Only weeks before the Red Army took Dyhernfurth, overran its castle, and drank all its wine, thousands of concentration camp slave laborers had been toiling away at Farben’s secret chemical weapons plant performing the deadliest of jobs. Wearing double-layer rubber suits and bubble-shaped helmets, prisoners filled artillery shells and bomb casings with nerve agent, marking each munition in a secret code indicating tabun nerve agent: three green rings of paint. The prisoners’ suits worked similar to deep-sea diving suits. Attached to the back of each helmet was a tube delivering breathable air. But the air tube was short and gave workers very little room to move. If a man accidentally detached from the air source, he would be exposed to the lethal vapors through the breathing tube and die.
But on the morning of February 5, 1945, the facility was empty. Not a chemist or a slave laborer remained. The munitions had been moved, documentary evidence destroyed, and all the IG Farben employees had fled. The prisoners had been evacuated by their SS guards three weeks before. Wearing prisoner pajamas and ill-fitting wooden work shoes, the Dyhernfurth laborers were marched west toward the German interior. Witnesses in nearby villages described a column of three thousand walking corpses. Temperatures in the area reached -18 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time the prisoners reached the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, fifty miles to the southwest, two-thirds of them had died of exposure.
Now, working on Hitler’s orders, a technical team was preparing to return to Farben’s secret facility for a final scrub of tabun residue. In the freezing predawn air, the two chemists, eighty technicians, and a group of German commandos donned double-layered rubber suits, pulled gas masks over their heads, and stole down the banks of the Oder River. They moved quietly across a partially bombed-out railroad bridge, walked slowly down the railroad tracks, and headed to the chemical weapons plant. The protective suits were cumbersome, and it took the technical team sixty-five minutes to travel less than a half a mile. Reaching the plant, the group made its way into the production facility that housed massive silver-lined kettles in which the nerve agent was made. Each kettle sat inside an operating chamber enclosed in double-glass walls encircling a complex ventilation system of double-walled pipes. While one group got to work decontaminating the chambers with ammonia and steam, another group scoured the surfaces of the munitions-filling factory where so many slave laborers had met death. The commandos kept guard.
While the technicians scrubbed, two and a half miles downriver Major General Sachsenheimer’s remaining platoon of soldiers sprang into action. They launched artillery shells at sleeping Russian forces in a diversionary feint. The Red Army reorganized and retaliated, and by lunchtime eighteen Soviet tanks were engaged in fierce fighting with Sachsenheimer’s troops. The battle, a footnote in the annals of the war, lasted just long enough for IG Farben’s technical team to get in, get out, and disappear.
Not for several days did the Red Army finally stumble upon Farben’s chemical weapons facility at Dyhernfurth. By then it was void of people and tabun but otherwise entirely intact. As the Russians examined the facility, scrubbed immaculately clean, it became clear to the commanders that whatever this facility had produced must have been considered of great value to the Reich. The laboratory layout bore signs of chemical weapons production, and the Soviet army called in their own chemical weapons experts from the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Chemical Brigades. The factory was dismantled, crated, and shipped back to the Soviet Union for future use. What had been produced here in the forest remained a mystery to its new owners—the Russians—for a little over a year. By 1946 the entire chemical weapons factory at Dyhernfurth would be reassembled in a little town outside Stalingrad called Beketovka, and the plant given the Russian code name, Chemical Works No. 91. The Soviets themselves then began producing tabun nerve agent on an industrial scale. By 1948, the Soviet Military Chemical Text Book would list tabun as part of the Red Army’s stockpile. But 1948 was so far away. So much would happen with America and Hitler’s chemists between 1945 and 1948, most of it predicated on the emerging Soviet threat.
Back in Berlin, Hitler read the first page of Speer’s report and ordered it filed away. Then Hitler became enraged. His furor was likely exacerbated by a conference taking place on the Crimea Peninsula, at Yalta, beginning February 4, 1945. It was to last for eight days. There, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were confirming their commitment to demand Germany’s unconditional surrender. There would be no bargaining, the three heads of state declared. No deals made with the Nazis. The end of the war would mean the end of the Third Reich. War criminals would be tried, justice meted out.
The idea of what defined justice varied dramatically from power to power. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted Nazis leaders to be treated as “outlaws.” He argued that they should be lined up and shot rather than put on trial. The premier of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, rather unexpectedly argued for “no executions without trial.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted a war crimes trial. What all parties agreed on was that, after the surrender, Germany would be broken up into three zones of occupation. (Soon, France’s involvement would make it four.) When Hitler learned of the Allies’ plan to divvy up the spoils of Germany, he became furious. Then he called on Albert Speer.
“If the war is lost,” Hitler famously told Speer, “the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable.” If Germany loses the war, Hitler said, the people deserved existential punishment for being weak. “What will remain after this struggle will be in any case only the inferior ones, since the good ones have fallen,” Hitler said. Following this logic, Hitler decreed that Speer’s ministry need not provide German citizens with even the most basic necessities, including shelter and food. He told Speer that if Speer were ever to give him another memorandum saying the war was unwinnable, and that negotiations with the enemy should be considered, Hitler would consider this an act of treason punishable by death.
Hitler then issued a nationwide “scorched-earth” policy. Speer was to help organize the complete destruction of all German infrastructure, military and civilian—from its transportation and communication systems to its bridges and dams. Officially entitled Demolitions on Reich Territory, this order became known as the Nero Decree, or Nerobefehl, invoking the Roman emperor Nero, who allegedly engineered the Great Fire of 64 AD and then watched Rome burn.
In central Germany, in the naturally fortified Harz Mountains, production of V-weapons continued at a frenzied pace despite every indication that Germany would soon lose the war. By late February 1945, conditions inside the Nordhausen tunnels had reached a cataclysm. It was bitterly cold, thousands were starving to death, and there was barely any food; watery broth was all the prisoners had to live on. The Nordhausen-Dora concentration camp was being overrun with new prisoners arriving on the death marches from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen in the east. Some came on foot and others came in cattle cars. Many arrived dead. Dora’s crematorium was overwhelmed. In this climate, Wernher von Braun and General Dornberger pressed on with plans to create a greater number of rockets each day.
Since moving his offices from the Peenemünde facility to the Harz Mountains, von Braun had been given a promotion. Now he was head of what was called the Mittelbau-Dora Planning Office, a division within Himmler’s SS. Von Braun lived just a few miles from the Nordhausen complex, in a villa that had been confiscated from a Jewish factory owner years before. Each day he drove to his office in Bleicherode, eleven miles from the tunnel complex, where he drafted designs for new and better test stands and launch ramps for the V-2. Despite the reality that the war was lost, the area was abuzz with new armaments factories being built, “dug by workers from some of the forty-odd subcamps now tied to Mittelbau-Dora,” Michael J. Neufeld explains. Von Braun’s vision was to escalate rocket production from two or three rockets a day to two hundred rockets a day. To prepare for this ambitious expansion, he commandeered factories, schools, and mines throughout the region. But rocket assembly was dependent on workers, and t
he slave laborers in Nordhausen were now dying at an ever-increasing rate. Von Braun had to have known this; he visited the underground tunnels in an official capacity ten times during the winter of 1945.
For the emaciated slave laborers who had managed to stay alive, trying to assemble missiles in filthy, unfinished tunnels without food, water, or sanitation in the bitter cold of winter had become more and more difficult, and it showed in their work. In skies across Europe these hastily constructed rockets began breaking apart in flight. And in the pine forests of northern Germany, including those around the Castle Varlar, quickly assembled rockets were exploding on their mobile launch pads. The managers at Mittelwerk suspected sabotage. To send a message, public hangings were held.
“Prisoners were hanged up to 57 in one day,” read one war crimes report. “They were hanged in the tunnels with the help of an electrically controlled crane, a dozen at a time, their hands bound behind their back, a piece of wood was put in their mouth… to prevent shouting.” The hangings were carried out directly above the V-2 production lines. Laborers were forced to watch their fellow prisoners suffer an agonizingly slow death. In solidarity, a group of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners staged a revolt. The suspects were rounded up. Mittelwerk managers and SS guards decided to make an example of them. After these men were hanged, their bodies were left dangling for a day. Only after Arthur Rudolph, the Mittelwerk operations director, received a memo from one of his German engineers asking when they were going to get their crane back were the bodies taken down.
In addition to von Braun’s recent promotion to head of the Mittelbau-Dora Planning Office, he was also promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer, or SS major. One of the benefits that came with this position was a chauffeur-driven car to shuttle von Braun back and forth between Nordhausen and Berlin. It was in the backseat of this car on the night of March 12, 1945, that von Braun was nearly killed. As his car was speeding down the autobahn headed for Berlin, his driver nodded off at the wheel. The car veered off the road and hurtled down a forty-foot embankment until it crashed on its side near a railroad track. The driver was knocked unconscious. Von Braun broke his arm. Both men lay bleeding in the cold, dark night when two of von Braun’s colleagues from Nordhausen, facilities designer Bernhard Tessmann and architect Hannes Lührsen, happened to drive by and spot the smashed-up car. They called for a military ambulance, which came to the scene and transported von Braun and his driver to a hospital.
While recuperating, von Braun received a visit from his personal aide, Dieter Huzel, and Bernhard Tessmann, one of the two men who had saved von Braun’s life. Tessmann and Huzel told von Braun that the arrival of the U.S. Army was imminent. Any day now, they said, V-2 operations would cease. Word was going around that every man not considered a valuable scientist was going to be assigned to an infantry unit, handed a weapon, and ordered to fight the Americans on the front lines.
Von Braun was now ready to concede that Germany would lose the war. What he was unwilling to do was relinquish his career. He needed a bargaining chip to use against the Americans after he was captured. Von Braun told Tessmann and Huzel where he kept the most valuable classified V-2 documents. Because von Braun was bedridden, he needed his two subordinates to crate up these documents and hide them in a remote, secure place where the Allies would never find them on their own. Von Braun told Tessmann and Huzel that if they could do this they would be included in von Braun’s future negotiations with the Allies. General Dornberger would also be part of the team. Von Braun told Tessmann and Huzel that he would personally bring the general up to speed.
Mittelwerk laborers continued to produce missiles until the end of March. The last V-2s were fired on March 27 and the last V-1s were fired the following day. On April 1, Dornberger received an order from SS-General Kammler demanding that Dornberger evacuate his staff from the Mittelwerk at once. Kammler had selected five hundred key scientists and engineers who were to board his private train car, parked in Bleicherode and nicknamed the Vengeance Express, and then travel four hundred miles south into the Bavarian Alps to hide out. Huzel and Tessmann were on Kammler’s list, but after colluding with General Dornberger they were able to stay behind to complete the document stash. Von Braun, still requiring medical attention and encumbered by a heavy cast, was taken to the Alps in a private car. Dornberger and his staff drove themselves, fleeing the Harz in a small convoy.
When night fell on Dörnten, a small mining community at the northern edge of the Harz, the village was in a blackout. The local gauleiters (Nazi Party district leaders) had ordered villagers to shutter their windows, turn off the lights, and stay home. It was April 4, 1945, and American forces were reportedly camped out just thirty miles to the west. The village’s cobblestone streets were empty, save a lone truck driving slowly with its lights off, navigating by the moon. In the front seat sat Tessmann and Huzel. In the back of the truck were seven German soldiers wearing blindfolds. Also in the truck were dozens of crates filled with classified V-2 information.
The truck passed through town and headed up a winding rural road leading into the mouth of an abandoned mine. Huzel and Tessmann parked the truck and shook hands with the caretaker, Herr Nebelung, a loyal Nazi, who sold the two engineers space in a large antechamber in the back of the Dörnten mine. The seven soldiers were told it was okay to take off their blindfolds now and get to work.
The group unloaded the crates, placed them onto flatcars, and oversaw them as they were driven down a long tunnel by an electric-battery-powered locomotive. At the end of the tunnel, behind an iron door, was a small, dry room. The crates of V-2 documents were packed inside, the door shut and locked. Outside, a soldier lit a stick of dynamite in front of the doorway to create a huge pile of rubble and keep the important Nazi documents hidden from the outside world.
Huzel and Tessmann had sworn not to tell anyone what they’d done, but just as they were leaving for Bavaria to rendezvous with Dornberger and von Braun, the two men decided to make an exception. Karl Otto Fleischer had served as the army’s business manager for the Mittelwerk slave labor enterprise. Fleischer’s name was not on General Kammler’s list, and he’d gone home to his house in Nordhausen to blend in. Karl Fleischer was a loyal Nazi who reported directly to General Dornberger during V-2 production, and Huzel and Tessmann believed Fleischer would keep their secret safe. Fleischer was local. He could keep an eye on things and monitor if anyone started poking around the Dörnten mine. Huzel and Tessmann told Karl Fleischer about the secret location of the V-2 document stash, and with the U.S. Army just a few days outside Nordhausen, Huzel and Tessmann sped away.
CHAPTER THREE
The Hunters and the Hunted
In France, Samuel Goudsmit and his team of Operation Alsos scientists had been waiting patiently since November to launch their next scientific intelligence mission. It had been four months since the team hit intelligence gold, inside the Strasbourg apartment of the Reich’s virologist Dr. Eugen Haagen. Now, in the last week of March 1945, Goudsmit and his military commander, Colonel Boris Pash, were finally getting ready to seize their next targets: IG Farben factories over the border in Germany, believed to be the locus of the Nazis’ chemical weapons program.
Since November, Haagen’s apartment in Strasbourg had been serving as Alsos headquarters. There had been long delays. In December, Hitler’s counteroffensive in the Ardennes Forest meant that Alsos scientists could not conduct frontline missions as planned. But as serendipity would have it, the entire first floor below Haagen’s Strasbourg apartment belonged to IG Farben, the primary chemical weapons supplier of the Third Reich, and Alsos seized a considerable cache of documents Farben kept there. Alsos knew Farben was involved in weapons-related vaccine research and suspected they were involved in medical experiments on prisoners. The two Farben factories they had in their sights were located only about eighty miles away, in the German cities of Ludwigshafen and Mannheim. For this, Operation Alsos had put together their largest task force to date: ten civilian scie
ntists, six military scientists, and eighteen security operators. But venturing into German-held territory on their own was considered too dangerous for the American scientists. They had been waiting for Allied forces to cross over the Rhine River into Germany, at which point they, too, would be allowed in. Now, in the third week of March 1945, this long-awaited crossing appeared imminent.
On March 23, 1945, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery began a colossal troop offensive across the Rhine River, code-named Operation Plunder. Adding to the namesake’s subtext of seizure and pillage were Montgomery’s famous words: “Over the Rhine, then, let us go. And good hunting to you all on the other side.” Sacking a vanquished country at the end of a war was as old as war itself, but the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 prohibited looting beyond token items claimed as “trophies of war.” What, exactly, did Montgomery mean? On a tactical level, the Rhine River crossing meant that the Allies would smash open more than five hundred miles along the western front. From an intelligence collection standpoint, it truly meant plunder.
As soldiers pushed forward into Germany, accompanying them were more than three thousand scientific and technical experts with the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee, or CIOS, the joint British-American program that had been established in London the summer before. CIOS teams reported to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces, or SHAEF, located in Versailles and staffed by experts: scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians accompanied by linguists and scholars to translate and interpret the documents that were seized. Representing the United States from CIOS were men from the War Department General Staff, the navy, the Army Air Forces, the State Department, the Foreign Economic Administration, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the Office of Scientific Research and Development. The British sent experts from the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry, and the Ministries of Supply, Aircraft Production, Economic Warfare, Fuel and Power. All CIOS staff worked from a list of targets, similar to those used by Alsos, which became known as Black Lists. Frontline requests for specific CIOS teams were relayed to SHAEF from the combat zone. An appropriate CIOS team would be dispatched into the field.