Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

With the evacuated prisoners came numerous SS men, including Richard Baer, the last commandant of the original Auschwitz camp. (The primary extermination center for Jews had been the nearby Auschwitz II-Birkenau.) On February 1 Baer displaced Mittelbau’s camp commandant, Otto Förschner, who was probably dismissed for letting the underground get out of hand. The new commandant raised the level of horror yet higher with a gruesome wave of hangings in late February and March that focused on the Soviet resistance organization, although a number of prominent German Communist prisoners were shot or beaten to death in the “bunker.” The unprecedented 162 executions in March included 133 Russians, 25 Poles, 3 Czechs, and 1 Lithuanian. Most of the sentences were carried out in a few horrific mass executions: 16 on March 3, 57 on March 11, and 30 each on March 21 and 22. 49

Two of the hangings took place for the first time inside the plant instead of in Dora. Although it is unlikely that any recent arrivals from Peenemünde were present, one or both executions were seen by Arthur Rudolph and others assigned to the Mittelwerk. Erich Ball, a shop foreman sent south after the 1943 air raid, described the first to an American investigator in 1947:

A large wooden plank was brought into tunnel B and attached to the hooks in the overhead crane…. By this time all work in the factory had stopped. Everybody was ordered to watch the hanging. When the [12 to 16] Haeftlinge who were to be hung came in they had their hands tied behind their backs. They had wooden gags in their mouths. [A] German [prisoner] put a separate rope around each man’s neck[;] the other end of the rope had previously been tied to the plank. The man who normally operated the crane was a French Haeftlinge [sic] and under my control. However, I called [him] down from the ladder. [Chief SD officer] Bischoff asked why… and I said, this man works for me and if he has to hang his friends he will be sick and will not be of use to me…. [H]e was scared and crying. The [executioner] went up the ladder[,] then Bischoff… read the order by Himmler, and gave the order to raise the crane.

A French prisoner, Yves Béon, and his compatriots were forced to file past the still hanging prisoners later that night:

Most of their bodies have lost both trousers and shoes, and puddles of urine cover the floor. Since the ropes are long, the bodies swing gently about five feet above the floor, and you have to push them aside as you advance…. [Y]ou receive bumps from knees and tibia soaked in urine, and the corpses, pushed against each other, begin to spin around…. Here and there under the rolling bridge, truncheons in hand, the S.S. watch the changing of the shifts. They are laughing; its a big joke to these bastards.

This gruesome spectacle was repeated a few weeks later with about thirty condemned, who were once again surrounded by guards carrying “machine guns.” 50

Notwithstanding the increased terror and the extreme chaos in the war economy, Mittelwerk apparently kept churning out missiles right up to the end of March, although documentation exists only for 362 A-4s shipped up to the eighteenth. (Total verifiable Mittelwerk production is 5,789; Peenemünde built 150–200 more test-model A-4s, and Mittelwerk also assembled a few thousand much simpler V-1s, beginning about October 1944.) That deliveries continued at such a high rate can only be attributed to the consolidation of parts production in the tunnels and the high priority the ballistic missile retained to the very end. In the last days of the Mittelwerk, even Karl Otto Saur installed himself in the tunnel offices, but a bizarre “Twilight of the Gods” atmosphere hung over the place. Prisoners later reported that empty champagne bottles lay scattered next to the offices in the morning, and women in Saur’s entourage sat around in nightgowns until ten, chatting with the prisoners and giving them bread and cigarettes. 51

Toward the end of March the western front collapsed. After Allied armies crossed the Rhine in large numbers, the last V-2s were fired at Antwerp and London on March 27, and the last V-1 the following day. Kammler then ordered his units to fight as infantry. Around that time he found a large number of East European workers wandering in the chaos of collapsing Germany and personally ordered his soldiers to massacre at least 207 of them. Apparently he did not have enough blood on his hands already. 52

Soon the rapidly moving American armored spearheads approached Thuringia, forcing Kammler’s hand. Late in the day on April 1, he called Dornberger’s chief of staff and commanded an evacuation to the Bavarian Alps of about five hundred key people. Von Braun, still burdened by his heavy cast, was driven to the designated site in Oberammergau, where some Messerschmitt people had already been collected. Dornberger’s staff proceeded with its own convoy. On April 6 a sleeping-car train ironically dubbed the “Vengeance Express” (it had been used as a residence in Heidelager, Heidekraut, and Thuringia) departed with the rest of the group. Kammler’s apparent motive was to hold them as a bargaining chip for peace talks with the West, although killing the lot of them if negotiations failed may well have crossed his mind. One thing we do know: The five hundred Peenemünders once again had no control over their destination. Indeed, it would have made more sense for them to stay put and wait for the Americans in Thuringia. 53

For the prisoners, evacuation was presaged by yet another horrible tragedy: Two successive RAF night firebomb raids on Nordhausen killed 1,500 of them at the Boelcke Kaserne. Beginning on the morning after the second raid, April 4, about 25,000 to 30,000 inmates of the Mittelbau camp system were then forced into railroad cars and shipped to Bergen-Belsen. Their journeys took days and—like all the camp evacuations—an enormous toll in human lives due to starvation, disease, and wanton cruelty. Even more catastrophic was the fate of thousands from outlying Mittelbau subcamps, who were forced to leave on foot for lack of transports. Many collapsed and died by the side of the road or were shot for straggling. Nothing, however, compares in horror with the worst single massacre in the history of Mittelbau. At Gardelegen, SS guards herded into a barn 1,016 evacuees exhausted from marching and set the building on fire, burning them alive. Any who escaped were gunned down. When the 3d U.S. Armored Division liberated the Nordhausen area on April 11, all that was left were 600 extremely ill survivors in Dora and 405 living skeletons at the Boelcke Kaserne. 54

By the best estimate, of the roughly 60,000 unfortunates who passed through the Mittelbau–Dora system, at least one-third did not survive. Perhaps half (10,000) of the deaths can be linked to A-4 production. In addition, more than 8,200 prisoners died at Zement, although most were the victims of mass starvation in the last few months of the war, when the camp was no longer part of the program. A smaller but unknown number of victims must be attributed to Schlier, Lehesten, Rebstock, Zeppelin, and other locations. Attempting an exact total can become a meaningless numbers game, but it is clear that the A-4 was a unique weapon: More people died producing it than died from being hit by it. In round numbers, 5,000 people were killed by the 3,200 V-2s that the Germans fired at English and Continental targets. (More V-weapons were launched at Belgium than at Britain, although one would hardly know that from the literature on the topic.) By that measure, at least two-thirds of all Allied victims of the ballistic missile came from the people who produced it, rather than from those who endured its descent. 55

While the concentration camp prisoners suffered and expired in the final catastrophes, the Peenemünders languished in uncertainty in Bavaria and Thuringia. Events were largely out of their control, including the fate of the prisoners. In Oberammergau, von Braun saw Kammler for the last time early in April. From the Berlin bunker, Hitler had bestowed on the SS general his last, highest, and most absurd title, “Plenipotentiary of the Führer for Jet Aircraft.” Kammler set off on a frantic tour around a rapidly shrinking Reich, trying singlehandedly to stave off defeat. According to Dornberger, if he could not sleep, he would “wake the slumbering officers of his suite with a burst from his tommy-gun.” Kammler’s final fate is uncertain, but the most plausible report is that he arranged to be shot by his adjutant in Prague around the time of the final German surrender, rather than be captured by Czech partisans. 56