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By Root 423 0

stepped into the darkened complex. Everything was intact: equipment, safes, precision tools, files with test results, and all manner of documents and blueprints, many stamped SECRET or TOP SECRET. Even the keys to the gleaming white laboratories had been left behind—obligingly numbered, in neat orderly rows. Chertok stowed the gun. He barely knew how to use it anyway. The sidearm, like his ill-fitting uniform, was a new and uncomfortable acquisition, a recent addition to his wardrobe that left him feeling like an imposter. The bars and gold star on his shoulder boards identified him as a major in the Red Army, but the military garb would not have fooled a seasoned veteran. The tunic was too clean, the boots too unscuffed for a frontline officer. What’s more, not a single combat decoration hung from Chertok’s breast, a highly suspect omission after four years of all-out war. Major Chertok, it was clear, was only masquerading as a soldier. In reality he was a thirty-three-year-old electrical engineer with a prematurely receding hairline, the slight paunch of someone who spends too much time behind a desk, and a dossier identifying him as an employee of NII-1, the Soviet Union’s leading rocket research agency. Hundreds of civilian specialists just like him were pouring into Germany, arriving daily in a motley assortment of Dodges, Studebakers, and converted Boston B-25 bombers that the United States had given the Soviet Union under the lend-lease program. And they were coming—as Edward R. Murrow had prophesied—to claim the intellectual spoils of war, to seize upon Nazi Germany’s “malignant ingenuity.”

The research institute in Adlershof was just one in a burgeoning catalog of places of scientific interest in the Berlin area. There was the Askania factory nearby, the Siemens plant in Spandau, a design bureau in Mariendorf, another Askania facility in Friedenau, a Telefunken factory in Zehlendorf, and the list went on. Each of these sites held its own wonders: magnetron tubes with a pulse power of up to one hundred kilowatts, accelerometer calibrators, polarized relays, transverse and longitudinal acceleration integrators—precision instruments that the Russians had only dreamed of. It was such sophisticated components that made the world of difference between the giant, guided V-2 and the crude little directionless Katyushkas the Soviet Union had built during the war. And Joseph Stalin wanted that technological edge.

German precision engineering was now the official property of the Soviet government. The specialists back home were anxiously awaiting the war trophies. Epic bureaucratic battles would later erupt in Moscow over who got the booty. Fortunately for Chertok, his initial role in this national technology transfer was restricted to inventorying, packing, and shipping the loot. Others would have to fight over it. At times he felt like a wide-eyed child that had been handed the keys to the Detsky Mir toy store across from NKVD headquarters in Dzerzhinski Square. “Oh, this German love for details and this exactness, which has ingrained such top-notch work into the culture,” he declared in an April 29 diary entry. “I am envious.”

Anything was for the taking—exquisite Khulman drafting tables, vibration benches, entire photochemical laboratories. And what brand names: Philips, Rohde & Schwartz, Lorentz, Hartmann-Braun, Haskle, AEG, Karl Zeiss. Chertok had read about these famous firms in the Western journals that were selectively circulated at NII-1, but until now they had been as familiar and unavailable as a Lana Turner pinup.

Taking it all seemed only fair. “We have every right to this,” Armaments Minister Dmitri Ustinov explained. “We paid for it with a great deal of blood.” After all, it was the Germans who had violated the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, who had attacked unprovoked two years later and slaughtered millions of Soviet citizens. In Russia, they lacked everything, while Germany had an overabundance of everything. “The thing that every laboratory needs the most and is in the shortest supply,