Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

It was only on the following day, August 26, that the new underground site was selected. Speer called Saur, Dornberger, Kammler, and Degenkolb into his office for “very secret negotiations.” They settled on tunnels near the small city of Nordhausen in Thuringia as the location for the primary A-4 factory. That facility would soon be called the Mittelwerk (“Central Works”), a deliberately vague allusion to its geographical position in Germany. 13

One of Degenkolb’s production planners had first scouted the tunnels about mid-July, after it had become increasingly obvious that missile production might be in danger from the air. Ever since 1936 a government corporation with the innocuous name Economic Research Ltd. (German acronym: “Wifo”) had been expanding an old and unprofitable gypsum mine near Nordhausen into a strategic oil and chemical weapons reserve. Two massive tunnels, “A” and “B,” each big enough to accommodate dual railroad tracks, were driven into Kohnstein Mountain. Wifo also dug smaller cross tunnels for storage every few dozen meters, forming a ladderlike network. Plans were made to push the tunnel system all the way through from north to south, a distance of about 1.8 kilometers (a little over a mile). But when the Armaments Ministry seized the facility from Göring’s Four-Year Plan organization at the end of August, only tunnel B had broken through to the south side, and not all of the cross tunnels were finished. One of the first tasks of the concentration camp prisoners, whom the SS trucked from Buchenwald with amazing speed (the first group arrived on August 28), would be to push the digging and blasting forward. 14

The choice of the underground factory site was by no means the end of the postraid reorganization; in fact, it was only the beginning. On September 4 General Fromm took Dornberger out of Ordnance and made him an immediate subordinate with the opaque bureaucratic title of Army Commissioner for Special Tasks (BzbV Heer). In that position, Dornberger assumed responsibility for the creation and training of the operational rocket units but gave up direct supervision of Peenemünde-East. Fromm’s order had two purposes: to strengthen Dornberger versus the Armaments Ministry and the SS, and to bolster the rocket chief’s position within the Army, since Dornberger had very much wanted to be the operational commander of the world’s first ballistic missile troops. (In the fall of 1943 the opening of the attack on Britain was still optimistically scheduled for the end of the year). But Dornberger’s larger ambition to be the dictator of the A-4 program was not within Fromm’s power to grant. As Kammler and Himmler also found out in short order, the central role of Speer and his organization could not be reduced by anyone but Hitler, and that was hardly likely at a time when the Minister’s reputation for producing armaments miracles was at its height. After the August 18 air raid, the coalition of forces controlling the missile program had thus shifted to a new equilibrium: The SS had gained considerable influence, but it was still less powerful than either the Armaments Ministry or the Army. 15

Dornberger’s new position necessarily brought other changes. Colonel Leo Zanssen formally resumed his position as Commander of Peenemünde in early October, as had been planned after the failure of the SS plot against him in the spring. The return of Zanssen to Peenemünde (he had actually come back the day after the raid) created an uncomfortable situation, since his betrayer, Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard Stegmaier, was still on base. Dornberger designated Stegmaier as head of a new training school for the rocket troops at Köslin on the Baltic. Zanssen also assumed Dornberger’s position as chief of Wa Prüf 11. That double burden proved to be too great, so the Ordnance rocket section was broken up in December 1943. Zanssen kept the liquid-fuel programs as the head of a new section, Wa Prüf 10, but the duties were soon given to another engineering officer, Brigadier General Josef Rossmann. The modest Zanssen received a promotion to general but retained only his Commander’s post in mid-1944. 16

In the meantime Hitler had given Dornberger command over military deployment on October 4, 1943, after the general had once more traveled to the Wolfsschanze. This visit had been occasioned by the destruction of the half-completed Watten firing bunker in two American air raids on August 27 and September 7. The Führer approved its replacement through a redesign of the projected rocket storage dump at nearby Wizernes, despite Dornberger’s express opposition to fixed sites. But even in the case of operational command, the longtime rocket specialist was to meet frustration. In November and December Hitler ordered the creation of a special interservice corps, combining the A-4 with the Fi 103 (V-1) and long-range guns to be used against England. The corps commander, General Erich Heinemann, repeatedly clashed with Dornberger over the ballistic missile’s immaturity as a weapons system. Heinemann finally succeeded in having him replaced as A-4 tactical commander at the end of December. 17

Meanwhile, Dornberger was creating a staff headquarters at Schwedt on the Oder River, between Stettin and Berlin, and was moving most A-4 test and training operations to the Waffen-SS exercise area at Blizna. That heavily forested site near the confluence of the Vistula and San rivers, 150 kilometers northeast of Krakow, was a former Polish Army artillery range, which the SS had renamed Heidelager (Heather Camp). The plan, as outlined by Kammler, was to fire missiles at isolated regions to the north. In keeping with Nazi racial policy, the SS was concerned only about the accidental loss of German lives or property; the impact on Poles was considered irrelevant. On September 28 Himmler himself went to check on the progress of the launch site. 18

Heidelager was not, however, destined to become the evacuation site for Peenemünde, as the Reichsführer-SS had planned. Kammler had suggested in the August 26 meeting in Speer’s office that camp prisoners excavate an underground site in Austria for the development facility, probably because Blizna was too remote and was inappropriate for a subterranean factory. In mid-September two Peenemünde veterans who had become redundant, “Papa” Riedel and Ministerial Counselor Schubert, were sent off on a survey trip to the Austrian Alps, along with an SS officer. The location they chose, about 100 kilometers east of Salzburg, received its final code name from Kammler in December: Zement (Cement). Despite the opposition of Wernher von Braun, who thought the move would cause unnecessary disruption, in late October the Army and the SS gave approval for the complete withdrawal of guided missile development from Peenemünde to the Zement tunnels as early as the first months of 1944. The original rocket site was to become a mere artillery range, where some missiles would be launched for test purposes. By the beginning of 1944, however, the schedule for the project began to slip steadily because of high cost, difficult geological conditions, conflicts between the SS construction office and the Army, and lack of clarity as to what underground facilities would be required. 19

As von Braun had pointed out in his October 2 memorandum against the Zement concept, Peenemünde had already taken effective measures against crippling damage from another attack. The center had dispersed a significant fraction of its development personnel to locations southeast along Usedom island. Beach hotels, restaurants, and other buildings were commandeered by the Army for the purpose, and the summer vacationers were sent home for good. The valve and materials testing laboratories were evacuated even farther, to an air base at Anklam on the mainland. In October Ordnance decided to move Rudolf Hermann’s wind tunnels to Kochel in the Bavarian Alps, where a cooperative Luftwaffe-Army hypersonic Mach 10 tunnel was planned. Hermann’s group had never been a formal part of the Peenemünde Army center; rather, it had reported directly to Dornberger in Berlin. Now it was made into a independent government company with a misleading cover name. 20