Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

How much faith the Reichsführer-SS placed in von Braun’s willingness to cooperate in a conspiracy is questionable, however. Since at least mid-October 1943 the leading Peenemünde engineers had been under surveillance by agents of the SD (the SS intelligence service). According to notes taken on March 8, 1944, by General Alfred Jodl, Field Marshal Keitel’s deputy in the OKW, von Braun was guilty of making statements that were treasonous—at least from the viewpoint of the Nazi police state. He and two friends, Klaus Riedel, head of ground equipment for A-4 deployment, and Helmut Gröttrup, Steinhoff’s liaison to the Dornberger staff, had allegedly stated that their “main task was to create a spaceship.” Moreover, Jodl claimed, Riedel had called the A-4 an “instrument of murder,” and the three had made “comments about the war turning out badly.” Considering that his source was the SD, those charges must be taken with a grain of salt, but they certainly must have perturbed Himmler. Thus it is likely that, when the Reichsführer-SS invited von Braun to his headquarters, he saw it as the rocket engineer’s last chance for self-redemption before the trap was sprung. 42

Once von Braun had refused to take the bait, Himmler moved to prepare the political ground for the arrest of the three. His chances in this matter were improved by the absence from headquarters of the A-4’s strongest defender, Speer, and by a sense of crisis in the German leadership as a result of heavy American bomber raids in late February. On March 5 Hitler asked the Minister’s deputy, Saur, to reexamine the A-4’s drain on productive resources in view of the pressing need for more fighter aircraft. Also influencing the Führer’s attitude was the continuing delay in the missile’s deployment and the cheapness of the Luftwaffe’s alternative (the V-1). Only days earlier Saur had been put in charge of a new Fighter Staff, which included Milch and Kammler as members, with the aim of greatly increasing production in that sector. For the SS and Kammler, the Fighter Staff meant a significant gain in influence through the expansion of underground factory construction by slave labor. 43

It was in that context that the SD apprised General Jodl of the evidence against the rocket specialists on March 8, including claims that Klaus Riedel and Helmut Gröttrup had been members of leftist or pro-Soviet organizations before 1933. In the case of Riedel, there is some verification for this charge. Rolf Engel, an original member of the Raketenflugplatz and later an SS officer, remembers him as an idealistic fellow traveler of the Communist Party in the heyday of the Berlin group. The SD report also tied von Braun into what Jodl called a “refined Communist cell” by noting that the three were close friends and that the Technical Director was “very friendly with Mrs. Gröttrup.” Himmler must then have discussed the charges with Hitler in one of their many conferences at Führer headquarters, which had been moved to Berchtesgaden on the Bavarian–Austrian border at the end of February. The Reichsführer-SS had earlier met Hans Kammler in East Prussia on February 18 and now saw him again on March 6. Moreover, on more than one occasion in mid-March he separately met his deputies Gottlob Berger, who had been involved in the Zanssen affair, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Security Main Office. 44

Shortly thereafter Kaltenbrunner’s secret police arm, the Gestapo, struck. At 2:00 A.M. one morning, three agents appeared at the door of von Braun’s apartment and hauled him into “protective custody” in Stettin. The same day or a short time later, Riedel and Gröttrup were arrested, as was von Braun’s younger brother Magnus, a chemical engineer and Luftwaffe pilot who had been called to Peenemünde in 1943 to work on the Wasserfall program. The exact sequence of events may never be clarified, but von Braun must have been arrested between March 19, the beginning of an eighteen-day gap in his pilot log, and March 23, his thirty-second birthday, which he claims to have spent in jail. The most likely date is the March 22, since Gröttrup attended a meeting with Dornberger the previous day at the general’s headquarters in Schwedt. 45

Early on the morning of the arrests, Dornberger asserts, he was awakened by a phone call from Führer headquarters asking him to come at once to an urgent conference with Field Marshal Keitel. He and his driver spent most of the day crossing the Reich from the northeast to the Bavarian Alps. Arriving in Berchtesgaden rather late, he finally learned what had happened but received no explanation. The next morning he went to Keitel’s office. The chief of OKW allegedly told him: “The charges were so serious that arrest was bound to follow. The men are likely to lose their lives. How people in their position can indulge in such talk passes my understanding.” By his own testimony, Dornberger put his career on the line to defend the reputation of the arrestees. Von Braun and Riedel in particular, he argued, were absolutely essential to the resolution of the technical problems that were holding up military deployment. Keitel refused to act, however, pathetically claiming that he could not appear less zealous than the SS because he was the last voice of the Army officer corps in Hitler’s inner circle. At Dornberger’s behest, the Field Marshal then called Himmler’s headquarters nearby, but the Reichsführer-SS refused to see Dornberger, referring him to Kaltenbrunner in Berlin. The general went back to Schwedt in a rage. 46

The following day he went to the bomb-damaged SS headquarters in the center of the capital, where he was referred to Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller. Kaltenbrunner was away (he was with Himmler again at midnight on March 23). According to Dornberger’s memoirs, Müller was extremely cold and even threatened the general with the fat file the Gestapo had on his responsibility for holding up A-4 development. If that indeed happened, it is another indication of how dangerous the Third Reich was becoming as it approached its end. Dornberger left without any resolution, but working through Abwehr (Military Intelligence, which had recently been put under SD control), he was finally able to secure from Führer headquarters an order for von Braun’s conditional release. It was undoubtedly helpful that Speer had interceded with Hitler when the Führer came to visit him on March 19 or 23—probably the latter. The Armaments Minister had been briefly quartered near Berchtesgaden while on his way to recuperate from his dangerous illness in an Italian mountain resort and had seen the Führer then. 47

Von Braun, meanwhile, languished in jail for nearly two weeks without the slightest indication of the charges against him and with no contact with the others. Dornberger appeared, he later claimed, just as he was being interrogated by a group of Gestapo officers. They had accused von Braun of sabotaging the A-4 project by concentrating more effort on spaceflight than on his duties, as well as of having a plane ready to fly to England with the plans for the missile, which was impossible to prove or disprove. Armed with the order from Führer headquarters, Dornberger was able to free von Braun for a preliminary period of three months. After Speer’s return from Italy, Hitler grumbled “about the trouble he had gone to” in this case but promised the Minister in mid-May that, “as long as [von Braun] is indispensable to me [Speer], he will be exempted from any punishment, however serious the resulting general consequences might be.” The others were conditionally released not long after their boss. In July the orders were renewed; in early August, Klaus Riedel was killed in a car crash near Peenemünde. Gröttrup may have remained under a form of limited house arrest until the end of the war, but von Braun’s case was eventually dropped altogether. 48