The history of Dora, the tunnel factory, and the camp is part of the history of rocket development—part of the German period of that history at any rate. Literature on the subject is both abundant and uneven. The best and most recent overall work is Canadian historian Michael J. Neufeld’s book, The Rocket and the Reich, published in 1995. It is a complete and well-balanced account of all the technical and political aspects of this adventure right from the 1920s until the capitulation in 1945. The following presentation of the events prior to the creation of Dora, particularly those in Peenemünde, owes a great deal to Neufeld’s account and analysis.
THE ERA OF THE AMATEURS. Space flight had been the object of major theoretical work in Russia (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky beginning in 1903), in France (Robert Esnault-Pelterie), and in the United States (Robert Goddard), but it was only in Germany and Russia that attempts were made to put theory into practice. Interest in rockets, in Germany, began in the 1920s, in the Weimar Republic, and was immediately associated with the futuristic aspect characteristic of the era. What took place at that time is well known, because the protagonists, concerned with securing financing for their experiments, did a considerable amount of self-promotion. A certain number of facts need to be pointed out.
First, the important role played by Hermann Oberth. Born in 1894, Oberth was a German professor of mathematics in Transylvania, and thus at the time a Romanian citizen. In 1923 he published in Germany Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (Rockets to Outer Space), which, though it enthused only a limited number of readers, brought a new theme to the fore. In 1929, Fritz Lang brought out his film Frau im Mond (Woman on the Moon) with Oberth’s scientific support.
Rocket enthusiasts set up a sort of club and, in September 1930, rented an abandoned military site, in Reinickendorf, north of Berlin, which they referred to as the Raketenflugplatz, for their activities. Their performances were varied. They were generally young, like Oberth himself. Youngest among them was Wernher von Braun, born in 1912 to an aristocratic, wealthy, and conservative family. In spite of their undeniable know-how and enthusiasm, these amateurs were not able to get very far in terms of conquering space. They lacked the money, organization, and simultaneous mastery of numerous technologies. Outside of Germany, this enthusiasm for rockets was found only—and to a lesser extent—in the Soviet Union. The key person there was Serge Korolev, born in 1907, who was to crop up once again after 1945.
THE ERA OF THE ARTILLERYMEN. The experiments of the amateurs on the Raketenflugplatz were followed with interest by professionals. Artillery officers made up Section 1 of the test division of the Heereswaffenamt—which Neufeld translates into English as “Army Ordnance Office.”1 In 1932 this section (Prüfwesen, Abteilung 1) was headed by Col. Karl Emil Becker. In 1938, Becker, promoted to general, became director of the office itself. The tests took place on the military training ground at Kummersdorf, south of Berlin near Zossen. In light of the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, work in the field of heavy artillery was not allowed, but nothing forbade taking an interest in rockets.
Following a demonstration in June 1932 at Kummersdorf by a group of enthusiasts, Becker offered to assist them in the pursuit of their activities, but demanded absolute secrecy. The student von Braun was the only one to accept.2 The divulging of the results attained by the others was forbidden in April 1934, once Hitler had come to power.3 In December 1932, having obtained a research contract, von Braun began working at Kummersdorf while at the same time working on his doctorate at the University of Berlin under Dr. Erich Schumann, who was also an adviser to the Ordnance Office.4 He defended his thesis “with distinction.” The title and contents were not made public.5
Two important remarks have to be made here, following Neufeld. The first has to do with the considerable influence of the artillerymen within the German army. All the high-ranking officers were from the artillery: this was true during the Weimar Republic and remained the case after 1933. When the War Ministry, controlled by Werner von Blomberg, an artilleryman, was eliminated by Hitler in February 1938, it was Walther von Brauchitsch, another artilleryman, who became commander in chief of the army and who promoted Becker. This makes it easier to understand the continuity of support and credit accorded to rocket research between 1932 and 1940.6 The other remark concerns the links between the army and the universities. Becker and his collaborators did specialized university studies in their capacity as officers. Many of those in charge at Peenemünde came from the university.
At Kummersdorf, von Braun worked in a wide variety of fields: metallurgy, rocket shape, ignition problems, guidance systems, and so on. He was joined by two former amateurs who were to play key roles at Peenemünde: Walter Riedel in January 1934 and Arthur Rudolph in August of that same year. When the first A1 rocket did not work, von Braun designed an A2 rocket, two prototypes of which were launched successfully in December 1934 on the island of Borkum. But the A2’s dimensions remained limited.7
The initial A was taken from the word Aggregat, meaning aggregate or assemblage, and was deliberately meaningless. At Kummersdorf and later at Peenemünde a whole series of rockets bore this name, some actually built while others remained on the drawing board. Neufeld provides the characteristics of the whole series, from A1 to A12. The A4 was the only one to have been built in a series and to have been operational. When it was launched in September 1944, Goebbels nicknamed it the V2, the V coming from Vergeltungswaffe (retaliation weapon). In order not to confuse his readers, however, Neufeld speaks only of the A4, as did the German technicians at the time. Yet inasmuch as the general public has only ever heard of the V2, it seems impossible to avoid the term. For reasons of pure convention, in the first part of the present book, up until the bombing of Peenemünde, reference will be to the A4; beginning with its assembly in the Dora Tunnel, reference will be to the V2.
In March 1935, Germany denounced the restrictive military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles and revealed a rearmament program. Particular attention was given to aviation. In charge of developing Luftwaffe weapons was Wolfram von Richthofen (cousin of the famous Richthofen of World War I), who maintained excellent relations with Becker’s team. Joint projects were envisaged.8
THE EARLY YEARS AT PEENEMÜNDE. In June 1935, the Kummersdorf facilities having become inadequate, von Braun suggested the creation of a special rocket base. An agreement in principle was arrived at for a base that was to be shared by the Armaments Office and the Luftwaffe. In late 1935, von Braun discovered an appropriate site on the north part of the island of Usedom, in the Baltic. The Ordnance Office and the Luftwaffe came to an agreement on financing, and the Peenemünde land was purchased on April 1, 1936. Work on setting up the site began in August.9
On the north of the island, “Peenemünde-West” was reserved for the Luftwaffe, and “Peenemünde-East” for the Ordnance Office’s rockets. There were possibilities for extension toward the south in order to house the personnel working at the base, and a little railway to ensure links. In spite of good relations on the local level, cooperation with the Luftwaffe did not materialize. Richthofen was replaced in early 1937 by Ernst Udet. In April 1938 the formal separation of the two bases was decided.10
Two individuals took control of Peenemünde: Walter Dornberger and von Braun. Longtime collaborator of Becker’s (and von Brauchitsch’s protégé), Walter Dornberger, born in 1895, was put at the head of the Office’s new “rocket section” in the summer of 1936. Another artilleryman, Leo Zanssen, was to command the Peenemünde base as of the summer of 1938. Wernher von Braun, at twenty-five, was designated technical director in May 1937. Dornberger and von Braun got along well together. Beginning in 1938, Dornberger’s Berlin-based section came to be known by the abbreviation Wa Prüf 11 (Heereswaffenamt Prüfwesen 11). The base was to be designated HVP (Heeresversuchstelle Peenemünde). The A3 rocket, a larger version of the A2, was finished at Kummersdorf and testing took place in December 1937 off the coast of Peenemünde, on the little island of Greifswalder Oie. Three failures were registered, full of lessons to be learned, as von Braun would later claim.11 A certain number of A5s—a rocket derived from the A3—were subsequently built and tested on a number of occasions. But effort henceforth focused on the A4 rocket—the one that was to be built at Dora and would become known in 1944 as the V2. Six years would be required, from 1938 until 1944, for this rocket to become operational. It was in 1938–39 that, at Dornberger’s instigation, considerable means were put into the project. He obtained from Becker the financing and personnel he asked for. Neufeld clearly shows the importance of the technological challenges to be overcome in three essential areas. The first was that of the engine, of which chemist Walter Thiel was in charge. The second was that of aerodynamics, put in the hands of Rudolf Hermann, a junior physicist. The third was that of guidance systems, entrusted to a third academic, Ernst Steinhoff.12
Because of the new nature of these fields of research, which all had to be coordinated, Dornberger focused all available means on the Peenemünde site. Thiel, who had stayed at Kummersdorf, joined the others in 1940. A highly modern wind tunnel was built, along with a guidance-systems laboratory, launching pads, and an electric power station. A small urban center with a variety of housing and sports facilities was set up, and a new electric line was also put in. This required the overcoming of major difficulties, in that the terrain was not propitious and access to the island was inconvenient.13 As of September 1939, three thousand people worked at Peenemünde. Many would remain nostalgic for these early years.
What is remarkable is that this exceptionally consequential program escaped political interference until 1940. Hitler’s regime had been in power since 1933. A certain number of the technicians were notorious Nazi Party members—this was the case with Rudolph, Hermann, and Steinhoff but not Walter Riedel, Thiel, or military men Dornberger and Zanssen. Von Braun, when asked to do so, agreed to join the SS on Dornberger’s recommendation; his membership took effect on May 1, 1940, and von Braun was registered as an Untersturmführer, or second lieutenant.14
The project remained the affair of the artillerymen, and Neufeld emphasizes that they had a purely tactical conception of the rockets, which they saw as supercannons. Their objective was to exceed by far and away the performance of the Long Max (that Neufeld refers to as the “Paris Gun”),15 which in 1918 had been used to shell Paris from a distance of seventy-five miles.
UNCERTAINTIES IN THE FIRST YEARS OF THE WAR. Contrary to what one might suppose, German arms policy in the first years of the war was characterized by great confusion. Work on the rockets was scarcely affected by this, but Dornberger was constantly obliged to remain on guard. An initial scarcity of munitions was already being felt in November 1939, and the Ordnance Office was held responsible. To solve the problem, Hitler named Todt armaments minister on March 17, 1940. Becker, besieged by private problems, committed suicide on April 8.16 He was replaced by Gen. Emil Leeb, another artilleryman, who held the position right up to 1945. Leeb continued Becker’s policies but lacked his experience and influence. Dornberger benefited, however, from the support of von Brauchitsch, who remained commander in chief of the army until December 1941.
The fundamental problem was that of the respective priorities to be assigned to planes for the Luftwaffe, submarines, and rockets. This battle of priorities, described by Neufeld, was translated by a year and a half of confusion, with Hitler making no real choice. On August 20, 1941, Hitler received Dornberger, von Braun, and Steinhoff along with Fromm and Keitel in East Prussia. The offensive in the east was moving ahead favorably, and Hitler, envisaging a swift victory, planned to then turn on England, using rockets to do so. He wanted to have a large number on hand as quickly as possible. This priority was confirmed by the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) the following month.17
All the research and development work to get the A4 operational was able to proceed normally, but there continued to be difficulties for the production factory, which, when the time came, would have to deliver the quantities of rockets Hitler demanded. Dornberger, like many officers of his generation, did not wish to entrust this production to private industry. And he wanted, moreover, production to be located at Peenemünde in order to maintain close links between development and production engineers. But inasmuch as the A4 rocket had still not achieved a perfectly successful launch, he had a hard time convincing his interlocutors of the importance of his immediate needs in terms of steel and labor.
SPEER’S SUPERVISION AND HIMMLER’S INTRIGUES. On February 8, 1942, replacing Todt, who had just been killed in an airplane crash, Albert Speer became armaments minister. His authority rapidly asserted itself, thanks to Hitler’s support. He was favorable to developing the rockets, and he was familiar with Peenemünde where he controlled a construction office. He had actually worked there himself as an architect and had met von Braun and the other young project leaders, with whom he had many affinities both culturally and socially.
As minister he did not have authority over aeronautical construction but got along well with Field Marshal Erhard Milch, the man in charge of it. The people in Peenemünde-East and Peenemünde-West were in constant contact, despite their administrative separation. The people in the eastern unit used the western unit’s airport, and in turn, the western unit was housed by the eastern unit. Cooperation was established for the use of gyroscopes or antiaircraft missile projects. However, in early 1942, the Luftwaffe ventured alone into the conception of a flying bomb. The code name of the operation was Kirschkern (Cherry Pit). The device, designed by Argus Motorenwerke and the Fieseler company, was baptized “Fi 103.”18 It was to be known in 1944 as the V1 and was ultimately manufactured underground at Dora.
Dornberger and von Braun’s greatest problem, in the course of the year 1942, was to succeed finally in launching an A4. The first two launches, on June 13 and then on August 16, yielded only mediocre results. Dornberger could not keep from expressing his disenchantment.19 It was only on October 3 that the launch was totally successful: the rocket climbed 50 miles into the air and fell to the ground 120 miles from the launching point after five minutes of flight.20 The following launch, on October 21, was only a partial success. By contrast, the first launch of the Fi 103 at Peenemünde-West, on December 24, was a total failure.
Speer, who had until then kept his distance, decided to directly exercise his authority. In December 1942 he ordered the creation of a Sonderausschuss A4 (A4 Special Committee), putting responsibility for it in the hands of Gerhard Degenkolb, from the DEMAG company, who had successfully directed German locomotive production.21 The headquarters was in Berlin, at the so-called Lokomotivhaus. A Nazi and an authoritarian, Degenkolb quickly ran into conflict with Dornberger.
Assembly-line production of a rocket—only one of which had ever functioned properly—is different than producing locomotives, whose technology has been well known for a long time. One of the points of contention had to do with the launch method to be used—against England obviously. Dornberger was in favor of a mobile launching device. In December 1942, Hitler declared himself favorable to the construction of a bunker in the north of France, in the Éperlecques Forest north of Saint-Omer; the Todt Organization was put in charge of building a seventy-one-foot-high concrete facility. English-language documents refer to it as the Watten Bunker, from the name of a small town slightly to the east, with a “mountain” serving as a reference point for aviators. In July 1943, Hitler ordered the building of another bunker in the Cotentin, in Sottevast, from which the southwest of England could be reached.22
Assembly of the A4s was scheduled to take place at Peenemünde, but also, as of late 1941, in Friedrichshafen, at the Zeppelin factories there. In March 1943 the Rax Werke factory in Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna, was added to the list. A fourth site envisaged at Falkensee at the DEMAG, to the west of Berlin, was ultimately ruled out. Degenkolb set an objective of three hundred rockets per month at each site, to be reached by December 1943.23
At Peenemünde, an administrative distinction was established between development and production. There was, on the one hand, the development unit (Entwicklungswerk or EW), which pursued development of the rocket. On the other hand, the testing factory for the manufacture in series (Versuchsserienwerk or VW—that is, “test series works”) had a hard time getting under way.24 A heavy burden of responsibility weighed on Rudolph’s shoulders as chief engineer. The collection of the plans and the list of the parts furnished by Walter Riedel’s office were constantly incomplete as those in charge of development incessantly introduced new modifications—a fact that led to serious tensions.
There was, moreover, a constant dearth of labor, and the use of foreign workers raised security problems. For pure road and construction work, Italian and Polish laborers had often been used. But now, the nonqualified positions in the factory had to be filled by Polish workers and Soviet prisoners of war. This fell under the responsibility of Jäger, who was at the head of the Sonderausschuss A4 labor subcommittee (Arbeitseinsatz). In April 1943 there were more than three thousand foreign workers on the entire Peenemünde complex.25
In May 1943, to make things official, Speer set up a Commission for Long-Distance Bombings, presided over by Waldemar Petersen, director of the AEG. On May 26 at Peenemünde, Speer brought together his assistant Saur and Degenkolb, General Fromm, Field Marshal Milch, Adm. Karl Dönitz, and many other notables. Two A4 rockets were launched. The first was perfectly successful, the second was a partial failure. The two attempts of the Fi 103 were a total failure. Nevertheless, the commission recommended the construction of both devices, considered to be complementary. This decision had manifestly been made beforehand by Speer and Milch.26
Afterward, on July 7, Dornberger, von Braun, and Steinhoff were received by Hitler in Rastenburg in the presence of Speer and Keitel. Von Braun provided commentary on the film of the successful launch and Dornberger gave a lecture. Hitler was particularly impressed by von Braun, who was given the title of professor.27 The enthusiasm spread to all those present, and to Saur in particular, who had hitherto been reticent.
Degenkolb brought in consultants, in particular Albin Sawatzki, who had brilliantly directed the construction of Tiger tanks at Henschel in Kassel. He was designated on August 4 to plan the production of the A4s, which had to begin by the end of the month.28 As will be seen further on, the bombing of Peenemünde during the night of August 17–18 would quickly overthrow all these plans.
The meetings regarding the rockets did not include the SS and its chief, Himmler, who nevertheless showed his interest in various ways. On December 11, 1942, he came to Peenemünde and watched a failed launch (after the successful launch of October 3). In 1943, when the Stettin Gestapo carried out a number of arrests, Colonel Zanssen, who commanded the Peenemünde base, was accused. The affair, which reached very high levels in Berlin, quickly came to nothing and Zanssen, vigorously supported by Dornberger, was cleared.29
Himmler’s second visit took place on June 28, 1943. For the occasion, von Braun apparently wore his SS uniform—one of the few times he is known to have done so. He was then promoted to Sturmbannführer—that is, major.30 But this was not how the SS managed to get itself involved, in mid-1943, in rocket production. It was by providing a concentration camp workforce.
FIRST RECOURSES TO CONCENTRATION CAMP LABOR. The prisoners from the Buchenwald camp who arrived at Dora on August 28, 1943, were not the first to be used for rocket manufacturing. Others had already been put to work at Peenemünde, in Wiener Neustadt, and in Friedrichshafen. It all began with an initiative of Jäger’s: following a discussion at Peenemünde, where Rudolph mentioned to him his concerns about a labor shortage, Jäger organized a visit for him to the Heinkel factories in Oranienburg, where a large Kommando of prisoners from the Sachsenhausen camp was employed and housed.31 The visit, which took place on April 12, 1943, was the object of a detailed and highly favorable report by Rudolph, with instructions as to how to proceed in order to have the prisoners sent.32 With Dornberger’s approbation, a meeting took place on June 2 at Heinz Kunze’s office—Degenkolb’s assistant—and it was decided to request fourteen hundred prisoners through Jäger from Obersturmführer Maurer, of the SS’s WVHA.33
Rudolph’s report and the minutes of the meeting at Kunze’s marked the beginning of a process that would lead to the deaths of thousands of prisoners in Dora. Some fifty years later, what is all the more striking is the utter banality of the documents. Rudolph appears concerned exclusively with solving his labor problems, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in whatever way necessary. He would have preferred more German specialists at his disposal, but several hundred were all he managed to obtain, by means of a complicated administrative procedure (point 3 of the minutes). Beyond that, he was advised to solicit the help of a development unit for the production factory, even though the rocket was far from being ready.
As for foreign workers, for security reasons, the French and all those who had the right to leave were to be excluded; Ostarbeiter and Russian prisoners of war would have to suffice. In any case, the latter were already locked up in the shacks of the Trassenheide camp. Thus prisoners remained the only option; it was to be hoped that they had the requisite professional skills. In any case, with regard to prisoners, there was no need to worry about housing, food, pay, etc. So much the less to worry about. The minutes of the meeting show that Jäger’s indications were adopted without discussion, and the meeting then moved on to the next point.
The dominant impression is that of supreme indifference with regard to the lot of the prisoners. And this is the impression that Neufeld emphasizes on several occasions. Rudolph was well aware of the Heinkel Kommando prisoners’ working and living conditions. He had made a special trip to Oranienburg to gather information. He himself, as already mentioned, was a Nazi of very long standing. But the others taking part in the meeting were also necessarily aware of what was going on. Kunze and Jäger were Speer’s men, and the two officers in attendance were representing Dornberger.
At Peenemünde, the first 200 prisoners to arrive from Buchenwald, on June 20, were Germans and Russians. On July 11 the next convoy of 400 was made up essentially of French prisoners, bearing identity numbers in the “14,000” series (see chapter 4), who had arrived at Buchenwald in June.34 In Wiener Neustadt, 500 prisoners arrived on June 20 from the Mauthausen camp. They arrived on June 22 at the Zeppelin factories in Friedrichshafen from Dachau. On August 14, another Kommando from Dachau was established in Saulgau, in the Upper Swabia, to manufacture for Zeppelin demifuselages for the V2s, intended to be put together at Peenemünde, and then at Dora.35
As for prisoners’ conditions at Peenemünde, Neufeld found only one witness, a German nonpolitical prisoner, Willy Steimel, whom he did not consider entirely reliable.36 But there are also the written testimonies of French political prisoners, Roger Berthereau,37 André Cassier,38 Eugène Laurent,39 and above all Michel Fliecx, who devotes fourteen pages of his resistance and deportation memoirs to a sustained account of his time at Peenemünde, from July 11 to October 11, 1943.40
His narrative comprises three successive episodes: the month preceding the bombing, the bombing itself, and the aftermath of the bombing up until the return to Buchenwald. Fliecx, who suffered a great deal afterward at Dora and Bergen-Belsen, as will be clear in examining other excerpts from his memoirs, has rather good memories of his first month at Peenemünde. The prisoners were housed on the ground floor of the factory in specially reserved and carefully enclosed quarters that were clean and had new bunks and earthenware washbasins. Food was more or less adequate.41
The prisoners were guarded by the SS, with a camp commander who was “fairly above board with us, except when he was drunk,” in which case he was liable to be dangerous. Among the wardens was a “Romanian” nicknamed “Mustache”—a Volksdeutsch, a Romanian German—who would lash out wildly.42 On the prisoners’ side, the camp senior was a Red, a respected German politician. The other Germans were Greens—that is, criminals of all kinds.43
French prisoners who had professional qualifications were employed normally. Others, like the student Fliecx, more or less easily found themselves small jobs. One Peenemünde director complained that he did not find as many qualified workers among the French as he had been promised.44 Relations with the German civilians appear to have been acceptable. Fliecx confirms that the mortality rate was low. Steimel mentions, among others, four deaths due to the consumption of methanol. Fliecx confirms this, adding that the four were German criminals.45 It was a classic—and awful—story that comes up again and again. At Peenemünde it was necessary to mix ethanol with methanol in order to reduce the impact on the potato harvest. This more or less bearable situation came to an end with the bombing. The factory was hit, and the prisoners’ quarters destroyed. The camp senior was killed, and the Greens took power. The final weeks of the Peenemünde camp and the transfer of the prisoners to Dora will be dealt with in chapter 4.
Several members of the Kommando from Wiener Neustadt were French, and had remained at Mauthausen since their arrival from Compiègne in April 1943. An enclosed complex was reserved at once for the new factory and the camp, with solid buildings. This complex was close to the Rax Werke, a railway construction factory specializing in tenders, whose very name was unknown to the prisoners. The conditions of existence were at first acceptable, before the arrival of further Polish and Russian prisoners, also from Mauthausen, accompanied by a control team, the most frightening member of which was the Kapo Georg Finkenzeller, known as “Big George,” a former member of the French Foreign Legion who would turn up once again in Dora in 1944. With respect to the SS, the prisoners recall two Rapportführer, known as the “black panther” and the “blond panther,” mentioned by Louis Crotet,46 Pierre Lucas,47 and Paul Bochet.48 With them was Jean Maupoint, a cabaret artist in Clermont-Ferrand, then in the camp of Compiègne, as well as Arsène Doumeau.
THE BOMBING OF PEENEMÜNDE. The activity on the north of the island of Usedom, which had been going on since late 1936, could not go unnoticed by the British indefinitely. First of all, in November 1939, the British naval attaché in Oslo had been tipped off by an unknown informer, no doubt German, as to rocket testing taking place on a remote Baltic island, in all likelihood Greifswalder Oie. Subsequent rumors had come from Scandinavian countries about rockets being spotted by fishermen off Bornholm. Then more precise information was passed along by the Polish resistance movement, originating from workers employed at Peenemünde. And finally, on May 15, 1942, following a photographic reconnaissance mission of destroyers moored at Swinemünde, a reconnaissance pilot had taken several pictures of Peenemünde on his way back, revealing surprising details. All the evidence seemed to converge.
In April 1943, Duncan Sandys, a young (thirty-four-year-old) member of Parliament and Churchill’s son-in-law, was put in charge of looking into the matter. He had himself been an artilleryman before suffering foot injuries and had some notion about rockets. He had a systematic aerial investigation carried out, which revealed the presence at Peenemünde of two long objects in the form of torpedoes (on June 22) and the existence of various buildings that had recently been put up in the north of France. The key person in carrying out this research was Dr. R. V. Jones, scientific adviser with the intelligence services of the Air Ministry.49
On June 29, Churchill, following the recommendations of the Defense Committee, decided to launch a massive nighttime air raid—code-named Hydra—on Peenemünde.50 As it happened, the bombing raid caught those in charge completely off guard, although security measures had been increased. The problems linked with using foreign workers have already been mentioned above. Attempts were made to eliminate the very name Peenemünde from new documents. As of June 1, 1943, the base ceased to be called Heeresanstalt Peenemünde and became Heimat-Artillerie Park 11, with the same abbreviation of HAP. It was located at Karlshagen, a village further to the south on the island of Usedom.51 Karlshagen was also the name of the prisoners’ Kommando. It is quite unlikely that these subterfuges caused much bother to British intelligence services, but they did hinder the work of historians.
The attack took place during the night of August 17–18, 1943, taking advantage of the full moon. The British, by means of a diversionary tactic, managed to draw German fighter planes all the way to Berlin. More than six hundred aircraft took part in the bombing, which lasted almost an hour. In the end, forty bombers were shot down by antiaircraft units or fighter planes that subsequently arrived on the scene.52 The damage was not as great as was believed in London. The test stands, wind tunnel, and measurement room were not hit. Von Braun was able to save the plans and archives from the fire. But human losses were high because the bombs hit first and foremost the living quarters to the south. There were 735 casualties, above all among the Russian prisoners and Polish workers housed in the Trassenheide camp barracks. Also, 178 German technicians were killed, including Dr. Walter Thiel along with his family.53
But the most important consequence was that the Germans knew henceforth that the Peenemünde base was not secure enough for building rockets, and that a factory had to be put up elsewhere, as sheltered as possible from air raids. The large complex set up by Dornberger had to be largely dispersed. Coincidentally, on the 13th of that same month of August 1943 the Rax Werke factories in Wiener Neustadt were bombed and on the 27th it was the Éperlecques blockhouse, which was, this time deliberately, rendered unusable.
FROM PEENEMÜNDE TO DORA. It took the German leaders only some ten days to draw their conclusions about the bombing of Peenemünde. On August 18, Speer traveled by plane successively to Peenemünde, Schweinfurt, and Ratisbonne to get an idea of the extent of the destruction caused by the British and American bombing raids. During this time, Himmler left his headquarters in Hochwald in East Prussia to meet with Hitler in Rastenburg and urged him to take three steps: move A4 production facilities from Peenemünde to an indeterminate underground site; move the test base to an SS training camp in Blizna, Poland; and use only concentration camp labor in the factory, alongside the German personnel.
On August 20, at Hitler’s request, Speer and Saur came to Hochwald to discuss the implementation of these decisions with Himmler. Brigadeführer Dr. Hans Kammler was put in charge of the SS’s side of the operation. On August 25, Dornberger, brought up to date in Berlin, entrusted von Braun by telephone with organizing a meeting of those in charge of Peenemünde in order to plan the transfer of production. There seems to have been some discussion of an installation in the Saar area. Sawatzki and Rudolph were put in charge of the operation.
On August 26, in the course of a meeting in Speer’s office between Dornberger, Kammler, Saur, and Degenkolb, the Kohnstein site was decided upon. The site had been located in mid-July (that is, before the bombing) by one of Degenkolb’s collaborators, who had been looking for a suitable underground setup. The site had been dug out by the WIFO company for its own purposes, as will be seen shortly. The company endeavored to hold on to the site but was soon obliged to relinquish it, in spite of Göring’s intervention.54 On August 28, Kammler had the first prisoners sent from Buchenwald to commence work on the site.
The underground complex where it was decided, on August 26, 1943, to transfer the Peenemünde production factory had been dug in the Kohnstein hill, to the south of the Harz Mountains. The successive waves of prisoners from Buchenwald that were sent there knew nothing about this underground facility, which they discovered with alarm; they did not even know the name of the hill itself, about which they would remain ignorant. The geographical landmarks—Thuringia, the Harz Mountains, Nordhausen—would all come later, and in generally imprecise fashion. Thus care must be taken not to rely excessively on notations of this kind to be found in the memoirs.
Interesting indications with regard to the surroundings of Dora are to be found in the writings of the German historian Manfred Bornemann, who comes from the region and is very familiar with its past and geography. A new and expanded edition of his book, Geheimprojekt Mittelbau, was published in 1994.
THE HARZ MOUNTAINS AND SURROUNDING AREA. The whole region is dominated by the wooded massif of the Harz Mountains, which stand out clearly on any map of Germany—even a simple road map. It is the most northerly part of the chain of hills, valleys, and mountains that comprise the Harz range and that make up most of the relief of what is now central Germany. The summit, the Brocken, reaches 3,712 feet, but the plateau is between 1,600 and 1,900 feet high.55 There has always been a great deal of human activity in the Harz Mountains because of the metal mines, but no normal-gauge railway crosses the massif, which has to be circumnavigated to the east or west. This topography was decisive for the way in which evacuations took place in April 1945.
Because of its proximity to such large urban centers as Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig, the Harz Mountains were, before 1939, a resort area, and the presence of numerous hotels and villas facilitated setting up offices and housing for the management transferred from Peenemünde in 1943. The Harz climate is harsh, but the towns and villages of the southern part are relatively protected; the winds were less severe at Dora than at Buchenwald, which was built on the Ettersberg heights, facing north.
The Thuringian basin—a fairly complex sedimentary basin with a variety of rock from the Mesozoic era—spans from the south of the Harz Mountains all the way to the Thüringerwald. At the edge of the Harz Mountains, at the level of Dora, is a thick layer of anhydrite, which makes up the Kohnstein (culminating at 1,079 feet) as well as the neighboring rises, dominating Dora to the north. To the south of the site of the camp, on the other hand, the horizon opens onto a virtually flat subsidence plain, the Goldene Aue. It was in that direction that fragments of civilized life could be perceived.
ANHYDRITE AND ITS USE. It was thus in a layer of anhydrite that the underground galleries of the Kohnstein had been dug. But one wonders whether, at the time, the prisoners were ever able to identify this rock: some spoke of white quartzite, others simply of crystalline rock. Anhydrite is an anhydrous calcium sulfate, and gypsum is the corresponding hydrated form; on the surface, due to rainfall, the anhydrite may turn into gypsum. Anhydrite and gypsum are both used in making plaster. The German word Gips, in everyday usage, refers at once to anhydrite, gypsum, and plaster. Anhydrite is also a raw material of the chemical industry.
In the Zorge valley, at the foot of the Harz Mountains, the exploitation of anhydrite in quarries is a dominant feature of the landscape—similar to the exploitation of gypsum in Cormeilles, in the Paris area. But the extraction sometimes takes place in galleries in the interior of the hills—as was the case for gypsum for many years in Montmartre. This extraction is facilitated by the relatively horizontal character of the layers of anhydrite and the homogeneity of the rock, which generally requires no special props. The Kohnstein to the south of the Zorge, and to the north, the Himmelberg and the Mühlberg, are all part of one geological formation. At the level of the Zorge, several rifts can be detected, and digging the tunnels was a somewhat more difficult undertaking, as will be seen shortly.
Bornemann’s very-well-documented study shows the importance of the plaster industry in the region, particularly at Ellrich, before the First World War. In the 1920s, anhydrite, extracted in Niedersachswerfen, was above all used by the Leuna synthetic fertilizer manufacturer, near Merseburg. Then came the crisis that affected all the activities right across the board.56 It was in 1935 that the involvement of the WIFO factory was to change the conditions of exploitation.
WIFO AND THE DIGGING OF THE KOHNSTEIN. The WIFO company was founded in 1934 by the Reich Ministry of Economics. Its full name was Wirtschaftliche Forschungsgesellschaft—that is, economic research society—which made a wide variety of activities possible. Foremost among them was to stockpile reserves of hydrocarbon in various sites throughout Germany. It was also involved in the exploitation of tanker trains and pipelines (in Romania).57
It was in order to set up a depot in Niedersachswerfen that, in 1935, the WIFO struck an original bargain with the IG Farben company, linked to the joint digging of an underground complex under the Kohnstein. The anhydrite extracted in the operation was to be used by IG Farben (principally) for the Leuna factory, and the WIFO was to be able to take advantage of an underground depot without having to worry about getting rid of the rubble. The operation was profitable for both parties.58
The project, which would be completed in 1944 under different conditions, consisted of digging two parallel tunnels from north to south, then linking them together as the digging advanced with regularly spaced, perpendicular galleries. Tunnel A to the east can be distinguished from tunnel B to the west. The perpendicular galleries were numbered, in Arabic numerals, from north to south. The length of each tunnel was approximately 5,850 feet (a little over a mile), and each gallery was 490 feet long. There was also an emergency gallery (Notstollen) that started from tunnel A and ended up on the eastern flank of the Kohnstein.
The digging began in June 1936 and took place in three successive phases. The first, rapid phase ended in May 1937 with gallery 18. In the second phase, from June 1937 to August 1940, after a shift in direction toward the east, gallery 30 was reached in tunnel A and gallery 32 in tunnel B. It was then that a median gallery was undertaken, halfway between tunnels A and B, extending from gallery 20 to gallery 45. The third phase, with a smaller work crew, began in July 1941 and was interrupted in August 1943 by the change in plans regarding how the complex was to be utilized. By then, tunnel B was finished, but not tunnel A, which had no southern exit. A new gallery (Grenzstollen) went from tunnel A to the eastern flank of the Kohnstein.59
From one phase to the next, the tunnels’ cut was modified, though the overall dimensions remained more or less the same: thirty feet wide and twenty-three feet high. Overall, according to Bornemann, more than 35 million cubic feet of anhydrite were extracted—in other words, some 3 million tons. None of the prisoners knew how the tunnels and galleries had been dug out. Various rumors spread. Sadron simply wrote: “I was told that the digging of the tunnels had begun toward the end of World War I.” Others added that it had been done by Russian prisoners. The idea that it may have been the outcome of a commonplace mining activity, of the kind that had been ongoing in the Harz region for centuries, sprang to no one’s mind.
At the end of the 1930s, the WIFO had transformed the halls into a hydrocarbon depot, with gasoline reservoirs and tanks. When the war started, its activity increased, and a wide variety of goods came to be stockpiled in the underground halls. The labor force required for this stockpiling activity was initially German. In 1943 it comprised a certain number of foreign workers, in particular Czechs and French from the STO.
THE WIFO’S OTHER ACTIVITIES. In 1940, the WIFO was put in charge of the material recovery of war booty and requisitioned raw materials. Branch operations were set up, in particular in Paris and Brussels. Their activity was looked into, after the war, by the French Service for Financial Investigations in Germany. The French historian Jacques Delarue devoted the first part of his book Trafics et Crimes sous l’Occupation (Trafficking and Crime During the Occupation) to the “underside of the black market” and the role played in this domain by various German organizations, paying particular attention to the Rohstoffhandelsgesellschaft or Raw Materials Trading Company, known as the ROGES, a filial of the WIFO, created in 1940.60
Delarue describes its functioning as follows: “The role of the ROGES company, though purely administrative, and consequently unspectacular, was nevertheless of capital importance. It was this company that centralized, first of all through book-keeping, as well as materially, all goods sent to Germany. Every forty-eight hours, the purchasing organizations would announce the delivery of goods by category. The ROGES supervised the accuracy of the deliveries, which it had shipped duty free, as the property of the Wehrmacht, taking full responsibility for the duration of the whole shipping operation, which was carried out by an accredited transport company.
“It was also the ROGES which received the funds attributed by the delegate of the Four-Year Plan, and which advanced the necessary currencies to the purchasing offices for buying goods on the black market. And, lastly, it was the ROGES that resold these same goods, in Germany, to the firms designated by the distribution service, at prices fixed by the national economic offices. The resale prices being lower than the purchase prices, a compensation fund at the Finance Ministry covered the difference as well as the ROGES’ operating expenses. But all of this was, of course, nothing but a book-keeping game and a means of control, the ‘purchases’ in France being covered by the occupation expenses, which meant that the goods cost nothing whatsoever.”
It is clear that the WIFO, either directly or through its filial the ROGES, played a leading role in Germany’s war economy. And it is clear that it had the ability to take on and carry out an undertaking as large as the digging out of the Kohnstein underground passages. It is also clear that, set up by the Ministry of the Economy and linked to the Four-Year Plan administration, it depended on Göring,61 for whom, moreover, it facilitated the “acquisition” of artworks. It is not surprising that Göring, in vain as it turned out, intervened to avoid the WIFO’s eviction from the Kohnstein in late August 1943. Nor is it surprising that it was necessary to move the metals and various goods out of the Kohnstein halls, as will be seen further along.