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

NICK COOK 53
near Breslau under the auspices of an altogether separate contract.
Toward the end of the war, the legend stated that Miethe was drafted
from his activities in Breslau to assist with the Schriever/Habermohl disc
in Prague, an indication, perhaps, that the Schriever/Habermohl disc was
the better bet in a procurement environment that was by now desperately
short of money, skilled labor and raw materials. This streamlining coincided
with the "administrative change" that had led to the abandonment
of Schriever's V3 design for the altogether more viable V7.
The V7, then, seems to have been the result of a three-way endeavor,
although there were reports that a Miethe disc—based, perhaps, on the
project he abandoned at Breslau—was captured by the Russians, along
with a number of engineers and scientists, when they drove the Germans
out of Poland.
As for the V7, some say it, too, was acquired by the Russians when they
took Prague; others that it was blown up by the Waffen-SS on May 9,
1945, the day hostilities in Europe ended. The Legend had it both ways.
The detail in the Schriever/Habermohl/Miethe legend was rich and
impressive. Here were names, dates and places—minutiae even, that
seemed to corroborate everything Rudolf Lusar had written down. The
trouble was, the data was based heavily on the say-so of Schriever, who
was long since dead; the rest had magically appeared out of thin air, just
as Cross had said. No one knew where the detail emerged from. Over the
years it had been passed down from one researcher to the next, with
no apparent attribution. When I approached BMW's archivists, for
example, they denied that there had been any BMW factory near Prague
"engaged in advanced aircraft projects including design or advanced
research during World War II."
I began to see what Cross meant. Cross and I were used to sourcing
every piece of information we ever came by. This stuff was unverifiable.
What I needed was hard, solid proof; and within the Schriever portion of
the Legend there was nothing to hang a hat on, beyond the fact that the
man himself had existed.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the other characters in
the story. All attempts by researchers to trace Miethe and Habermohl
had foundered, although there had been occasional "sightings" in the
lore that had grown up around them.
Miethe is supposed to have escaped Czechoslovakia in early May and
to have headed west, eventually making contact with U.S. technical
intelligence teams operating inside Germany. Herded into a "pen" along
with Wernher von Braun and his fellow rocket scientists, Miethe was said
to have been taken to the United States, ending up at Wright Field, the