In comparison to the Mittelwerk or the A-4 batteries, Peenemünde felt Kammler’s heavy hand much more indirectly. The fortunate coincidence that most of the facility had been incorporated just after July 20 had indeed given von Braun’s development engineers greater institutional protection against an SS takeover. Kammler also knew that he needed Peenemünde’s technical expertise if he was to make his weapon system work. Moreover, the fact that the A-4 finally was put into action relieved some of the intense political pressure on the program that had built up during the long months of technical difficulties in the first half of 1944.
Even so, it is clear that Wernher von Braun, for one, had still not returned to the good graces of the SS. After the opening of the V-2 campaign, Himmler proposed three names to Hitler for a high noncombat decoration, the Knight’s Cross of the War Service Cross: Dornberger, Kunze, and Riedel (Walther Riedel, head of the Peenemünde design bureau). Himmler ignored von Braun, just as he never raised him in SS rank again after the early promotion of June 1943. Only Speer’s insistence and his remaining influence with Hitler got von Braun the Knight’s Cross. In the end, the young engineer and Georg Rickhey (the nominal General Director of Mittelwerk) were added to the list, while Riedel’s name was dropped.16
Whether Himmler’s distaste for von Braun was reflected in Kammler’s behavior is unknown, but the SS general had earlier attacked the Peenemünde technical director as too young and arrogant for his job. Von Braun quietly returned the contempt. In November Kammler asked for an immediate solution to the extremely difficult problem of determining the impact points on enemy soil of individual V-2s, with the obvious goal of improving accuracy. Von Braun wrote sarcastically in the margin of the document mentioning Kammler’s demand: “Trivial! The day after tomorrow!”17
Another marginal comment from the same period indicates von Braun’s growing skepticism about the war and about the regime’s promises of a miraculous reversal of its course. On a Wasserfall report that asserted the importance of the anti-aircraft missile for “the overcoming of enemy air supremacy and therefore for the achievement of victory,” he wrote: “Final victory, well, well!” Peenemünde colleagues have also said that he seemed depressed when the A-4 was finally used against people, although his defenders have probably exaggerated his reaction. While there is no solid evidence that slave labor disturbed him much, his arrest and the hopelessness of the war alienated him more and more from the Nazi system as it neared its end. Moreover, von Braun later claimed that his last meeting with Hitler in July 1943 had disillusioned him. The dictator was “suddenly revealed to me as an irreligious man, a man who did not have to answer to a higher power…. He was completely unscrupulous.” In dealing with Kammler and other fanatics, however, von Braun had to be extremely careful to present a loyal face, because the political atmosphere was so paranoid. It is a wonder that he was not more careful in his marginal notations and in his comments to colleagues. Clearly, his indispensability and the protection of Speer and Dornberger gave him a certain latitude, however small.18
Just as the increasingly disastrous war made the political atmosphere at Peenemünde touchier, so too did it make daily life more of a struggle. During the summer of 1944 three successive daylight American heavy bomber raids (on July 18, August 2, and August 25) inflicted extensive damage on Test Stands VII (the original A-4 launch site) and XI (the former Production Plant test stand used for calibrating mass production engines). Peenemünde-West was also attacked for the first time. On the Army side, a few dozen people were killed, but the dispersion of the preceding year had worked; those raids failed to have any lasting impact on the way the facility operated. Nevetheless, the attacks, along with the repeated air raid alarms that occurred throughout the period, slowed development and testing.19
The state of the war created numerous other difficulties too. The Allied bomber offensive made gasoline hard to obtain; travel became problematic even between the dispersed facilities of Electromechanical Industries. Liquid oxygen and many other materials became increasingly difficult to acquire as well. For the staff of Peenemünde, rationing became ever tighter in the fall of 1944, while work hours became even longer. In September the sixty-hour week was officially introduced for all employees. Finally, the country’s manpower crisis created relentless pressure from the draft authorities to cancel previous exemptions, plus pressure from the Mittelwerk to transfer more workers and managers, which eventually resulted in a nasty feud between the two companies. By January 1, 1945, Electromechanical Industries had shrunk to 4,325 Germans, a loss of more than 10 percent of its staff in less than five months.20
In circumstances of decreased efficiency and labor shortages, it is not surprising that the technical work of the center suffered. But development at Peenemünde was distorted even more by the demands of the increasingly catastrophic military situation.
DEVELOPMENT AND DESPERATION
In the first six months of Electromechanical Industries’ brief existence, most of its development work fell into two categories: regular projects that suffered only limited eleventh-hour intervention and true desperation projects that expressed the Third Reich’s growing flight from reality. But the best example of the distorting effects of the military emergency was a project that fell between the two: the A-9 or A-4b, as the missile was renamed in October to take advantage of the A-4’s high-priority ratings. On the one hand, the revival of the winged A-4 was merely a continuation of research halted in October 1942 to concentrate resources on A-4 production and Wasserfall development. On the other hand, as the A-4b, the glider missile began to function primarily as a further justification for the existence of von Braun’s engineering team, which was threatened by draft callups and pressure from Kammler for instant results. Improvisation and desperation marred work on the A-4b, which had to be rushed to the launch pad as soon as was feasible.
The A-9 project was first revived in mid-June 1944 on a very small scale. Probably as a result of Air Ministry pressure, Ludwig Roth was ordered to hand over his remaining Luftwaffe people to the Wasserfall detail design group run by the Flak Experimental Center. With the four staff members he had left under his direct supervision, he was to restart work on the A-9. Passing references in documents from the intervening years show that this missile had always been regarded as the next project in the series, presumably because it promised a relatively low-cost way to increase range. The fact that a decline in A-4 development work was on the horizon may also have been a factor in the A-9 decision. Roth immediately complained to von Braun that he could not make worthwile progress with so few people. To make matters worse, Hermann’s aerodynamics group was unavailable until October, as it was completing the reconstruction of its wind tunnels in the Bavarian Alps. Nothing much could be done about those problems, however, except for writing a couple of contracts with universities to make trajectory calculations. As a result, the A-9 project moved very slowly in the summer of 1944.21
Only after the German position in France collapsed in August did Kammler begin to pressure Peenemünde to find urgent ways to extend the A-4’s range. Fortunately for the missile batteries and unfortunately for London, the Allied advance slowed to a crawl in September, leaving German-occupied areas in western Holland that were still within 300 kilometers of the British capital. The heavily bombed bunker at Wizernes had been abandoned during the retreat, as were a number of prepared sites for the mobile batteries, but the rocket troops launched their missiles from completely unprepared areas. As Dornberger had foreseen, this method worked quite well. No one in the High Command could guarantee, however, that a further withdrawal from the Netherlands would not happen. Although more V-2s were eventually fired at the Belgian port of Antwerp than at London, it was important to Hitler to retain the capability to attack Britain directly. His desperate strategic concept hinged upon knocking the British out of the war by terrorizing the war-weary civilian population of the enemy capital. The glider missile could fill the bill, since its projected range of 500 kilometers (310 miles) would permit firing on London from northwestern Germany. Alternatively, if Holland was retained, the A-9 could be used to attack more distant British cities.22