Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

As a part of these twists and turns, a new—and largely futile—attempt was made to straighten out the mess in the war economy. Fritz Todt’s modest advances toward a more rational system were vitiated by the victory over France, which strengthened the hand of the military. His two main competitors, Göring and General Thomas of OKW, now attempted to adapt the priority system to the “redirection of armaments production.” As the Peenemünde case has shown, there were two uncoordinated systems: the construction priority levels of Göring’s October 1939 order and steel rationing. The latter had the greater impact but stifled production instead of encouraging efficiency. Göring (for whom Hitler had just invented the rank Reich Marshal, equivalent to a six-star general, to keep him above the many new Field Marshals like von Brauchitsch) issued a revised system incorporating steel rationing on July 18. His order created only two priority levels (I and II), reflecting Hitler’s penchant for avoiding difficult choices. As a result, the system was ineffective, but it shocked Army Ordnance because Peenemünde was not mentioned at all. After two weeks of panic, the rocket program was reinstated in priority level “I” “through the back door” under the category of “munitions in short supply.” 38

Only one measure discussed during the June euphoria was actually carried out. Leeb had decided that the Army’s own inefficient bureaucracy was a hindrance to the construction of the Production Plant. He approved negotiations to have Albert Speer’s Peenemünde organization take total responsibility for building sites at the center. Construction Group Schlempp, named after its local chief, formally displaced the Army construction office on September 15. 39

To speed the project further, Ordnance went to Todt looking for construction workers to supplement the basic force of 3,000 that had been working for the Army at Peenemünde since late 1939. In mid-July, Dornberger asked the Minister to double that number. Todt promised a thousand from his own projects and another thousand from Speer’s, but Speer soon said that he could not fulfill his end of the bargain. Todt did supply a thousand, but they may only have replaced some 900 Polish workers who were apparently withdrawn after OKW forbade the use of non-Germans on secret projects. Unlike the situation after 1942, the security threat posed by forced and foreign labor still outweighed the need for manpower in the early years. A few hundred Czech workers had been used at the Peenemünde factory site in mid-1939 but were sent away at the start of the war, presumably to protect secrecy. The Polish workers appear to have arrived in the spring of 1940. Whether or not they were actually withdrawn that summer, the exploitation of East European laborers and prisoners of war would soon become normal in Peenemünde and elsewhere. It was a harbinger of the eventual enslavement of concentration camp inmates for A-4 production. 40

All the uncertainty and bureaucratic maneuvering of the early summer was not, however, the end of the program’s troubles. At the end of August the priority system entered a new state of flux, throwing Peenemünde’s status again into question. So ineffective was the July priority order that Thomas and the service ordnance chiefs agreed to split level “l” into “la” and “lb.” On August 20 Hitler ordered the establishment of a “special level S” for “Operation Sealion,” the invasion of Britain, above both. The problem was that the services were all jockeying to have their programs in the top level, while stealing resources from each other or blaming the OKW for their problems. So competitive and disorganized was the situation that Todt was forced to complain to Hitler. The Army had issued armaments orders directly affecting his Ministry that he heard about later only through “unofficial channels.” 41

Dornberger responded to the new period of uncertainty by again arguing for the disastrous impact of a priority reduction on Germany’s position in the alleged international missile race. He mentioned the discovery by occupation authorities of secret military experiments by the French rocketry pioneer Robert Esnault-Pelterie, suggested that Vichy France might still be pursuing a missile(!), and noted that there had been no news of Goddard since 1938, when the U.S. War Department had supposedly intervened. (In fact, the American physicist and inventor began working on small projects for the military only in 1941.) Dornberger believed that Goddard was “about two years behind German development” in 1938. That estimate was not too far from the truth, but once again Dornberger had no intelligence to support the assumption that the Americans had made huge investments in a ballistic missile program. His claims were “fully” supported by the Army Ordnance leadership nonetheless. In the midst of the Battle of Britain, however, the argument was ineffective, and the rocket program was reduced at the end of September to level “lb,” that is, third priority. 42

Although there had been some temporary loss of workers in the manufacturing of key electronic components during the uncertainties of late July, that priority assignment produced the first real threat to the development of the A-4. Firms began responding with letters saying that their contracts for the program could not be fulfilled because of the demands of projects at higher priority levels. Dornberger’s protests went up the line to the Army Commander-in-Chief, and after only two weeks Peenemünde was unofficially bumped up to second priority (“la”) by the OKW Dornberger naturally still wanted to get all the way to the top level (“S”). On November 19 Keitel informed von Brauchitsch of Hitler’s decision. The Führer confirmed the rocket program’s assignment to second priority, including the steel quotas imposed one year before. The Führer may have been restating his interest in the project after the Luftwaffe’s failure in the Battle of Britain, but his endorsement remained lukewarm at best. 43

In early 1941 Peenemünde’s priority level took on new urgency with the invention of yet another level above all others, “special level SS,” which had nothing to do with the SS. A process of priority inflation was at work: The services would all try to crowd their contracts into the top level until there were not enough manpower and resources to satisfy even that level’s demands, given the German war economy’s poor efficiency. Since the OKW was often too weak to refuse the demands of the services, and Hitler preferred to avoid hard decisions, it was easier to invent a new level than to impose priority reductions. As a result, lower levels suffered “a certain degeneration,” according to an OKW staff member. By February 1941 levels below “SS” and “S” were phased out as meaningless. 44

In this light the rocket program was reevaluated, and on February 5 the head of the Development and Testing Division, General Koch, told Dornberger that its priority would be split: Development would go to the top level (“SS”), and the Production Plant would be put in “S.” That measure, which became official toward the end of March, presumably corresponded to Hitler’s view at the time. In a phone call to Leeb, General Fromm said on May 7 that “in line with the Führer order, only development is allowed in Peenemünde, therefore at most a test series” can be produced. If, by this order, Hitler meant that the missile had to be proved to work before manufacturing it, his position was entirely reasonable. It is also possible that this had been his thinking since the autumn of 1939. 45

Thus after six months of lower priority, missile development was once again supported as most urgent. For the production facility, however, machine tools and laborers remained difficult to acquire. Dornberger still hoped that the A-4 would be finished and production could begin on a small scale in early 1942 if the Army found more resources. Plans called for the factory eventually to turn out five hundred A-4s a year, the official goal since the cutbacks of early 1940, unless the grandiose original plans for three assembly buildings could be revived. But all those ideas remained unrealistic. Even if top priority for the production facility could be obtained from Hitler—as it would be in the late summer of 1941—developing and producing the A-4 in less than a year was a fantasy. Dornberger and Ordnance had become trapped by their own political salesmanship and by their unavoidable ignorance of the difficult technological challenges that lay ahead. 46