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

178 The Hunt for Zero Point
have ignored Skoda, even if they had been unaware of the SS-run special
projects group in its midst.
The U.S. officer who stonewalled Voss over the papers in the truck
told him that a U.S. "ordnance team" had inspected the plant earlier that
week. "Earlier that week" could only mean that the "ordnance team" had
walked into the plant alongside or directly behind the combat units of
16th Armored's Task Force Able on May 6.
There is no official record of any such unit's visit to Skoda. There are,
however, reports that a U.S. team with nuclear expertise entered the
plant and gained access to documents that outlined the SS cell's work in
conjunction with the Junkers company at Dessau on nuclear propulsion
for aircraft. I had been informed by someone that an account of
this activity was contained in Atomic Shield, the official history of the
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. But after extensive inquiries with
archivists at the U.S. Department of Energy, the AEC's successor, I was
assured that there were no references in that book or any other to Skoda,
its purported S S think tank or German nuclear research at Pilsen or
Dessau.
Given Voss' claims that nuclear propulsion work had been one of three
primary areas of research within the Kammlerstab, alongside lasers and
guided weapons, it is inherently credible that some such work had gone
on there.
It is at odds, however, with the official view that Germany was
nowhere near as advanced in nuclear weapons technology as the
Americans, who by May 10 were less than two months away from
detonating their first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert.
According to Speer, official Nazi sanction for attempts by Werner
Heisenberg, the father of the would-be German atomic bomb, were
rescinded in 1942 on the grounds that the earliest timetable for an
available weapon was 1946—too late, Speer concluded, to be of any use
in the war.
In late 1944 and early 1945, U.S. technical intelligence agents from the
Alsos Mission ("alsos," in a quirky piece of coding, being ancient Greek
for "grove," i.e. General Leslie Groves, who was in charge of the U.S.
bomb project) tore into France, Belgium and Germany searching for
signs of German atomic bomb work and quantities of German-held
uranium oxide ore—a material that is inert until it has been subjected to
neutron bombardment in a nuclear reactor.
On April 23, an Alsos team led by the unit's commander, Lt. Col.
Boris T. Pash, a former high school teacher turned Army G-2 security