Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

Based on Dornberger’s concept, the factory group quickly outlined a facility that dwarfed the existing development works. Judging by the new Heinkel aircraft plant at Oranienburg, north of Berlin, Schubert initially estimated the need for a workforce of almost five thousand. But there was no place to house that many people on the rural island of Usedom, so it was necessary to build a “Large Settlement,” really an entire town, for them and their dependents. Moving them to work required a better system than the old, broken-down trains currently running to the Army and Luftwaffe facilities. Schubert’s group planned a special electric train system, modeled on the Berlin S-Bahn (surface railroad). That system and the factory itself needed more electrical power than was available from the existing grid. A new power station had to be built. That requirement in turn necessitated a greatly improved harbor for coal delivery by ship.

As if these technical and financial challenges were not enough, Schubert perceived from the outset in January 1939 that Peenemünde’s northern coastal location presented a number of strategic and practical problems. The island was more exposed to air attack than a site far inland, yet Usedom’s sandy, water-logged soil was ill-suited for underground shelters. More expensive above-ground protection would have to be constructed. In addition, the soil problem, along with brine seepage into the water table, meant that water supply and sewage systems for the workforce would be difficult to construct. The land would have to be pumped out and a dike built to protect the area from high water. Finally, the relatively remote location of Peenemünde complicated construction and labor problems generally. 6

The massive scale and the difficulties of the production plant project would soon make it an onerous burden on the rocket program. Why, then, did Dornberger choose to build there, rather than find an industrial contractor for missile production? Clearly, the factory fitted his “everything-under-one-roof” concept, which had worked well in research and development. But Dornberger’s specific rationale was that the Army’s missile technology was so new and exotic that it was important for the plant to be situated next to the development works for easy consultation. Moreover, extensive testing and checkout would be required for production rockets, necessitating stands to test-fire them; combustion chambers would have to be tested and calibrated as well. Only at Peenemünde, he argued, were there sufficient safety and security to carry out that continual operation, since explosions were likely. Schubert’s group therefore planned three test stands surrounded by circular earthen blast walls west of the factory complex. 7

Dornberger’s extensive testing regime shows how premature it was to rush the ballistic missile into production. Only the conviction that this weapon could be militarily decisive, and that Germany must exploit its lead in a race with other powers, explains why Dornberger and the Army leadership accepted the necessity of initiating manufacture while development was far from complete. The approval of the missile factory by von Brauchitsch and Becker also reflected the Army’s desire to build an empire in armaments production. Since 1934 Ordnance had been constructing its own munitions plants on the grounds that private companies would never build sufficient capacity for wartime needs. Those “Army-owned enterprises” were then grouped under a large holding company to disguise Ordnance’s control from the outside world. Many were in fact leased to explosives firms for management, but the Army’s tendency toward state ownership was deeply rooted in the Prussian tradition of the officer corps. The sociopolitical environment created by National Socialism may have had some influence too. While Hitler took little interest in economics and discouraged the “socialist” elements in his own party, there is little doubt that the role of nationalized corporations grew during the Third Reich. 8

The Army-owned enterprises certainly influenced Schubert’s plans for the Peenemünde Production Plant. In 1941, while lamenting the disruptive effects of the war on that factory, he stated that his original plan had been to create, along the lines of the Army munitions factories, a “model facility” in which “expense should not be the sole determining factor.” The buildings, the machines, the fire and air raid protection systems, the facilities for worker eating and relaxation, would all be first-rate. He also incorporated into his plan the German Labor Front’s requirements for good social provisions and the “beauty of labor.” Thus he included sports fields, cinemas, and attractive apprenticeship training shops. Together with the facility’s scale and construction problems, this extravagance resulted in a hefty bill for the factory: by one 1939 estimate, 180 million marks, or roughly quintuple the expenditure on the development works up to the end of 1938. 9

In return for that investment, the Reich was to receive five hundred A-10s or 1,500 A-4s a year, numbers that look, in comparison to later wartime production, unimpressive. The low output resulted from at least two factors. First, the German armed services in the 1930s emphasized quality over quantity in armaments production. That meant an excessive dependence on skilled labor and a poor level of economic efficiency in the early years of war. This high-skill philosophy, which was taken for granted by Army planners like Schubert, could only have been reinforced for the Peenemünde facility by the exotic and highly specialized character of the technology to be manufactured. 10

A second factor lowering output was an emphasis on making as much of the rocket at Peenemünde as possible. The Production Plant was supposed to build almost all the major missile components itself, except for the guidance system and the turbopump–steam generator combination. The rationale for that approach probably arose from a combination of the exacting standards to be applied during production, Dornberger’s general preference for “everything under one roof,” and the limited manufacturing capacity available elsewhere in an economy apparently strained to its limits. In defense of the original factory concept, Rudolph later claimed that the facility had been designed as a “pilot production plant” to pioneer the technology before handing it over to private firms for mass production. Although that was the name the factory later carried, there is no evidence that Dornberger’s originally intended it to function that way. The pilot production label was not applied until the fall of 1941 and became meaningless within a couple of months, because the factory was once again designated as a regular production site. 11

The planned output of 1,500 A-4s a year (125 a month) was thus the maximum missile production that Army Ordnance foresaw in 1939, at least in single-shift operation. As it turned out, about 6,000 A-4s would be built in much more difficult conditions over fifteen months at the end of the war. Although it is hardly fair to blame Schubert, Dornberger, and their superiors for failing to see all the shortcomings of the Nazi economy or their own planning, it is an indictment of the leadership of the rocket program and the Army that they committed such huge resources to a project to launch fewer than three dozen high-explosive warheads a week at enemy targets—and in the expectation of spectacular military results. The decision to build the Production Plant is comprehensible only in the light of Ordnance’s romantic infatuation with rocket technology, the predominance of artillerists in the Army leadership, and German officers’ tendency to offer tactical solutions to strategic problems.

Von Brauchitsch’s November 1938 order reflected the Army’s remaining autonomy in the armaments sector as well. In the last years before the war, a free-for-all existed among the services. Hitler consciously attempted to play off individuals and groups against each other, while demanding as rapid a reamarmament as possible without regard to economic feasibility or effective interservice coordination. By 1938–39, skilled labor and other crucial resources were stretched to their limits, and even a “Führer order” did not necessarily have much effect. For example, in January 1939 Hitler ordered that the Navy’s grandiose “Z-Plan” for a massive battle fleet be given priority over the plans of the Army and Luftwaffe. But that had little practical impact, because the resources were not there given the prevailing inefficiency, and the other services were not about to cooperate. Thus it was entirely possible for the Army to order a huge increase in the scale of the Peenemünde project without consulting anyone, but it was quite another thing actually to carry it out. At the outset of the planning, Dornberger told Schubert that he could not hire a large staff. Even labor to build the construction workers’ barracks on Usedom was difficult to find. 12