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

172 The Hunt for Zero Point
had spawned his delicate sketches of Auschwitz, were just a generation
away from the safe confines of my own world. And all I had succeeded in
doing was immersing myself in the fate of its slave workers, not in the
thoughts of the icy technocrat who'd driven them on. In the subzero chill
of the tunnels, all I could hear were the cries of the dying, not Kammler's
whispered escape plans.
Only when I reemerged from the tunnels could I reapply my mind
back to the problem.
When the building work on the tunnels stopped, those that survived
went on to work on the rockets. At first, quality control was poor and
many of the rockets exploded or went off course.
Suspecting sabotage, the SS ordered mass executions.
On one day in March 1945, the guards hanged 52 people in Gallery 41,
tying a dozen at a time to a beam which was then pulled up by an
electrical crane. Those next in line to die were forced to watch.
Then there was Gardelegen, 80 miles to the north. On April 13, two
days after advance U.S. units entered Nordhausen, the SS forced a
thousand evacuated prisoners from Dora into a barn that had been presoaked
with gasoline, locked the doors and set light to it. When American
troops came across the scene, they found some of the bodies still in the
barn, some in a partially dug mass grave. Twenty men had survived by
sheltering in holes they had dug beneath the charred corpses of those that
had perished in the first moments of the conflagration.
These were Kammler's hallmarks. Others might have pulled the
trigger, operated the cranes or poured the gasoline, but these acts had
been carried out according to his wishes. More than 50 years later, you
could sense it.
This was something about the man that I had pulled from the dank,
subterranean air.
It was curious, then, that so few people after the war—the many tens
of thousands whose lives had been touched by Kammler—could recollect
him in any detail. I found this incomprehensible at first, remembering
occasions in which concentration camp survivors had identified their
tormentors decades after the war.
Even those who had not been directly traumatized by Kammler
commented upon this mercurial ability to blend in. A U.S. diplomat who
had served in Berlin until the U.S. entered the war in 1941, whom
Agoston had interviewed, recalled his ability to "soothe and tame an
unruly horse, using a magically gentle touch, and then minutes later
order a negligent groom to be brutally horsewhipped.
"I always thought he was a man to watch," the American told Agoston.