Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

Toftoy and the Ordnance Rocket Branch had to struggle to satisfy the Peenemünders in the face of limited budgets and the restrictive boundaries of their ambiguous status. (They ironically called themselves “prisoners of peace”; they were not legal immigrants, and their freedom of movement was limited.) In order to retain a few valued specialists, the Army, like the other services, also had to bend the rules regarding exclusion of individuals with dubious Nazi records. Under Project Paperclip, which had replaced Overcast in March 1946, the long-term use of former enemy scientists and engineers had been provided with a stronger legal basis. But security reports for a number of individuals, including von Braun, had to be revised or fudged to circumvent the restrictions that still existed. Some writers have seen those actions as evidence of a conspiracy in the Pentagon to violate a policy signed by President Harry Truman, but it really reflected a conscious choice by the U.S. government, approved up to the level of the Cabinet at least, to put expediency above principle. The Cold War provided ample opportunity after 1947 to rationalize that policy on anti-Communist grounds, but the circumvention of restrictions on Nazis and war criminals would have gone ahead at some level anyway, because the Germans’ technical expertise was seen as indispensable. 7

Thus when the Army’s own investigators came looking for witnesses and evidence for the Mittelbau–Dora war crimes trial, which was held at Dachau in 1947, it is no surprise that Ordnance was none too cooperative in granting access to the Fort Bliss Germans. The whole story of Mittelwerk and its prisoners was to be obscured as much as possible, because it would besmirch Army rocket development. Indeed, from the very end of the war, if not before, the Peenemünders had divorced themselves from any responsibility for slave labor; the SS provided a convenient scapegoat for all the crimes associated with the program. It was a position that the American authorities found easy to accept. 8

With that issue buried rather quickly, von Braun’s group was free to continue to play a historic role in the rise of the guided missile and the space launch vehicle, particularly after the Cold War spurred heavier American investment in the technology. In 1950 the Army transferred the group to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where they became the premier rocket development group in the United States. Their arrival in the States had in fact changed the whole balance of Army rocket activities, since the Germans displaced the smaller groups that had begun to flourish in World War II, like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

At Huntsville, one of the keys to the Germans’ success was the “everything-under-one-roof” approach developed at Kummersdorf and Peenemünde under the direction of Becker and Dornberger. It proved very compatible with the U.S. Army’s “arsenal system” of in-house development. Under von Braun’s leadership, the German-dominated group successfully developed the nuclear-tipped Redstone and Jupiter missiles in the 1950s. The Redstone—which was really just a much-improved A-4—then became the vehicle that put the first American satellite and first American man into space. Finally, under NASA aegis after 1960, the Peenemünders crowned their success with the phenomenally reliable Saturn vehicles, which launched Apollo spacecraft into orbit and put humans on the moon. 9

The rebirth of Peenemünde in Huntsville was necessarily unique, because the center’s engineering leadership had survived as a coherent group. But the Baltic coast center was also in some sense reborn in the many other postwar missile projects that sprang up in the United States and elsewhere. The transfer of Peenemünde’s technology was crucial to the U.S. Army’s work on anti-aircraft missiles and the Air Force’s early research on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), although personnel and ideas from the smaller German rocket programs had a role as well. In France and to a lesser extent in Britain, Peenemünders played an essential role in the development of missiles and space launchers. Even in the Middle East and China, the transfer of German rocket technology, often through indirect routes, was critical to guided missile proliferation.

But the Soviet Union was the most important heir to German rocket technology outside the United States. After the Soviets had built up Gröttrup’s rocket institute, they rounded up the Germans at gunpoint on October 22, 1946, and shipped them off to Russia, along with thousands of other specialists from the eastern zone. Gröttrup and a few other leaders received reasonably comfortable accommodations near Moscow, while the majority of the rocket engineers and their families were dumped on a rather primitive island in a lake north of the capital. A year later, on October 30, 1947, the Russian military fired the first re-manufactured V-2 (R-1) from a bleak semi-arid site in the south not too distant from Stalingrad. 10

Gröttrup and some of his assistants were important advisers at those launches, but the Germans soon found, to their frustration, that they would not be fully integrated into the Soviet rocket program. They were set to work designing new advanced missiles that remained paper projects, because Stalin’s military had decided to pump the Germans for their knowledge and then to toss them aside. The Gröttrup group was gradually cut off from contact with regular design bureaus. Beginning in 1951 its members were sent back to their native country. Communist paranoia and traditional xenophobia had prevented an effective integration of German talent such as had occurred in the United States. The Soviets also had many highly capable rocket engineers of their own. Impelled by their inferiority in nuclear weapons and long-range bombers, they pushed ballistic missile development more energetically than did the United States prior to 1954. The result was Korolev’s Sputnik surprise of October 1957, a triumph that rested to no small extent on a rapid and effective absorption of Peenemünde’s technological revolution.

The German Army rocket program clearly had a profound impact on science, engineering, and warfare in the second half of the twentieth century. But that inevitably raises a question that might be called the central paradox of Peenemünde: Why was the Army’s guided missile technology such a bad investment for the Third Reich when it was so valuable to everyone else after the war?

To answer that question properly, a cost-benefit analysis is needed. A systematic accounting of the Nazi regime’s expenditure on Army guided missile research, development, and production does not exist, but it is possible to make a rough estimate. According to May 1945 statements by Dornberger and von Braun, the Army facility at Peenemünde (including, in all likelihood, the ill-fated Production Plant) cost 300 million “gold marks” to build. The center’s mid-1944 monthly expenditure of 13 million marks equaled an operating budget of about 150 million annually, although it would have been less earlier in the war, when Peenemünde was smaller. (Expenditures before 1939 were so small by comparison that they can be disregarded.) The largest single expense was A-4 production. By Mittelwerk’s price list alone, the Reich paid the company approximately 450 million marks for nearly six thousand missiles, but this cost omitted the warhead and the guidance system. There is no reliable data on the total cost of mobile launch vehicles, troop training, construction of bunker sites and liquid oxygen plants, expenditures at Zeppelin, Schlier, Zement, and so forth. Thus 2 billion marks would appear to be a reasonable, even conservative, estimate. If those marks are converted according to the gold standard of that era (4.2 marks to the dollar—a problematic assumption), this amount equals about half a billion U.S. dollars of World War II vintage or about 5 billion current (early 1990s) dollars. 11