Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

In the end it was Speer who called a halt to the proceedings. At the beginning of August he decided that the Saur plan would be “postponed for the moment,” thereby reinstating the Degenkolb program of nine hundred A-4s a month at three sites by December. In the circumstances this overly ambitious scheme may now have looked at least reasonable to the Peenemünders. But in the meantime new conflicts with the A-4 Special Committee had erupted. Earlier in July someone in the Armaments Ministry had tried to have Schubert fired as head of the Peenemünde plant. Later in the month Degenkolb assigned four engineers to the center to investigate A-4 production, led by Albin Sawatzki, who had been decorated for Tiger tank production at the Henschel company. Under the impression that they would take over the factory, the four attempted to give orders, even though it was an Army facility. Sawatzki also put forth a new privatization plan for the plant. Dornberger was outraged and arranged for General Fromm to issue a rebuke to the A-4 Special Committee. The tense relations between Degenkolb and the Peenemünde Commander had thus not improved one iota over the preceding months. 59

Despite those battles, the two had no choice but to work together. They shared a fanatical belief in Hitler and in the ballistic missile as the salvation of the Third Reich. On August 4 they met in Peenemünde to settle the outstanding issues. Each was accompanied by his deputy (Zanssen and Kunze), and a representative of Fromm also attended. This group decided to assign Sawatzki to plan production under Stahlknecht, while two of his colleagues were to be made the directors of production at Rax. All of them were to refrain from meddling directly in the internal organization of Peenemünde. Dornberger agreed that three hundred A-4s would roll off the Peenemünde assembly line in December, but only on the condition that the Special Committee guarantee the availability of a sufficient number of high-quality parts and subassemblies—a sure sign that Dornberger did not have much faith that this goal could be met. In addition, von Braun’s deputy for the development shops, Eberhard Rees, was to be made the director of production in Peenemünde, effectively shunting Schubert aside. Rees had been on assignment since May directing the assembly of development A-4s in one of the Production Plant’s buildings. 60

The meeting’s most important decision concerned the labor force. Hitler had asked on July 7 that only German workers be used in the A-4 program for security reasons, but like many problematic Führer orders, that demand had to be quietly ignored. Dornberger’s minutes from August 4 read: “As a basic principle, production in all four assembly works will be carried out by convicts.” (Dornberger used the word Sträflinge instead of the correct SS term, Häftlinge , meaning detainees or arrestees.) Peenemünde was to have 2,500 concentration camp prisoners, a total that included a “buffer for the other works,” whereas Zeppelin, Rax, and Falkensee would have 1,500. (Speer’s decision to postpone DEMAG as a fourth site apparently had not yet been made official.) Peenemünde was to receive more German skilled workers, but the ratio of prisoners to Germans was to be ten or fifteen to one at all locations. Any serious effort to recruit foreign labor from Sauckel’s system was thereby abandoned. Rocket assembly would be done primarily by slave labor, a concept Dornberger fully accepted. In a draft of a letter to Saur that he wrote in advance of the meeting, he said: “Production by convicts—no objections.” To him they were merely factors of production. 61

Thus, as the summer of 1943 waned, full-scale missile manufacture finally appeared to be within reach. The assembly line at Peenemünde was scheduled to start in late August, and more concentration camp prisoners were to arrive at all locations. An uncomfortable but mutually tolerable division of labor had been made between the Army and the Armaments Ministry, while the SS had been largely confined to the role of a supplier of labor power. Those relationships, however, were about to change. Allied air power would be the deux ex machina that would usher in a dramatic new phase in the history of the rocket program.

Shortly after 1:10 A.M., Wednesday, August 18, 1943, the sound of anti-aircraft artillery jolted General Dornberger awake. After a moment of confusion, he leaped out of bed and began to dress. A bomb blast rocked the Development Works guest house where he was staying. Attired in uniform breeches, pajama top, trench coat and bedroom slippers, he pushed his way past broken glass and doors blown off their hinges, only to stand “transfixed” in the garden. Artificial fog from smoke generators rolled across the complex; a full moon, searchlights, exploding shells, and descending British target-marking flares lit up the sky; flak, bomb blasts, and the “monotonous drone” of four-engine bombers “assaulted” his ears. The attack was not a complete surprise. There had been many alarms in the recent past, and a handful of bombs had previously fallen in the area. In the almost comic first raid in July 1940, a solitary and lost RAF aircraft had killed a cow and set a haystack on fire. But this time it was clear that the Allies knew about the rocket center and had set out to destroy it. 1

The initial target was the Settlement, a residential community of three to four thousand with its own school, community buildings, and firehouse. The RAF had quite consciously decided to try to catch the leading engineering personnel in their beds. Because of a target-marking error, however, many bombers overshot their aiming points by 3 kilometers. Bombs rained down first on the Trassenheide construction labor camp, where more than three thousand foreign workers, mostly from Eastern Europe, were trapped inside barracks or behind barbed-wire fences. Hundreds were killed. The Settlement soon received hundreds of tons of bombs too, destroying at least three-quarters of the houses and apartment buildings. The residences near the beach housing young Labor Service women were particularly hard hit. Most of the leading personnel had made it safely to makeshift shelters and trenches. From the standpoint of the project, the only really irreplaceable loss was Dr. Walter Thiel, who was killed with his whole family by a direct hit on their shelter while their house remained relatively undamaged. Peenemünde’s rocket engine development would suffer from his absence. 2

Shortly after 1:30, the attack shifted to the Production Plant and then to the Development Works. But the tendency to overshoot continued, with the result that more bombs fell on the Settlement and Trassenheide. No devastating damage was inflicted on the important facilities farther north; the all-important wind tunnels and guidance and control buildings were almost untouched. Still, at least twenty-five buildings in the Development Works were set afire or damaged, including House 4, the headquarters building. After the raid ended at 2:07, Wernher von Braun and one of his secretaries risked their lives salvaging secret documents from the burning structure. Only scattered bombs fell on the test stands even farther up the island, suggesting that the British had not perceived their importance, and Peenemünde-West was untouched because the flying-bomb program was unknown to the Allies.

In the initial shock after the raid, Schubert estimated more than one thousand dead, but according to Dornberger’s postwar accounts, 732 or 735 were killed, of whom about five to six hundred were foreign laborers. Among the concentration camp prisoners in the Fl, Willi Steimel later reported eighteen dead and sixty injured, but the scattered bombs that fell on that enormous factory building did not damage it much. They exploded high overhead on the roof, while the heavy concrete floor of the main hall helped to protect the equipment and prisoners in the basement. 3