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Chapter 22
Special Incidents
The energetic but uneventful activities that characterized the formation of the
Institute RABE were punctuated by a few “strength tests.” There were many
conflicts among the town’s indigenous residents, the German specialists enlisted for
work, and Soviet military and civilian specialists arriving with “special assignments”
from Moscow. In most cases, these conflicts had to do with the forced reduction of
living space. More than a thousand new residents had converged on the small, quiet
town, and there had been no new construction.The housing conflicts were for the
most part successfully resolved through the personal efforts of the military
commandant’s office, the administration of the town Bürgermeister, and the Institute
RABE administration.
Transport was more difficult. Sometimes high-ranking envoys from Moscow
appeared who hampered work and who for some reason wanted to join in and get
some benefits. They demanded personal automobiles, private apartments, and
guides to show them local points of interest. Isayev and I, and later Pilyugin, had
to take on the task of throwing them out of Bleicherode as quickly as possible.
But there were incidents that we categorized as “critical.” Approximately two
weeks after the official founding of the Institute RABE, a Smersh lieutenant
colonel from the division that had been billeted in Nordhausen appeared in my
comfortable office. He reminded me of our meetings during our first days in
Nordhausen and was interested in what we had turned up using the information
we had received from Smersh about possible hiding places of secret equipment that
the Americans had not discovered. It turns out that we had forgotten about the
“forester’s cabin.”
“According to information that we received from the Germans in the first days
after we entered Nordhausen,” he said as he unfolded a large-scale map of
Germany,“somewhere in the area of the forest preserve, which used to be strictly
guarded under the pretext of protecting the wild animals, there is a forestry base
that locals called the ‘forester’s cabin.’ We haven’t been able to find anyone from
among the locals who has been at that base. The new German authorities have
found forestry service employees who themselves did not have access to that base.
They said that in actual fact there wasn’t a ‘forester’s cabin’ there, but a comfortable
house with all the conveniences that was used for recreation and hunting by
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