The lack of data in U.S. archives concerning the fate of the U-234, its cargo and its personnel is astonishing. But then, everywhere I'd looked prior to leaving London, a pattern had been emerging.
Protracted searches by archivists at the U.S. National Archives for any data on Kammler had failed to locate a single entry for him. It was the same for Skoda. Given Kammler's range of responsibilities in the final months of the war, this absence of evidence was remarkable; so much so, that one archivist at Modern Military Records, College Park, Maryland, said that it "redlined" him in her book. I asked what she meant. Somebody, she replied matter-of-factly, had been in and cleaned up. Tom Agoston had found evidence of much the same thing. Despite Voss' extensive debriefings on Skoda by U.S. CIC agents at the U.S. European Command Counter-intelligence Center at Camp Oberursel, near Frankfurt, no one had been able to trace any records or transcripts of the interrogation.
When Agoston ran checks on Kammler, it transpired that his name hadn't even registered at the Nuremberg war crimes trials — the very least that might have been expected of someone who had played such a prominent role in the Holocaust.
Unlike Martin Bormann, whose body was never found after he was reported killed during his escape from the Führerbunker on May 1, Kammler was never tried in absentia at Nuremberg. There is no evidence that anyone ever bothered to look for him. This, despite the fact that the four versions of his death conflict with each other so markedly that none stacks up under scrutiny.
The first version says he committed suicide in a forest between Prague and Pilsen on May 9, two days after the German unconditional surrender.
The second says that he died in a hail of bullets as he emerged from the cellar of a bombed-out building to confront Czech partisans that same day.
The third version says that he shot himself in a wood near Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary in today's Czech Republic), also on May 9.
What these variations on a theme do manage to assert is that Kammler was in or around Prague just prior to the German capitulation.
One witness quoted by Agoston, an official with the Prague regional office of the Buildings and Works Division of the SS Economic Main Office, recalled the date: "Kammler arrived in Prague early May. We did not expect him. He gave no advance notice of his arrival. Nobody knew why he had come to Prague, when the Red Army was closing in."
I could see only two reasons why Kammler should have made such a journey. First to retrieve the mother lode of documentation on the special projects group at Skoda and the Skoda administrative offices in Prague; and secondly to bury it somewhere prior to setting up the deal that would save him from the gallows and buy him his freedom.
Where in the crumbling, collapsing edifice of the Reich would Kammler have considered hiding this priceless cargo? Certainly not in Czechoslovakia, not with the Russians closing in. And it was unlikely that he would have headed west through the partisan-infested forests between Prague and the German border. The fourth version of his death, I felt, offered the best possible clue. The German and Austrian Red Cross, according to Agoston, held two relevant documents after the end of the war, the first posting Kammler as "missing," the second updating the first and listing him "dead." The first report had been filed by a relative. It placed Kammler's last known location as Ebensee in Steiermark, Austria. The updated report was based on the testimony of unnamed "comrades." No burial place was specified.
I did some thinking of my own, using the reference books I had brought with me as pointers.
In early May, the province of Steiermark was putting up a vigorous defense against the Russians, while bracing iself for the American advance, under the leadership of Gauleiter Siegfried Ueberreither. The gauleiter — the Nazi party's chief administrator for the Steiermark "gau" — was backed in his decision to hold the province to the last by large numbers of Wehrmacht and SS troops.
Kammler knew Ebensee well. Under his orders and supervision, work had commenced there in 1943 on a giant underground complex for the intercontinental A-9/A-10 rocket — the weapon that Hitler had intended to use against New York. The facility was code-named Zement and a large section of it had been completed by the end of the war. Zement was tucked into the mountains abutting the shoreline of Lake Traunsee.
On May 8, 1945, Lake Traunsee could be considered the epicenter of the Nazi empire on the eve of its surrender; a seething confluence of terrified citizenry, refugees from the east, heavily armed German troops and Nazi party members looking for places to lie low until the frenzy of capitulation had subsided. Gauleiter Ueberreither himself, having urged his people to fight to the last bullet, slipped out of his office in Graz and disappeared. Years later, he emerged in Argentina.
I began to make arrangements that would get me to Ebensee. But shortly before I could complete them, I received a call from Poland. A researcher there had responded to my request for information about German wartime research activities around Breslau, one of the two purported homes of German flying saucer research.
The guy's name was Igor Witkowksi and he had been recommended to me by Polish sources through my work at Jane's as someone who was both highly knowledgeable and reliable. Witkowski, they told me, had self-published a series of books in Polish detailing his findings.
For years, Witkowski had been sifting through archives related to the many secret Nazi scientific establishments in and around Breslau— modern-day Wroclaw — looking for traces of wartime secret weapons work. What he'd uncovered was evidence of a systematic SS-controlled R&D operation in a rat run of interconnected facilities, many of them underground, in the remote Sudeten Mountains in the southwest of Poland — Lower Silesia as it had been, before its handover to Poland under postwar reparations by Germany.
Witkowski's research led him to conclude that a number of these facilities had been used by the SS for nuclear research work. But one site did not conform to the pattern. In this case, he said, a series of experiments had taken place in a mine in a valley close to the Czech frontier. They had begun in 1944 and carried on into the April of the following year, under the nose of the advancing Russians.
The experiments required large doses of electricity fed via thick cabling into a chamber hundreds of meters belowground. In this chamber, a bell-shaped device comprising two contra-rotating cylinders filled with mercury, or something like it, had emitted a strange pale blue light. A number of scientists who had been exposed to the device during these experiments suffered terrible side effects; five were said to have died as a result.
Word had it that the tests sought to investigate some kind of anti gravitational effect, Witkowski said. He wasn't in a hurry to agree with this assessment, he added, but he was sufficiently intrigued by the data to alert me to the possibilities.
Like Witkowski, I was skeptical, a feeling that grew when he told me who had presided over the work: Walther Gerlach, Professor of Physics at the University of Munich and head of nuclear research at the Reich Research Council in 1944-45.
Wilhelm Voss, joint head of the SS special projects groups inside the Skoda Works, had made it clear to Tom Agoston that German nuclear work had absorbed a large part of the group's research activities. By early May, Kammler should have had adequate intelligence that Pash, the FBI-trained former teacher and head of the U.S. Alsos Mission, had located most, if not all Germany's nuclear research centers in the western zone of influence along with the scientists that went with them. Kammler might also have known that the U-234 had sailed with its cargo of uranium ore for Japan; maybe he'd been responsible for the order himself.