“Walter Dornberger was definitely the most hated man in the camp,” Sergeant Ron Williams, a prison guard, recalled. “Even his own people hated him. He never went out to the local farms to work like other prisoners.” Wherever General Dornberger went while he was at Special Camp XI, he required an escort. The British feared that other prisoners might kill him.
On the morning of September 12, 1945, Wernher von Braun, Dr. Eberhard Rees, and five midlevel V-2 rocket engineers left their U.S. Army–sponsored housing, in the town of Witzenhausen, for the last time. The men climbed into two army jeeps, headed for France. The Germans knew they were heading to the United States to work. They were not aware that their driver, First Lieutenant Morris Sipser, spoke German. As First Lieutenant Sipser drove the group to their destination in Paris, he listened to von Braun crack crass anti-American jokes. The jeep crossed over the Saar River into France, and Sipser overheard von Braun say to his colleagues, “Well, take a good look at Germany, fellows. You may not see it for a long time to come.” In Washington, Operation Overcast had been approved as a “temporary” program, but von Braun, ever the visionary, had the foresight to see that many of the rocketeers and engineers were heading to America to stay. “We felt no moral scruples about the possible future use of our brainchild,” von Braun later told New Yorker magazine writer Daniel Lang. “We were interested solely in exploring outer space. It was simply a question with us of how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.”
After arriving in Paris, the Germans were taken to the officers’ club at Orly Airport for dinner. Accompanying von Braun, Rees, and the five other V-2 engineers were four scientists from the Hermann G?ring Research Institute, handpicked by Colonel Putt and headed for Wright Field. They were Theodor Zobel, Rudolph Edse, Wolfgang Noggerath and Gerhard Braun. Luftwaffe test pilot Karl Baur was also with the group; he had served as aircraft manufacturer Messerschmitt’s chief Me-262 test pilot. Accompanying him he had his mechanic, Andreas Sebald. A little before 10:00 p.m., the Germans boarded a C-54 military transport plane waiting on the tarmac in the pouring rain.
“Quickly the plane moved through the clouds and a beautiful, clear sky with a moonlight night greeted us,” Karl Baur wrote in his diary. “For the first time—I cannot recall the number of years—I enjoyed a flight as a passenger.”
After a stop to refuel on the island of Santa Maria, in the Azores, the aircraft crossed the Atlantic, refueled in Newfoundland, and landed at New Castle Airport in Wilmington, Delaware, at 2:00 a.m. on September 20, 1945. Because the Germans were under military custody, they could not be traditionally processed by Customs. After a few hours, the sixteen Germans boarded a second, smaller airplane and were flown to the Naval Air Station at Squantum, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
At the naval base the Germans were loaded into sedans and driven out to the edge of dock, where a troopship waited for them. They boarded the vessel and made a short trip to a chain of small islands in Boston Harbor, the Harbor Islands, and out to the far end to a gravel shoal off Nixes Mate, where they were obscured from civilian view. There, a small Boston whaler idled on the sea. Its captain was named Corky, and the twenty-one-year-old intelligence officer who would take charge of the Germans was named Henry Kolm. Each German scientist was lowered down into the little Boston whaler by a harness hanging from a rope. “They were all seasick as can be,” Kolm later recalled.