All that was left, was Kammler's lasting legacy: the underground factories that riddled his kingdom, built to his carefully exacting standards, forged by the Holocaust that was also largely of his making.
I requested some time off work and booked myself a fly-drive package to Hanover. From there, with a good rental car, I would be in the Harz Mountains less than two hours after the wheels of the aircraft greased the airport tarmac.
Chapter 17
I entered the complex from the southern end of the Kohnstein — a long ridge dotted with pine and deciduous trees that rose like the hackles of a crouched beast above a sleepy plateau in the Harz Mountains close to the small town of Nordhausen. Inside, I hesitated before drawing breath. Twenty thousand people had died in the construction of Nordhausen, many of them right here, inside the mountain itself.
Anywhere else and you could half pretend that you were in the bowels of an archaeological site; where lazy reveries about the past of the place were part of the experience. But the imprint of what had happened here within the bare limestone walls was indelible and overwhelming.
I was standing at the entranceway of Gallery 46, a long tunnel with a semicircular roof. It was still littered with wartime debris. The records said that it had been used in the construction of the V-l flying bomb.
Every now and again it was possible to recognize a piece of hardware— components of an Argus pulse jet destined for a V-l, a section of fuel tank or a part of a wing — but, for the most part, in the dim yellow electric light, it could have been any old scrap metal. Next to nothing had been touched, my guide informed me, since this part of the facility had been reopened to visitors in 1994.
Soon after the war, when eventually the Americans left the site — but not before they'd shipped 100 fully assembled A-4/V-2s back to the States — the Soviets sealed Nordhausen by blowing the entrances to the long galleries. In time, the trees had returned to the Kohnstein and East Germans could almost forget that the place had ever been here.
There was a kind of symmetry to this; the Nazis had gone to very elaborate lengths to conceal it during the war, even from their own people.
The Mittelwerk was vast. At the height of its activities, it had been turning out thousands of V-l s and V-2s a month and had consisted of almost 100,000 square meters of floor space. Built in the 1930s as an underground storage facility for fuel oil, the complex — already huge — gave Speer and Kammler a head start in the construction program they began and completed between 1943 and 1944.
The site consisted of two main tunnels running in parallel between the northern and southern faces of the ridgeline. One of these, Tunnel B, the main V-2 production line, was a kilometer and a half long.
Between the tunnels, like the rungs of an enormous ladder, were 50 "galleries," each between 100 and 200 meters long. Many had been component manufacturing facilities for the giant rocket assembly line. Some, such as those given over to the manufacture of jet engines, were assembly lines in their own right.
Until the construction of concentration camp Dora nearby, the slave workers who had prepared Nordhausen for the V-l and V-2 had lived in situ.
Six thousand prisoners had crammed into three tunnels, Number 46 being one of them. Initially, they had slept on straw, their surroundings lit only by a few carbide lamps. Then, they had been allowed to build bunks, four-story affairs that touched the ceiling, but which still failed to accommodate everyone. Since work went on around the clock, this did not matter; the laborers went to work and slept in shifts.
Beyond Gallery 18, deep inside the mountain, there was no ventila tion, water or heating. Every explosion set off by the tunnelers filled the galleries with blinding, choking dust and gases.
This, mixed with the smell of the open latrines — oil drums sawed in half with two planks on top — made the air almost unbreathable. They also made the tunnels a place of terrible disease and infection. It was a privilege to be on the evening rota that loaded the latrines onto train wagons and emptied them in the open air.
A little more than 50 years later, as I walked the galleries beneath the Kohnstein, I found the silence deeply troubling. I'd wanted to concentrate on the science and engineering, to look at the Mittelwerk as a place that had been responsible for the most awesome piece of technology to have come out of Europe during the war; to breathe the same air as those who'd created the A-4 rocket's assembly line, to soak up that atmosphere in the way that a profiler would use a murder scene to build a picture of the killer. This place, after all, was one of the final staging posts to Kammler's disappearance. I needed to think as he had thought. But uppermost in my mind was the sheer scale of the crime that had been committed down here and its unexpected proximity to my own ordered existence. The people who'd toiled and died down here to create this Dantean design from Kammler's notebook, the same one perhaps that had spawned his delicate sketches of Auschwitz, were just a generation away from the safe confines of my own world. And all I had succeeded in doing was immersing myself in the fate of its slave workers, not in the thoughts of the icy technocrat who'd driven them on. In the subzero chill of the tunnels, all I could hear were the cries of the dying, not Kammler's whispered escape plans.
Only when I reemerged from the tunnels could I reapply my mind back to the problem.
When the building work on the tunnels stopped, those that survived went on to work on the rockets. At first, quality control was poor and many of the rockets exploded or went off course. Suspecting sabotage, the SS ordered mass executions. On one day in March 1945, the guards hanged 52 people in Gallery 41, tying a dozen at a time to a beam which was then pulled up by an electrical crane. Those next in line to die were forced to watch.
Then there was Gardelegen, 80 miles to the north. On April 13, two days after advance U.S. units entered Nordhausen, the SS forced a thousand evacuated prisoners from Dora into a barn that had been presoaked with gasoline, locked the doors and set light to it. When American troops came across the scene, they found some of the bodies still in the barn, some in a partially dug mass grave. Twenty men had survived by sheltering in holes they had dug beneath the charred corpses of those that had perished in the first moments of the conflagration.
These were Kammler's hallmarks. Others might have pulled the trigger, operated the cranes or poured the gasoline, but these acts had been carried out according to his wishes. More than 50 years later, you could sense it.
This was something about the man that I had pulled from the dank, subterranean air.
It was curious, then, that so few people after the war — the many tens of thousands whose lives had been touched by Kammler — could recollect him in any detail. I found this incomprehensible at first, remembering occasions in which concentration camp survivors had identified their tormentors decades after the war.
Even those who had not been directly traumatized by Kammler commented upon this mercurial ability to blend in. A U.S. diplomat who had served in Berlin until the U.S. entered the war in 1941, whom Agoston had interviewed, recalled his ability to "soothe and tame an unruly horse, using a magically gentle touch, and then minutes later order a negligent groom to be brutally horsewhipped.
"I always thought he was a man to watch," the American told Agoston. "But I never saw him again. When I got back to Berlin after the war, no one seemed to remember him."
How could this man, this monster, the most powerful individual in Nazi Germany outside Hitler's inner circle in the last days of the war, come to be quite so easily forgotten?
It was only outside Nordhausen's giant bombproof doors, as I gazed again at the single wartime picture that exists of Kammler — in his general's uniform, striding for the camera, his cap with death's head badge enough to one side to betray more than a hint of vanity — that I began to understand. Kammler was fair, as so many Germans are. There was a gleam of raw intelligence behind those expressionless eyes and a hint of cruelty about the mouth. But take away the uniform, take away the job, the jut to the jaw and the energy in the stride, and he could have been any average 40-year-old European male.