Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

Kammler’s absence from Bavaria proved a boon to the rocket veterans. They succeeded in persuading the local SS to allow a dispersion to various towns instead of a concentration in Oberammergau. A small group around Dornberger ended up in a mountain resort hotel high up on the former Austrian-German border. Von Braun joined them later in April, as did Dieter Huzel and Bernhard Tessmann, who had separately made dangerous Odysseys across the Reich after burying Peenemünde’s archive in a mine northwest of the Mittelwerk. The clear intent of that action was to create the group’s own bargaining chip for use after the war. For the rest of the month there was little to do but stare at the sky, play cards, and worry about the omnipresent SS. 57

By then many Peenemünders had been found by U.S. Army Ordnance intelligence officers in Thuringia, where the great majority of the rocket group had remained. Only the five hundred sent to Bavaria were left. A few were found by French troops, but most waited for an opportunity to surrender to the Americans—the only time during the entire evacuation when they had any control over their fate. Among the last to encounter the invaders were Dornberger and von Braun. On May 2, two days after Hitler’s suicide, Wernher von Braun’s English-speaking brother, Magnus, was sent down the mountain on a bicycle to find American troops. He encountered a rather surprised patrol, and soon the arrangement was made. After fifteen amazing and eventful years, the Army liquid-fuel rocket program was over. 58

Peenemünde’s death was followed quickly by its rebirth elsewhere. Even before the war was over, teams from the major Allied powers began searching for the spoils of the Baltic coast center and its revolutionary technology. In central Germany, U.S. Army Ordnance moved quickly to seize parts for one hundred A-4s, as intact missiles were nowhere to be found. Speed was of the essence. Thuringia was to be part of the Soviet zone of occupation, and the Red Army might move forward as early as the beginning of June. Ordnance’s Special Mission V-2 also managed to ferret out the location of the Peenemünde archive from a former manager who had seen Huzel and Tessmann before they disappeared. Trucks whisked the 14 tons of paper out of the mine on May 27, allegedly just as the British began setting up roadblocks in what was to become their zone of occupation. After some delay, the Soviets occupied the Mittelwerk on July 5. Realizing what they had in their hands, a Soviet intelligence team that included Sergei Korolev, the Chief Designer of the Soviet space program in the 1950s and 1960s, was sent to investigate Peenemünde. What the Russians found was quite disappointing. The evacuation had stripped the center of much of its equipment, the defending forces had blown up many buildings, and the occupying Soviet units had carried off some of what was salvageable. Eventually the Soviets dynamited the rest. 1

At the Bavarian ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, von Braun, Dornberger, and other Peenemünders were interrogated not only by U.S. Army Ordnance but also by numerous American and British intelligence teams, many of which showed themselves to be laughably ill-informed, in the Germans’ opinion. Ordnance officers were well aware that the guided missile interested not only other Allied powers but also other American agencies, such as the Army Air Forces, which everyone expected to become a separate service in the near future. Although the incipient Cold War certainly played a role in Ordnance’s motivations, it was no more important than a “denial policy” that applied to everybody. The American government sought to prevent a repetition of the Weimar Republic’s secret rearmament in other countries, and American services and agencies sought to exploit German achievements to benefit the nation and themselves—not necessarily in that order. (The American tradition of interservice rivalry puts the Third Reich’s internal battles in perspective.) Thus, when the leaders of the German rocket program sought to negotiate with Ordnance, they scarcely needed their document cache as a bargaining chip. 2

The real questions became, how many Peenemünders would come to the United States, and on what basis would they be hired? Ordnance’s interest in the German Army rocket program was influential in the creation of “Project Overcast” by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in July. The official rationale for Overcast was the temporary exploitation of 350 German specialists to help in the defeat of Japan, but the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon rendered that purpose moot. Overcast went ahead anyway, and Colonel Holger Toftoy, chief of Ordnance Rocket Branch since late June, moved to fill his quota of one hundred Peenemünders. Von Braun was chiefly responsible for drawing up a balanced list of people and then persuading them to sign on for what was, theoretically, only a six-month commitment. The former technical director decided that he could not do with fewer than 115 or so specialists, and Toftoy went ahead to acquire them. Like many of his colleagues, he did not let the wording of orders get in his way if he could avoid it. 3

The Soviets were naturally disappointed not to get von Braun, Steinhoff, and other leading engineers of the program, although they did find low-ranking people and much equipment following their occupation of the Nordhausen area. They broadcast offers to Peenemünders to come over to their zone, where they would receive excellent positions at good pay. A few individuals were willing to accept, the most prominent being Helmut Gröttrup, who had been arrested with von Braun and had been Steinhoff’s deputy in guidance and control at the end of the war. Although he was one of the most left-wing members of the rocket group, personal resentments more than political affinities seem to have caused him to cross the line after being evacuated from Thuringia by the Americans. He was not satisfied with the deal that Wernher von Braun was trying to strike with the United States. Besides, other Peenemünders falsely accused him of being the one who revealed the location of the documents. Gröttrup became the head of a rocket institute near the Mittelwerk after the Russians had begun to restore some of its manufacturing capability. 4

Although the French also began to contact some rocket specialists, U.S. Army Ordnance’s main competitor for leading Peenemünders turned out to be the British, and that only temporarily. In order to understand better how the A-4 worked, the British Army had created Operation Backfire. After some inter-Allied conflict, the two countries forged an agreement to lend some of the Germans earmarked for the United States to Backfire, which launched three missiles from the German North Sea coast in October 1945. A few other Peenemünders not wanted by von Braun and Toftoy were taken to Britain, most notably Walter “Papa” Riedel, who had been exiled to the Zement project in late 1943. The one person Ordnance could not get back from the British was Dornberger. According to a U.K. interrogator, the former rocket general had “extreme views on German domination, and wishes for a Third World War.” Moreover, the British were determined to try Dornberger in Kammler’s place for indiscriminate V-2 attacks on civilians. They kept him in a POW camp until 1947, but the hypocrisy of such a charge made a trial untenable—roughly 1 million Germans and Japanese had been killed by Allied bombing. Because of the narrow focus of war crimes investigations, the rocket general also avoided trial on the one charge that could have stuck: complicity in the exploitation of slave labor. 5

While Dornberger sat in jail, U.S. Army Ordnance conveyed across the ocean nearly 120 selected Peenemünders, the essence of a development organization that had once employed six thousand people. Von Braun had already departed for the United States by airplane with six others in September 1945, followed in stages by the rest, who traveled by ship during the winter months. All were eventually assembled in the desert at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas. One of their first tasks was to assist in scientific and military V-2 launches that began at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, in April 1946. The chief role of the von Braun group was, however, to cooperate in planning future rocket development with Project Hermes, which Ordnance had contracted to General Electric in 1944 after the magnitude of the German rocket effort became clear. The Germans, however, were frustrated at their primitive laboratories and the postwar cutbacks that seemed to derail any hope for a return to accelerated work. 6