The order for 12,000 V-2 rockets

On 19 October 1943 the Army Ordnance Office (Heereswaffenamt), headed by General Emil Leeb, signed war contract No. 0011-5565/43 with the newly founded company Mittelwerk GmbH for the delivery of 12,000 A4 ballistic missiles – the weapon the world later came to know as the V-2. According to studies of the programme’s history, each rocket was to cost 40,000 Reichsmarks. The contract put on paper the decisions taken in August, after the British raid on Peenemünde: production of the “wonder weapon” was to go underground, into the galleries of the Kohnstein hill in the Harz, and the work there was to be done by concentration camp prisoners.

Some accounts speak of an order placed by the “German War Ministry” with “Mittelwerk”. More precisely, the purchaser was the Army Ordnance Office, which had run the rocket programme from the start, and the party to the contract was the company, not the factory itself – that was only just taking shape in the tunnels.

After the Peenemünde raid

As late as the summer of 1943 the rockets were to be built in three surface plants: at Peenemünde itself, at the Zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen and at the Rax works near Wiener Neustadt. In July, after being shown a film of launches during Dornberger and von Braun’s visit to his headquarters, Adolf Hitler gave the programme top priority in the armaments industry. A few weeks later, during the night of 17–18 August, RAF bombers carried out Operation Hydra, a raid on the Peenemünde establishment. The damage proved smaller than the British believed, but Berlin concluded that surface plants were too exposed to bombing.

The solution was proposed by Heinrich Himmler, who since the spring had been looking for a way to give the SS a say in the rocket programme. He offered concentration camp prisoners as a labour force – cheap, easily replaced and, he argued, a guarantee of secrecy, since the prisoners had no contact with the outside world. Hitler agreed at the end of August. Hitler, Himmler and the armaments minister Albert Speer agreed to move assembly to the extensive system of galleries under the Kohnstein near Nordhausen in Thuringia. Anhydrite had formerly been mined there, and from the mid-1930s the state-owned company Wifo (Wirtschaftliche Forschungsgesellschaft) had been fitting out the workings as an underground store for Wehrmacht fuel and oil. Two parallel main tunnels, linked by several dozen transverse chambers, could quickly be converted into an assembly hall impervious to any bombing.

Construction was entrusted to the SS officer Hans Kammler, head of Office Group C (construction) in the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office. Kammler, an engineer responsible for building all the concentration camps, including the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau, now became one of the key figures of the rocket programme. Formally, Mittelwerk never left the control of Speer’s ministry, but it was Kammler who decided the pace of construction and the fate of the people who carried it out.

The company and the contract

A separate company was set up to run the underground factory. The decision to create it was taken on 21 September 1943 in Speer’s ministry under the direction of Karl Maria Hettlage (PL), head of its economics and finance department, and on 24 September it was formally founded by the state-owned company Rüstungskontor with a capital of one million Reichsmarks. Mittelwerk GmbH (“Central Works”) was a state enterprise in the form of a private company, in which the armaments ministry, the army and the SS all had their people. The first managing director was the engineer Kurt Kettler from the Borsig works, and his deputy – representing the SS – was Otto Förschner, commandant of the camp at the tunnels. The company was entered in the Berlin commercial register on 7 October.

The contract of 19 October gave this arrangement its financial form: the army paid the company for each finished rocket, and the company – like other firms using prisoner labour – paid the SS for “hiring” them. The figure of 12,000 was not arbitrary. The original plan had provided for the assembly of 1,800 rockets a month at Mittelwerk; in November 1943 the target was cut to 900 a month. A contract for 12,000 rockets thus corresponded roughly to a year’s output at that rate. None of the planners yet knew that the rocket was still not ready for series production – test rounds were still breaking up in the air – or that constant design changes would hold up assembly for a long time.

The Kohnstein tunnels and the Dora camp

The work paid for on 19 October was done by prisoners. On 28 August 1943 the SS brought the first 107 prisoners from Buchenwald to the Kohnstein and set up a subcamp of Buchenwald there, code-named “Dora”. By the end of the year some 11,000 people had been transported there. For the first months they all worked on converting the galleries: blasting rock, carting away spoil, and installing the services and the machinery brought from Peenemünde and Wiener Neustadt. There were as yet no barracks above ground. The first prisoners slept in tents, and from the autumn on straw and on four-tier bunks in the dead-end chambers of the tunnels, next to workplaces where blasting went on without pause. They did not see daylight for weeks at a time. Water was short, and halved barrels served as latrines.

The consequences were catastrophic. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the number of registered deaths rose from five in September 1943 to 669 in January 1944. People died of exhaustion and hunger, of pneumonia, dysentery and diseases caused by the dust from the blasting. The sick and those unfit for work were sent in transports to Majdanek and Bergen-Belsen; counting them, the death toll of the camp’s first, construction phase approached six thousand by the beginning of April 1944. In this period the prisoners were exclusively men, most numerously Soviet citizens and Poles, followed by French, Germans, Belgians and Italians.

Plan and reality

The contract was never fulfilled. The first rockets were assembled in the tunnels at the turn of 1943 and 1944, and regular assembly – in two shifts, from about two hundred prefabricated components supplied by hundreds of firms – began only in the spring of 1944. The figure of 900 rockets a month was never once reached: shortages of parts, design modifications, Allied raids on subcontractors and the low productivity of exhausted people all stood in the way. By the end of March 1945, when assembly stopped, Mittelwerk had produced between five and six thousand V-2s, according to various estimates. The unit price was reduced over time.

On average about five thousand prisoners worked on the assembly line under the supervision of German foremen and engineers. The Peenemünde team was responsible for quality; Wernher von Braun admitted after the war that he had visited the tunnels a dozen or so times, including during the worst period of construction in the autumn of 1943. Supervision of assembly was headed by the engineer Arthur Rudolph. For sabotage, real or alleged, prisoners were hanged in front of their fellow inmates, including from the overhead cranes in the assembly halls.

Place in the war

The rocket, which Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda named “Vengeance Weapon 2” (Vergeltungswaffe 2) in 1944, went into action on 8 September 1944: the first operational missiles fell on Paris in the morning and on London in the evening. By the end of March 1945 the Germans had fired more than three thousand of them, mainly at London and at Antwerp, the Allies’ supply port. According to the more commonly cited estimates, they killed about 9,000 people, civilians and soldiers. There was no defence against a missile travelling at several thousand kilometres an hour; the Allies could only attack its launch sites, depots and factories as part of Operation Crossbow.

Meanwhile the Dora subcamp grew into a complex in its own right. In the autumn of 1944 the SS made it a separate concentration camp, Mittelbau-Dora, with several dozen subcamps in which prisoners dug further underground factories in the Harz. According to the Mittelbau-Dora Memorial, some 60,000 people from nearly fifty countries passed through the complex, and at least 20,000 of them died or were murdered. Historians stress that producing the V-2 cost more lives than the rockets’ attacks themselves. The Americans entered the camp on 11 April 1945.

The men of Peenemünde and Mittelwerk – von Braun, Dornberger and Rudolph among them – went to the United States after the war, where they built American rockets and later worked on the space programme. Rudolph, accused in the 1980s of complicity in slave labour, renounced his US citizenship in 1984 and left for Germany. At the Dora trial held by the Americans at Dachau in 1947, the defendants were mainly SS men and kapos; the only manager tried, Mittelwerk’s general director Georg Rickhey, was acquitted. Kammler disappeared in May 1945 and was later declared dead by a court. The contract of 19 October 1943, an ordinary commercial document, is thus one of the points at which German rocket technology, the armaments industry and the concentration camp system became bound together into a single whole.