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

168 The Hunt for Zero Point
service with the Luftwaffe at the end of the war and plans for hundreds
of other jet aircraft were on drawing boards at aircraft factories across the
Reich. The Americans arid the Russians could take the blueprints for
these projects and the design staff associated with them irrespective of
Kammler.
The same went for the A-4. As von Braun's actions testify, the rocket
had been secretly earmarked for handover to the Americans for some
time by the people who had designed and built it. Whether Kammler was
aware of these moves or not is immaterial; the fact that there were
hundreds of V-2s in various stages of construction at Nordhausen meant
that the Americans would simply take them as war booty, with only the
fate of the design engineers left to negotiate.
If Kammler did have plans to hand the Dornberger/von Braun design
team over to the Americans, these came to naught. It appears, though,
that he never even tried.
On April 13, von Braun succeeded in persuading Major Kummer to
disperse the scientists into the surrounding villages, ostensibly to cut
down the risk of their being wiped out by air attacks on Oberammergau.
Von Braun's real fear, of course, was that it would be Kammler issuing
the orders for their annihilation.
The move may well have saved their lives, but it also left von Braun
free to make his own deal with the U.S. agents that had been dispatched
into Bavaria to seek him out.
On April 17, Kammler sent his message to Himmler about the
"truck"—the last signal he was known to have dispatched from his
Munich headquarters. Under German communications procedure, his
teletyped "signature" was preceded with the letters "GEZ"—an abbreviation
for "Gezeichnet or "signed by"—denoting to the recipient that
he was physically where he claimed to be.
The fact is, he could have been anywhere—anywhere within a narrow
corridor of territory then still in the Reich's possession.
As I immersed myself in as many sources as I could regarding
Kammler's mercurial existence, a single question pounded repeatedly
above the others.
Where had he gone?
Degenkolb was taking care of jet aircraft production. The inner circle
in the Führerbunker, cut off from reality and increasingly from the
world, had its own problems. No one seemed to care anymore about the
whereabouts of the golden boy—the keeper of the miracle weapons who
would save Germany from annihilation.