Space Race

by Deborah Cadbury

  The Third Reich was doomed, crumbling into the dust of history as the victorious Allies moved inexorably across Germany; the Soviets thundering across the country from the east, the American and British armies moving in to meet them from the west. The US army had crossed the Rhine between Mainz and Mannheim and soon they would be at the Elbe in the eastern half of Germany, shaking hands with the Soviets and comparing stories. On one occasion, Huzel recalled hearing the ‘ever present rumble of distant cannon fire grow in loudness until it was a roar’. He looked up, momentarily blinded by the sun, and was shocked to see ‘hundreds upon hundreds of Allied bombers, surrounded by the tiny points of their fighter escorts’. He was aghast ‘at the immensity of the formation’ and stared open-mouthed. Berlin was bombed night and day in terrible retribution. For mile after mile the stony skeleton shapes of once majestic buildings stood open to the sky.

  At the very centre, enclosed in his tomb-like bunker, Hitler was still there, shouting at his generals, issuing directives. On 19 March, he had issued a decree that anything of value to the enemy was to be demolished:

  DEMOLITIONS ON REICH TERRITORY

  ‘Nero Decree’

  Every opportunity must be taken of inflicting, directly or indirectly, the utmost lasting damage on the striking power of the enemy … anything … of value within Reich territory, which could be in any way used by the enemy immediately or within the foreseeable future … will be destroyed.

  Hitler would not listen to dissenting voices and was convinced the German people were unworthy of him. ‘If the war is lost,’ he ranted, ‘the nation will perish … it will be better to destroy these things ourselves because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one … Only the inferior will remain, for the good ones have all been killed.’ According to Hitler’s decree, nothing that could be turned against Germany was to remain; his enemies would acquire only ‘scorched earth’.

  Von Braun and Dornberger, who was now installed nearby in Gad Sachasa, quietly discussed Hitler’s directive. They were still guarding 14 tons of precious blueprints. If these were destroyed by the SS, or if they themselves were killed, years of groundbreaking work in their field would be lost. They thus took the fateful decision to go against Hitler’s express orders and at least hide the documents. They knew exactly what their fate would be if Kammler discovered their plan – but Kammler was distracted. He had been promoted yet again and now carried the impressive title of ‘Special Commissioner for breaking the Air Terror’, an impossible, Canute-like task. The Luftwaffe was impotent. Allied bombers ruled the skies and at this late stage of the war nothing could stop wave after wave of bombers blackening the heavens. The ominous drone of their engines filled the air and the bombs continued to fall like a deadly hailstorm.

  Whatever steps Kammler took in an attempt to manufacture yet more German aircraft, the Allied planes were always above him. No one around him dared to murmur even a word of opposition. Kammler had special powers; if any Luftwaffe generals failed to carry out his orders they could be shot. Kammler’s temper was tuned to breaking point. ‘He was on the move day and night,’ observed Dornberger.

  Conferences were called for 1 o’clock in the morning somewhere in the Harz Mountains, or we would meet at midnight somewhere on the autobahn and then, after a brief exchange of views, drive back to work again. We were prey to terrific nervous tension. Irritable and overworked as we were, we didn’t mince words. Kammler, if he got impatient and wanted to drive on, would wake the slumbering officers of his suite with a burst from his machine gun. ‘No need for them to sleep,’ Kammler would say. ‘I can’t either.’

  Secretly, von Braun picked two trusted men, Dieter Huzel and Bernhard Tessman, and ordered them to collect all blueprints and plans and find a safe hiding place for them, such as a disused mine. They represented a small, treasured seed of possibility which, if von Braun lived, he would reclaim one day. The A-4, the V-2 prototype, was for von Braun just one of a family of rockets – for which the latest designs embodied the future of space travel. The A-9, which had winged surfaces and included room for a pilot in the cockpit, was designed to travel several thousand miles and was for him the first step towards a space ship. The A-10 was a booster that would enable the A-9 to span even greater distances. These documents were irreplaceable and represented von Braun’s future and his hopes that space exploration could one day be pursued without limitations. Their safety was paramount. In spite of the enormous risk involved in disobeying Hitler’s orders, he was determined to save them.

  Equipped with three trucks and trailers, along with false papers from von Braun which appeared to validate his mission, Huzel set off with Tessman to find a suitable site. This was not easy: abandoned mines were suddenly at a premium. Huzel was soon at breaking point, struggling to avoid endless low-flying enemy aircraft which plagued even minor roads and worried by the menacing proximity of enemy guns, when to his great relief he discovered a forgotten and untenanted mine. Down a long passageway he found a wonderfully dry room behind a locked door. To his relief, a nearby SS post did not detain him or question his mission, but warned him that American troops were entering the next village. This was the spur Huzel needed and he and Tessman worked through the night to hide the documents.

  Meanwhile, in Nordhausen the usually dashing figure of von Braun had been obscured under a bizarre arrangement of plaster casts and bandages. Although recuperating in the sumptuous splendour of the Villa Frank, his arm would not heal and it caused him some pain. It had not been properly set and further treatment was needed if he was to avoid the risk of amputation. There was no time to seek medical help, however, with the Allies closing in. It was difficult to know just how near they were since no real news was transmitted on German radio. In its absence, rumour took on a convincing reality – the American army were sited just twenty miles away. Von Braun and Dornberger were hoping that they could persuade the Americans to employ the rocket team for further research in space. Quite apart from their own expertise, the unique hoard of documents would be a useful bargaining tool. Yet, surrounded by the SS, there was no chance of surrendering. It was unclear what might happen if they tried to escape.

  Dornberger had informed von Braun how edgy and unpredictable Kammler had become. Although he still cut an authoritative figure in his black leather SS military greatcoat as he emerged imperiously from a handsome German car with a flurry of attendant guards, the leonine features of the general were now taking on a drawn and worried look. Dornberger had overheard Kammler instructing his Chief of Staff, SS Major Starck, to remain at all times 20 feet behind him, and, if they found themselves in an uncompromising position from which there was no escape, Starck was to shoot him in the back of the head. Frantically trying to prop up the last remnants of the regime, the ‘berserk warrior’, as Dornberger now called him, had every reason to be nervous as a high-ranking Nazi officer with a very long list of war crimes behind his meteoric rise in rank. If the Americans caught him he would almost certainly be hanged. He was as good as dead already – except that he had a strategy. The time had come to implement a plan that would protect him.

  Kammler was aware that in his hands he had a tantalizing prize to offer the Americans in exchange for his life: the rocket team. A manageable number – five hundred of the top men under close SS guard – would be enough to impart a feeling of security. And if he failed to strike a bargain, it would not take long to shoot them as Hitler had ordered, rather than let them fall into enemy hands. On 1 April, therefore, Kammler ordered that von Braun and five hundred of the leading scientists were to move immediately to the Bavarian Alps. Hitler and the best SS divisions would be there, Kammler explained, employing the natural fortifications of the landscape from which to mount a victorious attack on the enemy.

  Kammler’s train offered an atmosphere of luxury entirely divorced from the war, with wagons-lits, and a dining car offering excellent cuisine and choice of wines in which the general increasingly indulged on his not infrequent trips.
Yet as von Braun’s team departed on their tortuously slow four-hundred-mile journey south to the Alps chaperoned by a hundred SS guards, it was difficult to disguise the feeling that they were being imprisoned. At least one scientist, the talented young engineer Helmut Gröttrup, was beginning to question von Braun’s leadership. At Peenemünde, Gröttrup had worked as deputy to the director of Guidance, Control and Telemetry. With the situation in Germany increasingly dangerous and unpredictable, he was worried about leaving his young wife, Irmgardt, and their two children. In addition, he was aware of the persistent rumours ‘that prisoners on the train were to be killed on account of their knowledge of secret information’.

  ‘I don’t even know where he will be taken or when he will return,’ wrote his wife Irmgardt in her diary, despairing that her whole family ‘was scattered somewhere around the burning world … In the evenings I sit and wait until late at night … As we said goodbye it all became so empty and dreadful … They keep coming to take more of our group away. Will we ever see one another again? It astounds me that man endures so much suffering …’

  Helmut Gröttrup’s train left at midnight on 6 April yet with so many lines damaged or destroyed, the speed rarely exceeded 3 mph. Just before Munich, he seized his opportunity to escape. Despite the presence of the SS guards, he jumped from the train and managed to hide. Moving only at night, he began the long walk back towards Nordhausen while the remainder of von Braun’s leading scientists continued south towards the Bavarian Alps for Hitler’s alleged last stand.

  In early April, a few days after von Braun left the Nordhausen area, John Gallione of the US 104th Army Infantry Division set out to find a concentration camp that was rumoured to be in the vicinity, providing labour to make the Nazis’ V-2 rockets. The 104th Infantry Division had swept almost two hundred miles from the Rhine in a relentless push to the east. ‘We felt lucky to have made it this far in the war,’ said Gallione, ‘but something was driving me on to find the prisoners. I just had a gut feeling that something horrible was going on …’ He decided the best way to find a camp was to follow the railway line. The only way the Nazis could sneak large numbers of people into a camp, he reasoned, was by train.

  He followed the track for miles until, to his horror, he came across a carriage full of dead bodies. ‘The smell was horrible. Where I was standing, I could see a hidden tunnel coming out of the side of a mountain.’ While he was investigating the tunnel and the bodies, trying to find any papers that would help him identify the nationality of the dead, he was spotted by an SS guard. ‘I was shot at and took cover … we shot back and forth for a while, but he seemed to let me go. He was in a hurry to get out of there …’

  John Gallione went for help and found a soldier with a Jeep. They retraced the route back to the train and slowly became aware of a foul smell: a strong, sickly, bad smell, impossible to identify with any certainty but undoubtedly a precursor of trouble. They found a gate into what seemed to be a vast enclosure and broke the lock. The night was almost over and in the half-light of dawn they became aware of shadowy forms, not quite human, moving about. Caught in the headlights of the Jeep, skeleton figures could be glimpsed, apparently wrapped in skin. They were moving painfully slowly among piles of the dead who were grey in colour with limbs like sticks. Picking his way towards them through the bodies was one of the living skeletons, his face devoid of recognizably human features, his skin drawn tight over the bony head, his eyes those of a very old man. He gesticulated and tried to explain. ‘There are people in here,’ he cried out, ‘desperate for help.’

  This glimpse of a ghoulish, subhuman scene was too much for the terrified driver. He reversed the Jeep and kept on reversing until they were well away from the camp. ‘That’s how frightened we were that we might be captured,’ explained John Gallione. ‘We did not know what was going on in there and we did not want to end up like the people we had seen.’ Thoroughly unnerved, the two men raced back to headquarters and explained that they had seen the inmates of some kind of concentration camp. They immediately radioed for help from other divisions in the area. By 11 April, a massive rescue operation was underway involving tanks, medical teams and the Red Cross.

  The place they had chanced upon was Camp Dora, which had been built by Kammler to house the men who provided slave labour for the manufacture of the V-2. John Gallione found the courage to return and tried to describe the scene. ‘There were dead bodies piled up. The smell was so bad, like nothing you can imagine. The people were so happy to see us; they were tugging our clothes, feeling our uniforms between their fingers like they were gold. They just wanted to touch us, thanking God over and over again. They looked like the walking dead; skin and bones – that’s all. Some of them were so weak they didn’t even get to see their own rescue. They died on the way.’

  Nothing had prepared the combat soldiers and medical teams for the grim sight that they uncovered. This was as close to hell as it was possible to get. ‘The gun and the pursuit of the enemy was dropped,’ reported one medic from the 104th Division. ‘All hands were turned to the overwhelming task of saving the living if at all possible.’ Another medic, David Malachowsky, heard machine-gun fire. To his horror, as he approached a rise in the land he saw ‘the SS … frantically trying to finish the job. They had a bunch of prisoners lined up against the fence and were gunning them down.’ On the hill he could see the huge cavern-like entrance to the factory. Six thousand emaciated bodies covered the ground far into the distance. Halfway up the hill in a low building, the furnaces of the crematorium were still smouldering; the doors open, awaiting more human fuel. ‘They had been shovelling people in and burning them up.’

  Before long the US army came across yet another concentration camp in nearby Nordhausen. More slaves for the Mittelwerk V-2 factory were housed in rancid-smelling buildings; the dead and living shared wooden bunks, the difference between them hardly discernible, those still alive, immobile, waiting patiently for death. Sergeant Ragene Farris of the 329th Medical Battalion, 104th Infantry Division, was approached by a Frenchman who was anxious to get immediate help to his fellow French prisoners in the dark cellars of another building. ‘It was like stepping into the Dark Ages to walk into one of these cellar cells and seek out the living,’ reported Sergeant Farris. ‘One French boy was huddled up against a dead comrade, as if to keep warm, having no concept that the friend had been dead two or three days and unable to move his limbs.’ There were so many bodies, but his eyes were drawn to one girl in particular: ‘I would say she was about 17 years old. She lay where she had fallen, gangrened and naked. In my own thoughts I choked up – couldn’t quite understand how and why war could do these things.’

  The camp had been bombed and in one bomb crater lay about twenty bodies. ‘We pulled about 3 or 4 feebly struggling living ones from the bottom of the pile,’ continued Farris. ‘They had been struggling for 5 or 6 days to get out, but the weight of the other bodies on them had been too much for their starved emaciated frames.’ One man feebly staggered to attention for the US medics, ‘and tried to salute us as tears slowly trickled down his cheeks. Too weak to walk, this man was genuinely moved to pay tribute to those who were helping him – showing him the first kind act in years.’ Night and day the army of workers buried the dead and did what they could for the dying. Few of the inmates could stand or walk, but those who could reached out for the hands of their liberators, their pale faces washed with tears – and the hardened, battle-weary men of the 104th cried too.

  After the bombing of Peenemünde in 1943, the Nazi hierarchy had been determined to form an impregnable factory where the V-2s could be mass-produced. Kammler, Himmler’s right-hand man, was keenly aware of Hitler’s insistence on the immediate production of five thousand rockets ‘to force England to her knees’. The SS had taken prisoners from Buchenwald concentration camp at Weimar to a disused mine in the Harz Mountains in central Germany. Out of the solid rock of the mine and without modern tools, the prisoners had laboured to build a
vast underground factory. They forged two tunnels, each two miles long, connected by a series of intersecting tunnels. The main assembly line ran down one of the tunnels while supplies and sub-assemblies came through from the parallel tunnel. Once the prisoners had built the production line, they manned it and began producing V-2 rockets. At first the prisoners lived in the tunnels, but, as production increased, concentration camps were created at Dora and Nordhausen to house them.

  Their daily food ration was well below subsistence level, about 1000 calories a day. There were no washing facilities or latrines in the mine; a few buckets were provided for use as toilets. In the absence of drinking water, the labourers were compelled to drink from the puddles formed by water oozing from the walls. Disease and skin infections were prevalent; dysentery, gangrene and starvation offered the most commonplace exit from this hell on earth. Encouragement, in the form of a beating, was often administered to those too weak to work. The SS had worked out with chilling precision the most cost-effective way of working the prisoners. In the hot and humid tunnels, and with the minimum of food, a fit man could usually give six months’ work before he died of starvation. Around 160 workers a day died, but that was irrelevant to the camp administration; they could always be replaced. Now and then, if a little more ‘encouragement’ was required, there would be a public hanging, the victims selected for random, arbitrary reasons. At least twenty thousand slaves died creating Mittelwerk and building the V-2.