Georg Rickhey was a tunnel engineer, and his value to the U.S. military was the knowledge he had gained while overseeing vast underground building projects for the Reich. A memo in Rickhey’s dossier, written by the army’s Office of the Deputy Director of Intelligence, kept his most powerful negotiating secret a secret: “He was in charge of all tunnel operations directly under Hitler’s headquarters in Berlin.” Georg Rickhey had overseen the building of the Führerbunker, where Hitler lived the last three months and two weeks of his life. With its more than thirty rooms, cryptlike corridors, multiple emergency exits, and hundreds of stairs, all located more than thirty feet under Berlin, the Führerbunker was considered an engineering tour de force. The army was impressed by how well Hitler’s Führerbunker had withstood years of heavy Allied bombing and was interested in learning from Georg Rickhey how to build similar underground command centers of its own.
As the Cold War progressed, the U.S. Army would begin the secret construction of such facilities, notably ones that could continue to function in the aftermath of a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack. It would take decades for journalists to reveal that, starting in the early 1950s, several sprawling, multifloor, underground command centers had been secretly built for this purpose, including one in the Catoctin Mountains, called Raven Rock Mountain Complex, or Site R, and another in the Blue Ridge Mountains, called Mount Weather.
Georg Rickhey’s expertise in underground engineering was not limited to the construction of the Führerbunker. During the war, he had also served as a director of the Reich’s Demag motorcar company, where he oversaw the construction of a massive underground facility where tanks had been assembled. And as general manager of the Mittelwerk, he oversaw the construction of the rocket assembly facility near Nordhausen. In his army intelligence dossier, it was noted that Rickhey had overseen the underground construction of more than 1,500,000 square feet of space. At Wright Field, Rickhey was meant to start consulting with American engineers on underground engineering projects for the army. But that work was slow and Rickhey was given a second job. Despite poor English skills, Rickhey was put in charge of examining V-2 documents captured at Nordhausen and, in his words, the “rendering of opinions on reports.”
In the late summer of 1946 Albert Patin and Georg Rickhey started running a black market operation at the Hilltop, selling booze and cigarettes to their colleagues at premium prices. Rickhey had years of experience in wartime black market operations. Military intelligence would later learn that during the war, what little rations the slave laborers were allotted by the Speer ministry, Rickhey would sometimes sell off at a price. At Wright Field, Rickhey and Patin’s black market business quickly expanded, and the men enlisted outside assistance from Rickhey’s sister, Adelheid Rickhey, who was living in a hotel in New Jersey at the time. Adelheid Rickhey agreed to move to Ohio to help the men expand their black market business into Dayton and beyond. Because the Germans’ mail was monitored, it did not take long for the higher-ups at Wright Field to learn what was going on, but the Army Air Forces took no action against either man. The business continued into the fall of 1946, when it came to a head.
In their private time Rickhey and Patin liked to gamble. They also liked to drink. The two men regularly hosted parties at the Hilltop, staying up late drinking and playing cards. One night, in the fall of 1946, a sixty-three-year-old German aircraft engineer named Hermann Nehlsen decided he had had enough. It was a little after midnight during the second week of October when Rickhey, Albert Patin, and a third man were playing cards. The noise woke up Hermann Nehlsen, who knocked on the door and told the three cardplayers to quiet down. After Nehlsen’s second request was ignored, he opened the door, walked into the room, and turned off the lamp on the card table. Rickhey, by Nehlsen’s account, was drunk. As Nehlsen was leaving, Rickhey lit a candle and laughed at his German colleague. A man “could still play cards with a good kosher candle,” Rickhey joked.