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.^[1][2]

Kransberg Castle before the World War II

Among them were leaders of V-2 missile project (including chief designer Wernher von Braun); leaders of the atomic and nerve-gas development projects; "members of the special research staff of the Reichsforschungsrat (Imperial Research Council)" (including its director, Werner Osenberg); members of German Ministry of Armaments and War Production (including the minister Albert Speer and his associates Karl-Otto Saur, Karl Maria Hettlage [de], Walter Dornberger and Theodor Hupfauer [de]^[3]); Abraham Esau, leading German expert on radar; directors of Telefunken; professor Friedrich Gladenbeck [de]; 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;^[1] and former Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht.^[3][4]

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".^[3][4]

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".^[1]

Similar interrogation camp, Ashcan, was created in Luxembourg for the 86 most prominent surviving Nazi leaders prior to their trial in Nuremberg.