Krause strode towards the door when two men appeared from the hole in the wall. They immediately snapped their weapons up and shouted a warning.
“Hauptsturmführer Berndt Krause SS number 52119.”
The two guards did not lower their weapons.
“Advance and be recognized, Sir.”
Krause walked up to the two men slowly, always keeping his hands where they could see them. He paused in front of the led man then very gingerly got out his ID. The guard checked it then stood bolt upright as he handed the ID back.
“Sorry Sir we had to be sure as we have never actually seen you before.”
“You are only doing your job Oberschutze.” Krause put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Where is Gruppenführer Sporrenberg?”
“We don’t know Sir, he entered the room to execute Führer directive 525 but he never returned. When we went in to check… Well he has just disappeared, along with the device and one of the scientists. We found the body of the younger scientist.”
“OK.” Krause said, “Wait here.”
Berndt Krause came out five minutes later after carrying out his own inspection.
“It is your lucky day men, we have to get a message to Berlin and then you two will accompany me as my personal guards. Any problem with that?”
The two men shook their heads.
Krause got his message out to Berlin, it was short:
‘Sporrenberg 52119, package destroyed. On route to an agreed destination after completion of 525. Sporrenberg out.’
The message would have meant nothing to the allied observers but the German high command knew exactly what it meant. A secretary in the Reich Main Security Office, Prinz-Albrecht-Straße no.8 Berlin, quietly and efficiently replaced the personal information from SS folder 3809 and 52119; finally, she swapped the pictures over and then placed the files back into their proper locations.
The fall of the Third Reich
Just over twenty-eight hours later Deputy Commander-in-Chief Georgy Zhukov and Commander Konstantin Rokossovsky 1st Baltic Front and 2nd Belorussian front, Red army soldiers uncovered the chaos and devastation strewn across the fields leading up to the Owl Mountains.
The Red army investigated the scene thoroughly. Destroyed American Sherman tank hulls were mixed with burnt-out German tanks. There were Tiger II, Tiger I’s and Panther tanks. All had been eliminated.
A large battle must have taken place here and now the Russians had entered the secret facility buried deep under the mountain. They knew something important must have been housed here as the American’s had taken a huge risk in mounting this operation; Stalin would not be pleased when he heard the news.
The Soviet’s stripped all of the weaponry they could from the fallen soldiers. They took pictures and copious notes on what they found. The 5th SS Mountain division was hardcore sons of bitches and they had just been in a hard-fought battle with a US division without any insignia.
The Russians searched the whole facility but they found nothing of interest. There was a large laboratory housed at the very bottom level of the facility that had a huge amount of electrical transformers; these would generate more power than was needed to run a large city. The Red army could find no clues in the lab apart from a large coating of purple dust, which they took for analysis.
Whatever was in the facility the Germans had either destroyed it or the American’s had got what they had come for. Zhukov sighed, and filed his report for Stalin and then awaited the inevitable backlash.
A secret meeting was hastily arranged at the insistence of Joseph Stalin with ailing American President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the meeting, Stalin raged for hours at American interference in his country’s war effort. Stalin repeatedly slammed his fists onto the large wooden table; his face was a vicious shade of red.
Roosevelt sat patiently through this tantrum; he had seen it all before although admittedly not on this level. Finally when Stalin had finished Roosevelt stood calmly, moved towards the desk and slowly scanned through the document that Stalin had produced.
“You will sign it Franklin otherwise I can guarantee there will be war between our countries.”
Roosevelt said nothing; he signed the document then sighed heavily. He left for America shortly after.
The decision he made on that fateful day cast a dark shadow over the world in the years to come. Roosevelt would not live to see it but yet that decision weighed heavily on his shoulders for his remaining months.
Stalin had got what he wanted; his Red army forces would ‘win’ the race to Berlin and would get the glory of defeating the Nazi’s in their capital. Stalin would get the barrier he craved and the iron curtain would be born. Even when World War one veteran Harry S Truman was sworn in as the thirty-third president of the United States he could not risk breaking Roosevelt’s deal and secretly instructed US forces to allow the Soviets to get to Berlin before them; to the world it looked like a close race to the capital between two superpowers but in reality the result was never in doubt.
The 30th April 1945 Adolf Hitler sent his last message as Führer of the Third Reich. He dismissed Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring who was second in command and interior minister Heinrich Himmler who had both tried to seize power. Hitler then appointed Karl Donitz as President of Germany.
As the battle of Berlin raged above to its inevitable conclusion and with all escape routes out of the city gone; Adolf Hitler killed himself in the Führer bunker along with his bride of forty hours, Eva Braun. It took another three days for the Soviets to take the building completely after horrendous room-to-room fighting with their German counterparts.
The official end of hostilities in Europe was 8th May – VE – Day – Victory in Europe however technically, the war in Europe did not end until a small group of German soldiers surrendered to some Norwegian Seal hunters on the 4th September 1945, they were meant to establish a weather station but had lost contact in May 1945, they surrendered two days after the defeat of Japan.
Slowly the world began to rebuild itself and the Nazi party members that were still alive gradually to go on trial for the atrocities they had tried so hard to keep hidden from the rest of the world.
SS Gruppenführer Jakob Sporrenberg SS no:5219 was captured by British forces in Norway in May 1945; he was later questioned by the War Crimes Interrogation Unit who established his participation in a number of atrocities committed in Poland and Russia.
Jakob Sporrenberg was extradited to Poland in October 1946 and was sentenced to death by a Warsaw Court in 1950. He was hanged on 06 December 1952. His subordinate Berndt Krause was never found.
Operation Paperclip
After the war had finished American and Russia stripped Germany of all of her remaining assets. President Truman secretly authorized Operation Paperclip; a Joint intelligence objectives agency program where more than one thousand six hundred German scientists, engineers, and technicians were recruited to U.S Government employment.
Under President Truman’s instructions, the team was led by newly promoted war hero Robert Miller. The most famous of these scientists was considered a real coup; the Russians were known to desperately want Dr. Wernher von Braun.
Von Braun was the brains behind the V2 rockets that caused such destruction in London but ever since reading the science fiction writing of H.G. Wells, his real dream was to build rockets for space travel.