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But a parallel development that would soon have a powerful impact on how Axis POWs were treated in the West was taking place. There was at the time in American hands another group of Axis prisoners, who, unlike the collaborators from the East, were regarded as quite valuable: scientists who had put their skills to work for the Nazi cause.

All the major powers considered German scientists part of the booty of war. The Americans, British, and Soviets each had established special teams that concentrated on the capture and preservation of German laboratories, industrial patents, and similar useful hardware of the modern age. Scientists were generally regarded as another technical asset to be appropriated.

The United States and Great Britain jointly created a Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) to coordinate their
efforts to seize particularly valuable targets. Actual raids were carried out by subordinate teams designated by a letter, like the “S Force” (also known as the “Sugar Force” in cable traffic) in Italy, the “T Force” in France, Holland, and Germany, and so on.
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These units had only minimal armed strength, but they traveled complete with accomplished linguists, Western scientists, and police specialists who permitted them to identify rapidly and capture useful experts and materials.

The stakes in the search for the scientific expertise of Germany were high. The single most important American strike force, for example, was the Alsos raiding team, which targeted Axis atomic research, uranium stockpiles, and nuclear scientists, as well as Nazi chemical and biological warfare research. The commander of this assignment was U.S. Army Colonel Boris Pash, who had previously been security chief of the Manhattan Project—the United States' atomic bomb development program—and who later played an important role in highly secret U.S. covert action programs. Pash succeeded brilliantly in his mission, seizing top German scientists and more than 70,000 tons of Axis uranium ore and radium products. The uranium taken during these raids was eventually shipped to the United States and incorporated in U.S. atomic weapons.
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The U.S. government's utilitarian approach to dealing with German science and scientists, however, proved to be the point of the wedge that eventually helped split American resolve to deal harshly with Nazi criminals, including the captured collaborators who had served on the eastern front. It is clear in hindsight that the Americans in charge of exploiting German specialists captured through Alsos and similar programs became pioneers of the methods later used to bring other Nazis and collaborators into this country. Equally important, the philosophical concepts and psychological rationalizations expressed by U.S. officials in dealing with the German experts were gradually stretched to cover utilization of almost any anti-Communist, regardless of what he or she had done during the war.

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Other features of military regulations promulgated by Manstein on the eve of the war include orders for the immediate liquidation of all captured Soviet political officers or leaders, summary executions for civilians who “participate or want to participate” in resistance to German troops, and “collective measures of force”—which soon came to mean murder of entire populations of villages, including children—to punish hamlets in which “malicious attacks [against the Wehrmacht] of any kind whatsoever” had taken place. German soldiers who had committed what would otherwise be crimes under Germany's own military code were not to be prosecuted if their acts had taken place “out of bitterness against … carriers of the Jewish-Bolshevik [
sic
] system.”

Manstein later claimed at his trial for war crimes that the starvation order had “escaped my memory entirely.” He was convicted by a British tribunal and sentenced to eighteen years in prison, but he obtained release in 1952 after serving fewer than three years of his term. The former field marshal eventually became an adviser to the West German Defense Ministry.

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Vlasov was seriously ill with alcoholism throughout the war, and his condition worsened as defeat neared. Still, he clung to the conviction that his Nazi-sponsored army might somehow contribute to the overthrow of Stalin. Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, Vlasov's German liaison officer, remembered one of his last encounters with the general as follows: “That night when he had gone to bed I went up to his room. ‘Forgive me, Wilfried Karlovich,' he said. ‘Of late I have been drinking heavily. Of course I used to drink before, but it never got hold of me. Now I want to forget. Kroeger keeps filling up my glass and perhaps he thinks that is the way to manage me. He is wrong.… I miss nothing I just want to get away.… Wilfried Karlovich … [you must] tell the others that Vlasov and his friends loved their country and were not traitors. Promise me.…'” A broken man, Vlasov lapsed from these reflections into a fitful sleep.

In the very last days of the war Vlasov and his troops also betrayed the Germans and briefly assisted Czech partisans in Prague who were fighting the Wehrmacht. Following a short battle there, the general surrendered his men to the U.S. Third Army in early May 1945. The Americans, operating under wartime orders to cooperate with the Red Army in POW matters, turned Vlasov over to the Russians shortly after his capture.

There are several versions of how Vlasov passed from American into Soviet hands. The most colorful one is offered by Jürgen Thorwald, a German publicist who enjoyed close personal ties with a number of Vlasov's senior officers. Thorwald asserts that an unknown American officer lured Vlasov to a secret conference at a “mysterious locality” near where the Russian was being held under house arrest. “While the party was passing through a wooded lane … it was suddenly surrounded by Soviet troops. Vlasov and his staff were overpowered before they knew what was happening.” Other versions claim the United States simply turned the general over to the Soviets during a routine POW transfer. Whatever the truth on that point is, it is clear that Vlasov and ten of his senior officers were tried for treason in Moscow during the summer of 1946. On August 12 the Soviet radio announced that “all of the accused admitted their guilt and were condemned to death.… The sentences have been carried out.”

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These troops were among the actual triggermen of the Holocaust, and were particularly active in machine-gun slayings of civilians. Some of Kaminsky's men were also known to have titillated themselves by photographing naked Jewish women moments before murdering them. Some of the militiamen seem to have enjoyed “before and after” pictures, for a number of such prints were later discovered on the bodies of fallen Kaminsky soldiers. The Germans, however, fearing that premature publicity might wreck their “race and resettlement” schemes, soon put an end to Kaminsky's picture-taking sessions at the edge of the executioner's ditch.

CHAPTER THREE

“Chosen, Rare Minds”

German General Walter Dornberger is a case in point. Dornberger—a military, not an SS, officer—was never indicted or tried on any war crimes charge. Instead, he became a famous man in aerospace industry circles and remains much respected by U.S. corporate and military associations to this day. Dornberger is often cited as an example of the sort of German who was really innocent of Nazi crimes and who was appropriate for the United States to recruit once the war was over.

The U.S. Air Force, it is now known, secretly brought Dornberger to this country in 1947 and put him to work on a classified rocketry program at Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) near Dayton, Ohio. By 1950 he had gone into private industry with Bell Aircraft, and he eventually rose to be a senior vice-president in the Bell Aerosystems Division of the massive multinational Textron Corporation. There he specialized in company liaison with U.S. military agencies. He enjoyed high U.S. security clearances and many public honors, including the American Rocket Society's Astronautics Award in 1959. He died peacefully in June 1980.
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Prior to his arrival in the United States Dornberger had been a career German artillery officer. He had recognized as early as the 1920s that the Versailles Treaty prohibited Germany from building more than a handful of cannons, bombers, naval guns, or similar conventional weaponry. Rockets, however, had been unknown as
modern weapons at the time of Versailles and thus had not been banned by that agreement. Dornberger was one of the first who figured out that these scientists' toys could be put to use to propel high explosives. He labored hard from 1932 on to make missiles an integral part of the arsenal of the Third Reich.

It was not easy being a military rocket chief in Nazi Germany. The SS, in particular, tried to muscle in on Dornberger's work. Money, engineers, and slave laborers used in construction seemed always to be in short supply. And in March 1943 a terrible blow fell: Adolf Hitler had a dream in which Dornberger's pet project, the giant liquid-fueled V-2 rocket, failed to cross the English Channel. The Führer put great stock in these nightly visions, and soon the general's project had fallen to the bottom of a heap of high-priority “secret weapons” that were supposed to extricate Germany from the mess it had created.

But General Walter Dornberger was nothing if not determined. He requested and got a private audience with Hitler during July 1943. With films, little wooden rocket models, and other audiovisual aids, Dornberger personally convinced Hitler to authorize the creation of a gigantic underground factory near Nordhausen for mass production of his machines. This factory would also house one of the major crimes of the war.
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The Nazis used slave labor from the nearby Dora concentration camp to build the Nordhausen rocket works. In fewer than fifteen months of operation the SS drove Dora's inmates to hack a mile-long underground cavern out of an abandoned salt mine to house the facility. The starvation diet and heavy labor generally killed the toilers after a few months. The assembly line workers who actually built the missiles once the cave was finished were not much better off.

At least 20,000 prisoners—many of them talented engineers who had been singled out for missile production because of their education—were killed through starvation, disease, or execution at Dora and Nordhausen in the course of this project.
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The question of who bears responsibility for these deaths has been the subject of considerable controversy since the war. After 1945, of course, Dornberger and his subordinates denied that they had had anything to do with the Nordhausen production line. The SS, not they, they said, had controlled the labor force at the underground factory.

The SS surely deserves to bear part, perhaps even the largest part, of responsibility for the crimes at Nordhausen. But it is a mistake to think it acted alone. In truth, Dornberger and his aides fought a long bureaucratic battle with the SS over control of Germany's rocket program, and the degree of Dornberger's personal authority over what took place on the production line shifted with Hitler's moods. In late 1944 the general reached an agreement with Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, under which the SS's representative, Hans Kammler, took over day-to-day management at Nordhausen on the condition that selected Dornberger subordinates (like latter-day U.S. rocket program administrator Arthur Rudolph) retained their positions of authority at the facility. Dornberger himself retained explicit jurisdiction over production schedules, including the number of missiles to be built and the mix of the various models.
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Dornberger, in short, did not directly control the slaves at Nordhausen. His production orders, however, set the schedule by which they were worked to death. And he was, it seems, an enthusiastic taskmaster. He demanded more and more rockets—more than there was even fuel to launch—until the very last moments of the war. Food for the slaves at Nordhausen—never much in the first place—ran out altogether sometime in February 1945. But Dornberger's orders for more missiles never stopped, and the labor battalions worked around the clock without nourishment. The SS simply crammed more prisoners into the Dora camp, used the strong ones for labor until they dropped, and let the weak ones die.

Thousands of inmates starved to death. Cholera raged through the camp, killing hundreds each day. At first the SS cremated the dead so as to keep down disease among the surviving slaves. As the end neared, however, the ovens couldn't keep up with the demand and the corpses were simply left to rot. Inmates piled the bodies up in corners, under stairways, anywhere that was a little out of the way. And the rocket work continued.

Dornberger visited the Nordhausen factory on many occasions. He knew—or should have known, for the atrocity was evident to any eye—that the prisoners who worked on his rockets were being systematically starved to death. And he knew, for he has said this much himself, that Germany's defeat was inevitable.
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Dornberger could have shut down the assembly line on some technical pretext. He could have demanded adequate rations for the prisoners. He
could have cut back his missile orders to the number that Germany was capable of launching. He chose instead to accelerate production.

The general's postwar autobiography, which was received with some critical acclaim in the West, is filled with anecdotes about his rocket tests, bureaucratic struggles, and technical achievements. His machines are described in endless detail with precise information on takeoff weight, fuel consumption, thrust, and other minutiae of physics. Yet there is not a phrase of acknowledgment for the prisoners who actually constructed these machines at the cost of their lives. He presents events in his book as though his missiles had simply leaped off their drawing boards and into the skies with no intermediate steps, as though rockets could somehow build themselves.

When many Americans think of the Holocaust—those, that is, who were not eyewitnesses—they often think of the images on a certain piece of grainy motion-picture film, on which cadaverous inmates resembling living skeletons are shown leaning out from filthy wooden bunks to weakly greet U.S. Army liberators. The movie then cuts to a scene in which hundreds of corpses are laid out in a row. They appear hardly human even in death. The leg-bones are etched clearly against the ground, but the limbs seem too big somehow, as though they don't fit with the bodies. This is because there is no flesh left on the remains, only skin; the Nazis and their rocket factory have made off with the rest. The film flickers as an American officer walks past the atrocity, his face a mask.