It was then that I saw the Kammler special projects group for what it was; not as a facility where experiments were conducted, but as an R&D coordinating center. Testing wouldn't have been performed at Skoda itself, but in the field.
It was exactly as Agoston said it was: a think tank, not an experimental site.
I put out feelers into the Czech Republic and Poland. I now saw that if there had been any truth at all in the reports of flying saucers developed by the Germans at the end of the war, this was the place to start looking. If the legend that had grown up around the supposed activities of Messrs. Schriever, Habermohl, Miethe and Bellonzo was in any shape, way or form based on truth — and while my earlier research had shown there wasn't a shred of solid evidence to say they were, I was convinced there was no smoke without fire — two places always seemed to recur in socalled testimony.
The first was Prague, not a million miles from Skoda's twin hubs at Pilsen and Brno (Bruenn). The second was Breslau in the German province of Lower Silesia. Then part of Germany, Breslau — renamed Wroclaw — is today in southwest Poland. I turned my attention back to Kammler. In March 1945, Kammler moved his headquarters from Berlin to Munich, working out of the regional Waffen-SS and Reich Police Construction Office. On April 16, three weeks after he had received his mission from Hitler to change the course of the war, Kammler delegated Gerhard Degenkolb, industrial plenipotentiary for the manufacture of jet aircraft at Speer's ministry for armaments and war production, to assume special responsibility for manufacture of the Messerschmitt 262, Germany's last-ditch hope in the war in the air. On April 17, with the Third Reich crashing around his ears, Kammler sent a message to Himmler at SS Command Headquarters in Berlin denying Himmler the use of a heavy truck that the Reichsführer-SS had requested from the Junkers aircraft factory motor pool — an order so obsessive in its attention to detail, given the inferno that was burning around Kammler, that Speer later described it as "both terrifying and laughable."
Be that as it may. It was the last official message anyone ever received from Kammler, who by April 18 had dropped off the map — effectively without trace.
"In the course of my enforced collaboration with this man," wrote Speer of Kammler after the war, "I discovered him to be a cold, ruthless schemer, a fanatic in pursuit of a goal, and as carefully calculating as he was unscrupulous."
If there was one thing I had learned about Kammler in the short time I had spent analyzing his activities, it was that nothing in the clockwork routine of his life happened by chance. By the beginning of April 1945, while Hitler was heaping new responsibilities on his shoulders almost by the day, the general would have been acutely aware that it was just a matter of time before Germany collapsed.
In contrast to Himmler, who vainly believed that he could enter into armistice negotiations with the Allies and emerge from them with a leadership role in the reconstituted Germany, Kammler was a realist. His part in the construction of the concentration camps, the clinical way in which he had sought to boost the throughput of the gas chambers and ovens, not to mention the methods he had employed in leveling the Warsaw Ghetto, would have placed him high on the list of SS officers sought by the Allies for war crimes.
Unlike Himmler, however, Kammler had something of value to deal — something tangible. By early April, Hitler and Himmler had placed under his direct control every secret weapon system of any consequence within the Third Reich — weapons that had no counterpart in the inventories of the three powers that were now bearing down on central Germany from the east and the west.
A man who had no trouble transforming the grand visions of others into reality while retaining control of the minutiae, would have found it just as easy to talk victory and plot an exit strategy at the same time.
The clues, which double as the countdown to Kammler's disappear ance, were there from the beginning ofthat month.
On April 3, Kammler had his meeting with Hitler in Berlin. As Goebbels reveals, following their discussions about the "miracle" weapons that could still win Germany the war, the Führer retained great faith in him. But Kammler had already moved his headquarters out of Berlin to Munich for reasons that Speer guesses at — accurately, it seems — in his memoirs: given the expected failures of these projects, it would have been dangerous for him to remain within Hitler's reach.
Before he left Berlin for the last time, soon after his final meeting with Hitler, Kammler paid Speer a visit. He had come to say good-bye.
"For the first time in our four-year association, Kammler did not display his usual dash," Speer recalled. "On the contrary, he seemed insecure and slippery with his vague, obscure hints about why I should transfer to Munich with him."
Speer might have put this down to the fact that the central part of Kammler's kingdom, at least as far as he, Speer, was aware — the giant Mittelwerk underground A-4 construction complex at Nordhausen in central Germany's Harz Mountains — was about to be overrun by the U.S. First Army. With most of the A-4/V-2 program team still in place at Nordhausen, Kammler's nervousness was understandable. He needed to get them out.
But then, Kammler told the armaments minister that "efforts were being made in the SS to get rid of the Führer."
As Speer was also in the throes of a desperate scheme to assassinate Hitler, using poison gas to kill him and his entourage in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, this perhaps came as no great surprise, except that it came from Kammler's lips. Speer did not know it, but SS General Walther Schellenberg, Germany's combined intelligence chief, had already opened secret surrender negotiations on behalf of Himmler with Count Folke Bernadotte, vice chairman of the Swedish Red Cross. These were transmitted to the Western Allies, but promptly and roundly rejected.
But then Kammler told Speer he was planning to contact the Americans and that in exchange for a guarantee of his freedom he would offer them everything—"jet planes, as well as the A-4 rocket and other important developments." He informed Speer that he was assembling all the relevant experts in Upper Bavaria in order to hand them over to U.S. forces.
"He offered me the chance to participate in this operation," Speer said, "which would be sure to work out in my favor." Speer turned him down. In a late display of remorse for his years of unquestioning devotion to Hitler, the armaments minister now saw it as his solemn duty to prevent Hitler carrying out his scorched-earth policy in the face of the advancing Allies. As soon as Hitler was issuing orders for factories to be burned to the ground or blown up, Speer was countermanding them, arguing with frightened and bewildered plant managers that the war was lost and these facilities would be needed for the economic revival of the "new Germany."
On April 10, Army General Walter Dornberger, onetime head of the A-4/V-2 program, now subordinated to Kammler, ordered 450 key A-4 scientists to evacuate the Nordhausen complex and head for the mountains south of Munich. Those that could not board a special southbound train, nicknamed by those on it the "Reprisal Express," would be left behind at Bleicherode close by, where Dornberger and von Braun had established their headquarters.
Von Braun argued against this move on the grounds that it would mean deserting his men in the Harz, but Dornberger reminded him that Kammler had issued the order and if they did not obey it, "the SS would shoot them all."