Prague, Czechoslovakia
May 3, 1945
News of Hitler’s suicide had reached the SS general a few days ago, on April 30. For more than a month, Streicher had been working out his exit strategy, for it was evident to him—with his knowledge of all the wonder weapons in the SS arsenal—that there would be no last-minute breakthrough in time to win the war.
Streicher held no illusions about his fate. As the engineer who had conceived the extermination camps, raising the throughput of the gas chambers and ovens to sixty thousand
Untermenschen
a day, he would be high on the list of SS officers to be hunted down by the Allies and hanged for war crimes.
Plus, there was Dora, the slave-labor camp with the sky-high kill rate. It wasn’t for nothing that Himmler had rewarded Streicher with the rank of Obergruppenführer. That took the spilling of buckets of subhuman blood.
His only chance at surviving was to bargain. And of all those at the pinnacle of Nazi power—including Hitler and Himmler—Streicher was in the best position to negotiate. Last August, Himmler had named him special commissioner for secret weapons—weapons that had no counterparts in the arsenals of the three Allied powers. And from the bunker in Berlin, Hitler had recently conferred on him his last, highest, and most absurd title: plenipotentiary of the führer for jet aircraft.
Consequently, all wonder weapons in the Nazis’ Pandora’s box—both those in existence and those in development—were Streicher’s to do with as he wanted.
And what he wanted was to save his own skin.
Word that the U.S. First Army was heading for Nordhausen and the V-2 factory in the Mittelwerk tunnels had prompted Streicher to play the first card in his poker hand on Easter Sunday, a month ago. Late in the day on April 1, he had ordered his staff to draw up a list of the top five hundred scientists at work on the V-2 rockets. Then—under the protection of a hundred Death’s Head guards—he’d ordered them evacuated four hundred miles south to the Bavarian Alps, where rumor was that the SS had established a redoubt for the last stand of the Third Reich.
Von Braun, still burdened by the heavy cast resulting from his car accident in March, had been driven to Oberammergau. The other chosen rocketeers had traveled in style by train: a sleek, modern engine tugging twelve sleeping cars and a diner that served good food and fine wine. The so-called Vengeance Express.
Despite Hitler’s scorched-earth directive—“If the war is lost, let the nation perish!”—Streicher had other plans. His intention was to hold von Braun and the rocket specialists hostage, offering them to the Americans or other Allies in exchange for both his life and his freedom. Killing them all was his backup plan.
But no sooner had Streicher issued his order than he was summoned to Berlin to report directly to the führer in his bunker. With Gestapo meat hooks waiting for those who turned against the Reich to save their own skins, it was probable that the general had doomed himself.
It had been a gamble to take his sons to Berlin, but he’d hoped that Hitler would believe no traitor would bring his children along.
The general had been lucky.
His bluff had paid off.
Hitler’s sole concern had been
die Glocke.
Streicher had returned to the V-2 factory early in the morning on April 4 to find the sky above Nordhausen aflame from RAF firebombing in the preceding two nights. The Mittelwerk was safe, but not for long, because the U.S. First Army was thundering in fast. Himmler’s directive—that
Untermenschen
not be allowed to become witnesses against the Black Corps—dictated that Streicher herd nearly thirty thousand slaves in the Mittelwerk camps into the Kohnstein tunnels and blow them and the rockets up. That, however, would damage his bargaining chip.
Instead, the scheming general had played another card. Following Himmler’s own practice of moving inmates from threatened camps to safer ones, he had ordered all usable slaves to be evacuated to Bergen-Belsen by train or death march. The forty-five hundred rocketeers not chosen for the Vengeance Express to Oberammergau were to scatter to villages nestled throughout the Harz Mountains.
The Americans would arrive to find the factory in working order. The unassembled rockets in the tunnels would whet their appetite for the men who knew how to make the missiles blast off. And if they wanted the scientists, Streicher would be ready to deal.
And so the general had seen his sons off on one of the trains that moved the living skeletons away to other masters. Then he, too, had left the rocket works for the Bavarian Alps.
* * *
Oberammergau was an Alpine village of peasant woodcarvers and brightly painted houses. The spiked, snowy peaks towered high above the SS compound where von Braun and his elite rocketeers were being held. The barbed wire surrounding them was meant to keep the scientists in, not the Americans out. Streicher, meanwhile, was snuggled in at the “Hotel Jesus,” nicknamed for its Nazi innkeeper, who played the role of Christ in the village’s historic passion play. It was there, on April 11, the day that Nordhausen and Dora fell to the U.S. Army, that SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher had last met SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun.
“Schnapps?” the general offered.
“Thank you,” accepted the haughty aristocrat.
The SS engineer snapped his fingers at the hovering waiter while his other hand motioned the physicist to a chair by the fire. The chat took place in a cheery room off the lobby, with an SS guard outside the door. Heads of big-antlered trophies hung on the sooty walls, their glassy eyes staring down blankly at the men below. Von Braun’s seat faced the machine pistol that Streicher had propped conspicuously against his chair.
“How do you find your accommodations, Major?”
“Secure,” von Braun said dryly.
“And your team?”
“They’re as comfortable as can be.”
“And your broken arm?”
“It’s causing me distress. I plan to have it looked at in the hospital in Sonthofen.”
“Is your team in a position to recommence research?”
“Yes,” said von Braun, mustering as much enthusiasm as he could to reply to Streicher’s questions. It was obvious that he was still spooked from his arrest by the Gestapo early last year, after he had tried to retain some measure of control over the rockets he had created. Ostensibly, he’d been charged with treason—for sabotaging the V-2 project by concentrating more on space flight in the future than on crushing the Allies now—with the added allegation that he had a plane ready to fly him to London with blueprints for the Nazi missile that he planned to hand over to the enemy.
Treason was punishable by death, but von Braun was too valuable to be killed. Though spared, the rocketeer was intimidated. That’s why Streicher was reinforcing the threat today: to make sure that the uppity baron’s son knew that he would be as dead as the trophies on these walls if he stepped out of line.
Streicher played poker for keeps.
“Have you heard of my recent appointment to plenipotentiary for jet aircraft?”
“No,” said von Braun. “Congratulations.”
Was that a hint of sarcasm?
Streicher rose to his feet, a sign the meeting was over. Von Braun would go without schnapps. No “one for the road” was in the cards that day.
“I will be leaving here shortly for an indefinite period. Production of the Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter requires attention. In my absence, SS-Major Kummer will assume command. If you need anything to boost your work, ask him.”
“Thank you, General.”
“
Heil
Hitler!” Streicher’s arm snapped up and out.
“
Heil
Hitler!” Von Braun returned the salute.
Satisfied, the general watched the major depart, convinced that von Braun had folded his last treasonous hand.
In fact, the rocketeer would soon be calling Streicher’s bluff.
* * *
It wasn’t the Messerschmitt 262 that had lured the general away. It was the top-secret Streicherstab—
Stab,
as in “special projects staff”—hidden away behind the Skoda Works, a huge industrial complex in the vassal Nazi state of Czechoslovakia that manufactured munitions and guns for Hitler’s Reich. This was the black world of the Black Corps, a research-and-development think-tank so secret that it might as well not exist.
Had rockets and jets been the only wonder weapons in Streicher’s bargaining chip, the smartest way for him to play his hand would have been to hole up in his Munich headquarters and wait for the Americans. By April 17, the GIs of the 6th Army Group were days or hours shy of Munich, so why had one of the most hated butchers in the SS forsaken that best bet to run east toward the dreaded Russians?
Why indeed!
A good poker player always knows the true value of his hand. The V-2 and the jet plane were Nazi technologies the Allies had earmarked for plunder, but Streicher wasn’t sure he had a big enough ante in either to get in the game. The Me-262, the Arado Ar-234, and the Heinkel He-162 jet fighters were in widespread use in these closing days of the war. The Allies could seize their blueprints, along with the engineers who had designed them, from any number of factories around the Reich.
But with the V-2, Streicher held a stronger card. The American army had captured at least a hundred rockets in various stages of construction at the Mittelwerk, while the general kept von Braun and his rocketeers at arm’s length in the Alps. The brains behind the missiles were the key to their future. Yet even if Streicher did hand over the V-2 engineers, what would stop Eisenhower from reneging on the deal and sending him to the gallows as a war criminal?
Nothing.
Nothing, that is, except a sweetener to the pot, like the follow-on technology under development at the Streicherstab, a second generation of wonder weapons that would relegate the V-2 to the slag heap of Hitler’s arsenal. Wonder weapons like nuclear power plants for rockets and anti-aircraft laser rays to shoot down planes and—on top of all that fantastic technology—
die Glocke
and the
Flugkreisel.
If Streicher hoped to save his skin, he would need to offer the Pentagon something so spectacular that the U.S. Army would have no choice but to overlook the deaths of those six million Jews and all the slaves killed in the underground V-2 factory.
The first stop on Streicher’s Czechoslovakian odyssey had been the twin hubs of Pilsen and Brno.
Death’s Head country.
The scientists in the dual and separate think-tanks secreted away at the Skoda Works in Pilsen and Brno were the best brains that Germany had to offer. Selected for their brilliance as engineers and physicists, not for their allegiance to the Nazi Party, the Streicherstab scientists were culled from research institutes throughout the Reich. Geniuses submitted papers to a central office for scientific reports, which promptly passed them on to Streicher for assessment. The general then chose the most promising quantum-leap candidates for his special projects staff at the Skoda Works.
Two
think-tanks.
Pilsen
and
Brno.
Rivals competing to create the same quantum-leap weapons.
The central administration building at the Pilsen Skoda Works had been almost completely destroyed a few weeks back in an air raid by American B-17s. The scientists were all away devising tests of
die Glocke
in the Wenceslas Mine, so the general had the secret facility at the central core of the industrial complex all to himself. It had taken him days to bundle up the blueprints generated by the Pilsen special projects group and load them into his special evacuation
Kommando
plane. Everything else was torched to clean out the lab. Streicher and his six-engine, ultra-long-range Junkers 390 had then flown on to Brno—also abandoned by scientists off at the Wenceslas Mine—to retrieve the secret documents of that group too.
It was at Brno that he’d heard the news of Hitler’s suicide.
With no time to lose, an impatient Streicher had mobilized dozing members of his
Kommando
with a burst from his machine gun. This part of the SS domain was neither German nor Czech. The local people spoke German and were terrified of the Slavs to the east, so they didn’t know if they should stay or flee to the west. Columns of ragged Wehrmacht troops were in retreat, rolling toward Germany and the relative safety of surrender to American GIs. No one knew whether to fly the white rag of capitulation or the red, blue, and white Czech flag.
The war was all but over. Everybody knew it—except for Waffen-SS fanatics like those at Streicher’s next destination. They had announced their intention to defend this stronghold of Hitler’s Third Reich to the last bullet.
It was in Prague—while eradicating every reference to his double-barreled Pilsen and Brno special projects think-tanks—that Streicher had received an urgent phone call from a Gestapo spy in Oberammergau, informing him of the treason committed by SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun.
* * *
The way Streicher heard it was this.
On Easter Sunday, April 1—the same day
he
had ordered the evacuation of von Braun and his top five hundred rocketeers to Oberammergau—von Braun had caught a report that American tanks were only a few miles to the south of the Harz. Like Streicher, von Braun had feared that Hitler’s scorched-earth policy would destroy his bargaining chip—the tons of irreplaceable V-2 documents and blueprints that were his life’s work.
On that same day, it had become obvious to von Braun that he and the other evacuees on the Vengeance Express were to be held hostage in the Alps, so he had decided to create some leverage of his own. With the general on his way to Berlin to meet the führer and he himself on his way to Bavaria by car, he had instructed two of his closest confidants—Dieter Huzel, his chief of staff, and Bernhard Tessmann, the designer of the Peenemünde test site—to hide his treasure trove.