While driving around on his hunt, Staver kept boxes stashed in the back of his army jeep, filled with cigarettes, alcohol, and cans of Spam. These valuable black market goods worked well in exchange for information, and finally, Staver got the lead he was looking for. A source told him that there was a V-2 rocket scientist by the name of Karl Otto Fleischer who lived nearby. Fleischer had been an engineer inside the Nordhausen tunnels as well as the Wehrmacht’s business manager, and he knew a lot more than he was letting on. Fleischer reported directly to General Dornberger; he knew things. Staver drove to the scientist’s residence with a proposition more powerful than a can of Spam.
Major Staver told Karl Otto Fleischer that he could cooperate or go to jail. Important V-2 documents had been hidden somewhere around Nordhausen, Staver said. If anyone knew, Fleischer did, Staver surmised. Dieter Huzel and Bernhard Tessmann had indeed told Fleischer about the document stash in the D?rnten mine before they fled for the Bavarian Alps. But Fleischer’s allegiance was to his colleagues, so he lied to Staver and said he had no idea what Staver was talking about. He pointed the finger at another colleague, an engineer and von Braun deputy named Dr. Eberhard Rees. Ask Rees, Fleischer said. He was the former chief in charge of the Peenemünde assembly line.
When interviewed by Staver, Dr. Eberhard Rees played his own disinformation card, using Major Staver’s influence to help spring a third colleague from jail. Walther Riedel, chief of V-2 rocket motor and structural design, had been one of the four men honored at the Castle Varlar event the previous December. Now Riedel was receiving rough treatment in a jail eighty miles away, in Saalfeld. He had been mistaken by military intelligence as having been Hitler’s biological weapons chief. Agents with the Counter Intelligence Corps had knocked out several of Riedel’s front teeth. His security report listed him as “an active Nazi who wore the uniform and the party badge. Ardent.” Riedel joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and was a member of five Nazi organizations.
In a series of interviews with Riedel, Major Staver found him to be a strange bird. Riedel was obsessed with outer space vehicles, which he called “passenger rockets.” In one interview, Riedel insisted he’d designed these passenger rockets for “short trips around the moon,” and that he’d been pursuing “space mirrors which would be used for good and possibly evil.” Riedel said he knew of at least forty rocket scientists besides himself who should be brought to America to complete this groundbreaking work. If the Americans didn’t act, Riedel said, the Russians surely would. Staver asked Riedel if he knew where the V-2 technical drawings were hidden. Riedel said he had no idea.
Staver was working on a number of problems, all compounded by the fact that the Russians were coming. That much was real. Nordhausen had been liberated by the Americans and was originally designated to be part of the American zone. Stalin protested, saying Russia had lost seventeen million men in the war and deserved greater reparations for greater losses sustained. The Allies agreed to turn over a large swath of American-held German territory to the Soviets on June 1. This territory included all of Nordhausen and everything in it.
But Staver had more to worry about than the Russians. On May 18, 1945, an airplane arrived carrying a physicist and ordnance expert named Dr. Howard Percy “H. P.” Robertson. Robertson had been a team leader for Operation Alsos, and now he served President Eisenhower as chief of the Scientific Intelligence Advisory Section under SHAEF. Dr. H. P. Robertson told Major Staver that he intended to take rocket engineers Fleischer, Riedel, and Rees to Garmisch-Partenkirchen for interrogation, where they would be held alongside General Dornberger and Wernher von Braun until the War Department General Staff decided on a policy regarding Nazi scientists.
Major Staver refused to give up Fleischer, Riedel, and Rees. They were his charges, he told Robertson. As far as exploiting Nazi science for American use, Staver and Robertson saw eye to eye. But as far as giving Nazi scientists special privileges, the two men were on opposite sides of the aisle. The idea outraged Robertson, who saw Nazi scientists as amoral opportunists who were “hostile to the Allied cause.”