Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s

by Norman Longmate

  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 prisoner7 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.

  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 sudd
enly 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’.