On their way out of the Harz, Staver and Porter passed by Nordhausen to have one last look. “I wanted to blow up the whole factory at Nordhausen before we pulled out but [I] couldn’t swing it legally. I was afraid at the time to do the job ‘unofficially,’ and have regretted it ever since,” Porter recalled. He was referring to the European Advisory Commission decree, signed by General Eisenhower on June 5, 1945, in Berlin, which prohibited the destruction of military research installations in another power’s zone.
The Soviets were now heirs to the Harz. Major Staver had succeeded in secretly shipping out enough parts to reassemble one hundred V-2 rockets in America. Still, thousands of tons of rocket parts remained. For all the effort and moral compromise that went into Special Project V-2, the Red Army would now have no shortage of wonder weapons parts to choose from. The underground slave labor factory at Nordhausen was still virtually intact. Thousands of machine tools sat on the assembly lines ready to manufacture more parts.
After an eleven-day delay, the Russians finally arrived. Leading the pack were technical specialists from Soviet missile program chief Georgy Malenkov’s Special Committee for rocket research. For every German scientist that had taken up the U.S. Army’s offer to evacuate, between two and ten remained behind. The Soviet secret police began rounding up hundreds of former rocket scientists and engineers and put them back to work. A Soviet guidance engineer named Boris Chertok even managed to move into von Braun’s old villa, the one the SS had confiscated from a Jewish businessman a few years before. Chertok oversaw the renaming of the Nordhausen tunnel complex from the Mittelwerk to the Institute Rabe, an abbreviation for Raketenantrieb Bleicherode, or Rocket Enterprise Bleicherode.
Von Braun, eighty scientists, and their families were taken to the town of Witzenhausen, forty miles from Nordhausen, in the American zone. There, they were set up in a two-story schoolhouse and paid to get to work on future rocket plans while Army Ordnance worked on a plan to bring them to the United States, to the Fort Bliss Army Base, in Texas. The Americans had been obsessed with the V-weapons during the war. Now they had the science and the scientists.
In Washington, D.C., officials with the War Department General Staff remained undecided on a policy regarding what to do with Nazi scientists. General Eisenhower’s questions about long-term plans had not yet been answered, and Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson was asked to weigh in. Major Staver’s cable from Paris regarding the four hundred rocket scientists “in custody” drew attention to the issue. In America, five Nazi scientists had already been secreted into the United States for classified weapons work. Just a few days after the German surrender, the director of naval intelligence successfully lobbied the War Department General Staff to circumvent State Department regulations so that a Nazi guided missile expert named Dr. Herbert Wagner and four of his assistants could begin working on technology meant to help end the war with Japan. The War Department gave approval, and in mid-May Dr. Wagner and his team were flown from Germany to a small airstrip outside Washington, D.C., inside a military aircraft with the windows blackened to keep anyone from seeing who was inside.
During the war, Dr. Herbert Wagner had been chief missile design engineer at Henschel Aircraft. He was the man behind the first guided missile used in combat by the Reich, the Hs 293. This remote-control bomb was the nemesis of the U.S. Navy and the British Royal Navy and had sunk several Allied ships during the war. Not only did the U.S. Navy see glide bomb technology as critically important in the fight in the Pacific, but they saw Dr. Wagner as a man with “knowledge, experience and skills unmatched anywhere in the world.”