At the close of World War II, Russia had special search teams operating in Austria and Germany, especially in Berlin, to identify and “requisition” equipment, materiel, intellectual property, and personnel useful to the Soviet atomic bomb project. The exploitation teams were under the Russian Alsos, and they were headed by Lavrenij Beria's deputy, Colonel General A. P. Zavenyagin. These teams were composed of scientific staff members, in NKVD officer's uniforms, from the bomb project's only laboratory, Laboratory No. 2, in Moscow. In mid-May 1945, the Russian nuclear physicists Georgy Flerov and Lev Artsimovich, in NKVD colonel's uniforms, compelled Zimmer to take them to the location of Riehl and his staff, who had evacuated their Auergesellschaft facilities and were west of Berlin, hoping to be in an area occupied by the American or British military forces. Riehl was detained at the search team's facility in Berlin-Friedrichshagen for a week. This sojourn in Berlin turned into 10 years in the Soviet Union! Riehl and his staff, including their families, were flown to Moscow on 9 July 1945. Riehl was to head up a uranium production group at Plant No. 12 in Ehlektrostal’ (Электросталь”Электросталь” is sometimes transliterated as “Elektrostal”. A one-to-one transliteration scheme transliterates the Cyrillic letter “Э” as “Eh”, which distinguishes it from that for the Cyrillic letter “Е” given as “E”. Transliterations often also drop the soft sign “ь”.).Riehl and Seitz, 1996, 71-72.Oleynikov, 2000, 7.
