Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

Combined with the damage left in place for camouflage purposes, this dispersal significantly altered the character of “my beautiful Peenemünde,” as Dornberger called it in distress immediately after the bombing. No longer the “sleeping beauty,” with almost lavish facilities isolated from the reality of the war (if only for the German personnel), living conditions became more difficult and efficiency suffered. As a result of the move, the wind tunnels were out of commission for nearly a year. Even the local travel needed for Peenemünde engineers and administrators to meet each other was an obstacle, particularly as gasoline shortages steadily worsened. On the other hand, Walter Wiesman, a young airman who worked as an administrator in the valve laboratory, thought the dispersal gave him more freedom to get around needless red tape. All in all, the Ordnance facility returned to being a fully functioning research and development center only one or two months after the raid, in spite of the loss of efficiency. 21

The most fundamental change to Peenemünde was the evacuation of the Production Plant, which brought with it a decline in the center’s size and, to a much lesser extent, its character as an “everything-under-one-roof” facility. At its peak before the raid, the Army center had at least 12,000 employees, foreign laborers, and prisoners. About half that number were in the Development Works; the Plant probably had about two thousand German blue-collar and white-collar workers. To that number must be added the staffs of the Commander and Construction Group Schlempp, at least three thousand foreign laborers and six hundred concentration camp inmates. After a postraid period of confusion, in early September evacuations of machinery and personnel to Thuringia began. Most employees of the Plant, as well as some administrators from the central procurement group, were shipped off to become the office personnel, foremen, and skilled workers of the Mittelwerk. On October 13 the SS prisoners boarded rail cars to the same place. By mid-November 1943 Peenemünde-East had shrunk to 7,278 employees spread over a much wider area, plus about 2,500 forced laborers. The latter’s conditions must have been poor, because on October 19 Schubert reported an epidemic of typhus (a lice-borne disease) in the “Polish camp,” putting 1,300 out of work. After the completion of repairs and a drastically reduced construction program, most of the foreign workers were withdrawn in the first half of 1944. By the summer the Army center was down to less than six thousand Germans and a few hundred POWs. 22

Heading the evacuees to the Mittelwerk were Albin Sawatzki as chief planner and Arthur Rudolph as head of production. Since Detmar Stahlknecht’s planning group had lost all its office files in the air raid and had never been well integrated into Degenkolb’s organization, Stahlknecht left for other employment within the Armaments Ministry. Mittelwerk, which was called into being on September 24 as a government company financed by the Ministry, also received machinery and personnel from the other two A-4 assembly sites. At first there was some discussion of putting together missiles at Zeppelin and Rax, at least until Mittelwerk achieved its planned output of nine hundred a month. The threat and the actuality of further air raids against Friedrichshafen and Wiener Neustadt, however, quickly resulted in the abandonment of those ideas. Rax put together a few center sections (with tanks), but a November 2 raid then provoked the complete evacuation of the plant to Thuringia. Zeppelin remained as the primary center section and tank manufacturer. 23

The reorganization of the assembly process also necessitated a restructuring of the engine-testing program. The Linke-Hoffmann company in Breslau, Silesia, manufactured the combustion chambers, but the plan had been to construct a liquid oxygen plant and engine-calibration test stands at each A-4 factory. Immediately after the August raids on Peenemünde and Rax, worried officials in Wiener Neustadt commandeered a brewery in central Austria that had underground facilities appropriate to a liquid oxygen plant. The Rax test equipment was moved there, and Kammler took over the construction of new test stands using concentration camp labor. Many Rax prisoners were sent to that facility, code-named Schlier , where they worked under terrible conditions twelve hours a day in construction. Prisoners built a similar area south of the Mittelwerk at a quarry near Lehesten on the Thuringian–Bavarian border. At Peenemünde, two test stands continued the mass production calibration of engines. Engine-testing at Zeppelin, however, was shut down shortly after going into operation in late 1943, probably because of the visibility of firings across Lake Constance in Switzerland. 24

One of those who was intimately involved in these decisions was Wernher von Braun, chairman of the “Final Acceptance” subcommittee under Degenkolb. He flew to Austria twice in the fall of 1943, presumably to visit the Schlier and Zement sites, which were only 25 kilometers apart. He must also have driven to Lehesten on one of his longer stops in Nordhausen, the first of which was on August 30. Because of that responsibility, von Braun became implicated more deeply than ever before in the exploitation of slave labor. In an important November 1 meeting at Mittelwerk, Sawatzki demanded that more Peenemünde employees be transferred to Thuringia. Someone suggested using camp inmates at the test sites instead as a way to free up Germans for employment in the Mittelwerk. Von Braun, who was not present, seized on that idea and after some hectic calculations wrote Degenkolb that, because “you have now given the permission that… Schlier and Mitte [Lehesten] can be operated with detainees,” only 120 of the 360 people to be employed there need be civilians. The prisoner-to-civilian ratio could not, however, rise above 2:1 “because of the difficulty of the testing processes to be carried out there.” As two Austrian historians have noted, “considerations of a humanitarian nature never appear in the documents”—not in this case or in any other. Of course, the open advocacy of such considerations was ideologically unacceptable and even dangerous in the Nazi police state. Even so, it appears that the prisoners were only factors of production to von Braun and his engineers. The Peenemünders were under extreme pressure to produce the new “wonder weapon” quickly and many were believers in the regime anyway. Not surprisingly, they dismissed the treatment and fate of these unfortunates as someone else’s problem. 25

Nowhere, of course, were detainees needed more than in Mittelwerk, nor was any problem more critical to the restoration of the A-4 production program than the creation of the underground factory. As German workers, slave laborers, and machinery poured into the region, Sawatzki, Rudolph, and the SS construction staff struggled to turn a half-completed oil, gasoline, and poison-gas storage dump into a modern armaments factory. Workers and prisoners dismantled the huge petroleum tanks and loaded them on rail cars, while digging, blasting, and concrete-pouring operations continued deeper into the mountain. The first twenty cross tunnels, beginning with tunnel 0 near the north entrance, had cement floors, lighting, heating, and air conditioning. Farther in, conditions were primitive. For office space, the Mittelwerk company took over a school about 5 kilometers away, as well as numerous hotels, restaurants, and other buildings in surrounding towns. 26

Completion of the legal arrangements for A-4 production lagged behind the extremely rushed ad hoc conversion of the factory. Along with Kammler, A-4 Special Committee representative Sawatzki was the real driving force behind putting Mittelwerk into operation, even though he was not even on the board of the company at first. The formal leadership comprised Kurt Kettler and Otto Bersch, two business executives on assignment from the national railroad and heavy industry, plus SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Otto Förschner, the commandant of “Work Camp Dora” in the tunnels, which was a subcamp of Buchenwald. Förschner was on the Mittelwerk board as head of security but knew little about business management and concentrated instead on running his little empire of horror in overall conditions set by Kammler. 27