Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (12 page)

Speer’s own account was more informative:

In enormous long halls prisoners were busy setting up machinery and shifting plumbing. Expressionlessly, they looked right through me, mechanically removing their prisoners’ caps of blue twill until our group had passed them. . . . The conditions for these prisoners were in fact barbarous. . . . As I learned from the overseers after the inspection was over, the sanitary conditions were inadequate, disease rampant; the prisoners were quartered right there in the damp caves and as a result the mortality among them was extraordinarily high. The same day I allocated the necessary materials and set all the machinery in motion to build a barracks camp immediately on an adjacent hill. In addition, I pressed the SS camp command to take all necessary measures to improve sanitary conditions and upgrade the food. They pledged that they would do so.

On 25 January 1944 Werner von Braun also visited Nordhausen, where by now nearly 10,000 prisoners were at work and the installation phase was almost complete. ‘The young engineer’, noted the watching Poles, ‘walked all round the corridors in silence and left despondent.’ In fact, thanks to Speer, conditions at Nordhausen were already undergoing a remarkable improvement. The workforce’s living quarters had originally occupied only 5000 square metres of the Central Works’ 96,000, which eventually increased to 125,000, some of it devoted to flying-bomb production. All of this was underground, but immediately after Speer’s visit a hutted wooden camp began to be built outside the factory and by the end of the year half of the 11,000 men, with a few women, so far sent to Nordhausen were, by concentration camp standards, luxuriously housed:

The camp was set up in a mountain valley less than a kilometre from the entrance to tunnel B, to the south. All the living quarters were wooden, but well supplied with sanitary and heating appliances. Each barrack was divided into a sleeping compartment with two-tiered bunks occupied by two prisoners and an eating compartment with tables and stools. There was always running water in the barracks and the prisoners could also take showers. The domestic buildings were of brick, with modern equipment for the kitchen and laundry. A hospital was also built, consisting of eight barracks with equally modern equipment; there was also a cinema, a canteen and a sportsground with a swimming pool. The ground for the roll-calls and all the roads in the camp were cemented. . . . There also existed a special psychological and vocational selection unit, with modern equipment, to determine the professional qualifications of the individual prisoners. . . . Speer’s intervention also brought about an improvement in the food in a way quite exceptional for German camps. Within the camp there were pigsties and the prisoners began to get soup with macaroni and pieces of pork.

Eventually the amenities at Nordhausen even included a brothel, but the camp’s inmates, as this Polish writer was well aware, remained slaves, who could be maltreated or murdered at any moment: ‘Naturally there had to be a crematorium and a camp prison . . . and the whole camp was surrounded by high-tension wires and guard towers.’

Dora eventually became an independent camp under the name KZ (Konzentrationslager) Mittelbau, with its own network of sub-camps, and, ironically, since its ultimate purpose was mass murder, to be sent there came to offer the chance of life. The mortality rate, due to overwork, neglect and sickness rather than deliberate brutality, reached at its peak 15 per cent. At Auschwitz, excluding those murdered on arrival, it was 84 per cent. Some Jews already en route to extermination camps were diverted to Nordhausen, so great was its need for labour; the A-4 had saved their lives.

If it was Dornberger who had developed the rocket, and Degenkolb who had got it into production, the man who more than any other now ensured that it was used in action was SS Gruppenführer Hans Kammler, often referred to by his equivalent army rank of major-general. In the autumn of 1943, Kammler already had, at forty-two, a spectacular career behind him and, it seemed, an even more glittering one in front. Speer at first rather took to him, for, like himself, he ‘came from a solid middle-class family . . . had been “discovered” because of his work in construction and had gone far and fast in fields for which he had not been trained’. Later, his admiration waned. Kammler, Speer decided, more closely resembled that other young man whom Himmler had picked out for rapid advancement, Reinhard Heydrich, known to the Allies as the ‘butcher of Bohemia’, and both, considered Speer, ‘were surrounded by an aura of iciness like that of their chief’, as well as being ‘always neatly dressed’. Later Speer was to modify this first impression of Kammler:

In the course of my enforced collaboration with this man, I discovered him to be a cold, ruthless schemer, a fanatic in pursuit of a goal, and as carefully calculating as he was unscrupulous. Himmler heaped assignments on him and brought him into Hitler’s presence at every opportunity. Soon rumours were afloat that Himmler was trying to build up Kammler to be my successor.

Kammler had, since the spring of 1942, been responsible for SS construction work, which extended from the gas chambers at Auschwitz to the great training camp near Blizna, and he made his appearance on the rocket scene at the conference called by Speer after the bombing of Peenemünde. He worked with Saur and Degenkolb on producing the scheme to replace Peenemünde by Nordhausen and on 1 September formally took charge of the resulting building programme. Dornberger, always ready to resent anyone else’s intrusion into what he regarded as his private domain, disliked him from the first, though recognizing the young brigadier’s (he had not yet been promoted) impressive appearance:

He had the slim figure, neither tall nor short, of a cavalryman. . . . Broad-shouldered and narrow at the hips, with bronzed, clear-cut features, a high forehead under dark hair slightly streaked with grey and brushed straight back, Dr Kammler had brown, piercing and restless eyes, a lean and curved beak of a nose and a strong mouth, the underlip thrust forward as though in defiance. That mouth indicated brutality, derision, disdain and overweening pride. The chin was well moulded and prominent. One’s first impression was of a virile, handsome and captivating personality. He looked like some hero of the Renaissance.

Along with Kammler’s good looks, however, went a less than attractive personality, as Speer was also to discover:

After a few moments he captured the conversation. . . . His first concern was to show you what a splendid fellow he was, how boldly he spoke his mind to his opponents and superior officers, how cleverly he pushed his partners on and what exceptional influence he had at very high levels. There was nothing for it but to let him talk. He was simply incapable of listening. . . . He had no time for discussion or reflection. . . . It was quite out of the question to get him to change his mind.

Kammler briefly endeared himself to Dornberger by dismissing the latter’s own old adversary, Degenkolb, as ‘a hopeless alcoholic’, but his other judgements soon proved equally severe. Colonel Zanssen, he decided, was ‘unacceptable for collaboration with the SS’ and he was now removed from the rocket project for good. Kammler described von Braun as ‘too young, too childish, too supercilious and arrogant for his job’, but he had to put up with him. By November 1943, however, Kammler seemed to be ubiquitous, like Degenkolb before him. ‘He took part in conferences as Himmler’s representative,’ grumbled Dornberger, ‘and came to the launching tests without being asked. He talked to individuals, listened to opinions and differences of opinion . . . started playing one man off against another.’

There was ample room for his intrigues, for the final stages of the development programme, testing the model of which mass production was about to begin, were going badly. Up to now all the launching tests had taken place over the sea and, though there had been numerous failures on or soon after lift-off, ‘we were’, wrote Dornberger, ‘of the firm opinion that the end of the trajectory left nothing to be desired’. Now they learned that many rockets were exploding in flight, often as they re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, though many did not get so far.

Troubles now came thick and fast. Shot after shot went wrong. . . . Some rockets rose barely sixty feet. Vibration of some sort would cause a relay contact to break, the rocket would stop burning, fall back to earth and explode. . . . Other rockets made a good start, but then unaccountably exploded at 3,000 to 6,000 feet or even higher. The rocket was destroyed and with it all the evidence of the cause. Others, again, made a perfect flight, but over the target area a white cloud of steam suddenly appeared in the sky, a short, sharp double report rang out, the warhead crashed and a shower of wreckage fell to earth. The rocket, after covering 160 miles, had unaccountably blown up at a height of a few thousand feet. Only 10 to 20% of the rockets launched reached their target without a hitch. I was in despair.

Dornberger sought, and obtained, permission to fire rockets from one range to another over the heads of any remaining Polish civilians living below the flight path, though, disquietingly, the matter was first referred to Himmler. With von Braun he spent many hours that autumn and winter crouched in a slit trench somewhere below the point where the latest A-4 should begin to plunge to earth, staring skywards with binoculars. In case launching a rocket was, as some of the staff at Peenemunde had all along contended, too complicated for ordinary soldiers to handle, engineers and technicians from Peenemünde joined the firing crews, but there was no improvement. Was, they wondered, a particular fault creeping in, either in the rockets still coming from Peenemünde or in those now coming off the production lines at Nordhausen? But this theory was soon, quite literally, exploded. ‘We had the same failures with all of them.’ While conference followed conference, ‘visitors from headquarters drove away with long faces’, but eventually the causes of the premature explosions, which proved to be due to a variety of reasons, were identified and cured. Meanwhile some rockets were ‘fitted with the new measurement data transmitters . . . which would reveal danger points while the rocket was in flight’, the resulting information being transmitted by radio. Dornberger had apparently forgotten that famous slogan,
Feind hört mit,
‘The enemy is also listening’. At last six rockets resulting in ‘six impacts’ were launched in a single day, the longest run of success so far. The A-4 as a warhead-delivery system was as near perfect as they were going to get it in the time available and, as Dornberger put it, ‘we thought ourselves justified in devoting time to increasing the explosive effect’.

All the A-4s so far fired had been loaded with nothing more lethal than sand, though even these did a formidable amount of damage, for ‘the sheer momentum of a rocket weighing over 4½ tons and travelling at 1500 m.p.h.’, they had established, ‘caused a crater 30 to 40 yards wide and 10 to 15 yards deep even without a high explosive charge’. Dornberger would have liked to install a proximity fuse to explode the warhead ‘about 60 feet above the target . . . to get the maximum lateral effect’, but for once ‘it proved impossible . . . to get such a device manufactured in Germany’. They were also compelled slightly to reduce the weight of explosive used, having to fit ¼ inch steel over the warhead in the nose in place of the scarce light alloys they would have preferred. However, even the 1650 lb (750 kg) for which they finally settled – within a warhead weighing 2200 lb (1000 kg) – exploding 10 feet from the ground or even, as Dornberger anticipated, on impact, should prove impressively destructive. They also consoled themselves for the continuing tendency of the rocket to break up on re-entry into the atmosphere with the evidence that ‘in hundreds of cases . . . the warhead and the adjoining instrument compartment flew on alone . . . and reached the ground undamaged’ so that ‘we could expect to achieve some effect even with the 30 per cent that disintegrated’.

The need for continued testing meant that consignments of rockets had regularly to be shipped from Peenemünde and Nordhausen to Blizna, providing useful experience of the problems that would arise when finished A-4s were shipped straight from Nordhausen to the munitions dumps supplying the launching units. The whole procedure was studied in detail, and eventually it was found that it would take six or seven days for the rockets to complete their journey, travelling in pairs on flat wagons, with five or ten wagons to a train. The usual labels and documentation were omitted, the curious or bureaucratic being repelled by the detachments of soldiers who travelled with each trainload.

A realistic target had now been set – an output of fifteen A-4s a day from the beginning of April 1944, rising to twenty-five by the middle of the month. The real bottleneck was the liquid oxygen supply, calculated to be sufficient for only twenty-eight firings a day, though a substantially higher rate of fire would be possible if sufficient missiles were available. Already two detachments or
Abteilungen,
each of three batteries, had been formed to use the A-4 in action. One
Abteilung
would be mobile and was expected to fire off up to nine A-4s per battery in each twenty-four hours, a maximum of twenty-seven. The other, based in a permanent bunker, was expected to launch more than fifty, giving the two
Abteilungen
together a capacity of nearly eighty missiles a day, considerably more than the one per hour which the British experts regarded as intolerable. Later, when supply permitted, a third
Abteilung
might be formed.

The first battery actually to be set up was No.444 (Experimental and Training), designed to test rockets under field conditions and to work out the ‘drill’ on which the instructional manuals could be drawn up for later units. It was formed at Koslin on the Baltic in the summer of 1943 and in October moved to Blizna. Here, while Dornberger was, most unfortunately as it turned out, ‘detained in Berlin by some conference’, it gave its first demonstration of a mobile unit in action.