The End Game: Racing for the Remains On April 11, 1945, the spearhead of the advancing American troops, Combat Command B (CCB) of the 3rd Armored Division, under Brig. Gen. Truman Boudinot, entered Nordhausen. Here CCB was to pause and link up with the 104th Infantry (Timberwolf) Division before continuing its drive to the east. Third Armored had been warned by Army Intelligence to expect something a little unusual" in the Nordhausen area, but they knew nothing of the horrors to be soon discover. One of the first sickening encounters took place at the Boelcke-Kaserne (also called the Nordhausen Camp), a former German military barracks that the SS had used as a dumping ground for prisoners from Mittelbau camps and projects who were too weak or diseased to include in the transports and forced marches out of the area. The dead also included prisoners killed in an Allied bombing raid aimed at Nordhausen. An estimated 1,300 to 2,500 corpses were found here, along with a few survivors, cared for by the 104th Division's medical staff. Then, troops from the 104th and Third Armored discovered Dora and the entrances to the Mittelwerk tunnels. A first person account of this can be found at: http://members.aol.com/Galione3/timberwolf415b001.htm Maj. William Castille, Intelligence Officer for CCB, is quoted as having said that entering the Mittelwerk tunnels was like being in a magician's cave." The Americans were stunned to discover orderly rows of V-2 parts and subassemblies stretched out through the tunnels. Work had stopped at Mittelwerk on April 10, 1945, but the assembly line was left with its electric power and ventilation systems still running, as if the former occupants had gone out for lunch, and would return after a while. News of the discovery of Mittelwerk was passed back to Col. Roger Toftoy, Chief of Ordinance Technical Intelligence in Paris. Toftoy had already been requested by Col. Trichel, Chief of the Army Ordinance Rocket Branch at the Pentagon, to acquire 100 V-2s and ship these back to White Sands Proving Ground (WSPG) in New Mexico for further study. Col. Toftoy reported to Col. Joel G. Holmes, and thence to Maj. Gen. Henry B. Taylor, Chief of Ordinance, European Theater of Operations. To support his mission, Col. Toftoy had organized special rapid response ordinance technical intelligence teams attached to each Army Group. These teams were equipped with cameras, radios, transport, and qualified personnel whose job it was to ferret out interesting weapons technology and record it. There was also a gypsy teama sort of roving bandthat Toftoy himself could deploy to check-out any interesting discovery. The team designated to investigate the Mittelwerk tunnels (Special Mission V-2) was headed by Maj. James Hamill of Ordinance Technical Intelligence. He was assisted by Maj. William Bromley in charge of technical operations and by Dr. Louis Woodruff, an MIT electrical engineering professor, as special advisor. The team was head quartered in Fulda, about 80 miles southwest of Nordhausen. Trichel had also designated Maj. Robert Staver (from the Rocket Section of the Research and Development branch of Gen. Saylers Ordinance Office) to direct the effort to find and interrogate the German rocket specialists who had built the V-2. On April 20, 1945, Staver flew from London to Paris and prepared to leave for the Nordhausen area. Before leaving Paris, Staver left word for Dr. Richard Porter, a young electrical engineer who worked for General Electric and headed up an effort called Project Hermes, intended to find and catalog German rocket technology and personnel. By April 20, however, things were moving quicklythe Russians were attacking the suburbs of Berlinit was Hitler's 56th birthday and he was immobilized 50 feet underground in his Reich Chancellery Bunker. Shortly thereafter, on May 1 Hitler's death was announced to the German people. Prior to that, however, the Germans in charge of the V-2 program had been maneuvering for leverage in the end-game of the war. Late in March, SS General Kammler had selected from the 5,000 or so German rocket scientists and engineers who were living and working in the Mittelbau area a group of about 500 key workers. These workers, including von Braun and Dornberger, were rounded up by the SS, loaded on a special Kammler train, and sent 400 miles south to the Bavarian Alps, where a Bavarian Redoubt was rumored to be being established for the last stand of Nazism against the advancing Americans. Von Braun, however, correctly suspected that Kammler has preparing to hold him and the Nordhausen evacuees hostage as a bargaining chip with the Americans, and sought to create some leverage of his own. On April 3, 1945, he sent a convoy to carry 14 tons of the most important V-2 plans and documents and conceal these in an abandoned salt mine in the tiny village of Dornten. The roof of the mine was then dynamited, concealing the cache. On May 2, 1945, the antitank company of the 324th Infantry of the 44th ID was patrolling in the area of Reutte, just over the Austrian border from southern Bavaria, when Magnus von Braun, Wernhers brother, came pedaling down the road to announce that the leaders of the V-2 team, who were holed up just ahead in a small hotel, wished to surrender to the Americans. These included the von Brauns, Gen. Dornberger and his chief of staff, Hans Lindenberg, Bernard Tessmann, and Dieter Huzel, the last two of whom had been the ones who had stashed the V-2 documents in Dornten. After the general German surrender on May 7, 1945, the V-2 entire group of V-2 scientists and engineers was moved to a prisoner enclosure in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where a variety of Allied interrogators questioned them. Meanwhile, Army Ordinances Special Mission V-2 was busy doing an inventory of the Mittelwerk tunnels and trying to figure out how to disassemble, pack, and move a huge quantity of V-2 parts and subassemblies to the port of Antwerp, and thence to WSPG in the United States. One of their first moves was to call for some U.S. troops with basic mechanical skillsin this case, the 144th Motor Vehicle Assembly (MVA) Company, which had been working the docks in Cherbourg. This unit arrived at Mittelwerk on May 18th, and joined the 319th Ordinance Battalion for the task of moving V-2 parts out of Mittelbau. After rounding up captured German rolling stock and clearing a way into the tunnels, Special Mission V-2 succeeded in loading up and sending off its first 40 car trainload of V-2 parts On May 22, 1945. Shipments like these reportedly continued for the next nine days, and on May 31st, the last of the 341 rail cars left Nordhausen for Erfurt, and then Antwerp. Although the British properly protested that by prior agreement half the captured V-2s were to be turned over to them, the Americans ignored these protests. Sixteen Liberty ships, bearing the parts for 100 V-2 rockets, finally sailed from Antwerp, bound for New Orleans and WSPG. But the V-2 documentation hidden by Von Brauns staff was still unaccounted for, and without it, the Americans would have had a hard time making operational V-2s from their boxes of parts. Since April 30th, Major Staver and Ed Hull, a GE engineer from the Hermes Project, had been in the Nordhausen area searching the plants and smaller laboratories for V-2 technicians. On May 12 Staver located his first V-2 engineer, Karl Otto Fleisher, who began to put him in touch with other Mittelbau engineers who had not been part of the caravan to Bavaria. Then on May 14 Staver found Walther Riedel, Chief of the rocket motor and structural design section, who was interrogated through May 18. Riedel emphasized the use of the V-2 for space travel, and urged the Americans to import perhaps 40 of the top V-2 engineers to America. As it turned out, Fleisher was the only person remaining in the Nordhausen area who was aware of the general location of the V-2 documents hidden by von Brauns group. Staver succeeded in tricking him into believing that von Braun had already authorized him to reveal the location of the papers, and on May 20 Fleisher named the Dornten tunnel. But by this point, the Americans had only one week to go before the Dornten area would fall into the hands of the British, who would then remove the documents themselves. There followed a frantic scramble to locate sufficient manpower to excavate the demolished tunnel and enough transport to move the document crates back to Nordhausen. On May 27, with only a few hours to spare before the British occupied the area, the Americans succeeded. The stolen documents were quickly shipped to Paris and then back to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. On June 8, 1945, senior Mittelbau engineers who had been part of the von Braun contingent arrived back in the Nordhausen area at Stavers request, to assist him in identifying which of the thousands of German technicians and their families should be offered evacuation to the American Zone, in advance of the Russian occupation of the Nordhausen area, which had been finally scheduled for June 21. Then, less than 24 hours before the Russians arrived, some 1,000 German V-2 personnel and their families were gathered up and placed aboard a 50 car train, which finally made it to the small town of Witzenhausen, 40 miles to the southwest and just inside the American Zone. Months later, at White Sands in the New Mexico desert, the first reassembled V-2 was successfully launched on June 28, 1946. In 1979 the U.S. Congress opened a special investigation to uncover Nazi war criminals living in the United States. One of von Braun's colleagues, Arthur Rudolph, former Saturn V project director, was implicated in a report describing the use of slave laborers at the Mittelwerk. Rudolph was accused of prisoner exploitation during the war, however, at the time the OSI had no evidense (it was years later that a 1943 report came to light in which he seems to have suggested the initial use of forced labor at Peenemünde). The main body of evidence they had against Rudolph was his own testimony which he gave voluntarily without legal council. Rudolph didn't want any publicity and quietly left the United States after he was coerced into renouncing his citizenship through threats and intimidation against his NASA pension and family. Later, the German government asked the OSI for its evidense and received nothing. They launched their own investigation and found nothing against Rudolph that warranted prosecution. After helping the United States win the moon, Rudolph felt betrayed. The tunnels of the Mittelwerk languished in obscurity for almost 50 years, remaining buried in history until the German reunification in the early 1990s. By 1995 the Dora concentration camp memorial had opened, finally revealing the horrors and suffering, commemorating the prisoners who died to build Hitler's ballistic missile.