In the chaos of the collapsing Reich, Kammler could have gone any where he wanted, assumed any persona he liked, and no one would have been the wiser.
On April 11,1945, when the first elements of the Third U.S. Armored Division of the First Army swept into Nordhausen, Kammler's legacy would have been plain for the Americans to see. Clearly, however, his war crimes were not uppermost in their minds. When Voss was picked up by agents of the U.S. Counter-intelligence Corps soon after hostilities ended, he told them about the existence of the Kammlerstab at Skoda. Their reactions surprised him. They appeared so unmoved by the notion that the special projects group contained a Pandora's box of exotic military secrets, he concluded that U.S. intelligence already knew.
When Voss went on to propose that they should spare no effort in finding Kammler before the Russians got to him, the CIC agents appeared equally uninterested.
This, from a nation that had mounted the biggest plunder operation of all time — involving the Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as civilian agents — to bring advanced German technology back to the United States.
At first, I wondered if their behavior had to do with the fact that Pilsen had fallen within the designated Russian zone of occupation. Maybe the CIC recognized that Kammler was beyond their reach and had simply abandoned any hope of finding him? Then I came upon the final piece of the jigsaw. The rapid eastward push that had brought the Third Armored
Division to Nordhausen did not stop there. Disregarding agreements signed by the exiled Czech government and the Soviet Union, troops of Patton's Third Army to the east of Nordhausen crossed the Czech frontier on May 6.
Deep into the Soviet-designated zone of occupation, a forward unit of Patton's forces entered Pilsen that morning. Records I'd had sent to me from the U.S. National Archives before I left England showed that U.S. forces had the run of the Skoda Works for six days, until the Red Army showed up on May 12. Following protests from Moscow, the U.S. Third Army was eventually forced to withdraw.
Six days is a long time if you're retrieving something you already know to be there.
Had Kammler already done his deal with the Americans? Speer, dur ing his initial interrogation at the hands of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Mission on May 21, less than two weeks after the German surrender, intuitively believed so.
Asked by the mission for technical details of the V-2, he replied: "Ask Kammler. He has all the facts."
As I pushed eastward toward the Czech border, using wartime documents I'd gathered in London and a worn copy of Blunder! as my guide, I found myself following a scent of collusion that was still choking more than 50 years later.
Chapter 18
On the morning of Sunday May 6, 1945, five days after the announce ment of Hitler's death in Berlin, troops of the U.S. 16th Armored Division pushed cautiously through an eerie, soulless landscape that its soldiers described as "neither German nor Czech." The local people— German-speaking, terrified by their Slav neighbors to the east and undecided whether to remain in their homelands or flee westward — were powerless to resist the U.S. troops.
The war was all but over and everyone knew it; everyone except a hard core of Waffen-SS in and around Prague, southern Czechoslovakia and Austria that had signaled their intention to defend this, one of the final remaining pockets of the Reich, to the very last.
As the half-tracks rolled deeper into Czech territory, the U.S. soldiers passed ragged columns of Wehrmacht troops rolling westward to the comparative safety of the U.S. zone of occupation. The U.S. objective was Pilsen, a place known to the soldiers of the 16th Armored for its beer, not the giant armaments factory where Skoda had cranked out guns and munitions for the Nazis for the best part of seven years.
Inside the U.S. half-tracks, you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. No one wanted to end up a statistic in the last few days of the war. But still, the pace was relentless. Rumor had it that Patton wanted to reach Prague ahead of the Russians. And that meant a confrontation with the SS.
Approaching Pilsen, the atmosphere changed. The U.S. troops noticed a scattering of red, blue and white Czech flags in place of white flags of surrender. As the half-tracks left the Sudetenland behind and pushed on into the heartland of Czechoslovakia proper, the people came out into the streets, waving and cheering as the 16th Armored swept past. "It was Paris all over again, with the same jubilant faces, the same delirium of liberation," one soldier recalled in the 16th Armored Division's official account of the liberation of Pilsen.
By 0800 hours, the U.S. troops were in the center of Pilsen, their advance all but halted by the crowds that had spilled off the pavements and into the streets. The situation was chaotic. It was only when German snipers opened up in many sections of the city an hour after the Americans arrived that sanity of a kind was restored. The civilians fled back into their homes, leaving the U.S. soldiers to mop up what resistance remained and carry out house-to-house searches.
One unit from the 16th Armored soon came upon Lt. Gen. Georg von Majewski, the German army commandant in Pilsen, with 35 members of his staff in the Wehrmacht's town headquarters. As American troops entered von Majewski's office, the general surrendered his forces to the officer in charge, then pulled a pistol from the drawer of his desk and shot himself through the head in front of his wife.
Von Majewski was one of 14 enemy dead that day. Around 4,500 more surrendered. The Americans had suffered one fatal casualty in the whole Pilsen operation.
A second 16th Armored unit, Task Force "Casper," captured the airport and a third, Task Force "Able," occupied the Skoda Works.
An air raid by U.S. B-17s several weeks previously had rained de struction on a large part of the facility. The forward units of Task Force Able reported that the central administrative building had been 80 percent destroyed.
The news that Pilsen had fallen to the Americans was picked up on the radio that night by the onetime head of the Skoda Works, Dr. Wilhelm Voss, who was hiding out with his wife and family at a hunting lodge on a Skoda estate south of Prague.
Voss had been out of a job since January, when Goering had dismissed him for refusing to accept two of his nominees on the Skoda main board.
For weeks, Voss had been monitoring the Allies' radio reports for news of their advance, knowing that it was touch and go whose forces would get to Pilsen first. Armed with the news he wanted to hear, Voss seized the moment soon after the German surrender on May 7 and set out for Skoda.
Given Voss' former position and the chaos that engulfed the former Protectorate, this was a hazardous undertaking. Czech partisans were summarily executing all the Germans they could find. While the bulk of the Waffen-SS units had officially surrendered, some were reported still to be holding out against the Russians in and around Prague. But as Voss told Tom Agoston during their conversations in 1949, he was determined to hand over the blueprints of Kammler's SS special projects group to the Americans, not the Russians.
According to Blunder! Voss finally pulled up in front of Skoda's main gates on May 10. He bluffed his way past the American guard and found a very different place from the one he remembered; a Skoda in transition, with Germans, Czechs and Americans milling about the plant. In the confusion, he located a member of the Kammlerstab, who told him that survivors from the group had already recovered some documents, marked them up as personnel and payroll records, and loaded them onto a truck. They were hoping to get them to a place of safekeeping before the Russians arrived. The facility was due for handover to the Red Army in two days' time.