Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

If the situation for Wasserfall production was bleak in the first half of 1944, the launch schedule was scarcely better. Von Braun had originally wanted to begin launches in late 1944, allowing adequate time for development, but the Air Ministry demanded in early 1943 that the schedule be greatly accelerated in view of the war situation. Before Wasserfall’s wing design was even revised, Peenemünde committed itself to component contracts for two missiles to be launched by the end of 1943. Development problems delayed those attempts into early 1944, then the first vehicle was damaged in an engine test. Just as in the case of the A-4, the second test vehicle became the first to be launched. On February 29, 1944, it rose off its launch pad on the Greifswalder Oie. With no guidance except two gyros for stabilization, it had a simple trajectory, but the system nonetheless failed, and the missile tumbled out of control and fell into the sea. The next attempt, with the repaired first vehicle, was no more successful. Because of the inexperience of the launch crew, which the Flak Experimental Center insisted on staffing with its own people, the filming of the March 8 test was bungled; no conclusions could be drawn about the cause of the failure. 86

Siemens’s late delivery of the improved control system for the second Wasserfall configuration, compounded by severe manpower shortages at Peenemünde, postponed the next launch until May 12. The missile went off course after twenty-two seconds, in all probability because of the failure of a vane servomotor. On the fourth attempt, June 8, one of the explosive bolts holding the missile to the mobile launch table did not fire, resulting in a fiasco: the vehicle took off with the stand attached and crashed after nine seconds. During the fifth flight in July, the engine malfunctioned and the vehicle blew up in the air. Meanwhile, because attempts to work with the joy-stick on the May flight had not yielded much useful information, the Army center had launched an A-4 with the relevant equipment on June 13. It was successful for half a minute, then the joy-stick operator lost sight of the missile and it strayed to the left, ultimately ending in an airburst over southern Sweden. That embarrassing failure placed much new information about the A-4 in the hands of the Allies, although the peculiar guidance equipment on board proved to be misleading to intelligence analysts. 87

So it went—a checkered launch record that is not surprising in light of Peenemünde’s previous experience, nor that of later missile development elsewhere. But the project’s original schedule and the assumptions behind Wasserfall’s guidance development demonstrate how much wishful thinking, impelled by desperation about the war situation, had permeated the anti-aircraft missile program from the outset. In May 1944 the Flak Experimental Center still wanted to launch hundreds of missiles by the end of the year, notwithstanding the bleak short-run prospects. It was hard to admit the truth: that Wasserfall, like the other anti-aircraft missiles, was a promising long-term development project but was illusory as an answer to Allied air attacks during the war. There was no way it was going to be finished on time. Even if it had been, the joy-stick system would have been ineffective and susceptible to Allied electronic jamming. Nonetheless, the program was bureaucratically entrenched in the Army and the Luftwaffe, and the desperation felt by the German authorities ensured that Wasserfall would continue, whether it made any sense or not. 88

Thus, as the summer of 1944 turned into fall, the anti-aircraft missile program struggled onward, while the ballistic missile troops finally began to move into firing positions in the west. In the meantime, the rapid decline of the Army’s power in the Reich had ushered in the final phase in the history of the Ordnance liquid-fuel rocket program: one in which Peenemünde was a civilian corporation and Heinrich Himmler’s SS had finally secured the dominance it had long sought.

On July 20, 1944, the anti-Nazi resistance tried valiantly, but failed miserably, to overthrow the Third Reich. After the bomb planted by Colonel Claus Count von Stauffenberg narrowly missed killing Hitler in the briefing barracks at the Wolfsschanze, the attempted military coup in Berlin quickly sputtered and died. A little after midnight, the Chief of Army Armaments and Commander of the Replacement Army, General Fritz Fromm, directed the summary execution by firing squad of his chief of staff, Stauffenberg, and three other prominent subordinates. Although the opposition movement had a base among traditional elites such as the officer corps, the aristocracy, and the civil service, it had been centered in Fromm’s office because his control over Army units inside the Reich provided the basis for a coup. Fromm himself had played an ambiguous and indecisive role before the uprising, neither denouncing the conspirators nor committing himself to their plans. His summary action had been designed to save his own skin. But it did him no good. Hitler had already named Himmler as Fromm’s replacement that afternoon. Not long after the executions, the general was arrested. He languished in jail until March 1945, when the Führer, in a belated act of revenge, had him shot for “cowardice.” 1

The failure of the plot was a further devastating setback for the Army, even though the senior service was predominantly loyal to the Nazi regime. As a wave of arrests swept across Germany, hundreds of officers, often of impeccable Prussian aristocratic background, were caught up in the Gestapo’s net. Many were subjected to grotesque show trials and gruesome executions. Among those arrested was the early rocket veteran General Erich Schneider, head of Ordnance Development and Testing since mid-1943. He was fortunate to be released after a month because of Speer’s intervention and, one can presume, because of a lack of any evidence to implicate him in the conspiracy. 2

The arrests were only part of the Army’s troubles. Hitler’s appointment of the Reichsführer-SS to a leading command position was “a calculated act of humiliation for the officer corps” that also signaled the ascendancy of the SS and the virtual dissolution of the Army leadership as a coherent body. Himmler soon detailed his new duties to Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Hans Jüttner, the head of the SS Leadership Main Office, which acted as a sort of general staff for the Waffen-SS. But Himmler’s latest title allowed him to achieve at least one long-cherished objective. He gave Kammler full powers on August 6 to accelerate the deployment of the A-4. It was all Kammler needed to consolidate ultimate authority over that program. 3

Adjusting to the SS’s new power over them was, however, only one of two transitions the rocket engineers had to make in August 1944 as a result of the Army’s fall from grace. On the first day of the month the Armaments Ministry also gained further influence when von Braun’s development group became a government-owned, civilian corporation, “Electromechanical Industries, Karlshagen, Pomerania.” Once again, the balance of power in the program had shifted dramatically: The SS was now strongest and the Army weakest, with Speer’s Ministry in a still powerful but eroding position.

Peenemünde’s conversion so soon after July 20 suggests a sudden improvisation to keep the facility out of the hands of the SS. In fact, the move had been planned since at least late May, although it was indeed a response to the threat posed by Himmler and Kammler. The wonder is that the conversion was accomplished with so little fuss. Not much more than a year previously, a heated confrontation over proposals to privatize the facility had erupted between Dornberger and Ordnance on one side and Degenkolb and associated industrialists on the other. By contrast, there is no evidence of a fight in 1944 over the conversion, or even much evidence of the discussions that must have preceded it. Dornberger’s memoirs only mention laconically that incorporation was “tolerated because the measure would prevent the seizure of Peenemünde by any military or semimilitary organization,” by which he apparently meant the SS. 4