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

NICK COOK 187
Reich Security Office, the Nazis' central agency for internal counterespionage
and repression. For Sporrenberg to have been assigned the
command of the Special Evacuation Kommando unit attached specifically
to Hanke's gau of Lower Silesia shows how important Bormann's evacuation
plan was considered to be.
And, I thought, just how secret. There has never been any official
acknowledgment of the existence of the Special Evacuation Kommando.
Exactly what, I asked Witkowski, was the Kommando tasked with
evacuating?
The taciturn Pole, concentrating on the road ahead, flashed me a look.
Patience. Everything in its own time.
Sporrenberg, he continued, was sent for trial and sentenced to death
in 1952, but not before he had testified in secret before the Polish courts
about his role as one of Lower Silesia's main plenipotentiaries for the
evacuation of high-grade technology, documents and personnel or his
part in the murder of 62 scientists and lab workers associated with a top
secret SS-run project in a mine near Ludwigsdorf, a village in the hills
southeast of Waldenburg, close to the Czech border.
Sporrenberg, operating under the political oversight of Gauleiter
Hanke, had been in charge of a Kommando cell tasked with "northern
route" evacuations via Norway, which remained in German hands until
the very end of the war.
The NKVD/Polish intelligence team learned that SS-Obersturmbannführer
Otto Neumann, who had commanded a Kommando detachment
in Breslau, had been responsible for all southbound shipments to
Spain and South America.
Neumann was never caught, but was reputed to have escaped to
Rhodesia, where he was supposedly sighted after the war.
According to some estimates, Witkowski said, the air bridge established
by the Kommando's southern command between the Reich's
remaining occupied territories and neutral, but Axis-sympathetic Spain
managed to evacuate 12,000 tons of high-tech equipment and documentation
in the final months of the war using any commandeered Luftwaffe
transport it could lay its hands on.
The Kommando southern command had one other exit route available
to it up to the end of the war—albeit an even more hazardous one. Using
some of the northern Adriatic ports that remained in German hands up
to the surrender, a brave or foolish U-boat commander could conceivably
have run the gauntlet of Allied air and maritime superiority to evacuate
cargo and personnel by sea.
But it was Sporrenberg's northern route operations that underpinned