Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

Within days of that decision, a senior AEG director and electronics expert, Professor Waldemar Petersen, presented an even more radical proposal: The whole of Peenemünde-East should be converted into a company. Surprisingly, General Leeb had made the same comment at the end of 1941, while turning down Dornberger’s proposal to militarize the center’s personnel completely, perhaps by expanding the Northern Experimental Command. Leeb had apparently accepted many of the criticisms of the bureaucratic manner in which Army Ordnance operated. Nothing came of those discussions, and Peenemünde-East remained what it was: a military research and development facility with a large civilian component. In November 1942 Ordnance began a new round of discussions on lessening red tape in the A-4 production program. Normally, all contracts for rocket parts and subassemblies, tools, and jigs for the factories, and the like, had to be let through Ordnance’s procurement and price control bureaucracy in Berlin. The outcome of those discussions, reinforced by pressure from the Ministry and Degenkolb, was the creation in the first half of 1943 of a Peenemünde purchasing and contracting operation working on more commercial lines. That measure streamlined administration and allowed the Army to defeat—temporarily—the attempt of Speer’s industrial managers, with their close ties to the Party, to take the Peenemünde center away. 15

It was not long before the engineers at Peenemünde shared Dornberger’s anger and irritation with Degenkolb. As soon as the chairman of the A-4 Special Committee had finished filling out his organization, he moved to force a dramatic speedup in missile production. The last and most ambitious program outlined by Stahlknecht, in February 1943, called for Peenemünde and Friedrichshafen to begin assembling five A-4s in April and July, respectively, and to increase their monthly output in steps to a maximum of three hundred rockets each from September 1944 on (an annual production rate of 7,200). In the wake of the October 3 success, Dornberger had proposed adding a third A-4 assembly plant in the General Government (that is, rump Poland). This colonial appendage of the Third Reich lay under a vicious, genocidal occupation, but it was beyond the range of Allied bombers and promised a supply of cheap Polish labor. Speer gave oral approval to that plan in late December, but Degenkolb soon cast it aside, probably because the factory would take too long to construct. At the end of March Stahlknecht announced that the Rax-Werke, a locomotive and railcar factory in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, would be the third site. A couple of days later Degenkolb issued his first program: each of the three sites was to begin producing three hundred rockets a month by December 1943! 16

Degenkolb’s schedule bordered on the absurd; he had clearly failed to understand that a missile was much more complex than a locomotive. Although his energetic action, combined with the backing of the Armaments Ministry, had done much to accelerate the A-4 production program, the practical difficulties of the new schedule were insurmountable. Degenkolb apparently thought he could create a third factory by fiat, even though Rax would need test stands and a liquid-oxygen plant to supply the engine firings, as was the case in Peenemünde and Friedrichshafen. (In mid-1942 the Army had started building a new test-stand area for Zeppelin near the village of Oberraderach.) It was also unclear how the original two sites were to be ready in time, or where the program was going to find the parts manufacturers, alcohol supply, and liquid-oxygen capacity needed to assemble, test, and launch ten thousand missiles a year. Von Braun had to exert all his authority just to keep his people cooperative. 17

The A-4 was also still far from ready for manufacturing in the spring of 1943. Only two or three of the eleven launch attempts from late October to the end of March were even partially successful. Crucial guidance equipment like the radio cutoff system was not available for launch testing until the spring, and the first rocket even to approach the designated range of 270 kilometers did not fly until April 3. Moreover, to the shock of the non-Peenemünde members of the A-4 Special Committee, many of the drawings of electrical components were still not ready in March, nor were subcontractors lined up for many components. In virtually all areas, the drawings and parts lists remained in a state of confusion, and excessively complicated development models had been forced into production for lack of time. 18

The situation drove Walter Thiel, among others, to the brink of despair. Before going on a short rest cure in March, he wrote a letter to Wernher von Braun from Friedrichshafen, indicating that he was mentally and physically exhausted. He had not yet been able to make the “mixing nozzle” injector work as a replacement for the eighteen-pot motor, the turbopump–steam generator system was nightmarishly complicated and unreliable, and liquid oxygen was a poor propellant choice for a weapon. A combination of nitric acid and a hydrocarbon fuel, on the other hand, could be made to ignite on contact and would lack the handling problems of a supercold fluid. Stegmaier’s marginal comment said it all: “The war is not going to wait for Dr. Thiel.” The order of the day was send weapons into production, whatever the drawbacks. 19

In the end Thiel and his colleagues had no choice but to tolerate the myriad interventions of Degenkolb and his friends on the A-4 Special Committee. It was the price Peenemünde had to pay for the earlier excessive salesmanship of Dornberger and the Army. The leadership of the Third Reich had been repeatedly told that the A-4 was a weapon that could change the course of the war. Now that Hitler and many of his subordinates were coming to embrace that proposition, the rocket group had to produce results—or face the end of their program.

Besides Speer, one other top Nazi leader began to pay close attention to the Army rocket program: the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler. He had been informed of the October 3 success and had shown some previous interest in rocketry. In addition to promoting the development of solid rockets for the Waffen-SS (the military wing of the SS, which was growing into a rival of the Army), he had promoted the career of Helmut von Zborowski, an enthusiastic SS officer who was pioneering nitric acid rocket technology at BMW Aircraft Engines in Berlin. But it was probably Hitler’s endorsement of the A-4 in late November 1942 that induced Himmler to take a look at the Army’s new weapon. Less than three weeks later, on December 11, he traveled to Peenemünde for his first visit to the complex. While there he witnessed the embarrassing failure of the A-4/V9, which blew up and crashed after only four seconds. 20

Five days after the visit, one of Himmler’s chief deputies, Gottlob Berger, wrote the Reichsführer-SS at the request of an old friend from southwest Germany, Gerhard Stegmaier. Berger headed the SS Main Office, which was responsible, among other things, for recruiting. The letter reads:

The Peenemünde Army Establishment is deeply impressed with the visit of the Reichsführer-SS even today. Lt. Col. Stegmaier , who was happy as a small child about his special greeting from the Reichsführer-SS, asks to convey the following message:

The section chief, Col. Dornberger , wishes to make an official presentation to the Führer, together with the developer [of the missile], Dr. v. Braun , in order to hold discussions with the Führer and to hear his views and wishes, especially regarding the deployment possibilities of the device.

The decisions that the Führer would lay down would then give a clear direction to the already ongoing partial preparations for deployment.