In August, the same problem was again at issue. This time Wernher von Braun initiated the action himself. On August 15, 1944, von Braun wrote a letter to a Mittelwerk engineer, Albin Sawatzki, describing a new laboratory he wanted to set up inside the tunnels. Von Braun told Sawatzki that to expedite the process, he had taken it upon himself to procure the slave laborers from the Buchenwald concentration camp.
“During my last visit to the Mittelwerk, you proposed to me that we use the good technical education of detainees available to you [from] Buchenwald,” wrote von Braun. “I immediately looked into your proposal by going to Buchenwald [myself], together with Dr. Simon [a colleague], to seek out more qualified detainees. I have arranged their transfer to the Mittelwerk with Standartenführer [Colonel] Pister,” the commandant of Buchenwald.
In December of 1944, with slave laborers dying by the thousands in the Mittelwerk tunnels and V-2 rockets crashing into civilian population centers, causing mayhem and terror across Europe, it would have been hard to imagine that some of those directly responsible would ever be regarded as individuals of great value to the United States. And yet in less than a year Arthur Rudolph, Georg Rickhey, Wernher von Braun, Major General Walter Dornberger, and other rocket engineers would secretly be heading to America to work. In the last days of World War II few would ever have believed such a thing.
But the war’s last days were coming. Just three weeks after the celebration at Castle Varlar, Albert Speer found himself with a lot less to celebrate. Visiting the Belgian border town of Houffalize, accompanied by an SS armored force commander named Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, Speer had what he would describe in his 1969 memoir as a realization. Gazing upon the bodies of hundreds of dead German soldiers killed in a recent Allied bomber attack, Speer decided the war was over for the Reich. The German war machine could no longer compete against the force and will of the Allied offensive. “Howling and exploding bombs, clouds illuminated in red and yellow hues, droning motors, and no defense anywhere—I was stunned by this scene of military impotence which Hitler’s military miscalculations had given such a grotesque setting,” Speer wrote. Standing there in Houffalize, Speer—Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production—decided to flee from the danger zone.
At 4:00 a.m. on the morning of December 31, under cover of darkness, Speer and an aide climbed into a private car and hurried east, headed for the comforts of a sprawling mountaintop castle outside Frankfurt called Schloss Kransberg, or Castle Kransberg. Built on a steep, rocky cliff in the Taunus Mountains, the castle was one of Hermann G?ring’s Luftwaffe (German air force) headquarters. Just as many of Hitler’s scientists would soon become American scientists, so would many of the Reich’s headquarters and command posts become key facilities used for Operation Paperclip. Castle Kransberg also had a storied past in the history of warfare. The structure dated from the eleventh century, but its original foundation had been built on top of the ruins of a ring-wall fortification constructed in the time of the Roman Empire. Battles had been waged in this region, on and off, for over two thousand years.
Castle Kransberg was grand and splendid, built piecemeal over the centuries to include watchtowers, half-timbered meeting halls, and stone walls. It had 150-odd rooms, including a wing that had been redesigned and renovated by Albert Speer in 1939, when Speer was still Hitler’s architect. At Hitler’s behest Speer added several state-of-the art defense features to Kransberg Castle, including a twelve-hundred-square-foot underground bunker complex, complete with poison gas air locks designed to protect inhabitants from a chemical warfare attack. Now here was Speer, having fled from the front lines to hide out in this citadel. The next time he would live here it would be as a prisoner of the Americans.
Hitler had his own headquarters just a few miles away. Adlerhorst, or the Eagle’s Nest, had also been designed by Speer. It was a series of small cement bunkers at the edge of a long stretch of valley near the spa town of Bad Nauheim. Few knew it was there. From Adlerhorst, Hitler had been directing the Ardennes campaign—the Battle of the Bulge.