Hans Kammler was the SS general who commanded Nazi Germany's secret weapons program. He constructed the underground lairs that hid the V-2 missile program, oversaw the construction of Germany's most advanced jet aircraft, and was responsible for the use of tens of thousands of slave laborers from the concentration camps.
He was, to all intents and purposes, the real Dr. Evil. Yet at war's end this very high-ranking Nazi official simply disappeared into thin air, never to be seen again.
Kammler was born in Stettin, Germany, now part of Poland, in 1901. He was a civil engineer who earned his doctorate in 1932.
He had missed service in World War One, but in 1919 he joined a Freikorps, one of the many private right-wing armies that sprang up in post-war Germany and fought against communists for control in the Weimar Republic. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and the SS in 1933.
Well regarded, he rose from head of the building department at the Air Ministry to deputy chief of the SS Main Economic and Administration Office. That vast organization managed finances, supply, and business projects for the SS state, as well as running the concentration camps.
Kammler oversaw Office D, the department that administered the concentration camp system, and also Office C, the section that designed and built camp infrastructure. For example, he oversaw construction of the crematoria buildings at the expanded Auschwitz camp in Poland, known as Birkenau.
In 1942 Kammler began to be involved with the advanced weapons program, again in the construction of secret facilities. He began by building manufacturing plants and test stands for the V-2 and the new Messerschmitt Me 262 jet.
In August 1943, following a heavy British air raid on the Peenemünde army research center in northern Germany, it was decided to shift V-1 flying bomb and V-2 missile research, development, and construction to special underground facilities. These were created using vast amounts of slave labor.
Kammler created the enormous Mittelwerk facility three kilometers northwest of the town of Nordhausen in Thuringia, plus its attached concentration camp at Mittelbau-Dora. Within that vast subterranean world, the V-1 and V-2 were built under the supervision of Nazi scientists like Dr. Arthur Rudolph and engineers like Magnus von Braun, Wernher von Braun's brother.
At Mittelwerk, 2,275 V-1 flying bombs were built and used to bombard England, as well as 5,200 V-2 missiles, also used to pound targets in England and parts of northwestern Europe. The facility also manufactured the revolutionary Heinkel He 162 "Volksjäger," or People's Fighter, a last-ditch emergency fighter that fortunately appeared just too late to pose much of a threat to the Allies. There was an underground jet fuel production facility as well.
In total, of the 60,000 people who passed through the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp and its sub-camps, some 20,000 perished, including 350 hanged by the SS. General Kammler famously said at the time: "Don't worry about the victims. The work must proceed ahead in the shortest time possible."
All this construction meant that Kammler was close to Albert Speer, Hitler's minister of armaments and war production. Speer appointed Kammler his representative for special construction tasks.
But Kammler had a strong streak of self-promotion running through him. In March 1944 he persuaded Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, to appoint him head of special buildings under the fighter aircraft program. This made Kammler a top economic manager and, in many regards, more important than Albert Speer.
Incredibly, from building V-2 production facilities, on August 8, 1944, Kammler was then appointed by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, to command the operations of the missiles themselves, which had been under the auspices of General Walter Dornberger, an army officer. Officially, Kammler was given overall command of V-2 operations.
On January 31, 1945, Kammler's command was confirmed when he became head of all missile projects in the crumbling Third Reich. It is notable that Kammler was the last officer Himmler promoted to the rank of Obergruppenführer in 1945.
He was also awarded the Knights Cross of the War Merit Cross with Swords, Germany's highest non-combat distinguished service medal. Further promotion followed. With Hermann Göring increasingly disgraced and sidelined, Kammler was able to further consolidate his power base by being appointed in early April 1945 the Führer's general plenipotentiary for jet aircraft.
With time fast running out, Kammler ordered the evacuation of Wernher von Braun and 500 missile technicians to the Alps on April 1, 1945. The SS missile launching division was re-rolled as infantry.
Kammler disobeyed the Armed Forces High Command, which had ordered him to defend the Nordhausen area against the advancing Americans. Instead he abandoned the Mittelwerk facility, sending the valuable scientists and technicians into hiding.
What about Kammler's movements at war's end? Quite a bit is known, because the British had actually targeted him for assassination some months before.
Since February 1945 Kammler had been tracked by British intelligence via Enigma decrypts of his communications, as part of a plan to kill ten senior SS officers codenamed Operation Little Foxley. The original Operation Foxley had been an ambitious plan to kill Hitler using snipers dropped by parachute close to his alpine headquarters on the Obersalzberg in southern Bavaria. That plan was abandoned due to arguments in Britain over whether Hitler, because of his disastrous military decisions, was more useful to the Allies if left alive.
Little Foxley targeted 10 important personalities. Apart from Dr. Kammler, they were SS Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg, head of the SS spy service; Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, deputy director general of the Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs and former head of the Einsatzgruppen death squads on the Eastern Front; Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, chief of the SS recruiting office; Obergruppenführer Hans Jüttner, chief of the SS Leadership Main Office; Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, Kammler's one-time boss at the SS Main Economic and Administration Office and administrator of the concentration camp system; SS Gruppenführer Richard Glücks, in charge of the concentration camp forced labor and the supervision of medical experimentation in the camps; SS Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, Himmler's liaison at Führer headquarters; and lastly Obergruppenführer Alfred Wünnenberg, chief of the Order Police.
The British found Kammler a difficult target to track, as in the last months of the war he moved about regularly. They tried to kill him on April 3 and 4, 1945, when they knew he and his staff were at Nordhausen. Massive air strikes by the RAF killed 8,800 people in the Nordhausen area, but Kammler and his staff survived. They drove through the burning ruins to safety.
Enigma decrypts revealed that Kammler was in Munich on April 13, attending a meeting with Albert Speer. Next he appeared at Itter and the Linderhof Palace, a large castle in southwestern Bavaria located near another large underground SS lair, the Messerschmitt 262 jet aircraft factory at Oberammergau. Kammler and his immediate staff reached the castle on April 22, 1945. Tons of research documents were hidden nearby.
Kammler didn't hang around for long. On April 28 he and his staff moved to Ebensee, Austria, and the Villa Mendelssohn. Close by to Kammler's location was Ebensee concentration camp, its inmates being used to construct an underground armament storage facility.
On the night of May 3 to 4, 1945, just four days before the final German surrender, Kammler gathered his staff and announced that they would be moving to Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia and still under German occupation. Although not a popular decision, the small convoy set out nonetheless.
Kammler travelled in a vehicle with his driver, SS Oberscharführer Friedrich Baum. His adjutant, Sturmbannführer Arthur Struck, followed with second driver Kurt Prieck and a handful of trucks and field cars with the remaining small staff.
On May 4, following a route map marked up by Prieck, the convoy passed through Linz, Austria. Interestingly, the annotations on the map ended at Freistadt, Austria, and not Prague, Czechoslovakia. Also during the movement, Kammler and his driver Baum became separated from the main convoy. At this point the trail of Kammler runs cold.
Kammler had definitely been covering his tracks. On May 4, 1945, a British unit had captured a bunker near Lübeck in northern Germany. Investigators found some SS vehicles that records showed belonged to Kammler's close entourage. Floating in the bunker's water tank was a badly decomposed corpse that carried Hans Kammler's identity papers. The British didn't think it was Kammler.
The British last heard of Kammler on May 7, 1945, when they intercepted an order he sent to the SS signal school at Leitmeritz. Kammler's location when he sent the message is unknown.
The story is that Kammler and Baum made it to Prague, but they were caught up in the Czech uprising against the German occupation. Baum was apparently shot in the left knee, taken to hospital, and then killed by Czech partisans when the hospital was overrun.
Interestingly, records show that an Oberfeldwebel Friedrich Baum, not SS Oberscharführer Friedrich Baum, was admitted to the military hospital at Gmunden, Austria, on May 23, 1945, after having been shot in the knee in Prague on May 4. The ranks are a similar grade, one army and one SS, as are the name and type of injury. Many SS personnel changed into regular army uniform at war's end to avoid arrest.
Army senior sergeant Baum died of an infection at Gmunden on May 29, 1945, and was buried locally. A further search of army records reveals that there was never an Oberfeldwebel Friedrich Baum army driver. Was this Kammler's SS driver?
Hospital records show that Baum had been shot in the right knee, not the left as reported in the original story. Many have surmised that the Baum in Gmunden was actually a wounded Kammler who had changed into an army uniform and adopted his dead driver's name, escaping from Prague until his infected wound caused him to seek medical attention. But it was too late to save his life, and he died of blood poisoning.
But there is a twist in this scenario. In 1967 Austrian authorities emptied several small cemeteries of German wartime dead and reinterred them in one large cemetery. When Baum's grave was opened, it was found to be empty. Had Kammler faked his own death in late May 1945, perhaps with some help?
Another story long reported has been that Kammler killed himself while on the run. Some of his staff who were later captured by the Allies reported that Kammler and some of his staff left Prague on May 9, 1945. Kammler had left in the midst of a German army convoy near to the town of Písek in southern Czechoslovakia. Kammler had pulled over and either shot or poisoned himself, then been buried by loyal staff in an unmarked grave, the location of which they couldn't remember or wouldn't divulge.
In 1949 Kammler's roadside suicide was refuted by a U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps agent working on denazification in Hessen. This man stated that Kammler had in fact been captured by the Americans in May 1945 but had escaped and was then working for the Soviets in East Germany.
Had Kammler actually fallen into U.S. hands on or about May 9, 1945, at Oberammergau, and the entire Prague story been fabricated to provide a plausible death scenario for Kammler in the soon-to-be Soviet occupation zone, where no proper investigation could ever be made?
The seeming lack of urgency with which the Allies searched for Kammler immediately after the war suggests that they already had him in secret custody and didn't want the Soviets to know. For example, his name was kept out of the Nuremberg trials. In 35,000 pages of testimony and evidence, Kammler, who oversaw the concentration camps, was mentioned a grand total of only 26 times.
He was also declared dead fairly quickly. In September 1949 Kammler's widow petitioned to have her husband declared legally dead. This was approved without any fuss, conveniently halting any official interest by intelligence organizations in searching for him.
At war's end Kammler had only been 43 years old, so it may be assumed that he would have lived on for decades after the war. Considering the lack of any evidence for his death apart from contradictory stories from loyal SS staff, the decision seemed suspect and pointed to a very alive Kammler in Allied hands.
He had some use to the western intelligence services. He knew where certain people and documents were hidden, and so on. Though he was not a scientist like Wernher von Braun and the thousands of Nazis the Americans shipped to the states after the war in Operation Paperclip to populate NASA and other government agencies with the Third Reich's best brains, a hint of a possible fate for Kammler was the story of an OSS officer who claimed decades later that Kammler was sent to the United States and held in captivity until 1947, but that he then committed suicide.
Two reports have emerged from declassified U.S. files that seemed to show that Kammler was in American hands. The first, dated May 30, 1945, originally from the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, lists Kammler on a list of senior German air force personnel in U.S. custody. Top of the list was Hermann Göring. Kammler's name appears at number 18, listed as inspector of all jet fighter units of the Luftwaffe.
Kammler's capture is noted on another document dated July 10, 1945, an organizational structure of the Luftwaffe in the final stages of the war. Kammler is listed as one of the prisoners held for interrogation.
What became of Kammler thereafter remains a mystery. Did he, as reported by the OSS, kill himself while in U.S. captivity in 1947? We may never know. But it is clear that Kammler survived the war and never faced justice for his considerable crimes.