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

Chapter 20
In his interrogation sessions with the NKVD and his deposition to the
Polish courts, SS General Jakob Sporrenberg could only tell the
interrogators and the prosecutors so much, Witkowski told me.
Sporrenberg was a policeman and an administrator, not a technician. He
could relay what he had seen and heard, little snippets he had picked up,
but the technology itself was beyond him. He had been tasked with
getting men, materiel and documents out of Lower Silesia before the
Russians reached them; he had had no need to know much else. This was
standard SS operating procedure.
I asked what else he knew about Sporrenberg.
Witkowski stared straight ahead as he talked. First, I had to
understand that Sporrenberg was very high up the chain of command.
Records showed, he said, that Sporrenberg was appointed deputy
commander of the Waffen-SS VI Korps under SS-Obergruppenführer
Walter Krueger in 1944. Krueger, as far as Witkowski had been able to
ascertain, had been involved in a series of top secret SS-conceived
operations in the closing months of the war, including a plan to occupy
neutral Sweden, the evacuation of Nazi wealth to South America and
other neutral or nonaligned states, a harebrained scheme to strike at
New York with V-ls launched by submarine and, of course, the special
evacuation of Nazi secret weapons and high technology. Sporrenberg
was appointed plenipotentiary in charge of northern-route "special
evacuations" to Norway on June 28, 1944. Like Kammler, it seemed that
General Sporrenberg was recognized and rewarded for his ability to
organize, not for his ability to fight.
Following his capture, as much as Sporrenberg was able to divulge
to Soviet intelligence and the Polish courts about the Bell was this,
Witkowski said. The project had gone under two code names: "Laternentrager"
and "Chroms" and always involved "Die Glocke"—the bellshaped
object that had glowed when under test. The Bell itself was made
out of a hard, heavy metal and was filled with a mercury-like substance,
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