Jonastal (Jonas Valley), situated in the Ilm-Kreis district in Germany between Crawinkel and Arnstadt and near to the town of Ohrdruf, was a scene of military construction under the National Socialist regime during the last years of the Second World War. Thousands of prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp under the command of SS General Hans Kammler were forced to dig 25 tunnels into the surrounding mountain and the whole operation was performed under the strictest secrecy. The site was not completed and construction was abandoned before the end of the war. The exact aim of the operation remains uncertain although it is now believed to have been either a potential final headquarters for the führer Adolf Hitler, a military communications post or a possible center for V-2 rocket and Wunderwaffe weapon production and research. The latter is given some credence by the fact that SS General Hans Kammler was in overall charge of the construction efforts. Ohrdruf, its forced labour camp and the nearby Jonas Valley were captured by American troops on April 4, 1945, by the 4th Armored Division and the 89th Infantry Division. The camp was the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by the U.S. Army. At the end of the war, the Soviet Army, which took over the site from the Americans, immediately classified it as a restricted zone and then used it as a military training ground. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the site was taken over by the German armed forces who continue to use the area. Rumours In 1962, East German officials interviewed contemporary witness who claimed to have sighted atomic weapons tests on the training ground in March 1945. Cläre Werner, for example, a former administrator of the adjacent Veste Wachsenburg, assured officials that she had seen a glowing light, as bright "as hundreds of bolts of lightning," red inside and yellow on the outside, at approximately 9:30 p.m. on March 4, 1945. Werner went on to describe how a powerful squall had moved across the mountains. The next day, she said, she and others in the areas had had nosebleeds, headaches, and sensations of pressure in their ears. She also claimed that she had heard another loud noise on March 12 at 10:15 p.m. A book by Rainer Karlsch, Hitlers Bombe, published in 2005, alleges that Kurt Diebner's team tested some type of nuclear related device in Ohrdruf, which