While he could not have known that the Americans were close to perfecting their own nuclear weapon, or that the U-234 would fall into U.S. hands, he didn't seem like a man who would gamble his life on providing America with a technology it had already acquired via diligent detective work. It didn't tally with his profile.
My feeling was that Kammler would offer them something so spectacular they'd have no choice but to enter into negotiations with him; and, intriguing as it was, this experiment down the mine didn't seem to fit the bill. The sickness suffered by the scientists appeared to be the result of radiation poisoning. As for the device itself, I said, by now thinking out loud, since it fell within the Soviet zone of influence, it hardly conformed to the plan that Kammler had outlined to Speer in Berlin.
It was then that Witkowski, who had listened for several minutes patiently enough, interrupted me. His research had uncovered the existence of an SS-run "Special Evacuation Kommando (command, team or unit)" that had evacuated the "Bell" and its supporting documentation prior to the Russians' overrunning the facility. The evidence said it had been shipped out, destination God only knew where; except it wasn't there when the Russians arrived.
Despite the warmth of my hotel room, I felt a sudden chill. For all the months I had been following Kammler, he had been a remote figure, even at his closest in the wet, freezing-cold underground galleries at Nordhausen. Now, fleetingly, I felt him in the same room as me. "And the scientists?" I asked. "What happened to them?" I thought the line had gone dead, but it was just Witkowski taking his time, choosing his words. "They were taken out and shot by the SS between April 28 and May 4, 1945. Records show that there were 62 of them, many of them Germans. There were no survivors, but then that's hardly surprising."
He paused. "It's quite clear that someone had gone to very great lengths to clean up."
It was the second time in as many weeks that this expression had been used in the context of Kammler. Within the hour, I had booked myself on a flight to Warsaw.
It was thus — simply and irrevocably — that I was pulled into the extraordinary story of the Bell.
Chapter 19
We left the Polish capital in the haze of an overcast dawn, moving quickly past drab living blocks half-hidden by a frenzy of construction work.
Witkowski drove, apologizing in advance for the schedule ahead. The Wenceslas Mine was 50 kilometers or more the other side of Wroclaw and Wroclaw, formerly Breslau of the German gau of Lower Silesia, was around 350 km from Warsaw. The drive would be hard, he said, much of the route consisting of poorly maintained single-lane roads, but all being well we would reach our destination before sunset. In the meantime, he would bring me up to speed on his research, which had started with a phone call from a Polish government official.
Witkowski, a former defense journalist, did not want to tag his in formant, but he assured me that his integrity was impeccable. The official had permitted him to view some documents, to make notes, but not to take anything away with him.
Witkowski had taken him at his word and transcribed most of what he had been allowed to view verbatim.
At the airport, his stocky appearance was just as I had imagined him. He was younger than I, with a thickset expression, high Slavic cheekbones and dark, intensely serious eyes. From the word go, we talked about little else but the research that united us. Had Witkowski been in any way a lightweight, I would have turned around and got on the first plane home. But when I saw him, I knew he was OK. There were aspects to him that I saw in myself. Like me, Witkowski was consumed by a thirst for knowledge. Knowledge of a highly specialized kind.
After months on the road it felt good to be sharing data again. And the very fact he'd let me in on his discovery told me that Witkowski felt the same way. We were walking a tightrope. If either of us were wrong about the data we'd collated, it'd be a long fall. On the phone, Witkowski had convinced me that he could take me to places that only he and a select group of local researchers knew about. The papers that Witkowksi had been allowed to transcribe detailed the activities of a special unit of the Soviet secret intelligence service, the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB. Attached to this unit were two Polish officers, General Jakub Prawin, head of the Polish military mission in Berlin, and Colonel Wladyslaw Szymanski, a senior member of his staff.
It was during their "debriefing" of a former high-ranking official from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Central Security Office or RSHA, that Prawin and Szymanski learned of "General Plan 1945."
Their interrogation subject, Rudolf Schuster, had worked at the RSHA — one of four security organizations run by the SS-controlled Sicherheitsdienst or Security Service — until his deployment on June 4, 1944, to the Special Evacuation Kommando, an organization unknown to the NKVD, which prided itself on knowing everything. Schuster, it transpired, had been responsible for the ELF's transportation arrangements.
Schuster's information must have set alarm bells ringing at the highest Soviet levels, for Prawin and Szymanski had learned that the man behind General Plan 1945 was none other than Martin Bormann, Hitler's deputy, last seen fleeing the Führerbunker on the night of May 1. Though supposedly killed in the attempted breakout, Bormann's body had never been formally identified. Tying Bormann into a scheme for some kind of evacuation procedure, therefore, had disturbing implications, but pumping Schuster was evidently pointless as it was clear he was only privy to the transportation details. The SS, operating its traditional compartmentalization system of security, had kept him from the broader aspects of the plan. It was apparent, however, that much of the Kommando^ activities centered on the territory of Lower Silesia, now southwest Poland. The next piece of the jigsaw was provided by SS-Obergruppenführer Jakob Sporrenberg, who from June 28,1944 had commanded a section of the Kommando attached to the Gauleiter of Lower Silesia, Karl Hanke. Hanke, like all gauleiters, who were the party's representatives in the gaus or regions, was answerable directly to Bormann, the party chief.
Sporrenberg had been captured by the British in May 1945, but was handed over to the Poles because he was a general in the SS and had been active in Poland, the scene of many of the SS-run death camps. Had they realized Sporrenberg's true brief, it is unlikely they would have been quite so quick to release him.
Sporrenberg was a big shot, one of a scattering of senior SS police generals of exalted rank and status positioned to give Himmler absolute power throughout Germany in the closing years of the war. To put his seniority in perspective, he carried the same rank as Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the brutal Austrian who succeeded Heydrich as head of the Reich Security Office, the Nazis' central agency for internal counterespionage and repression. For Sporrenberg to have been assigned the command of the Special Evacuation Kommando unit attached specifically to Hanke's gau of Lower Silesia shows how important Bormann's evacuation plan was considered to be.
And, I thought, just how secret. There has never been any official acknowledgment of the existence of the Special Evacuation Kommando.
Exactly what, I asked Witkowski, was the Kommando tasked with evacuating?
The taciturn Pole, concentrating on the road ahead, flashed me a look. Patience. Everything in its own time.
Sporrenberg, he continued, was sent for trial and sentenced to death in 1952, but not before he had testified in secret before the Polish courts about his role as one of Lower Silesia's main plenipotentiaries for the evacuation of high-grade technology, documents and personnel or his part in the murder of 62 scientists and lab workers associated with a top secret SS-run project in a mine near Ludwigsdorf, a village in the hills southeast of Waldenburg, close to the Czech border.