Det går framåt i Gabriels och min utmaning mot stjärnorna.
Idag fick jag ett nytt vykort.
In the clement beach town of Yalta in the Crimea, the victors meet. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the USA’s president, Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, and Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, prepare to set the contours of the post-war world. The Nazi Empire is divided into spheres of influence; the east of Europe, and the east of Germany is largely left in the hands of the Soviets, whilst the West comes under American influence.
In February 1945, months before the Western Allied forces enter Germany, a special task force is set up by US Army Intelligence. This is T-section, which will later become Operation Paperclip, tasked with gathering Nazi technology and scientists, especially those with a hand in the V-2 rocket design.
In April 1945, US forces enter the German provinces of Thuringia and Saxony, in the east of the country. The Americans know that, as per the Yalta agreement, this area will soon have to be turned over to the Soviets. However, the provinces are renowned for their wealth of factories, laboratories, and missile launch sites. With the clock ticking, the Americans work to lift as much technology and as many German scientists as possible before the deadline. Operation Paperclip begins.
The Mittelwerk Factory in Nordhausen, central Germany, is a prime target. Though in the Soviet zone, American troops arrive first. Here they find a massive underground factory building jet engines, V-1 buzz bombs, and V-2 ballistic missiles. The Americans take everything, every blueprint, spare part and engineer.
Nordhausen is not a normal factory. It is buried deep underground and is a vast network of tunnels and vaults. Slaves do all labour here; those caught up in the Nazi holocaust. Jews, Roma, communists and other so-called ‘deviants’ are forced to work in horrifying conditions until they die from injury, overwork or starvation. The Americans who liberate the labour camp are appalled, a report commissioned after the site’s discovery states, “this factory is the epitome of megalomaniac production and robot efficiency and layout. Everything was ruthlessly executed with utter disregard for humanitarian considerations. The record of Nordhausen is a most unenviable one, and we were told that 250 of the slave workers perished every day”. Still, their moral outrage does not stop them from spiriting the site’s managers, members of the high Nazi command, and engineers to the USA, and away from justice.
The greatest prize is found not in the industrial heartlands of the Reich, but in the pristine snowy Alps of southern Bavaria. Wernher von Braun, engineering genius, designer of the V-2 rocket, Nazi Party member and participant in the crimes of the holocaust, flees here. He is running from both his former comrades in the SS, who have been tasked with his execution, and the advancing tide of the Red Army, whom he believes will indict him for his work at Mittelbau-Dora, the concentration camp which provided the slave labour required to construct the rocket. In May 1945, he and a team of important engineers surrender themselves to a unit of American soldiers, and in a matter of weeks, he is on an aeroplane headed for Fort Bliss, Texas.
In the end, three hundred rail-car loads of V-2s and their components are captured and shipped to the United States, and 126 of their principal designers, including Wernher von Braun, travel to America to help the US understand the technology. The Soviets arrive in Nordhausen to find the factory almost totally picked clean. With Von Braun, his team of engineers and all the schematics and blueprints of the Nazi Rocket Programme in their hands, the USA begins to take the lead in the race.