In the course of 1944, the fate of thousands of prisoners in the Dora camp and the tunnel factory as well as in the various camps and Kommandos that were being set up throughout the Mittelraum depended on initiatives and rivalries between teams in positions of power that were not always homogeneous, each of which had its own ties to the führer with his shifting priorities. The aim of this chapter is to attempt to introduce some order into a confusing story based in large part on the later memories of some of the protagonists, which have been used by other authors with varying degrees of goodwill or hostility. The most recent studies, which are more qualified, nevertheless give us a fairly good idea of what happened.
On the one hand, a Mittelwerk complex, including the tunnel factory and the Dora camp properly speaking, was still intact along with a few ancillary Kommandos. The chapters in part 3 of this book deal with this complex and its relationship to what was left of the Peenemünde base. On the other hand, the SS under the direction of Kammler undertook a major works project using a workforce made up of prisoners in various parts of the Reich, particularly the Mittelraum. Those work sites and the corresponding camps will be mentioned in part 4.
Some of the workforce was initially moved around between the Mittelwerk complex and the new work sites, under the authority of the Buchenwald command. In the autumn of 1944, however, the SS put up Dora as an autonomous camp, bringing most of the Mittelraum sites under its authority. This was the situation prevailing in particular in the first quarter of 1945, which will be described in part 5.
Whereas the notion of Mittelraum, encompassing the Harz region and northern Thuringia, is a convenient geographical expression, there was a well-defined Sperrgebiet Mittelbau under the direct authority of Kammler, within a radius of twenty and later thirty miles from Nordhausen.1
Chapter 1 dealt with the military situation in Germany in mid-1943, when the story of Dora first began. From then on, the situation gradually grew worse on all fronts.
On the Eastern Front the retreat first became obvious in the Ukraine: the Soviets took back Kiev on November 6, 1943, Odessa on April 10, 1944, and Sebastopol on May 9. In the north the siege of Leningrad ended on January 27. In July 1944 the Soviets arrived first in Minsk, then in Vilnius, Lublin, Lvov, and Brest-Litovsk; they were at the gates of eastern Prussia and on the Vistula across from Warsaw. Blizna had to be evacuated. In August 1944, Romania switched camps, followed by Bulgaria in September, while Finland laid down its weapons. In October the British were in Athens. By the end of 1944 the Germans had abandoned Macedonia, Serbia, and Albania. On December 27, Hungary was invaded and Budapest was surrounded.
In Italy the Allies took Monte Cassino in May 1944, entered Rome in June, Florence in August, and Ravenna in December.
The Allies landed in Normandy on June 6 and in Provence on August 15. They reached Paris on August 25, Lyon on September 3, Antwerp on September 4, Luxembourg on September 10, and Strasbourg on November 23. By this time German territory was directly threatened: the Americans took Aachen on October 21 and Düren on December 12. Hitler decided on a counteroffensive in the Ardennes that began on December 16, but Bastogne was relieved on December 26.
By the end of 1944 in the East as well as the West, the conquest of Germany was drawing near.
The various teams or factions involved in German politics in 1944 paid close attention to Hitler’s decisions, either in order to comply with them as best they could or to attempt to influence them in one direction or another. Various alliances developed or dissolved depending on the moment, but the power relationships were never perfectly clear. It took an event like the failed assassination attempt of July 20, aimed directly at the Führer, to generate clear-cut decision-making. It seems legitimate to divide the story of 1944 into two periods, before and after that date.
It is striking, as Speer reported, that the landing in Normandy did not disturb the routine of daily life in Berchtesgaden, where Hitler had been settled for several months.2 The date of June 6 made no difference in this respect. Hitler’s residence was called variously the Berghof, or Obersalzberg or Berchtesgaden. All three names are still used, according to each author’s preference.
As mentioned earlier, at the end of 1943, Albert Speer’s influence had reached its peak. He had all of German industrial production under his authority, since Walter Funk, minister of the economy, had handed over to him all prerogatives stemming from the Four-Year Plan in September. He was neither in charge of aircraft construction, which was under the authority of Marshal Erhard Milch, nor of shipbuilding, which came under the authority of Adm. Karl Dönitz, though he had no personal conflicts with either Funk or Milch or Dönitz.
In fact, if his memoirs are to be believed, it was with Hitler’s “inner circle” that Speer was not on good terms; this included Martin Bormann, head of the Chancellery, his deputy Hans Lammers, and Marshal Wilhelm Keitel.3 The old cronies from the early days of Nazism, who often became Gauleiter, such as Fritz Sauckel in Thuringia, also took a dim view of him. Each one tried to preserve his authority over his own territory against the initiatives of the minister of armaments. As for Göring and Goebbels, his relationship with them varied according to circumstances. On the whole he had solid support in the army, from Gen. Heinz Guderian, for example, but he ran up against the ambition of Himmler and the SS.
He relied on the technicians, civilians and military, who held him in esteem and sought his support. He was particularly involved with the specialists at Peenemünde and Mittelwerk, and therefore particularly anxious to see V2 testing resume rapidly, using rockets produced by the Mittelwerk factory, the factory of the Dora Tunnel. The first tests in Blizna came to nothing.
Speer’s situation was seriously compromised when he fell ill in January 1944. He was suffering from an inflammation of his left knee and had to be hospitalized on January 18. He was treated by Dr. Gebhardt at the Hohenlychen Hospital, which was under the authority of the SS.4 Hohenlychen is located north of Brandenburg, about seven and a half miles from Ravensbriick. (This same hospital will be mentioned once again in connection with events in April 1945.)
Speer was above all completely exhausted, and he had trouble running his ministry from his hospital bed. On February 10 he fell into a coma for three days with various complications: Friedrich Koch, sent by Hitler’s physician, remained at his bedside. He recovered and was able to leave Hohenlychen on March 18 for a period of convalescence. He spent a few days in Klessheim, near Salzburg, where he received a number of visits, including one from Hitler, and then went on to Meran (Merano) in South Tyrol, which was attached de facto to the Reich since the Italian capitulation. There he was informed of the decisions taken in his absence.5
During the three-month period when Speer was removed from power, a number of events took place, including the arrest and later the release of von Braun. What is known about this subject comes from the testimony of von Braun and Dornberger, which Neufeld has scrupulously analyzed.6 The dates indicated here are only approximate, for want of conclusive documents.
It all began when von Braun (who was an SS officer, as has already been noted) was called by Himmler to his Hochwald headquarters in eastern Prussia sometime in February 1944. Himmler recommended that von Braun work more closely with Kammler to solve the problems of the V2. Von Braun claims to have replied that the problems were purely technical and that he was confident Dornberger would help him. It appears that von Braun had been under surveillance since October by the SD, which was drawing up a report against him as well as against Klaus Riedel and Helmut Gröttrup. They were said to have expressed regret at an engineer’s home one evening that they were not working on a spaceship, and that they had the feeling the war was not going well. Kohler, who was eager to share anecdotes, noted that they were denounced by “a young, very attractive woman dentist.”7
Von Braun was arrested on the above-mentioned grounds, no doubt on February 22, and taken to Stettin. Riedel and Gröttrup were arrested the next day as well as von Braun’s younger brother, Magnus, a chemical engineer and pilot in the Luftwaffe who had been assigned to Peenemünde on the Wasserfall project. Von Braun remained imprisoned for two weeks without any idea of the charges against him. Dornberger was called to Berchtesgaden (from Schwedt) to be informed of the arrests by Keitel, but he was not allowed to intervene on their behalf with Hitler. It was only through the Abwehr in Berlin that he was able to obtain the conditional release of von Braun, who was never bothered again, nor was his brother. It appears that Speer, too, despite his illness, intervened on their behalf. Riedel and Gröttrup were also criticized for their political sympathies prior to 1933, yet they, too, were released. Riedel died in an accident in August. Gröttrup appears to have been under surveillance for a longer period. He was to be found in Thuringia in 1945, and later on, in Russia.
At the time of the “duel for the conquest of space,”8 all this history would be used to enhance von Braun’s image. At the time it was one more episode in the rivalry between Speer and Himmler, who thus suffered a temporary setback.
On April 19, Speer sent a memorandum to Hitler from Meran in response to the latter’s decision to build six huge underground factories to protect the aviation industry from bombing and Dorsch’s assurance that the project could be completed in six months. Gitta Sereny recalls in detail9 the events that followed the receipt of Speer’s memorandum: Hitler’s hostile reaction, rumors of Speer’s resignation, a message of affection addressed by Hitler to Speer, and Speer’s return to his position of authority, as Hitler could not do without him at the head of industry. On May 8, 1944, Speer was back in his office in Berlin and started out on a new round of inspection tours throughout Germany. Dorsch remained at the head of the Todt Organization in the occupied countries. He was a personal friend of Himmler and had taken part in the 1923 putsch in Munich.10 Nevertheless, Speer retained his authority over building within the Reich.
During Speer’s absence the SS was successful in one endeavor, however. Kammler was placed in charge of equipping the underground sites for the aviation industry using concentration camp workers. Hitler promised to provide him with contingents of Hungarian Jews for that purpose.11 The project was independent of the one that he examined with Dorsch. In both cases they were at the time priorities for Hitler, who was very concerned about the intensity of the American bombing in late February.
At the beginning of the process, a Jägerstab, a headquarters for fighter plane production, was formed as a result of an agreement on March 1 between Speer and Milch to see to it that aircraft construction would not be penalized in relation to the weapons industry.12 Sauer was appointed head of this headquarters, which included Kammler. It was on this basis that Göring gave orders to Kammler to put the aviation industry underground.
Kammler immediately set up a Sonderstab, a special headquarters bearing his name, which launched construction projects in various parts of the Reich, particularly in the Mittelraum.13 The complex organization of the Kammler Sonderstab was further aggravated by the use of a rather unfamiliar coding system. This will be discussed later in chapter 11 in part 4, which deals mainly with projects B3, B11, B12, etc., and the corresponding camps such as Ellrich and Harzungen resulting from the Kammler Sonderstab’s activity.
While these projects were getting under way, transfers were soon being made to the existing underground sites, but they could offer only a very partial solution to the problem. From the Junkers-Betriebe company, production units from Magdeburg, Köthen, and Leipzig were taken to Nordwerk Niedersachswerfen, the name given as of April 1944 to the northern part of the Kohnstein Tunnel, which had been handed over to Hall 20 by Mittelwerk.14 Other Junkers production units, from Schönebeck, made up the Thyrawerke Rottleberode. There the underground site was a natural gypsum grotto, known as the Heimkehle, the largest of its kind in Germany, located near Rottleberode.15
The first V2 firing toward Paris, and then London, would not take place until September 8, 1944, more than a year after the bombing of Peenemünde and eight months after the first rockets were rolled out from the Mittelwerk factory. The Blizna testing center operated until June, but tests were being performed simultaneously on the island of Greifswalder Oie, near Peenemünde.16
Apparently the first rockets that were delivered in early 1944 had a number of defects, which were not surprising given the condition of the factory at the time. Leaks and poor soldering were noted, and the electrical system had to be systematically revised by DEMAG in Falkensee, which meant more time and therefore delayed the tests. Serious problems continued at the launches until the spring: rockets exploded or fell back, damaging the firing equipment. In the following months the rockets were observed to disintegrate several thousand feet above the target.
There was still considerable uncertainty about these technical problems when a major meeting was held on May 6, 1944, in the office of Georg Rickhey, the new head of Mittel werk since April 13. He had been chosen by Speer and had a background in industry as manager of a Ruhr subsidiary of DEMAG and manager of the Technical House in Essen.17 The participants at the meeting included, first, General Dornberger, General Rossmann, commanding officer of “Wa Prüf 10,” and five officers from the army’s Ordnance Office (artillerymen); second, four directors of Sonderausschuss A4, including Kunze and Storch (whose name will come up again soon); third, von Braun and Steinhoff; finally, nine representatives of Mittelwerk, including Rickhey, Kettler, Sawatzki, Rudolph, and Förschner, and a representative of Askania, a subcontracting company.
It was actually a summit meeting of all the parties concerned about the success of the rockets, which may have been an exception in terms of its size. One is struck, in passing, by the number of university degrees the participants held. Most of them appear to have had links with Speer in one way or another, and this rapport no doubt explains the “spirit of camaraderie” that characterized the discussion. It was announced that Speer was going back to work full-time, which was a cause for celebration.
The participants toured the factory on this occasion, naturally without going to visit the still occupied “dormitories,” but they might have crossed paths with hundreds of despised prisoners in the factory, even in the mildest Kommandos. The SS was represented at the meeting only at the level of Förschner, who was the camp commander, and as such, one of the directors of Mittelwerk. The minutes of the meeting contain no mention of his taking part.
Indeed, many of the questions discussed were of an ordinary, technical nature and could well have been brought up in any large firm in peacetime, such as production delays due to modifications resulting from tests, the problem of not having an up-to-date list of spare parts, the need for double-checking, once at the subcontractors’ and again upon receipt at the Mittelwerk factory, and so on.
As was customary in this type of meeting, the lack of manpower was used to explain some of the problems, and it was not surprising that Kammler was asked to provide eighteen hundred additional prisoners. The latter ignored the request in any event, as the prisoners sent from Buchenwald at the time went on to Ell-rich, Harzungen, or Wieda.
In the minutes, which seem, by their sheer banality, to have been very faithfully recorded, one sentence stands out, attracting the reader’s attention some fifty years on. The discussion concerned the disadvantages of having production of the Rudermaschinen (the servomotors for aerodynamic control of the rocket) too widely dispersed from a geographical standpoint. They were being manufactured in Mittelwerk, Saarbruck, Litzmannstadt (the new name of Lodz), and by two Parisian companies (“2 Pariser Firmen”). It appeared advisable to group all this special production together at Mittelwerk and transfer both the machines and the workforce.
At this point a remark was made (it happened to be made by Storch, but that is neither here nor there) without drawing any conclusion: “Einsatz französischer Arbeiter im MW nur Einkleidung möglich” [We cannot use French workers unless they are made to wear the uniform]—by which everyone understood he meant “striped prisoner’s pajamas.” For Storch it was a banal observation given the situation. The fact that it would mean arresting and deporting French civilians was not his concern, and there is nothing to indicate that he himself was in favor of this solution. On the other hand, if the Gestapo and the SS were to take care of supplying the manpower, they would know how to put it to use. In any event, it never occurred. Yet the degree to which the concentration camp system had become widespread, which leaps out of the page from this simple, isolated sentence, is no doubt significant.
Whatever may have been their manpower needs, there was no question at the time of relying on Hitler to give priority to manufacturing V2s. Indeed, the Luftwaffe’s V1s were practically ready to be launched on London. The first firing in that direction took place on June 13, only one week after the landing in Normandy, when it was still possible to harbor some illusions. The device could be quickly mass-produced, which pleased Hitler.18
The fact that, for a number of weeks in mid-1944, Hitler showed less interest in V2s was an obstacle to giving it priority, but it allowed Dornberger and von Braun time to analyze the problems. In Blizna they went so far as to station themselves on the actual targets to see more clearly what was happening, and von Braun nearly got himself killed. The story of that adventure is one of the reasons behind the later “gesture” toward von Braun.19
It now appears after the fact that this period served above all to draw up an indispensable list of parts, taking into account the constant changes resulting from the tests, to be applied both at Peenemünde and Mittelwerk. It was said that by the end of the war some sixty-five thousand changes had been made, usually in details, which, from a technical standpoint, is not aberrant.20 At the time, prisoners who found themselves working as “inspectors” or warehouse keepers had an impression of gentle chaos that hardly disturbed the Meister.
At Peenemünde, von Braun and the others were not restricted to developing V2s. They had other tasks, particularly designing an antiaircraft missile for the Wasserfall (waterfall) program initiated in 1942. In August 1944, one-fourth of the workforce at Peenemünde was assigned to the program.21 The Luftwaffe was officially in charge, though in June 1944 aircraft production was transferred to the Armaments Ministry (and Milch resigned).22
Various tests failed until June 13, when a V2, equipped with Wasserfall missile guidance, was launched in Peenemünde. The rocket veered off course and burst in the air above the Swedish town of Kalmar, which would later make it possible for the Allies to collect a great amount of varied debris from the site.23
The intense bombing of Peenemünde in August 1943 shows that the British took very seriously the risk of a German rocket attack on England, which would have been likely to cause massive destruction and compromise preparations for the landing in Western Europe. At the end of 1943, top-level meetings were held between the British and Americans.24
Their worries were compounded by the discovery that new installations, obviously intended for firing, were being built in the north of France. Corroborating information on the subject was provided by French Resistance fighters25 and British agents in France. Aerial photographs revealed the existence of “ski sites” in particular, edifices resembling giant skis laid backwards, that had to be launching ramps facing London. There were also much larger concrete buildings.
These constructions were scattered between the Pas-de-Calais and Somme regions on the one hand and the Cotentin on the other, designed to send rockets to either London or ports in southern England. Within the scope of Operation Crossbow, launched in December 1943, an air offensive was launched on the installations and severely damaged them. The Germans then changed their technique, pretending all the while that they were maintaining their activity on the “ski sites.” They built dozens of modified sites that were rudimentary and camouflaged, where the ramp would not be mounted until just a few days before the beginning of the offensive.26
It began on June 13, after the Normandy landing, and on June 15 244 V1s were launched within twenty-four hours. The two-thousandth firing took place on June 29. By early July the rate had reached 200 a day from Pas-de-Calais and the Somme. They caused considerable damage, especially in London, and a million Londoners abandoned the city for the provinces. Starting on June 17 the term V1 was used in the press by Propaganda Minister Goebbels to designate the Fi 103. V stood for Vergeltungswaffen—or retaliation weapons.
The V1s were not the Allies’ sole preoccupation. The fact that Peenemünde was being little used for launchings intrigued the Allies until the Polish Resistance supplied information drawing attention to the Blizna site at the end of December 1943. Photographs finally made it possible to identify a rocket on May 5, 1944.27
It was not until June, however, that more specific information was obtained from the debris that had fallen onto Kalmar, Sweden, from the rocket that went off its path and exploded there. After vigorously protesting, the Swedish refused to return the debris to the Germans but agreed to turn it over to the British. A cargo plane was discreetly sent over from England to pick it up. The reconstruction carried out in Farnborough in July was deceptive, for, as mentioned earlier, the guidance system belonged to a Wasserfall missile.28 Yet the Allies did find out the weight of the nose cone, which had hitherto been overestimated, and the presence of serial numbers indicated that the offensive was drawing near.
McGovern tells the long story of the recovery of another V2 by the Polish Resistance and the transport of the main parts (with the real guidance system) by a Dakota which was sent to pick them up from the base in Brindisi.29 It was ultimately brought to Great Britain after the Swedish V2.
The failed assassination attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944, resulted in Himmler’s being appointed head of the army inside Germany to replace Fromm. The conspirators were members of Fromm’s staff, and he could not have been totally in the dark about their plans. He was quickly imprisoned and would be executed in March 1945.30 Since September 1943, Himmler had been Reichsminister of the interior. Now he controlled the country from both a civilian and military standpoint. In actual fact, Fromm’s real successor was SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Jüttner, who was head of the headquarters of the Waffen-SS.31
Fromm, to whom the artillerymen of Peenemünde reported, had long been one of Speer’s allies against the SS. When he was arrested, Speer lost a key figure in his system. Dornberger, Zanssen, and Gen. Erich Schneider had been Becker’s deputies in the Ordnance Office in the early thirties. Schneider, who had been head of the office since 1943, was arrested and then released through Speer’s intervention and had the charges dismissed, but he did not resume his position.32 Zanssen took up a command position on the Western Front.33 Dornberger, whose loyalty was unquestionable, remained isolated.
On August 6, Himmler gave full authority to Kammler to speed up the use of V2s,34 which had become the focus of German hopes as the V1s had merely spread panic in London. By this time the English were stopping them with barriers of antiaircraft guns and captive balloons, and fighter planes also shot them down. On July 31, the Americans finally broke through the lines at Avranches.
The Allies were advancing quickly by the end of August and the beginning of September: Paris was liberated on August 25, Amiens on August 31, Brussels on September 3, and Antwerp on September 4. As a result, any firing sites that had not been destroyed fell into their hands between the lower Seine and the lower course of the Meuse. That was exactly what happened to the Wizernes Bunker, intended for V2 launching, which was bombed and left uncompleted,35 along with the liquid oxygen plant in Éperlecques.
The first V2s were fired on September 8. A rocket launched from the Ardennes towards Paris landed in Maisons-Alfort. Two rockets fell on London, in Chiswick and Epping. From now on the firings were carried out from mobile ramps, as Dornberger had advised from the beginning. They circulated in the wooded expanses of Haagsche Bosch, behind The Hague, in Holland, and in Western Germany. The targets were London and Antwerp as well as Liège.
Jüttner, eager to avoid being outflanked by Kammler on Reich territory, put Dornberger in charge of training battery personnel and delivering V2s to the borders of Germany.36 This balance of responsibilities was to remain in place until the country was invaded. The Luftwaffe remained in charge of V1 firing, and manufacturing was then transferred to the Dora Tunnel as will be shown further on. The firings were aimed at Antwerp and Liège.
After July 20 the final reorganization of Speer’s production system took place, which no doubt had been in the works for some time. The main change concerned the Peenemünde base, which had remained a military establishment. As mentioned earlier, it had been the Heimat-Artillerie Park 11, or HAP, of Karlshagen since June 1, 1943.
As of August 1, 1944, a new company was set up under the name Elektromechanische Werke GmbH, Karlshagen, or EW, which took over the development unit’s activity for the Armaments Ministry, just like Mittelwerk. The managing director was Paul Storch, a director of Sonderausschuss A4, who came from Siemens.37 He had taken part in the May 6 meeting at Rickhey’s office. Peenemünde continued to belong to the military, which rented it to EW. The Versuchsplatz Karlshagen, the operations base, remained under the command of General Rossmann, the head of Wa Prüf 10.38
At the same time Kunze was placed at the head of Sonderausschuss A4 and Degenkolb pushed aside. After making insulting remarks about various Nazi leaders, he was interned in a clinic from which he reappeared in April 1945 as a liaison agent between the ministry and Kammler.39 Kunze, whose offices had been transferred to Thuringia in early 1944,40 was thus coordinating three companies: Mittelwerk with Rickhey, EW with Storch, and a third company managing Rudolf Hermann’s wind tunnel in Kochel. The companies that had been set up for the engine testing centers in Lehesten and Redl-Zipf41 merged with Mittelwerk, which also took over the Ni Agency of WIFO on August 15.42
The new organization was less complicated and did not disturb Dornberger or von Braun or their deputies, whose expertise protected them completely from any interference. It was impossible to do without them, just as Hitler could not do without Speer at the head of industry. Kammler was powerful but he knew nothing about rockets, and they could not be abandoned.
From August 1944 to January 1945, work continued at Peenemünde despite a diminished workforce resulting from transfers to Mittelwerk as well as American bombing on July 18, August 2, and August 25, and frequent air raid warnings.43 Von Braun saw to it that the employment of his staff was justified by various tasks.
A great deal of work was still required on the V2s and for Wasserfall.44 The team took up earlier studies on a winged A9 rocket, renamed the A4b, and tests took place in December 1944 and January 1945, unsuccessfully, which was not a surprise to anyone.45 At the request of the Luftwaffe they also worked on a small antiaircraft missile called the Taifun (typhoon).46 They even went so far as to devote a considerable amount of time to imagining a sort of platform towed by a submarine from which V2s could be launched on New York. A production contract was concluded with the Vulkan shipbuilding company in Stettin.47
Von Braun remained in close contact with Mittelwerk and sometimes went into the tunnel factory. One occasion is recalled in a letter he sent on August 15, 1944, to “Dear Mr. Sawatzski,” including, among other things, the following paragraphs: “During one of my latest visits to Mittelwerk, you spontaneously suggested that we take advantage of the good technical training of prisoners available to you and at Buchenwald to organize additional development work and construction in small units. On that occasion, you introduced me to a French physics professor and prisoner who has been working until now on checking mixing devices (Mischgeräte), who would be particularly capable of running such a production unit. I immediately accepted your proposal. Together with Dr. Simon, I went to Buchenwald to see other able prisoners, and as you suggested, managed to have Standartenführer Pister transfer them to Mittelwerk.”
This text is interesting for a number of reasons. It shows that von Braun was making frequent visits to Mittelwerk, that his visits gave him an opportunity to talk about various topics, including the prisoners, and that he was quite capable of conducting procedures within the concentration camp system, even with the camp commander at Buchenwald.
As it happens, the rest of the story of the French professor assigned to the Mischgeräte is known. His name is Charles Sadron, and he gave the firsthand account of the disinfecting process mentioned earlier. This is how he tells it:48” To be honest, however, I have to point out that I did meet one man who showed an almost generous attitude towards me. It was Professor von Braun, a member of the technical HQ, who developed the aerial torpedoes. Von Braun came to see me in the production unit.
“He was a young, very Germanic-looking man who spoke perfect French. He expressed his regret, in courteous, measured terms, at seeing a French professor in such a state of misery, and then he proposed that I come and work in his laboratory. Of course, it was out of the question that I accept his offer. I harshly refused. Von Braun excused himself and smiled as he left. Later on, I was to learn that, despite my refusal, he had nevertheless tried several times to improve my situation—in vain by the way.” This text was published in 1947, before von Braun had become famous.
In chapter 6 the close relationship between the concentration camp system and the factories working on the V2s was mentioned. Two further components should be added.
The first was the existence of an underground factory in a closed down railway tunnel where special vehicles were equipped to transport V2s. Its code name was Rebstock (vine plant) because it was located in a winegrowing region near Dernau/Ahr in the Rhineland. The prisoners who worked there came from the Natzweiler-Struthof camp.49
The second was the existence of a new concentration camp at Peenemünde itself,50 with prisoners taken mainly from Sachsenhausen. This camp will be discussed at the end of chapter 10.