Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

Reflecting the complexity and ambiguity of the command structure over the rocket program, the company sought confirmation of Kammler’s order from the chief of Army Ordnance. General Leeb gave his approval the next day, February 1, but there was little chance that he would have defied the SS and an even smaller chance that he would have done so successfully. That course of events demolishes the postwar myth that the rocket group had a choice as to whether to stay or go. Von Braun joked decades later that “I had ten orders on my desk. Five promised death by firing squad if we moved, and five said I’d be shot if we didn’t move.” He therefore decided to go along with Kammler, he claimed, because it suited the group’s desire to head for the Americans. While it is almost certainly true that orders must have existed to stand and fight, probably from the Gauleiter of Pomerania as commander of the Volkssturm, von Braun had no power to make such a decision. Even within Peenemünde, Storch and Rossmann stood above him, and above them came Dornberger, Leeb, and Kammler. Moreover, there is little doubt that, if push came to shove, Himmler’s protégé could have overruled the Gauleiter. 41

Similarly, the realities of the evacuation order destroy the myth that the rocket group steered itself in the path of the American forces. It is certainly true that von Braun had conversations with close associates about the postwar situation and how to salvage Peenemünde’s unique expertise, especially in view of his self-appointed historical mission to develop rocketry for spaceflight. The outcome of those discussions, which National Socialist fanatics would have seen as defeatism and high treason, was unanimous agreement to surrender to the United States, if possible. As one unnamed engineer put it immediately after the war: “We despise the French; we are mortally afraid of the Soviets; we do not believe the British can afford us, so that leaves the Americans.” But neither von Braun nor his subordinates had the power to choose their destination. Although Kammler may already have been thinking of the group as a bargaining chip for separate peace negotiations with the West, the move to Thuringia made perfect sense on its own: It concentrated part of the Reich’s remaining technical expertise near underground facilities in an SS-controlled region relatively far from the front lines. 42

Not long after the evacuation order, von Braun traveled south to survey locations for the various divisions of the company, while in Peenemünde preparations went ahead day and night for the departure. The transportation coordinator, Erich Nimwegen, an entrepreurial character who operated on the thin edge of the law, proved his worth in mobilizing much needed material and transport. He also allegedly thought up a way to exploit a mixup in some newly printed forms: BzbV Heer had been garbled as VzbV, which he turned into a top-secret agency under the SS. Soon, Huzel says, those initials “began to appear in letters several feet high on boxes, trucks, and cars.” For movements by road in the chaotic conditions of the last months of the war, any SS credential proved useful to get through the many roadblocks set up to catch deserters and to stop unauthorized travel. Von Braun himself admitted to the American authorities in 1947 that he had put his rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) on transportation orders, although he claimed that it was “the only time” he had ever exploited the title. 43

After von Braun had spent three weeks in Thuringia and had met the initial arrivals there (the first train left the center around February 17), he returned late in the month for his last visit to Peenemünde. After staying only a few days, he departed, never to see the place again. All launch activity had been shut down, and the mobile crews evacuated from Heidekraut in January were sent to northwest Germany. The last convoys, trains, and barges moved out in early March, even though travel was difficult because of roving Allied fighter-bombers. Peenemünde began to resemble a ghost town, with only a skeleton staff remaining. Ironically, it would remain that way until May 5, because not long after Kammler ordered the evacuation it was discovered that Soviet forces were farther away than believed. Rather than head north, the Russian winter offensive was going east—in the direction of Berlin. 44

Among the last to leave the center was Dieter Huzel, a special assistant to von Braun since the autumn of 1944. When he arrived in the town of Bleicherode in the middle of March, he found an “[e]xtremely primitive headquarters… in a former agricultural school. There was not much sense of order. We couldn’t just bodily lift a whole engineering plant, drop it two hundred miles away, and expect it to continue functioning without interruption.” Although Kammler had made Electromechanical Industries the center of a development cooperative of advanced weapons firms, virtually everyone perceived the exercise as futile. The prospect of total defeat hung like a dark cloud over everything. Von Braun chaired meetings and investigated underground and above-ground sites for restarting work, but there is little doubt that he was merely putting on a good show for the ever watchful SS. By the time Huzel arrived, von Braun was hospitalized with a broken right arm, because his driver had fallen asleep at the wheel one night (the only time safe to travel) and the car had flown off the road and crashed into an embankment. A couple of days before his thirty-third birthday, the young technical director was released from the hospital wearing a massive cast. He rejoined Dornberger in useless planning, while others carried out design work on paper. In divisions like the valve and materials testing laboratories, virtually no work was done, because they were situated far from the oversight of the SS and the headquarters group. 45

Not many kilometers away, the concentration camp prisoners were dying en masse , although there is little evidence that the Peenemünde evacuees confronted that suffering directly. Von Braun asserted in 1947 that he last visited Mittelwerk in February 1945 and that working conditions inside the plant were, if anything, better in the last months of the war. While his statement is true in a sense because of the completion of the heating, air-conditioning, and lighting systems, it is also rather callous, because the prisoners were starving and were subject to arbitrary terror even more intense than before. “Dora” had entered its third phase: the relatively mild period of summer-fall 1944 had ended, and the camp death rate once again skyrocketed. 46

The situation had taken a noticeable turn for the worse in November. Shortly after the SS had made Dora the main camp of a new “Concentration Camp Mittelbau” (Central Construction), the local SD security organization had succeeded in penetrating and destroying the Dora prisoners’ underground organization. Many of its leaders were locked up in the “bunker,” and some were horribly tortured. Most ended up on the camp gallows, with a consequent acceleration in the execution rate. 47

Beginning in January 1945 conditions dramatically worsened. Germany’s war economy and transportation system collapsed because of Allied bombing and the Soviet invasion of the Upper Silesian industrial region. The food supply for the whole population deteriorated, but in the Nazi system distribution was deliberately structured to favor the “Aryans.” At the bottom of the hierarchy, unsurprisingly, were the concentration camp prisoners, who began to starve even more rapidly than before. The food supply and the health situation in the Mittelbau camp system, which now included about three dozen subcamps, was worsened further by transports full of exhausted prisoners evacuated from the east, most notably from Auschwitz. Dora’s population grew from nearly 13,500 on November 1 to more than 19,000 in March, while the total of all Mittelbau prisoners went from about 26,000 to more than 40,000 in the same period. These numbers would have grown even faster but for disease and starvation; the bodies began to pile up at the crematoria faster than they could be burned. From December 24 to March 23, the camp administration counted 5,321 deaths, of which 1,090 were in Dora. The SS created a particularly horrendous situation at the Boelcke Kaserne, a former barracks in the city of Nordhausen, by using it as a dumping ground for hopeless cases, many from the transports. 48