It sat in a dead end on one of the upper tiers of the Imperial War Museum in London, a heavy metal barrel that most visitors walked straight past. The caption caught the eye first: “Hitler’s barrel. ” According to the museum, the object had been dug up from the grounds of Hitler’s house in the Bavarian Alps and donated empty by its discoverer, a certain Lieutenant Colonel Tilly. When it had been found, the barrel was full of documents.
What became of them, the museum could not say. That Tilly was a British officer operating in the American occupation zone of Germany made it doubly interesting. The combination of a buried barrel, a cache of papers, and an intelligence officer suggested one thing: an intelligence operation. The museum had no further information on the barrel, its contents, or Tilly.
So the trail had to be followed elsewhere, into the declassified records of the months after Germany’s surrender, where a far larger story emerged—of Allied agents scouring the ruins of the Third Reich for atomic secrets and scientists, and of a shadowy joint Anglo-American agency that almost no one has heard of even now. The barrel itself was a large, waterproof metal drum, fitted with stout locks on the lid. It looked like a standard 1930s industrial barrel, modified for a purpose. There must have been several of them—why go to the trouble of modifying only one?
The reason seems to have been to hide things. But what things? By the spring of 1945, Germany’s attempt to build an atomic bomb had failed, but it had produced vast amounts of data and material of intense interest to the Allies. The German project had employed some of the most famous scientists in the world, among them Werner Heisenberg and a host of other leading names, and some of its results had fed into the Allied bomb effort, the Manhattan Project.
The Americans and British decided to snatch those scientists, interrogate them, and seize their research materials. Eventually, many of the personnel would be relocated to the United States to work on postwar weapons and rocketry in what became known as Operation Paperclip. The hunt had actually begun in September 1943, with a joint military unit called the Alsos Mission, part of the Manhattan Project. Its job was to discover how far Germany had progressed in nuclear technology and to seize any nuclear resources useful to the project—and deny them to the Soviet Union.
Alsos teams followed close behind the front lines in Italy, France, and Germany, sometimes even slipping behind German lines to grab valuable resources. But in early 1945, a bigger agency was created to secure a far wider list of technologies, scientists, and technicians, covering civilian applications as well as military ones. Ordered into existence by US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, it operated under the aegis of SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe. A British officer, Brigadier R.
J. Maunsell, was appointed its commander, with a US deputy chief, Colonel Ralph M. Osborne. It was called the Field Information Agency, Technical—FIAT for short.
FIAT grew to some five hundred teams, each made up of between one and ten members. Even eighty years later, little is known about those individual teams, but the scale of the operation gives some measure of how much effort went into snatching materials and scientists at the end of the war. The Tilly named by the Imperial War Museum turned out to be Major Edmund Tilly of FIAT’s Enemy Personnel Exploitation Section, an officer in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps. Born in 1892 in Marburg, Germany, to Australian parents, Tilly had spent part of World War I in Canada—his daughter Elaine was born in Nova Scotia in 1916—and his wife was American, from New York City.
His nickname was Dee. He had been a university professor before the war and spoke fluent German. Earlier in the conflict he appears to have worked as an interrogator at the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre in Cairo, Egypt. These centres, the most notorious being the London Cage, were run by MI5.
Piecing together Tilly’s role in FIAT is not easy, but at the National Archives in Kew, London, several declassified reports written by him survive, and they offer clues to his work across Europe. At that time the continent was awash with Allied intelligence agencies hunting through the ruins of the Reich: the Monuments Men searching for looted art treasures, officials of the US Treasury looking for Nazi gold, much of it buried or stashed in mines in Germany and Austria, and special technical units from the RAF and the US Army Air Force chasing high-tech German aircraft and the designers and engineers behind them. For the Western Allies, it was like Christmas come early. In reports dated 1945 to 1947, Major Tilly hunted and interrogated individuals involved with poison gas research and chemical warfare, officers of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, and employees of the giant German firm IG Farben.
He interviewed Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister, and Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, former president of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics. He interrogated rocket scientists. And in one report held at the National Archives in Washington, DC, he described digging up boxes of chemical warfare documents and specimens originally from IG Farben that the SS had buried in Verona, Italy.
Among the items found were vials containing uranium 234, uranium 235, and other materials. In the period 1945 to 1946, Tilly was evidently commanding a small FIAT team of unknown size. He would have had his own transport, a jeep perhaps, plus a truck, and the manpower to exhume materials from the earth or from hiding places, and to guard and escort suspects. His work went from lead to lead, from interview to interview, always following the clues toward what were quite literally buried treasures—documents and specimens worth their weight in gold to the Allies.
That trail leads to Berchtesgaden, to Hitler’s house, the Berghof, set in the gated community of Obersalzberg in the mountains above the Alpine town. Much of interest to Allied intelligence gravitated to the high mountains of Bavaria and neighbouring Austria at the end of the war, for these were the last areas overrun by the advancing Allied ground forces. Billions in gold and paper currency were stashed among the craggy, snowy peaks, some of it never found to this day. Wanted war criminals sought shelter in huts on high alpine plateaus, and Nazi scientists hid out in villages and towns across the region.
Everywhere, things were buried, hidden in mines, or tossed into deep alpine lakes. What precisely brought Major Tilly and his FIAT team to Bavaria is not recorded. It was probably a lead from an interview. The fate of Nazi documents in and around Hitler’s Alpine retreat began with an order on Hitler’s last birthday, 20 April 1945.
That day, Soviet forces reached the eastern suburbs of Berlin, and Hitler, through Martin Bormann, activated Operation Serail. The plan was the evacuation by air of personnel and records from Hitler’s last command post, the Führerbunker below the ruined Reich Chancellery in Berlin, to Obersalzberg. Over several days, crates of documents and many passengers were loaded aboard Junkers 52 trimotor transports and flown south to Berchtesgaden. Huge amounts of material were taken to the Berghof or other buildings in the area and stored; a great deal seems to have been buried to prevent its capture by the Allies.
One plane, a larger Junkers 352, was shot down and crashed in the Haidenhold forest on the Czech border. It was loaded with ten heavy chests of Hitler’s personal files and other items, and its cargo has allegedly been lost ever since. There was a second part to the plan. Hitler ordered his naval adjutant, Rear Admiral Hans-Erich Voss, to join the evacuation and to proceed to the Berghof and destroy all of Hitler’s personal files and properties stored in the tunnels beneath the house.
Voss flew out of Berlin on 21 April and went straight to the Berghof, ordering the SS guard detachment there to assist him. Tons of paperwork, uniforms, and personal effects were dragged out of the tunnels and thrown onto bonfires. But the task was so enormous that it was not completed before Allied forces threatened to capture the area, and much material was left behind for the Allies to find. Clearly, not all papers were meant to be destroyed.
Hitler kept volumes of files and reports on Germany’s secret weapons projects, including the atomic bomb program, and it is not inconceivable that certain files were kept back from the flames because of their importance to the Germans or their value after the war. The fact that Tilly told the Imperial War Museum he had dug the barrel up full of documents in the grounds of the Berghof suggests these barrels must have contained Hitler’s own reference files on such matters as chemical warfare and atomic research. This is speculation—it cannot be proved—but it seems likely that a good deal of this material was sent to Bavaria on one of the Operation Serail evacuation flights. Until 25 April 1945, when Obersalzberg was very heavily bombed by the RAF, the complex remained intact and heavily guarded by its SS detachment.
The area around Hitler’s house was a special security zone within an even larger security zone. Anyone burying barrels of documents at the site of the house, or anywhere else on the Obersalzberg, could only have done so with higher authority and permission. That Major Tilly found at least one of these barrels after the war is most interesting. He had access to the site, probably because his interrogation of Reich Chancellery personnel—which the records at Kew confirm—and of others close to Hitler had pointed him toward it.
Whatever was in the barrel now on public display is truly unknown. Other barrels may have existed, of course, perhaps destroyed during the RAF bombing of Obersalzberg. Once FIAT was shut down in 1947, Tilly—by then a lieutenant colonel—became involved with Operation Paperclip, the gathering up of Nazi scientists and their families for relocation to the United States, where they would staff the precursor organization to NASA. Lieutenant Colonel Tilly lived at Number Four Weatherby Mews, Court Square, London, just after the war; that was where his World War II medals were sent to him by the government.
They were the standard issue, an anonymous collection: the 1939–45 Star, the Africa Star, the France and Germany Star, the Defence Medal, and the War Medal. The last one, though, gives a small hint of something more. The oak leaf on the ribbon of the War Medal 1939–45 indicated that Tilly had been mentioned in dispatches for gallantry. Colonel Tilly died in Cornwall at the age of seventy-four in November 1966.
His personal papers, relics of his war service, and his medals appear to have ended up in Australia, where his parents had originally come from, and were auctioned there in 2025. The barrels were buried around the Obersalzberg area—that seems clear. Some were probably destroyed during the Allied bombing raids.
But it is entirely possible that some remain even today, buried somewhere around there, perhaps from other departments of the Nazi state, waiting to be found.
