Kammler did not come with von Braun and Dornberger on the journey south, but he did make arrangements to meet them at the Hotel Lang, near Oberammergau, which was already serving as an evacuation site for Messerschmitt's advanced projects team, evacuated late the previous year from the company's bombed-out factory at Augsburg.
Von Braun and Dornberger made their way by car to Oberammergau, arriving there on April 11, the day that U.S. forces entered and overran the underground factory they had just left. The two men, who had cooperated on the rockets from the beginning, were settled into a compound that had been prepared for them by the SS. On his arrival, von Braun remarked on the beauty of his new surroundings, the snow on the peaks, the lush pasturelands, but noted, too, that the barbed wire had been designed to keep them in, not the Americans out. Soon after he arrived, von Braun made his way to the Hotel Lang. As he sat in the lobby, he could hear two people talking in an adjoining room. Straining to catch what they were saying, the rocket engineer recognized the voices as those of Kammler and his chief of staff, SSObersturmbannführer Starck.
The two men were discussing a plan to burn their uniforms and lie low for a while in the 14th-century abbey at Ettal, a few kilometers down the road. From the tone of the conversation, von Braun was unsure if they were serious or joking. It was at that moment that an SS guard appeared and ushered him into the room.
Kammler, sitting next to Starck, appeared relaxed and affable — very different from the man that Speer had described a week earlier in Berlin.
He asked von Braun how he found the accommodation, whether his team was comfortable, if the broken arm that von Braun had suffered in a car crash the previous month was causing him any great distress, whether the team would be able to begin its design work again soon.
Von Braun, noting the machine pistol propped beside Starck's chair, replied as enthusiastically as he could to Kammler's questions, careful to maintain the charade. To have done anything less might have been fatal given Kammler's ruthless nature; besides which, von Braun had made provisions of his own.
Before leaving Nordhausen, he had had his men stash ten tons of blueprints relating to the A-4 and its successor, the intercontinental A-9/A-10 rocket, in a deserted iron-ore mine several kilometers from the complex. Had Kammler any inkling of this, von Braun had no doubt as to the fate that awaited them all.
But with the A-4 team settled in Bavaria, the general didn't appear overly concerned about the scientists anymore. He had other matters to attend to, he told von Braun, matters relating to his duties as Hitler's special plenipotentiary for jet aircraft production. He would shortly be leaving Oberammergau for an indeterminate period. SS Major Kummer would assume command in his absence. Kammler got to his feet. The meeting was over. They said their good-byes and von Braun left. It was the last time anyone of any standing could corroborate seeing
Kammler. Yet there are traces of his movements in the days, even weeks, that followed; and some of his subsequent actions are decipherable — to a point.
Kammler told von Braun that he had to leave Oberammergau to oversee production of the Me 262 jet fighter according to Hitler's wishes. Yet, five days later, on April 16, the general appointed Degenkolb to the job, thereby delegating his responsibility; to someone eminently capable, as it turned out. Kammler communicated this decision from his office in Munich, dispatching it to Speer, Goering, Himmler, Hitler's Luftwaffe liaison officer Colonel Nikolaus von Below and SS General Hermann Fegelein, Himmler's liaison officer in the Führerbunker. Describing this communiqué years later as a bafflingly "unimportant message," even Speer signals his bewilderment at Kammler's determination to spread the word to all and sundry about Degenkolb's appointment.
It seemed obvious with the benefit of hindsight that Kammler wanted as many people as possible to see that he was on top of his assignment— that he was in Munich doing what he had been told to do.
With Degenkolb in charge of Me 262 production, a job that required constant supervision, it left him free to pursue other matters.
When Kammler told Speer that he would offer the Americans "jet planes and the A-4 rocket," he must have known that their currency was devalued by the sheer numbers of people associated with them. The Me 262, Arado Ar 234 and the Heinkel He 162 jets were in widespread service with the Luftwaffe at the end of the war and plans for hundreds of other jet aircraft were on drawing boards at aircraft factories across the Reich. The Americans arid the Russians could take the blueprints for these projects and the design staff associated with them irrespective of Kammler.
The same went for the A-4. As von Braun's actions testify, the rocket had been secretly earmarked for handover to the Americans for some time by the people who had designed and built it. Whether Kammler was aware of these moves or not is immaterial; the fact that there were hundreds of V-2s in various stages of construction at Nordhausen meant that the Americans would simply take them as war booty, with only the fate of the design engineers left to negotiate.
If Kammler did have plans to hand the Dornberger/von Braun design team over to the Americans, these came to naught. It appears, though, that he never even tried.
On April 13, von Braun succeeded in persuading Major Kummer to disperse the scientists into the surrounding villages, ostensibly to cut down the risk of their being wiped out by air attacks on Oberammergau. Von Braun's real fear, of course, was that it would be Kammler issuing the orders for their annihilation.
The move may well have saved their lives, but it also left von Braun free to make his own deal with the U.S. agents that had been dispatched into Bavaria to seek him out.
On April 17, Kammler sent his message to Himmler about the "truck" — the last signal he was known to have dispatched from his Munich headquarters. Under German communications procedure, his teletyped "signature" was preceded with the letters "GEZ" — an abbreviation for "Gezeichnet or "signed by" — denoting to the recipient that he was physically where he claimed to be.
The fact is, he could have been anywhere — anywhere within a narrow corridor of territory then still in the Reich's possession.
As I immersed myself in as many sources as I could regarding Kammler's mercurial existence, a single question pounded repeatedly above the others. Where had he gone? Degenkolb was taking care of jet aircraft production. The inner circle in the Führerbunker, cut off from reality and increasingly from the world, had its own problems. No one seemed to care anymore about the whereabouts of the golden boy — the keeper of the miracle weapons who would save Germany from annihilation. They could have had little idea that he was planning to bargain them for his freedom — for his life. What did Kammler hope to trade? The rockets were gone. The jets were gone. That left the "other developments" he had told Speer about. On April 17, the GIs of General Devers' 6th Army Group were just days — hours, perhaps — from Munich. All Kammler would have to do was hole up and wait for them. But what evidence there is suggests he did something quite else. There is testimony that Kammler moved on from there to Prague, a journey that would have taken him right past the Skoda Works at Pilsen. Voss had spoken about nuclear propulsion, highly advanced guided weapons and lasers. What other secrets resided within the Kammlerstab? If the witness testimony was accurate, if Kammler did move into Czechoslovakia, what was so precious about the inner workings of the "special projects group" — this Pandora's box of advanced weaponry— that it compelled him to go east, not west? Toward the Russians, of all people?
Nothing in Kammler's carefully coordinated life happened by chance. I knew that much. The documentation led nowhere. Even Agoston had reached the end of the trail.