“Von Ploetz said that General Dornberger told General Rossman [the German army’s Weapons Office department chief] that documents of V-weapon production were hidden in Kaliwerke [salt mine] at Bleicherode, walled into one of the mine shafts,” read Robertson from his notes. Robertson suggested that Staver use that information to his advantage. He agreed to leave Fleischer, Riedel, and Rees with Major Staver while he headed to Garmisch-Partenkirchen to interview General Dornberger and Wernher von Braun.
At Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Robertson found the rocket scientists sunbathing in the Alps. This lovely Bavarian ski resort was the place where Adolf Hitler had hosted the Winter Olympics in 1936. Now the U.S. Army had hundreds of scientists set up in a former military barracks here. The food was plentiful, and the air was fresh and clean. “Mountain springtime,” Dieter Huzel recalled in his memoir. “Trees by now had donned their fresh, new green, flowers everywhere as far as one could see from our windows and balconies. Rain was infrequent and almost every day sunbathing was possible on a lawn-covered yard.” Huzel’s only complaint was that he didn’t receive mail and couldn’t make telephone calls.
Wernher von Braun, General Dornberger, and their group had been here since being transferred from CIC headquarters in Reutte. Isolated in the Alps, the two scientists had been frustrating their interrogators, stonewalling and withholding information. Dr. Robertson came to see if he could get any better information out of the scientists. Most of the rocket team was here, including the two men who had stashed the V-2 documents that Staver was now searching for, Dieter Huzel and Bernhard Tessmann. Neither Huzel nor Tessmann had shared with von Braun or Dornberger the fact that they’d told Karl Otto Fleischer the location of the stash in the Dörnten mine. Dornberger and von Braun were under the assumption that they held all the bargaining chips.
The intelligence officer Walter Jessel had sensed something was amiss with Dornberger and von Braun—that the two rocket scientists were playing games. “Control was exercised by Dornberger in the course of the CIOS investigations,” Jessel noted in one report. Dornberger’s “first instructions [to other scientists], probably under the impression of immediate transfer of the whole group to the United States, were to cooperate fully with the investigators,” Jessel explained. But as the days wore on and no deal was offered by the Allies, Jessel watched Dornberger become intractable. “Sometime later, he [Dornberger] gave the word [to the others] to hold back on information and say as little as possible.” The scientists were walking on the razor’s edge. If they said too much, many of them could be implicated in the slave labor war crimes, as was the case with Arthur Rudolph, Mittelwerk operations director.
For Rudolph, it was best to say as little as possible. He described his time at Garmisch-Partenkirchen as enjoyable because it meant that “the horrible days of fleeing were over.” Years later, he described his weeks of internment in the Alps as ones where he could finally “enjoy a few days of relief,” but this relief was short-lived owing to his “restless intellect.” Rudolph demanded more of himself than a suntan, he later said. “There were already rumors that the Americans would take us to the U.S.A. So, I decided I needed to learn English.”
Arthur Rudolph’s interrogator saw Rudolph differently than he saw himself. In military intelligence documents, Rudolph was described as “100% Nazi,” a “dangerous type.” There was a decision to be made: whether to use Rudolph as an intelligence source or to intern him for denazification and investigation into possible war crimes. Denazification was an Allied strategy to democratize and demilitarize postwar Germany and Austria through tribunals in local civilian courts (Spruchkammern) that were set up to determine individual defendants’ standings. Each German who was tried was judged to belong in one of five categories, or classes: (1) major offenders; (2) party activists, militarists, and profiteers; (3) individuals who were less incriminated; (4) Nazi Party followers; (5) those who were exonerated. Rudolph’s interrogator did not believe a committed Nazi like Arthur Rudolph would make a viable intelligence source, and he wrote, “suggest internment.”
Rudolph hoped he would be hired by the Americans. He located a murder mystery in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen library, The Green Archer, and attempted to learn English for what he believed, correctly, would be a new job.
Back in Nordhausen, Major Staver was making headway. Working on the new tip from Dr. Robertson, Staver drove to meet with his new source, Karl Otto Fleischer, in a parking lot. This time, Staver had Walther Riedel with him. In the parking lot, Staver demonstratively pulled a notebook from his breast pocket, just as Dr. Robertson had done with him. Staver read aloud a narrative he’d composed, part truth and part fiction. “Von Braun, [Ernst] Steinhoff, and all the others who fled to the south have been interned at Garmisch,” Major Staver told his two prisoners. “Our intelligence officers have talked to von Ploetz, General Dornberger, General Rossman, and General Kammler,” Staver said—also partially true. “They told us that many of your drawings and important documents were buried underground in a mine somewhere around here and that Riedel, or you[,] Fleischer, could help us find them,” Staver said, which was made up.
Staver told the men that it was in their best interest to think over their next move very carefully. They could cooperate, he said, and give up the location of the V-2 documents. Or they could stonewall and risk being put in prison for withholding information. They had one night to consider the offer. Staver would meet the two men the following morning, in the same parking lot, at exactly 11:00.
When Staver arrived at the rendezvous point the next day, he was disheartened to find Riedel waiting for him but not Fleischer. Even odder, Riedel said he had a message from Fleischer to pass along: Fleischer was waiting for Major Staver in Haynrode, a nearby village, with “some very important news.” Staver needed to travel to Haynrode, find a boardinghouse called the Inn of the Three Lime Trees, and ask for the concierge. Was this some kind of a trap, or just another wild goose chase?
Staver and Walther Riedel drove together to the Inn of the Three Lime Trees. There, they met up with the innkeeper, who produced a message from Fleischer. Staver and Riedel were to walk through town, pass down a long alleyway, and head to the edge of the village, where they were to go to the home of a local priest. Staver and Riedel followed the trail, finally arriving at the priest’s house. There, in flawless English, the priest told Major Staver that Fleischer would see him soon. Fleischer emerged at the top of the stairs, came down, and asked Staver to follow him outside so the two men could talk privately under an apple tree. There, “in almost inaudible, somewhat apologetic tones[,] Fleischer admitted he had not been completely frank” about the whereabouts of the V-2 document stash, Staver explained. In fact, he knew where they were hidden and “believed he was the only one in Nordhausen who did.” But there was a problem, Fleischer said. He described to Staver how the caretaker at the mine had dynamited a wall of rubble over the entrance so no one could find them. This man was an ardent Nazi and would never turn over the documents to an American officer like Major Staver. Fleischer said he’d take Dr. Rees with him to do the job. As unreliable as he was, Staver decided to take Fleischer at his word. He gave him passes that allowed for travel around Nordhausen as well as enough gasoline to get back and forth between Nordhausen and the mine. Fleischer and Rees succeeded in getting the mine’s caretaker, Herr Nebelung, to cooperate. Local miners were paid by Fleischer, using money from the U.S. Army, to excavate through the rubble and retrieve the documents hidden in the mine.
The stash was enormous, the crates weighing more than fourteen tons. Only now there was a new hurdle to overcome. British soldiers were set to arrive in Nordhausen on May 27 to oversee the transition to Red Army rule. This meant that Major Staver had to get the documents out fast. The original agreement between the British and the Americans was that the two Allies would share with one another everything they learned about the V-weapons. If the British found out Staver was planning to secretly ship one hundred V-2 rockets back to
the United States, they would likely consider it a double-cross. Major Staver needed to get to Paris. It was the only way he could obtain access to the ten-ton trucks necessary for moving such a large cache in such a short period of time.
Staver assigned a colleague to oversee the Dörnten mine operation while he attempted to hitch a ride to Paris in a P-47 Thunderbolt. The pilot said it was impossible—that the Thunderbolt was a single-seat fighter. Staver said that his mission was urgent and offered to ride in the tiny space behind the pilot’s seat. The pilot finally agreed. Avoiding terrible weather higher up, the men flew all the way to Paris at “tree-top level” and arrived safely at Orly Field. Staver found a ride down the Champs-Élysées in a U.S. Army jeep. At Ordnance Headquarters he found the exact man he was looking for, Colonel Joel Holmes, sitting at his desk. As chief of the Technical Division, Colonel Holmes had the authority to grant Major Staver the semitrailers he needed to evacuate the Dörnten mine stash before the British and the Russians arrived.
But Staver had a second plan that he had been conceiving, and, as he later explained, this moment in Paris was his prime opportunity to act. He told Colonel Holmes that there was a third element necessary to make the V-2 rocket program in America a success. Staver had been locating rocket parts and the documents necessary to assemble them correctly. But to make the rockets fly, the Americans needed the German scientists. The army needed to bring these scientists to the United States, Staver explained. Their superior knowledge could be used to help win the war in Japan.
“You write the cable and I’ll sign it,” Staver remembered Colonel Holmes having said. In Paris, Staver sat down and wrote a cable that would have a huge impact on the future of the Nazi scientist program. “Have in custody over 400 top research development personnel of Peenemünde. Developed V-2,” Staver wrote. “The thinking of the scientific directors of this group is 25 years ahead of U.S.… Later version of this rocket should permit launching from Europe to U.S.” Given the enormity of this idea in 1945, that a rocket could one day actually fly from one continent to another, Staver pushed: “Immediate action recommended to prevent loss of whole or part of this group to other interested parties. Urgently request reply as early as possible.”
The cable was sent to Colonel Trichel’s office at the Pentagon, and Major Staver returned to Nordhausen. The documents were loaded up and driven to Paris under armed guard. From there, they were shipped to the Foreign Documents Evaluation Center at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland. Special Mission V-2 was declared a success. The U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, now had one hundred rockets and fourteen tons of technical documents in its possession. But Staver did not view Special Mission V-2 as entirely complete. He still had his sights set on the rocket scientists themselves.
With the arrival of the Soviets into Nordhausen less than forty-eight hours away, Staver got the approval he’d been waiting for from SHAEF headquarters. He went to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, picked up von Braun, and returned to Nordhausen. The clock was ticking. Staver needed von Braun’s help getting every last rocket scientist out of the Harz before the Soviets arrived.
“We landed running,” remembered Staver’s team member Dr. Richard Porter. Back at Nordhausen, the men got to work locating the scientists who were still living in the area. Staver had a stack of note cards with the names and addresses of the V-2 engineers. He instructed every available U.S. soldier he could find to round up anything with wheels—trucks, motorcycles, and donkey carts—and sent soldiers fanning out across the Harz. Scientists and their families were given an offer. They could be transported out of what would soon become the Russian zone, or they could stay.
Arthur Rudolph’s wife was in Stepferhausen, eighty-five miles south of Nordhausen, when a U.S. soldier arrived. “A black GI drove into town in a truck looking for me,” remembered Martha Rudolph. “He had a list of names and mine was on it. He told me that if I wanted to leave to get ready. He would be back in 30 minutes to pick me up. My friends all said, ‘Go, go—the Russians are coming. Why would you want to stay here?’ So I packed up what I could and left on the truck when the GI came back.” The Rudolphs’ daughter, Marianne, accompanied her to the train station.
The scene at the station was surreal, recalling the horrific transport of prisoners during the war but with the roles reversed, fate and outcome turned upside down. Over one thousand Germans—scientists and their families—stood on the platforms, waiting to fit themselves into boxcars and passenger cars. The train’s engine had yet to be attached, and there was no announcement explaining the delay. Tension escalated, but the crowd remained calm until a mob of displaced persons flooded the station. Word had leaked out that German scientists were being evacuated out of Nordhausen in advance of the Red Army’s arrival. Suddenly, many other locals wanted out of the Harz, too. The Red Army had a terrible reputation. There were stories of entire units arriving in towns drunk and seeking revenge. At the railroad station, U.S. soldiers were called to the scene. Using the threat of weapons, they prevented any displaced person who was not a scientist or an engineer from boarding the boxcars and passenger cars.
At the eleventh hour, Major Staver and Dr. Porter learned of one last potential disaster that needed to be dealt with. Right before boarding the train, General Dornberger confessed to having hidden his own stash of papers, an ace in the hole had Dornberger been double-crossed by von Braun and left out of the American deal. General Dornberger told Major Staver that he had buried five large boxes in a field in the spa town of Bad Sachsa. The boxes, which were made of wood and lined in metal, contained critical information about the V-2 rocket that would compromise the U.S. Army if it fell into Russian hands. In a last-ditch effort to find Dornberger’s secret stash, Staver and Porter set out on a final mission.
The men drove sixty miles to the headquarters of the 332nd Engineering Regiment at Kassel, where they borrowed shovels, pickaxes, three men, and a mine detector. Back in a large field in Bad Sachsa, they searched the ground as if looking for a buried mine. Finally, they located Dornberger’s metal-lined cases, which contained 250 pounds of drawings and documents. The stash was loaded onto a truck and driven to an army facility in the American zone.
On their way out of the Harz, Staver and Porter passed by Nordhausen to have one last look. “I wanted to blow up the whole factory at Nordhausen before we pulled out but [I] couldn’t swing it legally. I was afraid at the time to do the job ‘unofficially,’ and have regretted it ever since,” Porter recalled. He was referring to the European Advisory Commission decree, signed by General Eisenhower on June 5, 1945, in Berlin, which prohibited the destruction of military research installations in another power’s zone.
The Soviets were now heirs to the Harz. Major Staver had succeeded in secretly shipping out enough parts to reassemble one hundred V-2 rockets in America. Still, thousands of tons of rocket parts remained. For all the effort and moral compromise that went into Special Project V-2, the Red Army would now have no shortage of wonder weapons parts to choose from. The underground slave labor factory at Nordhausen was still virtually intact. Thousands of machine tools sat on the assembly lines ready to manufacture more parts.
After an eleven-day delay, the Russians finally arrived. Leading the pack were technical specialists from Soviet missile program chief Georgy Malenkov’s Special Committee for rocket research. For every German scientist that had taken up the U.S. Army’s offer to evacuate, between two and ten remained behind. The Soviet secret police began rounding up hundreds of former rocket scientists and engineers and put them back to work. A Soviet guidance engineer named Boris Chertok even managed to move into von Braun’s old villa, the one the SS had confiscated from a Jewish businessman a few years before. Chertok oversaw the renaming of the Nordhausen tunnel complex from the Mittelwerk to the Institute Rabe, an abbreviation for Raketenantrieb Bleicherode, or Rocket Enterprise Bleicherode.
Von Braun, eighty scientists, and their families were taken to the town of Witzenhausen, forty miles from
Nordhausen, in the American zone. There, they were set up in a two-story schoolhouse and paid to get to work on future rocket plans while Army Ordnance worked on a plan to bring them to the United States, to the Fort Bliss Army Base, in Texas. The Americans had been obsessed with the V-weapons during the war. Now they had the science and the scientists.
In Washington, D.C., officials with the War Department General Staff remained undecided on a policy regarding what to do with Nazi scientists. General Eisenhower’s questions about long-term plans had not yet been answered, and Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson was asked to weigh in. Major Staver’s cable from Paris regarding the four hundred rocket scientists “in custody” drew attention to the issue. In America, five Nazi scientists had already been secreted into the United States for classified weapons work. Just a few days after the German surrender, the director of naval intelligence successfully lobbied the War Department General Staff to circumvent State Department regulations so that a Nazi guided missile expert named Dr. Herbert Wagner and four of his assistants could begin working on technology meant to help end the war with Japan. The War Department gave approval, and in mid-May Dr. Wagner and his team were flown from Germany to a small airstrip outside Washington, D.C., inside a military aircraft with the windows blackened to keep anyone from seeing who was inside.
During the war, Dr. Herbert Wagner had been chief missile design engineer at Henschel Aircraft. He was the man behind the first guided missile used in combat by the Reich, the Hs 293. This remote-control bomb was the nemesis of the U.S. Navy and the British Royal Navy and had sunk several Allied ships during the war. Not only did the U.S. Navy see glide bomb technology as critically important in the fight in the Pacific, but they saw Dr. Wagner as a man with “knowledge, experience and skills unmatched anywhere in the world.”