The bedrooms in the new quarters had fresh sheets, plush mattresses, and soft pillows. Strolling through the house, G?ring pointed to a chandelier and warned his fellow Nazis to be wary of listening devices. When one of the prisoners asked if they could sit outside in the garden, a guard checked with a superior and said yes. G?ring made note of a single patch of shade under a weeping willow tree and suggested it as a good spot. The men dragged four garden chairs into the shade, sat down, and began to gossip.
“Heavy, guttural voices could be heard loud and clear,” Andrus recalled. “They were being recorded onto the black gramophone disks.”
It was a brilliant start. But only a start. Soon, it began to rain. The men moved inside. There, they sat around barely saying a word. The following day, it rained again. That evening, Colonel Andrus received an order from SHAEF. The eavesdropping project was being shut down. Andrus had twenty-four hours to pack up his prisoners and leave.
This time the ambulance took the direct route back to Mondorf, just three and a half miles away. “G?ring was furious,” Andrus recalled. “How could they have gotten back to the prison so quickly! They realized they’d been had.”
Back at Ashcan, things moved in a whirlwind. John Dolibois received a “Letter of Authority” on August 10, 1945, stating that CCPWE No. 32 was going to be closed down. Dolibois was to be part of the transport team now taking prisoners to new locations. For reasons Dolibois was not privy to, thirty-three of the fifty-two Ashcan internees were going to a new prisoner of war interrogation facility, this one located in the small town of Oberursel in the Taunus Mountains. Only later would Dolibois learn that many of these Nazis would be hired by the U.S. Army to write intelligence reports on work they had done during the war. Oberursel was just a few miles from the Dustbin facility at Castle Kransberg. The transport would be a convoy of six ambulances, a command car, a jeep, a trailer, and a truck carrying the prisoners’ suitcases. Dolibois was assigned to ride in the first ambulance. His prisoner list included Admiral Karl D?nitz, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, General Walter Warlimont, cabinet minister Schwerin von Krosigk, OKW Foreign Office head Admiral Leopold Bürkner, and Admiral Gerhard Wagner.
The trip from Mondorf to Oberursel was a journey through ruined countryside. Crossing from Luxembourg into Germany, Dolibois watched the chatter among the Nazis in his backseat come to a “halting end” as they saw the destruction and despair everywhere. “This was their first look at the condition of their country” since the war, Dolibois explained. From churches to administrative buildings to shops, entire villages had been reduced to rubble. In three months of peace there were no resources to clean anything up. People were starving and trying to survive. “The destruction that was the aftermath of Hitler’s determination to ‘fight to the last man,’ ” said Dolibois.
The convoy arrived in Oberursel. Like many other army interrogation facilities across the American zone in postwar Germany, the one in Oberursel had been an important Third Reich military post during the war. Oberursel had a particularly storied past. This Dulag Luft, or Durchgangslager (terms for air force prisoner of war camp, or transit camp), had functioned as the sole interrogation and evaluation center for the Luftwaffe. It was here that Nazi interrogators had questioned every Allied pilot who had been shot down during the war. The Luftwaffe’s lead interrogator, Hanns Scharff, kept a diary. “Every enemy aviator who is captured… will be brought to this place for questioning. It makes no difference whether he is taken prisoner at the front lines or whether he comes dangling down from the sky in the most remote location… he comes to Oberursel,” wrote Scharff.
Physically, things had not changed much since Oberursel had changed hands. The interrogation facility centered around a large half-timber “mountain house” that served as an officers’ club. Nearby there were fourteen buildings for officer housing. The prisoners’ barracks, a large U-shaped building, contained 150 solitary jail cells. This building had been called “The Cooler” during the war, and it was the place where interrogator Hanns Scharff did most of his work with captured Allied pilots. Now it was the new home for thirty-three former Ashcan internees, at least for a while.
Dolibois turned his charges over to the guard detail at Oberursel. His orders said to return to Luxembourg and wait for new orders. Setting out for Ashcan, he rode in the lead jeep with an enlisted man. A little less than an hour south of Frankfurt, Dolibois came upon a row of U.S. Army trucks stopped along the side of the road. One of the soldiers stepped into the road and signaled for Dolibois’s convoy to stop. John Dolibois climbed out of his jeep. He became overwhelmed by a horrific stench, “sickeningly sweet, nauseating,” he later recalled. He heard retching. Several of the men in his convoy had gotten out of their vehicles and were now throwing up along the side of the road.