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

NICK COOK 177
a very different place from the one he remembered; a Skoda in transition,
with Germans, Czechs and Americans milling about the plant. In the
confusion, he located a member of the Kammlerstab, who told him that
survivors from the group had already recovered some documents,
marked them up as personnel and payroll records, and loaded them onto
a truck. They were hoping to get them to a place of safekeeping before the
Russians arrived. The facility was due for handover to the Red Army in
two days' time.
Sensing that this was the time to act, Voss sought out the U.S. officer
in charge, informed him who he was, then told him what was in the truck.
The American listened, unimpressed by what he was hearing, and finally
informed Voss he was under orders to hand everything over to the
Russians. Voss insisted, but the American was adamant; nothing was to
be moved. An American ordnance team had already inspected the plant
earlier that week, he told the exasperated industrialist, and had picked up
everything it needed.
Two days later, Voss watched as the truck was driven away by a Red
Army transport officer.
In Blunder!, Tom Agoston had traced records showing that a Britishled
Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee team entered the
Skoda Works on May 12 and promptly got the runaround from Skoda's
newly ensconced Czech managers, who wanted to cooperate with the
Russians and no one else.
I had found another set of CIOS reports, from a British team that
entered Skoda one week later on May 19 with the plant now firmly under
Soviet jurisdiction. This report, CIOS Trip No. 243, summarized a combined
U.S.-U.K. operation—the U.S. team, it said, having entered the
plant on May 16—in which nothing of any real interest was discovered,
except for certain new projects in the ammunition field and some advanced
German design and production methods for guns and munitions.
The triple ring of security put in place by Himmler and Kammler
around the Kammlerstab had done its job, even after hostilities had ended.
Voss' story implies that Kammler never made it to the Skoda Works to
retrieve the blueprints of the Kammlerstab—that instead the papers were
ignominiously removed by the Russians and taken back to the Soviet
Union.
It didn't look that way to me.
Based on what was happening in Germany, where U.S. technical
intelligence agents were systematically targeting any weapons facility of
interest and plundering the contents, it is inconceivable that they would