Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

This document is of extraordinary importance for two reasons. First, in conjunction with Jaeger’s original suggestion, Rudolph’s memo initiated the systematic exploitation of slave labor in the rocket program months before the creation of the infamous Mittelwerk underground facility near Nordhausen in Thuringia. In the traditional accounts of Wernher von Braun and others who followed him, it was Himmler who forced the program to use concentration camp prisoners following the first large-scale air raid on Peenemünde. (Dornberger, on the other hand, never once mentions the prisoners in his memoirs, despite his central role in decisions regarding their use.) Second, the Oranienburg memorandum is also relevant to the recent, much-publicized Rudolph case. Because of his role as a manager in the underground facility, Rudolph, who was Project Manager of NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket in the 1960s, was forced to leave the United States in 1984 and give up his citizenship. Yet the U.S. Justice Department made its case without knowing about the April 1943 document, which shows that Rudolph was not just the manager of slave labor but also an advocate of it. 44

Jaeger’s and Rudolph’s suggestion was enthusiastically taken up by Dornberger and the A-4 Special Committee. In the third week of April, when the chief of Wa Prüf 11 went on a trip to Friedrichshafen and Vienna with unnamed Committee members, they discussed the acquisition of 2,200 skilled SS prisoners for the Rax-Werke assembly plant. Meanwhile, the Zeppelin company had apparently begun using concentration camp labor on its own initiative. The Friedrichshafen camp, which was a branch camp of Dachau (near Munich), is first mentioned on February 23, 1943, and its prisoners were soon put to work on Peenemünde contracts. Zeppelin had been manufacturing A-4 propellant tanks, midsection fuselages, and other components since 1942, as well as preparing for assembly operations. 45

In the spring of 1943 it was still not clear, however, that SS prisoners were the complete solution to the production labor problem. More German skilled workers would be needed in any case. The Army and the Committee therefore invited the labor supply czar, Sauckel, to Peenemünde for the royal tour, which took place on May 13–14, one day after Dornberger had become Commander. Sauckel went away thrilled by the successful A-4 launch he had seen and promised full support. Some Russian POWs and other laborers did later arrive, but it is unclear if Sauckel’s promises ultimately amounted to much. On June 2 Degenkolb’s deputy, Heinz Kunze, complained that the labor bureaucracy had done nothing to exchange French workers with vacation rights for forced laborers with no such rights. German skilled workers, moreover, were simply unavailable. Rudolph was told that there was no recourse in the latter case but to transfer personnel from the Development Works. Although the number of workers and engineers under Stegmaier and von Braun had expanded considerably, particularly through the diversion of soldiers into the Northern Experimental Command, that suggestion was hardly realistic in view of the heavy demands imposed by A-4 production and the Wasserfall project. 46

In the same June 2 meeting the Peenemünde group, headed by Rudolph, presented a formal request for 1,400 concentration camp prisoners, subdivided by skill. Jaeger was to complete negotiations with the SS, while Rudolph would be the liaison person with the camp commandant when the first installment of prisoners arrived. The chairman of the labor supply subcommittee set the maximum number of prisoners for Peenemünde at 2,500. They were to be temporarily housed on the lower floor of Fl, where locker rooms, storage areas, air-raid shelters, and workshops for the assembly of subsections and components were located. On the main floor of the building, an “assembly line” for whole missiles was being finished. The rockets would be assembled in a horizontal position on movable railcarts, in contrast to the development shops, which put them together vertically more or less by hand. Only two weeks later, on June 17, Schubert’s chronicle of the Peenemünde factory reports “arrival of the first 200 detainees, half German, half Russian, who will be housed in the F1 and who will be employed first on [the construction of] the barbed wire fence around the F1.” Three days after that, the infamous Mauthausen camp delivered about five hundred prisoners to the Rax-Werke in Austria. Those men immediately began finishing the main assembly hall and performing other construction work. 47

The new arrivals in Peenemünde had been shipped from the Buchenwald camp near Weimar in Thuringia, accompanied by about sixty SS guards and staff. Virtually the only information now available about their conditions comes from the postwar testimony of a German criminal convict, Willy Steimel, who was involved in the prisoner-run section of the camp administration at Buchenwald, Peenemünde, and Mittelwerk. His testimony is not entirely trustworthy, because he was in a privileged situation and was probably an SS informant. By Steimel’s account, conditions in the F1 were very good by camp standards. The facilities had been designed with German workers in mind and were thus new and clean. The admixture of a small number of prisoners with many civilian and Army people also inhibited some of the usual “chicaneries” and beatings by guards, leading to “a partly bearable situation.” Steimel’s health, he said, began to improve. Still, the F1 was no rest camp; an eleven-hour day and a six-day week were normal for prisoners at the time. According to Steimel, during the four months spent at Peenemünde, three prisoners died of tuberculosis, two of injuries, and one was shot trying to escape, while four others died from drinking alcohol rocket fuel that was part methanol. 48

On July 11 four hundred more, mostly French prisoners, arrived in Peenemünde. Schubert was disgruntled because few of them had any specialized skills; he asked the SS to exchange them for German craftsmen. Five days later prisoners began to work on the assembly of A-4 midsections and on the construction of jigs for the main assembly line. SS detainees also flowed into Wiener Neustadt and Friedrichshafen during that same period. Clearly, A-4 production was about to begin in a big way at long last through the exploitation of slave labor. 49

As the hectic preparations of summer 1943 indicate, the A-4 had finally become the highest priority of the Third Reich. Speer had secured the Führer’s backing for such a declaration by carefully preparing the ground politically. In February he formed a high-level “Long-Range Bombardment Commission,” probably at Hitler’s request. Chaired by AEG director Petersen, its task was to consider the merits of the competing Army and Luftwaffe missile projects. Yet it scarcely functioned, aside from a handful of meetings, most notably at the “comparison shoot” of May 26, 1943. On that day, the greatest collection of Third Reich dignitaries ever assembled at Peenemünde saw two launches each of the A-4 and “Cherry Stone” (now more often known as the Fi 103). Among those present were Speer, Saur, Degenkolb, General Fritz Fromm, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz (Commander-in-Chief of the Navy), Field Marshal Erhard Milch, and a host of other high-ranking officers. The nominal purpose was to compare the performance of the two weapons and decide whether to proceed with both. After witnessing the successful launch of A-4/V26 around noon, those present saw the two Fi 103s crash ignominiously into the Baltic after lunch. Late in the afternoon, A-4/V25 took off successfully in better visibility than had the earlier vehicle but fell very short when the engine cut off too early because of a “calculation error.” Milch nonetheless slapped Dornberger on the back and exclaimed: “Congratulations! Two-nothing in your favor!” 50