Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

Only on January 13 does his chronicle mention a meeting with the Ministry’s chief physician, “who painted the health situation in the Mittelwerk in the blackest colors.” The next day another of Speer’s assistants began an investigation, which may indeed have led to minor improvements. In his memoirs and in his later badly organized and unreliable book about the SS, he asserted that he had been responsible for the construction of the barracks at Dora and the consequent lowering of the death rate. Yet the camp was already under construction at the time of his visit. Speer’s dishonesty here is reminiscent of one of the more famous stories in his memoirs: that he received only a vague warning about horrendous activities at an unnamed “concentration camp in Upper Silesia” in mid-1944. Actually, by then he had long corresponded with Himmler about Auschwitz and had been active in the deportation of the Berlin Jews. 34

Speer and the Armaments Ministry do not bear sole responsibility for the criminal enterprise that was Dora/Mittelwerk. Without a doubt, the greatest portion of the blame lies with Kammler, Himmler, and the SS for designing the concentration camp system and for forcing the pace of conversion. But Sawatzki too rates his share for pushing the construction of the factory so hard. He was also feared in the tunnels for personally beating and kicking prisoners he considered lazy—in fact one French survivor’s memoir symbolically uses his name for the company. At a further remove, Degenkolb, Dornberger, and their organizations all drove the A-4 program forward without regard for the cost to the detainees of Dora, not to mention those in Schlier, Lehesten, Zement, Friedrichshafen, and other locations. It is all too easy to forget that this brutal exploitation was not confined to Mittelwerk. Once mining operations began at Zement in late November 1943, many of the same horrors were repeated on a smaller scale, although without the peculiar refinement of an underground camp. 35

With the sole exception of the new Austrian development facility, however, by the end of December the enormous sacrifice of the prisoners had brought the reorganization of the rocket program nearly to conclusion. On New Year’s Eve Arthur Rudolph, who was on the second level of Mittelwerk management as production director, was called out of a party to straighten out the loading on railcars of the first four or five A-4s. Sawatzki wanted to make a symbolic show of some production by year’s end. Those missiles were actually so unsatisfactory that they were returned to the tunnels for repairs within days, but their rollout signaled the accomplishment of a remarkable, if callously executed, feat: In only four months the Army, the Armaments Ministry, and the SS had evacuated A-4 assembly from its planned locations and had initiated it in the bowels of the earth. 36

When Speer sent his words of praise to Kammler on December 17, he promised to repeat his sentiments to the Reichsführer-SS. He may or may not have done so, but five days later the Minister wrote to Himmler indicating that he had given further construction projects to Kammler “because in this manner I have been promised additional laborers through the provision of prisoners.” The manner in which the letter was phrased was every bit as cold and calculating as Himmler’s letter to Speer immediately after the Peenemünde raid. Speer transparently wished to signal that, in the case of the rocket construction projects, Kammler worked for the Armaments Ministry, not the reverse. That message no doubt irked Himmler, whose designs on the A-4 program had once again been partially thwarted. In the first months of 1944 he spun a new web of conspiracy against Peenemünde that led to one of the most curious episodes in the entire history of the Army missile project: the arrest of Wernher von Braun, Klaus Riedel, and others by the Gestapo. 37

Because Himmler’s file on this matter appears not to have survived the war, even the dates of key events are unclear. The arrests must have occurred on or about March 22, but von Braun’s crucial meeting with Himmler beforehand is extremely difficult to pin down. The earliest complete account of the incident comes from the rocket engineer’s manuscript article of the late 1940s:

One day in February, 1944, I received a phone call to report without delay to SS Chief Himmler’s headquarters in East Prussia. I must confess that I felt a bit jittery when I was shown into his office, but he greeted me politely and conveyed rather the impression of a country grammar school teacher than that horrible man who was said to wade knee-deep in blood.

“I trust you realize that your A-4 rocket has ceased to be an engineer’s toy,” he spoke up, “and that the German people are eagerly waiting for it. I can well imagine what a pitiful position you are in: a poor inventor enmeshed by Army bureaucracy! Why don’t you come to us? You know that the Fuehrer’s door is open to me at any time, don’t you? I shall be in a much better position to help you lick the remaining difficulties than that clumsy Army machine!”

I replied coolly that in General Dornberger I had the best chief I could wish to have, and that it was technical trouble and not red tape that was holding things up. I ventured to compare the A-4 with a little flower that needs sunshine, fertile soil and some gardener’s tending—and said that by pouring a big jet of liquid manure on that little flower, in order to have it grow faster, he might kill it.

According to von Braun, he was soon “politely dismissed,” although in a later, even more embroidered version, Himmler was said to have given a sardonic smile while looking angry under a veneer of politeness. 38

Von Braun’s manuscript states that the incident took place three weeks before the arrest, yet in his 1947 affidavit about his political record he specified eight weeks. Furthermore, the meeting could not have taken place on the evening of February 21, as two popular histories have asserted, because von Braun’s pilot log shows him flying back from Nordhausen to Peenemünde precisely at the time he was supposed to be heading east. Himmler’s desk calendar entries are in fact silent about such a meeting, and there is no unambiguous entry in von Braun’s log for a flight to East Prussia after October 1943. In short, there is no evidence that the meeting even happened except for von Braun’s word, but it would have been out of character for him to have wholly invented such a story. All one can say is that he probably saw Himmler during one of the SS leader’s periods of residency in Hochwald: February 7–11 or 17–22. 39

The motives and sequence of events behind the Reichsführer-SS’s actions are easier to surmise but equally hard to document. Himmler clearly hoped to use von Braun to seize control over Peenemünde and Army missile development. It must not be forgotten that the young Technical Director was an SS officer; Himmler probably ordered von Braun to appear in that capacity, otherwise the request should have gone through the Army. The Reichsführer-SS doubtless hoped that von Braun would be amenable to a conspiracy to place the rocket center under the control of Kammler, whom Himmler had promoted to Gruppenführer (Major General) in January. 40

The conditions were right for such a conspiracy by Himmler. The technical and production problems delaying the A-4’s military use were angering the Führer and putting the already weakened Army in an uncomfortable position. Moreover, Speer had been hospitalized since January 18 with a severe knee infection that escalated into a life-threatening illness. The Minister had attempted to run his armaments empire from a hospital bed; on February 10–11 he suddenly collapsed from exhaustion, fever, and a pulmonary embolism. Himmler used the opportunity to plot with Göring and others to undermine Speer’s influence in a number of sectors. 41