Camp Dustbin


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.
Among them were leaders of V-2 missile project ; leaders of the atomic and nerve-gas development projects; "members of the special research staff of the Reichsforschungsrat " ; members of German Ministry of Armaments and War Production ; Abraham Esau, leading German expert on radar; directors of Telefunken; professor ; 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; and former Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht.
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".
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".
Similar interrogation camp, Ashcan, was created in Luxembourg for the 86 most prominent surviving Nazi leaders prior to their trial in Nuremberg.