Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (7 page)

‘I never knew, I never even dreamed you’d get so far! . . . You have convinced me. From now on I shall be one hundred percent behind you. . . . Come and see me if you want anything, either alone or with Degenkolb.’

Saur’s support was to prove more embarrassing than his opposition, for he now began to out-Degenkolb Degenkolb in his efforts to increase A-4 production. At a conference in (somewhat inappropriately) huts erected in the Berlin Zoo in July, Saur astonished a conference of 250 managers and technical staff from the major firms assigned contracts for A-4 components, by announcing that the Degenkolb programme, which Dornberger thought impossible to achieve, was to be raised dramatically ‘from 800 to 2,000 units a month as from December’. While ‘Degenkolb, beaming, shook hands with me,’ wrote Dornberger, ‘Professor von Braun . . . was giving me imploring and despairing looks, shaking his head again and again in incredulous astonishment’ – as well he might. Even if, by some near miracle, the three existing factories, and a fourth now under construction at Nordhausen, could produce 2000 rockets a month, another great bottleneck, that of fuel supply, would remain, for ‘oxygen-generating plant could not be conjured from nowhere’, so that liquid oxygen ‘could not be guaranteed even for 900 units a month’, while ‘how much alcohol we should have depended on the potato harvest’. But Degenkolb, in the chair, and Saur, now his ardent supporter, were deaf to all entreaties. Dornberger tried to reintroduce a note of realism by stressing that any increase in the supply of components at the expense of reliability would be worse than useless. ‘Better’, he urged, ‘fewer rockets of first-rate quality than masses of inferior ones that cannot be used except as scrap.’ But Degenkolb and Saur were interested only in production figures; they, after all, would not have to use the rocket in action. One manufacturer who attempted to explain his difficulties in increasing output of a key piece of equipment, the mechanism for feeding liquid oxygen to the A-4, was rudely interrupted. ‘I am not interested in your difficulties,’ Degenkolb told him, and when the industrialist replied that he must consult his staff before undertaking to meet the new schedule Saur also intervened, threatening to dismiss him from his post and to hand the firm over to trustees. Others who raised similar points met with the same treatment until, as Dornberger observed, ‘opposition and objections grew weaker and weaker until finally the heads of firms, when asked whether they could meet the schedule, merely nodded resignedly’. They were, he decided, demoralized by being publicly reproved like naughty schoolboys and ‘so completely convinced of the impossibility of meeting Saur’s requirements that they believed there would be no harm in agreeing’.

Peenemünde now acquired an even more powerful and even less welcome friend than Saur, Heinrich Himmler, Minister of the Interior and head of the Gestapo, who invited himself for a brief visit early in April 1943. To Dornberger Himmler looked, as they talked in the Mess, ‘like an intelligent elementary school-teacher’ and he ‘possessed the rare gift of attentive listening. Sitting back with legs crossed, he wore throughout the same amiable and interested expression. His questions showed that he unerringly grasped what the technicians told him.’ Less reassuring, however, was Himmler’s offer to protect Peenemünde ‘against sabotage and treason’ once Hitler had finally endorsed the A-4 programme, since the last thing the army wanted was a Gestapo presence there. The mere threat brought General Becker’s successor as head of the Army Weapons Department, General Leeb, hurrying to Peenemunde, and Himmler was, for the moment, bought off by the tactful suggestion that he should declare ‘a prohibited zone round Peenemunde’ and should order ‘a tightening up of security measures in northern Usedom and the adjacent mainland’, a task entrusted to the police commissioner for Stettin, himself an SS general. For the moment the army was allowed to retain responsibility for security at Peenemunde itself, though Gestapo spies were installed in the nearby town of Zinnowitz, where the scientists went for recreation, with instructions, Dornberger suspected, to ‘watch us rather than . . . local inhabitants and strangers’. More seriously, the official commandant of the whole establishment, Colonel Zanssen, was, on SS instructions, relieved of his duties on 26 April, after various vague but alarming charges had been made against him, and transferred back to Berlin.

On 29 June Himmler paid his promised second, and longer, visit to Peenemunde, entertaining the assembled scientists until four in the morning with an account of Hitler’s racial theories and the Nazi plans to colonize Russia and Poland. Although Dornberger claims to have ‘shuddered at the everyday manner in which the stuff was retailed’ – ‘We hardly ever discussed politics at Peenemunde,’ he insisted – he and his colleagues seem to have been untroubled to discover the sort of New Order their work was helping to establish and to have been undismayed by Himmler’s promise of ‘severe punishments’, at the first hint of sabotage or spying, for the foreign, forced labour he wished them to employ. Nor was he deterred from laying on the demonstration planned for Himmler’s benefit next morning, a grey, overcast day on which everything went wrong. By now thirty-seven A-4s had been fired, twenty-three of them since the first major success on 3 October 1942, but number 38 proved what the launching team had nicknamed ‘a reluctant virgin’. It had hardly left the ground when it plunged back to earth, this time on the Luftwaffe airfield at Peenemunde West, two miles away, where no one was hurt, though three aircraft were destroyed. Himmler, still in a good humour despite his late night, joked that he could now recommend the A-4 as a close-combat weapon, while one of the men from Peenemünde, not to be outdone in wit, commented that it had also justified its description as a revenge weapon; only a few days before, one of the Luftwaffe’s flying bombs had landed near the army’s Development Works, also without casualties. A second test that afternoon,
⁴
however, went off perfectly, and Himmler parted from Dornberger on good terms, promising ‘to put our point of view to Hitler’, though adding ‘that he could help us only if Hitler’s decision were favourable.’

At last, on 7 July 1943, came the opportunity, promised months earlier by Albert Speer, for Dornberger and his colleagues to demonstrate their progress before Hitler in person. Dornberger prepared for the great occasion carefully, taking with him a whole range of visual aids that might capture Hitler’s interest, including ‘coloured sectional drawings . . . the manual for field units’ and a large-scale model of the massive storage and launching site already planned for the Channel coast, complete with ‘models of the vehicles one detachment required’. The star item was a film of a successful launching, for Dornberger attributed Hitler’s lack of enthusiasm for the rocket so far to his never having seen, ‘even in a photograph, the ascent of a long-range rocket’ or ‘experienced the thrill provided by the huge missile in flight’. To support him, Dornberger selected von Braun, the most impressive and articulate of his lieutenants, and the young and enthusiastic Dr Steinhoff now head of his Instruments, Guidance and Measurement Department, who was also a qualified pilot. Through the thick fog which blanketed eastern Germany Steinhoff groped his way, with radio help, towards Hitler’s ‘Wolf’s Lair’ at Rastenburg. Beyond the Vistula the skies cleared and ‘below us, as far as the eye could see,’ observed Dornberger, ‘stretched the dark forests of East Prussia, plentifully adorned with glittering lakes and occasionally flower-decked meadows’. Having risked their lives to get there on time the little party now found their appointment had been postponed till 5 o’clock that afternoon and when Hitler finally appeared, escorted by General Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Supreme Command, General Alfred Jodl, C-in-C of the army – their old friend von Brauchitsch had been dismissed in disgrace after the army’s failure in Russia – Jodl’s Chief of Staff, General Buhle, and Albert Speer, Dornberger was shocked by the deterioration in the Fuhrer’s appearance since he had last seen him at Kummersdorf in 1939. ‘A voluminous black cape covered his bowed, hunched shoulders and bent back. He looked a tired man. Only the eyes retained their life.’ To Hitler the presentation was clearly just one more event in a wearying day. To the rocket men it was the unique, all-important opportunity of a lifetime, and Dornberger later recalled every detail:

After briefly greeting us he sat down between Speer and Keitel in the front row. . . . On to the screen came the historic ascent of the A-4 which had so enraptured us at the time and everyone who had seen it since. Von Braun spoke his commentary. The shots were thrilling. The sliding gates, nearly ninety feet high, of the great assembly hall of Test Stand VII opened. . . . A completely assembled A-4 rolled slowly out of the hall and over the great blast tunnel sunk in the ground. . . . The men in attendance shrank to nothing. . . . The rocket was loaded on to the transporter scheduled for field use, a
Meillerwagen.
Driving tests on the road and in cornering proved the remarkable ease with which the rocket could be carried. Soldiers operating a hydraulic crane set the rocket vertically on the firing table, so astonishingly simple in design. The
Meiller
’s hydraulic machinery handled the 46 foot rocket . . . like a toy. Sequences showing fuelling and preparations for launching proved the missile capable for use under field conditions. Finally came the actual launching . . . followed by animated cartoons of the trajectory of the shot on 3rd October, indicating speeds, heights and range reached on that day. . . . The end of the film was announced by a sentence which filled the entire screen: ‘We made it after all!’. . . . Von Braun ceased speaking. Silence. . . . No-one dared utter a word. Hitler was visibly moved and agitated. Lost in thought, he lay back in his chair, staring gloomily in front of him. When, after a while, I began to enter into some lengthy explanations he came to with a start and listened attentively. . . . At last . . . I stopped speaking and awaited questions. Hitler walked rapidly over to me and shook my hand. I heard him say, almost in a whisper: ‘I thank you. . . . Why was it I could not believe in the success of your work? If we had had these rockets in 1939 we should never have had this war.’

As the team had foreseen, Hitler’s imagination was particularly caught by the model of the proposed firing bunker, which must, he insisted, with his familiar obsession with detail, have a roof 23 feet thick; Dornberger’s preference for small, mobile batteries he brushed aside. Within minutes a ‘strange fanatical light’ had flared up in his eyes and he was demanding 2000 rockets a month, each able to deliver a 10 ton warhead, and shouting ‘What I want is annihilation!’ Eventually, however, he calmed down and the meeting ended agreeably, with Hitler announcing that he had created von Braun a professor – though of what and where was not clear – while Dornberger was given an even more striking indication of the Führer’s favour:

Halfway to the door, he suddenly turned round and walked back to me.

‘I have had to apologise to two men only in my life. The first was Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch. I did not listen to him when he told me again and again how important your research was. The second man is yourself. I never believed that your work would be successful.’

He walked out of the room with his suite. We were left alone.

That evening, while Hitler, to universal relief, ate alone, Speer entertained the three scientists to a modest celebratory meal of soup, fish and sweet with a glass of wine, but coffee, brandy and cigars followed, and eventually they made a night of it, keeping up the celebrations till 7 a.m. Already Dornberger, a born worrier, had a new anxiety, for Hitler, he realized, expected the A-4 ‘to produce a turning point in the war’, while Dornberger himself recognized that ‘the military situation had long ceased to be such’ that even ‘launching 900 . . . a month’ could snatch victory from defeat. He would have been even more troubled had he been present at the subsequent meeting between Hitler and Speer, as later described by the latter:

Hitler . . . was greatly impressed and his imagination had been kindled. Back in his bunker he became quite ecstatic about the possibilities of this project. ‘The A-4 is a measure that can decide the war. And what encouragement to the Home Front when we attack the English with it! This is the decisive weapon of the war. . . . Speer, you must push the A-4 as hard as you can! Whatever labour and materials they need must be supplied instantly.’

For once, Hitler was as good as his word. The decree he was about to sign giving the highest priority to tank production was now amended to put the A-4 on a par with it. The effects were immediate, especially on the Luftwaffe’s flying-bomb programme and its orders for other new weapons. A conference at the Air Ministry on 13 July heard one industrial representative complaining bitterly that companies who refused new A-4 contracts because they were fully stretched already were told bluntly ‘You’ve got no option – this is DE production’,
i.e.
it enjoyed super-priority, while a factory already making Wasserfall (Waterfall), a new and highly promising rocket-powered anti-aircraft missile, had simply been requisitioned to produce A-4 components instead. Even worse was the loss of specialist staff. The army, it was also learned, had simply absorbed into the A-4 programme 500 technicians lent it by the Luftwaffe to work at Peenemünde on Wasserfall. At a conference at the Air Ministry on 29 July 1943, in the middle of the RAF’s devastating series of raids on Hamburg named Operation Gomorrah, the Luftwaffe men agreed to hang on to their skilled labour wherever they could, but four days later, on 3 August, both Speer and Milch were present at a further meeting at which it was reported that ‘a man turned up at the Daimler-Benz factory and said that all 103 [i.e. flying-bomb] production is being shut down and that A-4 rockets will be manufactured instead’. Speer denied that his ministry was to blame and on 17 August issued a new directive stating that ‘the Air Force’s manufacturing programme is not to be interfered with by the A-4 programme’, but inevitably the latter’s demands were now being felt over the whole of the skilled engineering industry. The Heinkel factory at Jenbach, instead of making ordinary aircraft motors, was turning out the most complicated part of the whole rocket, its pump turbine, and in the Freiburg area alone 36 firms, each employing up to 200 workers, were making magnetos and control gear.