Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

On the evening of June 28, Himmler arrived at Peenemünde for a second, more formal tour of the center, to be held the following day. He was accompanied by Mazuw and Leeb. According to Dornberger, he was finally able to confront the Reichsführer-SS about the Zanssen accusations the next afternoon, while on a boat to the Oie to witness the second, and this time successful, A-4 launch attempt from Peenemünde. The new Commander got nothing but a cold brushoff. Himmler indeed had every reason to be disgruntled about the way the whole thing had turned out. But there were other satisfactions to be found in the visit. The sight of Wernher von Braun in a black uniform must have inspired Himmler, because the Technical Director received an early promotion to Sturmbannführer (Major), backdated to June 28. The Reichsführer-SS must also have been excited about the progress of the missile, which the Führer’s whole entourage now believed could knock Britain out of the war. In the meantime, he would have to bide his time and await another opportunity to exert his influence over the program. 37

While the Zanssen affair was still being cooked up behind the closed doors of the SS, Peenemünde became more deeply involved with Himmler’s organization by another route: through the decision to use concentration camp labor for A-4 production. After the war the Peenemünders made the SS a scapegoat for all the crimes associated with the rocket program, yet the initiative for this action came not from the SS but from the A-4 Special Committee and Arthur Rudolph, who were searching for a way around the prevailing labor shortage.

The problem of finding workers for the missile assembly plants had long plagued Dornberger, Schubert, and the production planners. The original Peenemünde site had been designed as an “everything-under-one-roof” factory with a highly skilled workforce, but wartime compromises had turned the misnamed Pilot Production Plant into an assembly facility for parts mostly produced elsewhere. That change at least allowed for the possibility of using fewer skilled workers. Immediately after the October 3 success, Dornberger still proposed transferring the labor needed for the Peenemünde plant from the Development Works, but the second site at Zeppelin could use “mostly foreigners and prisoners of war,” as was becoming common in German industry. His plan to build a third site in Poland also implied that the labor force there would be dominated by non-German labor under some form of compulsion. In any place where Poles, Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), or other Eastern Europeans were employed, they stood under extremely discriminatory and exploitative Nazi regulations. Most of their wages were confiscated, and they had to wear a distinctive badge, as did the Jews. Vicious racial laws dictated transfer to a concentration camp or even execution for such “crimes” as sexual relations with “Aryan” women. Food, housing, and health care were often wretched. 38

Poles had worked under those conditions at Peenemünde since 1940, but their numbers had remained rather small, and responsibility for them lay in the hands of Speer’s Construction Group Schlempp. No more than a thousand Polish workers had been employed at any one time in 1940; in December of that year there were 633 Poles out of 4,780 construction workers on both sides of the Army facility. (Foreign workers were not allowed into the Development Works until about 1943.) Beginning in the spring of 1941, 700–1,000 Italian contract workers were employed on site during the construction season. The number of Polish and, later, French workers was apparently only a few hundred. As elsewhere in Germany, voluntary foreign laborers with a right to vacation were less favored, because they were not as easy to control as the forced labor of POWs and civilian workers drafted from the occupied countries. But the ultrasecret character of Peenemünde, combined with the priority problems of the Production Plant, greatly limited the use of both forced and voluntary foreign labor. Only after Hitler’s go-ahead for A-4 production did that barrier begin to come down. At the end of April 1943 there were more than three thousand foreign laborers in both Peenemünde-East and Peenemünde-West. 39

When Degenkolb formed the A-4 Special Committee earlier in the year, he also created a “Labor Supply” subcommittee headed by a Mr. Jaeger from his office. Its task—to find production workers—was organizationally distinct from that of the construction labor bureaucracy, although both drew on much the same pool of workers. Arthur Rudolph, who was the Peenemünde factory’s chief engineer, met Jaeger at the beginning of February and was told that at least the problem of finding unskilled workers for A-4 production could be solved through the use of “Russians,” mostly Soviet POWs. 40

That plan was entirely in keeping with the general movement of the German war economy. Until early 1942 few soldiers captured by the Germans on the Eastern Front had been exploited for work, because the armed forces (not the SS) had intentionally left these “subhumans” to die in huge numbers. In one of the forgotten Holocausts of the Third Reich, more than 2 million of some 3.35 million Soviet prisoners were dead by February 1942 as a result of mass starvation and disease. (The death toll by 1945 was more than 3 million out of 5 million captured.) Only after Germany failed to knock the Soviet Union out of the war in 1941 did their labor become desirable, particularly because the Eastern Front’s insatiable need for German manpower made the labor shortage in the Reich ever more severe. With the further reorganization of the economy under Speer, an attempt was also made to rationalize the employment of foreign workers. On March 21, 1942, Hitler appointed Fritz Sauckel, Nazi Gauleiter of the central German state of Thuringia, as General Plenipotentiary for Labor Supply, with power over the bureaucracy of the labor exchanges. At the same time greater efforts were made to salvage surviving Soviet POWs for work. They were reinforced by the large number of Soviets captured in the summer campaign of 1942 and by the forced recruitment of “Eastern workers,” mostly young women. 41

Thus, for a short time in early 1943 the use of “Russians” became the basic plan for the Peenemünde Production Plant. On April 8 and 9, however, Jaeger visited Peenemünde and recommended another solution to the factory’s labor problem: the employment of SS concentration camp prisoners. That proposal was in consonance with a related shift in the war economy. Until the spring of 1942 Himmler’s organization had attempted, with limited success, to exploit its prisoners in camp-based enterprises. The camps’ primary purpose remained suppression of opposition to the Nazis plus, beginning in late 1941, the mass extermination in Polish camps of Jews and gypsies. The SS had turned down requests by the almost equally cold-blooded Army Ordnance leadership to use camp prisoners as slave laborers in armaments production. But even before the appointment of Sauckel, Himmler decided to secure his own place in the war economy by reorganizing his camp system to emphasize greater economic efficiency. Through mergers, he created the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office and gave it the camp inspectorate. The SS began, in effect, a rent-a-slave service to firms and government enterprises at a typical rate of four marks a day for unskilled workers and six marks for skilled ones. In return, the SS supplied guards, food, clothing, and shelter, usually in a manner that led to a heavy death toll from starvation, disease, and overwork. The lives of camp inmates were, by definition, expendable. 42

After Jaeger suggested that concentration camp prisoners be used in the Peenemünde Production Plant, Rudolph went on a tour of the Heinkel aircraft works in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, on April 12. He returned enthused about the advantages of concentration camp labor. In only eight months Heinkel had increased the number of prisoners in Oranienburg from zero to four thousand, because it had only the “best experiences” with them. The mixture of multiple nationalities—mostly Russians, Poles, and French—helped to undermine resistance activity, and the prisoners could be accommodated in the locker rooms of the plant, where their beds were crammed “very close together.” The area in which the prisoners worked and lived was surrounded by an electrically charged barbed wire fence with watchtowers. Rudolph continued: “This system has worked well, and the employment of detainees [Häftlinge] in general has had considerable advantages over the earlier employment of foreigners, especially because all non-work-related tasks are taken over by the SS and the detainees offer greater protection for secrecy.” The memo concludes: “Production in the F1 [the main assembly building at Peenemünde] can be carried out by detainees.” The Production Plant would have to make an application through Stahlknecht to the A-4 Special Committee, which would approach the SS. 43