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

180 The Hunt for Zero Point
radiation. This, in turn, meant the uranium oxide ore had been subjected
to enrichment from a working nuclear reactor. The gold lining was to
prevent the radiation from penetrating the U-boat's hull.
And yet, officially, there had been no nuclear reactor in Germany
capable of fulfilling this task.
Not in Speer's orbit of operations. But what about Kammler's?
The journey to this point had revealed the extent to which the SS had
ring-fenced its top secret weapons activity from the rest of the German
armaments industry. Could the Kammlerstab have contained the plans of
a working nuclear reactor? Its secret location, even? It was a possibility I
had to confront.
The lack of data in U.S. archives concerning the fate of the U-234, its
cargo and its personnel is astonishing. But then, everywhere I'd looked
prior to leaving London, a pattern had been emerging.
Protracted searches by archivists at the U.S. National Archives for any
data on Kammler had failed to locate a single entry for him.
It was the same for Skoda.
Given Kammler's range of responsibilities in the final months of the
war, this absence of evidence was remarkable; so much so, that one
archivist at Modern Military Records, College Park, Maryland, said that
it "redlined" him in her book.
I asked what she meant.
Somebody, she replied matter-of-factly, had been in and cleaned up.
Tom Agoston had found evidence of much the same thing. Despite
Voss' extensive debriefings on Skoda by U.S. CIC agents at the U.S.
European Command Counter-intelligence Center at Camp Oberursel,
near Frankfurt, no one had been able to trace any records or transcripts
of the interrogation.
When Agoston ran checks on Kammler, it transpired that his name
hadn't even registered at the Nuremberg war crimes trials—the very
least that might have been expected of someone who had played such a
prominent role in the Holocaust.
Unlike Martin Bormann, whose body was never found after he was
reported killed during his escape from the Führerbunker on May 1,
Kammler was never tried in absentia at Nuremberg. There is no evidence
that anyone ever bothered to look for him. This, despite the fact that the
four versions of his death conflict with each other so markedly that none
stacks up under scrutiny.
The first version says he committed suicide in a forest between Prague
and Pilsen on May 9, two days after the German unconditional
surrender.