Hitler's Revenge Weapons
Page 19
On 23 March the Allied armies were on the verge of crossing the Rhine in strength and elements of Kammler’s Revenge Corps were ordered to retreat east, with as much of its equipment (including rockets) as possible, and to continue firing on London from any new sites they could find. Together with the units around The Hague, the V2 bombardment of London continued, with destructive strikes on Tottenham Court Road, Stepney (twice), Edmonton, Cheshunt, Ilford, Hutton and Orpington. With desperation in the air, the Germans tried hard to destroy the key bridge over the river Rhine at Remagen after it had been captured by the Americans on 7 March. Firing eleven V2s, surely more in hope than expectation for this point target, caused a great deal of collateral damage and fatalities among the American forces nearby – but the bridge survived.
Rural, wooded areas on the west coast of Holland were used extensively for launching V2s against England in late 1944 and early 1945, leaving craters such as these along this track in Bergen Op Zoom. (Medmenham Collection)
Last Gasp. In the last months of the Second World War Flak Abteilung 444 fired a final 77 V2s against England from the small forest of Het Rijsterbos, in Friesland, Holland. The author’s wife, a child living there at that time, reads the history at the forest entrance. (Author)
With natural and man-made camouflage readily available in West Holland, it was rare to find V2s in the open, ready to launch, these two PR shots, taken on 26 Feb 1945, merely revealing post-launch craters in the Duindigt area of Wassenaar, close to The Hague. (Medmenham Collection)
Kammler’s men were now very tired; they were facing endless disasters on the battle front, very heavy workloads and ever-changing plans, having to travel long distances, only at night, to attend endless meetings. However, he himself seemed tireless and had no patience with those who could not keep up with him – often using a burst of his tommy-gun to wake them from their slumbers. Production of the V-weapons continued apace, with streams of railcars carrying them from Mittelwerk to the front, but as the railways came under ever increasing attacks from the Allied bombers and the Dutch Resistance, so more soldiers were needed to guard them.
So it was that the last V2 was fired at London, by Battery 1/485 at The Hague, at 16.48 on 27 March 1945, landing in Orpington, Kent, 15 miles from its aiming point, killing one and injuring twenty-three. One day later, at 08.49, Battery 2/485 fired its last V2 at Antwerp, from Burgsteinfurt, Germany, the rocket landing 11 miles north-east of its target, at Ossendrecht. The V2 units then simply melted into Germany, to destinations largely unnoticed in the confusion of the time. The last V1 to be launched against London, from Delft in Holland, landed at Datchworth, Herts, at 16.00 on 29 March while two others which followed were brought down by AA, one at Sittingbourne, Kent, the other off the coast at Orfordness. Shortly thereafter, Mr Churchill announced that the missile attacks on England were over. Antwerp had to suffer from the V1s until 30 March – after which the missilemen were in full retreat, some re-roling, with great reluctance, as infantry soldiers. Although there had been plans to use the V-weapons against the Russians, these did not materialise.
In the last week of March Bletchley Park decoded a message from the Revenge Corps, which hinted strongly that its rocketmen were about to evacuate West Holland, and this was ordered by Kammler in a signal on 31 March; their fate was also to become infantry soldiers, in a final attempt to repel the Russians on the river Weser, north of Hannover. This was indeed a dismal prospect for them, given that, of the 1,000 gunners who had been sent as infantrymen to the Russian front in January, only 100 had returned in March, to the rallying point at Suttrop, in north Sauerland. Suttrop was also the scene of one of Kammler’s most brutal executions when he ordered Obersturmführer Wolfgang Wetzling to exterminate 208 slave labourers who were found cooking chickens in the surrounding woods as they tried to walk home to Russia.
Amongst all this chaos, missile production at Mittelwerk continued with 617 V2s and 2,275 V1s assembled there in February while plenty of components and the necessary machinery remained to manufacture more. Earlier plans to fire-bomb the tunnel entrances to the underground works had been shelved, but the RAF did bomb Nordhausen on 2/3 April, virtually destroying the old city and killing an estimated 8,000 people, including some 1,500 prisoners in the Boelcke Luftwaffe barracks. The Americans arrived there shortly thereafter, to find that many of the starving and dying prisoners of Camp Dora had been murdered by the guards, in one case 1,000 having been herded into a building and burned to death. SS guards then packed trains with an estimated 4,000 prisoners from Mittelwerk for transport to Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in Lower Saxony ready to resume work on the missiles there once the Germans had prevailed over the Allies. This route took them north via Gardelegen where their journey ended six days later, the rail lines beyond having been destroyed by Allied bombs. Those prisoners who had not died already were then herded into a barn full of straw soaked in petrol and burned to death, many of those trying to escape being gunned down by the guards, most of whom then defected and melted into the countryside. Much of the production and supporting equipment at Mittelwerk was then destroyed as the Wehrmacht retreated, but there were still many spoils of war to be had when the Allies arrived (Chapter Eleven).
On 1 April Kammler ordered 500 people, including von Braun, to leave Bleicherode – again without their families – to an unspecified destination ‘where you can continue your important work’. Those remaining at Bleicherode were simply left to face the Russians. The ‘Vengeance Express’, which had been home to many of the top rocketeers since their days in Blizna, rolled out of Bleicherode on 6 April, for the six-day journey to the Bavarian Alps. Von Braun realised that further work would not be practicable without all the notes and equipment left behind or lost en route and knew, realistically, that they were simply fleeing for their lives. He ordered his assistant, Dieter Huxel, to collect all the classified documents he could lay his hands on and take them, in three large trucks, to a hiding place in a mineshaft near the town of Dörnten, north of the Harz mountains, from where they could be retrieved at a later date, leaving him to make his own way south to Oberammergau. There, von Braun, Dornberger and others were accommodated at a hotel in the ski resort of Oberjoch, on the Austrian-German border, waiting to surrender to Americans. Von Braun was now suffering severely from incorrect treatment to his broken arm, but a local ski surgeon put this right by breaking the plaster cast and resetting the bone before confining him to bed. In the weeks to follow, the many photographs taken of him as a prisoner of the Americans, would show his arm raised as if in a salute – but not to the Führer!
Kammler seems to have departed from the Revenge Division on 7 April, and was later believed to have attempted to muster a few remaining troops for a futile fight against the Americans before he himself escaped to Prague, where it is said he shot himself to avoid capture by Czech partisans. On 14 April the Revenge Division was ordered to re-role as infantry, to face the oncoming Russians on the river Elbe but, in Kammler’s absence, the divisional commanders thought better of it and, on 26 April, they surrendered to the US Army, hoping that their proven knowledge of missile operations would stand them in good stead in what followed. They were disarmed on the Elbe and taken into captivity, only too pleased to escape the Russians – who failed in their demands that they should be their prisoners.
Hostilities in Europe ceased on 8 May 1945.
Chapter 11
The Spoils of War and Operation Backfire
Forward thinkers, particularly among the three great Second World War Allies, the Americans, Russians and British, undeniably impressed by the German innovation which resulted in the Vergeltungswaffen, were now anxious to lay their hands on their definitive designs, hardware and expertise – and the Russians were the first to do so when they occupied Blizna on 6 August 1944.
In a letter to Stalin, dated 13 July 1944, Churchill alerted the Russians to the importance of the missile testing range at Blizna when he sought his permission for a group of Brit
ish specialists to visit the area once it had been occupied by Soviet troops. Stalin agreed but, having been so alerted, he ordered Major General P.I. Fedorov, director of NII-1 (Russian Research Institute) to pre-empt the British visit by taking his own team to scour the area in early August, and remove anything which might be of value to their own research. In fact, it was soldiers of General Kurochkin’s Sixtieth Soviet Army who recovered the first pieces of the V2 found there in the second week of August, before the NII-1 team arrived. At that time the Russians had little knowledge of rocket technology nor any idea what they were looking for because when the British arrived, armed with maps of the launch areas and other points of interest on the range, together with details of the missiles, they found many useful remnants to take back to London for evaluation.
At the end of the war, the Soviets were in control of 600 German aircraft plants, or 50 per cent of the total capacity, but they wanted more as reparations for the damage the Germans had done to their country. Clearly the defeated country could not pay the millions of dollars demanded, so Joseph Stalin set up a ‘Trophy Committee’, consisting of representatives of Soviet industries, tasked with seeking out and securing anything of potential scientific or technological value and shipping them back to Russia, as their armies marched into Germany, rocket science being high on their list of priorities.
The next source of interest was Peenemünde where the Germans had stripped down every facility and strived to destroy anything of value on missile hardware and documents, but the Russian NII-1 specialists still found much of interest when they arrived there on 2 May 1945. They discovered large items from various Aggregate rockets, launching platforms and a complete Rheinbote rocket gun, in addition to many documents on other projects, including a revolutionary rocket-propelled aircraft which undoubtedly helped the Russians with this new science. Most of the German scientists and senior specialists had already fled south but the Russians did capture Helmut Gröttrup, one of von Braun’s chief assistants and initially 200 of Gröttrup’s colleagues, from which nucleus grew a body of some 5,000 workers from all skill levels which was put to work repairing and salvaging what they could to return Peenemünde to a productive unit – albeit as a shadow of its former self. What might have seemed like a good deal to the Germans, for them to have a job at all in their war-torn country, let alone one with which many of them were already acquainted, came to an abrupt end a year later. On 22 October 1946 Stalin ordered Operation OSOAVIAKHIM, the removal and dispersal of the whole facility and many of the workers, ostensibly on five-year contracts, to separate sites in Russia, where work would continue on weapons development. Gröttrup himself was working under the eminent Russian rocket engineer Sergei Korolev in NII-88 on Gorodomiya Island. At the same time some Russian scientists were sent to Germany to study at appropriate academic institutions, while back-engineering and a new fuel produced a successful Russian version of the A4 (V2), the R-11; this rocket, which emerged in 1955, had a range of 170 statute miles. The German workforce, effectively kidnapped in 1946, would remain in Russia for several years, helping to breathe new life into Russian advanced weapons technology, until they were no longer needed when they were returned to Germany.
A British soldier inspects a V2 and its Mielerwagen transporter/erector at a typical forest launch site somewhere in Holland. (Medmenham Collection)
American troops discovered ‘ready to use’ V2s on railway wagons close to the Mittelwerk production centre. (Medmenham Collection)
It was, however, the Americans who won the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Germany’s missile legacy when they arrived at Nordhausen and its massive weapons factory, underground at Mittelwerk, on the southern edge of the Harz mountains. This prize fell to Combat Command B (CCB) of 3rd Armored Division, US Army, which discovered the horrors within the tunnels of Mittelwerk and at Camp Dora but also a treasure trove of complete missiles, missile components and ancillary equipment, much of it loaded on freight trains ready to leave for the front. Wasting no time the US Chief of Army Ordnance Technical Intelligence in Paris, Colonel Holgar Toftoy, sent teams of experts to Mittelwerk to raid the offices and workshops for every technical detail on the two missiles, and initiated ‘Special Mission V2’, the evacuation of 100 V2s and associated equipment to the USA.
With commendable dispatch, and paying little heed to an earlier agreement that any such find would be split equally between the Americans and British, the first forty of 341 fully loaded railway wagons left Mittelwerk for Antwerp docks on 22 May, the last leaving on 31 May. Within days, the first of sixteen Liberty ships left Antwerp for New Orleans, to be trucked on to White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. The CCB may have been unaware then that Mittelwerk would be in the Soviet zone of occupation because a residue of missile equipment remained there for the Russians to find when they arrived on 21 June.
There remained the need for experienced German missilemen to clarify the technical details needed to avoid the problems found during the testing, trials and launching of the missiles at Peenemünde, Blizna and elsewhere, and in helping to ‘reverse-engineer’ the missiles, and it was down to Major Robert Staver of the US Ordnance Office to find this expertise. The big fish, including von Braun, had by this time surrendered to the Americans in the lower Baverian Alps, and were under guard in Garmisch Partenkirchen where selection for employment on rocket work in America was taking place. However, back at Nordhausen, Staver found V2 engineer Otto Fleisher and structural engineer Walther Riedel who were only too pleased to help, again with the prospect of emigration to the United States. A further search of the area revealed another pool of expertise, covering most aspects of missile technology, from which von Braun’s engineers identified the men they thought would be of most use to the Allies and, on 20 June 1945, the best of these were moved a few miles south-west, to Witzenhausen, in the US Zone, one day before the Russian occupation of Nordhausen. Angered that the Americans had taken the best of the missile bounty, and having failed to woo more than a handful of potentially useful German scientists and technicians into their employ, the Russians hatched a plan to kidnap some or all of those now lodged temporarily at Witzenhausen. They entered the town with convincing paperwork and dressed in British military uniforms (believing they were in the British Zone) but the American guards were smart enough to detect the ruse and sent them on their way.
There only remained that huge cache of documentation on the Vergeltungswaffen, so scrupulously recorded in the German way and hidden by Dieter Hexel in the old mine at Dörnten, to give the Americans all they wanted to pursue rocket technology in the their own backyard (Chapter Ten). Again Staver came to the rescue when he found one of the few remaining missilemen at Nordhausen, Karl Fleisher, who knew where the documents were hidden and, on 20 May 1945, he led the Americans to them.
The Americans may have secured the lion’s share of the rich pickings to be had at Mittelwerk, but a Soviet ‘Special Purpose Brigade’ still managed to find some items of interest which were assembled in Berka, near Zonderhausen, run by Major General Tveretsky and veterans of the Russian Katyusha (Rocket) units. Further missile ‘trophies’ found in Bad Sachsa, a stopping-off place for the Peenemünde party heading south, were said to have been shared with the Americans. Meanwhile, a key member of NII-1, Boris Chertok, who was already making use of the missile expertise of German specialists found languishing in Russian prison camps, arrived at Nordhausen as late as July 1946 and still managed to make contact with, and recruit, the few German missile technicians still there. Finally, the Russians also lured a few more of the German rocketeers from the care of the Americans in Bavaria with better pay and food, and the chance to stay in Germany, but all these efforts paled into insignificance compared with the Americans’ rich pickings.
The British, having been outwitted by the Americans on the ’50:50 per cent’ deal, did their best to make up ground with a Special Projectile Operations Group (SPOG). While they already knew much about the rocket from the errant V2 which had crashed in
Sweden and from good intelligence work by Polish and Dutch partisans (Chapter Four), they needed to know more, particularly on the operational missiles’ support equipment. This being so, and with so many rocket scientists and 8,000 German rocket troops now in Allied hands to help them, the British secured permission from Supreme Commander Eisenhower to ‘to ascertain the technique for launching long-range rockets, and to prove it by actual launches’. SPOG was tasked with demonstrating the preparations for – and firing of – three fully serviceable V2s into the North Sea, monitored by radar, from a well-equipped German naval gun range at Altenwalde, south of Cuxhaven. The War Office was given ultimate responsibility for Operation BACKFIRE, with Major General Cameron in command and Colonel W.S. Carter running the demonstration; the Americans would provide support and the exercise would be witnessed by a selected audience from the Allied Powers. Wernher von Braun and Gen Dornberger were released from American custody, temporarily, to advise the British, particularly on matters of safety and security, propellant storage, transport, loading, erection and best firing sites, Dornberger offering thirty of his men to help with the tests. The rocket troops assisting in the exercise who formed into the Altenwalde Versuchskommando (AVKO), a military style unit under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Weber, one-time commander of the very successful Training and Experimental Battery 444, included everyone, civilian and military, involved in the final preparations – and the launches themselves; all had significant operational experience with V2s in the field and would add logistical support. For the purpose of the exercise, and for some rocket work thereafter, some who were already in US custody were lent to the British. Other prominent Germans who contributed to BACKFIRE were Kurt Debus, who had been responsible for Peenemünde’s Test Stand VII, Hans Fichtner and Al Zeiler, while British rocket specialists would be on hand to witness the preparatory work and the firings. Two thousand Canadian engineers, supplemented by a force of British soldiers, took three weeks to refurbish existing facilities and build special equipment for the trials, which included a giant proofing tower, a vertical structure for testing the rockets in their launch position, constructed from parts of a redundant Bailey bridge. The majority of the rocket technicians and their assistants arrived at Altenwalde on 22 July where they were split into two groups and interrogated, a final group joining them in the second week of August.