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

NICK COOK 195
the last major player in the story of the Bell and the Special Evacuation
Kommando, an SS-Obergruppenführer called Mazuw. A high-ranking
general, Emil Mazuw had been able to acquire any significant technology,
science theory or patent application that had come to the
attention of the SS—and via its prolific security arms, there wasn't much
that passed it by. The FEP, according to Witkowski's researches,
operated independently of the Reichsforschungsrat, the Reich Research
Council, but would unquestionably have had oversight of it.
My guess was that the FEP had been administered by Kammler's
secret research cell within the Skoda Works. After the war, the Allied
powers seized 340,000 German-held patents from the captured records
of the Reich Research Council.
But here was something else: the cream of Germany's wartime
scientific research that had been skimmed off by the SS and compartmentalized
for its own use. Its value would have been immeasurable.
Perhaps this really was what Kammler had returned to Czechoslovakia
for in the death throes of the Reich?
There were other clues, too, but these, Witkowski repeated, were the
physical traces at the mine itself and were best explained when we got
there.
At Ludwigsdorf we followed the line of an old railway that had been
built before the war to connect the region's network of industries to the
outside world. As the road climbed, we found ourselves in a valley
bordered on both sides by tall trees. A patchy mist clung to the upper
branches as we ascended into the hills.
Then we rounded a bend and the scenery opened up. We were in a
valley, one that had appeared out of nowhere. Witkowski parked on a
patch of gravel overlooking some level ground. The railway track,
overgrown from years of disuse, followed its median line, eventually
disappearing from view behind a large derelict building whose tall arched
windows rose cathedral-like into the mist. It was next to this building,
Witkowski said, that the shaft of the mine disappeared belowground.
I stood on the edge of a steep bank a short walk from the car. The valley
was around 300 yards across, the trees either side of it so dense you'd
never know the place existed unless you happened upon it.
The bank, which was 20 feet high, was mirrored by an identical feature
on the opposite side. During the war, this expanse of land had been an
underground marshaling yard, Witkowski told me, thick wooden planks
called sleepers topped with turf hiding a six-lane section of track where
the railhead met the workings of the mine.