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

176 The Hunt for Zero Point
and into the streets. The situation was chaotic. It was only when German
snipers opened up in many sections of the city an hour after the
Americans arrived that sanity of a kind was restored. The civilians fled
back into their homes, leaving the U.S. soldiers to mop up what
resistance remained and carry out house-to-house searches.
One unit from the 16th Armored soon came upon Lt. Gen. Georg von
Majewski, the German army commandant in Pilsen, with 35 members of
his staff in the Wehrmacht's town headquarters. As American troops
entered von Majewski's office, the general surrendered his forces to the
officer in charge, then pulled a pistol from the drawer of his desk and shot
himself through the head in front of his wife.
Von Majewski was one of 14 enemy dead that day. Around 4,500 more
surrendered. The Americans had suffered one fatal casualty in the whole
Pilsen operation.
A second 16th Armored unit, Task Force "Casper," captured the
airport and a third, Task Force "Able," occupied the Skoda Works.
An air raid by U.S. B-17s several weeks previously had rained destruction
on a large part of the facility. The forward units of Task Force
Able reported that the central administrative building had been 80 percent
destroyed.
The news that Pilsen had fallen to the Americans was picked up on the
radio that night by the onetime head of the Skoda Works, Dr. Wilhelm
Voss, who was hiding out with his wife and family at a hunting lodge on
a Skoda estate south of Prague.
Voss had been out of a job since January, when Goering had dismissed
him for refusing to accept two of his nominees on the Skoda main board.
For weeks, Voss had been monitoring the Allies' radio reports for news
of their advance, knowing that it was touch and go whose forces would
get to Pilsen first. Armed with the news he wanted to hear, Voss seized
the moment soon after the German surrender on May 7 and set out for
Skoda.
Given Voss' former position and the chaos that engulfed the former
Protectorate, this was a hazardous undertaking. Czech partisans were
summarily executing all the Germans they could find. While the bulk of
the Waffen-SS units had officially surrendered, some were reported still
to be holding out against the Russians in and around Prague. But as Voss
told Tom Agoston during their conversations in 1949, he was determined
to hand over the blueprints of Kammler's SS special projects group to
the Americans, not the Russians.
According to Blunder!, Voss finally pulled up in front of Skoda's main
gates on May 10. He bluffed his way past the American guard and found