The Man from Mittelwerk Read online

  The Man from Mittelwerk

  M. Z. Urlocker

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2022 M. Z. Urlocker

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Inkshares, Inc., Oakland, California

  www.inkshares.com

  Edited by Adam Gomolin and Pam McElroy

  Cover by Tim Barber

  Interior design by Kevin G. Summers

  ISBN 9781950301416

  eISBN 9781950301423

  LCCN 2022930119

  First edition

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part II

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part III

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part IV

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part V

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  I would always remember his frantic eyes, just before my world exploded in blue-and-orange flame.

  I had to know. Was he still out there?

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  The Tunnels

  Nordhausen, Germany

  April 11, 1945

  We faced only feeble resistance in taking Mittelbau-Dora. My men and I were among the 1,500 soldiers of the U.S. 104th sent to secure the camp’s perimeter by late-morning. I was a captain and that allowed me the freedom to scout the mission.

  We’d been moving across German lines without break since November. Every day was a blur. All a man could do was worry about the day in front of him and hope to hell to make it to the next.

  We passed the tunnel entrance, and then the gatehouse. That’s when the dregs of the Nazi guards, too old, too ill-equipped to mount a serious challenge, salvaged some pride and fired a few rounds into the spring sky. Then they threw down their weapons.

  Some soldiers were having a laugh behind me. “These guys are older than my dad,” one dogface said as the guards raised their hands and fell to their knees.

  Germany was losing the war and everyone knew it, especially the Germans.

  Mittelbau-Dora was a high-value target. G-2 reports said there was an underground weapons factory, directly beneath the camp in a series of tunnels. We had to get a look before the Russians did.

  My source went a step further, reporting that Himmler had authorized some new scientific work down there, something they called Wunderwaffen, the so-called miracle weapons that would win the war for Germany. Above ground, we were liberating POWs. Underground, well, who knew what would happen?

  I led my men to the side of the camp gatehouse and gave my orders. We would secure the prisoners’ barracks, half a klick up the gravel road. We marched ahead through puddles, into what looked like an abandoned lumber camp.

  We were at alert, weapons raised and ready, moving ahead in column formation. We saw no prisoners. I signaled to the radioman to check in with Divisional HQ. “Tell them we’re moving forward. No hot contact so far.” I still had time.

  All morning, there had been a foul smell, heavy in the air. The closer we got to Mittelbau-Dora, the worse it was. Pigs? Slaughterhouse? Unclear.

  Up ahead, two GIs from another squad were bent over in a ditch, a fifty-foot fire pit with wood stacked alongside and smoke floating near the ground. Something was off. It didn’t fit with a wood fire in a pine forest. One of the soldiers gave me a cursory salute as we passed, pale like he was about to faint; the other one retched. The dwindling smoke of the near-extinguished fire burned my eyes and I rubbed them. When I opened them again, I understood.

  It wasn’t a wood fire. The stacks were bodies of prisoners piled like logs. God, what were we up against? We’d heard rumors, but in war, you never knew what to believe. I froze in my steps and somebody bumped into me. I barked orders.

  We ran to the barracks to search for survivors, and that’s when we discovered how bad things were. I’d been a cop in Detroit. I’d seen the bodies from the Purple Gang’s street wars.But nothing prepared me for this. They were stick people. More than a hundred of them. On bunks and the floor, packed in tight. The smell was putrid, worse even than the sight.

  These weren’t the Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals who ended up at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps in Poland. Their red triangle badges indicated they were politicals, sent to the tunnels to be worked to death. They spoke mostly French, some Russian, some German. I counted seventeen dead in the bunks. One man whispered: “Merci, les Américains.” His throat was full of fluid and he sounded like he was drowning. Then he dug a harmonica from his pocket and started to play La Marseillaise. He got five notes out on the rusted Hohner before he ran out of breath, choking. The fellow behind him patted his shoulder blades with the strength of a baby. I doubt the Frenchman was much older than I was.

  It was 11:40 hours. Getting late. I had to embark on my mission—something my C.O. only vaguely understood and my men knew nothing about. I turned to Baldwin. “The camp is secure. I need you to take care of this.”

  “Cap, we barely started,” he said in his staccato way. Baldwin spoke like an automatic rifle. Rapid bursts. Short pauses. Made sure he always hit target. “Twenty more buildings. Who knows what we’ll find?”

  “We scouted the whole area. There isn’t a German soldier worth worrying about for ten miles.” I glanced at my watch. “Stay put and do your best for these men.”

  “Where you gotta be . . . sir?”

  We’d been through a lot together, and if someone had to know, it would be Sergeant Baldwin. But the risk was too high.

  “I’ve got some orders. A joint operation in the tunnels. That’s all I can say.”

  “Your brother and his secret ops? Keep me out of it.”

  I knew what he meant.

  Leon Baldwin had joined the 104th in December, transferring in from the First Division. The Big Red One was a strong unit and I was glad to have him join. He was a small, wiry guy from Atlanta. When I first met Baldwin, I wondered how he passed the army physical and whether he actually ate, because there seemed to be nothing to him physically, except unlimited energy. But he proved he was all soldier and a natural leader. He also knew when to steer clear.

  “Battalion aid will be on its way,” I said. “Don’t feed anybody anything. Liquids only. Tag ’em if they can’t sit up or speak, move ’em outside if they’re able.”

  I turned and made my way. I was to rendezvous with British intel inside the tunnels at twelve-hundred hours. Jordan had infiltrated the site a few weeks earlier, working undercover for the Office of Strategic Services, the top U.S. spy agency. My mission was to get Jordan out and let the Brits exfiltrate any German scientists and equipment of value to the Allies.

  That was the plan, but nothing was easy. Now that the Nazis were near defeat, cooperation between the Allies was getting rough. Each country was in it for its own interests. All I cared about was Jordan. It was too late to worry about anything else.

  I jogged back to the tunnel, alone, gravel flinging from my boots. Once I passed the gatehouse, I hit it double-time, like a drum solo reaching a crescendo. After what I’d seen at the prison camp, I didn’t want to think about what the Germans would do if they discovered a spy.

  I hit the entranceway and nearly skidded in front of the two American MPs at their post in front of a jeep. They looked like a couple of linebackers right out of college.

  The MPs were dwarfed by the entrance to the tunnel, a rectangle built of concrete wide enough for two locomotives, with two sets of railroad tracks underfoot. The Germans had built wood scaffolding overhead, draped with a camo net, making the entrance invisible from the air.

  “This is a secure area,” the first one said, stepping forward.

  “JIC-Two,” I said. JIC referred to the Joint Intelligence Committee. The “Two” I threw in to set them back on their heels. “I’m following up on a repor
t of incendiary devices, if you boys want to join me.” I drew my pistol.

  “Ah, that’s all right, sir.” He saluted and his partner stepped back, staring at the ground.

  Twenty paces into the tunnel, it was a new world. Wet. Colorless. It was all black and gray. No vegetation, no birds, no sign of life at all. Carbide lamps hissed overhead, releasing a faint garlic smell and lighting the tunnel in a yellow haze.

  I ran down the tunnel, my shadow shortening as I approached each lamp and then elongating again. My footsteps echoed off the distant walls and sixty-foot ceiling, sounding like a squad. It was cold enough to see my breath. The tunnel seemed to go on forever until it opened up onto a central area three stories tall, carved out of solid stone. This was Mittelwerk, an underground factory spread throughout five miles of tunnels dug in an abandoned gypsum mine.

  The floor was smooth and level, embedded with perfectly laid small-gauge rail tracks. The walls were set uniformly straight with sharp right angles. I had to give it to the Nazis; they built the place to last a thousand years. It was like an underworld Ford factory, stretching out as far as you could see. No woody station wagons here, though. At Mittelwerk, they used prisoners from Mittelbau-Dora as slave labor to build the V-2 rockets that bombed London and the Belgian port of Antwerp. We didn’t know what other weapons they had built down here.

  I could see the Nazis’ vast ambition laid out before me. They planned to conquer the world, enslaving people to build the very weapons that would destroy them. There must have been thousands of people working here just days ago. Now it was quiet as a Detroit snow fall.

  I shook my head to get clear. I listened for a moment. Nothing.

  I was to meet my contact at Bay 47. I didn’t even know his name. British officer “F” was all they had signaled. I’d be temporarily under his command as part of a program called T-Force. There was a four-minute window to meet him. If one of us didn’t make it, the other had to decide whether to go in alone or call the operation off.

  I squinted to read the map Jordan had prepared. There were two long S-shaped tunnels, A and B, that ran parallel, connected by a series of numbered chambers every thirty meters.

  I made a short right turn into Tunnel B and started running again. It was lined with a dozen workshops, each one numbered and labeled. There were half-built rockets, hundreds of control panels, helmet-shaped gyroscopes, motors, and tools laid out. Not a worker in sight, as if they’d all gone on lunch break and never returned. I ran almost a mile until I came to what I was looking for. A white “47” painted in two-foot numerals on the rock wall at eye level. Danke for German orderliness.

  Bay 47 was the final stage of the plant. I passed two giant specimens of fully assembled V-2s. One was erect and spanned nearly the full height of the tunnel. Another was loaded horizontally on rail cars. The fins alone were taller than I could reach.

  The scientists behind the V-2 were far ahead of the Americans. No one had ever thought on such a grand scale. The V-2 traveled five times faster than the speed of sound. It was a weapon of sheer terror.

  I thought of the civilians we’d met in Antwerp, in northern Belgium. They had endured two months of V-2 pounding, going about their lives knowing there would never be a warning. The V-2s flew so quickly they were silent until they struck, leaving a crater the size of a city block, four stories deep.

  I paused to examine the map. Next to Bay 47, the word “descend” was written in Jordan’s neat handwriting. I looked around. No signposts here. You had to know what you were looking for. Then I saw it, the rounded top of a metal ladder that led down an almost-hidden shaft to a lower floor. I felt relief that I’d found it. I climbed ten steps down the ladder to a landing where I faced a black metal door with no number —Dunkelwerk, the secret lab within the secret plant. The dark factory.

  Jordan never explained what the Germans were doing at Dunkelwerk, only that he had to infiltrate it and slow them down. Now that I had seen the scale of Nazi brutality in the camp, I had to wonder what he thought he could achieve.

  I glanced at my watch, the silver one that Jordan had given me. There was a metallic taste in the back of my throat, and things felt shaky for a second. It was 11:58. I had two minutes. The smell of sweat and disease from the prisoners stirred my stomach. We were going to make it. We could get out alive. But where was F?

  I breathed silently and listened for enemy soldiers nearby. I was cold now. It was noon and I hadn’t eaten since battle breakfast at zero five hundred. I heard nothing but water dripping. I waited the four-minute window. No F.

  Christ almighty.

  I waited another two minutes. That was the limit. T-Force operated with no backup rendezvous or timeslots. These were single-shots. Get in, get what you needed, and get out before anything could go wrong. Timing was so tight, it was a miracle when the operations worked. A no-show or a dead scientist, that was the norm.

  I should have called for backup. I could have brought Baldwin into it. I could have done it five different ways.

  I had a bad feeling. It was like when you knew there were enemy soldiers just beyond the next ridge. You hadn’t seen them, or even heard them, but you just knew.

  I looked at my pistol and checked the clip.

  Jordan had goaded me the first time I had used a weapon. We were boys and our dog, Boxer, had been missing for a week. There was a rabies scare all summer. Jordan found her, disoriented and snarling in the woods behind the farm. Jordan said we had to take care of it ourselves. He loaded the clip and then handed me the old Springfield rifle from the barn. “You have to kill it, to protect the farm,” he said. “You have to be brave.”

  He never had to tell me again.

  I slipped open the door to Dunkelwerk.

  A narrow corridor opened up into a well-lit chamber. The air was still and it smelled of carbolic, like the army hospital at Camp Adair where I had trained. I didn’t know what to expect. But not this. It looked like a laboratory that had been hit by a tornado. Papers littered the floor. Filing cabinets circled the room, drawers yanked open, contents spilled. Was I too late? Maybe Jordan had gotten out on his own. Or had the Germans fled and taken him as a bargaining chip?

  I looked for any sign indicating that people were still around. I could make out steel cabinets and racks of electronic equipment, vacuum tubes, wires, and complex instruments.

  A strange looking wood-and-steel chair stood at the center of the room, with a tangle of wires running up its back. I could see that there were posts in the ground where other such chairs had been, evenly spaced out across the lab. There had been a dozen of them, but now there was just one, under a bare light bulb, like a barbershop that had fallen on hard times. I counted a dozen gurneys around the perimeter. I pulled the sheet off the nearest one. It held two emaciated, identical, naked corpses. I almost jumped. What the hell was this place? What had Jordan gotten himself into? What had he gotten me into?

  I walked counter clockwise around the periphery slowly, trying not to make a sound. A soft scraping near the entrance acted like an electric shock. I ducked behind one of the large metal cabinets and held perfectly still. I counted to ten. I heard nothing more. I peered from behind the cabinet. Still nothing.

  My eyes were drawn toward a large wooden door at the far end of the room. Two German guards emerged, shuffling and talking loudly. Their hands were full, and their rifles were slung on their backs. The first was straining under the load of two metal gas cans that sloshed as he walked. The oily smell of kerosene filled the air. The second, who looked barely twenty, held a bundle of long brown tubes in his arms like firewood. It wasn’t hard to work out what they were up to. Hitler had given the Nero Decree: burn everything that might assist the Allies. This was a complication I didn’t need.

  “Halt,” I called. I pulled my Colt M1911 and aimed at the closer of the two. “U.S. Army. Surrender.”

  The two soldiers swung to face me, and the second one dropped part of his load. I braced for an explosion that didn’t come. The first turned pale as the moon and then there was a large, growing damp spot in his pants.

  “Hands high,” I jerked my left hand and pointed it upward. They gently put down their wares.