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

188 The Hunt for Zero Point
the reason for the trip, because it was Sporrenberg who provided the only
details that have ever come to light on the Bell.
The experiment started out at a top secret SS-run facility near Leubus
(Lubiaz in modern-day Poland), northwest of Breslau, in early-mid 1944.
With the Soviets' rapid push into Poland during late 1944/early 1945,
the unit was transferred to a castle on a hill above the ancient village of
Fuerstenstein (Ksiaz), 45 kilometers to the south, close to the Lower
Silesian coal-mining center of Waldenburg. From there, it was moved
again to the mine near Ludwigsdorf (Ludwikowice), 20 kilometers the
other side of Waldenburg, nestling in the northern reaches of the
Sudeten Mountains. The Wenceslas Mine, where the Bell ended up, had
been requisitioned by the S S as part of a neighboring underground
weapons complex, code-named Riese—"Giant."
Riese, only part-completed by the end of the war, was an attempt to
transform an entire mountain into an underground weapons production
center. The many tens of kilometers of galleries that had been tunneled
by the end of the war had been clawed from the rock by inmates drafted
in from the nearby concentration camp of Gross-Rosen. Modern
excavations of Riese show that the S S had been attempting to link it to the
Wenceslas mine via a tunnel almost ten kilometers long.
By mid-afternoon, Witkowski and I had reached Wroclaw, a smoky
industrial city on the banks of the River Oder that in 1945, as the
"fortress" city of Breslau, had held out against the Red Army for more
than 70 days, despite total encirclement.
In September 1944, long before the Russians were at Breslau's gates,
the German military commander, General Krause, proposed the
evacuation of 200,000 civilians, but Gauleiter Hanke refused, seeing it as
a sign of weakness.
Four months later, as the Soviet ring of steel closed around the city,
Hanke finally relented and women and children were permitted to leave.
But in the depths of a winter that was cold enough to freeze the
sweeping waters of the Oder, those that weren't cut down, killed or
raped by the Russians succumbed in their thousands to the subzero
temperatures.
In February, the troops of SS Fortress Battalion "Besselein" launched
a ferocious counterattack in an attempt to break the siege. While the
German troops met the Russians head-on in some of the heaviest streetfighting
since Stalingrad, Hanke exhorted his citizens to victory under
the slogan "Every house a fortress." He then ordered a ruthless
conscription of manpower that produced five regiments of Volkssturm—
old men beyond normal fighting age—and Hitler Youth.