01 September 2007

The Nazi's at Sand Point




By November of 1946, the last German prisoner had left Fort Hunt. The Bogus Russian Major cleared out his office in the magazine of Battery Sheridan, and the combined Army/Navy Intelligence group closed down their operation. The land was returned the land to the National Park Service.

All of the buildings connected with the Interrogation center were removed. Not a brick or board was left. Walls and wires, towers and cell blocks that had accommodated several thousand prisoners vanished, leaving only the massive concrete of the artillery batteries as a reminder that Spain was once thought to be a threat to the nation's capital.

A legion of young men began to return from overseas, and soon enough, families began to return to the Fort, spreading picnic lunches under sunny skies, unaware of what had transpired on the grassy lawn.

The Germans were elsewhere. Von Braun and his rocketeers were at Fort Bliss, deep in the heart of Texas and deployed to White Sands Proving Grounds. There could be nothing less similar to the gray skies of the Baltic Sea at Peenemunde, but the work was the same.

Gravity's Rainbow is what novelist Thomas Pynchon called it, the trajectory of the V-2 rocket from the pad to London. Upward to fuel exhaustion as the gyroscopic action moved the fins, tipping the missile forward, downrange to London.

Between September 1944 and March 1945, a total of 1054 rockets landed on England: 517 of them arriving faster than the speed of sound.

That was just one of the curious things about the rockets. The explosion of the one-ton warhead was the first announcement that an attack was in progress. Only after the blast did the boom of displaced air arrive. Over 2700 civilians were killed in the rocket campaign against Britain, and more than 6,000 injured.

As the Red Army closed in on the installation, Von Braun and his scientists fled south, first to Oberammergau in the Bavarian Redoubt. Then, when the SS guards fled, to the arms of the Americans. Anything was preferable to capture by the Russians.

What the interrogators heard in the debriefings was more than alarming. It was positively terrifying.

The V-2 wasn't the pinnacle of Germany's rocket program. There was much more. Von Braun's design team had plans for a two-staged winged missile designated the “A-9/A-10” which had a range capable of hitting New Year or Washington. Another variant was mated to the later type XXI U-boats, and three successful trial submarine launches were conducted. That would place the entire east coast at risk from missiles fired from the sea.

The limited throw-weight was considered a problem, but the enterprising Germans developed a solution: the Army Ordinance Department successfully tested the nerve agents Tabun and Sarin, and by late in the war were producing more than 1,000 tons of the deadly material per month. It was a simple matter to pour the agent into a package that could be carried on the rockets.

Weapons of Mass Destruction had arrived. Project PAPERCLIP was the vehicle by which the technology would be channeled to constructive purposes, and added to the arsenals of the West.

The implications were profound, and highly classified. It was a messy business. The War criminals had to be punished; the weary public expected nothing less. That expectation had to be balanced by the interests of the new and disturbing competition with the old Ally to the East. The Russians had Peenemunde, and some of the scientists who had worked in the rocket program.

Some of the scientists had been ardent Nazis. Others had been forced to go along with a criminal system. It was hard to tell the difference, and the scientists kept their thoughts to themselves. Von Braun went to Texas to work for the Army. Other Germans went to the Navy, and traveled to Long Island, to a castle on a promontory overlooking the Sound.

The Naval Reserve Intelligence Program, run out of the District Three Office in Manhattan was responsible for setting up the retreat.

In private life, they were successful entrepreneurs and lawyers. In public service, their exploits inspired a Humphrey Bogart movie about patriotic Mafiosi who suppressed Nazi saboteurs on the docks. When not coordinating the efforts of the Mafia to make the docks safe from Nazi saboteurs, members served behind the lines in the invasion of Sicily. Bernard Baruch was attached to the unit; Charles Lindbergh was a consultant.

With the war over, and the docks secure, the District Office took over the care and feeding of the Germans at Sand Point. The subject of membership in the Nazi Party was not a matter that seemed to have much relevance, and more than it did in Moscow. It was a new world in a make-believe version of an ancient castle.

Tomorrow: The Captain and the Lone Eagle
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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