The Vanished Nazi Officer: The Strange Case of Hans Kammler

This time, we travel to the 1940s and World War II as we explore the life and disappearance of Hans Kammler. A top Nazi officer, he played a large role in the Nazi Party’s extermination camps and in many of their technological advancements.

Mysteriously, his ultimate end remains unknown to this day. Could he have fled to South America or become a top-secret acquisition in Operation Paperclip?

Early Years

Hans Kammler was born in the city of Stettin right at the start of the twentieth century in 1901. At the time, the city was part of the old German Empire but would later become part of Poland.

After gaining a doctorate at university, he worked as a civil engineer, taking on many construction projects.

Joining the Nazi Party in 1931, he became a member of the SS two years later in 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany.

Role in the Nazi Regime

Kammler’s early positions in the party were mostly administrative. However, he still rose through the ranks rapidly in the Waffen-SS, the SS’ paramilitary division. He achieved the position of Obergruppenführer by the end of the war, one of the top ranks available in the Nazi hierarchy.

Working under Oswald Pohl and one of Adolf Hitler’s right-hand men in Heinrich Himmler, he was in charge of constructing the Nazis’ infamous concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Building underground bases and rocket bunkers were also some of his fundamental duties.

The world of long-range ballistic technology was where much of his responsibility lay, however. His team worked to develop the world’s first ballistic missile with the V-2 rocket program.

Another success was the development of the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first jet fighter. Due to this, Hitler decided to make Kammler responsible for all aircraft matters in the war’s final months. Hitler stripped these duties from Hermann Göring, the well-known top Nazi officer whose power and influence had waned by this point.

Atrocities and War Crimes

Kammler was regularly feared by his subordinates and was a harsh disciplinarian. Due to his involvement in the concentration camps, it is no surprise that he was more than happy to work prisoners to death. This, under extremely harsh conditions.

Putting this into numbers, Mittelbau-Dora was a concentration camp with prisoners often used for slave labour. 20,000 inmate deaths occurred over the camp’s history. Around half of these deaths resulted from the manufacture of Kammler’s V-2 rockets.

The Arnsberg Forest Massacre

Another of these incidents was the Arnsberg Forest Massacre, a series of egregious incidents during March 1945. Over 200 people of men, women and children were slaughtered under Hans Kammler’s command.

Author Nicholas Stargardt’s book The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 indicates how the massacre began. Stargardt suggests that it was instigated over as little as Kammler’s annoyance after being held up in his car on a countryside road.

This incident took place late into the war, with the Allied forces already advancing into Germany. The book highlights items belonging to the V-2 project under Kammler’s command were already being evacuated.

It’s possible then that Kammler decided to kill the prisoners to prevent them from handing secrets of the V-2 rocket to allied soldiers.

The killings spanned three instances that began on the 20th of March and proceeded until the 23rd. Like many such killings the Nazis perpetrated, victims were killed by firing squad into mass graves. Many of their belongings were confiscated beforehand or stolen. During an excavation of the area in 2019, many of these artefacts were discovered.

Not long after the massacre, Allied forces liberated the area. They soon found out about the atrocities that had been committed thanks to German informants.

In a view to enlighten the local population about what had happened, the townspeople were called to the site of the massacre. They were forced to witness the exhumation of all the bodies, which were then given more suitable and dignified burial plots. Pictures of these events show some of the German townspeople assisting in these duties.

Hans Kammler’s Disappearance

As the war’s final days approached and the Allied forces closed in on Berlin, knowledge of Kammler’s whereabouts became flaky.

The only certainties we have are his activities from the 1st – 5th of April 1945. Kammler gave the evacuation order to his missile technicians, and disobeyed orders to provide defence. Instead, Kammler ordered for the destruction of all V-1 flying bomb equipment, a type of early cruise missile that the Nazis had developed.

Allied forces had intelligence that Kammler was in the city of Nordhausen, Thuringia. It was here the underground Nazi weapons factory Mittelwerk was located. Kammler had constructed this base and was in charge of the whole facility.

In their desperation to eliminate the officer, a bombing raid was launched on the city over the 3rd and 4th of April. Leaving 8,800 civilians dead and their prime objective a failure, Hans Kammler remained alive. Kammler’s driver, Kurt Preuk, stated after the war that Kammler had subsequently driven through the burning remains of the city.

Future NASA scientist through Operation Paperclip Wernher von Braun was part of Kammler’s personnel. He claimed his superior was in Bavaria, planning to hide out in a nearby abbey.

From Bavaria, Kammler’s activities focussed on putting into place evacuation and contingency plans. He soon ordered the evacuation of the Ebensee office where he was then situated. Then fleeing to Prague over the border in the Czech Republic in early May.

Accounts from Kurt Preuk and Kammler’s former aide Heinz Zeuner state that he departed for a tank conference in nearby Austria from Bavaria. Kammler then delivered two cyanide capsules to his wife Jutta who was staying in the Tyrol region of the country. It was then that Kammler made his way to Prague.

Some days after arrival, they claim that Kammler then took a capsule as the Allies’ net tightened, committing suicide. They stated that they had also personally witnessed the officer’s corpse.

Preuk’s testimonies can be somewhat supported seeing that the planned travel route was marked on a map that still remains in existence. Curiously, this does not lead to Prague itself, instead stopping just short of the Austrian city of Linz, at least a few hours away.

In July after Germany’s surrender, Kammler’s own wife petitioned to have her husband’s death officially declared as 9th May. She hoped to achieve this with the help of the various statements collected. It wasn’t until 1948 that this was officially recognised by a German court with the country still under Allied occupation.

SS member Ingeborg Alix Prinzessin zu Schaumburg-Lippe supported the story of Kammler’s escape to Prague. The two had met in the city, with the officer saying his goodbyes and that he refused to be taken alive. Even with the Allied forces being willing to cut him a deal.

Bernd Ruland’s 1969 book Wernher von Braun: Mein Leben für die Raumfahrt gives a different run of events. Here, Hans Kammler became embroiled in a firefight not long after his arrival in Prague against Czech resistance fighters. At the point of capture, Kammler was shot by one of his own men to avoid custody.

This account was allegedly supplied by Walter Dornberger, an SS Major-General. Like Kammler, Dornberger was another German officer involved in V-2 development. Dornberger had heard the firefight story from another eyewitness. With this effectively being third-hand information, we cannot be certain of how truthful this account is.

The Chase

Once the German forces surrendered on the 7th of May 1945, the hunt began to discover Hans Kammler’s whereabouts, dead or alive. He made the list of the thirteen most-wanted Nazi war criminals by the UN.

Files were created by numerous Allied government agencies about Kammler. One of these was the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), a WWII-era American intelligence agency. They claimed Kammler had disappeared shortly before the arrival of US troops.

But, there’s something even more curious. The head of the CIC branch in the Austrian town of Gmunden, a Major Morrisson, made an interesting claim. He stated that he had interviewed someone in regard to a mysterious numbered account. This related to former-SS aircraft and missile production sites.

The kicker is that only three people had access to this account. One was documented as being outside of Austria at the time, one was being held as a POW under the Allies, with the other Kammler himself. A report into this event produced by the CIC did not name Kammler as the interviewee, however, an alternate independent report in fact did.

Oskar Packe, who worked in the US Denazification offices, therefore believed Kammler’s suicide was false. Reports Packe had filed also stated that Kammler had in fact been captured by US forces in Germany on 9th May 1945. This was the same date of his previously stated apparent suicide.

Operation Paperclip and Alsos Mission Links

Others claim that he was indeed captured by Allied forces. Being a key figure in the Nazis’ rocket program, it has been speculated that the US drafted him as part of Operation Paperclip. In contrast to his compatriot Wernher von Braun, Hans Kammler may have been hidden from the public eye.

Much of the information to come was uncovered by two people:

Marek Michalski, a Polish historian who detailed the findings of a recent team researching Kammler. He covered the story in a 2019 edition of the magazine Odkrywcy.

The other, Andreas Sulzer, an Austrian documentary filmmaker. Sulzer produced a documentary about the case that was released in 2020 with matching details to Michalski’s piece.

We do not know if he also got his information from the same team, or found out about the following independently:

The Richardson Account

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was another US wartime intelligence agency. The new findings claim that in 1997, former OSS agent Donald W. Richardson made a stark revelation to his family. He had helped former Nazis transition to the US as part of Operation Paperclip.

Richardson claimed that he had brought Hans Kammler to the US and supervised him until 1947. Not only this, but Kammler had been provided with a new identity, making him harder to trace.

This makes sense considering that Kammler moved in the highest circles of the Nazi regime. At the peak of his powers, he was only probably half a step down from figures such as Heinrich Himmler.

News of the US openly housing a war criminal of that ilk would have been a tremendous scandal. It has been suggested by some that he was afforded witness protection under a new identity.

Richardson stated the former Nazi officer was unwilling to cooperate with the US despite his good treatment. This matches the reports of the former SS member who met Kammler in Prague. Eventually, he was held in a maximum security unit where he was again reported to have taken his own life, this time via hanging.

Richardson was also a member of the Alsos Project. This was an Allied initiative to gather information on Nazi technological developments in the aftermath of the war in Europe. Andreas Sulzer found that Samuel Goudsmit, the scientific leader of this initiative, had held original documents of Kammler in his personal property.

This does indeed raise questions. However, the Alsos Project finding Kammler blueprints would not have been out of the ordinary given their mission. There was also the small matter that Goudsmit was Jewish. So with Kammler being a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi, he would have been very reluctant to cooperate with Goudsmit, at least directly.

Extra Supporting Evidence

As well as Richardson’s statements, documents have been discovered that do support Hans Kammler’s supposed capture. These come from the US government think tank the Wilson Center’s report on Hans Kammler written in 2019 by Frank Döbert and Rainer Karlsch:

US Air Force Files

The first of these is a document from 30th May 1945 written by Colonel Loyd K. Pepple, detailing numerous spoils of war obtained by the US Air Force. The document details not only military equipment the US gained, but also personnel set for interrogation.

Names such as Hermann Göring and Albert Speer are listed that were known detainees. But curiously, it also contains Kammler’s name, titled as ‘Inspector of All Jet Fighter Units of the Luftwaffe’. A seeming follow-up to this document from 10th July 1945 supports this file. It asks for Kammler’s interrogation along with other key Nazi personnel.

This is also supported by a letter from Brigadier General George McDonald to Major Ernst Englander, the US Air Force’s chief interrogator. This once again requested the interrogation of Kammler, along with Speer and Karl Saur, another Nazi official.

McDonald was responsible for judging the Nazis’ technological expertise after their surrender. He spent time inspecting their underground facilities in both Austria and Germany. His conclusion was that these locations were dangerous if another war broke out. He suggested they be used as targets for rocket-propelled atomic bomb tests to prevent this.

McDonald’s directives were given to him by the Commanding General of USAFE, the top US Air Force figure in Europe. At the time, this was General John Kenneth Cannon. Putting it all together, we can gather that it was Cannon supplying the orders for Kammler’s interrogation.

This new information sure seems to suggest that Hans Kammler did indeed fall into US custody. But, no other information has been found to delve into these circumstances and what his fate may have been from there.

American Secrecy and Kammler’s Importance

Even after the production of these documents, other Allied agencies still resumed their hunt for Kammler. The many theories floating around about the man just helped to muddy the waters for the US to keep any dealings hidden.

While not a key scientist like von Braun, Kammler was a central pillar of information when it came to the Nazis’ technological developments. He had potential access to all the knowledge the US required.

This included, according to British intelligence, information on bases, resources, stockpiles, scientists and more that were on the Russian side of the post-war German partition. Important, seeing as the Cold War was soon to emerge with tensions rising. Therefore, it makes sense from this point of view that American agencies would have looked to have kept his existence hidden.

Other Theories

In contrast to aligning himself with the United States, some suggest that Kammler instead went to the Russian side. Gottlob Berger was chief of the SS Main Office and was in charge of SS recruitment. He said in a post-war interrogation that he had personally witnessed Hans Kammler hand himself over to Soviet forces. This allegedly took place in the Austrian village of Kirchdorf in Tirol.

Some theorise that Kammler instead was still working on new Nazi technology in a hidden location, safe from any possible capture. This included supposedly working on ‘Die Glocke’. This was a theorised bell-shaped Nazi super-weapon with incredible abilities. It allegedly held anti-gravitational properties but time-travel capabilities as well. These dubious claims were first put forward by the Polish author Igor Witkowski in the year 2000.

Even wilder theories have been stated, however. This includes that he in fact travelled to a secret Nazi base in Antarctica, possibly working on flying saucers and other such things.

May Hans Kammler have been able to escape to South America or the Middle East, as was the case with some other high-profile Nazi figures? This is the opinion of Dean Reuter, author of The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America’s Deal with the Devil when interviewed on the History Unplugged podcast.

He believes that the CIC did their deal with Kammler, and then allowed him to escape. It’s on record that the CIC had done this with another high-profile Nazi, the so-called ‘Butcher of Lyon’ Klaus Barbie. Lieutenant Colonel Dale Garvey, the CIC commanding officer, authored documents for Barbie’s release as well as files relating to Hans Kammler.

Conclusion

Hans Kammler’s story is one surrounded by darkness and intrigue. His contribution to the Nazi cause cannot be understated, especially in his role in the construction of the horrifying concentration camps. Kammler’s fingerprints can be found on many aspects of the Second World War.

Despite the latest information uncovered, his ultimate fate remains somewhat of a mystery. The multiple accounts and theories suggest various different outcomes, and to this day it is still unclear as to what exactly took place.

The latest evidence does definitely suggest that Kammler was held in US custody, but we are unclear what became of him after this point. Did he really take his own life? Was he left to escape to South America like other high-profile Nazis? Or, was he quietly executed behind the scenes?

Hopefully, the continued work of researchers can shed light on what became of the former Nazi officer.

What do you think ultimately became of Hans Kammler? Did he die at the end of WWII, or end up in the hands of the United States? Leave your comments down below.