ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

164 The Hunt for Zero Point
from Kammler, who by April 18 had dropped off the map—effectively
without trace.
"In the course of my enforced collaboration with this man," wrote Speer
of Kammler after the war, "I discovered him to be a cold, ruthless
schemer, a fanatic in pursuit of a goal, and as carefully calculating as he
was unscrupulous."
If there was one thing I had learned about Kammler in the short time
I had spent analyzing his activities, it was that nothing in the clockwork
routine of his life happened by chance. By the beginning of April 1945,
while Hitler was heaping new responsibilities on his shoulders almost by
the day, the general would have been acutely aware that it was just a
matter of time before Germany collapsed.
In contrast to Himmler, who vainly believed that he could enter into
armistice negotiations with the Allies and emerge from them with a
leadership role in the reconstituted Germany, Kammler was a realist. His
part in the construction of the concentration camps, the clinical way in
which he had sought to boost the throughput of the gas chambers and
ovens, not to mention the methods he had employed in leveling the
Warsaw Ghetto, would have placed him high on the list of SS officers
sought by the Allies for war crimes.
Unlike Himmler, however, Kammler had something of value to
deal—something tangible. By early April, Hitler and Himmler had
placed under his direct control every secret weapon system of any
consequence within the Third Reich—weapons that had no counterpart
in the inventories of the three powers that were now bearing down on
central Germany from the east and the west.
A man who had no trouble transforming the grand visions of others
into reality while retaining control of the minutiae, would have found it
just as easy to talk victory and plot an exit strategy at the same time.
The clues, which double as the countdown to Kammler's disappearance,
were there from the beginning ofthat month.
On April 3, Kammler had his meeting with Hitler in Berlin. As
Goebbels reveals, following their discussions about the "miracle"
weapons that could still win Germany the war, the Führer retained great
faith in him. But Kammler had already moved his headquarters out of
Berlin to Munich for reasons that Speer guesses at—accurately, it
seems—in his memoirs: given the expected failures of these projects, it
would have been dangerous for him to remain within Hitler's reach.
Before he left Berlin for the last time, soon after his final meeting with
Hitler, Kammler paid Speer a visit. He had come to say good-bye.