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Nordhausen—City of Missiles and Death
oners had discovered the case and opened it;one of them said that it was very secret.
They decided to put it away until the Russians arrived.They used the case to pack
up various things that they had begun to acquire after liberation, and when they
found out that Shmargun was staying to wait for the Russians, they revealed the
secret to him and packed everything up in dirty blankets so that the Americans
would be less suspicious.
As we could see, the operation went brilliantly. Now Isayev and I were responsible
for this priceless windfall.We wrapped it back up in the blankets, since no
other container was available, transported it to the division headquarters, and
asked them to store it there until we could take it to Moscow.Approximately six
months later there was a struggle over the possession of this gyro platform that
led to the first rift in the relationship between Viktor Kuznetsov and Nikolay
Pilyugin, the friends that I made shortly after the instrument’s discovery. But we’ll
get to that later.
After a brief inspection of the horrible Dora camp, we hurried off to inspect
Mittelwerk itself. I must honestly confess that we hurried to leave the camp not
because we had completely run out of time.The horrors that Shmargun began to
tell us about and the live witnesses who had arrived from somewhere were so out
of synch with the radiance of the hot July day and our frame of mind as impassioned
hunters who had finally seized real spoils. We could not help wanting to
cast off this hallucination. They showed us the area where the bodies had been
placed before being fed into the crematorium and where they had raked out the
ashes. Now there were no traces of ashes anywhere.When the Americans had been
here a commission had been at work documenting atrocities and war crimes.
Before our eyes the camp was now being converted into a dormitory for displaced
persons. But the ashes we could not see were beginning to pound both in our
hearts and in our temples.
A group of Germans was waiting for us in front of the entrance to Mittelwerk.
They had turned up as a result of the Bürgermeister’s efforts.A young, thin German
with delicate facial features separated himself from the group. He boldly
approached and introduced himself,“Engineer Rosenplänter from Peenemünde.”
He explained that everyone had been evacuated from Peenemünde to
Nordhausen, and they had settled not far from here in Bleicherode. At first von
Braun and Dornberger, whom he knew personally, had lived there.They had left
Bleicherode and moved farther west.
Before the arrival of the Russians, the Americans had sent almost all of the
specialists to the towns of Worbis and Witzenhausen. Rosenplänter and several
dozen other specialists had refused to move, and the American officers, having
checked with their lists, didn’t make them go. Certain others had been taken
despite their unwillingness.
Rosenplänter said all of this rapidly; he was very agitated. Shmargun could not
keep up with the interpretation, so someone drove up to the camp and brought a
Russian girl who could interpret more rapidly than the Germans spoke.This inter-
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