It was the intractible aspect of this contradiction that led me to pledge quietly to myself that from now on I'd be much more careful about what I told him.
It was in August 1943, just three months after the first successful test shot of the A-4 rocket, better known as the V-2 vengeance weapon, that Himmler, head of the SS, managed to wrest the V-2 from the control of the Wehrmacht, the German Army. Himmler was at the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's remote headquarters in the forests of East Prussia, when the Führer, in the company of his deputy Martin Bormann, brought up the subject of A-4 manufacture and his concerns about program secrecy. Hitler, as was his wont, was demanding the impossible.
The recent test of the A-4, which had landed just five kilometers off target over a distance of 265 kilometers, had finally convinced Hitler, after months of vacillation, that the rocket would thwart the Allies' developing invasion plans and quite possibly bring Britain to its knees. He demanded that 5,000 rockets should go into immediate production and be delivered in the shortest possible time.
Himmler saw his chance. Quick to exploit an opportunity, the Reichsführer knew that neither the Wehrmacht nor Albert Speer, Hitler's young and energetic minister of armaments and war production, could deliver the project under existing arrangements. Hitler had decreed that "only Germans" should be employed in the production of the A-4, but the sheer size of the task meant, practically speaking, that foreign civilian workers — Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and others from the conquered east — would have to be involved sooner rather than later in the process. But with foreign workers came the risk of the security leaks that Hitler had expressly sought to eliminate. It was to this apparently insoluble conundrum that Himmler claimed he had the answer.
What he offered Hitler, he promised, was watertight: his proposed workforce would be drawn not from the diminishing manpower resources of the Reich's civilian labor pool, but from the SS-controlled concentration camps, from which there was no escape. The same workforce, Himmler added, could be used to build the underground manufacturing facilities that would keep the A-4 secure from Allied bombing. Faced with the logic of this proposal, Hitler agreed, but informed Himmler that he must cooperate with Speer.
Though the SS controlled the camps, it was the armaments ministry that had masterminded the revitalization of the German manufacturing economy, achieving month-on-month growth, in spite of the ferocity of the Allies' strategic bombing campaign, since Speer's appointment the previous year. Yet, when he was informed of Himmler's proposal, Speer couldn't help but object to it, knowing that Himmler, whose dreams invariably exceeded his abilities, would never be able to deliver what he had promised. This was undoubtedly the case, but it was not what Hitler wanted to hear. The following day, Himmler informed Speer that he had taken charge of the manufacture of the "A-4 instrument" (as it was known to conceal its identity and purpose to outsiders) and demanded Speer's full cooperation as a subordinate. This the outmaneuvered armaments minister was forced to provide.
Thus, within 24 hours, did Himmler not only acquire control of the V-2 program, but in the process lay the foundations for the SS takeover of all secret weapons programs within the Third Reich.
For years, the Reichsführer-SS had harbored a grand scheme to turn the SS, originally established as Hitler's bodyguard, into a self-sustaining economic entity, capable of funding and running its affairs without reliance on the everyday financial and administrative mechanisms that maintained and sustained the Reich. It was via the camps that Himmler and his leading economic authority, Oswald Pohl, realized that they could achieve their aims. By 1943, population of the camps had surged— from around 25,000 on the eve of the war, to well over half a million, a figure that did not begin to reflect the millions that had already died in death camps like Auschwitz, Dachau and Mauthausen and the millions more that would die of disease, starvation and the gas chambers before hostilities were over.
In a perverse reflection of the growth of the camps, the size of the SS itself surged from an eve-of-war strength of 240,000 to an end-of-war tally numbering 800,000. Aside from its task to maintain security within Hitler's state and its brutal administration of the death and labor camps, the SS also provided 38 fighting divisions alongside the Wehrmacht.
After the abortive bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944, a scheme hatched by anti-Hitler elements within the German Army General Staff, the control of the SS and its grip upon Germany would become absolute. But it was in August 1943, at the Wolf's Lair, that the seeds of the SS's takeover of the armaments industry were sown. Skilled workers and scientific specialists, Himmler told Speer, would immediately be transferred from the camps to begin work on the A-4. Furthermore, the Reichsführer-SS added, he had asked a "young energetic construction expert, who had already proved his outstanding ability, to take charge of the enterprise."
Speer must have had an overwhelming sense of inevitability as to the identity of this individual, but he inquired anyway. The man who was to assume direct oversight of the A-4's manufacture, Himmler told him, was Dr. Ing. (Engineer) Hans Kammler, head of the SS's Building and Works Division — the entity that had masterminded and built the camps.
Kammler's rise inside the SS had been meteoric. Up until 1941, he had been an unremarkable civil servant within the RLM, the Reich Air Ministry, with special responsibility for construction projects — hangars, barracks, administrative offices and the like. In the autumn ofthat year, realizing that he was never going to rise to the heights to which he aspired, he transferred to the SS, where he received the rank of Brigadeführer and was immediately put in charge of building projects. By the end ofthat year, Kammler had already drafted a five-year RM13-billion program of construction for S S barracks and concentration camps stretching from the newly captured territories of the Soviet Union to Norway.
The sense that the SS gave Kammler free rein to indulge his ideas and ambitions — suppressed during his years of obscure service at the RLM — is unavoidable. No sooner had his appointment taken effect, than he was drawing up detailed plans for the rapid expansion of the camps, egged on by Pohl, who had impressed upon him their value as the engines of growth for his and Himmler's grotesque vision.
To turn it into reality, Kammler immediately saw what needed to be done and requested to expand the capacity of the camps to four million; three months later, he increased this figure again to 14 million.
While the building program got under way, he set about industrial izing the existing camps, but progressively found himself thwarted by Speer, who, irrespective of any feelings he may or may not have had about the moral consequences of such a scheme, believed that the camps were not the answer to Germany's manufacturing needs. Yet it was a confrontation that Speer was bound to lose, as he tacitly admitted in his memoirs; for, in Kammler, he was essentially battling against a twisted image of himself.
"He too came from a solid middle-class family, had gone through university, had been 'discovered' because of his work in construction, and had gone far and fast in fields for which he had not been trained." Speer, it is clear, was jealous of Kammler, but while Speer patently wrestled with his conscience, especially during these years, there is no sign of any moral doubt on the part of the 40-year-old SS officer.
Kammler was cut from the same cloth as SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the author of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem," who was assassinated by Czech agents in Prague in 1942.