The Harz, late winter of 1946 by the author's calendar: sent to move the professor's dowry west by rail out of country already drawn for the Russians, the author counts everything, signs nothing, and comes away exactly one instrument richer. What obliges him, on the last morning, to walk into the mountain itself is the business of the number that follows. —Ed.
Considine walked my orders down the corridor himself, which from Considine was a decoration. "The professor's dowry," he said, and tapped the grease-pencil ring on his zone map. "Paper out of the mine, hardware out of the mountain, all of it west on rails before the thaw. The railhead belongs to an Ordnance major named Purcell, who is expecting a civilian instruments expert, that being what I told him you are. Sign nothing. Count everything. If it can't go west it doesn't exist, and if anybody asks who moved it, look helpful and give them Washington." Getz drove me north next morning with chains on and his horn going at the ox carts, and Bunny's Tuesday letter rode in my pocket: the club, the weather, and Daddy asks are you finding good things. I was on my way to find three hundred carloads of them. In the valise the Berlin card came along as ever, unconsulted, though Berlin now lay a good deal nearer than Frankfurt, a piece of geography I declined to work out.
Nordhausen town had burned in a night the spring before and stood about its own streets in sorted heaps, the Germans tidying ruin as they tidy everything. The mountain was two miles north, a low pine-topped hill called the Kohnstein, with two railroad tunnels running straight into its south face, rails and all, and a marshalling yard spread below where our engines stood steaming. Under the tunnel mouths lay a wired compound of long grey huts, empty, gates open, wire sagging, and I noticed that no man in that yard looked at it, the way a whole street will not look at a certain house. We passed close beneath the mouths with my window down, and the air that came out of the mountain was colder than the February outside and smelled of machine oil and wet stone and something underneath the oil, and my stomach rose against its breakfast without consulting me. I put the window up. My nose gives me two days' warning, as I have said, and it has never once rung false; at those mouths it rang with no date on it at all, and I told Getz to drive on to the yard, where the war paid wages.1
Major Purcell ran the evacuation from a transit shed at the yard throat: twenty-six years old, a physics degree off Fordham, three telephones, and a voice out of Flushing. He heard mine inside a sentence. "Astoria?" "Steinway Street." "Flushing," he said, and poured coffee, and that concluded the formalities, two Queens boys having been introduced already. "Here's the situation, and you'll notice I'm not writing it down. That mountain is full of rocket. Parts for a hundred of them: motors, center sections, tails, pumps, some of it still hanging on the slings where the line stopped. My orders are to have a hundred rockets' worth on cars and gone before the lines on the map get honored, and this county, you may have heard, is drawn Russian. My orders about the British are that they're not to learn the scale of it. My orders about the Russians do not exist. I asked the colonel in Paris to give me any of that in writing, and he wished me luck twice, which is not a document." "And I'm here as what?" "Frankfurt says an instruments man who signs nothing. The instruments we'll see about. The signing is the qualification: every officer in this yard signs, and a signature is a man a committee can find in five years. Somebody has to check my manifests who isn't in anybody's chain and can't be produced afterward. Congratulations."2
The British reached us before the Russians did: a colonel down from Cuxhaven wanting eight rockets for a firing trial of their own, requisition made out fair in quadruplicate, and a sergeant to carry it. "If your office will simply endorse the original and retain—" "It won't," Purcell said, pleasantly, and gave him a tour of the emptiest shed on the property, and me for lunch. I promised him a complete accounting at the appropriate time, cordially, twice, an accounting being precisely what that yard was organized never to produce; and he went away satisfied, the British being a people who will queue for their share of a robbery so long as the receipt is properly stamped. Purcell watched his car out the gate. "Eight," he said. "Let them have their eight in the summer. The other ninety-two will be in Texas."
The paper went first, Sennett's standing instruction being two words old and never rescinded. The mine lay a long morning north, an iron mine in the Goslar country, and the professor's archive sat at the back of a dead gallery behind a wall his own young men had bricked and blasted in the last week of the war, against exactly the callers now arrived to collect it. One of the bricklayers came along to find the spot, a silent young Peenemünde engineer I will call Voss, who had the gallery drawn from memory on the back of a ration card and the professor's contract, so to speak, in his breast pocket: the archive traveled under his people's inventory, not our quartermasters', that being a term I had shaken on in Bavaria. The wall came down in a forenoon. Fourteen tons came up the shaft: reports, series drawings, test film, the working mind of the rocket in numbered boxes, swung into Army trucks while the mine's own Germans were paid in cigarettes and told a story about patent litigation.3 That district was drawn British, and the British were due in it inside the week; we passed their billeting party on the road going out, and waved. Under Getz's tarpaulin rode three cases of microfilm that stood on Voss's tally, and on the Army's, at a strength of zero, consigned to a Halsted evaluation office that Sennett could conjure or dissolve as weather required. GET PAPER, the instruction ran. It did not say for whom.
Then the railhead in earnest. Combustion chambers came out of the mountain on flatcars like church bells; center sections rode eight to a car; turbopumps and tail units went boxed under stencils reading ORDNANCE EVAL, the stencil being the entire law of the operation. A Reichsbahn yardmaster I will call Faber made up the trains and kept the master manifest in a copperplate hand ruled to the single item, and corrected our captains' arithmetic with a courtesy you could have shaved with. Ten hours of winter light, forty cars a day, and every evening a cut went west toward Antwerp and the boats behind a pilot engine, seals on the doors, a guard yawning on the brake platforms. Take the lesson free, whoever inherits the moving trades, for the tuition was the Reich's: if ever you have plunder to shift by the trainload, shift it at noon, under government stencils, with the seals showing; midnight and tarpaulins are for amateurs moving hams. I stood at the yard throat most evenings with Faber's ledger under my arm, initialing nothing, and watched the brains of the Reich go west at a walking pace, in the best temper of my life.
On the second Thursday the north gate telephoned: a Soviet liaison party, come about billeting arrangements for the spring, a major of artillery and three civilians in leather coats who counted our boxcars from the moment the gate swung, your Russian being never happier than when counting another man's goods, the entry having been made in his own books at Yalta. Purcell was up the yard; I received them. I walked them two miles the long way round, through the shed the British had admired, past a hill of tail fins rejected for corrosion, and fed them lunch with a ham in the middle of the table, which the major regarded for a moment with a soldier's face and then ate heartily. "Much activity," he said over the coffee, nodding at the yard. "Salvage," I said. "Scrap and clearance. You know us, Major: a tidy people." "This will be Soviet zone." "So I'm told. And you'll receive every rock of it." We parted with expressions of regard, and I went down the yard and told Purcell that the friends who send hams had surveyors a day behind the liaison, which Considine's last teletype had promised and the leather coats had just confirmed. He strung lights that night and put on a second shift, and the mountain emptied around the clock after that.4
My own commission I took off the breakage pile behind the transit shed, where the crane's mistakes went. Out of the straw of a smashed instrument crate came a gyroscope assembly the size of a shaving mug, machined like the inside of a good watch, an eagle stamped small on the acceptance plate, and it left the yard wrapped in a sock in the bottom of my musette bag, entered nowhere on this earth. Faber's ledger booked the crate as breakage, contents unsalvageable, in copperplate, and for once the documentation and I were in perfect agreement.5 I have stolen articles of better value in my time, and none that wore longer; but that comes later.
It was Faber who found the hole, on the last Monday, with the final cut of cars standing made up in the yard and the surveyors' theodolites already glinting on the ridge road. He came into the shed with the ledger open like a hymnal. "Herr Klipspringer. Motors, one hundred and eleven. Center sections, one hundred. Control compartments," and he turned the ledger to face me, "thirty-one." The steering gear, the platforms and amplifiers that hold a rocket's nose straight while it climbs, the very subject I had talked my way through Germany on: still below, in a side gallery deep past the assembly halls, where the line had stored them when the line stopped. Without them, Purcell was shipping Texas a hundred church bells. He worked it on the plan in grease pencil, the tunnels running straight in a mile and better, galleries off both sides like ribs. "Six men and one day is what the timetable gives me," he said. "And it wants somebody down there who knows a stabilizing platform from a junction box, because those crates are stenciled in German or stenciled in nothing, and my six men are riflemen." He looked at me with the simple confidence of a man who had read Considine's teletype. I had spent two weeks at that railhead being the instruments expert, correcting captains on drift rates at dinner, the patter costing nothing above ground; and here was the bill, presented at the mouth of a mountain I had been careful not to look at for two weeks.
I heard myself say the drawings were no trouble, that it was only a question of light, and my thumbnail went back and forth along the fold of his plan while I said it. "First light, then," Purcell said. "Faber goes with you; he knows the galleries. Anything wearing a red star turns up meanwhile, we load rocks and wave." At the door of the shed he stopped. "It's a hole in a hill, Klipspringer," he said, in the tone of a man who had been in once and had not gone back.
Faber was waiting at the mouth in the morning with carbide lamps and his ledger, and the air came out of the mountain at us the way it had come at the car window, cold under the cold, oil and wet stone and the thing beneath the oil. "You will want a lamp," he said. I took the lamp.
The mountain is the Kohnstein, north of Nordhausen, and the plant inside it was the Mittelwerk, to which V-2 production was moved underground after the Royal Air Force bombed Peenemünde in August 1943. The tunnels were extended, and the rockets built, by prisoners of the concentration camp established at the tunnel mouths, known as Dora, later Mittelbau, liberated with the district in April 1945; the wired compound the author passes with his window up is that camp. Modern accounting puts the dead of Dora and its subcamps near twenty thousand, several times the number the weapon itself killed. The author does not go below ground in this number. He goes below in the next. —Ed.
The evacuation is in the record as Special Mission V-2, ordered by Colonel Holger N. Toftoy, chief of Ordnance Technical Intelligence in Paris, and executed by Major James P. Hamill, aged twenty-six; the author, by lifelong habit, renamed the officer he liked. Between May 22 and May 31, 1945, three hundred and forty-one railway cars of rocket components left Nordhausen for Antwerp, nine days of work, the last train out a month before the district passed to Soviet occupation on July 1. Hamill's instruction that the removal was not to become obvious, in particular to the British, was delivered orally and never reduced to writing, a method of administration for which the author needed no training. The reader will notice that the author has the work done in the late winter of 1946; his calendar, here as in the two preceding numbers, runs the better part of a year behind the Army's, and the editor, as promised, has stopped adjusting it. —Ed.
Fourteen tons of the Peenemünde archive had been walled into a gallery of the Dörnten iron mine, in the Goslar country, in the first days of April 1945, by two of von Braun's engineers, Dieter Huzel and Bernhard Tessmann, against all comers; an American document team under Major Robert Staver recovered it in the last days of May, days ahead of the British assumption of that district. The material was inventoried, as the author says, under the team's own men, a condition consistent with the contract terms reported in the preceding number. The recovery reports enumerate the boxes with great care and say nothing of microfilm, an omission the reader is now equipped to weigh. —Ed.
The Soviet administration received the Mittelwerk, emptied, on July 1, 1945, and organized what remained, with several thousand German specialists who had not been gathered west, into institutes at Bleicherode and Nordhausen; among the officers who worked that ground in the year following was the engineer S. P. Korolev, later chief designer of the Soviet space program. In October 1946 the specialists went east by train in a single night, as noted at No. 2, and the R-1, the Soviet copy of the V-2 assembled on what the mountain and its men still held, flew in 1948. The major's remark about the spring was, in the long run, not idle. —Ed.
The bankruptcy inventory of the storage unit, drawn in 2010, lists among sundries one gyroscopic instrument of German wartime manufacture, eagle acceptance stamp, serial plate present, no accompanying papers. Visitors to the author's Palo Alto office across fifty years describe the same instrument on the desk, and three published profiles identify it as a relic of his own early laboratory work; the author is not on record correcting any of them. —Ed.