The Buried Treasure That Took Us To The Moon – They Never Told You

The Space Race, the Cold War, and the Moon Landing all have an origin story connected to a small, obscure silver iron mining operation in the mountains of Lower Saxony in Germany – and it’s such a complex, unbelievable tale that it exposes our most dangerous intersections of science and morality.

14 tons of buried paper determined the fate of the world and kicked off humanity’s exploration of space.

We already know the end of the story: we know about Sputnik and Apollo 11, we know about Werner von Braun, and we know about Operation Paperclip. But pulling the threads of NASA and the Soviet Union’s Vostok program unravels an unknown World War II race between trucks and time, a struggle of secrets and survival, and a twist-filled tale of man, mind, and morality.

What you need to know is that story’s beginning – and if you don’t know it already, that’s because they never told you.

#spacerace #coldwar #science #history

14 tons of material from an old mine in  Lower Saxony determined not only how we   got to the moon — but who got there first.  A nearly impossible undertaking buried it,   and the fate of the world hinged on who dug it up.

It was a tiny fraction of the 15.15  million tons of iron ore that came out   of the Georg-Friedrich mine in Dörnten between  1880 and 1968 — just .0000924% of that total. But it was one of the most valuable  caches in human history. And it wasn’t  

The iron that had come to the Goslar  region through millions of years of   sea surf and flood deposits and tectonic  upheavals. The Romans had started digging   and smelting all that in the 3rd century,  and everyone already knew it was there.

And it wasn’t the silver ore that had  been known to the region since 968,   during the reign of Holy  Roman Emperor Otto the Great,   Charlemagne’s true successor — when this  payload was discovered in 1945, 14 tons of   pure silver would’ve only been worth a quarter  million dollars, or about $3.8 million today.

What came out of the Georg-Friedrich was beyond   price, and only a handful of  people even knew it was there. It was 14 tons… of paper. Dieter Huzel had to figure it all out  because his boss had a broken arm. He’d   given Dieter a glorified permission slip and said,  

“There is little I can recommend to you on where  to hide the documents. You are on your own.” And he quite nearly was, almost  everyone else had already fled.   Soviet T-34s were 80 kilometers  to the East and gaining quickly;   American M4 Shermans were just 19 kilometers  to the West and closing even faster.

Returning to Berlin, well — the war was  effectively over, and everyone who knew   even a fraction of what Dieter knew was marked  to be executed to keep them from talking to the   Allies. There was no refuge — just survival. And  the furthest thing from his mind was the Moon.

The South was closed off, so the only  viable route was North. Dieter chose   to go up and a bit to the west —  with 10 men, 3 Opel Blitz trucks,   2 trailers, and more information  than any of them could carry.

Dieter had actually done this once before,  when the lab had moved to Bleicherode. But   he’d had railroad cars then. The men  had to make small bundles for easy   hand loading… but 1 of the departments had  locked their documents in a 1-ton safe and  

Then left with the combination. It took  every last man to get it into the truck. The way to Clausthal meant hiding in the  trees from planes of all kinds — friends   and foes were all dangerous. They did make  it, and then a bureaucrat told them to move  

On. They went through the mountains to  Goslar, and then to the small village of   Dörnten — and that’s where they found  a mine secured by a thick iron door. It was the perfect vault for a priceless treasure.

The trucks drove to the mine in the darkness  of night, and all the men but the drivers   were locked inside so they wouldn’t ever know  its location. The mine had a small electric   locomotive inside — and it still took them until  noon the next day to unload all the documents.

When Dieter dynamited the mine shut, he knew he  was burying knowledge behind rubble for it to   be discovered again later, but he didn’t know  when, and he certainly didn’t know by whom.   Then he got on a bicycle and hailed trucks to  trek the nearly 300 kilometers back to Berlin  

To pick up his fiancee. They met up with his  broken-armed boss — Wernher von Braun — at   Oberammergau on the Austrian border and drove into  US lines at Ruette with the rest of their team. Surrendering to the Americans was better  than rolling the dice with the Soviets — but  

They never leaked the location of the hidden  documents. The US Army knew the treasure existed,   all that information from the Peenemünde Army  Research Center, the Heeresversuchsanstalt   Peenemünde — so they had to piece together  clues from interrogating Huzel, von Braun,   and anyone else who might know the  secrets of German rocket science.

The Americans discovered the location of  the Georg-Friedrich mine and its scientific   treasure — and they launched Operation Paperclip  to bring more than 1,600 German engineers and   scientists to the United States to work for them  — some of whom pioneered the space program. We discovered two things hidden  inside that old iron mine:

One was a hoard of research that  would alter the history of the world. And the other was a tangle  of moral and philosophical   complexitie about the justness of  doing great things with bad people,   and reaching unimaginable heights for mankind  on a foundation built in part by evil.

From Peenemünde to Paperclip to Pluto — our  endeavors carry with us all these complicated   Daedalean legacies, because when we leap  forward, we never truly leave our faults behind. History and progress often turn on tortuous  moral trade-offs, and sometimes just on  

Coin flips — like a panicked scientist  choosing to go a little Northwest instead   of Northeast. If von Braun never gets in a  car accident and the men can’t lift the safe,   if Dieter takes a right instead of a left or never  finds the perfect vault, if the Allies don’t ever  

Solve the mystery or the Soviets get there first  — does Neil Armstrong still walk on the moon? And if you didn’t know the real story of the  buried knowledge that took us to the moon,   well… that’s because they never told you.