Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

The last estimate, which was based on no solid intelligence, shows Dornberger to be a true believer, and one willing to exaggerate for the sake of the cause. But his magnification of the foreign threat was not unusual for military-industrial project managers, then or since. A similarly flawed, although arguably more justified, estimate of Germany’s potential for building an atomic bomb spurred the Anglo-American Manhattan Project in 1941–42.

The most ironic feature of Dornberger’s December 14 memorandum is the claim that the A-4 could be decisive. In his memoirs, this comes up only in the context of a famous July 1943 meeting with Hitler, where he allegedly became worried when the Führer asserted that the weapon would be decisive. One must again wonder how Dornberger thought that relatively small numbers of conventionally armed missiles would have such an effect, since they would be launched, a January 1940 document says, against “valuable area targets (warehouses, airports, military-industrial facilities, railyards, and so forth).” To understand his thinking, one must accept his (unrealistic) assumption, based on his engineers’ theoretical calculations, that the accuracy of the missile would be less than a kilometer. But this targeting also appears to reflect the limited perspective of an artillery officer, with no influence from discussions of the aerial terror bombing of cities. 30

With the onset of the harsh winter of 1939–40, which halted construction for three months, and the beginning of the steel cutbacks, the Production Plant became bogged down in a morass of difficulties that were to last most of the next three years. The shifting priority and quota situation of the facility made planning chaotic. Manufacturing equipment arrived, and there was no place to put it; contracts had to be broken because of the construction cutbacks; the inherent problems of building on a low-lying barrier island caused further delays. To those problems were added constant difficulties in maintaining the construction workforce, especially with the housing shortages and the primitiveness of the barracks. In addition, the construction and manpower resources of the factory were constantly being raided to finish the more pressing projects in the development works, especially the A-4 launch facility (Test Stand VII). But the higher priority of that project reminds us that the Plant’s problems had little impact on the rate at which missile research and development went forward under von Braun. 31

For Dornberger and his subordinates, the situation nonetheless looked threatening in early 1940. At the beginning of March Wa Prüf 11 was informed that it would receive only 80 percent of its steel quota for the second quarter of the year. The uncertain political climate also unnerved at least one major contractor, Kreiselgeräte, which had to be reassured in mid-February that high-priority status for rocket development was continuing. Not coincidentally, Göring initiated a new campaign to eliminate unnecessary building projects about this time. Fritz Todt, the autobahn czar and head of construction in the Four-Year Plan, had urged that action. As a part of the campaign, Hitler wanted to reduce the Production Plant from first to second priority on Göring’s list, but the intervention of Albert Speer, the Führer’s chief architect, prevented it. 32

Speer made that effort because, over the preceding year, the Ordnance rocket program had forged a growing alliance with him—an alliance which was especially fortunate for Ordnance in view of his unexpected rise to Armaments Minister in early 1942. Speer had been consulted on the plan for the factory’s “Large Settlement” since February 1939 and had accepted a supervisory role over Peenemünde construction at the outbreak of the war, when he and Todt had taken over most Army and Luftwaffe domestic building projects. On first visiting the rocket center in January 1940, Speer had established a personal bond with its young engineers, if his memoirs from the late 1960s are to be believed. Their work “exerted a strange fascination upon me. It was like the planning of a miracle. I was impressed… by these technicians with their fantastic visions, these mathematical romantics. Whenever I visited Peenemünde I also felt, quite spontaneously, quite akin to them.” Speer was only seven years older than von Braun and like him had made a meteoric rise in the Third Reich to direct massive projects: the Nuremberg party rally buildings, the reconstruction of Berlin. His intervention would serve the rocket program well over the next few years, but his later assertion that he continued to build Peenemünde behind Hitler’s back, even though its priority was cut off, is clearly false. 33

In the troubled months of early 1940 a second personality began to loom large for the program: Fritz Todt. During the endless rounds of meetings produced by the “munitions crisis,” the name of the masterful builder of the autobahns and the West Wall fortifications had figured more and more in the search for solutions to the paralysis in the war economy. On March 17 Hitler made him the first Minister for Armaments and Munitions, with the specific task of eliminating the bottlenecks in Army weapons production. It was typical of the divided character of the Third Reich that Todt received no power over the Navy or the Luftwaffe, and even his ability to influence Army Ordnance and the OKW Economics Office was doubtful. He immediately issued orders stopping government experimental projects that could not produce results by October, but those injunctions were ignored in Peenemünde and elsewhere. 34

To the Army leadership, Todt’s appointment was an open rebuke. As a countermove, Becker momentarily persuaded Hitler to create a single more powerful Wehrmacht (Armed Forces) Ordnance office, which the Army would inevitably dominate. But an important director of the Krupp concern, appalled at the attempted reassertion of military control over industry, induced the Führer to reverse the decision on the same day, April 8. In the process the industrialist did not hesitate to hint at unspecified scandals in Becker’s family. Demoralized by months of attacks on Army Ordnance during the “munitions crisis,” Becker shot himself to death that evening after hearing of the latest assault on his person. It was a shocking blow to the rocket group, but the very next day Dornberger and von Braun visited Todt in his office and were reassured of his support for Peenemünde, whatever his orders had said. Moreover, General Emil Leeb, Becker’s successor and another artillerist, turned out to support the rocket program as enthusiastically as the former chief of Ordnance. 35

Leeb’s enthusiasm for the ballistic missile was amply demonstrated two months later. In the national euphoria over the lightning defeat of France, he thought he saw his moment. So convinced was Leeb of the A-4’s decisiveness, he wanted to give it the highest possible priority even if it could no longer affect the war against Britain, which appeared to be virtually over. Larger numbers of A-4s should still be produced, he said on June 20, “in order to have the possibility of keeping England under pressure even after the conclusion of peace.” To accelerate development and production, Leeb therefore approved measures outlined by Dornberger that would give the rocket program a kind of national superpriority: Peenemünde would be rated higher than the U-boats, armored vehicles, military aircraft, and all other armaments programs of the Third Reich. His immediate superior, the Chief of Army Armaments and Commander of the Replacement Army, General Friedrich Fromm, supported this misguided plan. Von Brauchitsch, although sympathetic too, quashed it because it would require him to go to Hitler to reverse the steel cutback. 36

The Army Commander-in-Chief doubtless saw that it was not the right moment to approach the Führer, who was confident that the Luftwaffe would defeat Britain. He was also aware of Hitler’s and Göring’s demand for the “redirection of armaments production” away from the Army and toward the Navy and Luftwaffe. The “redirection” reflected the two leaders’ naïve belief that a huge economy could be switched from one direction to another in a moment. In the end their demand accomplished little but to spread confusion in a war economy already losing momentum because of the widely held belief that victory was near. To make matters worse, by late July Hitler was reemphasizing the buildup of the Army and its Panzer divisions for an attack on the Soviet Union. 37