The capturing of Nazi scientists would now become a watershed. One by one, across the Reich, Hitler’s scientists were taken into custody and interrogated. The day after Dachau was liberated, 375 miles to the north, Soviet commanders planned their final assault on the iconic Reichstag building, in Berlin. Sometime around 3:30 in the afternoon, inside the Führerbunker, Hitler fired a bullet into his head. The Russians were just five hundred meters from the Führerbunker’s emergency exit door. Around the corner, under the Reich Chancellery, Red Army soldiers took over the underground subway tunnels, including the one Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber had been using as a hospital. Soviet film footage—alleged by Schreiber to have been filmed days later as a reenactment—shows Schreiber coming out of a cellar with his hands over his head.
Up north, Siegfried Knemeyer was captured by the British. Baumbach, Knemeyer, and Speer never escaped to Greenland after all. Shortly after Hitler killed himself, Baumbach was ordered by Grand Admiral D?nitz to go to the small town of Eutin, forty miles north of the city of Hamburg. Hitler had named D?nitz his successor; D?nitz set up his new government in the naval barracks at Eutin because it was one of the few places not yet controlled by the Allied forces.
Siegfried Knemeyer hadn’t been invited to join the new inner circle. Baumbach let him keep the BMW and Knemeyer fled west. On a country road outside Hamburg, Knemeyer spotted a vehicle filled with British soldiers on approach. He knew that the BMW he was driving would be recognized as belonging to a senior military officer, so he pulled off the highway, ditched the car, and fled on foot. British soldiers found him hiding under a bridge and arrested him. Knemeyer was taken to a newly liberated concentration camp outside Hamburg, where hundreds of other German officers and Nazi Party officials were held. He was a prisoner of war now and was accordingly stripped of his valuables and military insignia. Years later, Knemeyer would share with his son that he managed to hide his one remaining meaningful possession in his shoe: a 1,000 Swiss franc note given to him by Albert Speer.
Von Braun and Dornberger were not captured. So confident were they as to their future use by the U.S. Army that they turned themselves in. Since departing from Nordhausen several weeks before, von Braun, Dornberger, and hundreds of other men from the rocket program had been hiding out in a remote ski village in the Bavarian Alps. Their resort, Haus Ingeburg, was located at an elevation of 3,850 feet along a windy mountain road then called the Adolf Hitler Pass (known before and after the war as the Oberjoch Pass). Thanks to the resources of the SS, the scientists had plenty of fine food and drink. There was a sun terrace and, as von Braun reflected after the war, little for any of them to do but eat, drink, sunbathe, and admire the snow-capped Allg?u Alps. “There I was living royally in a ski hotel on a mountain plateau,” von Braun later recalled, “the French below us to the west, and the Americans to the south. But no one, of course, suspected we were there.”
On the night of May 1, 1945, the scientists were listening to the national radio as it played Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 when, at 10:26, the music was interrupted by a long military drumroll. “Our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery,” the radio announcer declared. The fight was a fabrication. But Hitler’s death spurred Wernher von Braun to action. Von Braun approached General Dornberger, suggesting that they move quickly to make a deal with the Americans. “I agree with you, Wernher,” Dornberger was overheard saying late that night. “It’s our obligation to put our baby into the right hands.”