be interned as a menace to the security of the Allied Forces."
• Hubertus Strughold, later called "the father of space medicine", designed
Nasa's on-board life-support systems. Some of his subordinates
conducted human "experiments" at Dachau and Auschwitz, where inmates
were frozen and put into low-pressure chambers, often dying in the
process.
All of these men were cleared to work for the US, their alleged crimes covered up and their backgrounds bleached by a military which saw winning the Cold War, and not upholding justice, as its first priority. And the paperclip which secured their new details in their personnel files gave the whole operation its name. Sixty years on, the legacy of Paperclip remains as vital as ever.
Advanced technology
With its radar-absorbing carbon impregnated plywood skin and swept-back single wing, the 1944 Horten Ho 229 was arguably the first stealth aircraft.
The US military made one available to Northrop Aviation, the company which would produce the $2bn B-2 Stealth bomber - to all intents and purposes a modern clone of the Horten - a generation later.
Cruise missiles are still based on the design of the V-1 missile and the scramjets powering Nasa's state-of-the-art X-43 hypersonic aircraft owe much to German jet pioneers.
Added to this, the large number of still-secret Paperclip documents has led many people, including Nick Cook, Aerospace Consultant at Jane's Defence Weekly, to speculate that the US may have developed even more advanced Nazi technology, including anti-gravity devices, a potential source of vast amounts of free energy. Cook says that such technology "could be so destructive that it would endanger world peace and the US decided to keep it secret for a long time".
But, while celebrating the undoubted success of Project Paperclip, many will prefer to remember the thousands who died to send mankind into space. In “The U.S. Army in the occupation of Germany 1944 – 1946” Earl F. Ziemke described the events that led to the liberation of Merkers, Ohrdruf/Jonastal and Nordhausen/Mittelwerk:
Nazi Gold
“Advancing north from Frankfurt, Third Army cut into the future Soviet zone when it occupied the western tip of Thuringia. On 4 April, the 90th Infantry Division took Merkers, a few miles inside the border in Thuringia. On the morning of the 6th, two military policemen, Pfc. Clyde Harmon and Pfc. Anthony Kline, enforcing the customary orders against civilian circulation, stopped two women on a road outside Merkers. Since both were French displaced persons and one was pregnant, the MPs decided rather than to arrest them to escort them back into the town. On the way, as they passed the entrance to the Kaiseroda salt mine in Merkers, the women talked about gold that the Germans had stored in the mine-so much gold, they said, that unloading it had taken local civilians and displaced persons who were used as labor seventy-two hours. By noon the story had passed from the MP first sergeant to the chief of staff and on to the division's G-5 officer, Lt. Col. William A. Russell, who in a few hours had the news confirmed by other DPs and by a British sergeant who had been employed in the mine as a prisoner of war and had helped unload the gold. Russell also turned up an assistant director of the National Galleries in Berlin who admitted he was in Merkers to care for paintings stored in the mine. The gold was reportedly the entire reserve of the Reichsbank in Berlin, which had moved it to the mine after the bank building was bombed out in February 1945. When Russell learned that the mine had thirty miles of galleries and five entrances, the division, which had already detailed the 712th Tank Battalion to guard the Merkers entrance, had to divert the whole 357th Infantry Regiment to guard the other four.
The next morning, after having steam raised in the boilers overnight to generate electricity for the lifts and ventilators, Russell went down into the mine with a party of division officers, German mine officials, and Signal Corps photographers. Near the entrance to the main passageway they found 550 bags containing a half billion in paper Reichsmarks. A steel vault door on the entrance to the tunnel said to contain the gold was locked. In the afternoon, after having tried unsuccessfully to open the door, the party left the mine without having seen the treasure.
The next day was Sunday. In the morning, while Colonel Bernstein, Deputy Chief, Financial Branch, G-5, SHAEF, read about the find in the New York Herald Tribune's Paris edition, 90th Infantry Division engineers blasted a hole in the vault wall to reveal on the other side a room 75 feet wide and 150 feet deep. The floor was covered with rows of numbered hags, over 7,000 in all, each containing gold bars or gold coins. Baled paper money was stacked along one wall; and at the hack-a mute reminder of Nazism's victims-valises were piled filled with gold and silver tooth fillings, eyeglass frames, watch cases, wedding rings, pearls, and precious stones. The gold, between 55 and 81 pounds to the hag, amounted to nearly 250 tons. In paper money, all the European currencies were represented. The largest amounts were 98 million French francs and 2.7 billion Reichsmarks. The treasure almost made the 400 tons of art work, the pest pieces from the Berlin museums, stacked in the mine's other passages seem like a routine find.
On Sunday afternoon, Bernstein, after checking the newspaper story with Lt. Col. R. Tupper Barrett, Chief, Financial Branch, G-5, 12th Army Group, flew to SHAEF Forward at Rheims where he spent the night, it being too late by then to fly into Germany. At noon on Monday, he arrived at Gen. George S. Patton's Third Army Headquarters with instructions from Eisenhower to check the contents of the mine and arrange to have the treasure taken away. While he was there, orders arrived for him to locate a depository farther back in the SHAEF zone and supervise the moving. Bernstein and Barrett spent Tuesday looking for a site and finally settled on the Reichsbank building in Frankfurt. Wednesday, at Merkers, they planned the move and prepared for distinguished visitors by having Germans tune up the mine machinery. The next morning, Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and Maj. Gen. Manton S. Eddy took the 1,600-foot ride down into the mine. When they stepped out at the foot of the shaft, the private on guard saluted and, in the underground stillness, was heard by all to mutter, "Jesus Christ!"
The move began at 0900 on Saturday morning, 14 April. In twenty hours, the gold and currency and a few cases of art work were loaded on thirty ten-ton trucks, each with a 10 percent overload. Down in the mine, jeeps with trailers hauled the treasure from the vault to the shaft, where the loaded trailers were put aboard the lifts and brought to the surface. At the vault entrance an officer registered each bag or item on a load slip, and at the truck ramps an officer and an enlisted man checked the load slips and verified that every item that left the vault was loaded on a truck. Finally, the officer recorded the truck number and the names and serial numbers of the driver, the assistant driver, and the guards assigned to the truck.
The convoy left Merkers on Sunday morning for the 85-mile trip to Frankfurt with an escort of five rifle platoons, two machine gun platoons, ten multiple-mount antiaircraft vehicles, and Piper cub and fighter air cover. All this protection, however, was not enough to prevent a rumor, which surfaced periodically for years after, that one truckload of gold (or art work) disappeared on the way to Frankfurt. On Sunday afternoon and throughout the night the trucks were unloaded in Frankfurt, each item being checked against the load lists as it came off a truck and again when it was moved into the Reichsbank vault. Two infantry companies cordoned off' the area during the unloading.
The same procedures, except that a hundred German prisoners of war did the work, were followed in loading the art objects aboard a second truck convoy on Monday, and a similar security guard escorted the trucks to Frankfurt the next day. After the main treasure was removed, the mine was still a grab bag of valuables. Reconnaissance of the other entrances had turned up four hundred tons of German patent office records, Luftwaffe material and ammunition, German Army High
Command records, libraries and city archives (including 2 million books from Berlin and the Goethe collection from Weimar) , and the files of the Krupp, Henschel, and other companies. The patent records in particular were potentially as valuable as the gold; but Third Army needed its trucks, and Bernstein had to settle, on 21 April, for a small seven-truck convoy to move the cream of the patent records, samples of the Krupp and Henschel files, and several dozen high quality microscopes.
Leads found in the Reichsbank records at Merkers also helped uncover a dozen other treasure caches in places occupied by US forces that brought into the vault in Frankfurt hundreds more gold and silver bars, some platinum, rhodium, and palladium, a quarter of a million in US gold dollars (the Merkers mine set the record, however, containing 711 bags of US $20 gold pieces, $25,000 to the bag), a million Swiss (old francs, and a billion French francs.
Hell has got a name - Ohrdruf
The front moved on; the troops read about the treasure in Stars and Stripes or Yank and probably only vaguely remembered they had been in~ or near Merkers. Another spot was more likely to stick in the memories of those who passed through it in early April 1945. On the 6th, the 4th Armored division took Ohrdruf, thirty miles east of Merkers, a small city hardly touched by the war. Atop a hill on the outskirts stood a row of empty stone SS barracks. On a nearly hill was a cluster of low, dirty, and weather-beaten wooden buildings. This was Ohrdruf-Nord, work camp for the Buchenwald concentration camp. When the troops entered, they found twenty-nine bodies on the ground in front of the administration building. A short distance away was a gallows and not far beyond it a shed in which fifty-two naked bodies were stacked in tiers of four, covered with what appeared to be powdered lime. They apparently had been awaiting transportation to pits in the forest where between two and three thousand others had been buried during the six months the camp had existed. Most had died of disease, but most also had marks on their faces and heads and bruises on their bodies. A third group, nine charred torsos lay among ashes under a rough incinerator made of railroad ties and rails. 'Those in front of the administration building were the most recently dead-all shot in the lack of the neck.
Ohrdruf-Nord was not a proper concentration camp. It had no gas chamber or high-performance crematorium. The deaths there were caused by disease and neglect, helped along by overwork and brutality. The inmates had been employed at digging a tunnel, probably as a site for an underground factory. A thousand had been there a week before the Americans came. In the succeeding days the guards had marched those who could walk away to the east. At noon on the 6th two busses had come to take out the bedridden sick. By then American artillery fire could be heard coming close, and the commandant lost his nerve, sent the busses away empty, and shot the prisoners with his pistol. A dozen men had hidden in the camp buildings and survived to tell about the last days at Ohrdruf-Nord and to identify the dead, among whom was an American pilot who had been imprisoned there after being shot down nearby and had contracted typhus.
Among the first persons that Lt. Col. James H. Van Wagenen, the 4th Armored's military government officer, took on a tour of the camp was Albert Schneider, Buergermeister of Ohrdruf. Schneider had been a party member since 1933, but he had also been an honest and conscientious mayor, and he had not skipped town ahead of the Americans as other Nazi officials were doing. He was shocked by what he saw. Admitting there had been rumors in the town, he claimed simply not to have believed Germans capable of such atrocities. On Van Wagenen's orders, he agreed to summon twenty-five prominent men and women who were to be taken to view the camp the next morning. In the morning, a soldier who had been sent to fetch him after he failed to appear at the stated time found him and his wife dead in their bedroom, their wrists slashed. G-2 investigators concluded the Schneiders' suicides were motivated by sincere shock and regret over what had happened in their town. One of the most frustrating psychological problems of the early occupation was going to be how to make the German people realize the horror of the concentration camps. In Ohrdruf, however, after the Schneider's' suicides and after others had been taken to see the camp, the citizens seemed to be convinced.
Nordhausen, on the edge of the Harz Mountains, is thirty-eight miles east and south of Goettingen. First Army's VII Corps, moving fast, took the town on 11 April. Again the Americans were astonished and shaken by what they uncovered: a concentration camp with 3,000 rotting, unburied bodies and 2,000 survivors all sick and nearly all in the last stages of starvation; a slave labour camp; two complete underground factories; and a treasure mine with unusual contents. The corps G-5 rounded up several hundred German civilians to bury the dead in the concentration camp and evicted several hundred others from their homes in the town to provide accommodations for the survivors. The 23,000 displaced persons and prisoners of war in the slave labour camp had been employed in the Mittelwerk, one of the underground factories. In the last months they had been dying at the rate of 150 a week; and 9,000 were sick, 1,000 with tuberculosis.
The Nordwerk, the other factory, was an assembly plant for jet aircraft engines. The Mittelwerk had all the equipment needed to manufacture V-2 rockets, from the components to the completed projectile, and the Germans had left behind enough finished parts to make 250 rockets. The Berntrode Mine, outside Nordhausen, contained the remains of Frederick the Great, Frederick William I of Prussia, and Paul yon Hindenburg and his wife; the Prussian royal regalia, scepter, orb, crowns, helmet, broadsword, and seal; over two hundred regimental standards; the lest hooks from the Prussian royal library; several dozen palace tapestries; and 271 paintings, all valuable, among them several by Lucas Cranach. The MFA&A officers could find only one defect in the mine as a storage place: although it was dry and had a constant temperature, it had been used since 1937 to house a munitions factory and still held 400,000 tons of ammunition, some of it in highly doubtful condition.”
Jet factory
But there were more secrets hidden in the mountains of Thuringia. In Kahla a company called Flugzeugwerke Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (REIMAHG) was formed as a subsidiary of the Gustloff Nazi industrial complex. REIMAHG eventually became concerned only with the Me 262, and its main production facility was located in an old porcelain sand mine in the Walpersberg Hill near Kahla (south of Jena). The existing tunnels in the Walpersberg were enlarged and others were dug, and massive concrete bunkers were built outside these tunnels. Subparts were made and partially assembled in the tunnels, then moved outside to the concrete bunkers, where final assembly took place. The assembled jets were then moved to the top of the hill via a platform that moved along a railed ramp by a power winch. The top of the Walpersberg had been levelled off and concreted in a massive construction effort, to form a runway some 3300 feet long. This was not sufficient for a Me 262 to take off so small rockets assisted take-off. The runway was also too short for the jets to land, so leaving the Walpersberg was an all-or-nothing proposition: there could be no emergency landings. The jets were flown from Kahla to a site some 130 kilometres away to be fitted with weapons and radios, and to undergo final testing.
Hitlers Bomb
In a school of Stadtilm, near Arnstadt, Kurt Diebner and a team of ten scientists were working on a project which may have been trying to develop a nuclear weapon from enriched uranium. Diebner's project was a rival to that of Werner Heisenberg, whose efforts in the German nuclear energy project were apparently directed primarily towards nuclear power. Heisenberg belonged to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Some commentators refer to Heisenberg as the chief Nazi nuclear physicist; but in terms of financial patronage from the Nazis, Kurt Diebner was viewed as far more important than Heisenberg.
According to the controversial historian David Irving, Diebner was head of the Heereswaffenamt (HWA; "army weapons office") project in Nazi Germany to develop an atomic bomb. Diebner's project was a rival to that of Werner Heisenberg, whose efforts in the German nuclear energy project were apparently directed primarily towards nuclear power. Heisenberg belonged to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Some commentators refer to Heisenberg as the chief Nazi nuclear physicist; but in terms of financial patronage from the Nazis, Kurt Diebner was viewed as far more important than Heisenberg. Werner Grothmann, chief adjutant of Heinrich Himmler, told interviewers in 2000-2001 that Diebner reported about the development and tests of a thermonuclear bomb direct to Himmler. Diebner was rounded up at the end of the war as part of the Allied Operation Overcast.
In the Farm Hall transcripts of secretly taped conversations by captured nuclear scientists after WWII, Diebner was assessed by his captors as "Outwardly friendly, but has an unpleasant personality; cannot be trusted." Diebner probably held much the same view of his captors as one of the transcripts records his conversation with Heisenberg in which Diebner speculated that their conversation was being secretly recorded. Heisenberg scoffed at the idea, but Diebner was clearly cautious about what he said out of suspicion that he was being recorded.
Much of what Diebner's nuclear team did during the war is still unknown to historians and subject to much speculation. A recent (2005) book by Rainer Karlsch, Hitlers Bombe, alleges that Diebner's team tested in Ohrdruf Thuringia a thermonuclear bomb.
S/III Olga in Jonastal is still a mystery. There are many theories, including headquarters for the Führer, manufacturing site for the intercontinental "America Rocket”, or a centre for atomic research. It has even been searched for the legendary amber room.
