Sporrenberg, operating under the political oversight of Gauleiter Hanke, had been in charge of a Kommando cell tasked with "northern route" evacuations via Norway, which remained in German hands until the very end of the war.
The NKVD/Polish intelligence team learned that SS-Obersturm bannführer Otto Neumann, who had commanded a Kommando detachment in Breslau, had been responsible for all southbound shipments to Spain and South America.
Neumann was never caught, but was reputed to have escaped to Rhodesia, where he was supposedly sighted after the war.
According to some estimates, Witkowski said, the air bridge estab lished by the Kommando's southern command between the Reich's remaining occupied territories and neutral, but Axis-sympathetic Spain managed to evacuate 12,000 tons of high-tech equipment and documentation in the final months of the war using any commandeered Luftwaffe transport it could lay its hands on.
The Kommando southern command had one other exit route available to it up to the end of the war — albeit an even more hazardous one. Using some of the northern Adriatic ports that remained in German hands up to the surrender, a brave or foolish U-boat commander could conceivably have run the gauntlet of Allied air and maritime superiority to evacuate cargo and personnel by sea.
But it was Sporrenberg's northern route operations that underpinned the reason for the trip, because it was Sporrenberg who provided the only details that have ever come to light on the Bell.
The experiment started out at a top secret SS-run facility near Leubus (Lubiaz in modern-day Poland), northwest of Breslau, in early-mid 1944. With the Soviets' rapid push into Poland during late 1944/early 1945, the unit was transferred to a castle on a hill above the ancient village of Fuerstenstein (Ksiaz), 45 kilometers to the south, close to the Lower Silesian coal-mining center of Waldenburg. From there, it was moved again to the mine near Ludwigsdorf (Ludwikowice), 20 kilometers the other side of Waldenburg, nestling in the northern reaches of the Sudeten Mountains. The Wenceslas Mine, where the Bell ended up, had been requisitioned by the S S as part of a neighboring underground weapons complex, code-named Riese—"Giant."
Riese, only part-completed by the end of the war, was an attempt to transform an entire mountain into an underground weapons production center. The many tens of kilometers of galleries that had been tunneled by the end of the war had been clawed from the rock by inmates drafted in from the nearby concentration camp of Gross-Rosen. Modern excavations of Riese show that the S S had been attempting to link it to the Wenceslas mine via a tunnel almost ten kilometers long.
By mid-afternoon, Witkowski and I had reached Wroclaw, a smoky industrial city on the banks of the River Oder that in 1945, as the "fortress" city of Breslau, had held out against the Red Army for more than 70 days, despite total encirclement.
In September 1944, long before the Russians were at Breslau's gates, the German military commander, General Krause, proposed the evacuation of 200,000 civilians, but Gauleiter Hanke refused, seeing it as a sign of weakness.
Four months later, as the Soviet ring of steel closed around the city, Hanke finally relented and women and children were permitted to leave.
But in the depths of a winter that was cold enough to freeze the sweeping waters of the Oder, those that weren't cut down, killed or raped by the Russians succumbed in their thousands to the subzero temperatures.
In February, the troops of SS Fortress Battalion "Besselein" launched a ferocious counterattack in an attempt to break the siege. While the German troops met the Russians head-on in some of the heaviest streetfighting since Stalingrad, Hanke exhorted his citizens to victory under the slogan "Every house a fortress." He then ordered a ruthless conscription of manpower that produced five regiments of Volkssturm— old men beyond normal fighting age — and Hitler Youth. Following the briefest of training regimes, principally in the use of antitank "panzerfausts," they went out and died in the thousands. We edged forward in the heavy traffic, soon finding ourselves on a long wide thoroughfare, the former Kaiserstrasse, which by April 1945 had been transformed into a landing strip for medium transport aircraft after the Russians captured the airport. It signaled the beginning of the end, but still the defenders fought on.
German Red Cross flights of Junkers Ju 52s removed 6,000 of the more seriously wounded and beneath the dense overcast that merged with the factory smoke a half century later, I could almost hear the rumble of trimotors as they swept into land, touching down at night under the guiding light of flame torches, and the crump-wump of artillery explosions in the suburbs.
By this stage, the defenders — soldiers and civilians alike — were forced to battle the Russians on all conceivable fronts, including the sewers beneath the streets.
On May 4, two days after the Russians took Berlin, a delegation of churchmen begged General Niehoff, Krause's replacement, to surrender. Two days later, he agreed and on May 7 the Red Army marched in.
Furious at having been held at bay by such a vastly inferior force, the Soviets launched heavy reprisals against the soldiers and citizenry of Breslau; a fate that Gauleiter Hanke chose not to share. He had flown out of the city on May 4 in a Fieseier Storch liaison aircraft to take up his post as successor to the disgraced Himmler, whose surrender negotiations had been uncovered by Hitler shortly before his suicide.
Hanke, local administrator of Bormann's enigmatic General Plan 1945, the man to whom the Breslau-based detachment of the Special Evacuation Kommando was directly acountable, was never seen again.
When I told Witkowski about Kammler, how he too had vanished off the face of the earth, he was unmoved. It was simply part of a pattern, he told me. Hanke, Kammler … there were dozens of high-ranking former SS or Party members that had never been called to account. They had simply disappeared. Many of them shared the distinction of having had access to highly advanced technology.
In the immediate aftermath of his death sentence, Sporrenberg, head of the Special Evacuation unit's Breslau operations, was smuggled to Russia, milked by the NKVD in one last brutal round of interrogation, then disposed of. Schuster, in charge of the unit's transportation arrangements, died "mysteriously" in 1947 and Szymanski and Prawin, the two Polish intelligence officers who'd interrogated them, also met untimely ends after their release from the special NKVD investigation cell — Szymanski in an air crash and Prawin in a drowning accident.
"What was it that killed them?" I asked. "Their knowledge of the Special Evacuation Kommando or the fact they knew about the mine?"
Witkowski kept his eyes on the road. "The Germans maintained a special detachment of aircraft, probably Ju 290s, and a single Ju 390, both rare heavy transport types, based at Opeln — Opole today — a hundred kilometers from here. Witnesses say the planes were well camouflaged and that some were painted with yellow and blue identification markings, which suggests they were masquerading as Swedish planes. If so, it was almost certainly a unit of KG 200, the Luftwaffe special operations wing, which frequently flew aircraft under the flag of enemy or neutral countries. The point is, the Evacuation Kommando had the ability to move thousands of tons of documentation, equipment and personnel, and they could move it north or south. Sporrenberg's brief was to go north. The whole operation was highly secret. But nothing, it seems, was more secret than the Bell."