By 1941, after two further years spent developing the A-4, Hitler had now become convinced that the work of von Braun’s team was of prime importance. Von Braun was summoned to the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s hideaway in East Prussia, to make a progress report. We do not know what von Braun said but after that August meeting Hitler pronounced that the war might be won decisively if tens of thousands of A-4s were to be produced. At this point the A-4 was far from ready to be mass-produced. It hadn’t even been fully tested. Static tests of the rocket’s engine that had taken place the previous November had been disastrous.
The first test flight of an A-4 didn’t take place until March 1942, and it, too, was a decided failure. A second launch attempt took place in June. Albert Speer, who had recently been appointed Minister of Armaments, was in attendance: ‘Wernher von Braun was beaming,’ he wrote later. ‘For my part, I was thunderstruck at this technical miracle, at its precision and at the way it seemed to abolish the laws of gravity . . .’ And yet even this launch was not entirely successful. Control of the rocket was soon lost and it crashed into the sea 700 yards off the coast. Nor was the next test, in August, problem-free, though for the first time in history a machine broke the sound barrier. A number of scientists had predicted that pressure waves around the rocket would become so strong that as the rocket tried to push its way through the sound barrier it would break apart. In fact there is no physical barrier as such. The rocket did break apart but not for that reason.
With all these delays, it was feared that Speer’s support might be lost, and that meant Hitler’s support would be lost too. Worse, the Luftwaffe had a rival project at Werk West, the V-1, a jet-powered flying bomb, what the Allies would call the doodlebug or cherrystone. Dornberger’s Werk Ost was in danger of losing out. Without the guarantee of a mass attack of thousands of rockets, Hitler was doubtful that the A-4 had a role to play in the war effort. He wasn’t that excited about the V-1 either, and for the same reason. It was left to Speer to convince him that both projects were worthwhile and complemented each other.
An entirely successful launch of an A-4 finally took place on 3 October 1942. Carrying a one-ton (presumably dummy) warhead, the rocket reached a speed of 3,100 mph, arced 56 miles into the sky and came down under control, landing exactly where it was meant to land, confirmed by marker dye released into the water where the rocket hit the sea over 100 miles from the coast. That night in the officers’ club, Dornberger told the crew that the spaceship had been born.
At that time, where the atmosphere ended and space began had not been universally agreed upon. The American definition put space at anywhere beyond 50 miles above the Earth’s surface. By this definition Dornberger was correct. A later, international threshold, the Kármán line, defines outer space as anywhere 100 kms (61 miles) above the Earth’s surface. It would not be long before an A-4 would break that barrier too.
On 11 December Heinrich Himmler, Chief of German Police and the main architect of the Holocaust, made his first visit to Peenemünde. Himmler had taken an early interest in von Braun, and would continue to do so. In the spring of 1940 von Braun had been invited/commanded by Himmler to join the SS. Von Braun asked the advice of his boss, Dornberger, who told him that the SS had been trying to get a finger in the pie of the rocket business and that for the sake of the group’s work he would have to join. He was given the rank of Untersturmführer, the equivalent of Lieutenant. He was promoted to Obersturmführer in November 1941 and to Hauptsturmführer (Captain) the month before Himmler’s visit. Von Braun said that he was notified of the promotions by letter and never did anything deliberately to advance his career in the SS. In an attempt to impress Himmler during his visit, an A-4 was launched in his honour. The rocket crashed four seconds after it left the launch pad.
Even after a successful launch in April 1943, von Braun was still of the opinion that the A-4 was not ready for mass production. Dornberger thought von Braun was too slow and meticulous, and evidently so did Speer, who sent in Gerhard Degenkolb, an engineering manager, to take control of production. Degenkolb was a fanatical Nazi, dictatorial and bull-necked. He immediately saw that if Hitler’s target was to be achieved the production process needed overhauling. Von Braun named Degenkolb and his cohorts Speer’s muscle men. Dornberger resisted as best he could Degenkolb’s attempts to wrest control of the project from Army Ordnance.
Recent victories by the Allied forces, at Stalingrad and in North Africa, put the A-4 back in the spotlight. Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch was put in overall command at Peenemünde and assigned 3,500 officers and enlisted men to boost the workforce and rocket production there. In June 1943 Hitler personally demanded that 1,000 A-4s be produced a month, ready for an attack on London planned to begin that October. In order to increase production, an assembly line was set up and 1,400 prisoners from concentration camps were brought in. They were mainly Russian POWs, employed against the terms of the Geneva Convention. They were imprisoned at Peenemünde in a small camp constructed in the basement of building F-1.
On 28 June Himmler made his second visit to Peenemünde. The following day two A-4s were launched. The first crashed into part of the site and destroyed several aircraft. The second launch was a success. Himmler promoted von Braun to Sturmbannführer (Major). Dornberger had recently been made Generalmajor (Brigadier General).
On 7 July Dornberger and von Braun were commanded by Hitler to make a presentation that very same day at the Wolf’s Lair. Von Braun brought along a film of a rocket launch he had commissioned from a professional film-maker. Hitler had never seen an A-4 in flight. The cameraman had employed a number of cinematic techniques. The film was in colour and reshot from various angles for dramatic effect. Von Braun spoke of the rocket with great enthusiasm. Dornberger told Hitler not to think of the ballistic missile as a wonder weapon. Hitler either wasn’t listening or ignored Dornberger. ‘A strange, fanatical light flared up in Hitler’s eyes,’ Dornberger later wrote. ‘But what I want is annihilation – annihilating effect!’ Hitler apologized twice for not previously believing in the work. He said that he had dreamed that their rockets would not work, but that he now revoked that dream. He ordered the production rate be increased to 1,800 rockets a month, with the threat of arrest if the target was criticized. He said that only German workers were to be used for fear of sabotage.
At the end of the meeting Hitler shook von Braun’s hand and said, ‘Professor, I would like to congratulate you on your success,’ which was how von Braun learned that he been made a professor. Speer said that Hitler would often talk of von Braun after that, bringing him up during his increasingly maniacal monologues, comparing von Braun’s invention with the achievements in their young years of Alexander the Great and Napoleon.
After Hitler had left, Speer introduced von Braun to the Nazi economist Hans Kehrl saying, ‘Congratulate the youngest professor of the Third Reich.’ Von Braun was so euphoric he forgot about the warning about talking only of the war and not of space, and began to speak animatedly to Kehrl about the future possibility of flying to the moon. When he got home Kehrl told his wife how at headquarters he had just met a madman.
To meet Hitler’s production target, more labour was brought in from the camps. Degenkolb and Dornberger ignored Hitler’s order that only German workers be used, and soon there would be 15 concentration camp workers to every German worker.
Increased activity at Peenemünde attracted the attention of the Allied forces. At 11pm on 17 August, after an evening of drinking, and soon after he had fallen asleep, von Braun was woken by the sound of sirens. Waves of British bombers had arrived. The attack was massive: 600 bombers dropped 1,800 tons of bombs, and 735 people were killed, half of them POWS and civilian forced labour from the camps. Walter Thiel, one of the designers of the A-4 rocket engine, was killed along with his wife and their children. Just days before, Thiel had dared to suggest that the A-4 could not be mass-produced and had recommended that its manufacture be abandoned. The Allied operation, named Hydra, had been pushed for by a young intelligence officer named Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law and chairman of a committee for defence against German flying bombs and rockets. The damage to the plants, however, turned out not to be as bad as it first looked. The test stands survived intact. Only two months later, von Braun’s operation was back in business.
The day after the raid, Hitler put Himmler in charge of overall A-4/V-2 production. An order went out that the manufacturing of V-2s was to be moved literally underground, to a series of storage tunnels that had been carved out of the Harz mountains, 250 miles to the south-west of Peenemünde. A new company was established named Mittelwerk, contracted to build 12,000 V-2s. The plan was to construct a truly vast underground factory, but by the end of the war the only operations up and running were the V-2 plant, a small operation that mass-produced V-1s, and another that made Junker aircraft engines. Himmler placed SS Brigadier General Kammler in overall charge of the factory. Von Braun was told that he no longer reported to Dornberger – his protector and something of a father figure – but to Kammler directly.
Dornberger and von Braun both loathed Kammler on sight. Probably neither of them would have known at that point about Kammler’s role supervising the construction of the Auschwitz gas chambers, but they had no trouble identifying a ruthless fanatic when they saw one. In turn, Kammler thought von Braun was ‘too young and too childish . . . for the job’.
At the end of August, labourers began to arrive from Buchenwald. For fear of sabotage, Jews were excluded, though some Jews slipped through the identification process. For the next three months the prisoners were set to work extending the tunnels using picks, drills and dynamite in an operation that continued 24 hours a day. Cathedral-like spaces were cut out of the granite mountains. Teetering wooden towers of scaffolding were constructed. The tunnels were thick with dust. Exhausted workers would regularly fall to their deaths: ‘A cry, a thud, that is all, another man takes the victim’s place.’ When von Braun visited the site in October – he was largely based in Peenemünde – there were 4,000 prisoners working in the tunnels. When he came again in November there were 10,000.
For the first months the prisoners worked, ate and slept – on straw or bare rock – in the tunnels themselves. As the numbers grew, a sub-camp of Buchenwald named Mittelbau-Dora was built nearby. Three other local sub-camps would be constructed before the end of the war, at Nordhausen, Ellrich and Harzungen. There were no latrines in the tunnels, and no drinking water. Epidemics of dysentery, typhus and tuberculosis swept through the workforce from the start. Around 20 prisoners died every day, mainly from disease but also starvation, blastings that went wrong or the extreme cold. The workers were beaten with clubs and rubber-tipped copper cable. Some prisoners went mad from the noise. There were mass hangings, with workers often chosen at random, 12 at a time. The wire noose ensured death came slowly. The bodies might be left hanging for days or weeks. One doctor told Speer that he had seen Dante’s Inferno.
At the end of 1943 the V-2 was still unreliable, often breaking up in the air. Of the 39 test firings of the missile that had taken place in the last two years, only 14 had been successful. During one launch, yet another test that attempted to fix the problem of the rocket exploding mid-flight, Dornberger and von Braun were closely following the trajectory of the rocket only to see it lose control and head straight in their direction. Dornberger threw himself to the ground, but von Braun, ever the scientist, held his ground in order to see what would happen. Dornberger said that afterwards von Braun was still standing there, but with a window frame around his neck. The account doesn’t sound very plausible, but it was claimed that von Braun had been similarly stalwart during the Allied bombing raid of Peenemünde.
The production target for December had been 200 V-2s (the targets were forever changing), but only a handful made it through the entire production line, and all were deemed to be of too poor quality to be used and were sent back. A new goal was set: to mass-produce problem-free V-2s by the following April.
A portable crematorium was brought in to Dora in January 1944. Before that, the dead had been sent to be cremated at Buchenwald. Prisoners at Buchenwald were so horrified by the condition of the bodies that some committed suicide rather than be sent to Dora. Others went there to sabotage the factory. Some Dora workers managed to send out intelligence reports useful to the Allies.
On 21 February Himmler summoned von Braun into his presence. ‘I trust you realize that your A-4 rocket has ceased to be an engineer’s toy,’ he told him, ‘and that the German people are eagerly waiting for it.’ He invited von Braun to call on his aid. Von Braun said he was confident in Dornberger and that it was technical problems not red tape that were holding things up. Apparently Himmler laughed and the conversation ended pleasantly.
A month later three SS officers knocked on von Braun’s door at around two or three in the morning. He was instructed to accompany them. He was not being arrested, they said, but being taken into protective custody. Wernher von Braun’s younger brother Magnus and Kurt Riedel (one of the founding members of the Berlin rocket group VfR) were also arrested.
During his period of captivity in a Gestapo cell von Braun turned 32. A car sounded its horn in the street. The driver got out and was allowed to bring in flowers and birthday gifts. One of von Braun’s engineers was in the car waving.
At the end of March charges against him were read out and von Braun was formally interrogated. There was a fat file on him. One document referred to a story he had written as a child. Another document claimed that the reason he held a current pilot’s license was because he planned to fly to England, taking with him plans of the A-4. Remarks he had made at parties that had taken place years earlier were read back to him. He had, apparently, and probably it was true, talked openly about how in the distant future a rocket would be developed and used to send mail between the United States and Europe. He was told that at a party just that month, he had talked about how the war was going badly, and had said that his main ambition was to create a spaceship. Von Braun said the interrogation was like a hallucination.
Dornberger came to the rescue, persuading Speer to intervene on von Braun’s behalf. Dornberger arrived at the prison with a bottle of brandy and a signed document from the Führer’s office granting von Braun conditional release for three months. Two months later Hitler was still grumbling to Speer about the trouble he had been put to, but the Führer told Speer that von Braun would be protected if he was that important to him. It seems likely that the arrest had been instigated by Himmler as a test of von Braun’s value to the Führer. There are no surviving records of the arrest. The events exist as anecdotal accounts written later by Speer, Dornberger and von Braun.
On 13 1944 June the first V-1 fell on London, damaging a railway bridge and a number of houses on Grove Road in Mile End. Six people were killed. The V-1 was technically a flying bomb – effectively an unmanned airplane, the world’s first cruise missile – not a rocket.
On 22 June a V-2 was the first rocket to enter space proper, reaching an altitude of 109 miles.
On 29 August Hitler issued an order to begin the use of V-2s as soon as possible. Himmler told Kammler to accelerate the timetable for V-2 deployment. Just 10 days later, Kammler’s rocket troops successfully launched V-2 rockets from The Hague towards first Paris and then London.
The V-2 was the world’s first ballistic missile, meaning that it was initially guided into an arcing trajectory but then came to earth under gravity. It stood 46 feet tall and weighed 13 tons, of which 1 ton was explosive packed into a warhead. The rocket was powered by alcohol and liquid oxygen fuels delivered by pumps – driven in turn by a steam turbine – to a chamber where the fuels spontaneously ignited. The power of the controlled explosion delivered a thrust of 55,000 lbs, and accelerated the rocket to 3,500 mph. It traced a path up into space and back to Earth again which Thomas Pynchon, in his 1973 novel partly set in London during the period of the V-2 raids, called Gravity’s Rainbow. The rocket was guided by an advanced gyroscope that relayed signals to the fins and to vanes in the exhaust. It had a range of 170 miles. A scientific reconstruction carried out in 2010 showed that a 1-ton V-2 warhead was capable of sending up 3,000 tons of earth, creating a crater over 60 feet wide and nearly 20 feet deep
The first V-2 fired that day exploded in Paris in the Porte d’Italie region of the recently liberated city, causing some damage. There were no casualties. Two more V-2s were launched in the direction of London.
6.43pm on a rainy, overcast autumn evening in London. Sapper Bernard Browning, on leave from the Royal Engineers, was walking down Staveley Road in Chiswick when, without warning, nearly 30,000 lbs of metal and explosive struck the ground nearby at three times the speed of sound. Browning would not have known what killed him. First came the simple presence of the rocket, only then the sound of the rocket arriving. From out of the upper atmosphere, catching up last of all, a sonic boom was heard all over London. There were two other fatalities: 63-year-old Mrs Ada Harrison, and three-year-old Rosemary Clarke (killed by the shock waves; there wasn’t a mark on her body), and 17 people were seriously injured. Rows of houses were reduced to rubble. A few minutes later a second V-2 landed in Epping. There were no casualties. In central London, Duncan Sandys looked up and said, ‘That’s a rocket.’ Only the day before he had assured Londoners that the city was safe: ‘Except possibly for a last few shots the battle of London is over.’
Of the 2,500 rockets that were launched before the offensive came to an end on 17 March 1945, 500 fell on London. In England 2,742 people were killed and 6,467 seriously injured. The worst single attack had taken place at 12.26pm on 25 November 1944 at Woolworth’s in New Cross in South London: 160 people were killed and another 108 seriously injured. Across Europe it is estimated that a further 5,000 people were killed. Around twice as many people died making the V-2s as were killed by them. Hitler had hoped to rain tens of thousands of V-2 missiles on England. In the event no more than 5,000 V-2s were manufactured. In the numbers game that is war, the attacks had done little more than briefly demoralize a country waiting to hear at any moment that Germany had capitulated. The V-2’s role in the war was at an end, but its role in history was about to begin a new chapter.
An unexploded V-2 in Trafalgar Square, 1945