Sensing that this was the time to act, Voss sought out the U.S. officer in charge, informed him who he was, then told him what was in the truck. The American listened, unimpressed by what he was hearing, and finally informed Voss he was under orders to hand everything over to the Russians. Voss insisted, but the American was adamant; nothing was to be moved. An American ordnance team had already inspected the plant earlier that week, he told the exasperated industrialist, and had picked up everything it needed.
Two days later, Voss watched as the truck was driven away by a Red Army transport officer.
In Blunder! Tom Agoston had traced records showing that a Britishled Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee team entered the Skoda Works on May 12 and promptly got the runaround from Skoda's newly ensconced Czech managers, who wanted to cooperate with the Russians and no one else.
I had found another set of CIOS reports, from a British team that entered Skoda one week later on May 19 with the plant now firmly under Soviet jurisdiction. This report, CIOS Trip No. 243, summarized a combined U.S.-U.K. operation — the U.S. team, it said, having entered the plant on May 16—in which nothing of any real interest was discovered, except for certain new projects in the ammunition field and some advanced German design and production methods for guns and munitions.
The triple ring of security put in place by Himmler and Kammler around the Kammlerstab had done its job, even after hostilities had ended.
Voss' story implies that Kammler never made it to the Skoda Works to retrieve the blueprints of the Kammlerstab—that instead the papers were ignominiously removed by the Russians and taken back to the Soviet Union. It didn't look that way to me. Based on what was happening in Germany, where U.S. technical intelligence agents were systematically targeting any weapons facility of interest and plundering the contents, it is inconceivable that they would have ignored Skoda, even if they had been unaware of the SS-run special projects group in its midst.
The U.S. officer who stonewalled Voss over the papers in the truck told him that a U.S. "ordnance team" had inspected the plant earlier that week. "Earlier that week" could only mean that the "ordnance team" had walked into the plant alongside or directly behind the combat units of 16th Armored's Task Force Able on May 6.
There is no official record of any such unit's visit to Skoda. There are, however, reports that a U.S. team with nuclear expertise entered the plant and gained access to documents that outlined the SS cell's work in conjunction with the Junkers company at Dessau on nuclear propulsion for aircraft. I had been informed by someone that an account of this activity was contained in Atomic Shield, the official history of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. But after extensive inquiries with archivists at the U.S. Department of Energy, the AEC's successor, I was assured that there were no references in that book or any other to Skoda, its purported S S think tank or German nuclear research at Pilsen or Dessau.
Given Voss' claims that nuclear propulsion work had been one of three primary areas of research within the Kammlerstab, alongside lasers and guided weapons, it is inherently credible that some such work had gone on there.
It is at odds, however, with the official view that Germany was nowhere near as advanced in nuclear weapons technology as the Americans, who by May 10 were less than two months away from detonating their first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert.
According to Speer, official Nazi sanction for attempts by Werner Heisenberg, the father of the would-be German atomic bomb, were rescinded in 1942 on the grounds that the earliest timetable for an available weapon was 1946—too late, Speer concluded, to be of any use in the war.
In late 1944 and early 1945, U.S. technical intelligence agents from the Alsos Mission ("alsos," in a quirky piece of coding, being ancient Greek for "grove," i.e. General Leslie Groves, who was in charge of the U.S. bomb project) tore into France, Belgium and Germany searching for signs of German atomic bomb work and quantities of German-held uranium oxide ore — a material that is inert until it has been subjected to neutron bombardment in a nuclear reactor.
On April 23, an Alsos team led by the unit's commander, Lt. Col. Boris T. Pash, a former high school teacher turned Army G-2 security officer trained by the FBI, arrived at the locked steel door of a box-like concrete entranceway in the side of a cliff above the picturesque German town of Haigerloch, near Stuttgart.
Pash, who had been in a race against the French to get there, shot off the lock and found himself in a chamber with a concrete pit about ten feet in diameter in the middle. Within the pit hung a heavy metal shield covering the top of a thick metal cylinder. The latter contained a potshaped vessel, also of heavy metal, about four feet below the floor level.
What Pash had discovered is what history describes as one of only two German reactors assembled, or partially assembled, before the end of the war — the other, at Kummersdorf, being captured by the Russians.
Using heavy water as a moderator and 664 cubes of metallic uranium as its fuel, the Haigerloch reactor had achieved a sevenfold neutron multiplication just a few weeks earlier.
Heisenberg had calculated that a 50 percent increase in the size of the reactor would produce a sustained nuclear reaction.
Had he done so, Hitler would have had the means to enrich enough fissionable material to construct a bomb.
This is the official view of the extent of the German atomic bomb program and it is terrifying enough. The Nazis had come close to developing a weapon.
But look a little to the left and right of the official view, as I had before leaving London, and an even more frightening scenario pulled into view.
On May 19, a German U-boat, the U-234, docked at the U.S. Navy port of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, having surrendered to a U.S. Navy destroyer two days earlier off the eastern seaboard. Her commander had received high-level orders to sail from Kristiansand in Nazi-held Norway to Japan on April 16.
On board, the Americans found an Aladdin's Cave of technical equipment and blueprints, most of them related to advanced German jet aircraft. The U-234 was also ferrying technical experts, a nuclear technician among them.
This fact alone tipped off U.S. investigators that U-234 was no or dinary U-boat. A secondary examination showed she had been modified to carry a very dangerous cargo. Set in her six adapted mine-laying tubes were 560 kilos of uranium held in ten gold-lined containers. The loading manifest maintained that it was uranium oxide, the state in which uranium is found when it is extracted from the earth and safe enough to carry around in a paper bag. That the U-234's converted mine-laying tubes were gold-lined indicates that its cargo was emitting gamma radiation. This, in turn, meant the uranium oxide ore had been subjected to enrichment from a working nuclear reactor. The gold lining was to prevent the radiation from penetrating the U-boat's hull.
And yet, officially, there had been no nuclear reactor in Germany capable of fulfilling this task. Not in Speer's orbit of operations. But what about Kammler's? The journey to this point had revealed the extent to which the SS had ring-fenced its top secret weapons activity from the rest of the German armaments industry. Could the Kammlerstab have contained the plans of a working nuclear reactor? Its secret location, even? It was a possibility I had to confront.