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Chapter 19
Nordhausen—City of Missiles and Death
We arrived in Nordhausen the evening of 14 July. The Seventy-seventh Guard
Division, part of the Eighth Guard Army, had just taken over the city from the
Americans and had already been billeted in the city and surrounding areas. The
offices of the commandant and the Bürgermeister were already in operation.With
some difficulty, we found Isayev’s team of engine specialists.They had arrived a day
earlier and had taken up residence in a remote and devastated villa close to the site
we were most interested in—Kohnstein Mountain, where the subterranean
Mittelwerk factory was hidden.
Isayev had already managed to establish contact with division intelligence and
Smersh. The division command had already placed guards at all the obvious
entrances to the subterranean factory and also at the Dora death camp. The
Bürgermeister promised to find and gather any Germans who had worked at the
factory and have them meet with us.
Meanwhile, we wandered around the city and discovered that American military
Jeeps were still tearing around at breakneck speed carrying obviously tipsy
soldiers with heavy pistols dangling from their broad belts. During their twomonth
stay in Nordhausen, the American soldiers had acquired a lot of girlfriends.
In spite of orders about the demarcation of the occupation zones, it wasn’t easy to
back out of the next date, and our patrol received these strict instructions: “No
conflicts with Allied servicemen until border guards have been set up.”
Half the night we talked with Isayev about our impressions and adventures. In
spite of our fatigue, here in this dark, ravaged villa hidden in the middle of an overgrown,
mysterious garden, we felt very uncomfortable.
The city of Nordhausen had been largely destroyed by Allied bombers. The
British and Americans, with assistance from our aviation, had tried to prevent
missile production.While they succeeded in destroying the city, the brutal bombing
attacks had not inflicted any damage on the subterranean factory and the
neighboring Dora concentration camp.
In the morning, we found that a whole line of people wishing to offer their
services had assembled at our villa after being summoned by the local authorities.
We began with a Soviet officer who introduced himself as “Shmargun, former
prisoner of war, liberated from the camp by the Americans.”According to his state-
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