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THE RISE OF THE FOURTH REICH
ensure that the place looked pretty much as it had always looked since mining operations began here at the turn of the last century, a clear indi cation that whatever had happened here during the war had been deeply secret. . . . Almost everything that was known about the Wenzeslaus Mine had been handed down from [SS General Jakob] Sporrenberg [the officer appointed to command the ‘northern route’ of General Plan 1945’s evacu ation Kommando]. It had been run by the SS, had employed slave-labor and had been sealed from the outside world by a triple ring of check points and heavily armed guards.” Sporrenberg’s testimony and affidavits, the only known description of the strange experiments at the mine, were given during a postwar trial in Poland. He was found guilty of war crimes and executed. In the closing days of the war, most of the local population was evacu ated westward. In fleeing the Russians, many of these refugees died during the fighting or froze in one of the coldest winters on record. Today, most of the local residents are newcomers with no recollection of what tran spired at the mine during the war. A central shaft led downward to the original mine as well as a labyrinth of additional underground facilities dug by Germans. But what most in trigued Cook and Witkowski was a huge circular concrete structure. Green camouflage paint was still visible on the edges. The circular structure was formed by twelve thick columns supporting a dodecagon-shaped reinforc ing concrete ring about ninety feet in diameter. Initially, Witkowski thought this might be the remains of a cooling tower. He abandoned this idea once he saw cooling towers at a different location on photographs of the area, taken in 1934. Next he thought of the structure as a “fly trap,” similar to those used to test helicopters and other hovering aircraft. Yet, this answer was not satisfactory either in that the researchers found a concrete duct containing thick electric cables leading to a power-generating station. Learning that high-voltage current cannot be used in mines with the potential for flammable gas—such as the Wen zeslaus Mine—Cook and Witkowski determined that the structure had nothing to do with mining but was used in connection with the strange experiments described to his captors by the SS officer Sporrenberg. These experiments centered around a bell-shaped object—appropriately