General Hans Kammler was a high ranking bureaucrat in the Nazi regime, in charge of developing the death camps and, by the end of the war, in charge of production of the V-2 rocket and jet engines. At the end of the war, he vanished, reported having killed himself rather than be captured. One of a whole lot of Nazi scumbags who simply disappeared under a mountain of corpses.

But over the years, Kammler has been kinda like the Elvis of Nazis: he keeps being reported to have survived the war, having escaped to Antarctica, or escaped to South America or having escaped on an alien flying saucer or a time machine, whatever the inventor of the tale thinks will make him a buck. Well, huzzah, there’s a new one:

Did US fake top Nazi’s WWII suicide and spirit him away to get hands on Hitler’s secret weapons programme?

The idea here is that the US quietly took Kammler to the US to help with rocket programs and the like. And it’s of course true that the US did bring a whole lot of German scientists and engineers and their data to the US for the purpose of aiding with American research programs. But there is a massive problem with this hypothesis for Kammler: He would have been useless.

Kammler was a civil engineer. That’s why he designed death camps… at its heart, a large camp (“death” or otherwise) is a matter for people who know how to build buildings and transportation infrastructure and the like. But the US had no need for death camps, nor the expertise on how to make them. The US was *loaded* with civil engineers. We didn’t need more. What we need were weapons designers… aeronautical and mechanical engineers, physicists, chemists.

(As we said back in my college days, aerospace engineers make weapons. Civil engineers make targets.)

During his stint running the V-2 and turbojet programs, he was in charge of seeing to it that production of these complex devices that required unusual alloys was successfully carried out. But here again, it would have been a useless skill in the US. If there was anything the US was good at in 1945, it was building things in large numbers at high quality on a budget. Scrounging for rare alloys? Just buy ’em. Rounding up slave labor? Not an issue.

Kammler probably didn’t know a damn thing about what made the weapons work or the physics behind them; nor did he need to. That wasn’t his job. And the job he did do… the US didn’t need.

So while I suppose it’s possible that the US took Kammler, there would have simply been no point in it. Those we took in Project Paperclip we were quite open about. Von Braun and his team were plastered all over the pages of Life and Time. If Kammler made it to the US, he can probably be found in a shallow grave somewhere in the Texas desert with a 0.45 inch diameter hole in the center of his forehead, buried shortly after arrival when they figured out just what a useless tool he was.