Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

Since Electromechanical Industries would in effect be owned by the Armaments Ministry, the tension between the Ministry and Ordnance clearly must have eased enough since 1943 to allow a fairly painless transition. There were two explanations for this. First, Degenkolb had delegated virtually all his authority to his deputy in the A-4 Special Committee, Heinz Kunze, after the staff was evacuated to Thuringia in early 1944. Thus the locomotive czar’s abrasive personality and blatant ambition were no longer a factor. (Degenkolb disappeared altogether in the autumn after making insulting comments about various Nazi leaders. Because of his connections, he ended up in a mental clinic instead of in the hands of the Gestapo. He resurfaced in April 1945 as a Ministry liaison to Kammler.) A more important reason for the Ordnance-Armaments Ministry rapprochement was the common threat of the SS, which drove the two closer together. Of course, without the Army’s loss of power even before July 20, that service would never have conceded ownership of the heart of its missile development capability. 5

Besides the decline of the Army and the rise of the SS, one more factor shaped the third major reorganization of the rocket program in a year and a half: Dornberger’s battle to salvage what was left of his declining influence. His appointment as a special commissioner under Fromm had marginalized him even within his own service instead of making him the “Führer” of the A-4 program. The commander of LXV Army Corps had succeeded in removing him from tactical control of the rocket batteries. Moreover, Dornberger began to clash with Ordnance, to which he had devoted fifteen years of his life. He was no longer in the chain of command for Peenemünde, yet he continued to exert influence through Zanssen, von Braun, and others. That caused discomfort for Ordnance, which pushed its own candidate, General Rossmann, who came to head the liquid-fuel rocket section, Wa Prüf 10. To add insult to injury, when Speer returned from his convalescence in early May, he issued an order spelling out the division of powers in the A-4 program. The document’s primary purpose was to circumscribe the role of the SS, but Speer omitted any mention of Dornberger, either because he had forgotten that the general was independent of Army Ordnance or because he had heard that the continued existence of Dornberger’s position (BzbV Heer) was in doubt. On May 31 Dornberger issued an ultimatum to Fromm that was both an indirect response to Speer and an expression of frustration at losing his grip on his life’s work. 6

Dornberger once again demanded that the organizational confusion in the A-4 program be overcome by making him its leader and military commander. This time, however, he ended by claiming that he would go over Fromm’s head and appeal directly to Hitler if necessary. “Fromm summoned me. I was reprimanded, threatened with punishment, my honor was impugned by a charge of unsoldierly conduct and cowardly dereliction of duty, all with the objective of inducing me to modify my demands.” In the end Fromm did nothing, and Dornberger’s threat proved to be empty. Dornberger’s memoirs further claim that in July, before the assassination attempt, Himmler pressed OKW chief Keitel to appoint Kammler the leader of the program, but the status quo once again held. But not for long: After July 20 Kammler rapidly acquired the position Dornberger had so long sought. 7

In the midst of those battles, the corporate conversion of Peenemünde was finalized between Ordnance and the Armaments Ministry. Dornberger’s May 31 document mentioned in passing “Director Storch as head of HAP 11 [Peenemünde-East].” Paul Storch, one of the top managers of the giant Siemens electrical engineering firm, indeed became the head of Electromechanical Industries when it came into being on August 1. One may conclude, therefore, that some such move had been under consideration in the late spring. Storch had headed the electrical and guidance equipment subcommittee of the A-4 Special Committee and was thus by no means “practically a stranger to our work,” as Dornberger later asserted. On June 28 an unsigned Peenemünde document, “The Tasks of Electromechanical Industries, Ltd.,” discussed the objectives of the proposed company. A week later von Braun’s deputy for in-house manufacturing, Eberhard Rees, wrote to Storch about the budget. The company’s monthly expenditures, including personnel, were projected to be 13 million marks, a sizable sum. In July 89 percent of the materials and procurement costs would be spent on the A-4 and only 11 percent on Wasserfall. Even in December the ballistic missile’s continuing development needs were going to eat up half the procurement and personnel budget, a fact that Rees thought Storch might find “strange.” 8

Rees’s estimates were based on a total employment of six thousand, but the company actually turned out to be smaller because of the way the facilities were divided with the Army. As of August 19 Electromechanical Industries had 4,863 German employees, plus 379 East European forced laborers and prisoners of war. (There were no concentration camp prisoners, but the Luftwaffe still had an SS camp for Peenemünde-West.) Of the Germans, 3,580 were civilians (618 of them women) and 1,283 (all male) were in the military, including 559 in the Northern Experimental Command and 411 in the Flak Experimental Center. The German staff included 264 graduate engineers and scientists and 590 engineers with lesser training, but well over half the staff were blue-collar workers; Peenemünde thus retained a significant in-house development capability in spite of the slow erosion of its “everything-under-one-roof” approach. Finally, 601 employees were assigned to Production Supervision, the Mittelwerk company, or elsewhere, leaving 4,262 at Karlshagen, a category that included dispersed facilities spread over the island and mainland. Those numbers indicate that roughly a thousand people in Peenemünde must have remained in the direct employ of the Army. 9

This arrangement, probably the result of a compromise during the negotiations, did not promote the highest efficiency. Electromechanical Industries was only a tenant in Army-owned buildings, the motor pool and aircraft were to be shared between the two, and each retained its own launch equipment, all of which caused friction between the company and the Army. Base administration was left in the hands of the former Commander’s office, which became the Karlshagen Test Range, headed by a colonel. The senior officer on base was General Rossmann, whose Wa Prüf 10 also shared the facilities. General Zanssen was sent off to command a solid-rocket brigade on the Western front, because Kammler had refused to work with him, and Ordnance no longer wished to fight that battle. 10

There were one or two advantages to corporate conversion: Electromechanical Industries could rid itself of some civil service red tape and pay salaries competitive with the private sector. Indeed, von Braun and his chief subordinates received large pay raises as of August 1, although it did not do them much good; virtually everything was rationed anyway. The reorganization also made von Braun Storch’s deputy, but the manufacturing shops and the test stands no longer reported to the young rocket engineer directly. Still, not much changed in the way the place operated, since von Braun continued to be the real leader of the group. Storch, for all his familiarity with the guidance and production dimensions of the A-4 program, was a product of a corporate culture very different from that of Peenemünde. His quiet, authoritarian style clashed with the outspoken group fostered by von Braun and Dornberger. Nonetheless, the arrangement worked reasonably well, in part because von Braun applied his usual tact and energy to keeping rocket development going no matter what the difficulties—or costs. 11