"Both were blond, blue-eyed, long-headed, always neatly dressed, and well bred. Both were capable of unexpected decisions at any moment, and once they had arrived at them would carry them through with a rare obstinacy," Speer noted.
With Heydrich dead, Himmler had found in Kammler a cold, ruthless and energetic executor of his wishes; the man who would carry though his simple, yet grandiose vision.
Kammler set about his task as overseer of the A-4 manufacture program with clinical zeal. One week after Himmler's fateful meeting with Hitler at the Wolf's Lair, he dispatched the first group of concentration camp inmates from Buchenwald to Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains of central Germany, where work on a giant underground construction facility for the A-4/V-2 commenced.
Within a month, Kammler and Speer, the latter in his new capacity on the project as junior partner to the SS, established the low-profile Mittelwerk GmbH (Central Works Ltd.) to run the rocket venture.
By the end of the year, 10,000 Buchenwald prisoners — mostly Rus sians, Poles and Frenchmen — had been dispatched into the limestone cliffs of the Kohnstein, the mountainous ridge close to the village of Nordhausen into which the facility was tunneled, to bring about the impossible: the construction of the largest underground factory in the world, a facility a kilometer and a half long containing 20 kilometers of tunnels and galleries, dedicated to the construction of rockets, missiles and other top secret weapons. It was finished in a year—20,000 prisoners dying in the process.
Plans show that it was the first phase in a construction program that would have made the Mittelwerk part of an enterprise three times the size.
Thereafter, Kammler's ascent to the top levels of the bureaucracy surrounding Hitler's inner cabinet was unstoppable. As 1943 drifted into 1944, the SS's steadfast refusal to believe in anything other than final victory ensured its deepening involvement at all levels of state. In March 1944, at the formation of a combined "Fighter Aircraft Staff composed of senior Luftwaffe and armaments ministry officials tasked with increasing fighter production in the face of the Allies' determination to wipe it out with carpet bombing, Kammler represented the S S as Himmler's special delegate, offering two primary areas of expertise: his rapidly developing knowledge of underground factory construction and his ability to mobilize vast numbers of concentration camp laborers. In recognition of this, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler's nominal successor, tasked Kammler with transferring strategic aircraft factories underground. Just over three months later, Himmler was able to report to Hitler that ten aircraft factories with an underground floor space of tens of thousands of square meters had been constructed in just eight weeks.
As the Reich's decay accelerated under the relentless news of defeat on all fronts — the D-Day invasion had placed Allied troops in France, the Red Army had just crossed into Poland and British and American bombers were pummeling German cities daily from the air — Kammler's influence spread. In the air of paranoia that followed the bomb plot of July 20, his ascendancy entered its final and most decisive phase. On August 6, following Himmler's appointment as head of armaments, adding to his portfolio as chief of internal security and commander in chief of the reserve army, Kammler was given responsibility for all aspects of V-2 operations — from design through manufacture to deployment and offensive operations against England and the Low Countries. In effect, Kammler now had sole charge of the project from planning to firing; a position that, thanks to his obsessive eye for detail, gave him an insight into the running of a strategic weapons program that no other individual has enjoyed before or since.
In January 1945, with the Red Army in Budapest and Warsaw and the Western Allies turning the tide of the Germans' Ardennes offensive, Kammler was appointed head of all missile programs — defensive as well as offensive. On February 6th, Hitler transferred cradle-to-grave responsibility for all air weapons — fighters, missiles and bombers — to the man that many Party insiders now viewed as the most powerful and influential state official outside Hitler's inner cabinet.
Kammler had first come to Hitler's attention with a carefully crafted hand-colored design for the Auschwitz concentration camp. It was his perverse capacity to retain control of the minutiae of a project without ever relinquishing grip on the strategic objectives, a trait shared by Hitler himself, that drew him increasingly into the Fiihrer's orbit; a characteristic that came to the fore when Kammler "reengineered" the Warsaw Ghetto after the crushing of the uprising in August 1944. He not only leveled the "contaminated area," but made sure that each of the 34 million bricks from the Ghetto was used for other essential building projects. He was also called in to advise on methodologies for increasing the daily output of the camps' gas chambers and ovens from 10,000 to 60,000. For this and his other work he was rewarded with an SS general's rank of Obergruppenführer.
By the beginning of April 1945, with the Red Army driving toward Berlin and Hitler now ensconced in the Führerbunker below the Party Chancellery, Kammler had acquired control of every single major aircraft — or rather, aerospace—program of any importance within the Third Reich. His empire now included any project or facility that had either an S S influence or was aircraft or missile related. Geographically, this gave him the authority to enter and operate any weapons plant within the shrinking borders of the Reich, by now restricted to Norway, Denmark, northern Germany, southern Bavaria, Czechoslovakia, Austria and northern Italy.
What is astounding is the belief of the Nazi leadership, even at this terminal stage of the war, that Kammler would bring about miracles and deliver the German people from the relentless advances of the Soviets in the east and the British and Americans in the west. "The Führer has had prolonged discussions with Obergruppenführer Kammler who now carries responsibility for the reform of the Luftwaffe," propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary on April 3. "Kammler is doing excellently and great hopes are placed on him."
Yet, for all the power vested in Kammler at this late stage of the war he barely rates a mention in standard works of reference on the Luftwaffe or its major programs. There is so little data on him, in fact, that archivists at London's Imperial War Museum confessed that their files contained next to nothing on him. Just when I thought I was going to have to look elsewhere, perhaps in Germany itself, I received a phone call from a diligent researcher at the Imperial War Museum who'd become as engrossed as I was by the lack of information on Kammler.
The researcher told me, a note of triumph in his voice, that he had turned up a book on Kammler after a rigorous search: a slim volume, with a curious title—Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia—penned by a British Cambridge graduate-turned-foreign correspondent named Tom Agoston.
What Blunder! contained, however, was dynamite, for Agoston had established what no other researcher has managed to before or since.
While Kammler carried out his job to the letter, churning out the rockets and jet aircraft that Hitler hoped would turn the tide against the Allies in the closing weeks of the war, he also set up, unbeknownst to anyone connected with those projects, a top secret research center tasked with the development of follow-on technology, a place where work on "second-generation" secret weapons was already well advanced.
"In modern high-tech jargon, the operation would probably be re ferred to as an 'SS research think tank,' " Agoston wrote.