downward. With a faint tearing sound, the skin on the side of the body ruptured and a foul-smelling black substance splashed down onto the rough concrete floor. A rank odor filled the chamber, and both the soldier and Wolf stepped quickly backward.
“What the hell?”
“Don’t touch the other one,” Wolf ordered, turning away.
But the soldier stayed where he was, staring down at the corpse with horrified fascination. “How could that, that thing,” he almost stammered, “how could it do that to a human being?”
“It’s only a Jew,” Wolf snapped, “and I’ve no idea. Right,” he went on, ignoring the two bodies and consulting a list of names, “we know what we have to do. Find Major Debus and bring him here to unhitch Die Glocke from the power supply and the other connections. Then we can load it onto the truck.”
Getting the device out of the test chamber was far from easy, because of its bulk and weight and also because of the myriad connections that needed to be detached before they could even begin the removal process.
Eventually, Wolf ordered his men to back a truck through the main entrance to the Wenceslas Mine. The driver maneuvered it carefully down the narrow corridor until it was within a few meters of the test chamber. Struggling with the object’s bulk and inconvenient shape, they used a pair of trolleys to haul it over to the truck, finally transferring it to the back of the vehicle.
As well as the device and the people who had been developing it, Wolf had also been ordered to remove the most vital sections of the reams of documentation that had been generated during the testing process. In all, it took nearly five hours to complete this part of the operation and transfer everything to the trucks waiting outside. The scientists would be easier to deal with.
Wolf consulted his list of names again. In fact, he had two lists, which corresponded with the two groups of scientists now waiting in the different chambers to leave the facility. He nodded to two of his men and led the way down the corridor. He opened the door of one room, stepped inside and carried out another roll call. It didn’t take long, because there were only three people on his list: SS Major Kurt Debus, the engineer who’d shown his men how to detach the connections and prepare Die Glocke for removal from the test chamber; Elizabeth Adler, the specialist mathematician who had previously worked with Professor Walter Gerlach, the founder of the project; and the scientist Dr. Herman Obeth. As soon as he was satisfied that he had correctly identified these three individuals, he stepped outside again and ordered his men to escort the scientists out of the mine and into one of the waiting lorries.
Only then did he instruct another group of his soldiers to place the demolition charges that would be used to collapse the roof of the main tunnel and seal the mine for all eternity. Finally, he turned his attention to the large group of men and women in the second chamber.
Wolf stepped inside the room and duplicated his earlier action with the first group, taking a careful roll call to confirm exactly who was in the room in front of him. The twenty-eighth name he called out was Georg Schuster. Nobody was missing. He nodded, replaced the paper in his pocket and gestured to two of his men who were standing just behind him.
“Unfortunately,” he began, “although the Junkers is a very big aircraft with an impressive carrying capacity, I regret that it is not big enough to take the device and all of you as a single load. But the Fuhrer has decided that your knowledge of this project is so detailed and so important that we have to take elaborate precautions to ensure that you will not be captured by the advancing Russian forces. I wish there was some other way, but my orders leave me with no choice.”
Wolf stepped out of the chamber, ignoring the puzzled expressions on the faces of the thirty-seven men and women who were standing there, as the first questions were directed toward him.
The two soldiers who were still standing just inside the room each removed a stick grenade from their belt, primed it and tossed it into the midst of the crowd of people in front of them. As the first terrified screams echoed through the chamber, they stepped outside, slammed the heavy door closed, and threw home the two massive steel bolts to secure it.
The grenades exploded within half a second of each other, the double explosion echoing through the tunnels and bringing down a scattering of small rocks and dust from the stone ceiling above.
The loud screaming inside the room had stopped, but neither Wolf nor his two men believed that just two grenades would have been sufficient.
“Go inside and finish them,” he ordered crisply, then strode away toward the main entrance of the Komplex Milkow.
Wolf waited outside the entrance to the Wenceslas Mine until the last of his men emerged, then gave orders for the explosives to be blown. Seconds later, there was a dull rumble from inside the mine as the dynamite completed its work. He waited a couple of minutes to ensure that all the charges had detonated, then crossed to the entrance to check that the inner passageways were no longer accessible.
He glanced at the narrow-gauge railway that linked the Wenceslas Mine with the airfield at Bystzyca Klodzka and for a moment wondered if that would have been a better way to transport Die Glocke, but then shook his head. It would have meant transferring the device from the truck onto one of the railway carriages, and then repeating the process in reverse at the other end of the journey, and all of that would have taken time. Time which he really didn’t have.
Only when he was completely satisfied did Wolf climb into his staff car and lead the small convoy of three trucks containing his men, the device they had extracted from the testing chamber, and those three scientists whose work, knowledge and ability was of the highest caliber and who were vital for the eventual success of the project.
At Bystzyca Klodzka airfield, which lay in a valley within the Eulenbirge Mountains, to the west of Opole, the flight crew had already removed the tarpaulins that had concealed the huge six-engined Junkers Ju-390. They’d carried out the necessary preflight checks on the aircraft and the rear cargo door was wide-open, waiting for loading to begin.
The device was heavy, bulky, and awkward to handle because of its shape, and maneuvering it inside the relatively confined space of the fuselage was difficult. But eventually they got it secured in place, and Wolf then ordered the three scientists to climb on board the aircraft. The expressions on their faces reflected their conflicting emotions. They’d expected to be evacuated from the area, simply because of the importance of their work to the Reich and the vital knowledge they possessed, but what had happened at the mine clearly showed that there was more than one way for their masters to ensure that they kept their mouths shut.
When they had taken their seats in the cabin, Kurt Debus-the only one of the three with any military training- leaned across to Elizabeth Adler, who was visibly shaking.
“Don’t worry,” he murmured. “If they were going to kill us, they’d have done it back at the mine. We’re safe, because we’re too important to Hitler.”
“Where are they taking us?” Herman Obeth asked. “Not Berlin, surely?”
“I’ve no idea, but somewhere out of the Fatherland, I think we can be sure of that. What we’ve achieved can still change the course of the war. We just need a little more time to perfect it.”
“I hope you’re right,” Adler replied, her voice quivering with emotion. “I really hope you’re right.”
Hauptsturmfuhrer Wolf was the last to take his seat, and only did so after carrying out a final check that nothing had been left in any of the vehicles that might compromise the project.
One of the engines on the port wing of the Junkers spluttered into life, then settled down to a steady reassuring roar. Then the second engine started, and the third, and in less than a minute the flight deck crew had all six running. The Junkers, which had been painted light blue and illegally wore the markings of the Swedish Air Force-a rudimentary disguise that might make an enemy pilot pause before opening fire with his cannon-began to move, and the massive aircraft started to taxi across the short distance to the end of the runway.
Moments later, the pilot pushed the throttles fully forward and the huge aircraft began gathering speed. It lifted into the darkening sky and swung around toward the west.
It’s reasonable to assume that the paint job was a success, because no units of either the Russian forces or the Western Allies reported seeing a Swedish aircraft at any time that day or evening. They were too busy watching out for enemy aircraft, and it seems likely that the Junkers managed simply to slip through the front lines, perhaps seen but certainly not noticed.
The Junkers’ ultimate destination was never recorded in any of the surviving documentation, and it’s quite
