Dornberger and von Braun meet Hitler

On 7 July 1943 the creators of the German A4 long-range rocket flew to Adolf Hitler’s headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair near Rastenburg (Kętrzyn) in East Prussia: Generalmajor Walter Dornberger, head of the rocket branch of the Army Ordnance Office, and his technical director at the Peenemünde establishment, the 31-year-old Wernher von Braun. They showed Hitler a colour film of the successful rocket launch of 3 October 1942, together with models of the launch sites. The impression was enormous: Hitler, who for years had not believed in rockets, ordered that the A4 programme be given the highest priority in German armaments production. From this decision grew the mass production of the weapon the world came to know in 1944 as the V-2, and the underground factory in which concentration camp prisoners assembled the rockets.

The long road to the Wolf’s Lair

The A4 had been developed at Peenemünde since the late 1930s as an army programme. Hitler had seen rocket engines at the Kummersdorf proving ground in March 1939, but asked hardly any questions and showed no interest. In the years that followed the programme’s priority rating varied, and its managers had to fight the Luftwaffe, the navy and tank production for steel, specialists and money. The first successful launch of an A4 on 3 October 1942 changed the situation. On 22 December 1942 Hitler signed an order to prepare series production, even before the rocket was ready. The Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, set up a special A4 committee headed by the industrialist Gerhard Degenkolb, who had previously organised locomotive production.

The rocket, however, was not yet perfected. In the spring of 1943 many test rounds exploded on the launch pad or broke up in the air on re-entering the denser layers of the atmosphere. Its rival was the Luftwaffe’s Fieseler Fi 103 flying bomb, later the V-1: much cheaper, but slow, low-flying and vulnerable to being shot down. On 26 May 1943 a commission at Peenemünde that included Speer, Field Marshal Erhard Milch and Admiral Karl Dönitz watched launches of both weapons. It found no decisive advantage in either and recommended producing both. A few days later Dornberger was promoted to Generalmajor. What was still missing was Hitler’s personal backing, without which no programme in the Third Reich could expect priority access to raw materials and workers.

A film at the Führer’s headquarters

On the morning of 7 July 1943 Dornberger, von Braun and the head of the guidance department at Peenemünde, Ernst Steinhoff, flew to East Prussia in a Heinkel He 111 bomber piloted by Steinhoff himself. This was two days after the start of the German offensive at Kursk, when the headquarters was preoccupied above all with news from the Eastern Front. According to Dornberger’s memoirs the audience was set for 11.30 a.m. but was postponed until 5 p.m. Dornberger, who had not seen Hitler for four years, was shocked by his appearance: a stooped, aged, tired man. Some studies place the presentation itself on the following day, 8 July; most accounts, based on Dornberger’s memoirs, assign it to the evening of 7 July.

Present in the headquarters cinema were, among others, the Chief of the Armed Forces High Command (OKW), Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the Chief of the Operations Staff, General Alfred Jodl, and Speer. Von Braun provided a live commentary on the film, which had already made a strong impression on visitors from Berlin: the assembly hall at Peenemünde, the rocket being raised to the vertical, the great launch stand and finally the launch of 3 October. Dornberger then presented the organisation of the future combat units and the mobile launchers, and von Braun a model of a huge concrete launch bunker that the Organisation Todt had already begun building on the Channel coast near Watten in northern France.

Hitler was delighted. He liked the bunker model so much that he demanded several such structures, although Dornberger argued that mobile launchers would be harder to detect and cheaper. According to Dornberger, Hitler asked whether the rocket could carry ten tonnes of explosive instead of one, and whether 2,000 could be produced a month. Dornberger replied that a heavier rocket meant several years of new work, and that production would be limited above all by the supply of the ethyl alcohol that fuelled the A4. Even so, the mood of the meeting did not change. Dornberger remembered Hitler telling him that he had apologised to only two men in his life: to Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, to whom he had not listened when Brauchitsch stressed the importance of rocket research, and to Dornberger himself, because he had not believed his work would succeed. Hitler is also said to have added that had Germany possessed this weapon in 1939, there would have been no war. These remarks are known only from Dornberger’s account, written after the war.

What mattered most was the decision: the A4 programme received the highest priority in German armaments production, and men, materials and machinery were henceforth to go to it ahead of other orders. At Speer’s suggestion Hitler also conferred the title of professor on von Braun. Von Braun recalled that Speer whispered something to Hitler, who then came over, shook his hand and congratulated “Herr Professor”. According to German studies, the certificate of appointment bearing Hitler’s signature is dated 8 July 1943. A few days earlier, on 28 June, von Braun had been promoted to the SS rank of Sturmbannführer; he had been a member of the SS since 1940.

Production plans and slave labour

After the return from the Wolf’s Lair the programme was given everything it had previously had to fight for. The head of the technical office in Speer’s ministry, Karl-Otto Saur, immediately set a target of 2,000 rockets a month, although there was no prospect of so much fuel or of training so many launch crews; according to Dornberger, the Reich’s alcohol production capacity alone was enough for at most some 900 launches a month. The plan provided for assembly at several plants: at Peenemünde, at the Zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen, at the Rax works in Wiener Neustadt and at the DEMAG factory near Berlin.

Labour, however, was in short supply. As early as April 1943 the engineer Arthur Rudolph, responsible for starting production at Peenemünde, had backed the idea of employing concentration camp prisoners, and from June prisoners from Buchenwald were being brought to Peenemünde. On top of that came thousands of forced labourers from Poland and the USSR and prisoners of war held in camps at Karlshagen and Trassenheide. The minutes of a meeting on 4 August 1943, signed by Dornberger, recorded that the ratio of German workers to concentration camp prisoners was to be 1:15, or at most 1:10. In practice, then, Hitler’s decision of 7 July meant that the A4 would be built largely by people forced into slave labour.

The raid on Peenemünde and Dora

From the spring of 1943 British intelligence had been gathering information about the rocket weapon, including from the Polish underground, and identified rockets at Peenemünde on aerial photographs. On the night of 17–18 August 1943 nearly 600 RAF bombers attacked the establishment. Among those killed was the chief engine designer, Walter Thiel, and several hundred forced labourers from the camp at Trassenheide also died. After the raid Hitler accepted Heinrich Himmler’s proposal to move production underground and staff it with SS prisoners. General Hans Kammler was put in charge of construction on behalf of the SS.

From the end of August 1943 prisoners dug out and extended the tunnels in the Kohnstein hill near Nordhausen in Thuringia, where the underground Mittelwerk factory was set up. At first they lived in the tunnels themselves, without daylight, amid dust and damp, and without enough water or food. The camp, which in time became independent as Mittelbau-Dora, became one of the harshest places in the concentration camp system. Historians estimate that between 16,000 and 20,000 of some 60,000 prisoners died in the Mittelbau-Dora complex and during its evacuation, among them many Poles, Soviet citizens and Frenchmen. The programme’s leadership, including Dornberger and von Braun, knew of these conditions; von Braun visited the Mittelwerk many times.

Where the name V-2 came from

In July 1943 nobody yet spoke of the “V-2”. In documents it was simply the A4 (Aggregat 4), and in the military units often “the device”. The letter V comes from the word Vergeltungswaffe, “retaliation weapon”. Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda first applied it to the Fi 103 flying bomb, used against London in June 1944 as the V-1. The A4 rocket was renamed the V-2 only after the first combat launches in September 1944; the name was introduced internally in the summer and publicly in the autumn of 1944. It was meant to present the bombardment as retaliation for Allied bombing of German cities.

Place in the war

The decision of 7 July 1943 came too late for the rocket to change the course of the war, and it was too costly not to affect other branches of armaments. American bombers attacked the bunker construction site at Watten as early as 27 August 1943, and Allied raids on the factories and launch sites, carried out as part of Operation Crossbow, delayed the weapon’s use. The first combat rockets were fired on 8 September 1944 at Paris and London. By March 1945 the Germans had launched more than 3,000 rockets, mainly at London and Antwerp, killing, according to various estimates, some 5,000–9,000 people. More people died producing them than were killed by the rockets themselves.

In his post-war memoirs Speer counted his support for the programme among his most serious mistakes: vast resources had been swallowed by a weapon that carried less than a tonne of explosive and could not decide the war. At the same time the A4 was the first long-range ballistic missile in history and the first man-made object to reach space. In May 1945 Dornberger and von Braun surrendered to the Americans and, under Operation Paperclip, went to the United States. There von Braun built the Redstone and Saturn V rockets, and his wartime past, including his SS membership and his knowledge of the fate of the Dora prisoners, remained for decades overshadowed by the successes of the American space programme.