Kransberg Castle before the World War II
Camp Dustbin was a British-American interrogation camp located first at Chesnay, near Versailles, France and then moved to Kransberg Castle outside Frankfurt, Germany, during World War II. It served as a processing station and interrogation center for the German scientists, technicians, and administrators, captured during the war.[1][2]
Among them were leaders of V-2 missile project (including chief designer Wernher von Braun); leaders of the atomic and nerve-gas development projects; "members of the special research staff of the Reichsforschungsrat (Imperial Research Council)" (including its director, Werner Osenberg); members of German Ministry of Armaments and War Production (including the minister Albert Speer and his associates Karl-Otto Saur, Karl Maria Hettlage, Walter Dornberger and Theodor Hupfauer[3]); Abraham Esau, leading German expert on radar; directors of Telefunken; professor Friedrich Gladenbeck; industrialists like "steel barons Fritz Thyssen and Hermann Röchling, and Volkswagen’s Professor Ferdinand Porsche"; leading figures of I. G. Farben, developer of nerve gases: Gerhard Schrader, inventor of nerve gases tabun and sarin; Richard Kuhn, "inventor of the most toxic of the gases", soman;[1] and former Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht.[3][4]
The camp was open for the inmates, who "were free to wander around the castle grounds. The wrought-iron gates remained open. ... They passed the time by giving talks, listening to Schacht’s poetry and by staging a weekly cabaret mounted by the inmates that made light of their fate".[3][4]
In 1946, interrogations in camp Dustbin "had the aim of finding out about Soviet development projects as well as German wartime achievements"; "scientific workers threatened with kidnapping by agents of other countries, chiefly the USSR, were held there".[1]
Similar interrogation camp, Ashcan, was created in Luxembourg for the 86 most prominent surviving Nazi leaders prior to their trial in Nuremberg.
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Maddrell, Paul (2006) (in en). Spying on Science: Western Intelligence in Divided Germany 1945-1961. Oxford University Press. p. 17-21. ISBN 978-0-19-170840-4. https://academic.oup.com/book/3061.
- ↑ Crim, Brian E. (2021). "Allied Internment Camps in Occupied Germany: Extrajudicial Detention in the Name of Denazification, 1945–1950 by Andrew H. Beattie (review)". pp. 618–620. ISSN 2164-8646. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/836286.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Kitchen, Martin (24 November 2015). "12. Nuremberg" (in en). Speer. Yale University Press. p. 283. ISBN 978-0-300-21600-4. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.12987/9780300216004-016/html?lang=en. Retrieved 28 December 2023.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Andrew, Christopher; Tobia, Simona (29 April 2014) (in en). Interrogation in War and Conflict: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Analysis. Routledge. pp. 96-97. ISBN 978-1-134-70338-8. https://books.google.co.il/books?id=cS9zAwAAQBAJ&.
The original article can be found at Camp Dustbin and the edit history here.