Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (11 page)

There is a large concentration of craters in and around the target area and many buildings are still on fire. In the North Manufacturing Area some 27 buildings of medium size have been completely destroyed; at least four buildings are seen still burning. . . . Severe damage has been done to the buildings of the factory and laboratory type probably serving the supposed ‘projection installations’ and the aerodrome. The accommodation for personnel has suffered very severely.

Group Captain Searby was awarded an immediate DSO and received a congratulatory letter from ‘Bomber’ Harris, whose tactics had been brilliantly vindicated: only one Mosquito had been lost over Berlin, of the nine which had tied up virtually the whole German night-fighter force. An analysis of the 400 photographs brought back by the Peenemünde raiders revealed that ‘it is probable that nearly all aircraft bombed within three miles, and the majority within one mile, of the aiming point’. On 21 August, when Duncan Sandys submitted his tenth report to the Chiefs of Staff, he was soberly confident:

There is every indication that the raid on Peenemünde was most successful. . . . A large part of the living quarters were annihilated and many buildings in the main factory area were destroyed. From preliminary assessments of damage it would seem unlikely that any appreciable production will be possible at PEENEMÜNDE for some months.

The Chief of Staff had already, two days earlier, turned down a generous offer by the US 8th Air Force to finish the job off in daylight. There was, they believed, nothing worthwhile left to destroy.

This indeed was how it must have seemed to Dornberger on the miserable, smoke-wreathed morning of Friday, 18 August. He had seen his own ‘stamp collection . . . shotguns and hunting gear’ lost in his burning house and the great establishment he had virtually created destroyed around him. But, as always, action lifted his spirits. When ‘the canteen manager . . . appeared . . . hatless, in torn clothes, hurt and singed by phosphorus bombs’, he was instructed ‘to go and get coffee and soup ready at once’, and Dornberger set off on a tour of inspection by bicycle. Things, he soon discovered, were not quite as bad as they had seemed during the night. ‘The waterworks were undamaged.’ So, too, was ‘the assembly hall for experimental rockets’. Even more important ‘the big assembly hall of the pre-production works’ was still standing, though ‘nine 1000 lb bombs and many phosphorus and stick incendiaries had penetrated the concrete roof and exploded or burnt out in that huge place. . . . Machines and material had been hit by bomb splinters. There were hits in the outer side aisles, big holes in the masonry of the walls. But the damage was not really serious.’

As it became light Dornberger reached ‘the settlement’, the residential estate for the German staff, and here, as he put it, ‘Death had reaped a rich harvest’, among those who had not fled along the coast to Zinnovitz when the bombing started:

Soldiers of the Northern Experimental Command, Labour Service men and some of the staff were feverishly working to open up buried cellars, clear slit trenches, rescue furniture from burning houses and remove fallen trees, beams and other wreckage. I saw the bodies of men, women and children. Some had been charred by phosphorus incendiaries. I hurried along the beach road to Dr Thiel’s house. It had been destroyed by a direct hit. The slit trench in front was just a huge crater.

It was a scene which, thanks to Dornberger himself, was soon to be repeated on a far larger scale in southern England, but this thought does not seem to have crossed his mind as, ‘shaken to the very soul’, he huried to the school being used as a temporary mortuary and ‘stood before the remains of Dr Thiel, his wife and his children’. Thiel had been one of the inner circle of rocket researchers ever since 1936, and, wrote Dornberger, ‘my heart overflowed with gratitude for all he had done for our project’; without his work on developing its motor and perfecting the mixture of propellants there might, indeed, have been no A-4. However, to a soldier death was commonplace. ‘I pulled myself together. The most important thing now was to help the living.’

With von Braun beside him Dornberger flew over the site by air in a light Storch aircraft, their first view of it by air since the triumphant return from the visit to Hitler a month earlier. He was ‘struck to the heart by this first comprehensive view of the destruction’ and ‘on landing . . . could only mutter wearily: “My poor, poor Peenemünde!” ’ But the arrival that morning of Albert Speer, who flew on to report to Hitler on what had happened, helped to cheer him up, as did the discovery that ‘material damage to the works, contrary to first impressions, was surprisingly small’ and that ‘the test fields and special plant such as the wind tunnel and Measurement House were not hit’. The damage that had been done, he turned to his advantage. Once the main administration building had been made usable again, burnt timbers were laid across the roof to mislead subsequent reconnaissance sorties and, where they did not actually block a road, craters were not filled in. ‘We maintained the effect of complete destruction for nine months, during which we had no more raids,’ he later recalled – a vital nine months, for ‘the project could not be prevented now from coming to fruition’.

What was the true balance sheet for the Peenemünde raid? To set against the 40 heavy bombers and one Mosquito missing in action, at least 39 German fighters had been lost, 9 of them shot down and the rest victims of each other, of their own anti-aircraft guns, and of collisions on the ground, owing to the chaos that had developed in the skies over Berlin and on the airfields around it. This fiasco also brought the RAF its most distinguished victim of the night, General Hans Jeschonnek, for whom the news around 7 a.m. that Peenemünde had apparently been destroyed proved the last straw, after being harangued by Hitler the previous day and bawled at in the early hours by Goring. He wrote a reproachful, but still loyal, suicide note before shooting himself. ‘I cannot work with Goring any more. Long live the Führer!’ Of 12,000 people living on the Peenemünde ‘campus’, 8000 of whom, including dependants, were directly concerned with rocket production, 732 had been killed. Only 120 were German; the rest, in Dornberger’s words, ‘consisted of Russians, Poles, etc.’ The British were to pay a heavy price for the mis-aimed bombs which had killed them. Previously these forced labourers had been a valuable source of intelligence, a source which now wholly dried up.

The loss of accommodation on Usedom was rapidly overcome by billeting bombed out people all over the surrounding area and collecting them by special transport. No premises not absolutely essential were repaired, thanks to a captured airman cheerfully passing on to his interrogators the information he had been given at briefing that Peenemünde would be bombed again and again until it was destroyed. The immediate effect on rocket testing was slight, for Test Stand VII had not been seriously damaged by the few stray bombs that had landed near it. Nor was production seriously interfered with, thanks to the foresight shown back in March when it had been ordered that ‘production blueprints, special tools and so forth’ should be maintained elsewhere. But the cumulative effect of the raid, and of the loss of life and general disruption it caused, was substantial, undoubtedly justifying the lives and effort devoted to Operation Hydra. Winston Churchill, in his post-war memoirs, considered that ‘The attack on Peenemünde . . . played an important part in the general progress of the war’ and that ‘but for this raid Hitler’s bombardment of London by rockets might well have started early in 1944’. This is to claim too much. Dornberger put the delay in resuming work at ‘only four to six weeks’, though no doubt to achieve full production took longer. Goebbels, in mid-October, made a similar estimate. ‘The English raids. . .’, he wrote, ‘have thrown our preparations back four or even eight weeks, so that we can’t possibly count on reprisals before the end of January.’ R. V. Jones, reviewing all the evidence long after the war, concluded that ‘the raid must have gained us at least two months’ – ‘very significant’ months, as he points out.

The bombing of Peenemünde, although much the most serious, was not the only blow to befall the A-4 programme that summer. On 22 June 1943, six weeks before Operation Hydra, sixty Lancasters had been sent against the former Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constanz, in the belief that early-warning radar installations were being built there. The attack, carried out without loss, was spectacularly successful, though undertaken for the wrong reason. The factory was in reality being converted to turn out 300 A-4s a month, a target now unlikely to be achieved. On 13 August 1943, four days before the great Bomber Command assault on Peenemünde, the US 9th Air Force had made an equally fortunate mistake, sending a heavy force of Liberators to destroy the Messerschmitt works at Wiener Neustadt in Austria as part of its long-standing campaign against German fighter production. Only after the war was it learned that Wiener Neustadt was manufacturing rocket components.

Our hour of revenge is nigh!

Adolf Hitler, broadcasting from Munich, 8 November 1943

Less than a week after what Dornberger described as Peenemunde’s ‘flaming night’ Speer and Himmler spent a long session with Hitler discussing the A-4 programme. Speer’s report, on Sunday, 22 August 1943, made a deep impression on Hitler, even though he had never visited the place,
⁶
and he now ordered that the ‘pilot factory’ there should not be expanded for mass production, as intended, but that manufacture of A-4s on the site should continue only until a safer location had been developed. Pre-production work on the A-4 would be taken over by a new plant at Traunsee in Austria, codenamed ‘Cement’, and the principal testing range for rockets would be transferred from Usedom to Blizna, a small village near Debice in Poland, and about 170 miles south of Warsaw.

The name Blizna now began increasingly to feature in the intelligence reports about the A-4 reaching London. Before 1940 it had been notable only as the site of the confluence of the River Vistula and River San, but then the inhabitants had been evicted to make way for a huge SS training camp, 20 kilometres square, the work being done after 1941 by Russian prisoners of war, deliberately worked and starved to death, and by the occupants of a small concentration camp now set up in the area, known as Heidelager, or ‘the camp on the heath’, a name now transferred to the whole establishment. The decision to move rocket research to Blizna led to its being expanded still further. The existing railway siding, linked to the main railway line from Cracow to Lvov, was lengthened, new roads and barracks were built, and, after a visit from Himmler on 28 September 1943, a full-scale programme of camouflage was put in hand. ‘The outlines of cottages and outbuildings’, a Polish historian noted, ‘were brought from Germany; fences were erected and linen hung on them; dummies of men, women and children stood around, and flowers were sown.’ But there was one sinister addition to this idyllic picture. ‘At the railway siding trains began to arrive composed of long flat trucks, covered with canvas, hiding long objects’, a development rapidly reported to the Cracow District of the Polish Home Army by the Poles of the Forestry Commission, allowed by the Germans to remain in residence when the rest of the population were deported. Apart from them it was now a solidly German area, with no fewer than 16,000 troops in the main barracks. Another 400 were stationed six miles away, with SS officers to keep an eye on them, near what had been earmarked as the main A-4 launching and test site. Blizna reminded Dornberger of Kummersdorf, where the rocket programme had begun: ‘in the thick woods of fir, pine and oak’ there was ‘a big clearing measuring a little over half a square mile. A small, stone-built house and a dilapidated thatched stable stood there in complete isolation’. Under SS General Hans Kammler, however (of whom much more will be heard), in charge of the building programme, no time was wasted in creating a new, if more modest, Peenemünde in Poland. ‘A concrete road, built in a few weeks, led from the nearest main highway to our testing ground. . . . During October and November, huts, living-quarters, sheds and a large store were erected close by.’

The whole rocket programme was now coming increasingly under the control of the SS, that ‘state within a state’ – originally set up to protect the Nazi regime against disaffection – which had steadily spread its tentacles over every part of the nation’s activities. Speer, for all his professed innocence of the worst aspects of Nazism, raised no objections to Himmler’s invasion of his own specialist field, munitions production. ‘The Führer orders’, he noted loyally in his office diary after the meeting of 22 August 1943, ‘that, jointly with the SS Reichsfuhrer [i.e. Himmler] and utilizing to the full the manpower which he has available in his concentration camps, every step must be taken to promote both the construction of A-4 manufacturing plants and the resumed production of the A-4 rocket itself.’ Speer seemed delighted with the turn events had taken. ‘The A-4 men’, he told a conference in Berlin approvingly on 26 August, ‘have met with the strongest support from the SS in accelerating rocket production.’

On 9 September 1943 the Long-Range Bombardment Commission, set up to advise on the manufacture and use of both main secret weapons, under the chairmanship of Professor Petersen, and with Dr Saur of the Ministry of Munitions, now, in his own words, ‘a fanatical disciple of this project’, in attendance, tried to tie von Braun down to firm delivery dates for the operational version of the A-4. Hitherto only rockets with dummy warheads had been fired, and Petersen dealt briskly with von Braun’s reluctance to bring the ‘live’ trials forward from mid-November to mid-October, observing that though ‘the most unexpected surprises might crop up . . . the earlier we invite these surprises, the more quickly we shall be able to overcome them’. This pressure for results probably reflected the growing faith of all the Nazi leaders in the rocket. A mass turnout of Nazi ministers and senior officers, summoned to the Wolf’s Lair on 10 September 1943, heard Hitler predict that the bombardment by both secret weapons could begin in February 1944, but it was the A-4 on which he set the highest hopes. ‘The Führer’, observed Goebbels in his diary, ‘is hoping for great things from this rocket weapon. He believes that in certain circumstances he will be able to force the tide of war to turn against England with it.’ That month Dornberger was formally appointed Commissioner for the A-4 programme, responsible to the C-in-C of the Home Army, Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, for any remaining development of the rocket that was needed and for ‘the formation and final training of field units for operations.’

Meanwhile the arrangements for rocket manufacture, in which Dornberger had little say, were being finalized. Ultimately a group of factories known collectively as the Southern Works, incorporating the Zeppelin factory at Friedrichshafen, the Henschel Rax works at Wiener-Neustadt, and various other firms around Vienna and throughout Austria would receive A-4 contracts, and there were also plans for an Eastern Works, another umbrella title covering several concerns, near Riga. The chief, and at first the only, source of finished rockets, however – the many other factories involved were merely producing components – would be the so-called Central Works, occupying a site selected by the dynamic Degenkolb, carved into a peak called Kohlstein in the Harz mountains in the very centre of Germany, a location often referred to in the German documents as Hammersfeld, though the nearest town was Nordhausen. The place was remote and secure both from air attack and from prying eyes, and soon the highly disciplined labour battalions of the Waffen SS were extending the caves and tunnels used before the war to store sensitive chemicals for the Industrial Research Association into the largest underground factory in the world.

Central Works Ltd came formally into existence on 11 September 1943 and took over from Peenemünde responsibility for meeting the contracts previously placed there. Many subassemblies would also be manufactured at Nordhausen, but it was primarily an assembly centre to which the many thousands of parts making up each A-4 would be brought for transformation into a complete missile. The factory consisted primarily of two spacious tunnels, a mile and a quarter long and about three-quarters of a mile apart, with forty-six smaller galleries connecting them – a layout which lent itself to a highly efficient production-line system, based on a railway track along which each missile moved as new components were added to it. The engineer supervising the installation of machinery had formerly been in charge of the pilot factory at Peenemünde and, once it was in operation, quality was maintained by constant inspection at every stage. A mobile force of a hundred army officers would overcome any bottlenecks, being given unlimited powers to take charge on the spot to get the assembly lines moving again.

Gauleiter Sauckel, the Reich’s manpower director, now amply repaid the care devoted to entertaining him at Peenemunde. On 30 September 1943 Hitler agreed that prisoners with scientific qualifications could be sent there, irrespective of nationality, while the bulk of the workforce was to come from slave-labourers from eastern Europe. Himmler, via General Kammler, offered to provide 16,000. They were to be kept in order by an SS officer, Major Förschner, who was deputy to the General Manager, Dr Kettler, a scientist, though in April 1944 a Director-General was brought in over his head. Förschner was in charge of five SS men, who were responsible for beating and bullying the assembly-line operatives into working themselves to death and for preventing any of the German craftsmen supervising them from treating their workmates with normal decency.

The earliest contingents to reach Nordhausen came largely from Buchenwald where, ‘during the second half of August 1943’, a Polish historian has recorded, ‘the news went around . . . that a small transport would be going to set up a new sub-camp in the Harz mountains’. In the end ‘107 Poles, Russians and Germans were chosen’ and set off, escorted by forty SS, on 27 August, being followed a few days later by another ‘1,223 prisoners, mostly French, Polish and Russian’. During September the total rose to 3300, housed in tents while they built a barracks for their SS guards. Soon there were also Belgians and Italians in the makeshift camp, at first known as Mittelbau, but later called Dora. The Italians were former soldiers, hitherto allowed to wear their own uniforms and be commanded by their own officers. When they protested at being treated like ordinary political prisoners and being expected to work on the A-4 assembly line, six were shot, the first clear indication of what the regime at Nordhausen would be like.

Even the contingents sent from Buchenwald had not wanted to come, reasoning that any change the Germans made must be for the worse, and their fears soon proved well founded, as the Polish prisoner
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previously quoted has recorded:

After two months of living in tents, towards the end of October the whole sub-camp
Dora
was transferred underground. The prisoners were shoved into chambers . . . still in a raw state, dark, damp and full of an irritating dust. Normally . . . the bunks were three-tiered; here four tiers were set up. They worked and slept in two shifts; when one went to work the other lay down on the same filthy litters and covered themselves with the same damp blankets. There were no latrines at all; empty carbide barrels, cut in half, were used; it was necessary to walk about a kilometre to the water-taps.

As the work made progress the nature of the prisoners’ duties changed:

In the beginning 70—80% of the prisoners were employed in unloading, transporting and setting up the machines. About 1,500 worked at building the camp. . . . [Most of] the rest drilled the rock. From the end of November . . . all the prisoners, except for those building the camp, were employed at assembling rockets. Since after twelve hours of hard labour a further six and a half hours had to be spent on roll-calls, getting to work and standing in a queue for food, as well as finding a place to sleep, barely five and a half hours were left for rest. There was very poor and insufficient food, brutal treatment and constant very hard work, so the mortality rate was high.

On 23 September 1943 Hitler kept Goebbels up into the small hours at a late-night tea party at the Wolf’s Lair while he held forth on the transformation the A-4 was about to achieve in the whole war situation. ‘The Führer thinks that our great rocket offensive can be opened at the end of January, or early in February,’ noted Goebbels in his diary. ‘England must be repaid in her own coin and with interest for what she has done to us. . . . The Giant rocket-bomb weighs fourteen tons. What an awe-inspiring murder weapon! I believe that when the first of these missiles screams down on London, something akin to panic will break out among the British public!’

A week later, on 1 October, Degenkolb officially asked the German War Office to issue a contract for the installation at the Central Works of 1800 A-4s a month, but at a subsequent conference with representatives from the factory it was agreed to scale down the target figure to more realistic proportions. On 19 October 1943 the general responsible personally signed War Contract No. 0011-5365/43, for ‘the manufacture of 12,000 A-4 missiles at a rate of 900 monthly, not including electronic, warhead or packing material’. The price was set at 40,000 RM (£3520) each, later raised, in the light of experience, to 100,000 RM (£8800) per rocket for the first thousand and, by gradual reductions, to 50,000 RM (£4400) after 5000 had been delivered.

The repercussions of this order, still far higher than could conceivably be met, on the slave-workers at Nordhausen were immediate:

They were driven to work with sticks, they were not allowed to rest for a single moment, any negligence was regarded as sabotage. . . . Their output fell and the mortality rate rose.
Dora
did not yet have its own crematorium, so trucks carried hundreds of corpses to Buchenwald more and more frequently.

By November Nordhausen had already overtaken Peenemünde as the main source of finished rockets, and on 10 December 1943 it was visited by Albert Speer, whose ministry in theory, he later wrote, ‘remained in charge of manufacturing’ though in practice ‘in cases of doubt we had to yield to the superior power of the SS leadership’. His office diary recorded what happened in a notable example of euphemism, if not Orwellian double-speak:

Carrying out this tremendous mission drew on the leaders’ last reserves of strength. Some of the men were so affected that they had to be forcibly sent off on vacations to restore their nerves.