While the Peenemünders were considering the design of a bunker to be used in conjunction with the mobile regiment (the railroad concept was shelved), Speer was considering how best to push through A-4 production with the maximum possible speed. Hitler still did not want to give missile manufacturing the superpriority rating of “DE,” a grade that was supposed to be reserved for urgent new weapons development, not for production. No later than December 5, the Armaments Minister decided that the best solution was the creation of a “A-4 Special Committee” headed by one of his most energetic subordinates, the “dictator” of locomotive production, Gerhard Degenkolb.10
Degenkolb was representative of the new breed of corporate managers who had come to the fore under Todt and Speer. On leave from his position as a director in the heavy industry firm of DEMAG, the heavy-set, totally bald Degenkolb was a fanatical Nazi and a ruthless and authoritarian personality. He had made his reputation by shaking up the production of locomotives in 1942, when Germany’s vast continental empire was desperately short of transport.11
Dornberger probably first met Degenkolb three days before Christmas during a crucial meeting in Speer’s Berlin office. Among others in attendance were Ordnance chief Leeb and Karl Otto Saur, Speer’s forceful, even rude deputy, who was apparently still unconvinced of the A-4’s value. The chief of Wa Prüf 11 lectured on the plans for military deployment and the possible sites for a bunker inland from Calais and Boulogne, France, using a cutaway model and a diorama of a mobile battery, complete with toy vehicles. Speer approved the plans and assigned bunker construction to the Organization Todt, the huge construction organization he had inherited from the former Armaments Minister. A site selection group composed of Stegmaier, guidance chief Steinhoff, and Lieutenant Colonel Georg Thom, Dornberger’s chief of staff for liquid-fuel rocketry, was to leave immediately after Christmas. Most important, Speer formally approved A-4 production “on the order of the Führer.” He may even have brought with him a decree signed by Hitler. At the same time he dismissed the suggestion, probably from Dornberger, that “Cherry Stone” was a threat to the A-4. The Minister felt that it was not far enough along in its development. Indeed, when the Luftwaffe attempted the first launch of the missile from Peenemünde-West two days later, it was a complete failure.12
In January 1943 Degenkolb began to organize the A-4 Special Committee, which was modeled on the committee system of economic administration that Todt had founded and Speer had extended. Under the supervision of Degenkolb’s Berlin office at “Locomotive House,” the new body would eventually comprise approximately twenty “working committees” of industry, Ministry, and Ordnance representatives (including Peenemünders). The task of the subcommittees was to coordinate the production of the missile and its various components, ancillary equipment, and propellants. Von Braun, for example, became chairman of “Final Acceptance,” responsible for the engine and missile test stands located at each production site for calibration and quality control. (Since the A-4 had no feedback control regulating engine thrust, it was necessary to calibrate and match combustion chambers and turbopumps through systematic testing.) Detmar Stahlknecht, on assignment from Speer since mid-1942 as head of the Production Planning Directorate in Peenemünde, was made chairman of a similarly named subcommittee. That move was an attempt to coordinate the latest organizational innovation with the preceding one, but the boundary lines between the activities of Stahlknecht and Degenkolb initially remained fuzzy. An even earlier attempt to sort out the confusion in the missile production program, Dornberger’s Ordnance A-4 Working Staff, had in the meantime faded into irrelevance because of his attempt to proceed without the Armaments Ministry.13
Notwithstanding that experience, the chief of Wa Prüf 11 naturally resented the A-4 Special Committee’s intrusion into his bailiwick, particularly when it came in the form of an individual as tactless and overbearing as Degenkolb. In his very first meeting with the locomotives czar, Dornberger had realized with a shock that Degenkolb had been one of Ordnance’s most vituperative critics during the “munitions crisis” of 1940, leading to the suicide of General Becker. Degenkolb embodied the Armament Ministry’s reorganization of the war economy in favor of industry and at the expense of the military. In short order, the relationship between the two became tense. Matters only worsened at the end of February 1943, when Degenkolb tried to arrange for the sale of the Peenemünde Production Plant to the giant electrical firm AEG. He was justifiably unimpressed by the way Dornberger and Schubert had laid out the factory, but he also brought with him a general contempt for military management. In order to stop the AEG initiative, Dornberger proposed the creation of an “Adolf Hitler Ltd.” instead, presumably under Army ownership. Ultimately the power of the senior service was still sufficient to stymie Degenkolb’s blatant power grab; AEG pulled out of the deal in early March.14
Within days of that decision, a senior AEG director and electronics expert, Professor Waldemar Petersen, presented an even more radical proposaclass="underline" The whole of Peenemünde-East should be converted into a company. Surprisingly, General Leeb had made the same comment at the end of 1941, while turning down Dornberger’s proposal to militarize the center’s personnel completely, perhaps by expanding the Northern Experimental Command. Leeb had apparently accepted many of the criticisms of the bureaucratic manner in which Army Ordnance operated. Nothing came of those discussions, and Peenemünde-East remained what it was: a military research and development facility with a large civilian component. In November 1942 Ordnance began a new round of discussions on lessening red tape in the A-4 production program. Normally, all contracts for rocket parts and subassemblies, tools, and jigs for the factories, and the like, had to be let through Ordnance’s procurement and price control bureaucracy in Berlin. The outcome of those discussions, reinforced by pressure from the Ministry and Degenkolb, was the creation in the first half of 1943 of a Peenemünde purchasing and contracting operation working on more commercial lines. That measure streamlined administration and allowed the Army to defeat—temporarily—the attempt of Speer’s industrial managers, with their close ties to the Party, to take the Peenemünde center away.15
It was not long before the engineers at Peenemünde shared Dornberger’s anger and irritation with Degenkolb. As soon as the chairman of the A-4 Special Committee had finished filling out his organization, he moved to force a dramatic speedup in missile production. The last and most ambitious program outlined by Stahlknecht, in February 1943, called for Peenemünde and Friedrichshafen to begin assembling five A-4s in April and July, respectively, and to increase their monthly output in steps to a maximum of three hundred rockets each from September 1944 on (an annual production rate of 7,200). In the wake of the October 3 success, Dornberger had proposed adding a third A-4 assembly plant in the General Government (that is, rump Poland). This colonial appendage of the Third Reich lay under a vicious, genocidal occupation, but it was beyond the range of Allied bombers and promised a supply of cheap Polish labor. Speer gave oral approval to that plan in late December, but Degenkolb soon cast it aside, probably because the factory would take too long to construct. At the end of March Stahlknecht announced that the Rax-Werke, a locomotive and railcar factory in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, would be the third site. A couple of days later Degenkolb issued his first program: each of the three sites was to begin producing three hundred rockets a month by December 1943!16