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

NICK COOK 65
yet kicked in and my breath mingled as condensation with the steam
rising from the cup.
The documents were contained on several reels of microfilm and, like
the reels at the main repository in Alabama, they were in bad condition.
My business schedule allowed for one shot at a read-through. My plane
left at 6:15 that night.
To help me cut to it, the archivist had offered to open the office early
and said I was welcome to turn up any time after seven. Coffee was on the
house.
Time was already short when I slapped the first reel into the microfilm
reader and got to work.
Lusty opened with a condensed history, the opening paragraph of
which began:
"At a medieval inn near Thumersbach near Berchtesgaden [Hitler's
mountaintop retreat in Bavaria], early in May 1945, the German General
Air Staff patiently awaited the outcome of surrender negotiations taking
place in the north. They had arrived by car and plane during the past
weeks, when the fall of Berlin was imminent, and had kept in contact with
Admiral Doenitz at Flensburg. Through the interception of one of these
messages, their location, which had previously been unknown, was
discovered. Within 24 hours, Lieutenant Colonel O'Brien and his small
party, representing the Exploitation Division of the Directorate of
Intelligence, USAFE (United States Air Forces in Europe), had arrived,
located the party and conducted the first of a series of discussions with
General Koller, who was then in command."
Colonel O'Brien's men were the advance guard of 200 officers chosen
from HQ^Army Air Forces to oversee the USAAF tech-plunder
operation and it was clear right from the start that they were in a race
against time.
In the chaos of the collapsing Reich, many German scientists were
dead, others had been captured by the Russians advancing from the east
or the Americans, British and French in the west. Many were held in
internment camps, but in a country brimming with former Reich slaveworkers
and displaced citizenry—almost all of whom had to be filtered by
the Allies for Nazi party members and war criminals—it was hard to
know who was who or where.
But the vast majority were still at their factories and laboratories when
the advance units of the USAAF plunder operation screeched up in their
jeeps and half-tracks. With no orders to stop working, they had carried
on at their workbenches, even though the armed forces of the high